At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  “Look, Mom,” Katie says. “Almost every one starts with a ‘Chun’!”

  “Yes. She really loves that character, doesn’t she?” Obsessed. For ten years it has been her lifeline to you.

  “That ‘Chun’ up there,” Katie is saying, “looks like a plant coming out of the earth, y’see?” Clio nods. “I’ll try to copy it.” She leads Xiao Lu back to the table, and takes up the brush. Twirling the tip and then inking it, she points to the calligraphy with the plant-coming-out-of-the-earth “Chun,” and copies it, pretty well:

  Xiao Lu nods, appreciating how well Chun has copied the character she herself copied from the photos her teacher showed her of the “Spring” character carved into ancient tortoiseshells and ox shoulder bones.

  Katie says to Clio, “But she doesn’t have the one from the ‘New Beginnings’ card you got when you were waiting for me, the ‘amazing.’ I’ll see if I can draw it for her.”

  Clio feels a shiver go down her spine. To share that? Our story? But Katie can’t actually tell her the story. Relax, damnit. Let it go.

  “Here it is!” Katie is saying, proudly, tilting the paper up so Xiao Lu and Clio can see. She points to the character, and then to herself. “My Chun.”

  Xiao Lu is stunned by this, and studies it carefully. She has done many “Chuns,” but she has never before seen a character like this. It is an elegant, vibrant, alive creature that forms a bridge from the ancient “Chun” to the modern—the missing link in the chain of “Chuns.” It is new to her. She is thrilled, and feels a warm rush fill her body. She smiles her pleasure, and reaches out to touch her daughter’s face with her fingertips, caress it.

  Katie smiles, happy at the big smile from Xiao Lu, thinking, Wow, she really likes this one. Let me do it again better. She bends her face down close to the paper and concentrates on making this one perfect. When it smudges, she gets impatient and tries another. Finally, on the fourth try, she is satisfied and says to Xiao Lu: “Momma, this is my best one, see?”

  She looks up at Xiao Lu, who is smiling broadly—and then Katie realizes what she has done.

  She turns to look at Clio, hoping she hasn’t heard. But she has.

  35

  Katie has been looking forward to feeding the deer again at sundown. As the light begins to fade, she stands between Xiao Lu and Clio, facing the woods, her open palms filled with Goldfish. Pep, leaning on the monk’s staff, watches. The deer appear, and the little buck comes forward to nibble at Xiao Lu’s palm. The doe and fawn and a few others hold back for a moment, then bounce toward them.

  Boom! Boom! Boom! A pause. Boom! Boom! Boom!

  The deer vanish. The monk is walking around the clearing to the beat of a small drum clenched under his arm and struck with vicious abandon by the same mallet he used for vibrating the acupuncture needles in Pep’s toes. Boom! Boom! Boom! Pause. Boom! Boom! Boom! Xiao Lu screams at him to stop, but he does not. She tries to grab his arm, but in his floppy robe he is like a wave that no human hand can grasp—he keeps chanting and circling. Boom! Boom! Boom! It is as if he has been doing the same thing for so long, at dawn and at dusk, that it is wired into him.

  Finally he stops, spreads his bamboo mat, lights a joss stick, assumes the full lotus, and begins bowing and chanting again.

  Katie gestures to Xiao Lu and asks, “You think they’ll come back?”

  Xiao Lu shakes her head—“No, not tonight”—and gestures to come help make dinner.

  After the monk finishes, and as he is rolling up his mat, Xiao Lu says to him, “Go home! Go back to the monastery! You are ruining my time with my daughter!”

  “I don’t leave till I fix the man.”

  “He’s no better.”

  “He’s no worse. I will study my textbooks. Tomorrow I work on him some more. He is a great challenge. His heart is beating bad. Great danger. But I will cure him.”

  “You cause trouble for me. If you don’t go tonight, you don’t get the quilt.”

  “If you don’t give me the quilt, you lose your job. Where do I sleep?”

  “Leave!”

  “Stupid woman! Where do I sleep?”

  His eyes are two rocks. “Okay. I give you one more day. You sleep in the cave.”

  “What cave?”

  She leads him around the back of the house. The Macys follow. At the mouth of the cave, True Emptiness balks, curses, and says that not even in his days as an itinerant young monk with a begging bowl, not even during the Mao era when he hid out in the foothills of Tibet disguised as a butcher’s apprentice, did he stay in a such a cave, and he isn’t about to start now.

  “You either sleep in the cave or you sleep outside,” she says. “There’s no room in the hut. I’m going to have to sleep in the cave too.”

  “It stinks.”

  “It is a sacred cave.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “There are markings on the wall. There is an altar. There are legends. A holy man lived here for many years and when he died his body stayed here untouched by animals until his bones became a pile of white dust.” She points. “That pile of white dust you see in the corner there.”

  “What’s for dinner?” She doesn’t answer. He goes outside.

  Katie and Clio and Pep are amazed at the sight of the cave. The dusk light eases in through a wide crack in the rock, and water drips steadily through the crack and down twenty feet into what looks like a foot-deep, carved-out basin, then through a narrow channel cut into the rock and out through the entrance. On the smooth walls Clio can make out pictographs of animals and humans, and long columns of Chinese characters. It reminds her of the caves of the Dordogne that she visited with her mother and sisters so long ago, although these drawings are stick legged and simplistic, almost like the Chinese characters they became, not the full-bodied, fluid mammoths and deer, in red and black, of Font-de-Gaume.

  “Awesome!” Katie shouts up into the dome.

  “Awesome! Awesomeawesome...” the dome echoes back.

  “Lotta headroom,” Pep says, staring up into the expanse, “more than any other place we’ve seen in all of China. Nice.”

  Xiao Lu brings in a load of firewood and lights a large iron stove whose scarred, rusted flue pipe zigzags unsteadily up through the crevice in the roof. Then she goes out and returns with an armload of small, sweet-scented cedar boughs. Katie asks in gesture what she’s doing, and she indicates two rough-hewn beds, one large, one small, and two quilts. She starts stuffing the cedar boughs into one of the quilts, asking Katie if she’d like to help.

  “Look—she’s making mattresses! Are they for us?” Katie asks Xiao Lu in gesture. No, they’re for her and the monk tonight. “Hey, guys, maybe we can switch? It would be so fun, like sleeping in a pine tree—it smells all tree-ey and fresh. Please?”

  Pep has gotten out his blue-laser flashlight and is sweeping the recesses and the roof of the cave. Suddenly there’s a fluttering high up in a far corner, and something glides easily down around them like a paper airplane. It seems to be about to hit a wall when it banks away smoothly and sails on an imaginary gray wind in spirals, graceful floating loops, and quick flips, and floats off on another tack.

  “A bat!” Katie cries. “Wow!”

  “Careful!” Clio cries, taking Katie’s hand. “Let’s get out of here!”

  “Wait, Mom! They’re just doing big swoops—they’ll never bump into you! They’re blind and fly by echoes!”

  “Bats carry diseases,” Clio says. “Like rabies. Let’s go.”

  “Not really. I studied bats in Lucille Stotts’ class! I love bats! Bats don’t hurt anybody.”

  “Sick ones do,” Clio says.

  “Sure, ones cooped up by humans in zoos, but not wild ones, free ones.”

  Xiao Lu sees Chun’s fascination and the woman’s fear. She holds up her hand. A bat comes straight for it, then banks away
, and comes back and banks around it again, and sails off on another unseen breeze.

  “Cool!” Katie says. Xiao Lu’s really good with animals. Wild animals are like her pets. A pet bat is awesome. She loves animals and they love her. She’s in symbiosis! “That’s not a sick bat, Mom, no way! And they eat mosquitoes. So they protect us from malaria, right? They’re like good for us, right?”

  Clio says nothing.

  “Right, Dad? Low-risk, right? It would be so cool to sleep in here! Can we?”

  Pep feels caught between Clio and Katie. Lately when Katie gets a “No” from one of them, she tries to play them off each other. She’s right, he thinks, it’s not much of a risk, no. Pep glances at Clio, and sees in her eyes her fear and her resoluteness—she does not want them to stay here. He knows that she feels safer in smaller, enclosed spaces, with doors that you can close and lock, like the hut. Big, high spaces—which he prefers—make her nervous. In her glance is a firm “No.” But he feels he has to moderate it—Katie and she are getting into a fight about everything and anything to do with Xiao Lu, and all it does is push Katie away, toward her.

  “Mom ’n I will talk about it and let you know. Besides, Xiao Lu hasn’t said she’d switch and let us stay here.”

  “I’ll ask her.” Katie gestures. Xiao Lu smiles and nods. “It’s okay with her.” Katie glances at Clio, who looks even less open to the idea, and then focuses her hope on Pep. “Please, Daddy?”

  Pep realizes he has to be firm. “Sorry, honey, we can’t do it, not tonight.”

  Immediately Katie turns to Clio. “Mom, say yes.”

  “No, not tonight.”

  “You never let me do anything fun! And for your information, this would definitely be fun. Low-risk and fun! Like she’s fun and you’re not!” Katie flumphs out of the cave. Xiao Lu follows.

  “Katie, come here!”

  “No!” She turns and stares at her. “I’m not hanging out with you anymore, I’m hanging with her.” She stomps away, Xiao Lu walking quickly after her.

  Clio goes to the cave entrance and stares. Xiao Lu walks into the house, and comes out carrying a large wooden cutting board heaped with vegetables—spring onions, bok choy, yams, garlic cloves, ginger root. A small knife and a curved chopper lie beside them on the board. She squats on the ground beside Katie, balancing perfectly on her heels. Katie looks down at her, they exchange words, and then Katie squats down alongside her in the same way, balancing easily.

  Clio has never seen Katie squat like this before, perfectly balanced, just like her. With no effort, as if her body was designed for this.

  Xiao Lu and she seem, just then, like sisters sitting in the courtyard outside their family house—First Sister, Second Sister—two sisters squatting together in the dirt facing the woods, sharing an old wooden cutting board, starting to chop up the garlic and ginger and vegetables for the family’s evening meal, going over the day’s events as sisters do, happy just being together. Safe, at day’s end, with family, protected from the world. Located.

  

  “Pep? Pep, wake up, but shhh, quiet—don’t wake Katie.” He carefully gets up and limps on the uneven stones to the fire, where Clio is sitting on the chair. He takes the lone bench.

  They are alone. Xiao Lu and the monk are sleeping in the cave. It’s only ten o’clock—Clio waited until she was sure that Katie was sound asleep.

  They sit face-to-face, reading each other in the warm, close glow. Pep sees the worry in Clio’s face, and something else he can’t identify. He’s surprised at the acuity of his eyesight—no, not just that, his inner sight as well—he feels he’s never really looked into her eyes this unflinchingly, searchingly, before. He sees her concern, her terrible fear that things are going very wrong here—and shivers. Suddenly he wants to tell her all the things he’s come to understand during the monk’s treatment, and share his terror that his screwed-up heart could throw a clot into his brain that would paralyze or kill him—wants to tell her every true thing!—but can’t.

  Tell her! Can’t.

  And in that “can’t” something wells up that he’s felt once or twice in his life—as a boy at that moment when he sensed the dry depth of his father’s disinterest in him, and as a man when he stared with his wife into a childless future. He wants to tell her but he sees in her eyes her fright and sadness and all at once he’s weeping.

  “Oh shit, I’m sorry—” He tries to stop but can’t.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Again he takes a deep breath and tries to say something but keeps on sobbing, his body shaking. And then he feels her arms go around him and he understands that his tears are for her, for their baby, for all of them. He holds on to her, hard.

  Holding him, feeling his shudders, her heart opens and breaks a little. She hasn’t seen him like this in years. Not since they said yes to China and were handed Katie and their hearts flew up like birds and they were in love with her and each other and life itself and began living human-sized lives. As she cradles him, this poor man whose tightness restrains his anger like her tightness restrains her sorrow, she feels his terror, senses how much they have lost, how lonely and walled-off each of them has become, how the connection they made with each other and their baby has become a connection only through her, so that for years when they have “taken time for themselves”—a weekly movie date or dinner up in Albany or a trip to New York—all they talked about was their child. Katie has been their connection—which makes Katie’s distance, now, terrifying.

  Seeing him so vulnerable, for a moment she feels confused. Her instinct is to say to him, “Pull yourself together, be strong like always,” but then she hears her mother’s voice when her father didn’t get tenure in locust entomology and crashed into depression—“Pull yourself together, Forbes!”—and she damn well will not follow that shit now. Move! Accept him. Be with him where he is, right here, right now. She squeezes him as tightly as she can, feeling their embrace as a life preserver in this harsh, isolating world.

  They hug each other for dear life and for a long time. The strength that has seemed lost in either of them alone now seems to come back to both, in the shared flow of care, raveling them up, together. This little catch of fire, in their despair, warms them. Again they look into each other’s eyes for a long moment before pulling away.

  “Pep... I... thank you so much...”

  “And you.” He wipes his eyes, sighs.

  “Yes.” She collects herself. “But listen—we’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got a really bad sense about Xiao Lu, and it’s getting worse. Why didn’t she bring anyone to carry you out? We could be back in Changsha by now. Katie’s moving toward her, starting to love being here, love being with her. She’s hardly talking to me anymore—and Xiao Lu knows it. Katie’s learning words, sentences. A couple of times I even saw her cover her mouth with her hand when she laughed, just like her. We’re losing her—emotionally. Whatever I try just makes it worse! I have this feeling there’s a real possibility that Xiao Lu is going to try to take her.”

  “Clee, please—”

  “We have to take it seriously. The only thing that’s kept her going all these years is the hope of seeing her daughter again. Look at the walls—over and over she writes her name?”

  “What more can we do?”

  “One of us has to be with them at all times. At night, one of us will stay awake—I’ll put the chair against the door, to sleep. When the monk goes back to the monastery, if you still can’t get across, we’ll make sure he sends back the porters. And one other thing: Pep, we’ve got to stick together in this. In the cave thing, she tried to play you off of me, and she saw you waver—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Listen—if she sees the slightest crack between us, she’ll use it. Right now, with Katie, you’re the good guy. She’ll still listen to you. So you’ve got to be really there with her, o
kay?”

  “Sure. But she still looks to you first and foremost.”

  “When the hell, Pep, are you going to see how important you are to her, how powerful? When?”

  He’s startled at her vehemence. “Yeah, when indeed.” He sighs. “Sorry for my outburst. Guess I’m getting emotional too.”

  “Sorry? Pep, it’s a treasure.”

  Choked up again, he takes her hands. “Thanks.”

  

  Sitting there in the chair in the centuries-old stone hermitage, the embers casting a smoky glow and all kinds of clutter hanging from beams or tacked to walls or lying on sagging shelves, Clio feels her own heart racing. Despite feeling Pep so much with her, she feels like she’s lost her bearings on place and time, as if she’s in a fairy tale with a wicked witch, or in Hogwarts, or with Odysseus in the cave of the Cyclops—how Katie loved that story—Odysseus trying to figure out how to get his men out safely, all the while wondering which of them would be eaten next. In a way it’s so simple, with the Greeks.

  The chair blocks the door, and soon she feels safe enough to sleep. But in that phantasmal hypnogogic moment just as she’s falling asleep she’s jolted awake by a voice—She loves her more truly than she loves you. She stares around. Nothing.

  She takes a sip of black tea, intent on staying awake. Vigilant.