At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  “And after all that, you’d still want to see your birth mom?”

  “Yeah. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I don’t want to talk now.” She turns away, slouching against the back of the seat. Clio, shut out, feels terrible. She sees in Pep’s eyes her own question: Is it possible to stay? He says, “Let’s talk. C’mon.” Going handhold to handhold on the seatbacks of the lurching van they move to seats halfway between Katie and Rhett and Ming Tao.

  “Listen,” he whispers, “there’s one other factor here. I’m getting suspicious of these people. All these years in the insurance industry have made me a pretty good judge of when people are lying, right?” She nods. “Bottom line, I’m not sure I believe any of this. Any of it—that she’s her aunt, or that those were her nasty grandparents or that the lost sister and birth dad live nearby, the Elephant Temple and funny monkeys—it’s smells like a setup. A con. Whether it is or not, there’s no way of knowing the truth. Everything we know comes through Rhett. ‘On spec,’ okay? We have no idea what he’s translating to us.”

  Clio is startled. It’s like entering a whole new universe, alien to her, of deception. “Sure it’s possible,” she says. “But why? Why would they do that?”

  “They’re desperate to get out. They’ll do anything. You saw Ming Tao’s shop, her house—the jazzy new China is passing her by. Passing both of ’em by. You heard Rhett—he wants a visa, out.”

  “You don’t think she’s Katie’s aunt?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe she’s just some woman who happened by the police station just then. We saw Katie in her and wanted to believe it. Rhett overheard us. Don’t forget—Rhett had a half hour with her in her house before he came back to get us. She’s staring at the bare wires feeding that electric box on the wall, thinking about the lights in the big city. She wants a way out of her life; he shows up with a big smile and says, ‘Have I got something for you!’” He shakes his head in wonderment.

  “True, we can’t be sure,” Clio says. “And, I don’t know—I feel bad saying it, but after seeing the viciousness in those grandparents, and hearing about the crazy father and how Xiao Lu is so fragile, so broken-down—I just don’t know if we should risk it. Even if we were sure they were telling the truth.”

  “Especially if we were.”

  She considers this. “Yes. I mean, if she’s been obsessed all these years with finding her baby, well... maybe it’s all about... well, trying to get her back?”

  “Could be,” he says, nodding soberly. “If so, big risk.”

  She sighs. “Okay. We’ll write a letter to her. If she writes back when we’re home, we’ll assess things, and maybe implement them, maybe not. But for now, we’re done.” She looks back at Katie. “Poor little girl. I feel so bad for her! Having to see that old crone screaming at her, as if she were a... I don’t know, something she threw into the trash that somehow came back?”

  “It was a nightmare.”

  “But even after all that, she still wants to go.”

  “Unless,” Pep says, “it is really the deer and the monkeys.”

  Clio sits quietly, and then raises her eyes to his. “You think she’ll be okay?”

  “I do. As long as we are, she will be, yes.”

  Katie sits in the back of the van, still mad. Write a letter that’s all? She promised! Like last year in our school play Orpheus rescuing his bride Eurydice from the Underworld he promised Hades not to look back at her until they were safe again in the Realm of the Living—but then just when he saw the dim light ahead he turned around to make sure she was there and that was it. He lost her forever.

  

  On the outskirts of Tienja they get caught in bumper-to-bumper, wheel-to-wheel traffic—a rush-hour movement of fierce commerce, born of different sizes and shapes of the dark mountains of coal—and of the overflow from the Dragon Boat Festival down below, on the river. Trucks, buses, taxis, cars, motorcycles, bicycles with trailers, floods of pedestrians—all inch along in the fierce glare, honking angrily at the rubbish-lined, unblinking streets. Pep watches his watch obsessively, praying they’ll make their train. Suddenly his skin starts to itch, bad. Could it be hives? He’s never had hives, but his golf buddy, Toby Updike, editor of The Columbia Crier, started with hives—which soon exploded into psoriasis! Bad news, if this is that!

  The train has left.

  Pep starts to get angry, but Rhett checks and tells him that there is another train, which leaves for Changsha City at five in the morning. It arrives at nine thirty. They can still make their noon flight out. Rhett arranges a hotel. Pep gives some of his remaining cash to Ming Tao, and they all say goodbye.

  With great relief, by ten they are in their room at the Dripping Water Cave Hotel. They’ve feared the worst, but are pleasantly surprised. Hot water, flush toilet, no dripping, and no snails. The room is air-conditioned and has a reasonable bed for Clio and Pep, and a tiny bed in the entryway near the door for Katie. Rhett is in the next room. He will wake them at four a.m. for the five o’clock train. To be on the safe side, Clio sets their own two alarms.

  Katie, in her pajamas, sits on their bed. Clio is doing the nightly combing of the hair. Katie hasn’t said a dozen words since their argument in the van.

  “What’s wrong, hon?”

  “I told you I want to stay and find my birth mom. Why can’t we?”

  “Mommy and I have thought carefully about it,” Pep says, “we’ve really tried to see if there was a way that we could safely do it, but we can’t, we just can’t.”

  “On the plane tomorrow we’ll start planning everything out to come back. Your birth mom will still be there after Christmas.”

  “How do you know? She could be dead then. It might be now or never.”

  “Please, dear,” Clio says, “don’t think like that—”

  “But you promised. I said, ‘Do you promise if we have a chance to find my birth mom you’ll try your hardest to do it?’ and you said, ‘Yes, I promise.’ Remember?”

  “Yes, I do, sweetheart, but—”

  “And you’re gonna break your promise?”

  “Not break, just delay it until the next—”

  “You promised on this trip, now!” Katie jumps up off their bed and walks to her own bed near the door and lies down. Clio is mortified.

  “You promised?” Pep whispers. She nods.

  “I never imagined that there was the slightest chance...”

  “Jesus.” He groans and shakes his head in incredulity.

  Clio stares at Katie, her back turned away, her face to the wall. She gets up and walks over to Katie’s bed. She’s still facing the wall. “Want me to rub your back?”

  “No.”

  Clio feels this like a punch in the gut. “Please, let me...”

  Silence, then, “Nope. G’night.”

  “Goodnight, dear. Love you.” She waits for Katie to say, “Love you too.” Nothing.

  Back in bed, in the dark, Clio can’t fall asleep. She hears Pep groaning and grumbling, awake. “You can’t sleep either?”

  “Nope. Incredible headache. Aspirin won’t touch it.”

  “Is it safe to do an Ambien? We can’t afford to sleep through the alarms.”

  “With three alarm clocks among three consenting adults? Sure. We’ll just do a five. It’ll wear off by four.” He takes one. Clio abstains.

  

  When the alarms go off at four, Clio struggles up out of sleep, calls to Pep, turns on the light, and moves toward the bathroom. Katie isn’t in her bed. She goes into the bathroom. No Katie.

  “Katie?”

  No answer.

  “Katie!”

  Someone is knocking on the door. Clio opens it. Rhett.

  “Is Katie with you?”

  “No, why?”

  He
r legs turn to water. She finds herself sitting on the floor, in shock.

  19

  A hundred things go through her mind and one thing only. She’s on her feet and at Pep, shaking him. “Get up! C’mon, get up! Pep!” He’s sleeping on his side as if dead—groggy from the Ambien. She shouts in his ear. “Wake up!” A feeble groan. “Damnit!” She rolls him over on his back and grabs his nose and twists it hard, until he winces and wakes up. “Katie’s gone! Come on!”

  Pep is trying to push off the covers of the sleeping pill but he can’t seem to claw his way back out to her. Pain shoots through his nose and then from cheek to skull, and ricochets back like a metal echo. “Okay, don’t panic—”

  “Katie’s gone! I woke up and she wasn’t in her bed. Gone! We’ve got to find her! Get your clothes on and come on!”

  He snaps to, reaching for his clothes. “Any ideas?”

  “None! Hurry!” She is pulling a shirt on over her pajama top and slipping on her shorts. “Let’s go.”

  She leads Pep and Rhett out into the gloomy hallway. No Katie. She takes a deep breath. The elevator takes an age. She waits, and waits, and suddenly finds herself pounding on the closed elevator door and screaming, “Come on down, damnit, come on down!” She feels totally clear. Clear and fierce, ferocious.

  “Any idea where she went?” Rhett said.

  “None. She’d never go anywhere by herself, not at this hour. Lobby. Come on.”

  She stares around the lobby. Empty. Her focus falls on a clerk, asleep behind the reception desk. Every detail leaps out—skinny, with lank black hair and a thin moustache, a bow tie hanging from one point of his collar. Rhett awakens him. Clio and Pep look around every nook and cranny, into the tiny restaurant and kitchen and the bathroom. No Katie. Back to the desk clerk. Barely awake, he is spasmodically grasping at his bow tie, trying to attach it to the other point of his collar.

  “He hasn’t seen her,” Rhett says.

  “He has to have seen her,” Clio says. “You saw her. Someone kidnapped her. Where is she?” The clerk’s thick-lidded eyes bulge in fear. “Rhett. Get him to talk.”

  Rhett shouts at the young man. More fear in his eyes. He’s seen nothing of Katie.

  “Maybe,” Rhett says, “she just went out on one of her adventures.”

  “At three in the morning in China she does not go adventuring. I knew we should’ve just waited at the station!”

  “Let’s look out on the street,” Pep says. “Maybe somebody saw her.”

  To Clio the full moon seems ominous. The street is coated in a tin light. Sooty night moisture seems to lather the empty streets and shops with dangerous stuff. They stare around, up and down, and see no sign of life. For the first time in China, no people.

  “Pep, what time is it? I forgot my watch—”

  “Four ten. Let’s look around the block—” He starts off.

  “Wait,” Rhett says. “Let’s think this through. Like a detective would.”

  “Rhett, do not start that movie shit now,” Clio says. “Stay focused.”

  “We think it through while we look,” Pep says. “Anybody we meet, we ask if they’ve seen her. Move it!”

  Clio is already ahead, calling out at the top of her voice, “Katie? Kay-tee!”

  They follow, calling out. Everything is shut down, boarded up as if under attack. Finally they find a human, standing guard over several piles of coal. Rhett asks him if he’s seen Katie. He has not. They keep going. To Clio the lack of any readable signs and the cruel metallic light of the moon coating the dingy, run-down buildings make her feel even more terrified of where their daughter is, and what she could possibly have gotten herself into. Please God. A woman sweeping the street. No, she’s seen nothing. For a moment they stop, stand there forlornly. Clio shivers with a sense of doom, teeters—and fights it off.

  “Okay,” Rhett says. “Let’s go back, try to figure this out. I want to check out everything in the room—the bed, the floor, the door and lock, and make some calls—train station, bus station—”

  “Police,” Clio says.

  Rhett sighs. “Not sure about that—this is a restricted zone, and—”

  “Rhett, listen carefully,” Pep says, firmly. “We call the police. Now.”

  With a shrug, Rhett leads them back to the hotel, and calls the police. Next he calls the driver of the van, telling him to come at once, and then the train and bus stations. They go back up to the room. Clio can barely stand to look at Katie’s bed. Rhett inspects it carefully. It still has the indentation of her body. In a rumple of the covers he finds a tattered rag. “What’s this?”

  “Shirty!” Clio says, bursting into tears. “Her security blanket.”

  “Okay. Anything unusual here?” Clio shakes her head. Pep too. “Okay. No sign of a struggle. Good. The lock on the door is not broken or forced. Did you lock it before you went to bed?”

  “Absolutely,” Pep says. “Always.”

  “Good—so no one broke in. So that means one of two things: either she let someone in who she knew, or she went out of her own free will.”

  “I can’t see her doing either,” Clio says. “Not without asking us first. Why aren’t the police here yet? You really called them?”

  “Whoa,” Rhett says, holding his hands up in defense. “I called them, okay?” Clio doesn’t say it’s okay, but Rhett goes on, “What about clothes, shoes?”

  Clio looks around. “Her running shoes are gone.”

  “Good. That argues against anything forceful.”

  “But her cap is here,” Pep says, seeing the yellow cap with the chicken.

  “That could mean anything. Did either of you hear anything in the night?” They say no. “Do you remember the last time you saw her, and exactly where?”

  “I woke up at about twelve thirty,” Clio says, “and checked on her, and she was sleeping quietly, and I went back to bed. Once she’s asleep, she’s out—she never wakes up. Someone or something must have woken her up.”

  “So she’s been gone, at most, four hours?”

  As this sinks in, this amazingly long amount of time that her daughter has been gone, Clio sits down heavily on the edge of their bed. Suddenly she jumps up again.

  “Rhett,” she says, “where is she.”

  Rhett’s face goes tight, as if slapped. “What?”

  “I said where is she.” Clio moves toward him and tries to grab his shirt, but he slips behind a dresser. She traps him, is about to grab him again, but Pep’s hands are on her, stopping her.

  “Let go!” She shoves Pep away, grabs Rhett’s shirt with two hands, and shouts, “Where is she? She’d let you in, wouldn’t she? You better tell me right now, or you’re finished!” He doesn’t answer. “Only two people knew where we were—you, and Ming Tao. She’d never let her in without waking us—that leaves you.”

  “I did not take your daughter. No way.”

  She stares into his eyes, trying to fathom, and sees only dark. “For all we know, you’ve been lying to us all along—you might have cooked up this whole scheme—Ming Tao, the farm, her birth mom, everything. We need to know the truth here. All of it. Right now.”

  Rhett is staring at Clio, his mouth open in a little o of disbelief. Soberly, he says, “Truth is, I tried to help you.” He looks at Pep. “Sure, I want you to help me. I told you that from the start. But I’ve told you the truth. I don’t know about this Ming Tao gal, she could be lying—but I don’t think so. That’s ‘movie shit.’ As you said.”

  “Is she the birth mother?” Clio asks.

  “Her?” Rhett looks shocked. He thinks it over. “No. Never. No way.”

  “Okay,” Pep says, believing him. “Clio, we just have to plan on what we do while we wait for the police.”

  They send the van driver cruising around, his cell phone at the ready in case he spots Katie. Pep will s
tay in the room with the door open to keep an eye on the hallway, and Rhett with his cell will stay in the lobby and keep grilling the staff and guests for information. Clio wants to go out on the streets to search. Rhett starts to make a sign for her to carry, with Katie’s photo and the message that she is missing and that there is a one-hundred-dollar reward for her return. Left with the vision of her child lost out in the chaos of this city in the middle of China, Clio collapses on the bed, shaking. Disbelief turns to horror. From time to time she convulses in sobs. Pep sits on the bed beside her, feeling her shoulders shake the way their daughter’s do on the rare times now when she cries.

  20

  Beepbeep... beepbeep... beepbeep—

  Lying on her cot, hearing the alarm on her Baby-G wristwatch, Katie clicks it off and thinks, It sounds so loud I hope they didn’t hear it—it would ruin everything. She presses the tiny button for the pale-blue light. 3:00 a.m.

  Thinking, But can I really do this? Maybe it’s the only way ever to find her.

  She listens for any sound that means they heard it too, but hears only her own breathing. She holds her breath and listens. Nothing. Just her father snoring. She lies there for a moment, trying to shake off her dream. This one was about a tame deer on a path through the woods on a mountain, and a weird dream because the deer had a Chinese face. Thinking, Now, be as quiet as a deer.

  She slips on her shorts and socks and shirt but not her Nikes, which she holds in her hands. She tiptoes on deer feet to the door. Only one lock. They’ll be mad but I’m mad too. It is the only way, no question. Be gentle-gentle with the lock—click! Uh-oh. She holds her breath again and doesn’t move, listening. It’s like her mother has eyes in the back of her head and sees whatever she’s doing, especially if it’s bad. Nothing. Just her dad snoring.

  She hopes the door doesn’t squeak like it would in a cartoon and wake up Wile E. Coyote after the Road Runner’s gone. It doesn’t. She squeezes around it and out, closing it softly. Done. She runs. She decides not to take the elevator because when it opens in the lobby someone might hear it. She goes down the stairs. Yuck. Yucky smell, worse each floor down. She puts on her Nikes, runs down all the way, then gently opens the door. Wrong floor, the basement—it’s really yucky. She goes back up one flight. She’s worried that there’s a doorman or clerk there who might see her and stop her. She should have worn a disguise, even a boy disguise, like Mulan did. It’s too late now. She peeks out. No doorman. The lobby is dim. A clerk has his head down on his arms on the desk; he’s asleep. Quickly she dashes across the lobby and the door closes and she’s out! It’s 3:04 a.m. by her Baby-G.