At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  As if to affirm her optimism, among the chickens a bantam hen is strutting around, followed closely by a fuzzy yellow duckling. “Look, guys, a baby. A baby duck following a chicken!”

  Pep stares, assessing the property for clues to its inhabitants. Against the front wall of the house are farm implements of some ancient sort, long wooden handles leading to what looks like a scythe and some kind of wooden-pegged rake. The windows on either side of the doorway are open to the air, but barred. On one side of the door are several twig brooms in various stages of deterioration, like women in skirts once fashionable, now tattered. A ruined woven basket lies on the ground, like a partly submerged boat. Junk—botttles, plastic bags, cans, rotting greens—are scattered around some broken brown bricks. On the other side of the door is a tall iron container with a hinged mouth used for transport, maybe of coal? Shocks of straw lie on top of it, as if tossed by a recalcitrant cow, or a bloated water buffalo. The tall, wide wooden door, in several crudely fitted sliding sections, is open. Over the doorway is a tile mosaic with many pieces missing—a dragon? A phoenix? This is a house of people who are not quite making it through the basics of the day.

  “Well, here we are,” he says in a somber tone, putting his arm around Katie, feeling her trembling.

  “Stay close,” Clio says, clutching Katie’s hand hard.

  “Okay,” Rhett says. “Let’s see who’s here. Ming Tao and I’ll go in first.”

  They walk to the door and disappear into the dark. Pep and Clio try to see inside. On the wall facing the doorway is a large framed portrait of Chairman Mao. The walls are barren, with black streaks. Dark wooden furniture is scattered about.

  Suddenly they hear shouting, screaming, a high-pitched voice filled with venom, which, once started, seems to go on without interruption. Then they hear Rhett’s voice, also shouting, trying to interrupt without success, and then another high-pitched voice, maybe Ming Tao’s, shouting, and the screaming and shouting goes on and on. Abruptly it stops. A few more high-pitched screams. Rhett and Ming Tao hurry out of the doorway into the hazy day. They blink in the glare and, looking back a few times, walk toward the Macys, shaking their heads and talking.

  “Okay,” Rhett says, “let’s get out of here.”

  “But... but is this the right place?” Clio asks.

  “Un hunh. Too right. C’mon.” He picks up his fallen bicycle.

  “No! What’s going on? We are not moving until you explain. Who were you talking to?”

  “The grandmother. Katie’s father’s mother. The grandfather’s in there too, but he didn’t say anything. I don’t think he can hear.” He starts to wheel his bicycle.

  “And?”

  “Look. She wants no part of this. She doesn’t want to see you, she doesn’t want to talk to you, she wants you to go away.”

  “But why?”

  “I couldn’t tell why. Lotta hatred there, that’s all I picked up. The minute she found out who we were, she started screaming.”

  “And where’s the father, and the sister?”

  “She says they’re not here. Won’t tell me where they are.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “Who knows. But there’s no way—”

  “You’ve got to help us,” Pep says. “Come with us back in there.”

  “You do not want to do that,” Rhett says, shaking his head.

  “All right,” Clio says, “I’m going in there.”

  “Let’s go,” Pep says. “Katie, you wait with Rhett and Ming Tao.”

  “I’m going too,” Katie says. “It’s my...” She stops and stares.

  A woman is coming out, wheeling a wheelbarrow in which lies a man. Both are old, tiny, skinny. With each step the old woman takes, the old man’s head lolls side to side. She stops in the sunlight, puts a thin hand to her brow, and stares at them. For a long moment there is silence. The old woman wears faded blue Mao pajamas, the old man the combat-green version. The woman is emaciated, lips mere wrinkles in a desiccated face that seems to Clio, in its darkness, charred. In that dry carved oval, the eyes are rheumy.

  Clio finds herself stepping forward, hands clasped in front of her, and bowing slightly. “Ni hao ni hao,” she says, taking another step.

  The old woman’s eyes glance past her. Clio stops, looks back at Katie. Pep has stepped up behind Katie, has a big hand clasped over her chest, holding her tight to him. The old woman screams—Clio sees Katie jump. Clio turns back to her and sees that she has snatched up one of the twig brooms and is shaking it with pathetic weak movements. Her mouth is her real weapon, wide open and toothless. Clio tries again to make contact. Out of that gummy hole comes a series of shrieks and rages, all of it saying in the universal human language of hatred, “Get out of here. Now!”

  They pick up their bicycles. They pedal off, down, away.

  At the fig tree where the path forks, Rhett stops. They all get off their bikes.

  “That was terrible!” Clio says. Katie looks ashen, in shock. Clio reaches over to her, her own hand shaking before it touches Katie’s cheek. “Honey, are you okay?”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Katie says. “We didn’t do anything to her. Jeez!” Thinking, She’s like a bad witch in Harry. And why did we find her anyway? My birth mom wouldn’t be mean. She’s the one we should find. Her and my sister.

  “We certainly didn’t,” Pep says. “Rhett? What happened?”

  “What can I tell you?” He smiles. “She’s crazy about you.”

  “I have never, ever—” Clio starts to say, and then points. “Look, down there.” In the valley, the figure in white with the yellow straw hat is walking through the rice fields toward them. “Come on.”

  They pedal downhill a short way and then stop, laying down their bicycles at the opening of a footpath on top of the dike—across from the figure approaching them between several flooded paddies. They walk single file toward the person. The path curves this way and that with an ancient elegance and logic, but the curves lengthen the distance to the figure in the field. The air suddenly feels cooler, denser. They slip and slide on the narrow, mucky path. As they get closer to the figure approaching them through the waist-high grass, they see it is a woman.

  Rhett shouts to her. She sees them, stops, squints. Rhett shouts again.

  After a hesitating movement toward them, the woman turns and walks back quickly into the field, heading for the far dike, curving along down the valley. Rhett and the others try to move faster, but come to the end of the path, at the edge of the flooded rice field, and have to stop.

  The woman gives one backward glance and moves resolutely, faster than seemed possible, away through the muck and high grass. She’s soon a tiny straw spot—then nothing.

  “Shit!” Clio says. “I’m sure she’d know something. Why are they all so afraid?”

  Ming Tao says something, illustrating her thought by pointing her index finger at her temple and making a twirling motion—the universal sign of “crazy.”

  “She says,” Rhett offers, “that all of them are crazy here.”

  “And what do you think, I mean from trying to talk with them?”

  He puffs, thinks. “Nah. It’s just China—the old China. You see a stranger, you figure nothing good can come of it for you. You get out, or get them out, fast.”

  “We’ve come this far,” Pep says, “we’ve got to do everything we can to try to find the... well, the father, William, and the sister? Can you ask again in the village?”

  “Fine,” Rhett says, dejectedly. “I’ll try someone else.”

  In the square of the village, Rhett wanders off in search of information. He soon returns. “I asked around. They don’t live here anymore, but maybe—maybe—live on another farm, maybe an hour away.”

  “Another farm?” Clio asks. “Did he remarry?”

  “If they know, they ain’
t tellin’. That’s all I got.” He lights another cigarette, puffs. “There’s an old Chinese saying, ‘The bird sings, but the snake is silent.’ They don’t want to get involved. Now. If you want to make your train, we’ve got to go.”

  18

  As her bicycle spins noisily back along the river, Clio replays it over and over: the grandmother’s face, the father, who has taken the daughter and moved away, the fact that no one wants to talk about any of them. Then the immediate past lets go, and something more urgent hooks her: We are on the path she took, the baby in her arms, this same ride from the farmhouse down through the village and along this river, and then from Chindu by bus to Tienja, and then the long train ride to Changsha. This journey brought her baby from there—that grandmother, that farm, that poverty of dirt—to me.

  Clio has always thought that the birth mom’s misfortune was her own good fortune. But from time to time she’s wondered whether or not it truly was good fortune for Katie. Now it’s clear—health-wise and opportunity-wise, yes, no question. But love-wise? Sometimes lately Clio’s doubted that she’s good enough. Katie’s birth mother gave her up unwillingly—maybe she could have loved her better? A fertile woman, and young. Strong enough to live alone on a mountain, make a new life for herself. But what kind of “new life” is it when you abandon your child, both children? The shapes of path and river float by. She feels a clear moment of peace. Yes. Xiao Lu’s misfortune is Katie’s good fortune too.

  

  In the van, Katie sits looking out a window, Clio and Pep beside her. They could almost see the collision between her expectation and the reality—their experience as well. But soon a second shockwave seems to go through Katie, and she crumples down into Clio’s lap. Her desolation shakes them. Clio strokes her hair.

  Finally she sighs deeply, turns pensive, and sits up again.

  “Do you want to try to talk about it, honey?” Clio asks.

  “No, I want to think about other things, better things, that’s all.”

  Ming Tao and Rhett are sitting together, smoking, drinking cold beer straight from sweaty bottles. Both are smiling. They seem to be talking more intimately. Clio senses a mutual attraction; Pep sees a mutual endeavor.

  “Rhett?” Pep calls out. Rhett comes over and sits down across the aisle, Ming Tao sitting in the seat behind him. “We’ve decided that we do want to leave a note with Ming Tao,” Pep says, “for Xiao Lu. And we will negotiate a fee, for all her trouble. For the fee you will promise to deliver the note, and give us her address, okay?” Ming Tao smiles and says yes.

  “But I have one more question?” Clio says. Tao nods. “She tried, herself, to find us in Changsha, and then asked you to try. Why does she want to meet us?”

  “I asked her that,” Ming Tao says, smiling in a way Clio reads as self-congratulatory. “‘Why open this up again, it is over. Why?’ And she said...” She stops, closes her eyes. When she opens her eyes again, for the first time since they met her she is unsmiling. Clio senses that her lips are set against the danger of being flamboyant. “She said, ‘When I gave up my baby I thought it would be over, but giving her up made sure it would never be over. I did not solve a problem, I created more problem. But I learned one thing.’” Tao pauses. “And then she tells me a saying she heard somewhere, tells it in a serious voice: ‘The opposite of mindful is forgetting.’”

  Clio is surprised at this, at the wisdom in this “mindful”—mindfulness is part of the Eightfold Path—surprised at the wisdom of the whole phrase. She catches herself. Why shouldn’t she be wise?

  “What does that mean?” Pep asks.

  “I don’t know,” says Tao. “And then Xiao Lu said to me, ‘If they ever come back, the most important thing in my life is that they know I want to see my baby and meet them.’”

  Clio glances at Katie, concerned about where this is going, and yet needing to go on with it. Katie is turned away, seeming to be preoccupied. In a whisper so that Katie can’t hear, Clio asks, “Do you think that she wants her back?”

  Ming Tao thinks for a long time, and whispers, “I don’t know.”

  “But what do you think?” Pep asks.

  “Maybe she does. Her heart is broken. She is broken-down. But I don’t know.”

  Clio is digging in her fanny pack for a Kleenex before she knows she’s weeping.

  Katie is looking at her. “You okay, Mom?”

  Clio nods through her tears and takes Katie’s hand, unable to reassure her. Pep has his arm around her, and she glances at Ming Tao. She is staring at her, with a softening in her eyes—finally she has gotten what this is all about. The harder Clio cries, the less noise she makes. Pep hugs her firmly, his bulk reassuring. He hands her another Kleenex. “I’m sorry... so...” She wipes her nose and eyes, and sits quite still, the wet tissue in the palm of her hand like a crumpled lotus offered, and rejected.

  “Okay,” Ming Tao says, opening her red plastic pocketbook and taking out an envelope, handing it to Rhett. “I give this to you now.”

  Clio stares at the characters, written by the same woman who wrote the note in the swaddling clothes ten years before. Rhett writes out the English translation.

  “‘Bai Li Shan’—Hundred Mile Mountain—also called Emei Shan. One of China’s four sacred mountains, the highest—you see it for a hundred miles.” He goes on reading, “Then she says, ‘Go to Elephant Temple—ask for me.’”

  Clio feels her stomach churn, the air go out of her. A temple? A sacred mountain? Is that why she left? Or did something happen, back there, to force her out? She gave up everything to do that? She, the other, is one strong woman. One strong young woman. Daring, as I was, once.

  “And then,” Rhett is reading, “go to...” He hesitates, looking for the English words, “Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, where the path forks, and go to the left.” Rhett smiles. “Everyone’s heard of Emei Shan. It’s a famous tourist zone now, right, Ming Tao?” They talk together for a few minutes. “Yes, she says it is a big tourist zone. She heard they have a brand-new cable car that takes you up the mountain to the temples. Many Western tourists go there. They have English translators and she thinks even one Pizza Hut, and they take Visa. They want to make it like Disneyland, Enchanted Kingdom and rides and games and fun. And skiing.”

  “And that’s where my birth mom lives?” Katie asks.

  “That’s right,” she says. “Third Sister.” She reaches out and strokes Katie’s hair, trailing a long finger down her cheek. The red nail polish gleams against Katie’s skin. Clio is amazed—for the first time she seems really interested in Katie. Ming Tao says something with clear affection and enticement.

  Rhett translates. “She told me there are many animals there, where she lives. It is famous for two kinds of animals: tame mountain deer—the mountain deer have no fear of humans, and they come up to you and you can feed them—and, on that mountain, the biggest Joking-Monkey Zone in all of China!”

  “What’s a ‘joking-monkey zone’?” Katie asks.

  “The monkeys play with tourists—come down and let you feed them, and sometimes they take your hat, or throw fruits down for you—it’s great fun!”

  “Monkeys in their natural habitat! Mom, can we go there?”

  “It’s far away, sweetheart, three whole days, there and back. We have to catch our flight tomorrow, we can’t. Maybe next time—”

  “But we have to, since we’re already here.”

  “We can’t,” Pep says, “we can’t stay here just for some monkeys.”

  “It’s not for them—it’s to find my birth mom. Please?”

  “Yeah, it’d be great to do that, Kate-zer, but our plane leaves tomorrow—we’ve got Mommy’s family reunion in Annisquam, and then summer camp, and—”

  “I hate that reunion, it’s cheesy!” Katie says, with unusual anger. “Everyone asks me the stupidest questions—‘How’s school?’ Good. ‘Yo
u got so tall!’ Duhh. Yap yappety yap. I can’t even swim there—the water freezes your noogies! And stupid Aunt Thalia won’t call me ‘Katie’—she always calls me ‘Kate’! And you two hate it too, right? I mean that’s what you always say when the time comes to visit them.”

  “Katie, they’re family,” Clio says.

  “My birth mom’s family too! And it’s our only chance to find her.”

  “We’ll write a note to her,” Clio says, “you, me, and Daddy will write a note to your birth mom telling her we’ll schedule a trip back after Christmas, and—”

  “But it’s so far to here, we’ll never come back!”

  “We’ll write her a nice beautiful letter, Kate-zer, get everybody ready to meet—”

  “Cheater! You said you’d never say ‘beautiful’ again, ever!”

  “Goddamnit Katie—”

  “A swear! You used a swear on me?”

  “We have a schedule, darling, and—”

  “Mahh-ahhm—I want to go there, say yes, okay?”

  Clio looks to Pep, who shakes his head no, but says nothing. “Sorry, dear—”

  “Yeah, but what’s more important?” She stares at them, desperate and angry, and then folds her arms over her chest and turns and marches back to the last seat of the van, pulling the beak of her cap over her face. Clio glances at Pep, and then goes to Katie. He follows.

  “You’re upset about what happened at the farm, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I am, and not seeing my sister either.”