At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  Arms tighten around her arms, Clio and Pep are on either side of her, holding her back, talking to her. They are scared I will kill myself.

  They talk to her, through Rhett, the words at first seeming to come from far away. They are worried about her, they don’t want her to hurt herself. Everything’s okay. They forgive her.

  Clio takes her by the shoulders and turns her so they are face-to-face. “Tell her, Rhett,” Clio says, “that she saved... Chun’s life, and that we will always be grateful to her, always.”

  “Saved our lives too,” Pep adds, “risked hers for us all.”

  As Clio holds her, faces her, Rhett repeats this.

  Xiao Lu looks up into Clio’s eyes, sees the truth of this, and nods. Embarrassed, she turns away, looking out into the great expanse that stretches from this mountain to the next. The fishhook of the new moon is resting on its curve. The bright jewel of the Evening Star shines just above the upper horn as if it’s about to fall into the curve and rock back and forth like in a cradle—it reminds her of sitting out under the stars of a summer night, her mother telling her stories about all the gods in the sky.

  42

  Rhett and Thalia are in the hut. In the cave, Pep and Clio and Katie are awake in the large bed, Xiao Lu still awake in the other. When any of them moves, the light from the wood stove makes their shadows jump like liquid ghosts against the calcified wet of the rock walls. The bats are out for the night. Clio is using Pep’s flashlight to read to Katie, yet again, The Little House on the Prairie. Xiao Lu lies quietly, her arm freshly bandaged. The wound is healing. Her energy is coming back. Rhett and Thalia are anxious to get back to civilization and are pushing to leave tomorrow.

  After a while Katie yawns loudly and says, “I want to go to sleep.” Clio closes the book and puts her arm around Katie, who snuggles in. “Goodnight, Mom, Dad.”

  “Goodnight, dear.”

  “’Night Kate-zer. Have a beautiful sleep.”

  “Okay,” Clio says, “now everybody says goodnight to Xiao Lu. In Chinese.”

  “Wan-an,” Katie says, echoed by Clio and Pep.

  Xiao Lu lies there, knowing that it is the last night she will see her baby. She wants something more, but does not know what. She lies there rigidly, a thousand images racing through her mind.

  “Mom? Dad? This is our last night here, right?”

  “Probably,” Clio says.

  “And we can’t stay here any longer?”

  “No.”

  “Can I sleep with Xiao Lu tonight?”

  For an instant they each pause, and then, almost in unison, each says, “Yes.”

  “But you’ll be right here too, right?”

  “Of course,” Pep says, “for sure.”

  Xiao Lu hears them talking. She hears the pine boughs creak and footsteps on the stone and sees her little girl gesturing to her to move over and give her some room. She feels the pine boughs respond as Chun gets into bed with her. She is afraid to move.

  They lie there for long moments, side by side. She is afraid even to breathe.

  Then the girl yawns loudly, says something, and lifts her head. She puts her good arm around her and feels her head settle onto it and in the settling start to relax—once, twice relaxing—and she breathes, and soon her baby is asleep in her arms. She looks at her face, and she sees in it the face of her lost one, and then the faces of all her lost ones, alive now in the breathing of her child. She vows to stay awake the whole night this way, for it is not only her baby in her arms again but it is she herself in her mother’s arms and her dear lost sister back and all the floating dead come back to life, and for the longest time she is aware of feeling every touch of her daughter’s skin against her own, a lost world found, until an edgeless sleep, of love redeemed, prevails.

  43

  Maybe Chang-O the moon goddess,

  Will pity this single swallow

  And join us together with the cord of light

  That reaches beneath the painted eaves of your home.

  Rhett translates this, the calligraphy on the wall of the little hut, as they sit in the clearing finishing their lunch. “The name of the poem is ‘To a Traveler,’” he says, “the signature is Su Tung P’o.”

  “Did Xiao Lu do the calligraphy?” Pep asks.

  He asks her. “No, it was here before she came. She thinks it is ancient.”

  “Worth a fortune,” Thalia says, “if you could crack it off the wall in one piece.” She smiles. “Well, then, are we almost ready to go?”

  Clio, irritated, snaps, “No, we are not.”

  Thalia lets out a sigh of disgust and boredom.

  Katie, Clio, and Pep have spent the morning doing the usual chores and delights—the deer, the fire, the cooking, the cleaning, the calligraphy. Xiao Lu is much better, stable on her feet again, and even though her arm is in a sling she says she is ready to walk back to the monastery with them.

  They carry the plates back inside and make fresh tea. Then they sit, using Rhett to ask all the questions that they could not before. Pep is interested in finding out about the family history of illnesses, to pin down Katie’s risk factors. Clio asks about Xiao Lu’s marriage, about Xia, Katie’s sister, and about the circumstances of her giving up Katie. Katie sits at the calligraphy table, listening. Thalia announces she does not want to hear “all the gory details,” and goes outside to read her latest New Yorker.

  Xiao Lu tells them about her decision to give Chun up and about the trip to Changsha. She takes out her one souvenir from the trip, the pair of pink plastic sandals she has never again worn. Then she asks Clio, “Why don’t you have your own baby?”

  The bluntness startles Clio—she looks to Katie, to see how she takes this.

  “She doesn’t mean anything, Mom,” Katie says, reassuringly, “she just doesn’t know how we put it.”

  Clio smiles and nods. “We tried,” she says, “tried incredibly hard.” She glances at Katie again and decides for the first time to tell her. “Every month I had to take my temperature, first thing in the morning, and when I was ‘right,’ I had to call Pep to come home, to make love. And then every month, when my period came, month after month, it was like something had died—and some part of us had died.” She sees Pep nodding in sympathy. “Once, I did get pregnant. We were so happy! Finally! We celebrated—yes, Katie, celebrated, told people. I felt such a glow! And then, after about two months, in the middle of the night I... lost the baby.” She can’t keep talking, looks down, and then up at Pep. He has tears in his eyes, and tears roll down her own cheeks, turning to salt on her lips. She looks at Katie, and sees in her fallen face a sadness, and a puzzlement too. “I lost her.”

  “You know... I mean... it was a her?” Katie asks, her voice trembling.

  “Yes.”

  “I would’ve had a big sister?”

  “That’s right, honey.”

  “But you do,” says Xiao Lu.

  “Yeah. But if you had her, Mom, maybe you’d never ’a had me. It’s all kinda weird. Did you ever get pregnant again?”

  “No,” Pep says. “We tried, tried hard, went to doctors, everything. Never. Maybe it was just that by the time we tried to have children, we were older.”

  “Why were you so old?” Xiao Lu asks.

  Clio smiles. “We didn’t meet until we were older—I was in my thirties, Pep even older. I left my family, wanted to have adventures, see the world.”

  “And I never fell in love before,” Pep said. “It was love at first sight. We fell deeply in love—crazy about each other. But even as much as we loved each other, the pain of losing our baby was so depressing, we couldn’t even think of adoption for a long time. When we finally did, we found out that it was almost impossible for us to do. The rules were against us, because we were older, and we hadn’t been married long enough. We started to argue with each oth
er, we fought—a lot. For a while it seemed like we would split up. The marriage almost died. Just because of the rules.”

  “The rules were against me too!” Xiao Lu says, passionately. “The rules, and my in-laws. The rules almost killed us both, Chwin-Chwin.”

  “But we couldn’t give up,” Pep says. “Life without a child, for us, wasn’t really life. We felt so depressed, walked around in a daze—like facing death every day.”

  “Until we heard that we could adopt from China,” Clio says. “The moment we heard, we knew it was right.”

  “Why was it right?” Xiao Lu asks.

  “I was always drawn to China. My best friend, Katie’s godmother, Carter, spent years in Asia, some in China. As soon as I heard ‘China,’ I said, ‘Yes!’”

  “And my family,” Pep says, “is from an island called Nantucket, and they were whalers, and sailed to China to trade in silk and tea and rice and opium, hundreds of years ago. For me, too, it was so right—a big ‘Yes!’”

  “Can I tell Xiao Lu about the ‘Chun’?” Katie asks, excitedly. They nod. “Well, I wasn’t there when it happened but—” She stops. “I mean I was there, but not there there, I mean I was born already here and in the orphanage, but I wasn’t there with them when it happened like I’m going to say?”

  Rhett, with a contorted brow, tries to communicate this, and fails.

  Breathlessly Katie goes on, “So then like they were supposed to go to China to get me, but they didn’t get their documents like their police record ready in time, so their friends went to China to get their baby first. And it was Christmas and they wanted to give their friends a Christmas card to welcome them home, and they found one. It had a Chinese character on the front and on the back it said that the character meant ‘New Beginnings,’ it was like from the third chapter of a real old Chinese book called the I Ching and—” Rhett slows her down, to catch up.

  “What is I Ching book?” Xiao Lu asks Rhett.

  He stops and thinks. “Not sure.” He turns to Pep. “What is the I Ching? We never heard of it.”

  Clio and Pep are amazed. Sure that they aren’t pronouncing it correctly, they try to explain what it is—The Book of Changes, thousands of years old, one of the oldest books in the world, a classic in Chinese, a book of prophecies, of fortune telling?

  No, neither of them knows it.

  “Astonishing,” Clio says to Pep.

  “Thank you, Chairman Mao,” he says. “I guess that by their generation, it had been totally wiped out.”

  “Whatever,” Katie says with irritation, wanting the stage back. “So then this character for ‘New Beginnings’ is all about a plant born in the dark from a little seed and chaos looms!” She smiles. “But then it rises up from the earth into the nice beautiful light. And the card seemed so cool to them they didn’t give it to their friends but they kept it for themselves! They even like made a banner of it, and hung it up in their bedroom! Because they were going to have a ‘New Beginning’ in their life. And then, and then...” She looks at Clio and Pep and rubs her hands together with excitement, letting out little giggling squeaks. “And then two weeks later they got a call from the adoption lady, with news from the orphanage in China. And the lady said there were only two things they knew about their baby: her birthday, and her name. And her name was... the same name as the character on the card; it was Chun!”

  Xiao Lu’s eyes get big. She flushes and takes Clio’s hand.

  “My dad started crying and my mom fell down on the floor!” Katie screeches with delight, goes to the table, and gets her calligraphy to show them. “And of all the like millions of Chinese characters, it was mine, me! And this is the ‘Chun.’ See?”

  It is the character Katie drew a few days ago. Xiao Lu understood, then, that it was a bridge between the ancient pictograph and the modern character, a bridge unknown to her. To have it come to her this way, this lost character from her lost daughter, with the karma of connection between her life and the lives of these kind people, is astonishing. She sits there speechless, nodding. Then she gets up and shows them, in two “Chun scrolls,” the other two characters, and explains how this is a bridge. And how it all means “New Beginning,” or “Spring.”

  They ask the meaning of the scrolls. Rhett translates. “Spring returns flowers no fade,” he says—the literal translation. He tries again, “When Spring comes, the hidden flowers come up and blossom.” He reads others. “‘When Spring winds stop, moon shines clear’; ‘A Spring child, when a woman is twenty-eight, is good fortune.’”

  

  After lunch, it is time to leave. Pep produces his business card, Clio writes down all their numbers and e-mails—“in case,” Katie says, “she gets a computer.” They talk about bringing her to Columbia on a visa.

  Rhett takes photos of them standing in front of the house, at the cliff edge, with the fragrant ming aurelia, in the house, and in the mouth of the cave. At the flash the bats squeak and scatter, gliding here and there, and finally seek deeper dark.

  To Xiao Lu the walk back to the temple is funereal, reminding her of the journey with her mother’s body in the wheelbarrow, her half-crazed father trailing along behind, up the mountain from the river to the run-down little temple where the monks would do the cremation. Was Tao there, then? She can’t recall. This walk seems even worse. She is in good hands, yes, but how will I bear it again without her?

  Clio is worried. First that something will happen to keep them from getting there—but also that nothing will happen and that the wheel of loss will merely turn. She walks along, listening to Thalia’s inane chatter. Finally she says, “Would you mind not talking? This path is an old pilgrimage path between the monastery and the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion. Would you mind walking in silence?”

  “But why? We’ve got to amuse ourselves somehow.”

  “Well, then walk ahead or behind—I don’t care, just don’t spoil it!”

  “Now you just wait a second, missy! I came all this way—”

  “Shut up!”

  Thalia looks mortified. Settling her Great White Hunter hat with a harumph that Clio can barely keep from laughing at because it reminds her of the precious English literary novels they were forced to read in Mr. Parkman Howe’s Academy for Girls, Thalia stomps off to where Rhett is lighting another cigarette, using the smoke to try to discourage the pestilential insects. Clio feels great—lighter, freer. Her sister is stirring up her old rebelliousness, her wish to break free and do outrageous things in wild places. She wonders, Why, then, did I ever go “home”? Why the hell did I ever go back? She finds herself wishing now that the way back were forgotten, hidden away, and she an empty boat, floating adrift.

  

  When True Emptiness spots Pep, he breaks into a big smile and bows a formal Buddhist greeting. For the first time in his life Pep Macy bows to someone too. The monk motions him into his office. Pep insists Xiao Lu go first. Appalled at the severity of her monkey bite, the monk sets off a string of red firecrackers, and then, gathering the spent gunpowder and paper and mixing it with what could be rancid Tibetan yak butter, makes a poultice and wraps it from shoulder to elbow in a snow-white Red Cross bandage. He gives her a packet of medicine.

  He then ushers Pep and Rhett into his consultation room, a former classroom of the monastery, long abandoned. All along one wall are hundreds of two-foot-tall carved and painted wooden Buddhas, primitively done, as if by novices. The colors are faded, the paint chipped, but the hundreds of eyes are somehow insistent, although insistent about what, Pep can’t tell.

  Katie, Xiao Lu, and Clio are immersed in the carp in the reflecting pool outside.

  Thalia is buying souvenirs in the Elephant Temple Gift Shop.

  True Emptiness puts his fingers on Pep’s pulse and nods proudly. He does a more careful communion with the pulse, checks out the ankle—and for some reason does an extensive soundi
ng of Pep’s armpits. He says that almost all problems are cured, but that more medicines are needed. He goes to an old floor-to-ceiling cabinet, rummages around, and returns with a fistful of matter that he parcels out into paper packets. He writes down the doses, timetables, and route of administration, one of which, to his own great hilarity, is up the butt. Pep asks if these will assure his continued health. The monk holds his thumb and forefinger together in front of Pep’s eyes, and lets them go in the universal sign of “Poof!”—fairy dust being released, vanishing up into nowhere, not even air.

  “Take this correctly,” he says, “and you’ll be forever smiling and talking. Smiling like an idiot and clucking like a chicken!” They all laugh.

  “How long do I take the medicine?”

  “Not long,” he says. “Only for this lifetime.” He laughs again, bows, and starts to leave. But then he stops and asks Pep to remove his hat. He peers at the scars of Pep’s chronic scraping of skin off his scalp from bashing into the low beams of China, and is not pleased. He sets off a string of green firecrackers, and applies the same gunpowder, yak butter, and white bandage. He bows goodbye.

  Rhett and Pep go out and tell Clio, Katie, and Xiao Lu the good medical news to much delight. No one knows what to do next. The moment hangs, neglected.

  Xiao Lu gets up, thinking, I can’t stand this. She says, “It is time to say goodbye.”

  “Don’t you want to stay for dinner,” Clio asks, “and for the dusk meditation?”

  “No. My food is better, and I do not often meditate with them.”