by Samuel Shem
“You heard that?!”
“I couldn’t help it, honest.” Clio and Pep nod. “So I thought about it and I mean sure she wants me back. It’d be worse if she didn’t, right? I really wanted to meet her and I’m super glad, I mean, it’s really something to meet your birth mom. But it’s weird because I know I should have like really deep feelings for her?”
“We all know—”
“But maybe it’s because she’s so different and I’m so different from her—she’s so Chinese, she makes me feel I’m like less Chinese and more American. Really, you don’t have to like worry, okay?”
Clio smiles and hugs her. “Thanks, but sometimes kids don’t see the whole picture. Daddy and I have a lot more years than you, and, as you said after being lost, our job is to make sure you and the family are safe. So you’ve got to trust us on that.”
“But on what? I mean like on our... our like plight?”
Clio and Pep smile at the word. “About making sure, honey, that if we need help from other people, we can get it.”
Katie yawns. “Can I go to sleep now?”
They get her ready for bed—she’ll sleep on the mattress on the floor. She lies down and snuggles into the heavy quilt and sighs contentedly. Looking at Pep, she says, “Hey, Daddy, coazy-coazy! This is fun! Like the time we all camped out in our tent in the backyard and...” She’s out.
Clio and Pep clear away the dishes and clean up as best they can. Gingerly, Handi-Wiping here and there, Clio beds down with Katie on the floor. Pep scrunches himself into the small, rough bed. The kerosene lantern is turned down low. The night is so quiet it seems perversely loud. Even though his heartbeat still feels fast and weird, without Xiao Lu there they both feel a touch of calm.
“Clee?”
“Hmm?”
“Think, for a sec, what is the actual risk here? What’s the real danger? Katie’s finally got the message: be careful, and stick together. We’re together; we’ve got food, clothing, shelter—this place has been safe for human habitation for hundreds of years.”
“Call it intuition. I just don’t like it.”
“What’s not to like?”
“Oh, nothing,” she says, matching his flip tone, “I mean, just some minor thing like—as you yourself said—she’ll grab Katie and instead of waiting for us at the next bridge she’ll keep on going and disappear with her into China! Jesus!”
“But she’s had chances already, and—”
“She has not. I’ve kept an eagle eye on them.”
He pauses. “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?”
“How can I know, until you tell me.”
“Well, right...” He takes a deep breath. A risk, to say this. Definitely foreign territory. “Y’know, my problem isn’t the bridge—the bridge is the bridge. My problem is I can’t get over it—” He blinks, smiles. “That’s a dumb way to put it. But what I mean is, is that it’s not out there, it’s in here, in my head. And that’s what’s got to change, in me. So, well, maybe that’s true of you too?”
“And why am I so afraid? I’m not usually.”
“’Course not, usually. But, well... with Katie, sometimes. Even, sometimes, a bit overprotective and—”
“Don’t go there, Pep. Do not go there.”
“Sorry. Just consider it, okay? I mean we’re both really on edge about it—it’s a big-time fear, no question. But what is the fear, really? And is the fear commensurate with the risk? Is it poisoning the little time we all have with her? When we get home, will we look back and say, ‘What the hell were we so afraid of? Look what we missed out on!’”
Clio says nothing, fighting to control her anger—and fighting the paralysis of the control, The WASP Freeze. She tries to follow the breath, to breathe herself down. Okay, try to open up to the possibility that you’ve taken this—what Katie calls “a figment”—way too far, that she’s no real danger to your child, that you’re making something worse of her, for some reason that has to do with... with what? Closeness? Trying to keep Katie from spiraling out, away? Fear of Katie going out into this tough world with such an innocence, such trust? Possibilities crowd in. She feels the fist of fear unclench, a little, and the merely human ease in. And then she feels an appreciation for her husband. He’s hanging in there. Blunt as a pile of rocks, but as solid, too. Maybe there’s something new here. Maybe, because he himself feels humiliated, he’s more open?
“Pep, you awake?”
No answer. Rocklike. Good for him.
The acrid kerosene lamp is killing her throat, her eyes. She puts it out. Pitch black but for the glow of embers in the stove. She sits back down in the chair that’s squeezed between the bed and the stove and the calligraphy table.
She thinks of when she was a girl, every ritual summer like clockwork at the Hale Family Compound in the Poconos, the gangs of kids running around, the olders taking care of the youngers, one game running into another and campfires with s’mores and creaky old cabins with kerosene lanterns, wood fires and smooth wooden chairs and banisters that once were birch saplings and it was good fun, free and unbridled until the hormones hit and the boys became boys and the girls, girls, and everyone grew and fell in love and got married and had kids and was happy for a while and then was miserable and stifled and she didn’t marry when it was normal and had to run away to the sexy tropics—and couldn’t get back.
She stares at her sleeping daughter, who even after today seems to have no sense of the hole in the core of her soul. Stop it! How do you know what’s there? Didn’t she, in a moment after our visit to the orphanage, with tears in her eyes say, “I wish I knew my birth mom”? Well, now she does. And is that better?
All at once she finds herself weeping, forcing her hands over her mouth so as not to wake her husband or child. Weeping harder for her pitiful Hale Family Practice of Forcing Yourself Not to Weep At All.
32
Pep awakens to a touch on his arm. He has no idea where he is. He stares up at a golden glowing light. I’ve died and gone to heaven. But then a face darkens the glow and a cold drop of water falls on his forehead, and he is hit by the strong scents of damp wool, kerosene, and wood fire, and he sees that the face is ancient, Chinese, the ashen-tan color of a persimmon, and wrinkled like a prune—an old Buddhist monk’s face. If this is heaven, it’s the wrong heaven, and I’m toast.
“It’s okay, darling,” Clio says, touching his arm, “Xiao Lu’s brought him from the monastery. I think he’s a doctor.”
“A doctor? She was supposed to bring a porter—two porters—to carry me out. This guy looks like he needs to be carried out himself. What’s up?”
“I tried to ask her, but all she does is shake her head no. Maybe there weren’t any at the monastery, or she couldn’t persuade anyone else to come.”
The monk grabs him by the ears, as if they are two jug handles, and forces him to stare into his eyes, which, in contrast to his ashen old face, seem to be live coals in a dying fire. “Ow! Hey, pal,” Pep says, squirming away, “take it easy!”
The monk grabs his ears harder and forces him to submit to another set of hot stares. Finally he stops, lets go, knits his brow, strokes his chin.
Pep groans. She dragged this guy out in the middle of the night across those logs to treat me? He looks around. Katie is asleep on the floor, huddled under the quilt.
The monk takes Pep’s wrist, feels for a pulse, and his head snaps back. He drops the wrist as if it’s a live wire, and his mouth, which has been a thin, wrinkled slit, pops open in surprise. He barks something grim at Xiao Lu. Both of them stare down at Pep, who thinks, This is not a good sign. He starts to say something but the monk tries to silence him. Pep slips his head free.
“Clee, tell him the problem’s in my ankle.”
Clio tries to explain this. The monk nods in a dismissive way and traces a path on Pep’s body from his wrist pulse t
o his heart and then up to his head, mimics a man looking down at a chasm, terrified, and then traces a line back down through his heart to his ankle, which is swollen to the size of an eggplant and bruised the same color.
Pep focuses on his heart—it’s racing even more crazily. At that moment the monk puts his fingers on his pulse again, more lightly this time, and suddenly, as if receiving another shock, jerks his hand back. With a smile he shakes his fingers in the air as if to cool them off. Pep tries to explain that the monk’s exam is causing the symptoms he’s noticing, but he gets nowhere. Finally, after cooling his fingers in the pail of drinking water, the monk touches Pep even more lightly so that it might not even be a touch at all, keeps his fingers there, and closes his eyes.
From time to time he sighs, spreading the odor of garlic and ginger through the tiny room. He lifts his fingers, places them on the other side of the wrist. For another long space of time he communes with the pulse, his face twisted in worry. Pep is getting scared, feels his heart speed up—the damn thing seems to be beating at random!
Clio is fuming at this useless delay. Xiao Lu has failed to bring back anyone who could carry Pep out. After what seems like half an hour Pep and Clio are not even sure that the monk is awake. His breathing is deep and regular, and he isn’t moving.
Finally the monk stirs, groans, and digs in his bag.
“What are you going to do for him?” Clio asks, indicating this in gesture.
The monk stares at her with a haughty air—reminding her of the infertility doctor telling her that everything had failed. Again, but this time with insistence—as if explaining the basics of life to a child—he points to Pep’s heart, then traces his finger from heart to neck to head, into the brain, and then back down to the swollen foot. And then he smiles, revealing a silver mine of repaired teeth, front and back. He removes his worn quilted coat and points to his black bag. With a snort and a fist placed over his own heart, he indicates that he is the doctor and Pep is the patient and Clio counts for nothing and should just stay out of his way.
“Honey,” Pep says, “I’m a goner.”
The monk takes out a box of acupuncture needles.
“It’s okay,” she says. “He may be brusque, but acupuncture may be just the thing.”
“The porters are just the thing—why the hell didn’t she—?” The monk barks at him to be quiet. Pep lays his head back down and pictures himself dying of hepatitis or AIDS. He sighs. At least they say these acupuncture needles are painless.
Which is why, when the intense pain hits his inner thigh, he screams. The monk curses and tells him to be quiet. Katie wakes up, mumbles, and goes back to sleep.
The needles are a torment. So much for being painless, Pep thinks, these ones must be too thick or too dull—they feel like a nail twisted in through his skin. He bites his lip until it bleeds. The placements and twirlings are bad, but worse is when the monk takes a piece of kindling and sets the end aflame, then places it on a needle the length of a ruler stuck into the soft white middle of Pep’s belly. At this Pep groans, whimpers—which makes the monk’s wrinkled face re-wrinkle even more tightly in hearty laughter, joined by Xiao Lu. He tries to push away the big needle in his gut—the monk’s hand bats his away as if it were a Ping-Pong ball in a tight game, and cautions him with a single raised index finger not to try that trick again. Pep clenches the wooden sides of the bed, clenches his teeth, clenches his mind down on his body, fighting the burning needles.
On it goes, the monk really getting into the fire cure and Pep in hot pain and Clio in frank doubt, until suddenly, and for no obvious reason, the monk stops still, alert, as if he hears something scary outside. He puts down the wooden mallet he has been using on a picket fence of needles between Pep’s toes and, barking a command at Xiao Lu and motioning to Pep not to move, hustles to find his coat and umbrella and a rolled-up bamboo mat. Then, as if late for his next patient, he hurries out the door.
“Get him back in here!” Pep cries. “He needs to take out the goddamn needles!”
Clio gets up. From outside there’s the sound of a tiny bell being struck—first a dull clink, then a hard strike and long ring. As it ends, another dull clink and a long ring. A third time, then silence. Clio looks at her watch. Four a.m. exactly. She takes the flashlight and goes outside.
It is dark—a thick, heavy dark just this side of fog. She sweeps the beam of the blue-laser flashlight around the clearing. The light hits the cliff face and brings to life reflections in the skin of the rock, mica and quartz—the mineral soul of the mountain. She senses an aura of gold and silver ore all around her.
On the far side of the clearing, where the stream runs, the monk sits on his bamboo mat in a full lotus. The bell perches in his hand like a songbird, the echo of its song fading, fading, to nothing. With a serene diligence he lowers it to the ground, and places the small piece of padded wood with which he struck the bell beside it. He then gathers his heavy coat around him and chants the sutras, bowing to the Buddha.
Clio watches, startled and touched. Startled at the transformation from an irritated, haughty, even mocking doctor to a devoted old man who has given up everything and endured God knows what during Mao’s China for this classic Buddhist practice—to affirm that suffering is human, that there is a cause of suffering, that the cause is holding tight, that the relief of suffering is possible by merely this, merely letting go and bowing to the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. She watches with envy and dismay.
This matters. This practice, somehow, will help get them back to safety. Even having the monk here makes her feel safer; they’re no longer alone with her. Somehow this monk’s spirit will ease her husband’s fear. This is, because that is. That is, because this is. In the compost is the flower. In the flower is the compost. Does she believe it, this co-arising of all life? At her best, maybe. Now?
Not really, no. She wants to go over to the monk and point to her watch and say, “Excuse me, sir, how much longer do you think you’ll be? Back at the temple, the bowing and chanting lasts an hour. Is there any chance that, since this is a kind of satellite service, and my husband is paralyzed with fear and we can’t get out of here, you could cut it short?”
She watches for a while, feels the night chill start to seep into her bones, and goes back inside.
33
Katie, curled up asleep in the chair, doesn’t get to see the acupuncture needles porcupining out from her father’s body. She’s set her Baby-G to go off in time for her to feed the deer at dawn. By the time she awakens, the monk has ended his meditations, come back in, unceremoniously plucked out his needles, and demanded food.
Sleepily, Katie checks in with Clio, nods to Xiao Lu, is introduced to the monk, and asks Pep how he’s doing.
“Okay,” he says, cheerily. “Did you have a beautiful sleep?”
“Un hunh. How’s your ankle and your like panic attacks?”
“Ankle’s swollen, panic’s gone—as long as I’m on solid ground. This monk is a doctor—he’s already started working on it.” He doesn’t mention his pounding heart.
“He’s started with acupuncture,” Clio says.
“Needles!? Don’t let me see ’em, okay?” Clio nods. “Hey, wait—I thought she was supposed to come back with some guys to carry Daddy across?”
“So did we,” Clio says, tersely.
Katie picks up on Clio’s irritation. “So maybe there weren’t any guys and she left a message for them to come later.”
“Maybe.” Clio goes to Pep.
Xiao Lu settles the monk at the table and serves him a steaming hot bowl of congee. He slurps it up quickly, and asks for another. Though his name is True Emptiness, she has heard the joke around the monastery that this thin old man has such an enormous appetite they nicknamed him True Fullness. She laughs to herself, and wishes she could tell Chun this joke.
“Mom, can I ask Xi
ao Lu about feeding the deer?”
“You can ask, as long as you wait for me to come with you.”
Through gesture with the Cheddar Goldfish, she makes it known that she wants Xiao Lu to produce the deer. Xiao Lu gets a few packages of Goldfish and heads outside, Katie following.
“Katie?”
Katie stops on the threshold, turns. Clio, hand raised to pour water into Pep’s cup, is looking at her.
“Please don’t go out there without me.”
“But I’ll miss the—”
“I’ll be right there.”
Katie glances at Xiao Lu, who laughs. When Pep is settled, they go out.
The sun is barely up, more a glow than a disk. The morning, after the rain, seems to Clio all mist—scrubbed fresh, the dew hanging on the grass and big drops shining on the wide leaves of skunk cabbage and on the thinner leaves of what Katie has said is the only thing giant pandas eat, cold arrow bamboo. A dark cypress grows next to the cliff, and a weeping willow rises over a streambed. Flowering azaleas, their purple or white blossoms downed by the rainy wind, are scattered around as if a wedding party has passed by in the night. Bordering the ravine to the left are catalpas, and dragon spruce that climb straight up for a hundred feet. Clinging to the walls of the ravine are what might be thousand-year-old gingko trees, gnarled and angry looking in the easy dawn. And ferns, ferns everywhere, as big as Clio has seen in the jungles of the islands, and Panama and Costa Rica, and moss upon moss upon mulchy rotting logs. And earth. All in all, a perfect place for deer.
Katie and Xiao Lu are walking softly across the clearing to where the cliff edge cuts back into the mountain and the forest takes over. Xiao Lu puts some Goldfish in Katie’s hand, takes some herself, and faces the forest.
“Ping,” she calls out quietly, musically. “Ping. Ping.”
They only have to wait a few moments. Suddenly the mountain deer are there. Katie is amazed at how silently they come to them through the woods, how still they stand there—two, three, four—and one of them is a fawn! They’re much smaller than any deer she’s ever seen. Their long delicate faces and big dark eyes are beautiful. She wants to turn around to tell Clio but knows she mustn’t move or she’ll scare them away. They’re wild, but they act tame. Wild mountain deer her birth mom has tamed! She stares at Xiao Lu, who nods and slowly holds out her hand, palm up, motioning to Katie to do the same. They hold out their hands and wait.
