Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The dragons raised the boy for six years. And he loved them. But in the end, they could not keep him either.

  Now Dragon presses the sharp stone into his skin, seeking pain, seeking some trace of humanness in his blood. He knows the wounds will heal over before the end of the night, easy and smooth, as if they were never there—and he hates this sign of inhumanness in himself, as his first mother must have hated it.

  Having lived all his life in the Garden or the caves, he does not recognize Coyote when Coyote comes running across the night, his footsteps hot and immediate, much closer than the distant memory of dragons. Coyote runs from side to side across Dragon’s vision, veering constantly closer. He does not look at Dragon but Dragon sees him smile.

  “You called me?” Coyote says.

  “No,” says Dragon, sullen, trying not to look.

  “Then who are you calling, with your sweet-smelling blood?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? But your blood makes me hungry, and so I come.”

  Dragon watches Coyote tap the earth lightly, testingly, with his sly nose. “I don’t care.”

  “Whom do you cry for then, not caring, from your bleeding eyes?”

  Dragon sniffs. “My mother.”

  “Who is your mother?” Coyote swings closer, his path like a pendulum before Dragon’s vision, zeroing in tighter and tighter toward a single point.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Who is your mother?”

  “A woman! A woman who hated me because I shamed her, because I was too much a god.”

  “Who is your mother?” Coyote repeats more quietly.

  Dragon is silent.

  “Who?”

  “She was a dragon,” Dragon sighs, more quietly now because he feels somehow that his rage doesn’t matter, that it isn’t even real. “She gave me up because I was not one of her kind and she could not care for me.”

  “Who is your mother?” Only a whisper now. A hiss.

  Dragon tries not to cry. He grits his teeth, holding the bloody stone in his hand. “She was a goddess who cast me out of her garden. Because I was too much a human being.”

  “Whom do you cry for, then?” Coyote barks. “Whom do you call?”

  Dragon says nothing, only bows his head, and is about to begin again the drawing upon his flesh.

  But suddenly Coyote leaps forward at a single point between Dragon’s eyes, gripping the boy’s spirit in his teeth.

  “Who are you?” he snarls, his eyes swirling. “Are you a man? Who are you, spilling your own blood, not caring? Your actions have consequences. Your blood calls and I come.”

  Dragon shakes him off, shakes himself awake. He lies on his back, breathing hard up at the naked stars. Coyote’s voice is like a flame inside his skull.

  The next day he washes his body with dust. The wounds are gone but the memory of Coyote is alive and fierce within him. He turns away from the rainbow caves. There was no reason to come here. He keeps walking into the calm morning.

  He feels smooth and strong and his mind is clear. But his penis swells again, and aches all through him. He does not touch it. He lets his erection move him forward into the hot day, flaunting his frustration to the empty wind. The sand burns his feet. Sweat comes now, and traces the muscles of his chest, making him itch. As he walks into the afternoon, zigzagging dizzily across red and gold, he sees the bare desert before him rise sometimes into soft hills, draped here and there with swaths of tiny yellow flowers, and folding around his vision like flesh—as if the desert begins to evolve into a body before it reaches the sea.

  The sight of those hills, close and intimate around him, is what finally brings him down.

  Maybe you know, though no one admits it, and you do not know how you know, that Hanum’s wife killed him. It seems to you that the preacher hints at it in his sermons. Children are whispering about it in the schools. You shake your heads about it in silence, but thrilled shivers run through you as you pause at your work and stare out the window. At home, you will not look at each other for days, for fear that your eyes will betray the merest thought of it.

  “How did she do it?” wonder two young girls in an attic, who have pledged to be friends for life. “She put a spell on him,” says one, smiling wickedly. “Maybe she drowned him in the sea,” says the other, dreaming shyly into a corner.

  But at night, whether you live in families or alone, whether you fell asleep in someone’s arms or wrapped only in bleached sheets, your pillow is wet; you stare down your shadows with wide eyes in the space between midnight and dawn. What will happen, if your god is dead? Perhaps the Princess is real after all. Will she save you? But how could she, when she is only a girl? Why did beauty seem so important once; can beauty feed you, or undo your loneliness, or make you strong? You never believed in it, you tell yourself.

  Money, the measure of reality’s certainty, plummets in value. You reach into your pocket and finger it. It is so thin.

  There is a secret place in this world, but I cannot tell you where it is yet, and I cannot tell you how I know.

  In that place there is a girl named Mira, who is not crazy. And no one else there is crazy either.

  Mira can see everything that happens there, though no one can see her vision, which is enclosed in layers of numbness inside her mind. She can hide here in this place as well as anywhere. People might think she is here inside her body, for example, but she is not.

  Mira could tell you: that man who screamed and screamed for so many years was only angry because he did not want to go to sleep. Hanum was trying to make him go to sleep, trying to dull his body and make him forget his spirit, and he did not want that. That was why he screamed. That was the only reason.

  And that one who is afraid—paranoia, Hanum called it. That’s because there are things to be afraid of in this world. Mira knows. Weapons in the hands of anger. Careless bodies. Loud noise and machines faster than animals can run. Everybody wants something from you. People have secret aims, and they will use you to achieve them. Who could live with eyes and ears open, and not be afraid all the time?

  And that woman who raves about gods and dragons—couldn’t they be real? If they were not real, why would everyone be so afraid of what she’s saying? Why would they need to lock her up for saying it?

  And the one who isolates—maybe he needs to be alone. Maybe he needs space to think. Mira herself could never think with people all around her, digging and pulling at her with their needing eyes and hearts and minds. She would lose herself.

  This is where they’ve all been kept for so many years, in case you wondered—all the people who spoke the truth about the City, the people who did not believe in that reality. The ones who screamed the loudest have already been put to sleep: the one with panic attacks, who felt the walls were too tight, the hysterical one, who kept worrying that something was happening to her daughter, somewhere left behind with the man who almost killed her.

  Deep down, in this secret place, Mira closes her eyes now. Closing her eyes makes no sound, so no one knows if she is asleep or awake. Mira. Maybe that is her name, because that is what the others call her, and what her mother called her. Her father, in his desperate whispers, called her Mia. Her sister, a long time ago when they understood one another, called her Miri. But secretly, Mira calls herself Mirr. She likes the sound of Mirr, like a murmur, like the hum of the wind through the meadow…

  Sometimes Mirr still dreams of me. She feels my horn when she closes her eyes, a light spiraling up from between her own eyes. (As a child, she was surprised at her ability to move instantly into a dream like that, even without meaning to, even without going to sleep. Now she knows that everything is a dream, and everything is real, so that sleeping and waking are no longer separate for her.) Sometimes she can see that horn spiraling up from every mind in the room—every mind called crazy,
every mind spinning and spinning, a whirlpool of unruly spirit.

  She knows the old woman killed the man who trapped them here. She knows she killed him with the same poison with which he put them all to sleep. But it does not matter, because they’re still here, and they’re still sleeping.

  Mira also knows there is another woman, both young and old, kneeling before her now, even though she has not opened her eyes. Mira feels this woman surround her with love without touching her, and she knows this woman is the soul of the River Yora, which she used to see from the cliff as a little girl. She is afraid to open her eyes. But the image of the spiraling horn, the light between madness and heaven, snaps into oblivion in her mind, and she feels hoof-beats in her stomach, and she feels she will be sick, for she does not know that the running inside her is her own.

  Without opening her eyes or her mouth, she says to this beautiful woman, this spirit of the river, You have to get out of here.

  Lonely wakes on a beach, her dress like a jellyfish around her and the sand smeared across her, grating inside the crevices of her body. The riot of waves hitting the shore seems like nothing to do with the silent realm she has emerged from. She lifts her head and struggles up on one elbow. The other woman is braced above her, her body half over her, and she starts backward with a gasp as Lonely comes up—both of them startled as if they had just woken together in someone else’s dream.

  Lonely breathes in. She has never noticed air before.

  Her eyes take in the light. The woman’s body curves and swells like the water, and her pale skin is wet. Two beads of water tremble on her clavicle, catching the light; Lonely is breathless for a moment with the beauty of them, and then she remembers to breathe in again, and the air she breathes becomes space to hold this beauty. She looks up at the woman’s face, at her huge eyes with their grey-green darkness and feverish light.

  “Who are you?” asks Lonely, breathing out.

  The soft woman backs away, and as she does so, her gown flows toward the sea as if made of water. Lonely can see her rolling breasts like unshelled eggs under the rivulets falling from her shoulders. But her eyes, too, seem to retreat.

  “I do not know,” she answers.

  Lonely stares at her.

  “Yora,” the woman says suddenly, as if remembering now. “My name is Yora.” Her voice is deep and dark to match her eyes, its halting awkwardness belying its richness. “You are strong,” she says then. “You could have died, but you kept walking.”

  Lonely opens her mouth to speak. She tries to remember.

  “Did you know you were strong?”

  “No,” says Lonely.

  “We are both free now, and I must go,” says Yora, her voice turning windy and distant. “Is there anything you need?”

  “I need—” begins Lonely, but stops. What is need? She is lost. But she remembers the Witch, the sobbing face in a frame of driftwood and bone. “Love,” she says quickly, to cover the memory. “I need to find love.”

  “Ah,” says Yora, and her eyes turn away like the eyes of the fishes into darkness. “That is true,” she says. “It seems everyone wants that.”

  “Where is it?” asks Lonely.

  “Beyond the beach lie fields, and beyond the fields lies a desert, and beyond that lies the forest,” Yora’s faraway voice chants, like a prophecy, like a story already told, “and beyond that, the mountain—”

  “Yes, the mountain!” cries Lonely, for she remembers suddenly the peak she saw from her tower of dreaming. It seems long ago but she’s sure that it was real, that it means something, and since love is what she longs for, it must mean something about love. There is nothing higher, nothing more beautiful, than that mountain. In this image, somehow, she has already seen her prince’s face.

  “All I can tell you,” continues Yora, “is do not ever enter the City. You cannot find love there. You will lose yourself there.”

  “What is the City?” Lonely asks.

  Yora smiles a smile without joy, and does not answer. “And be careful of desire,” she says instead.

  “I desire nothing,” says Lonely, “except love.” For she remembers her father’s promises.

  “But once you begin to feel the pleasures of the body, you will feel desire. The more you desire, the more you will become human, the more you will become mortal. Eat once, and you will always be hungry. Trust me, for I have seen what it brings. Only suffering.”

  Lonely still doesn’t know what hunger is, though she wonders if she feels it now, looking into Yora’s tender eyes. “Don’t go,” she pleads.

  But Yora stands, the dress of water gushing across her, like a flood of tears unleashed in full. “I, too, must keep moving,” she answers. “But look.” She motions with her arm past Lonely. “Take this with you, my gift to you. Someone to carry you, because you have no shoes.”

  Lonely turns around and sees, before a wash of open hills—so much closer than the image of the familiar mountain, which she sees also, distant and wreathed in mist—a horse.

  A white horse, just like she always secretly dreamed of having for her own—with no prince riding it. It is white, but its belly is shaggy and dirty with the sand that clings to it. Its ankles are wet. It snorts, eyeing Lonely nervously, and sends a rough shiver from its shoulders to its flanks. She hears Yora’s sad voice behind her.

  “He has been a friend to me. But I cannot take him with me now, and there is no need for anyone to carry me. Because I am nothing….”

  Lonely turns back, and Yora, sighing as if with relief, is gone.

  She must have been a goddess. Perhaps she turned into water. Perhaps she shifted into some other realm or someone else’s imagination. But what Lonely is, Lonely herself is not sure. She knows only that she can never escape this question, now, of her own life.

  Dragon passes through an arch, rounds a corner, and is confronted with leering stone formations: awkward round-headed giants, curvaceous loops, strange bubbles of hardened sand. He falls to his knees without knowing why. The cliffside is pink, and successive U’s and arches lead into a labyrinth of smooth, interlocking caves. As his eyes close halfway, he can see only the searing line between their shadows and the unforgiving sunlight.

  He is masturbating. He hadn’t meant to. He’d thought he would seat and arrange himself carefully on this hard earth and bring stillness up through the stone, let the windows of stone within stone draw his focus inward to a place beyond himself, and bring him peace. He’s done it before. But there is no peace now. As soon as his knees touch the rock, his right hand is moving fast. When he finally touches that forbidden pillar of longing his blood rushes so fast to the sensation that he feels as if he will explode instantly. He pulls his dry hand harder against the skin, and he cannot move his hand fast enough—cannot get fast enough to the release that he knows won’t be enough even when it comes.

  But he is so accustomed to shame that when he sees a movement in the cave above him, he stops immediately. He falls forward on his hands and grips the stone to keep them still, gasping as he sees a woman crawl from a dark entrance. She is smaller than the goddesses, her skin brushed thickly with dusk and darker than his own, and when she emerges halfway into the last band of sunlight, she is still dark. But her eyes shine out from that darkness, laughing. She grips the small full fruits of her breasts in her hands as if she will toss them to him, then slides her hands luxuriously down the rumpled brown cloth that lies across her thin thighs. She plays her fingers around in that soft mess of darkness and cloth, then presses them deeper between her legs.

  “Come on,” she breathes, smiling. “Why stop?” Her words seem lit from within, each one wet and bright and caught like dew in the air. Her nipples are lavender within paler pools of skin more tender than a butterfly’s wing.

  Dragon is breathing so hard he feels he will choke.

  “Come on,” she says again, “I’ll do i
t with you.” And she lies back against the stone, unfurling her spine into a light, graceful arch, and as her lips part her legs part too, and her fingers press deeper into the crumpled brown cloth and beneath it. He cannot see the place beneath it, between her quick, dark, dusty legs. But the cloth splits open around her thigh and he can see the shape of her buttock curving smooth against the stone. When she licks her lips and grips one breast with her other hand, pulling it so hard that her nails press into the flesh, accentuating its impossible softness, he moves his hand again, and with one thrust he is already coming. His quiet cries grate against the dry air as he doubles over to the ground in dizzy relief.

  He remains there with his forehead resting on the stone, his body shaking, feeling the tears still in him—deeper in than that frothy excitement, and harder to release. When he finally raises his eyes, hopeful and afraid, the woman is gone. He tells himself he will go after her, but then drops his head and succumbs to an equally desperate exhaustion.

  Yora has no body.

  She has no feet that take direction. She has no lungs that take their share of oxygen. She has no eyes that have to witness or ears that have to listen. She has no hands that can love or hurt, give or take. No voice that speaks an opinion. No, she renounces these things. Not because she is a goddess, but because she is nothing. She is a drop in the sea. The drop is not the sea, nor is it separate from the sea. In the white steady roar of water, she attempts to lose her memory and her mind.