Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  She stayed away after that. She knew the mountain lion had done her a great honor by showing herself, because she never saw her again, not even her tracks. Sometimes, when she felt like the only person in the universe—and when that feeling made her wistful, and the desert space spun around her, dizzying in its silence—she remembered the lion, and thought she remembered all kinds of old, tough wisdom in that face. She thought she remembered loneliness in those eyes. She wondered if the lion was the last of its kind in these lands, or one of the last: she could feel her determination and strength, her tearless suffering, her undeterred loyalty to the pathways of her ancestors. She felt a kinship with the lion, in her solitude. She felt forever the way the lion had looked at her, as if that ancient predator recognized her.

  The bats, too, were Delilah’s kin. When she first met them, she was welcomed by a reckless young one who flung himself onto her arm on his way out and gripped her with his tiny piercing fingers, his little body crumpled like a lump of helpless black tissue on her sleeve, his eyes sad and intelligent, his nostrils huge and flaring up at her. She liked his bold, nightmarish face with its hairy muzzle.

  “You’re even uglier than I am,” she laughed, because she’d always thought she was ugly, with her wide nose like his and her big, intrusive eyes.

  Her skin was black like his too, and when she slept that day along with his tribe, she folded her body up tight like theirs, her mind swinging upside down into her first animal dream.

  She has never had to fight for this place before. The way it claimed her, the way it became like her own body over the years, the way no one could ever find her here—it was like she had always assumed that everyone in the world knew she owned it. She’s still reeling from the shock of Dragon’s arrogance. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t made him leave yet. That, and something else.

  Tonight she sleeps in until almost midnight, waking slowly to the bats’ urgent conversation. She’s been avoiding Dragon as much as usual, but it’s easier now, now that he’s with the little white girl all the time. With that girl, he is someone different than he has been with her. She sees in his eyes that same reasonless, unstoppable lust that she saw the first night she seduced him, when he fell on his knees before her cave. Now he feels it for this innocent other. She knows that’s what does it for him: the other girl’s innocence. And fuck that. But still—watching him with her, watching him watch that girl with his fists clenched in restrained desire, Delilah wants him almost as badly as she did in the beginning.

  Tonight she wakes up hurting again. Right in the center of her back, behind her heart, not a piercing, singing pain like the taut nerve in her neck but a soft, humbling ache that goes on and on like the bite of a weasel on the throat of its prey.

  She crawls out of the cave and stands, arching her spine, trying to stretch the pain out of her. It stretches but does not go. What if she is slowly breaking? What if she gets sick out here all alone? But then she’s ashamed of herself for even thinking like that. She can’t remember the last time she felt sorry for herself.

  Down below she sees Dragon with the girl, so she crouches down with a stolen can of beans to eat and watch them. She can tell they won’t notice her, the way they’re pressed so tightly together. Dragon is sitting on a stone and the girl is sitting sideways in his lap, her lips melded to his and her arms around his neck. Dragon’s hand has disappeared up her skirt and the girl keeps lifting one leg and pressing it restlessly against the other, squeezing his hand and pressing her breasts into Dragon’s naked chest. But every few seconds, she reaches down and pushes Dragon’s hand away—pulls it out from under her dress. Dragon appears used to this, and he doesn’t stop kissing her or trying to reach back in again. The game of it makes Delilah restless. What, are you too good for this? she thinks angrily at the girl, imagining herself on Dragon’s lap instead and what she would do.

  But then they stop. The girl is holding both of Dragon’s wrists in her own, stopping him. They are speaking in tones Delilah cannot hear, both of them frozen in motion, and then Dragon simply wraps his arms around her, but she’s still pulling back. Finally she jumps away from him, standing, and her voice is loud enough for Delilah to hear.

  “Because I don’t know if you love me. I don’t know if I love you.” Loud, like she isn’t sure that Dragon will be able to hear her from a distance where they are no longer touching.

  “How can you say that? How can you—”

  Delilah freezes without knowing why, hearing the roar in his voice as he stands up after the girl, coming toward her with heavy hands, with anger, with a wound tearing up from his chest. The girl, clearly frightened and unwilling to argue more, turns and flees toward the river. Dragon stands and looks after her, and Delilah, with a sudden premonition that he will turn and see her watching, ducks back into her cave.

  In the back of her mind, Delilah wants to search for Dragon, wants to caress that brutal longing with her own and meet it with the fury of her own desire. But she knows, too, that she is not the one he wants. And that makes her even more furious in her longing not to care.

  Accidentally, she meets the girl instead. Her whiteness can’t hide in the darkness, not that she’s trying to. In fact she rises up from the spine of a stone giant as Delilah approaches, and then she hops lightly to the sand. Delilah keeps walking. She is tired. It’s almost dawn, almost time for her to sleep. She’s been wandering the pine forest fruitlessly all night, a nameless anxiety inside her causing the pheasants and hares to bolt from the bushes before she even saw them. But the girl falls into step beside her.

  “Why do you sleep during the day?”

  “Because I blend in better at night, don’t you think?”

  Silence. They keep walking, and Delilah is going to walk right up to her cave and go inside, without stopping. She owes this girl nothing.

  “Why do you hate me?”

  Delilah is mildly surprised but still does not stop. “You know? I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “But there’s no reason for it.”

  Delilah turns to her again and is about to say something back—whatever, whatever comes out—but she stops. She’s never been embarrassed by her own anger before. It’s always comforted her, actually, to wield it around her; it is what she knows herself by. But something in this girl’s eyes slips under her fury, cuts the thread that binds her to it, and leaves her words—before she even speaks them—hanging uselessly in the air.

  “You and Dragon both,” says the girl into her silence. “You don’t really see me. You think I’m something else. I don’t know what you think I am. I don’t even know what I am.”

  It takes Delilah a few seconds to realize that she’s stopped walking. The girl has stopped too, and they are staring at each other. She has to admit that this girl seems nothing like the girls she hated in high school—nothing, actually, like anyone she’s ever met before. She is too bright, for one thing, like a soul without enough flesh to dim her light. She hurts Delilah’s eyes.

  “What does it matter?” she finds herself asking. “What does it matter, what I think?“ Then she is surprised to see the girl struggling for an answer, as if the question is important—more important than Delilah intended. This, too, embarrasses Delilah.

  “I’m so afraid,” the girl says finally. “I thought, if I could talk to you, if you could help me understand things… Because you’re—you’re—”

  “What?” says Delilah. “Do you know what I am? Do you?” But she knows what the girl was going to say: because you’re a woman. She looks up abruptly, past the girl’s shoulder. The strangest thing. She thought she saw a white horse pass beyond an arch in the distance.

  She looks back into the open, pleading face, and shakes her head. “I can’t—” She tries to remember what the girl said. She can’t do this. She feels like she is falling into this face, beyond which lies some deep well she thought she’d long ago
covered over, a place that no longer holds any water or any life, only a long dark fall and a long drawn-out death. It will hurt when she hits the bottom.

  “I can’t help you,” she says, tearing her eyes away, and keeps walking.

  This time the girl doesn’t follow.

  Dragon is blocking the entrance to Delilah’s cave.

  He doesn’t speak, but that look is back in his eyes—a merciless, reptilian desire—and this time it’s for her.

  Delilah stops some distance from him, held back by something that she doesn’t understand or recognize until it’s too late: fear. Fear is so unfamiliar to her in the face of a man she desires that she ignores it and walks toward him, not knowing what she’s intending to do. She’s still confused by the words of the girl, confused by something she hasn’t felt in a long time. Dragon is naked. She sees his desire. She sees his heaving chest, his fists.

  “What are you—” she begins, but then his mouth is drowning her, and a sharp ledge of stone tears her back as he throws her against it. She can feel the animal of him fumbling between her thighs, and then his hand—more calculated, more deliberate—pushing her thighs apart to let it in. And that makes her realize, despite the flush of familiar heat that she knows is desire—pulsing through her throat, between her breasts, between her hips—that she is holding the muscles of her thighs tight. She is holding them closed. Realizing it, she opens them, confused, and feels him push on blindly, ripping the button on her jeans, sliding her down over the sharp stone onto the ground, lifting his hips. She feels the pain of the stone and cries out without meaning to.

  “No.” It’s soft at first. “Don’t.” It isn’t even that she doesn’t want him. She always wants, always. And she wanted this, didn’t she? No sickly sweetness, no professions of love, no holy intentions, just instinctual relief. Just the abyss.

  But “No,” she says.

  And then she says it louder. Each time it becomes easier to say, though she has never said it like this before. She doesn’t know why she’s saying it, but she feels so amazed to hear herself say it, so overcome by the strange and surprising joy of saying something so completely unfamiliar to her, that she doesn’t realize at first that he isn’t listening, that he isn’t sharing in that joy. That he does not feel its sudden freedom. That he is, in fact, trapping her inside his body, and that he is, in fact, already inside her.

  Then something happens that Delilah does not understand, because she would never, ever imagine or believe such a thing. It’s like something out of one of Mira’s drawings of dramatic, magical lands when she was very young, before she went crazy.

  A unicorn dances out from behind the stone and rears up over Dragon’s head.

  It’s like everyone’s dream of a unicorn, its body flowing like white syrup, its horn spiraling into the sky like the ascent of the spirit Dragon talked about. It has a wizard’s goat beard and its eyes are made of the same stuff as dragon eyes, and it looks like it could kill him with the lightning of its legs, but it’s as light as a deer. She can’t see if it even touches him, or just swoops over him like a great bird, lowering its horn over them as it passes. But she can feel its heart singing right into her—as if it knows her, as if it knows her joy—and when it gallops away, it leaves Dragon sprawled on his back beside her, panting, staring after it with equal amazement.

  Delilah watches his erection slowly subside, as he turns back and looks at her with an expression of terror that she has only ever seen a long time ago in the City, in the expressions of other children’s faces when Mira had one of her attacks.

  “Leave,” she says quietly, and she knows it is the last time she will have to say it. She stands up, shaky, and climbs into her cave, which he is no longer blocking.

  But she cannot fall asleep all day.

  For the pale shining girl is gone for good. Delilah knows it.

  She can tell, by the absence of a light, cooling wind that she realizes has blown every day and every night, constantly, since the girl arrived here, and which now, suddenly, has stopped.

  2nd MOON

  Lonely, says the wind, and she feels strangely relieved to have her name back.

  She was not Yora, not that flowing, nourishing goddess of ocean and tears and refuge. She is as dry as the desert wind, a broken twig tumbling through this vast dream of emptiness. She hangs her head, and she walks beside her horse now. She doesn’t know why but she never wants to ride him again. She wants him to be free.

  Lonely, repeats the wind. Why did you deny your name?

  “I can’t say that name,” Lonely whispers. “Or no one will love me.”

  Ah, sighs the wind, but you must own your name in order to free yourself from it.

  “I can’t,” Lonely repeats. “I can’t say it. I am ashamed.” But inside, the wind has begun to worry her. What if Dragon didn’t love her because she did not tell him her true name? What if he was, after all, her prince, her one true love, but he could not recognize her because she lied?

  The horse hangs his head also, keeping his nose low to the ground, trying to stay in touch with the faraway smell of water. The river has fallen so deep below the ground that there is no sign of it, no green, no life. They travel for more than two days through a land of nothing but empty white sand, like the surface of the moon made soft and gentle, like the wing of a white bird folding over and over, its feathers the ripples of the wind’s design. Lonely is too lost in thought to wonder how her horse survives without water for so long.

  She didn’t realize how lost she felt with Dragon, until she left him behind. A fog that dulled her mind for days now lifts, as if in the absence of his touch the wind can sing clearly through her mind again.

  She wanted to believe he was the one. The way they found each other like that, in the river, at the peak of her longing, after the passionate rain—it was just the way it should have happened. He had to be the one. She wanted so much to believe she had found him before reaching that distant mountain. The mountain is so far. Seeing its distance now, she is overcome with darkness. She thinks of the way Delilah, too, turned away from her, and the way Dragon turned to Delilah then. When Lonely saw that she was still alone after all, she walked away from that place. She kept walking toward the mountain, her curse and her destiny, until her horse appeared from nowhere and walked alongside her. She was just Lonely again. It turned out she couldn’t escape that name.

  If he was the one, she thinks, then she must have ruined it somehow. She must have driven him to leave her. But why? Why did she keep refusing him? Why did she thrust away from her what she most desired? Did she ask too much? Did she have some ideal of love that was too big to come true, that would forever keep her from it?

  You curse yourself. You push away what you most want, with your own fear. You will always be Lonely, she thinks she hears the wind say. But she isn’t sure. Maybe it’s the voice of the Witch, carried by the wind as their voices were first carried to each other the day Lonely leaned out from her tower.

  But Dragon had said the same thing. What do you want from me? I’d give you anything, and you push me away.

  For a whole day, the vultures circle above her, their V-shaped wingspans tilting slowly back and forth like scales in the heavens. The thought of her own choices makes her dizzy.

  “I don’t know how to do this!” she cries out. “I don’t know what love is.”

  She thinks and thinks, and cannot think her way out of loneliness. The desert is just space, with no truth to hold onto. She remembers the vultures’ ugly faces and thinks of the old woman’s face on the island. Perhaps that woman is a vulture. Perhaps she is floating high above Lonely, following her along currents of invisible air, watching her wherever she goes, waiting for her to fail.

  But the vultures do not waste time on such drama. They simply rise and fall, riding towers of heat, scanning the open heart of the desert for that which has already transfo
rmed. They sniff for the scent of bodies no longer held by the purpose and longing of the spirit, bodies that relax, finally, downward. No more work, no more carrying forward, no more fighting gravity upward and onward, no more trying. The vultures float down the long ladder of the sky and skid at once heavily and buoyantly to the ground, lifting the black tents of their wings, enfolding the trembling ghosts in the soft comfort of forgetting. We are the ancestors, they whisper. We have come to take you home.

  At night Lonely is not tired, and she walks sleepless until the horse insists on resting. She cannot find the moon until long after dark, and then it is only a sliver the width of one hair, curling off into nothingness. She remembers the night by Delilah’s fire, when it was still almost full, and her love—was it love?—for Dragon was new and hopeful and still believed in itself. But she doesn’t remember looking at the moon since then. It has tricked her. When she wasn’t looking, the pregnant moon lost its child, and all the beautiful light went out of the sky, and the darkness caught up to her, just like the Witch predicted. And still she cannot sleep all night, opening her eyes constantly in fear that the darkness will devour her, and that if she sleeps, she might wake to find herself beneath the tower in total blackness, her hands grasping at nothing, her body gone.

  Each day at the first blink of sunlight, they begin walking again.

  Gradually the white land begins to swell and change, into great ridges of sand piled without purpose by the wind, rising and falling and then rising again into stone that still holds its form, not yet disintegrated into sand. Lonely focuses on her feet as they walk over the crumbs of greater stone, into the foothills of mountains, where the river runs again and thorny shrubs make the barest of livings along its edge. Then the greenery thickens and begins to enfold them into the breasts of the lower, wetter mountains. Birdsong once again twirls in the air and a mist alights on Lonely’s face, and she begins to cry again. Why? Why couldn’t they love me? She remembers Dragon’s fury and Delilah’s cold silence. There is something wrong with her. Something about her that does not make sense. For a short time she had been able to fool them into thinking she was one of them and could speak their language. But the truth of it came out—that she came from somewhere else, somewhere apart from the world, somewhere with no explanation, that no longer even exists.