Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Dragon thinks of Coyote, wonders about the animals of the desert, wonders if they are testing him.

  “What kind of meat are you eating?” he asks her.

  “Boar.”

  “How did you kill a wild boar?”

  “With a dagger, this one. Look, I don’t live here because I like conversation. Why are you here? You want another fuck, is that it? Okay. One more, and then go.”

  Dragons wants her, but he doesn’t know how to answer such a question. He does not like the word she used, and her forwardness makes him hesitate.

  “You should be more careful with that power,” he says.

  She looks at him sharply, but says nothing. He watches as pieces of her fall accidentally into the light: in this moment the damp little stones of her collar bone, in the next moment—as she turns to toss the fox a last morsel—the boyish turn of her ankle. He isn’t used to seeing a woman so careless with her body. Her ease is mesmerizing. It feels as if she might fall into his arms almost accidentally, if he were close enough. But no, when she turns back to him he remembers she is not careless at all. She is careful and precise. She won’t let him that close.

  “I just want you to come over here,” he tries. “By this fire I made for you.”

  But that makes her stand up again. She chews on her meat and stares into the fire, avoiding his eyes, one hip thrust outward.

  “Don’t you like me?” Dragon cries.

  Now her lips purse into a saucy squiggle as she considers him. Her eyes laugh in a way that makes him remember her touch, her easy wetness. There is something constantly seductive about those eyes, the way the pupils float up in them like flames from some low darkness, the way they sparkle like that below her crooked, mocking eyebrows. Her voice is too deep for someone so small: husky and confident. Dangerous.

  “I understand you,” she allows finally.

  “What do you understand?”

  “That you want to fuck, for example, but you don’t think it’s…right, or something.”

  Dragon leans back so the firelight can dream over his chest. She does want him, he thinks, but she does not love him. And he does not trust her. The moment he sees her, she makes this brutal urgency rise up in his body. With the goddesses, it wasn’t their fault that he felt this way. The goddesses taught him the meditations. They tried to love him. But Delilah has no boundaries. What she did to him that night is unstoppable and immediate. It could happen again and again. He sees himself spiraling into a darkness from which there could be no return, and where no love could ever reach him.

  Yet she needs him. In his heart, he feels almost certain of this. He could pull her out of that darkness.

  “Where do you come from?” he asks slowly, when she still doesn’t move. Maybe if she talks, he will begin to come closer to her, and she will trust him. “Where did you come from, before the desert?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can never go back.”

  “Neither can I.” He looks at her meaningfully, hoping she’ll remember what she said to him before, about going back where he came from—the unfairness of that demand.

  “The City,” she says, after a long pause.

  “What is the City?”

  “It’s where human beings are kept.”

  “Kept?” He’s feeling cruel, wanting to turn the knives of each careless thing she said back into her. “Like pets?”

  “Like slaves,” she says firmly. He sees he cannot hurt her that way, the way she hurts him. She is too hard. She squats again now, letting her legs open to the fire, casually inviting. There is a tiny hole in the crotch of her jeans. All he can see there is blackness. He watches her. He wants her to look at his body. He wants her to love that part of him, that important bulge in the costume he made.

  “So—you escaped? From slavery?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you have a mother?” Where that came from, he doesn’t know. He feels dizzy with the longing she makes in him, like a curse of desperation she lays over him. He needs to get inside her. He needs to understand her.

  “Somewhere.”

  “Don’t you care where?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you have—a father?” What does this mean? Something else he has never asked himself.

  “Dead.”

  He hesitates. “What is death? I mean—”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t been there,” she interrupts, her voice impatient, almost bitter, as if death is a place someone went without her and didn’t invite her along.

  She is never going to look at him. He lays his body closer to the ground, holding himself up on one elbow. He wants to press her body against his, rub it on himself like warm honey. He can feel the power in his arms, the way they will melt her against him.

  “Delilah,” he says with difficulty, unable to move. “Come here.”

  She shakes her head, still not looking at him, and makes a sound that seems like laughter, but he isn’t sure.

  How can she understand him? She is the opposite of him. How long has she lived here alone, without company, without words, without touch?

  “Aren’t you lonely?” he asks.

  “None of your business, and no.”

  They are silent for a moment while he thinks, but his thoughts are caught between his legs, weighted down by this endless urgency. He closes his eyes, anxiously closing his mind around the memory of those serene white faces, that cool fountain, those guileless flowers. He tries to hold onto the images but they’re all catching on fire. The white gowns aflame, the petals aflame.

  When he finally opens his eyes again, breathing a little harder, it’s because he cannot believe she is still there, not telling him to leave, but still staring into his fire. In her waiting there, in her long silence, he tries to believe he hears something like kindness, or at least interest.

  “Why do you live out here?” he asks softly.

  She shrugs. “Things are simpler.”

  “What do you mean? Please. I want you to talk to me. I want—” But he stops himself.

  She turns her face away, so that it is hidden in shadow. He hears her sigh, or did he imagine it? “I guess you don’t know unless you’ve grown up in the City,” she says. “But you could have anything there. There was too much. I started to hate it—how easy it was to get things, to have things, and none of it mattered.”

  She looks right at him now and lifts one corner of her mouth. “How’s that? You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, Dragon?”

  He senses her vulnerability but does not understand it, and does not know how to answer.

  “Dragon,” she whispers, and when she says his name again he feels that she has taken him secretly onto her tongue. “An hour’s walk from here, there’s a mound of trash so big, as big as a building. It’s just things that people used once, or maybe never used at all. People have so many things, they don’t know what to do with them. Someday the things will take up the desert—will take up the whole world. There’ll be no more room for people, for fire, for making love.”

  Her voice is so quiet he can barely hear it. He wonders if she will cry. Maybe she is lonely, after all. Isn’t she? Doesn’t she have to be? She’s looking into the fire again. His mind grasps at this moment, searching for a way in.

  “Did you have a lot of things?” he asks helplessly, not understanding.

  She laughs. “No, but I knew how to get what I wanted. I could always get what I wanted. I’m good at that.” Then she smiles at him, and he knows she’s thinking of the way she stalked him in the sand while he slept, and he starts to lose himself—loses track of what she’s saying. But she keeps talking now.

  “Some other kids and me—we used to make bonfires in this abandoned lot, burn random shit just to watch it burn. Didn’t matter what it was—trash, books, food, dead things, maybe even a fe
w live things. It didn’t matter because it was all the same to us. Nothing had any meaning. Could’ve been things I’d worked hard to steal, but they didn’t matter to me once I had them. I’d sit there in front of that fire, like I’m sitting here now, only I’d have something in my hand to play with—anything, maybe just a stick or a piece of paper—that I could hold into the fire and watch it burn, watch it turn to ash, watch the flame creep up to my finger. We were so fucking bored. With each other. With everything.” She pauses, slices her hand through his fire, leaves it hovering in the air for a moment. “Here in the desert, if I had something to burn, it would be so precious I would save it for when I really needed fire. That’s what I mean by simple. In the City there are too many things. Even if you’re poor and starving, you have too many things, all around you, and after a while none of them have any meaning. None of them can help you.”

  She looks up suddenly. “But I guess nothing is useful to you,” she says, leaning her weight on one arm as she eases onto the ground, giving him that tantalizing little grin over her raised, bare shoulder, “because you’re a god and you don’t have any needs.”

  “Yes,” says Dragon, his voice tangled in his breath. “I do.” Pieces of her words crawl over his body. Something in my hand to play with…

  But she ignores the lust in his voice. Now she is distant again, and now he wants her—wants her despite everything, despite the goddesses, despite his fear. He will forget everything, everything in that hot release….

  “But not for things,” she says.

  Dragon cannot speak. He thinks he can smell the meat as she licks her fingers, oily and rich like her body. He wants to eat what she eats, to devour whatever it is that gives her life, to devour her.

  But the fire is finally dying, slowly and without fanfare, almost without being noticed.

  “I want you to leave,” she says suddenly. To his horror, she stands up and wipes her hands on her jeans in a dismissive motion.

  “Delilah,” he manages. He can feel that horrible darkness filling him again, the darkness his mind disappeared inside the night he was cast out of the garden, and when Delilah overcame him that day, and when he took her in his arms again and ripped her clothes. He can feel it rolling over him, turning him inside out—his eyes blurring, his voice like hot water in his throat.

  “What?” she says.

  “You don’t love me.”

  “Love you?” She wrinkles her brow as if he has just suggested a game she doesn’t know. “I don’t even know you.”

  He stares at her, his pain a weight that crushes his voice, his eyes dry and cracking inside his skull. He is crawling against the bottom of the earth in misery, unknown to himself, so crushed beneath his own feeling that he feels nothing….

  “Don’t sulk,” she says. “I live here, and I want you gone. It’s that simple. I don’t want some pathetic needy little boy following me around.”

  Then fire shoots out of him. He doesn’t even know where it comes from. His mouth, his hands, his heart, his penis—he doesn’t know. He only knows that it catches the loose ends of her shirt in its blaze, and that—casually, without taking her eyes from him for more than a second —she wraps the cloth around it and smothers it.

  “Look,” she sighs. “I can’t give you what you need. And you can’t give me what I need. I just know that. I just know, okay?”

  “No,” Dragon shakes his head.

  She laughs. And he wishes that she were afraid, but he can see that she is not afraid of anything. Maybe that’s why he only lies there, ready, knowing she would take him instantly if he could only follow his urge forward, and yet unable to move. She is too easy. It frightens him.

  Already she is walking away.

  She is not at all what he knows or believes woman to be. Yet he knows this little oasis by the pink caves is where he will stay for a long time to come.

  Inside her cave, Delilah spreads her legs and thrusts both hands down her shorts without bothering to pull them down. Her fantasy begins with Dragon’s erection, growing longer while he tried to ignore it, demanding, as if it would break through the ridiculous disguise of the rainbow pants he wore. She would have taken him again, even though she had told herself she wouldn’t, even though he stayed in her territory, and she needed him gone. The fear is so strong—of not knowing when she’ll be touched again, when she’ll feel someone inside her again. It is impossible for her to say no to something she wants, and she always, always wants this. Always.

  But then his eyes kept speaking of that other hunger, and he kept crooning about how the fire was for her, and he kept talking about love—and he wanted to talk, like he wanted to be her friend. All of that makes her sick inside, and she wishes she hadn’t said so much, and even now, it stops her hands, as the urgency drains out of her. His weakness irritates her. His confusion irritates her. She saw how badly he wanted her, and she saw how he didn’t give in, and it was all because of some lofty ideal he has in his head. She can see that. She sighs, her fingers tired.

  She wanted him that day he came striding across the sand with his body shining gold, his muscles swinging easy, unafraid and sure. He was a man that day. But she has not seen that man again since. And she doesn’t want to deal with all the pain he brings, and that heavy, heavy male anger that has no expression, that she knows so well.

  She hates him being out there. She hates that, when she goes out again, she will have to notice where he is and avoid him.

  She hates that she let him see where she lives. She knew from the beginning that was a mistake.

  Lonely and her horse pass another seven days through easy fields, keeping the sound of the river always close enough to hear. Lonely spends hours just gazing at the sky, rocking in the horse’s rhythm and losing herself in dreams of her beloved. Birds fascinate her, though she does not understand them; they imply that this open land is only a step upward into the sky.

  She doesn’t know that the hawks, flying, are looking for something to eat down on the earth.

  The sun is always shining, and the horse seems content being a horse, allowed by Lonely to tear casually at the grasses as he goes. She feels safe with her body connected to his. She finds it easier now to talk to him, to press him with her thighs or her hands to keep him going the way she wants to go. She sets her direction always toward the mountain now. At night, in her sleep, the rhythm of the horse’s walk still throbs hot in the seat of her body, in tune with the rhythm of the cricket-song, and the wind flutters the slick cloth of her dress against her hips, and she turns restlessly in her sleep.

  Many nights she doesn’t sleep at all but lies awake, feeling the lowness of her own body against the ground. As long as she keeps her eyes open, she can see the space around her, not frightening but freeing, and when she looks up at the fountaining stars, she can imagine that she is lying again in her bed at the top of the tower, seeing the universe for the first time. More and more the fronds of the tall grasses shiver white over all the hills, as the moon blooms bigger and gathers them in its light. When she sees that youthful curve of moon cupped in space, she forgets the curse the old woman attached to it, and she lies surrendered beneath its light, feeling that some wild magic grows inside her—a great adventure of the heart that she has only begun.

  How much further—how many days and nights—will the distances keep spinning out ahead of her? How big is the world?

  But as soon as she closes her eyes, she can feel the darkness beneath her, and the horse and all other things tower above her, and the open space creeps over her and smothers her with its unknowns. The hills rise up, and she feels she will drown in their depths. She remembers the dark places from her father’s dreams. She does not know where they are, but she fears that when she least expects it, they will suck her down. The face of the old hag lurks beneath the ground of her dreams.

  You’re crazy, the wind taunts her, thinking the wind is ta
lking to you.

  And when she finally sleeps, she dreams again and again of the darkness below the tower, whatever it is, and in her dreams she wanders that darkness alone, hearing the weak and tormented sound of her father’s voice calling out to her—but unable to find his body, dead or alive.

  Those nights that she cannot sleep, or wakes again and again from nightmares, are the longest nights. They are longer than the days. Sometimes they feel longer than the whole of her life in the tower, which she is already having trouble remembering.

  One morning as she rises, her mind ragged from the long hours of fear, she tears the bottom of her skirt impatiently to free up her legs for riding. Something moves at her feet, and she sees an animal like a lost piece of river flowing away from her through the tall grass. When she searches for it, the snake pauses its waving motion and considers her with one eye. She can feel him watching her, though he does not turn his head. He has no arms, no legs; he is like an arrow toward some purpose, but an arrow that curves.

  “How do you move?” she asks in desperate wonder. “How do you move with no legs?”

  my movement is inside. my limbs are inside me, answers the snake, his answer coming warily through the earth as a vibration into her feet. He stays frozen there, waiting to see what she will do.

  “But why?”

  to be closer to the Earth. i caress the Earth. the Earth moves like this…. And he flows away like energy.

  All that day she thinks of the snake—how he did not need a horse or even feet to carry him over the earth. She remembers his body like a single loose muscle, and wonders what it would feel like in her hand. She feels his movement, wriggling up and down her spine, and imagines his cool skin against her own. That night, when she lies down, she is not afraid to be close to the earth, for she feels the snake’s ease against it and his body’s loyalty to it. Inside the cold ground she remembers for the first time the nourishing warmth of that bed that cradled her all through her childhood, which seemed made of earth and was her only home. For the first time, she asks herself where it came from—and also where she came from. Her dreams are full of the earth, its deep heart not dense and hard but open and breathing. Her mind dissolves into it, the way the tower dissolved into nothing, into this new, vivid Life.