At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  “C’mon, c’mon. You and Xiao Lu and Clio—and I want big happy smiles.” He lines them up in front of the dark-beamed hut, Katie in the middle, Xiao Lu and Clio on either side. He mimes big happy smiles, takes a few photos, and then as they move away he notices what looks like an ancient inscription carved into the front wall, several neat rows of characters, and captures them too, figuring he’ll get someone to translate it whenever. Xiao Lu gestures that he should be in a picture. Clio takes the camera and they get another few shots of Xiao Lu, Katie, and Pep—he towering over them with arms around all, a giant Hawaiian flowering plant.

  Xiao Lu smiles at them in a way that to Clio seems strained, and then walks briskly up the stone path across the compound, toward the woods, Katie following.

  At the entrance to the trail, Clio touches Katie’s shoulder and calls to Pep.

  “Just look,” Clio says, relieved now that they’re on their way out, “Just for one last moment. And if you really look, Katie, and snap your eyes closed like you’re taking a picture, you’ll remember it forever.”

  “But aren’t we coming back tomorrow?”

  “Xiao Lu will probably be coming to the monastery tomorrow anyway, so we can all visit there. It’s safer.”

  “Safer from what?”

  Damn, that was a dumb thing to say. “Safer from the rain and cold and exposure out here, and also it’ll be easier with other people around.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure, I just feel it will be.”

  They stand there. Xiao Lu comes back to them. The Macys take in the ancient old hut up against the black mountain, the old grove of mings and a gnarled gingko and, all around, resilient towering bamboo nestling into high pine. They say nothing, forced by the momentum of the natural world to merely take in as much as they can.

  For a long moment they don’t move. The only sounds are of rushing water and a lone bird singing without tune or cadence.

  Then Xiao Lu turns and walks briskly into the bamboo.

  As Katie hustles along behind her, Pep feels a sudden fear. He takes Clio’s arm. “Stay right behind them, Clio. If she disappears off this mountain with her into China, it’s over.” They hurry to catch up.

  

  The narrow path back through the bamboo is uphill, and slippery. They walk in silence, single file, Xiao Lu leading, followed by Katie, then Clio, then Pep. They gently hand off bamboo branches from one to another walking behind so no one gets smacked in the face. The late afternoon light filters dimly through the thick growth.

  Pep senses a seeping terror at the idea of recrossing the four log bridges spanning the gorge, the worst one first. In the gathering dark? With the bridges slick as fish after the rain? Like the imagined rumbling in the cataract ahead, he senses a distant rumbling in his bowels, which he fears might again turn explosive. He walks on, barely noticing the beauty all around him, barely taking in the fresh fragrance of the trees and the earth and the flowers and, yes, even the rocks—that sharp metal scent of certain rocks like the scent of iron in spilled blood.

  Xiao Lu sets a quick pace. Katie keeps up with her, right behind—it’s like a game they’re playing, a wilderness follow-the-leader—with Xiao Lu doing an occasional quick zigzag or detour into the pines, Katie following. Laughing.

  A space keeps opening up between Katie and Clio. At first it is a small space, so that Katie doesn’t have to hold the bamboo to keep it from whipping Clio, but then it’s larger, so that Katie is occasionally out of sight around a bend in the trail. Clio calls out to her to stay back, and she does, she and Xiao Lu waiting for Clio and Pep to catch up once again. The path has been cut and used by a short, slender woman, not a tall, broad man. Pep feels gargantuan, bending under boughs, blasting through narrow passages of bamboo, banging into bushes, and getting whacked around the shoulders and face by branches and twigs.

  Slowed by Pep, Clio tells Katie to take it slower, not to go on ahead with Xiao Lu.

  Katie says she understands, though clearly she’s not happy to be held back.

  Again they move on, up. Again Clio calls out to Katie to wait, and she does.

  Xiao Lu stands there holding her umbrella and torch, staring down over Katie’s head at Clio and Pep. Her face shows no expression. She moves on.

  It seems to take an age to get back to the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion.

  Pep and Clio rest on the benches, feeling discouraged at how much farther they have to go, worried about how much longer the light will last, and whether they will have to make the trip in the dusk or, God forbid, by torchlight. Clio can’t believe that Xiao Lu does it by torchlight all the time—she seems amazingly agile and strong, hardly even breathing hard at the really tough, tortuous uphill stretches. Like a lithe animal, she’s totally at home in the forest, in the twilight. Katie and she are on the ledge over the falls, laughing and playing, throwing stones down into the water. Pep calls out for them to get going. He is terrified of the first bridge down below—feels like he’s walking to a trial that cannot help but conclude in his summary execution. His heart thumps wildly. He sweats hard.

  The path from the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion to the first bridge is steeply down, which seems a blessing to Clio and Pep until they realize that Katie and Xiao Lu are using the slick downhill as a kind of slalom course, running, laughing, and shrieking, so that it is increasingly hard to keep up.

  “Katie, wait!” Clio shouts.

  “Meetchu at the first bridge!”

  “Wait!” But Katie doesn’t wait; she runs on ahead with Xiao Lu.

  “Clio,” Pep shouts, “let’s go!”

  “Right!” Clio runs off after them through a thick clutch of woods, but they are never in sight. Behind her she hears Pep trip and curse and then fall, and stops to see if he’s okay.

  “Yes, yes, I’m okay, you go on! Hurry!”

  Clio runs on as fast as she can, shouting for Katie over and over.

  No answer.

  Fear rises, invades. Breathless, she stops by the side of a deep gorge—holds her breath to listen for them. Looks around, tries to find tracks on the stony trail, to see if they’ve stayed on it this far—but can’t see anything. The noise of the rapids below, funneled up by the walls of the gorge, is deafening—she shouts her child’s name as loud as she can, over and over. Rage spews out—screaming, she picks up rocks and dead branches and dirt and throws them into the chasm. Stops. Nothing.

  She goes down the twisting, narrow trail, unable to see very far ahead.

  Finally there is daylight, and below her, Katie and Xiao Lu are standing together at the first log bridge. Both are smiling. Katie waves to her. She runs down to them and grabs Katie hard by the shoulders, glaring at Xiao Lu, shouting, “What the hell are you doing?!”

  Xiao Lu stares back, a smile still on her face, as if this is all a game. Then she lowers herself slowly down to a squat to rest, balancing on her heels.

  Clio turns to Katie. “What happened?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you run away?”

  “I told you I’d meet you at the bridge.” Katie tries to understand why her mother is so upset. Is she scared of Xiao Lu doing something to her? There was one second, maybe, when she and Xiao Lu were out of breath and hiding behind a tree when Xiao Lu moved closer and put her arms around her from behind and all at once pulled her tight against her body. When Katie turned around, her eyes were wet and there was something else there that Katie had never seen before, but when Katie pulled away she laughed, and let go. “We were just playing a game,” Katie says. “She didn’t force me or anything. It was fun.”

  “She made it fun!”

  “But Mom, why would—?”

  “You stay with me and Daddy now. From now on I don’t want you out of our sight. Never, understand? If you can’t see us, you are too far away! Let’s go back and find Daddy. He fell down.
You go first.”

  “What about Xiao Lu?”

  “Xiao Lu will be fine.” Clio looks back at Xiao Lu, still squatting, and now smiling. “This is not funny, understand? This is not funny or fun!” Clio realizes how much she relies on Pep’s bulk and power. She gives Katie a push in the back to get her going back up the trail. Quite.

  Xiao Lu watches them go. She feels humiliated and enraged—it is the worst thing that can happen, to lose face in front of her daughter. She gets up and follows, but at a distance. This woman’s fear will bring about what she fears.

  

  In a few moments they meet up with Pep. He is sitting down, rubbing his ankle. His pants and palms are muddy.

  Clio rushes to him, takes his hands. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I tripped and fell, turned my ankle, that’s all. I can walk on it. What happened with Katie?”

  Katie stands there, head down, fiddling with a loose rock with her foot.

  Clio’s voice is cool, and tight. “Katie Chun?”

  “Un hunh.”

  “Darling, please look at me?”

  Reluctantly, she tilts her head up, her eyes not quite visible under the chicken beak of her China Culture Camp 2001 cap.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” Clio says. “Understand?” Katie nods, puts her head back down. “Look me in the eye.” She does so. “Never go off like that. Never. Got it?”

  “Yes!” Katie cries out, ashamed and impatient. “Sor-ree! Okay?”

  “Okay. Now let’s get out of here.”

  They go down the trail to the bridge. Seeing them, Xiao Lu rises from her squat. Pep indicates that they are to go on. Xiao Lu leads. Clio makes a point of going next, followed by Katie, so that Katie will be sandwiched between her and Pep. Xiao Lu, Clio, and Katie cross the log bridge and stop on the other side of the gorge, waiting for Pep.

  He stands at the end of the logs. He knows not to look down but straight ahead. They seem far away, and thin. He breaks out in a sweat, starts to feel his heart speed up, his chest tighten, trapping his breath inside an iron box. He tells himself to focus. Stay with the reality. Wide, safe logs, wide as a sidewalk, safe as steel. Been there for hundreds of years, no problem with them. You’ll be okay if you don’t look down. He continues to focus only on the logs, but suddenly notices that they are wet with the rain, a little mossy, and, worst of all, they slope downward. No question about it, they tilt at a formidable and slippery angle down to the other bank. Even on the way over, with the logs sloping upward and dry—before the rain—he barely made it over them, only on his knees and with Xiao Lu’s help. He closes his eyes, tries to breathe. The others are calling encouragement to him.

  He opens his eyes, looks at the wide logs, thinks good thoughts, and steps out. Not too bad. Breathe, bend lower. One step at a time, you can do it. Is he saying that or are they? He’s so tight he can’t tell. He places his other foot carefully—but it’s the one he twisted, and it hurts. He tries to favor it and takes another step, but this brings him out over the chasm and he hears the roar of the water crashing on the rocks far below and there’s a ringing in his ears and he feels the mist coming up like a powerful sprinkler and he knows that the last thing he should do is to look down. But as if Poe’s “imp of the perverse” is perched on his shoulder, enticing him—“Look down! Look down! Jump in!”—he looks down. The height is dizzying, the water crashing crazily. He panics.

  Now he’s in survival mode. He goes down on all fours, clutching for something, digging his fingernails into the wet logs like a squirrel. He knows he cannot get across the logs to the other side and suddenly he’s worried about getting back to the bank that is only a few steps away. He can’t turn around, and he can’t go on. He’s terrified that his fingernails will give out and he’ll start to skid down the sloping logs and lose his balance and fall and die. He hears them calling to him to crawl, one knee at a time, but he can’t. He’s frozen. His heart is beating crazily, randomly, like a madman is trapped in his chest. Sweat seems to pour out of his skin like blood through a sieve, dripping down. Terror. Absolute terror. A sense of impending doom.

  Xiao Lu is coming back up the logs to help him, as she did before. Smiling, she bends down and reaches out her hands, but there’s no way he will unfreeze again.

  “Daddy, you can do it, I know you can!”

  “Pep, you have to! Come on!”

  He’s too scared even to call back. Shaking his head no to Xiao Lu—which makes her laugh!—he slowly edges backward up the logs a few yards that seem to be an eternity, and then, feeling solid earth again, digs his feet into it and scrambles off the bridge and flips himself over on his back, panting, humiliated, heart blasting, but safe.

  The three of them cross back and stand over him. He sits up, his hands clasping his knees, shakes his head, says over and over again how sorry he is but there’s no way, right now—especially with his turned ankle—that he’s going to be able to get over those logs.

  “Are you sure, honey?” Clio asks. His answer is in his terrified, exhausted eyes.

  “I feel like the biggest jerk in the world,” he says. “I’m sorry, Kate-zer, it’s a panic attack. I tried, but—”

  “I know, Dad—you tried your best. You’ll do it tomorrow, in like daylight?”

  “Do you have any Valiums?” Clio asks. “Maybe, if you calmed down...” He shakes his head no. She tries to think. “What if we get someone to carry you?”

  “Who?”

  “One of those porters, the ones who offered to carry us up the mountain. We could send Xiao Lu back to the monastery, and bring two of them back. Maybe with a stretcher?”

  “Good idea,” he says. “That’s the best bet. Let’s see if we can make her understand that. Katie, we need a drawing.”

  They manage to show Xiao Lu what they are thinking. She nods, but indicates that it will take time to go there and come back, and that as it is getting dark all of them will have to spend the night in the hut. Clio shakes her head no, it’s urgent, and the three of them will go back to the hut, but she will go on, right away. Xiao Lu nods but says she will lead them there, get them settled, and then go off to the monastery, and come back later tonight with help. They can go back tomorrow morning.

  “What about you and Katie going back to the monastery with her?” Pep asks.

  “Leave you alone out here? And us off in the dark with her? Forget it.”

  Xiao Lu indicates that they should start back to the hut.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” Pep says.

  “It’s okay, Daddy. My daddy’ll be okay. I mean like you’re the man!” She takes his hand and they walk on together, Katie matching her stride carefully to his limp.

  For the first time since her blowup with Xiao Lu, Clio looks her directly in the eye. She looks pleased. Of course she’s pleased, she’s gotten what she wants—another chance. Clio feels her spine stiffen, and indicates that Xiao Lu should follow Pep; she’ll bring up the rear. Slowly they go back along the overgrown path through the bamboo and pines, toward the hut.

  31

  By the time they reach the hut night has come. Clio tries to communicate with Xiao Lu that she should leave right away for the temple to bring back the porters, but Xiao Lu is getting things organized for their stay. She lights the kerosene lanterns and stokes the stove, and shows them where everything they will need is kept. She takes them outside again and points out the firewood, the latrine, and where her drinking water comes from—a pool formed by a little waterfall spilling over a ledge in the rock face above. Pep limps along after them. His ankle is swollen badly and hurts like hell. When she leaves, he’ll ice it in the pool. Filling a plastic bucket with water, Xiao Lu carries it back into the house. She puts on water for tea, and for rice for dinner—with jung yoo—and shows them oil and dried vegetables and fresh fruits, and what might be pieces of dried meat hanging from the raf
ters. Xiao Lu arranges where they will sleep—the bed, and what looks like a small straw-filled mattress and a bulky quilt on the floor.

  To Clio’s surprise and Katie’s delight, there are a large number of bags of a Chinese rip-off of Pepperidge Farm Cheddar Goldfish—Katie’s favorite. Xiao Lu points to the calligraphy of the deer and the dawn. Katie gets it at once.

  “Mom, can we get up early tomorrow and feed Goldfish to the deer?”

  “Of course, sweetie.” Clio is impatient with Xiao Lu, and wonders if she’s gotten the message that they want her to leave at once. She urges her to hurry. Xiao Lu laughs and nods, but dallies. To Clio, she seems to be stalling, as if prolonging the time with her daughter. Finally Pep and Clio lead her to the door, and she leaves. The Macys follow her outside and stand close together in the cloudy, misty night, watching the torch flicker between the pines until it might still be there, and might not. Then, feeling a sudden chill, they go back inside.

  They busy themselves with making dinner—rice and soy sauce, nuts and fruit and Goldfish. Clio and Pep fight their aversion to the dirt—the dirty plates, cups, food, chopsticks—and use their sterile Handi Wipes to keep whatever their mouths touch clean. But they are ravenous, and hardly speak as they eat. With joint sighs, they finish, and sit by the fire, warm and full and safe.

  “Dad, I feel kinda bad.”

  “Why’s that, sweetie?”

  “It’s like I did this, like I made it happen? I ran and made you run and trip and made it hard for you to cross the bridge. It’s my fault, and I’m really sorry.”

  “You didn’t do it, Kate-zer. It just happened.”

  “I know it feels that way, dear,” Clio says, “but it’s not your fault.”

  “Kinda it is.” She pauses. “Mom, there’s one thing I don’t get? When you said we have to get back to someplace safe, like the monastery, why isn’t it safe here?”

  “I just don’t feel safe with her—or that you are safe with her.”

  “You mean she’ll want me back?” Clio is startled. “I heard you guys talking in the van.”