At the Heart of the Universe (43 page)

“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?”

“The path up to the monkeys. Look.” She lifts the branches of bamboo and shows them the narrow path that they took before. “I brought lots of packs of Goldfish.”

“I'm not sure we have the time, hon,” says Pep. “To be on the safe side we'd just better go.”

“They're really close! I bet it won't take ten minutes even.”

“It took longer when we tried last time, and we didn't even get there.”

“I'll ask Xiao Lu how long.” Katie takes out the little map and, through gesture and drawing and a few words, asks Xiao Lu how long it will take them to reach the monkeys.

Xiao Lu draws a watch on the map. The monkeys are about thirty minutes away.

“See? Only thirty
minutes
! Please, Mom? Dad? I won't ask for anything else this whole trip, I promise. I want to see them so much! They're so cute! And they eat right out of your hand!”

Their daughter stands there in the fork of the path, so eager, so hopeful, that she is almost dancing. Clio just wants to get back to the monastery safe and sound. But she realizes how much Katie wants to be given this little bit of freedom. She herself was never allowed it. Her own mother was afraid that she would go too far out, and never get back—and because of that fear, Clio did just that, and that led to this.