Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “I trust you,” he hears her say. “I know you know the way.”

  At the same time her body moves, and it says, We are going to the mountain. We are going through the desert. We are going onward, toward the sun.

  The horse finds himself moving, a held tension finally released. The wildness of the meadow focuses in his strong limbs. And he carries her forward with a sense of relief now, the frame of her body channeling his own body forth the way the earth around the stream, with the will of its solid banks, gives the water its motion, its shape, and its freedom.

  Dragon sketches soft shapes in the late afternoon across the stone maze where Delilah lives. She’s chosen to live inside this cliff, he has learned, because it opens out on the other side to a tiny spring, that rises up from some unknown depth of earth. He likes to stay near it, playing his breath over its pink surface and listening to its small, sticky sound, for he knows that even if she avoids him by tunneling into secret, narrow caves, she’ll always have to return to the water. Usually she sleeps all through the day, and will not come until dusk. But he’ll see her eventually. And she is not going to make him leave. He belongs to the desert too. He was born here.

  He imagines her scooping the water, greedy and careless, her mouth slurping wet, the water running down her neck and soaking spots of her T-shirt against her skin. She wears a T-shirt now—something he has never seen before. She will not bare her breasts for him again. But the cloth of it is so helpless and soft, torn around her shoulders, and with little holes worn through it beneath her neck. Her hair is cropped short, ragged from the edge of the rusty knife she used to cut it, and its jagged edges leave her features sharp and bare, her smile twisting her face into a surprise of beauty as she turns toward him. Her naked neck dips helplessly into the quick points of her shoulders. He remembers this as he waits for her. He can imagine the muscles in her thin legs as she kneels and the mist of rough hair along them that darkens her already dark skin. Her feet are bare. The ragged threads of her cut-off jeans contrast with the dry smooth sheen of her thigh. Her hips are thin, her body narrow and wiry like some lonely child’s, but when he touched her she was soft—softer than any part of him, a softness that hid between her sharp bones, that wanted to yield to him.

  He hurls his drawing stone into space and lies on his back, letting the cooling breeze lick the sweat from his chest. He pictures for the hundredth time the insistent redness of her nipples shouting from the slippery darkness of her shiny body, feels her claws in his skin.

  “You can’t stay,” she’d hissed at him when he stepped in front of her on the second night, blocking her path. She was climbing down from her cave, her body instinctual and wary, but he could tell she had not expected him to be there still, and that his power in surprising her made her mad. “You don’t get to keep coming back for more. That’s not how it works.”

  He had gripped her waist then and leaned over her little frame, feeling his desire so strong it almost knocked him off balance. “What should I do?” he asked her. “What should I do with this feeling?” His voice was slow and careful and deep, like a hand that reached down into her darkness and lifted a jewel, examined it carefully, felt it pulse in his fingers.

  He felt her stiffen. He felt her fury but also her confusion. Her “no” was tiny then, and he knew she did not mean it. He reached behind her and gripped her ass in his fingers, feeling his own strength, feeling her flesh squeeze deliciously in his hand like a fruit that he could burst. If she were still wearing the little leather skirt, he could have slipped his fingers right up inside. But the denim was tight. He fit one finger beneath it, felt the misty heat radiating from her source. He ground her roughly against him. He could not stop himself—her body, the ecstasy of it, forced his hands. He ripped the cloth from her breasts and overcame her mouth with his, the sound of the ripping cloth arousing him so much he thought he would come immediately. His legs were weak with the memory of what his body remembered from the night before, and the memory of the goddesses was gone—everything was gone but her heat, and that place that would welcome him.

  But then his foot caught fire. When he jumped back, releasing her, he saw a scorpion standing tall in the sand, lifting its spiral tail and small, wrestler’s arms in challenge.

  “What—?” he cried. For it hurt, and she had done it to him, somehow. He had sensed this from the beginning: the desert was in league with her. And he needed her. He needed her not to hurt him.

  She was looking downward, stretching and releasing the torn cloth of her shirt impatiently. He didn’t understand how so much distance had inserted itself between them in only a moment. “Fuck you,” she said. “I only have two T-shirts left.”

  Dragon did not hear her. “You made that thing sting me.”

  Delilah laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the god. I don’t make anything do anything.”

  “But you did,” he insisted. He was afraid. This girl seemed the opposite of the soft-tongued women whose paradise he had left behind. Look what she had made him do! He felt suddenly that to step toward her again was to leave them behind forever. And despite his desire he could not move. He felt the scorpion’s hatred inside his skin. He knew that she would tear him to pieces. And who was he—that demon who had grabbed at her, unthinking and wild?

  “I want you gone,” she said, her voice dry and unkind. “Go back where you come from.” Then she turned and walked away, swinging her tiny hips as if she were huge, as if she were waves and waves of fat, luxurious flesh.

  “Delilah!” he yelled, but she did not turn around. Her words had made him so angry that, when he called her name again, it came out as fire. At first he did not understand what had happened. The flames stood in the air and blinded him. When they disappeared, the air was bowed and foggy with heat, and Delilah still had not turned around. His mouth was so dry he started coughing, but the tension in his body was relieved. He pawed the air as she continued to leave him, trying to understand if what he had seen was real.

  That’s what I can do, he thinks now. I can make fire. To avoid trying to understand it, to avoid realizing that he doesn’t know how to make it again, he thinks about love. He thinks he loves Delilah, and that fire is love. The scorpion was Delilah’s defense, an obstacle for him to overcome. And though he does not know how to love, the practice of those long hours forcing himself to be patient with the still loneliness of flowers, forcing himself to breathe as the goddesses moved around him, keep him now from madness.

  Tired of waiting, he gets up and wanders the desert with no direction, turning constantly to keep her caves in view, testing their angles in different perspectives in his memory. He doesn’t care whether it is day or night. Loneliness is like a sickness that weighs down his limbs and makes breathing difficult. Still, he feels the smallest sense of satisfaction, simply to know of her existence.

  High on the cliffside, giant saguaros make a forest of hard sentinels, and he feels their presence in the wind—feels that the whole world is watching him, its silence the challenge of possibility. His soul is the heat that lifts off the earth and bends the air into form.

  Coyote appears, running the other way. When he glances back once, Dragon imagines a look of disdain. Is he looking at Dragon, or beyond him, to Delilah’s caves? Coyote mocked him for crying for his mother. What kind of man are you, he might be saying now, that you let women control you?

  Dragon clenches his fists and turns back, squinting. The patterns of her caves swirl like a dangerous, frozen storm of pink fire, striking new hues in the changing sun, casting shadows thick as blood. Afternoon in the desert is a long story about shadow: giant shadows marching over giant stones, marching a path of silence. When he listens to that silence he believes he can hear Delilah’s soul turning deep within her, slower than her fast body and full of a wonder she will not speak of. It scrapes a little against her insides, like something dry and thirsty. He doesn’t know, after all, how
he feels about her. What does he want from her? What is she doing to him? He should leave. He should escape this tricky landscape of hope and death, which distorts his mind and turns him into some evil creature of reasonless lust. But where would he go?

  He lived here once, but that was long ago. He lived inside the earth then, for by then the dragons almost never emerged. It was too dangerous. They were the very last of their kind, and they had held out for hundreds of years, undiscovered. They meditated inside those caves, and ate nothing but the fire from each others’ mouths, and they never saw the sun. Dragon was one of them, and he remembered nothing of day and night, or of the world. They made the light with their eyes, with their fire. They made the darkness with their absence when they curled up to sleep. At each moment, the dragons made and re-made the only world there was for the boy who loved them.

  But now he walks alone on skin legs, human, and Coyote’s challenge pushes at his mind.

  He likes the idea of clothing. Delilah is less vulnerable, more sure of herself, inside her clothes; they raise her a level above him by hiding her from him. Dragon walks and tries to imagine himself into a costume that suits him. What does a man wear? He remembers the flow of the long robes the goddesses wore, how that flow carried them and made their walk easy. He wants that ease, but he wants the power of his legs, too, and their hard decision. He wants his penis free to rise, and he wants Delilah to look at it when it rises for her. But at the same time, he wants to hide it, so she will not have such power over him. He wants to tempt her. He wants her to want him.

  He closes his eyes while he walks, because there are no obstacles before him. He imagines the dragons, whose skin was rainbows—whose scales, sometimes, were eyes. It is one of those eyes that hangs over his heart now, one of his dragon mother’s million eyes, that he will keep forever for his heart to see by. This he will not cover. The area of his heart he must leave bare.

  Maybe he will walk then in a split skirt, a skirt that encloses each leg as he strides forward, and hangs loose below his groin. Maybe each leg of this garment will flare out around the ankle, so he will have the graceful flare of a skirt to carry him. This cloth will be sleek and tough like the skin of dragons, and rainbowed like their changing light, except that for Dragon the colors come through only in the redder colors of fire. Only the wisest, oldest dragons could achieve the colors of the hottest flame: the blue flame that turns to spirit. And Dragon did not live with them long enough to ever know that part of fire.

  Maybe gold bracelets will ring his wrists, spiraling power around his hungry hands. And he wants something on his head: a crown, a round channel to draw up the energy the way the goddesses taught him, so that one day he will learn to bring the power of that fire up into his mind. One day it will no longer torment him, but connect him with the sky. The crown must be gold, too, for gold is kin to him: gold is nothing more than dragons’ blood hardened.

  He opens his eyes and the costume is real. He laughs out loud. Yes, he is a god! He can do anything. He can make things appear by imagining them.

  What now? He stalks the desert restlessly, wishing Coyote would come back and see him. He walks until he tires himself, and then he searches for shade, not because he can be burned by the sun but because he burns from inside. Across from the cliff wall, a long walk away, the desert suddenly grows lush in a pathway of colorful cacti and arched, hanging trees with leaves like rain—a ribbon of life in touch with a ghost of water far below the earth. Here and there it bubbles to the surface, making small, miraculous oases where coyotes and rabbits alike come to drink. It runs parallel to the cliffside, between it and the terraced ledges of sandstone that rise higher and higher and are backed by a distant ridge in the north, a long purple spine spanning the horizon. He walks under the sun until he arrives at that river of green, then winds his way between the cacti where Delilah probably never goes, her bare human feet too vulnerable to the spines that litter the sand.

  Under a gentle bowed tree that breathes a shroud of cooling vapor, Dragon sits down, resting himself on the cold relief of stone. He closes his eyes. Just inside the gate to the Garden, before the palace of woman’s pleasure, lies a simpler, darker, first room, and there grows another great oak, with roots that travel beneath the entire garden and far out into the flowers and forest beyond. Around its base grow hundreds of ferns, their furry heads—Dragon knows—just now rising in their tight spirals. One goddess, sweet and shy, once knelt with Dragon among those ferns, showing him their ancient shapes like tiny human spines unfurling. She explained to him the way his desire—his life force—when he learned to focus it, would unspiral up the length of him like the growth of those primitive ferns, filling him with spirit, so that he could meet the world with all his being, whole and clear.

  Now he imagines meditating with Delilah, the amazing mystery of her darkness pressed wet against the hard sun of his rising, her legs around him. They would unfurl together like the ferns. He knows she needs that as much as he does. Together they will raise up their fire into something purer, something calm and brilliant like the eyes of the goddesses…

  But this time, his imagination does not make the image real. He struggles with the memory of her body—more fantastic, more painfully pleasurable than he had ever imagined a woman’s body would be. He wishes for water suddenly, that it might try to soothe him, the way the goddesses tried to soothe him, though they always failed.

  He opens his eyes. The cacti, purple and yellow and green, clench their unattainable water in swollen leaves, and they bristle cruelly at him. Twisted mesquite trees lean over, their leaves thin and spare, and littler trees thrust up under them, their stems crisscrossed like cages. Dragon sees the terror with which the things of the desert hoard their meager water inside themselves, and the beauty this hoarding brings. The silence of the desert, to which the long shadows march, is a song whose words become clear as he leans dizzily against the trunk of the tree—words about a longing for water, the absence of water, the spaces that water leaves behind. Water pumps through the deep silence of the tree, and through his body from his heart down through his limbs, down into his penis, into his feet, back to his heart again.

  This place will make him stronger. This place will make him a man, and he will win Delilah in the end. He opens his mouth and makes a hissing sound. He wants the fire to come again. He wants to feel that power that can come from him—a power he never knew he owned. But the fire will not come now. He stands up and hurls a stone against stone, breathing harshly. He wants to have some effect. Who is he? What belongs to him?

  Stumbling and angry, not thinking, he searches for water. When some instinct inside him finally finds it, it is rich and exuberant, lacing the happy stones with its nourishment—so much fuller and more alive than the tiny pool that Delilah drinks from, which is just enough to sustain her life. It is almost a real river here, wider and deeper than even the stream in the Garden. He kneels and kisses it with his lips, dazzled by its cold freedom, and afraid. If he lay down inside it, what then? What would happen to him? He gropes at it with his hands, but there is nothing to hold onto. Instead it holds him—pulls him inward like a depthless mouth—with its motion. He feels there is something for him inside it. Some gift there tantalizes him, glittering like a woman’s smile, but he does not know how to get in.

  Yet he is calmer now. He glances back into the far shadows where Delilah’s caves are hidden from view, enfolded in the trickster curves of desert cliffsides. He aches, suddenly, to know that she must live so far from these living things, for something tells him she cannot bear to be anywhere near this nourishing river of love.

  Moon, exhausted from vomiting up the poison he drank, his skin pale from long hours in used basement air, his eyes nearly extinguished from the low after the high, floats through the prettier streets of the City and listens to conversations outside parked cars.

  “Good morning. What a lovely day!”

  “Yes,
I hear it’s going to be a hot one.”

  He doesn’t mind the sick feeling in his body. At least it is something. It makes him feel more human, for once—human like the only person he has ever loved.

  Last night he dreamed of a frog in muddy, sick waters. He could hear the sound, underwater, of its delicate skin trying to breathe—a sound like paper tongues flapping in the wind. It was that grotesque sound that finally woke him, vomiting. He knows what the dream means, but it doesn’t matter.

  He likes it that he looks too ragged, too far gone to be spoken to. People turn their faces away. He doesn’t feel like talking to anyone. He just walks and listens, trying to understand.

  People talk about the weather all the time, like it’s important. But they don’t act like it’s important. There is something hard between them and the lifeless ground. They do not lift their arms and open their mouths when the wind blows, or pray when the clouds gather round, or seek the other worlds when fog settles in. Instead, they stand by their cars, saying the same thing they said yesterday.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Gorgeous!”

  But it’s the same as yesterday. Every day is the same: the sun in an empty sky, and hot. There is no other kind of weather in the City any more. Maybe the sky here is different, after a hundred years of smog coating it, or maybe the west winds that brought the weather have abandoned it, or maybe Hanum somehow engineered it this way. But every single day has been sunny and cloudless for as long as the youngest generation can remember.

  The people have nothing else to say. Don’t they have any other kind of weather inside of them? Yes, Moon thinks, and no one wants to admit it. But why be ashamed? Why be ashamed of the somber face of winter—that wordless stillness, the different shapes of trees when they lose their flesh of green? Why be ashamed of the passion of thunder, or the mystery of mist?