At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem



  At four the next morning the monk rings his bell and starts his chanting and wakes up everybody but Katie. Xiao Lu comes in and smiles and starts to boil water and cook congee. First Pep, then Clio, goes to the latrine, the other guarding the sleeping Katie.

  The monk finishes his devotions and walks into the hut and puts a finger boldly on Pep’s neck pulse. He nods rhythmically, as if in time with it—which Pep and Clio take for a change for the better. But then, cursing softly through clenched teeth, he shows his frustration. His examination of the ankle is more satisfying. Given the soaking in cold water and the poultice of an ointment made from mixing some black mud downstream from the latrine with the same bear-bile stuff that Pep has been drinking, the purple color has changed to blotched lavender, and the swelling is gone. He asks Pep to walk on it. Pep nods and smiles—it’s much less painful.

  After an enormous breakfast prepared by Xiao Lu and Katie, the monk disappears into the cave, indicating that they all should follow. He takes a large, leather-bound volume out of his bag, opens it, and invites them to look. Clearly it is a textbook of Chinese medicine, with page after page of finely wrought drawings of human bodies crisscrossed with lines of meridians and latitudes and longitudes that make them seem more like maps than people. There are also drawings of moxibustion cups and internal organs and whole chapters on acupuncture needles and their placements. It’s impressive, and they nod in appreciation of the monk’s obvious expertise. He indicates that they should leave him to study. At the cave mouth they look back. He is bent low to the text, a finger tracing the pathways, with the intensity of a man wrestling his gods, or his demons.

  Outside, Pep says, “Katie, I want to talk with you a sec, alone?” Clio goes off. When Katie and he are settled on a bench, he tells her how it’s not good that she and Clio are getting into fights all the time, and that it’s got to stop.

  “Yeah, but she’s like so nervous! Anything I do she doesn’t like!”

  “I know, I know, but put yourself in her shoes. She—and I—have a job to do, which is to keep you safe, and get you back home safely.”

  “But like I told you before—nothing’s not safe here! I’m just starting to have fun and she goes wild!” She pauses. “Not like you.”

  “Mom and me are totally together on this, understand?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really understand?”

  “No, you’re not really.”

  “Trust me—we are, okay?”

  Katie looks down at her running shoes and doesn’t say okay.

  “There’s one big thing you can’t do while we’re here: you can’t go outside the boundaries of this yard, from the moon gate to the cliff edge, from the cave to the woods over there, unless one of us is with you. Period. It’s a rule. Agreed?”

  Katie rolls her eyes. “What choice do I have?”

  “On that, zero.”

  “Okay, okay!”

  “Say it.”

  As if to say the word would destroy her very being, she grimaces and it slips out through her clenched teeth. “Agreed.” She gets up. “Now can I go? I’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

  “Have fun.”

  “I will!”

  36

  Xiao Lu and Katie again spend the day in ordinary ways but for Clio’s—and now Pep’s—heightened vigilance. They do the usual housekeeping tasks, and also go into the woods to gather mushrooms and herbs, Xiao Lu leading them to a damp, sunlit patch of obvious fertility—there are vegetables of all sorts, carrots and Chinese radishes, garlic and onions, bok choy and sweet potato. Katie and Xiao Lu prepare another dynamite lunch—which the monk eats by himself in the cave.

  Clio is exhausted from being up all night. Pep tries to persuade her to take a nap and hand over the care of Katie to him, but she can’t. To stay alert, she keeps up her intake of strong tea until her fingers tremble and her lips twitch. Despite several overtures, Katie doesn’t respond. Clearly she is still angry. Clio can hardly stand it.

  After lunch Katie sticks close to Xiao Lu, with Clio always nearby. Katie helps Xiao Lu cut up rags for the monk’s quilt, sew them together, haul water and chop wood, cook and clean. Katie makes a point of getting down in the dirt. She digs with her bare hands for mushrooms or roots or vegetables, lying on her stomach to reach into rotting holes in fallen logs or stumps and coming up smeared with mud, black half-moons of dirt under her nails, and her T-shirt and shorts the wet-brown color of the forest floor. Filthy, she smiles at Clio as if to spite her.

  In late afternoon, Pep and Clio sit on the bench at the corner of the house to get away from the intense tropical sun. Katie and Xiao Lu are on the edge of the clearing in the shade of a tall old pine, playing some kind of Chinese game that involves sticks and smooth river stones and a meticulous drawing of things in the dirt, upon which Katie is sprawled on her stomach, her face sideways on one hand, carefully tracing a figure on the ground. Xiao Lu is also on her stomach, drawing—or, it seems, extending Katie’s part of the drawing—with Katie’s head close beside hers.

  Pep asks Clio to check his pulse. She puts her finger on his wrist and looks at her watch. The sunlight makes it hard to see the second hand, and they turn and face away toward the cave, creating more shadow. She has to concentrate to find the pulse, and then try to count it. She can’t—it’s still too high and irregular. To Pep it feels horrific, like it’s tumbling over a waterfall and crashing on the rocks below. He shakes his head in dismay. Clio turns back to Katie and Xiao Lu. They’re not there.

  “Oh shit! Pep?”

  She starts running this way and that all over the yard, calling, “Katie! Katie!” Racing around the clearing and a ways up each of the faint paths leading into the bamboo and the woods. “Katie? Katie!” Except for the echo, dead quiet.

  Back in the yard, Pep joins her. They stand, catching their breath, staring around the grove in the stony mountain pass. Clio feels exhaustion come down on her, wanting nothing more than to go to sleep and for all this to be a bad dream, yet she feels adrenaline pumping and caffeine jittering—she’s on a razor’s edge. She tries to think, cradling her chin in her hands, fingers to her temples, pressing hard.

  “Hey, up here!”

  They look up. There, up in the big pine under which they’ve been playing, are Katie and Xiao Lu, smiling down at them.

  “We’re up in the tree house!”

  She and Pep stare up at the two girlish faces peering over the edge of a platform in the big old tree. “Get down!” Clio shouts. “Now!”

  “Come up and see—it’s really neat! The steps are on the other side.”

  “I said come down!”

  “’Kay. You walked right under us, it was so funny! You didn’t once look up!”

  “Katie!” Pep yells up at her. “I told you—don’t disappear!”

  “You said don’t go out of the clearing and I didn’t! Jeez Louise!”

  They come down on a series of wooden slats nailed to the unseen side of the tree. Clio takes Katie’s hand roughly and faces Xiao Lu. “It won’t work! I’ve had it!”

  “Stop it, Mom, please—” Clio starts leading Katie away.

  “Why are you scared of me?” Xiao Lu shouts, knowing she won’t understand the words. “She is my baby, I will never harm her! You take care of her but she is mine!”

  Clio shouts, “We’re leaving. Very soon. One way or the other, we will leave!”

  “Why do this to me? Is it my crime to love her?”

  Katie has never seen Clio like this. Her hand on her shoulder is shaking—her whole body is shaking. Clio walks Katie toward the hut, but then instead goes up to the mouth of the cave and looks back. Pep is hobbling along as fast as he can, trying to catch up. Katie looks back at Xiao Lu standing there alone, her hands down at her sides. She looks really sad.

  Suddenly Clio starts to feel like she�
��s evaporating. The caffeine has burned off. The strength goes out of her, the weight of fatigue rolls in, pulling her down. “I am very tired. If you promise, Katie, to stay close, I think I’ll lie down here in the sun and take a little rest? Daddy’s on duty.”

  “I promise.”

  Katie watches Clio stretch out on the sunny rock, adjust her body to its shape, and soon fall asleep. Pep sits there with his back against the warm cliff, watching. Katie nestles between his bare bony knees. It feels good.

  Xiao Lu is still standing there in the clearing, her hands stiffly down at her sides.

  Glancing at Clio, whose eyes are closed, Katie raises her hand and waves at her.

  Xiao Lu sees her wave and waves back. She is appalled at the way that the woman yells at Chun. The way they both are with Chun is so strange. It is almost as if they don’t like her. They will go soon now. How will I bear it? She sighs and looks out at the July sun, which has made its way far down into the ocean of sky, and is now only two fingers above a far peak, the one that, whenever she sees it in shadow, makes her think of her mother-in-law’s ugly chin.

  Time to prepare the evening meal. She starts to go into the house, and stops, turning to see her child deeply, maybe for one of the last times before they take her away. Chun sees her seeing, and nods. She nods back. I will not let that happen.

  

  Not long before dusk the monk comes out of the cave, banging his drum in a new, upbeat rhythm. He calls out to everyone in a reed-thin, piping voice to come to the center of the clearing. When they are gathered he puts down his drum, then turns and disappears into the cave. They wait in silence. He comes back with his black doctor’s satchel over his shoulder and a rolled-up bamboo mat under his arm. Carefully inspecting the lay of the land in the clearing, he picks a spot for the mat. He unrolls it gently, as if it is alive and now fragile in its flatness, and makes meticulous, almost surgical adjustments of edges and alignments to sky and earth.

  Then, walking in a circle around the mat, he stops at each of the four points of the compass and shouts up into the heavens, generating enormous high-pitched sound that drills the air. He cuts each shout off sharply, as if with a scalpel, so that he can luxuriate in the response from the suddenly talkative mountain. With a grand gesture to Pep and a broad smile on his face, he ushers him to the mat and urges him to sit in a full lotus position. Unable to achieve even a half lotus, Pep negotiates a Boy-Scout-at-a-campfire cross-legged sitting posture and waits. Clearly this effort, the result of the monk’s daylong retreat to study his texts and spiritual sources, is the do-or-die moment.

  The monk pounds his chest with his fist and points a finger like a sword at Pep’s head, maybe even his brain, making slicing motions up and down.

  “No way! Clio, don’t let him!”

  “Don’t worry, we’re right here.”

  The monk opens his satchel, takes out his tools, and gets to work. He places a few acupuncture needles over Pep’s heart and twirls them, first one, then another, then another, then back to the second, like one of those acts in the Beijing Circus where a guy keeps twenty plates spinning on wobbly sticks.

  The monk then lights one glass cup and places it on Pep’s knee, then another on the other knee. Clio holds Pep’s hand. The monk produces from his satchel a small, black-enameled box sparkling with inlaid precious stones in arcane, asymmetric patterns. He slips the bone-peg latches and opens it. Obviously the guy is pulling out all the stops, building to some kind of grand finale. Inside the box, catching the low sun, are long metal instruments thick as a pinkie, sharp at one end with a knob at the other. Before Pep can protest the monk has selected one and shoved the knobby end into Pep’s left ear. As it hits the eardrum Pep screams bloody murder, and keeps screaming, for the pain is intense. Clio moves to grab the monk’s hand, but he pushes her away and takes up his trusty all-purpose wooden mallet and grasps the metal stalk of the rod firmly in his left hand and raises his mallet in his right. Clio fears he’s going to shove the metal rod through Pep’s eardrum, maybe his brain, and again rushes at the monk, but again is pushed away roughly. As Katie screams, Pep tries to turn his head, but the monk has straddled it and is holding it firm between his knees.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Katie cries.

  “No, don’t!” Clio shouts, and again moves toward the monk.

  The monk lowers the little mallet—not to drive the rod into Pep’s brain but to gently strum the sharp end so that it vibrates back and forth. Strums it with a cellist’s touch, again and again.

  Pep yells and yells. Clio tries to shield Katie from the sight.

  Xiao Lu is laughing, not just at the antics of the angry monk but also at the Americans’ fear. Haven’t they ever seen someone’s ears tuned and cleaned before?

  With a final sharp tap of the vibrating rod, the monk yelps and pops it out of Pep’s head, releases him from between his knees, and steps back to observe.

  Pep is stunned. He feels like he’s been plunged down way too far underwater and his eardrum is screaming, “Let me up!” He puts a hand to his ear and, feeling a wetness, sees that his hand is covered in bright-red blood. He starts to panic, but then suddenly feels that something else has happened. What is it? And then he knows.

  “My heart!”

  For the first time in many days he has a sense that he is back to slow and steady, his heart back to strong, full strokes—a crew rowing boldly on a river. He puts his bloody finger on his wrist pulse and sure enough, it is slow and regular. He screams. “Yesss!”

  The monk comes over, feels his pulse, and screams, “Ya! Yaaaa! Ya! Yaaaa!”

  Clio and Katie cheer.

  The monk plucks out the last needle, pops off the moxibustion glasses, stows them away in his black bag, and bows in triumph.

  He turns to Xiao Lu. “I want my dinner, and my quilt. And then I will leave.”

  Xiao Lu indicates that dinner is ready inside. She senses his cure as her curse.

  

  Soon after the dramatic cure and dinner, the monk packs up to leave. Pep asks him through gesture if he’s sure that this means that he won’t have any trouble crossing the log bridges. The monk grabs Pep by the ears again and pierces him with his stare and makes it clear that he is absolutely sure that he will have no further problems. With one hand he makes a sweeping gesture like the sun traversing the sky—which Pep takes to mean that it could either last for one day or for the rest of his life. He re-grabs the ear, and seems to hold him there forever. Then, smiling, he chants another “Hm, hmmm. Hm, hmmm,” winks at Pep, and releases him. With an impresario’s flourish, he hoists his black bag to his shoulder and turns to go.

  Pep, still not satisfied, asks him again if he will have any trouble crossing the logs.

  The monk give the universal sign of “No problem.”

  Clio tries to ask, “But what if it doesn’t? Can he ask the porters to come?”

  True Emptiness seems to understand and, full of himself now, gestures grandly—“You doubt?! You doubt me?!” Then he shuffles off into the morning forest, his big black bag sagging like a dead animal over his back. The Macys follow him a little way along the path, waving and calling goodbye.

  “Tomorrow we go back,” Pep says.

  “Do we have to?” Katie asks. Both assure her that they have to, and she knows that there’s no argument. “Okay. But can we stop and see the monkeys on the way back? They’re right on the way, remember?”

  “We’ll see.”

  They walk back into the clearing. Xiao Lu has disappeared. They look around, and call out, and sit outside together, wondering where she went.

  The sound of chopping wood echoes among the silent peaks.

  

  At sundown, after feeding the deer, Xiao Lu motions to Chun to sit with her on the ground in a full lotus. Little Chun sits beside her and, with a quick twist of
her feet and legs, does it easily. Xiao Lu nods and smiles and motions for her to close her eyes and meditate with her as the sun sets.

  Pep and Clio watch from the doorway. In profile in the dusk, the two Chinese silhouettes seem much alike, sitting naturally in postures that, at their age, Pep and Clio could never attain. I invited her to meditate with me, many times, and she never would. A full lotus is beyond me now. We are old. We started too late. It’s too late to try. We can never catch up.

  Shivering, she feels the wings of death spread themselves inside her, a betrayal.

  

  Midnight. Xiao Lu is alone in the cave. She stares at the dust of the hermit’s bones. Like him, I will die here. It is a cell where I will spend the rest of my life, alone. She goes back out into the clearing and paces around. The loss she feels now echoes with all the other losses.

  She returns to the cave and takes out her mother’s little box of gods. Arranging them on the altar, she lights a stick of incense and prays to Kwan Yin, the thousand-handed goddess of compassion. At first she prays that she herself will be able to do something to stop her baby from leaving, praying until she feels the clutch of her desire loosen, a little. And then she prays that something will happen that will result in her baby staying, praying until she feels, again, the clutch of that desire loosen. Finally, ardently, she prays to the goddess—to all the little gods and goddesses that her mother prayed to, most fervently when First Sister never came back, never ever, day after day and night after night and month after month and year after year, never came back—she prays to them to help her let go of the pathetic clutch of desire completely.

  37

  “What’s wrong, Katie?” Clio asks. It is the next morning. They are already at the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, taking a first break. She and Pep sit in the sun. Xiao Lu squats by the mouth of the path leading down to the monastery. Katie is wandering around poking in the bushes, as if searching for something. Suddenly she stops.

  “Look!” she cries out. “I found it.”

  “Found what?”