by Samuel Shem
“But I thought you were a Buddhist?”
“No. I do not believe in religion. My mother did, with her little box of gods. I do not. I heard once that God has no religion. I believe that.”
“Your food,” Pep says, “is better. It is delicious! So fresh and healthy!”
“Yes,” Xiao Lu says, “the food here stinks. It was one reason I had to find another place to live, away from them and their religion and their food.”
“Rhett,” Clio asks, “did she really say ‘stinks’?”
“‘Stinks’ is a refined translation. In Chinese it’s a lot more literal.”
Xiao Lu is speaking again. “I will go now.”
“But you’ll be back again tomorrow?” Clio asks.
“No. It is too hard.”
“Well, um,” Pep says, “let us walk you back to the main gate?”
“No. I go alone.”
“Wait,” Clio says. All at once, as if it is her own, she feels the depth of this young woman’s pain, losing her child again. She has a sense that she has become like her, wanting nothing but her child. “Listen,” Clio says, hearing her voice as insistent, frantic, as if trying to catch a dream, “we’ll be back, you’ll come to America—”
Xiao Lu takes this in, and wants to be polite and say yes, yes, of course. But she has never been the polite one that says yes, yes, of course. “No, that will not happen.”
“But it will, it can, and I—”
Xiao Lu stops her with her hand on her arm. “No.”
Clio hears this “No” as the dead weight of ten centuries of things in this empire not working out for its Xiao Lus. As opposed to our flicker of two centuries that still, despite the duplicity and violence toward less lucky ones at home and brown-skinned others abroad, still holds out the illusion that we are an exceptionally good if not the best country in the world with our democracy and money that foreigners crave—and, hey, that things can work out if you just do what we want and buy our films and TV that will make you happy and that show you that things really can. Yes!
She feels Xiao Lu release her arm. Their eyes meet. Hold for a moment.
No.
Xiao Lu looks from Clio to Pep, and then to Chun. “All of you give me strength. Soon I will go back and visit my other daughter, Xia. Your First Sister, Chwin-Chwin.”
Xiao Lu bends slightly so that she is face-to-face with her child. She takes off the jade Buddha and places it around her neck. “From my mother, through me, to my daughter.” She looks at her then as if for the first time, looks at her in the care of this other woman, this other country, and feels it as unbearable and bearable. She takes her in, all of her, in the way that she took her in before she let her go the first time, thinking it was the last time she would ever see her, as this time might be too.
Katie looks into her eyes. “Can I ask you one more thing?” Xiao Lu nods. “What time was I born?”
Xiao Lu smiles. “You were born as the sun came up, about five in the morning. We call it the ‘springtime of the day.’”
“Shay shay,” Katie says. “I’m glad I know.”
“Goodbye, Katie Chun,” she says, but she does not move, cannot move yet.
Katie looks down at her shoes. Then she looks back up. Xiao Lu has tears in her eyes. Katie says, “Goodbye, Mom.”
Katie watches as Xiao Lu seems to tremble from inside, as if she’ll fall, and so she reaches out and puts her arms around her and hugs her and feels the thin body shake horribly as if collapsing—like she’s the little girl!—and then she feels arms around her too, not Xiao Lu’s arms but her mom’s and dad’s arms shaking and shaking because they’re crying really hard! All of them standing there together and she feels something break free inside her and she’s crying her eyes out too, just crying her heart out with everybody. They stand there together for a time, and the world around them disappears for a moment too. I’m with everybody in the world I love and who loves me too. They ease apart.
Without another sound Xiao Lu turns and walks quickly across the long, sunbaked courtyard. The thin, childlike figure, one arm wrapped in a white bandage with a red cross, the other carrying the unlit torch, walks out through the somber and capricious moon gate toward the green wall of mountain forest, and vanishes.
44
After the parting, a silence comes over all the Macys. They find themselves wandering aimlessly around the courtyards and gardens and temples. There is a strange feel to what remains of the day, as if it, too, is wandering aimlessly around, a confused child waiting for the rest of the hours to fill up again. They are depressed and distracted. Worse, each feels a distance from the others—just when they sense they should feel close. They are aware that it is the distance of loss, of the empty space where the young woman has been. No, not so much her, but more the web of feeling strung between them all, woven out in the woods and on the paths through the woods, woven around all the gnarled tree roots seeking life among the rock, woven in the way the sky as the rain came seemed to fall into the earth, woven in the hut and the cave. The distance straining between the ones who stayed and the one who is gone. The one who stayed, and the ones who are gone.
In the afternoon the three of them sit on a bench in the shade. After a while Thalia appears.
“And what are your plans for the summer, Clio?” Thalia asks.
“Nothing, really.”
“No camps for Kate?”
“Sure there are camps, but nothing we have to be back for.”
“Which ones?”
“The usual—tennis, horseback, swimming—”
“I hate those camps,” Katie says sullenly, “except horseback. And the ocean’s always too cold to swim.”
“And you?” Clio asks.
“Well!” Thalia says, in the definitive voice that reminds Clio of their much-feared Aunt Urania. “I’ve got a new Navigator. Good fun.”
“Navigator?”
“The new Lincoln Navigator—the biggest SUV there is—you know the Lincoln Continental?” Reluctantly Clio indicates that she does. “Got it from the settlement with my Freudian. I’m going to Navigate! The kids are gone, Dr. Ed the Sadist is paying through the nose—enormous!—I mean both his nose and his payments—and I’m taking my first road trip ever, to see all my old friends.”
“Nice,” Clio says. “Pep, Katie? Let’s put our things in the attic where we’ll sleep? And see if we can get them to cook you noodles for dinner?”
The smells in the kitchen, and the cobwebs and dank in the attic, drive them back outside. They wander around peering into barred, locked temples and empty classrooms, the musky shadows a relief from the final, pounding heat and glare of the sun.
For suddenly the sun is brutal. They realize that for the past several days they have been living in a high rainforest, with an umbrella of trees over their heads and a crisp breeze blowing not only from the fertile western valleys but from the foothills of the Himalayas. Now, in the monastery, they feel exposed. The sky is clear and still. The sun crashes down incessantly on the stone courtyard, as if stacking itself up in flat slabs for the long, freezing night on this scary mass of rock.
The monastery is by now familiar, so old and solid it seems safe. Compared to the woods out there, it seems civilized. But something is missing.
Pep and Clio sit on a stone bench at the top of the two hundred steps up from the path. They can see for miles out into the western prospect, watching the lowering sun, and can keep an eye on Katie, sitting in the Elephant Temple with a notebook and a pen trying to draw the white elephant, the lotus, and the Buddha.
As they sit there, a long line of porters climbs up, approaches them, and passes by. As far as they can see down the stone steps there are porters, all bent under loads of sacks lashed onto bamboo frames. Each load dwarfs its man, piled from where the pack rests on the man’s lower back to high up over his head.
From the careful way the men place their feet and stagger, the loads must weigh over a hundred pounds each, maybe two. The men are young, the men are in midlife, the men are old. They wear only rope sandals with a loop around the big toe, and are dressed in raggedy shirts, some with Chinese characters, others proclaiming “Nike,” “IBM,” “Abercrombie and Fitch.” They each have a half-gallon plastic milk-bottle dangling from a ratty cord attached to the top end of the bamboo spine, a water bottle within easy reach. Most of the plastic bottles swaying back and forth have been emptied along the way, fuel to keep these bodies climbing thousands of feet and many hard hours from below. Hanging from a piece of cord from the other spine of bamboo is a faded rag, with which they wipe away sweat. They use a thick wooden stick with a metal tip to climb with. At each step up, a hard, crisp tap echoes, loudest as they pass, fainter above and below: tap... TAP... tap. From time to time one of them will stop to rest. It is an elaborate ritual, for they never put down their loads. The “tap stick” is T shaped, and when a man wants a rest, he smoothly slips the stick into the bottom of the bamboo frame, the T fitting into a T-shaped crossbar. Then the man leans back on the stick, resting his legs from the load, but unable to move. When they rest, most take out a cigarette and smoke. Then they go on. With barely a glance, they pass by. An endless stream of burdened men, climbing thousands of feet up. Then down. Then up.
One older man stops in front of them, gasping like a stranded fish, and lights a cigarette. Other men move slowly past him. Pep stares into his eyes. The eyes seem both sunken and bulging. Pep is struck by what is in them. Sunken into a world that only he knows and that Pep can only dimly glimpse, and bulging at what?—at chancing upon this Westerner, at suddenly meeting the stare of this rich, foreign, tall, well-fed Round Eyes sitting there without a two-hundred-pound load on his back.
Pep is mesmerized. He holds, and tries to read, this man’s gaze. There’s no resentment in these eyes, merely an acknowledgment that this is who you are and this is who I am. But there’s something more: a desperate curiosity. These eyes seem to be asking, “This isn’t a life, is yours?”
The question rocks Pep back on his heels.
The man hoists his load, removes the stick that has been holding him and it up, and starts to climb the next set of steep steps, TAP... Tap... tap... taking his place in the line. Already the next man is climbing into view, tap... Tap... TAP...
“Whoa!” Pep says to Clio. “Did you see his eyes?”
“I did. Like an accusation.”
“More a challenge—like he’s saying, ‘What’s the load you carry? Big house, big cars, stuck-up expensive school? Yeah, you’re rich compared to me—so what? Why?’” Despite the sun, Pep shivers. “Insurance? You know, Clee, there never even was insurance, till the Medici thought it up. People used to take care of each other. When someone got sick or died we used to take care of them and theirs. Now? Forget it. And this is what we’re passing along to Katie?”
“I know. It’s depressing.”
“Lonely too.”
“Deadly,” she says. “Like watching a sunset alone. How can we take care of each other, locked up all day in our Navigators, buzzing around?”
Pep nods, with a grim smile. He sits there in the hot sun, quietly. “I feel so down, Clee—like there’s something desperately wrong with the way we’re living.”
“And the way we’re showing her how to live.” She feels a wave of sorrow, and then the air goes out of even that, so she’s left with an airless dismay, a paralysis that she senses will just get worse when, at home, she buries it under her errands.
“Really depressing,” he says. “To see it all so clearly right now, here.”
“But what the hell are we going to do about it, Pep? To sit here and get a glimpse, to understand this—to really feel it—and then just go right on with life as usual? That’s worse than never understanding it at all. ‘Blessed be the Thalias!’”
“Honey, we gotta start living it, or it’ll destroy us.”
Clio looks at him, surprised at this moment of clarity together. “Yes, we do. Live or die, but don’t just wander through.”
They sit, face-to-face, eye-to-eye, holding the awe.
Like making sure, Clio thinks, when you are saying goodbye to someone—even for a day, or for a night when you’re tucking them in to bed—that you look into their eyes and hold that look, because every time might just be the last time you see them alive.
“Pep, when you said goodbye to Xiao Lu, did you really look into her eyes?”
He understands. Thinks about it. “No. You?”
“No.”
“Mom? Dad?”
Clio and Pep turn and see Katie coming out of the Elephant Temple, her notebook under her arm. As she gets closer, they see that she is not happy.
“Look—I tried to draw the elephant, but it didn’t come out too good.”
“It’s not that bad, honey—”
“Mom, stop it! It’s bad, okay?”
“Okay. It is pretty bad.”
“Not even pretty bad. Bad. It is ugly!”
“Okay. Bad.”
“Agreed,” Pep says. “Ugly!”
“So then I thought, okay, I’ll do like what Xiao Lu does, I’ll draw the character for elephant she taught me, okay?”
“Great.”
“But it’s not great, ’cause it’s hard with a lot of lines and I can’t remember it too good. I drew this.” Katie shows them a character that looks a lot like an elephant.
“It looks a lot like an elephant, honey.”
“Sure does,” Pep adds.
“Guys, that’s the problem! It looks too much like! It’s supposed to be a... what?”
“An abstraction of—”
“Yeah, a metaphor like in Greek?” Clio nods. “But it isn’t! It’s just it itself!”
“Calm down, calm—”
“I’m not calming down, Mom! This is important. Listen to me, will you?”
“You’re right,” Clio says. “Don’t calm down. I’m listening.”
Katie waits to see if she is really listening. Finally she sees that she is.
“So then I decide to go back to basics, and draw what I know, you know?”
“Like?”
“Like a horse. The first thing Xiao Lu taught me. First the stick figure of a horse, then the old character, then the modern, and it was great, and I knew if I did it I would feel good about it, right?” Clio and Pep nod. “So I did it, and look!”
They do. It isn’t very good. The stick figure looks like a horse, but the character doesn’t, it doesn’t have much lift up off the pictograph into the art. The modern figure has even less.
“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Pep says, “they’re not too good.”
“Not that good at all,” Clio says.
Katie is startled—they told the truth? “No, they’re not,” she says, “and you know why?”
“Why?” they both ask, at the same time.
“’Cause I don’t have my real brush, the one she gave me! And I don’t have my real inkstone! All I’ve got is this dumb ballpoint pen from the Drippy Hotel!” As soon as she says that, she finds herself thinking, And I don’t have her!
“Well, where’s your brush and inkstone?” Clio asks.
“I forgot ’em! I left them at her house! Can we go back and get ’em?”
Pep and Clio glance at each other.
“Sorry, hon,” Clio says, “we can’t.”
“There’s no time now, and we leave tomorrow morning.”
“Shit!” Katie says. Clio stares at her. “I know, it’s a swear and I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Clio says. “You’re old enough now for a swear once in a while.”
Katie is staring at her, and then at Pep, silently making a plea: Please, Mom, please, Dad, don’t make it
nice anymore, just show me you get it and then tell me. Tell me.
“And,” Clio goes on, “you don’t have her with you either now, to help?”
Katie stares at her, and in her mind is a memory of sitting at the table in the hut, the scents of woodsmoke, garlic, and ink all around, her head bent close to the character that is really an animal, almost alive, and the scent of her birth mom—pine, rain, turned-up earth.
“Yeah,” Katie says, “I miss her already, really bad.” She snuggles into Clio’s arms.
All of them are bedding down for the night. Outside the tremulous arc of their candle it is deeply dark, cold, and scary as only a big mountain in a foreign wilderness can be. In the attic the damp cold is almost cutting. Pep, Katie, and Clio are on one side of the room, Thalia and Rhett on the other. The meal has been foul, the bedding is stale. It makes all the Macys miss the fresh vegetables and sweet cedar mattresses of the little hut and cave on the shy side of the mountain.
Rhett has located two bottles of beer, which he and Thalia are sipping.
“Okay, gang,” Pep sings out. “Bedtime. I’m taking orders for sleeping pills.” He holds out his palm. “Ambien reds, five millipedes, Ambien whites, ten millipedes—”
“Stop that, you cad!” says Thalia, laughing. “I’ll take a white.”
“For me, of course,” Rhett says with delight, “the red.”
Hungrily, Rhett and Thalia reach for the Ambiens, pick a couple of pills each out of Pep’s extended hand, and drink them down with their beers.
All say goodnight.
Rhett and Thalia are soon afloat in that rich, syrupy sleep of the drugged. They stir as the gongs chime at four in the morning but, groggy, go back to sleep until the sun clears the silent heart of the peaks and the monks start calling to the soul-mountain for their feeding at six. They look around. Katie and Clio and Pep, and all their things, are gone.
PART FOUR
The days grow long, the mountains beautiful. The south wind blows over blossoming meadows.Newly arrived swallows dart over steaming marshes.Ducks in pairs drowse on the warm sand.
