At the Heart of the Universe

by Samuel Shem

  Xiao Lu laughs and wags her finger at Katie—a “No, don’t be disrespectful” wag. Katie laughs at this. Xiao Lu wags once more, and points her umbrella up, signaling “Move it out!” Clio and Pep look at each other.

  “Super blunt,” Pep says, “even if culturally determined.”

  Soon Xiao Lu stops. Smiling broadly, she points to a pile of poop that, in mime, she avers is that of a bear. Katie shows her delight. Xiao Lu bends close to the poop and picks through it assiduously with a stick to show what the bear ate. Seeds, small bones, and a few shreds of aluminum foil. Katie is loving this.

  “Like in biology at school, Katie, isn’t it?” Clio says. “Picking through the owl’s nest?” Katie is too absorbed to answer. Clio shakes her head in frustration. She takes Pep aside, and whispers, “Honey, I... I have to tell you something?” He nods. “Last night I had a crazy thought—really scary. Out of all proportion?” He nods. “I thought, ‘She does want her back’?”

  He smiles, nods. “Not crazy at all, Clee, just not possible. Given everything, of course she’d want her back. How could she not? For her, we hardly exist—she wishes we didn’t. What else would she wish? But that’s all it is, and can be. End of story.”

  “Right. Of course. I’m overreacting. I just feel we have to be alert. Careful.”

  “Absolutely, and very.” He smiles at her, takes her hands in his. “But put yourself in her shoes. To her this is a gift from the gods!”

  They come to two logs set side by side across a hard-rushing stream. The logs are dry and level, the stream just below their feet. Xiao Lu skips across, Katie imitates her skipping, and Clio and Pep walk across. The path turns sharply up. The stream cleaves the rock more deeply. The next log bridge is higher up over a more threatening gorge. Despite the height, Xiao Lu skips easily across each time. Katie and Clio, enjoying the game now, follow her lead. Pep starts to feel uneasy.

  Coming out at the third bridge, watching Xiao Lu playfully hop on one leg across, watching Katie mimic her and seeing Clio look down once and then not hop but place each foot carefully, Pep feels shaky inside. Easing up to the edge, he looks down. Big mistake. The stream is now a torrent, rushing over rocks fifty feet down—to Pep it seems suddenly a hundred. Spray blasts up from the collision of the water and the rock. The rough spray has wet the logs spanning the chasm. The three others are waiting for him on the other side. He freezes. He reasons with himself: The logs are wide, wide as a sidewalk, and steady. They all did it, you can do it. He steps out, and finds himself paralyzed with fear. For a second he can’t make himself go on. He tries to make his foot move and can’t. Shit. A new phobia? Terrific.

  They are shouting to him from the other side. Xiao Lu skips back to him on light feet, her umbrella tapping playfully along. Laughing, she holds out her hand. He takes it—it feels like iron. This helps. Iron is what he needs. But it is awkward, she holding his hand and walking backward—it makes him even more frantic. He yells over the roar of the water for her to stop and gestures for her to give him both her hands. She tucks her umbrella under an arm and does so. He has to bend down to her level, which decreases the height over the logs, and makes him feel a little better. He can sense, through her hands, the strength of her arms, her legs, her whole wiry body, the sureness of it all, and tries to visualize her hands as two iron railings on either side.

  Step by step, he makes it. Katie looks at him strangely, as if thinking, What a wimp! Clio cheers. Xiao Lu bends double with laughter, unsympathetic to his plight. It irritates him. Through gesture he asks, how many more of these before the monkeys? She raises a single finger—just one more.

  The last bridge is even higher, and to him the logs seem like saplings. They slope up at a hefty angle. He thinks of the Nike slogan, “Just Do It,” and starts walking across. But his body decides “Just Don’t!” and balks, like a deer caught in headlights. Even taking Xiao Lu’s hands seems dangerous. He feels too high up to balance, and drops to his hands and knees. He sees the embarrassment on Katie’s face, but has no choice. The pounding of the stream on the boulders seems to engulf him, drowning out everything else. The logs are slippery from the spray, mirroring a slippage in his confidence. Finally, with Xiao Lu walking slowly in front and Clio walking slowly behind and Katie counting his crawling steps, he’s across. He sits there, drenched in sweat, trembling. Where the hell did this fear come from?

  “Why are you so scared of heights now, Dad?”

  “Honey, I wish I knew. I never was before—well, except looking down from super tall buildings. But I think she said that’s the last of ’em.”

  “Till we have to go back over them when we go—”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Sor-ree!”

  The path turns away from the stream and walks easily, moss-soft and gradual. They go in silence through high cypress and eucalyptus. The trail, cradled in the fragrant trees and the fresh, ever-thickening mist, revives his spirits. The air is cool, with a slight breeze flowing like a stream through the rocks of the trees. They are balanced at the right temperature, the right exertion, the right levels of hunger and thirst. No one talks. As happens at such times, all, in their separate ways and to different extents, have not so much forgotten their fears and desires as come alive to how even their worst fears and desires are a small, accepted, and acceptable part of their awe. They sense the deep green of the ancient trees. Stillness, but for a splash of birdsong—sparrow and jay, the odd dove. Silence, seamless with sound. The lively quiet captivates.

  They turn sharply up onto rocky ledge. The climb is steep. Xiao Lu glides up easily. Katie bounces up in a series of hopscotch jumps, but Clio and Pep have to hoist themselves up, taking the high steps one by one and creakily, palms on bent knees, grabbing the trunks of saplings. They come out upon an escarpment, a flat black shelf of rock that extends out ten yards or so to the edge of an open vista to the west. The drop down is significant. Pep feels a hit of terror, and grabs Clio’s arm. Her hand is on Katie’s shoulder to hold her safely back.

  The only sound is of water falling hard against rock. Xiao Lu takes out the crude map she sketched the day before and points to the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion. Then she turns and shows it to them—a small, open-sided, tile-roofed temple a few yards away, sitting on the edge of the cataract, with a clear view west. Katie pays it little attention, occupied with dragon-tail butterflies in a patch of lavender. Pep stares at one corner of the little temple, where a red-lacquered post has collapsed, bringing a section of the roof to an ominous sag. Rather than risk sitting under it, he lowers himself onto a rock ledge on the edge of the trail and closes his eyes.

  Clio welcomes the distraction from the turmoil in her mind. She finds herself in an architectural/botanical heaven, finding this ancient temple in the woods. The pavilion is probably hundreds of years old, of perfect shape and design, and more authentic for its decay. Vines and bushes nibble at it, but it endures. The pavilion is placed perfectly to—yes—Enjoy the Dusk. In form it is like the Elephant Temple, but much smaller and more worn—too isolated to be destroyed by Mao’s thugs, or now to be repaired. The red-lacquered posts and black-tile roof shaped in an exact hexagram, the central Tibetan stupa on top—Tang Dynasty. Around it the ancient, renewing bamboo soar to an astounding height—that of the matching white spruce—and there, lining the path, a cluster of ancient gingkoes, gnarled and weathered, immediate and prevailing for up to a thousand years.

  She stands there. Despite the busy roar of the cataract, she feels caught in a stillness, like a bird caught in an empty pocket of the wind. She recalls a beloved poem Tulku gave her, by a nameless Chinese monk in the year 58, on his first journey to the sacred Emei, ‘The Inner Mountain’. “I feel the mountain pushing up from below, I feel the spirit of the mountain flowing down from above. In the suffering and impermanence of life, the mountain is permanent and liberating. A mountain is unchanging. No one can take it away. A flood cannot t
ake it, a fire cannot destroy it. The inner mountain is our spirit. Rather than build a spirit mountain, we build up envy and delusion—and mountains of anger. Our minds move too fast. ”

  When she comes out of her reverie, Katie is no longer at her side, and not in sight—where is she? She finally sees her among the trees, with Xiao Lu on the edge of the cliff. “Katie! Careful! Not so close! Come back.” Clio rushes toward her.

  “I’m not close to—”

  “I said come back!”

  Katie stands there, her hands down beside her body, palms out toward Clio, her head hanging, her eyes glaring. “What, Mom, what?”

  Clio is reaching out to pull her back, but then notices what she couldn’t see from where she was—they are not at all near the edge. Another ledge of black rock, a step down from the first, reaches out some ten yards farther.

  Xiao Lu stands there staring at her, a puzzled, even contemptuous look on her face.

  “All right,” Clio says, putting an arm around Katie. She breathes deeply to calm herself. Rather than leading her away, she stands beside her, looking out. They are so high up that the ground below is obscured by fog or clouds. The sky is now all silvery fish scales, darkening over the mountains afloat in the west. She feels foolish at being distrustful—and yet...

  They go back into the half-collapsed pavilion and sit on benches on its good side. Clio can see how cleverly the pavilion has been sited—for both the dusk panorama and the boulder splitting the cascade. Behind her she senses the sheer bulk of the morning mountain. The mist rises from the falls and joins with a gathering of low-lying clouds all around, obscuring the foothills and plain far below. She glances at Pep. He is holding on to an ancient, mossy wooden pillar. She takes his hand. Xiao Lu starts out onto the ledge over the falls. Katie gets up and heads after her.

  “Wait!” Clio cries out. “Katie, please don’t.”

  “Mom, come on. She’s doing it.”

  “Kate-zer, it’s a no!” Pep says. “It’s a risk!”

  “Please?”

  “Exactly what part of ‘no’ don’t you understand? Come back here.”

  “Arrrrrrr!” Katie twists herself around in frustration. As if each step is a humiliating defeat she has to resist and dramatize, she stomps back and sits down.

  Xiao Lu is watching all this from the ledge. Why are they so afraid for her? They are very fearful. Very strange. They act like children toward her. Chun is always making a loud argument, always standing up in her selfishness. Xiao Lu was never so disrespectful of her elders, even if they accused her of being so—except her mother-in-law. But Chun is rich now, she has everything—just look at her shoes, her clothes, the watch she wears—she should know better. I could teach her, if I had her alone and if we could share a language. I could teach her the language—it must be in her. When she told Chun, with a laugh to show how serious she was, to show her parents more respect, she laughed in return, but didn’t seem to understand.

  After they have rested, Xiao Lu takes out the map and points again to the monkeys. Katie nods vigorously. Xiao Lu motions that she will now take them there. She turns abruptly and leads them away from the stream, and up. The path is steep, the footing more slippery in the floating mist, which, as they climb higher, gathers from time to time around them as fog. The man starts to breathe more heavily, and attempts to disguise it. She knows that he is terrified of the next bridge, and of going back over them all again. His chi is stuck, dammed up. He is so tall, the chi has trouble rising up to his brain.

  It starts to drizzle. At first, in the humid and hot mid-morning, it is a relief. They all welcome the wash of clean, fresh water, cool on their heads, their faces.

  The drizzle starts to thicken to rain. The sound of the large drops hitting the limbs and the leaves is a comfort.

  The man steps into a clearing and removes his hat. He lets the rain hit his face and catches some for drinking. Xiao Lu notices a big bandage on the top of his head, black with dried blood. She smiles, asks him about it. He mimes bashing his head on a low beam. In sympathy, she laughs. The man, looking surprised at her laughter, does not laugh back, but scowls at her as if she has insulted him! Strange! He is crude, blunt, like a block of concrete. He doesn’t see the subtlety of the different laughters.

  The drops turn into steady light rain, and then into a downpour. The path becomes a streambed, the fat leaves of the rhodos and maples and spruce drenched, funneling the water down on them as they huddle underneath. In gusts of wind, the thick trunks of bamboo clatter—Thwack! Thwack!

  Xiao Lu’s umbrella is small, and only little Chun can get in under with her. She waits with them under the trees for the rain to stop. It does not. What a pleasure for her to stand so close to her girl! Her heart flutters like a bird in the cage of her chest, yearning to fly free. Their sides touch. Xiao Lu yearns to put her arm around her, but dares not. To draw her close, to hug her, would be heaven! She stands stiffly, on fire in the cool rain.

  Soon they are soaked through, and chilled. The sky shows no sign that the rain will stop soon. The visitors talk among themselves. The woman is very quiet. She speaks in a way that seems calculated to soothe the man, but he growls at her. She snaps back at him. Chun says something to them, glancing at her, embarrassed at their arguing. The man smiles at Xiao Lu as if they’ve just had a family joke. He then speaks as the woman did at the beginning, in a tranquil manner. Xiao Lu wonders again at how fearful they all seem, the childish parents and the willful protected child. If they don’t let Chun do anything by herself, she will never learn. The parents are not used to the hard work in life. Their hands are soft. They are not used to being out in the woods. They seem ignorant of trees, and wind and air, and water. Ignorant and fearful. How do they live? Into her mind come lines of a poem by Po Chu-I, “Passing by Tien-men Street”:

  A thousand carriages,

  ten thousand horsemen

  pass through the Nine Crossroads.

  and not one person

  turns his head

  to see the mountains.

  Now they seem to be consulting little Chun about what they should do. Is it possible? They will do whatever the child says?

  Through yet another iteration of charades, Clio and Pep tell Xiao Lu that they want to turn back. They ask if there’s a place to get dry and warm. She takes out the map. They huddle under the umbrella. It’s gotten so dark that the man takes his blue-beam flashlight from his big-flower shirt. Xiao Lu traces a path from where they are—maybe halfway to the Joking-Monkey Zone—back to the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, and then not much farther down another path to her little hut. They smile and gesture for her to lead the way.

  By now the trail is all water and mud. It seems a lot steeper than what they have climbed, and they step hard down on slippery rocks and roots, trying to find the next handhold on saplings and bushes, bamboo and vines. Their feet are soon soaked, and they feel like they’re standing in little pools called shoes. Pep and Clio slip and fall several times, and are drenched and filthy.

  Suddenly Katie calls out, “A snake!” Clio snatches her by the collar and catches her foot on a root and tumbles down upon her, both of them rolling off the trail into the tangled underbrush, shrieking and terrified that it’s a deadly brown viper. Pep rushes to them, huddling in the bushes, staring.

  Xiao Lu is standing on the path, leaning on her closed, upside-down umbrella jauntily. The rain pours down on her, a wet, Asian Charlie Chaplain. She is laughing.

  Katie makes a motion of a sidewinding snake. Xiao Lu nods, smiles, and gestures to her feet. Pinned at the head by the crook of the umbrella handle is a three-foot-long black-and-yellow snake. Laughing, Xiao Lu bends down, finds a loose rock, and, with a single blow to the metal tip of the spine of the umbrella, cracks the snake’s back. The body writhes in the moss, stops. Xiao Lu picks it up and offers it.

  But Katie is distracted. “Hey, I cut
my knee! Look! Blood!”

  After a careful search, they find the tiniest scrape in the history of scraped knees.

  “It’s okay, darling. There—I’ve washed it off with rainwater.”

  “I need a Band-Aid!”

  “It’s nothing, Kate-zer, there’s a tiny—”

  “I want a Band-Aid!” She starts to cry.

  “Okay, okay.” Pep takes out a Band-Aid and tries to get it to stick to the wet knee. No luck. “Okay, honey bunny, the nice beautiful scrape will have to wait till you get dry.” She starts to wail like a toddler, a real meltdown they haven’t seen in years.

  “I want to go home,” she screams. “I want to go ho-ohmmm!”

  “Now you’re talking, kid,” Pep bursts out. “Now you are talkin’!”

  She catches herself. “I didn’t mean that! Not home, a hotel. I want to go to a hotel!”

  Pep shakes his head in frustration. “Fine. Whatever.”

  28

  Back at the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion the west wind has picked up and the temperature has dropped. The rain is turning to sleet and coming in almost horizontally. They all cover their exposed faces with their hands, and peer out at the trail. Xiao Lu takes a turn down into what looks like a stand of solid bamboo but conceals a neglected path they move through single file, and sometimes sideways. The leaves are rough and scratchy, the daylight subdued. From time to time, coming out into clearings, they can see that they are circling a western prospect of the mute, unyielding mountain, and once again they are exposed to sleet and hail. It stings their faces, their arms, their thighs. No one talks. Each feels defeated and glum. The recalcitrant mountain seems to exhale freezing vapors, filled with a metallic indifference. Soon, their wet clothes stiffening with ice, they are shivering.

  Pep knows that there is a real risk now—of exposure. He’s paid out many claims over the years on dumb Columbians done in by the cold—falling through ice, deer hunting drunk, hiking half-naked in the Berkshires. “Hurry, guys—we gotta get dry and warm fast. C’mon, family, move!”