Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  A horn blares, and Moon jumps to the side. Tires squeal angrily against pavement. He’d forgotten: this is where cars go, the road. Only cars here, not people. There are people inside the cars, but nobody remembers that. A person in one car honks and steers her car hard in front of another, as if the other car is only a car with nothing inside it. Are they real bodies inside those cars? They cannot feel the wind or touch the things they pass. They cannot see details. They twitch a single muscle in the ankle or the wrist, and the machine does whatever they want to do.

  But inside the cars are vulnerable bodies, and inside the thoughts are longings that no one speaks. Moon knows that.

  He stops and turns his flute over in his hands. No one remembers any more. No one remembers anything but sun and fake smiling; they’ve forgotten the beautiful darkness inside.

  No one cries now. No one remembers the rain.

  Delilah skips from shadow to shadow beneath the lithe, jagged pines. She feels their breathing, their ever-running blood. Their bristly tops sweep the sky, mirroring the tattered grey clouds that skid over them in the evening wind. The drone of that wind is like an eerie sleep through the heads of the pines, a foggy, disorienting sound.

  How can there be a pine forest here, she’d asked Moon years ago, on this cliff above the desert? How can it be winter up here, when below us the earth is bare and burned by the sun?

  Because we’re in someone else’s dream, he had said. Nothing makes sense in this world. Or if it does, we do not understand it.

  Whose dream? Who dreams us?

  No one knows. Most people don’t even know they’re in a dream.

  Is it because you’re a god that you know?

  No. He’d laughed. Anyone who’s paid attention to their dreams can tell that life is only another one.

  Why don’t you ever tell me your dreams?

  Because. They don’t mean anything.

  But you must know who’s dreaming us. You know everything. Tell me. I want out of this dream.

  No you don’t. He was serious now. And I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

  No. You’re right. Me neither.

  But Delilah climbs the cliff above her caves and enters this forest again and again because of her dreams, and she survives because of those dreams. The dreams tell her what animal to hunt—what animal has decided, for whatever reason she doesn’t pretend to understand, that it needs to become a part of her. It is always this wind through the tops of the pines, wailing like a witch’s prayer, that reminds her of her dream, even if down in the desert she could remember nothing but a shuffling darkness or a sudden movement opening in space. Sometimes even when she remembers the dream, the animal appears like a riddle, giving her a pathway to follow or an abstract pattern, which she doesn’t understand until she recognizes it in the retreating tail of a rabbit or the blurred fan of a grouse’s wings.

  She never kills predators, because she feels herself to be one of them. Nor does she kill in the desert, where among the bats, lizards, snakes, foxes, scorpions, owls, ravens, vultures, and all the other creatures people mistrust and fear, she has for the first time in her life come to feel at home. She kills only up here in the pine forest, where Moon first taught her to hunt.

  It’s spring now, but at night the iron-cold shadows of the pines, split in silence by white swords of moonlight, make her feel like it’s winter all year round. Sap runs through the lean, straight trunks in passionate rivers no matter what the season, and as Delilah crouches and encircles one of them with her arm to steady herself, she feels its spirit writhe gleefully like a wiry muscle up into the sky. Pines are the only trees she has ever known well, and she understands them, for unlike other plants, they feel as if they are constantly moving, as if they themselves are hunters or guardians of the hunt and the hunted. Their seeds germinate only at the touch of fire.

  The pines own this forest. In this part of it, nothing else grows beneath them but silence, and they cast their shadowy winter dreams upon a bed of their own red needles, nearly as soft under running feet as the desert sand.

  On the prickly desert floor, Delilah wears her old sneakers, their toes split open and curling upwards. But in the forest she wears strips of leather she made herself, cut to fit her feet. They’re tied simply and held clumsily, but they hold, and they allow her feet to move silently, feeling every detail without getting cut. She rises from the ground, listening. Her shoulders, always curled a little inward like the cave she sleeps in, ache, and she rolls them around impatiently, trying to shake off that nameless tension. She tiptoes at a run between the trunks, her bare feet inside the leather so calloused she does not feel the sharp points of the needles, only the silence that cushions them. She doesn’t know where she is going but she cannot stay still for long, and as always, it is pure need that propels her forward into the unknown.

  An owl calls, his voice the black hole of a question, observing her. Delilah stops and calls back in her owl voice—a different voice, one she does not recognize as part of her own limited self. Now I am also an owl, her call says. I am also a hunter; let me share your space.

  And yet tonight is different. Tonight she’s unsteady. She doesn’t know tonight what she is seeking.

  Delilah never begged when she lived in the City; she only stole. And it’s not like begging now, the way she creeps through the pine forest longing for food, though tonight she feels helpless in a way she has not felt before. It’s like…. She struggles to imagine, as she always does, how she would explain it to Moon, who is perhaps the only person she will ever see as worthy of explaining anything to.

  But no, she wouldn’t explain it to Moon after all, because it makes her sound selfish and jealous, and she doesn’t like to sound that way in front of Moon, because he is so good. Yes, she knows now: this helplessness is like the way she felt as a child when her father was still alive, when she walked into the kitchen late one night to get a glass of water and found her little sister Mira still up, talking in a hushed voice with her father like a grown-up. Delilah had stopped, instinctively ashamed, and their father had leaned back and taken his hands from Mira’s small lap, so that Delilah could see he’d been holding her hands in his. Mira had blanked her eyes to Delilah, revealing nothing. And Delilah had felt—what had she felt? Her father never told her his secrets. Her father barely spoke to her at all. She supposed he thought her too impulsive, too wild, too driven by desire to sit still and absorb such wisdom. But to Mira he gave everything, and Mira kept it all hidden within herself, never sharing those secrets with Delilah, until she became as foreign and indecipherable to Delilah as their father himself. It was as if their father gradually translated Mira’s entire being into another language, until Delilah could not understand her at all.

  Helpless. In fact, when hunting through her dreams like this, trying to understand the hidden ways of her prey, Delilah feels the way she always did, no matter what age, no matter how fierce she could be with anyone else, when she stood in the presence of her sister. Even once it became clear that Mira was completely mad—screaming whenever she was put in a car, not speaking to anyone, murmuring to plants—Delilah continued to feel vulnerable whenever she approached her little sister, as if she herself were the younger one. It was a feeling of inexplicable awe and longing that infuriated her, as every one of her attempts to soothe or talk to Mira was rejected.

  “Hoah,” Delilah huffs to herself in the darkness, trying to ground herself with the sound of her own voice. It unnerves her the way she gets lost in thoughts sometimes, the way her past still walks beside her constantly, and tries to talk to her. She loses her focus, spaces out—something she never used to do. Too many years speaking to no one but bats—that must be it.

  Often Delilah cannot remember her dream until she comes to the pine forest and hears the wind, but this evening she remembered the animal clearly when she awoke. Pausing and turning from side to side, she closes h
er eyes now and listens, hopeful that another, truer memory will surface—some dream beneath that dream. For the animal she dreamed of she cannot kill. She knew this when Moon took her hunting for the first time, and this animal was the first animal they spotted, standing alone in a clearing. He motioned with his head and waited for her to take aim, but she sat there with the bow resting in her lap, frozen.

  “Now,” he whispered, but she said, out loud, “No,” and her voice resounded in space.

  The deer bounded with graceful, slow-motion leaps into the forest beyond.

  “Not that one,” she gasped, snatching her breath back from the clutches of a terror she could not explain.

  “Why?” said Moon. “She was looking at me. She knew.”

  “No,” said Delilah, still staring at the empty clearing, “I mean not deer. Not any deer. I won’t kill that animal.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.” She said it with conviction, as if the terror of the unknown was reason in itself.

  “You’re crazy, Lil,” he said, but he was laughing, and he didn’t ask any more questions, which was why she loved him. Nothing angered him, and he never pressed.

  Later she knew, not suddenly but gradually—with a realization she managed to deny to herself for long enough that when it finally hit her its potency was faded and less painful—that animal reminded her of Mira. It was the deer’s silence, its sweetness, its feet light on the earth and its body thin and easily disappearing, but most of all its eyes, eyes that shamed her with their impossible compassion. Furthermore, Delilah knew that this feeling would always make her tremble when she hunted any animal—this sense that she was hunting Mira’s kindred. She felt, ridiculous as it would sound to say out loud, that her people were the predators and Mira’s were the prey, and that was why she had never been able to approach her little sister without feeling ashamed of herself, as if without even trying she would push Mira away with her own hunger, her own clumsy, ignorant humanness.

  But the feeling was strongest with deer. Now in the darkness she remembers the deer’s watery eyes in her dream last night. “I won’t,” she says out loud, the image of the deer so real inside her that she almost speaks her sister’s name. Mira. Miri. But she refuses. She would rather starve.

  “There must be someone else,” she whispers. Sometimes it overwhelms her to think how many animals must die in her lifetime to sustain her. She knows Mira used to feel the same, which was why she stopped eating meat, stopped eating almost entirely before she was taken away. But Delilah does not have that kind of self-control. In her memory, she has never had self-control of any kind. She cannot put off what she wants. Desire fills her, animates her, defines her, tells her where to go and what to do next in any given situation. With her whole body she desires meat. She doesn’t care for vegetables and she has no patience for stalking plants, which are even more hidden and mysterious to her than the animals. Occasionally she eats a little of the tough cacti, whose flesh she mashes into pulp. In the autumn sometimes she finds pomegranates, whose juice is like blood.

  She keeps moving. The deer’s eyes in her mind are like the round glowing call of the owl: singular, dark, and deep.

  Then she turns away from the sound and faces the long silence before her, and something happens that has not happened in the seven years since she came to the desert, not once. She misses her sister. The feeling roars up behind her heart like the oceanic wind, threatening to break her apart.

  “Fuck this,” she says to the silence, her voice determined and challenging. The whole night is the deer’s eye, murky and alive. She feels as if the deer is hunting her. She runs again and keeps on running, making a loop back to the open cliff, back to the safety of the desert.

  She has meat left still from the boar she killed a week ago. She will not kill tonight. Not if it means looking into those eyes.

  She skitters down the cliff face, spidery and swift, the motions of her hands abrupt with frustration. Her whole body hurts. Cramps in her legs. A pinched nerve in her neck. Her eyes hurt. Tension binds her shoulders. Pain. It comes like this, from nowhere, and she growls with it, furious.

  She takes a faster, steeper route than usual, having nothing to carry back with her. There is no landscape to separate the forest from the desert, or the desert from the fields, or the fields from the sea. Reality shifts suddenly, and one finds oneself suddenly in a different place.

  Maybe, Moon had said once, we are in the dream of a person who travels only by car, or by something even faster, so that they have no sense of the transition between places. Maybe we live in a dismembered world, a world dreamed by a mind that has forgotten the connections between things.

  Delilah had not understood what he meant then, but she remembered how her sister used to scream like an animal in the car. How she would look out the window with her little head jerking fast back and forth as if her eyes could not make sense of the images beyond a terrifying blur, how she would shrink and cringe at each other car that passed so close, and how as the ton-heavy mass of machinery hurtled her forward at a faster and faster speed, her scream would crescendo and then suddenly break off—though her mouth still hung open—as if the car moved so fast she had lost her voice somewhere far behind her.

  That’s how Delilah’s sister was. Things that everyone else took for granted, she saw as alien. As if she belonged somewhere else.

  That night, Dragon makes the fire again after all, as he did the morning Delilah turned from him and he called her name. This time it keeps burning, living on nothing.

  It happens while he’s meditating. He sits before Delilah’s caves, willing himself to breathe in the pink sandstone scent that he now associates with her and to sit quietly with the memory of her presence. As the women of the Garden taught him, he breathes his desire upward through his spine, into his belly, his rib cage, his heart, his throat, his mind.

  Once, he had asked them where the energy would go, and would it leave him finally—would he finally have relief. But they could not tell him this. They could not explain. They could only promise him that, with continued practice, he would find a new way to use this energy and that it would no longer torment and control him.

  He has always struggled with the meditation, but he continues to believe in it. He has never been able to bring it all the way up to his head. Usually by the time it reaches his heart, the fire down below—as if raging on its own brighter and brighter—draws all his energy and thoughts back down with its magnetism, repeatedly, until he finally gives in to it, his disappointment lost in the ecstasy of familiar release.

  But today, perhaps because he’s been with a woman now, even if only once, he is able to hold the fire hovering for longer and longer in his heart, though not any higher. It burns, and his chest burns, until he wants to scream, but he can’t, because he can’t bring it up to his throat. He feels so much love for Delilah—or what he thinks must be love—that it’s as if his heart itself is straining with the need for release. She is gone, and he cannot tell her. Then his heart seems to explode, and he coughs, and fire shoots out of his mouth, as if he really were born from dragons.

  As he watches the single flame twist eerily over the sand, all alone with nothing to feed it, yet alive, he feels the same sweet release as if he had really come, and then filling that emptiness he feels a power he has never known before. It makes him want to try again and again, so that when that first little flame dies into the twilight, he breathes in hard and closes his eyes, lifting his chest and willing the energy of his passion to rise up inside him once more.

  “I am a god!” he cries out loud. “I am a god of fire!”

  By the time night surrounds him, a full and many-tongued fire rages neatly before him, and it keeps burning all on its own. Delilah has appeared from nowhere, emerging out of the darkness around it with her quick eyes. This is my power! he thinks fiercely, and he waits for her wonder, her admi
ration.

  He watches her eyes move with the fire, and he feels certain of the hunger it makes in her, but she only says, low and angry, “You’re still here.”

  “Come sit with me,” he says, ignoring his own strange terror. “Please.” He knows his fire will win her. It has to. He watches her eyes, the way her chin jerks back a little as she swallows. She’s wearing a big button-down shirt, its collar falling back loosely around her neck and shoulders. He doesn’t know what men’s clothing looks like but he knows that shirt does not belong to her; its bigness makes her look vulnerable. “I made this fire,” he says. “I made it for you.”

  She seems to consider, though she doesn’t come any closer. “How is it burning?” But there is no question in her voice, only a slight growl beneath the flatness of it. Her curiosity seems to him milder than is appropriate for such a feat. His fire is burning with nothing to fuel it, with nothing to feed its hunger, like the fire of dragons!

  “I made it,” he says again, his breath catching in his own wonder. “With magic.”

  She nods once. He feels that perhaps he is not the first person to do magic in her presence, or the first god she has known. She is holding something in her fist, clutching it and bringing it to her mouth, where she rips off a bite and begins to chew. Eating. Hunger. Something he has never known. All his magic suddenly feels like nothing at all compared to her unattainable humanness.

  “Don’t you like fire?” he asks, a little desperately. She crouches now, outside the ring of the fire’s light, where he can barely see the whites of her eyes. Her knees poke through the frayed holes in her jeans.

  She doesn’t say anything. She rips the piece of meat she was chewing and tosses one half to a fox who moves in a careful half-circle behind her, engaged in a low dance of silence against the earth. The fox’s ears are bigger than her face, smart and alert, and her eyes wink open at Dragon, shaped like big glowing seeds. She is slim and wavering, a piece of elegant feminine magic that Delilah seems to have conjured up from nowhere, but when Dragon looks back at Delilah, the fox disappears, her tail erasing her into the darkness like a wisp of smoke.