At the Heart of the Universe (46 page)

Like being in a strange new house, they—even Katie—are awkward in their chores. Nothing they need seems close by or right; things they do find seem useless. They can't figure out what to do when. They float through the day clumsily; the meals they make are pallid. After lunch the monsoon comes again—they finally realize that in the summer on the mountain it comes every day, it's just a question of how fiercely—trapping them indoors for the afternoon. Katie goes to the hut to do calligraphy, Clio going with her. Pep stays with Xiao Lu in the cave.

The rain beats down on the stones of the path through the mossy clearing, on the roof of the hermitage, and the wind whips it against the cliff face. It's strange for Pep to sit there alone with the sleeping young Chinese woman. Occasionally she awakens, and seems disoriented and cries out. He goes to her, sits, holds her hand until she sees where she is and with whom, and calms down. He feeds her, washes her hot forehead, and smiles, and she smiles back, and soon goes back to sleep.

It reminds him of caring for Katie when she had pneumonia last year. She got more and more listless and said at first that she felt like she was going to die and then said she
wanted
to die—which sent a bolt of panic through him and they called Orville at two a.m. and she spent the night getting intravenous antibiotics in Kinderhook Memorial. He wonders, now, if Xiao Lu could die. Infections from bites, Orville said, always nasty, can be lethal. But she's strong, and tough. The next day or two will tell.

In the little hut, Katie is teaching Clio calligraphy. Trying to follow her lead, Clio feels an admiration for her, for the way that she's made a jump from doing it the Western way to the Eastern. It's hard to define the difference. It's something about not trying to make it happen, but being relaxed enough so that it happens. Katie has got it now and Clio has not. Together they laugh at Clio's clumsiness.

The rain stops in time for the evening feeding of the deer. Katie organizes this too, knowing where the deer appear, showing Clio and Pep how to creep up silently to the edge of the forest near the low moon gate, and signaling for them to be silent while she imitates exactly Xiao Lu's call to them. “
Ping
?
Ping
?”

The deer don't come. “Maybe they'll come if I'm alone?” Katie says.

Clio and Pep walk away, sit at the entrance to the cave, and watch.

“
Ping
?
Ping
?” Katie stands absolutely still, holding out her open palms with the orange Goldfish. “
Ping
?
Ping
?”

“She looks so young,” Clio whispers.

“Young and old both.”

“And almost like she's
right
, here?”

“Yes.”

The deer are coming. Like parts of the leaves they part to appear, all at once they are there. They are so small that Katie seems even bigger. The buck comes first, and then beside him the doe, and the fawn. They stop and stare at the girl. Then they come up to her, first the buck, finishing a handful, and then the doe for the second handful, and the fawn for a few nibbles of the third—which the buck finishes up. The deer ease back into the wood. Katie turns to look at Clio and Pep and gives a thumbs-up and shouts, “Yes!” Clio and Pep echo back, “Yes!” The last shafts of sunlight play off the flinty face of the mountain and dance across the clearing.

Smiling, Katie walks with unusual slowness through the bars of light toward them, not in a straight line but veering off here and there as a sound from the woods or the glimpse of a bird attracts her, as if she has become
like
all this, a current of mere nature, like the mountain deer Xiao Lu has tamed.



The next day is a horror. They awaken to demonic rain, carried on scary gusts that seem driven in directly from the Himalayas. It rains all day and into the night.

Xiao Lu is worse, her fever is 102, and she is delirious and disoriented, as if a part of her has gone away, disappeared. When she's awake, she fights their efforts to help. It is all they can do to get the antibiotic and fluids into her and change the dressing. And change her clothes and sheets—she can't let them know when she's got to go. To keep the rain out, they've strung a heavy blanket across, which keeps them more or less dry, but which entraps the smell of kerosene, sweat, urine, and feces. Inside, the air is soon fetid, but it's impossible to go outside at all. Even a run for the hut or the latrine soon soaks them through.

To keep the fire going with wet wood is difficult, and to keep bringing what they need from the hut to the cave is a pain. They take turns doing this, trying to dry out in between. The mossy clearing has turned muddy. The stones are slippery—unable to see where they're going, soon all three of them have fallen several times.

In late afternoon, as Xiao Lu goes through a bad run of delirium filled with shouts and curses and sobs, Katie turns to Pep. “Dad, is Xiao Lu gonna die?”

“No, no, Kate-zer. The medicine should work soon. By tomorrow.”

“What about giving her some of that monk stuff? It worked on you, Dad.”

They try to get the bear bile down, but she struggles against it.

Clio and Pep start to really worry. Pep realizes that Xiao Lu could actually die—the next day or so will tell whether Levaquin works for monkey bites. Despite the gentle deer and the beautiful scenery, the attack of the monkeys has made him afraid of what else is out there. With the constant pounding of the rain, he is filled with dread of the power of all the old rock of this mountain that has been here long before they were and will be here long after they are gone. The sheer
bigness
of what they are perched upon scares him, mocks him and his pitiful little pills. Time seems trivial, and immense. Death could come at any moment to Xiao Lu—and to him, Clio, Katie—death could come anytime, from anything out there. No one knows where they are. Their bodies would be eaten, their bones scattered, never to be found.

39

As they get ready for bed, Clio feels, for the first time in China, a sudden turmoil in her bowels. Grabbing the umbrella and the flashlight, she tells them she is going to the latrine. The wind and rain are fierce. She can barely see the path down to the ditch. One shoe comes off on the way, and she holds it in her hand. At the latrine she yanks down her pants with one hand and squats and... and nothing. Her belly aches, she feels an urgency to go, but nothing comes. She tries, waits. Still nothing, not even gas. It's difficult to balance there on her heels, holding the umbrella and shoe in one hand, the flashlight in the other. The smell is intense. She breathes through her mouth. Finally it starts to happen, semi-solid and smelling revolting, even breathing through her mouth. And then, in the middle of it, she feels something crawling across her bare foot. The cold sweat of terror comes over her.
Brown snake I'm dead they say not to move and it won't bite you.

She freezes, and then, feeling the thing crawl off her foot, she thanks God, but then the thing turns around and crawls
back
onto her foot and starts up her ankle. Still squatting she squirms around and puts the flashlight on it, and sees what looks like a foot-long giant red millipede crawling up her leg. She screams at the top of her lungs and kicks out with her leg to shake it off, which makes her lose her balance and start to fall, backward into the pit. Desperately she throws all her weight forward, like a rower with an umbrella and shoe for oars, and she avoids falling back into the pit but is so full of terrified strength that she reflexively springs straight ahead and finds herself sprawling in the mud of the path, both arms down hard into something soft, which she hopes is moss, a rivulet of water running over her outstretched arms. She feels the crawling thing—or now things!—creeping with sharp little tarsi up her other leg and lets out another howl and, trying to pull up her pants, gets up and then trips on the band of pants between her legs and goes down again, this time right on her face. Pebbles scratch her. Her face feels coated in a mudpack. She wails and cries and digs her fingernails into the dirt as if into a cliff to try to get up, pulling her pants up and then running as fast as she can back up the path, bamboo whipping against her.

She staggers into the cave. There's a strange howling coming from Xiao Lu. Pep and Katie are walking toward her bed. They turn when Clio comes in, and their look turns into surprise, then fear. Her face is filthy, mud on her nose and cheeks and hair, her clothes are soaking wet and dark with grime, she carries one soaked shoe and the umbrella, which is twisted inside out.

“What happened?” Pep says, over the howling.

“You okay, Mom?”

“No, I am not! I fell, I saw a... a...”

“Snake?”

“No, a bug as big as a snake—a huge creepy-crawly thing—and I, and it was revolting!” She stands there, wanting them to help her. Xiao Lu is crying. “What?”

“She had a poop, Mom, and she was lying in it asleep and she just woke up and started crying bad, so we were just starting to get her cleaned up. Can you help?”

Clio joins them. Xiao Lu looks at her and falls silent, a look of fright on her face, as if she's staring at some demon. But then, recognizing her, Xiao Lu laughs feebly, raising her good arm a little to point. Pep and Katie stare at Clio again, and start to giggle, and then as Xiao Lu laughs harder, they laugh with her. Clio, looking down at her messy shirt and shorts and legs, takes the mirror that Pep hands her, sees the total mud bath that is her face, her muddied hair standing straight up on top of her head like a rooster, and laughs with them. Soon all of them are laughing hysterically, deliriously. They stop, start again, and finally stop enough to help move Xiao Lu, strip and change her, and lay her down, clean.

“Now,” Pep says to Clio, “you.”

“Y'know what?” Clio says. “I'll just go out in the rain.”

“But it's cold out there!” Pep says, worried for her.

“Mom, are you crazy?”

“Yes!” She runs back out into the pouring rain and, laughing inside, twirls around in it, figuring she can't get any wetter. Waves of big, cold drops wash over her, but—like the frigid Atlantic at Annisquam when she was ten—it doesn't
feel
all
that
cold now, and to her surprise she realizes she's not
figuring
anything anymore.

She takes off her shirt and her bra and her pants and her panties, and uses the rain on her hands and fingers to wash her whole body, from her matted, muddied hair to the dirt beneath her breasts and her armpits and belly button—a big nugget there!—and in her vagina and the cleft of her butt and right down to the goop in the gaps between her toes. Feeling cleaner, she wanders here and there on the moss. The rain feels almost warm now, as if the wind has shifted to bring truly tropical clouds up from the South Seas and screw you too, Himalayas! And if at first she just walks around delicately, suddenly she lets go and starts twirling around like a dancer, like she used to dance in the steamy rain in Jamaica, just letting go and dancing. She feels dizzy but keeps on dancing, for the first time in weeks if not years not
worrying
that she feels dizzy and is dancing in the rain on a speck not on any map, dwarfed by a big, fucking-tough mountain.

As she twirls around she keeps touching, with her eyes, one stable point—not her husband and child silhouetted in the mouth of the cave, but the keystone of the arch in the moon gate, and her mind turns to a quote from Luke that Bob Marley put in a song—“The stone that the builder refused will be the main cornerstone
.
”
The two times and places come together, linked across time and space by the freedom she felt as a girl, and this sudden freedom as a woman.

And then something else happens. She realizes that she has been drowning in what she fears. Dragged down and under, scared to death of the dirt and shit and blood and strangeness of... of
China
! From the start she denied it, imagined she was going on this trip to China for the sake of her child. But in fact it was for the sake of her denial, to close the door on her child's past and even on her child's dream of finding her Chinese mother, to solidify that denial for all time, to nail down a “No, there's nothing we can know about where you came from.” And now she's found the “Yes.” Now finally, yes, the death of her denial. Her real fear all along—maybe for her whole life!—has been of opening up to the not knowing, to the dirt of bringing in someone unknown to love, to bring the unknown and different
other
into her heart as her beloved.

To bring to your bosom your hidden and mysterious beloved.

Clio dances on, drowning in the dirt of not knowing what's next and what's really there, undeniably there in who she is and who she will be.

You've had to lie about it to yourself—think you could keep it all nice and neat, clean and unknown—to really get it. The lying has led you here, to China.

She finds herself stopped still, staring at the silhouettes of her daughter and her husband in the mouth of the cave. They stand as still as she, as silenced by the rain.