At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  “Well, Kate-zer, this is a first. If a place doesn’t have Coke, it’s officially designated as ‘In the Middle of Nowhere.’ In the old days, when they came to the end of the world as they knew it, they wrote, ‘Here Bee Dragons,’ and drew pictures of dragons. That’s where we are. Dragon Country.”

  “So, dear, we have to be really careful about the water. You can either drink tea or water that’s boiled and that we let cool.”

  “I know, Mom. It’s okay.”

  The Macys are ravenous and try the food. It is a greasy stew with evidence of vegetables, but also of other things they cannot identify. The oil smells rancid.

  “Incredibly salty!” Clio says.

  “Whoa! Solid salt!” Pep says, mouth puckering. “Like eating a salt lick, yeah.”

  “I like it,” Katie says, smiling broadly. “And look, they’ve got rice.”

  “I know,” Clio says. “You want soy sauce, but there’s no way to ask—”

  “Jung yoo,” Katie says. “Remember at Shalom Hunan they said it’s called jung yoo?” She looks at Xiao Lu and mimes shaking a bottle and asks, “Jung yoo?”

  “Jung yoo!” Xiao Lu says suddenly and loudly, laughing, covering her mouth with her hand as many of the Chinese women they’ve seen do. The monks and nuns look at Katie and point their chopsticks and laugh and say, “Jung yoo jung—”

  Crack!—a sharp sound, from the end of the table. They jump. Silence.

  The head monk, of great age and steely thinness. His long, lined face is crowned by shorn cotton-white hair like a dusting of snow, his chin adorned with a long, snowy goatee. He has slammed a wooden umbrella down on the wooden table. He shouts toward the kitchen. A tiny man in a spattered apron, beneath which are bare ankles and duck feet, runs in and puts a bottle of soy sauce in front of Katie.

  “Shay shay,” Katie says. She puts it on her rice.

  Xiao Lu puts it on her rice, and even puts some in her stew. Katie follows suit.

  Clio and Pep look at each other. From the very first, Katie has loved anything salty, and nothing sweet. While her friends snack on cookies and candies and sweet sugary sodas and birthday cakes with ice cream, Katie has always preferred potato chips and pretzels. So she has the taste buds of her Chinese mother.

  Clio and Pep watch Xiao Lu eat. Like all Chinese, her head is down, the bowl is at her lips, and she shovels the mix of rice and stew into her mouth. She rarely looks up, and eats fast. The silence echoes with the slurps of the monks and nuns.

  Pep tries not to look at the others eating, but from time to time in the cooling quiet he hears a sharp crunch! as a molar dispatches what at best is vegetable, at worst a lower life-form. He feels ill, and wolfs down his rice, as does Clio. Most of the monks and nuns eat slowly, chewing each bite carefully, clearly meditating on the food. Slowest of them all is the head monk. The others wait for him finish.

  Suddenly he is done, and bows his head to his empty bowl. Through the windows high up under the curved eaves, rays of sunlight ride in, illuminating an army of hungry dust motes dancing their way down. In a movie, Pep thinks, the sunbeams would fall upon this last table of the dying Buddhists, but no. They miss badly—one falls upon a neglected white porcelain appliance near the kitchen with a mangle on top, another on the filthy, pitted stone floor.

  A small bell rings again. The senior monk swivels around on the bench, hawks, and spits on the floor. A few other monks partake of the ritual spit.

  Pep is appalled, thinking, TB. They all have TB in these places and there’s no shot for it—Orville Rose told him that. The new strains are untreatable, lethal.

  The head monk, using his umbrella as a cane, walks toward the door. He places each foot, in once-white tennis shoes, on the stone as if the earth below, all the way through to America, feels the weight of his soles. His umbrella taps stone in time. The other monks fall in behind. Pep is still worrying about the risk of TB.

  “Hop betwixt the gobs!” he says to Katie and Clio. “Attend to the phlegm!”

  On tiptoe Pep leads them out. The monks’ feet crunch gravel as they follow the sinuous garden path, and they walk on through the falling night toward a small temple, and disappear within. Soon there is the sound of another frail bell, and chanting.

  They stand there in the misty dusk. Pep shivers. The place seems even more ominous, lonely, and cold. The sun is gone. As if a warm coverlet has been pulled off, the bone chill of the mountain surrounds them, and seeps in. Pep opens his arms to Katie and Clio, who cuddle in and under for warmth.

  “Let’s organize where we sleep,” Clio says.

  “I’ll ask her,” Katie says. “Xiao Lu?” She nods. Katie puts her hands under her head in the universal sign of sleeping, and asks, “Where can we sleep?”

  Xiao Lu gestures for them to follow, and brings them to an aged nun who sits in the doorway of a room on the ground floor of the dormitory building. “Venerable Mother,” she says, “this is my daughter Chun, whom I gave up ten years ago—”

  “I know,” she says, in an irritated tone, “everyone knows already.”

  “They need a place to sleep.”

  “Think I don’t know that? I’ll do it, don’t worry.”

  Xiao Lu indicates that the nun will help, and that she will now say goodbye until morning. Pep indicates that they will escort her to the gate, and takes out his blue-laser flashlight and walks along with her, Clio and Katie following. He towers over her. She’s like a child—young enough to be our child. Katie our grandchild.

  The monks are still chanting, more softly than before, and more discordantly. The glow of a humming spotlight drapes the white elephant. The blue-white beam of Pep’s flashlight swings here and there, bringing stones and walls into eerie relief.

  They come to the massive pink moon gate in the front wall. A gatekeeper opens it. Pep hesitates, wondering whether to give Xiao Lu the flashlight. It is an ink-black night, the clouds obscuring any wedge of moon. He offers it to her. She shakes her head no and points to a wooden pole as tall as her, leaning against the door. It has a black blob on top.

  Pep thinks she wants him to get it for her, and goes and tries to pick it up. He doesn’t realize how heavy it is, and it tilts over and falls to the ground. Laughing, Xiao Lu bends and easily picks it up in one hand.

  All the Macys are surprised—this is one strong woman.

  Xiao Lu takes a matchbook from the pocket of her orange vest, lights a match, puts it to the top of the pole—it’s a pine-pitch torch, alight.

  Suddenly to Pep the flame and the pine-and-mist scent in the thick night air are a comfort, reminding him of Macy family summers in the Adirondacks, all canoes on silky, cold lakes and campfires and toasted marshmallows. The pine torch in one hand, Xiao Lu waves goodbye and walks lightly off down the steps, and then turns sharply into the woods.

  They watch for a long while. At first the pine torch bobs along smoothly on what looks like a wide path, but then it disappears up onto the black haunch of the mountain. As they watch, it starts to flicker as the trees block the flame. And then it seems to lose weight, or energy, and weakens. Pep sees it as an uncertainty, a wavering marker of one lone human soul going home in the dark of a fierce wilderness, filled with snakes. An uncertainty of whether one heartbeat will follow, in a civilized way, the last.

  

  In dim light filtering through a creaky wooden stairwell, the Macys—carrying quilts and cylindrical pillows filled with what Clio, from using similar zafus, is pretty sure are buckwheat shells—follow the nun slowly up three flights to a long, low room under the beams of the roof. Many narrow, wooden-framed beds are set out haphazardly. Dust is thick on the floor. Pep first, then Katie, starts sneezing. The nun turns on a bare bulb struggling at the end of a long wire. A dismal place, all cobwebs and mildew. At either end are two clouded windows.

  “Yuck! Gross!” Katie says. “I can’
t sleep here.”

  “It’s here or outside, hon,” Clio says, swallowing her own revulsion at the filth. “We’ll make the best of it and find a better place tomorrow. Come on—let’s all pitch in and help—it’ll be fun. Move the beds together.”

  For Pep, even to touch the beds is a challenge. He watches them try to move the bulky, rough beds, and finally helps. The nun smiles at their difficulty. Finally the beds are side by side in the middle of the room, quilts and pillows on each. They have been given three threadbare orange towels, which they place on the pillows.

  With a gesture that is universal, Clio asks where the toilet is. They follow her outside to a place behind the dormitory, a long latrine on the edge of a ravine.

  “I’m never going there,” Katie proclaims. “I’ll go in the woods!”

  “Shay shay,” Clio says, feigning delight and bowing.

  The nun smiles, says something, and walks away. They force themselves to manage. Pep gives thanks that he doesn’t have to squat.

  The beds are bad, hard and irrevocable. The quilts feel damp and moldy. The buckwheat shells are the only comfort, molding themselves to the three heads staring up in the dark. They cannot bring the beds close enough together to touch each other, and Katie suggests putting the mattresses on the floor. The sound of scurrying things stops them. Katie, clutching Shirty, climbs in with Clio, and barely fits.

  Silence. Clio and Pep wait for the Nightly Comment From Katie.

  “I told you, Mom, didn’t I?”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “That she’d recognize me.”

  “You were right.”

  “Now she’s not a figment anymore.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Of my imagination. She’s real.”

  “Very, Kate-zer, very,” Pep says, and then, “Love you.”

  Katie yawns, and settles. “Love you two too.”

  “Call me if I need you,” Clio whispers.

  In the silence, the sounds from the mountain, looming unseen, close by on the other side of the wall and leaning in, intensify.

  Pep hears a hoot, optimally a low-risk owl. And then a snuffling thing, at worst a bear, at best a panda. Rustling noises, and claws skittering over the black-tile roof—a squirrel, a rat? Rummaging through all the risks, he gives in to the fact that he’ll never get to sleep in this distressing place, and falls asleep.

  Clio lies awake, thinking of Xiao Lu. What is she feeling right now, finding her daughter again? Is it what I myself felt when I was handed the same daughter three months after she abandoned her? No. I was handed a baby to keep; she is seeing her baby as someone else’s child, to be abandoned by her all over again. All at once Clio feels what it must be like, that ache in that heart. Her own heart speeds up. She tries to breathe herself down.

  Why haven’t I tried harder to engage her fully? Is it that she seems annoyed that I exist? How could she not? She wants to be alone with Katie. Still, why haven’t I gone wholeheartedly into trying to make contact with her—why didn’t I join her, bowing to the Buddha? It’s hard not to see her as a stranger, foreign, other, but there was something else too. What was it?

  The answer comes, and she shivers.

  She does want her back.

  

  Her feet hardly need the torch to find the path home. For the first time she walks her path in something like happiness. Her lost daughter has come back. More beautiful than she ever could have imagined, almost like Second Sister. Thank you for finding them, giving them my message. Chun has grown tall; her face is the same face, her hair has the same tint of russet, the same double crown that means wisdom, the same eyes and lips. Very beautiful. Healthy and strong, more so for being given to them. My flesh and blood. Their child?

  Now she is pacing around the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, built facing west on a level clearing at a site called Ox Heart Rock—named for the shape of a boulder perched on the edge of a waterfall, splitting the stream to fall in two cascades into a pool. Here the water sprays up into a mist. In her darkest times, the endless power of this torrent crashing against the endless strength of this rock—and the rainbows that sometimes gather in the rising mist—has given her hope. This place was here long before she was born, and will be here long after she dies. This, her life, is a single flicker of the spray, only endless in a single moment, as now, here, facing this stream. The one pure and clean thing.

  Even when she was in the depth of despair at abandoning both her children, this place offered hope—that someday she would find the one she abandoned into the wide world, and bring her back to the one still there, Chun’s own First Sister, little Xia.

  Strange to see her as American. More strange to see that they are so old.

  I wish that I could sleep with her on my breast tonight, and every night. I wish she could be mine again.

  She feels such yearning that she stops pacing, leans on one of the decaying walls of the small Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion. The happiness of a moment ago has vanished and she is dizzy above the split waterfall. For the first time since she thought of killing herself on the mountain, she thinks of it again.

  Usually, the deeper into the mountain she climbs, the farther from people and the nearer to her little hut and cave and animals, the lighter her heart feels. This night, the deeper she goes, the heavier her heart. It is as if she is leaving her baby all over again, hearing again the terrible cries—“Whose baby whose baby?”—and once again not being able to shout out, “Mine!”

  27

  Xiao Lu comes at six, just as the first light of dawn unrolls itself up over the edge of the mountain and spreads out like a comforter over the stones of the courtyard. Soon, fed by the summer sun, the light feels warm. Clio and Pep are perched, thawing out and yawning, on the edge of the carp pond, watching Katie and a nun perform incense rituals at one of the three-legged cast-iron vessels. It has been a rough night. None of them can remember ever being as cold. In the morning they ran bent double to and from the latrine, trying to clench up against the shivering to get warm—which only made the shivering worse, and made their legs shake and their teeth chatter. Late June, and they could see their breath in the air.

  “I’m never sleeping there again!” Katie cried. “It’s scary and gross and cold and there are smells that even Cinnamon would be a’scared of. I want a hotel!”

  “There are no hotels on the mountain, dear.”

  “What? None?”

  Luckily breakfast, a gruelish rice soup called congee, was—unlike the stringy pickles in clotted-blood-colored sauce and what might have been pork or that squirrel on the roof but had to be vegetables—hot.

  Xiao Lu is dressed as before but without her orange vest, and carries a shoulder sack and a black umbrella. With a quick nod and smile to Pep and Clio, she goes straight to Katie and is soon grasping her own joss stick in two hands and waving it around, laughing like a girl.

  “I keep feeling,” Clio says to Pep, “that as of this morning our lives have changed, but nothing about it is clear.”

  “Agreed,” Pep says. “Adding another mother ain’t easy.” She smiles, appreciating his lightness. “But look at her—she’s so playful, seems so young—it’s more like we’re adding another kid.”

  “I want to embrace her, but...” Clio trails off. In her mind are all of the things Tao told them about Xiao Lu, things that cloud a fresh view of who she actually is now.

  “Understood,” Pep says. “Me too. Let’s just try to stay open.”

  “Openhearted?”

  “That too.”

  They set out, Xiao Lu leading, to the Joking Monkeys. She sets a fast pace, pointing out plants and birds to Katie, who is soon following close behind. Clio and Pep bring up the rear.

  At first the path is gradual, stone steps carved into rock. As the forest thickens, stone gives way to mossy earth, winding ways a
mong high pines, cedars, and old rhododendrons, their waxy, thick leaves looking to Clio like Elizabethan collars around pink blossoms as big as a baby’s head. Camellias abound. The air is cool and thick with rising dew, carrying the heady scent of pine, earth, high-mountain air, and flutters of jasmine. Birds sing—even, once, the harsh calls of a nightingale. There is a sense of solidity—Clio thinks of a mantra of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn: I am solid, like a mountain; I am fresh, I am free—a sense that underneath them is a big core rock, and nothing bad can happen as long as they put the soles of their feet firmly upon it, one after the other. Yet as she watches Xiao Lu and Katie playing as much as walking on the path ahead, so lithe and spry compared to her and Pep, part of her feels the opposite—apprehensive, worn, and slight, and on the shadow side of middle-aged. Thank God for Pep. Big and solid. Towering over all of us, especially Xiao Lu. Immoveable. The family mountain.

  The path borders a stream that thunders down around rocks and fallen tree trunks. A footstep often sinks into moss, sounding something damp and satisfying. Mists are everywhere, floating the morning, rising to eye level so the trail can be seen below but nothing above, until, in the next instant, the mist clears and they are in a tall grove of ancient sequoia. Up through the straight trunks Clio can see a congealing of mist to clouds, all puffy and moving fast toward the east, riding the big expectant sky.

  Pep, out in the open air and away from the low-ceilinged rooms and vans, feels good, free. He starts to sing, “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she—”

  “Daddy, don’t!” Katie cries out. “I told you not to. Not in front of her!”