Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “No,” says Moon senselessly, “you’ll be okay.” He keeps wrapping his body around her, his legs and arms and hips all around her, unfurling his magic into her body, imagining the strength of light flowing through it.

  “I’m okay now,” she says. “But it will come back, when you leave. I don’t know what’s happening.”

  He lies still, barely breathing. She makes him afraid. He doesn’t know what to do.

  “Where have you been, Moon?” she says suddenly, turning toward him. “Were you in the mountains? Did you forget about the desert this year?”

  Moon shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe I forgot.”

  “What makes you forget?”

  Moon rolls onto his back, lifts his flute and begins to play. The music takes over the little space they occupy, spiraling it backward in time, and it keeps Lil silent until he is finished. She turns around again, and when he looks at her, she is staring at him, her eyes shocked with emotion. He wonders if his music hurts her more than it helps. But if so, he envies her even that pain. He wishes he could feel what she feels when he plays, but he can’t feel the music, only play it.

  Finally she says, “That’s not what makes you forget, Moon.”

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  “Tell me,” he says, though he doesn’t want her to.

  “I’ll tell you what I think. And I’m not telling you because I’m angry. I’m telling you because I love you, because I’m scared for you. I think you go into the City again and again, as a human being. No one knows you’re a god. No one respects you—just a little girlish boy. And you let anyone have their way with you. You let them fuck you any way they want to. You like the pain. You like forgetting. You don’t do the drugs we did as kids, the ones whose spirits we knew, the plants who showed us the dreams of the earth. You do the drugs my father did, the ones that killed him, the mechanical ones made out of things we don’t understand. You don’t do them for wisdom any more. You do them to forget, like my father did. You do them because you don’t think any better of yourself.”

  Darkness criss-crosses inside Moon’s skull. The music stills within him. He tries to speak but his voice feels like a black hole; it won’t come out as words but only as a pile of rubble. He spins his flute in his hands, staring at it, trying to remember what it is. This is why he didn’t come back for so long, he remembers. This is why.

  Lil pulls him close. His mind is blank. Her human heartbeat drums inside him, reminding him insistently of life, rapping against the closed door to his own heart. “You’re destroying yourself,” she whispers.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because every time you come back, you look older, but you’re never any older inside. You’re not any wiser. That’s what those drugs do to you. They steal your life.”

  “But I can change my form however I like it—that doesn’t matter. I don’t get older. I’m immortal.”

  “Yes, you do get older. I love you, and I can see it. I know you think because I’m human my vision is simple, but being human means I see things as they are. I can see past your magic because I love you. And you’re making yourself old. You’re killing yourself. I watched my father do it, and now you’re doing it, even though you’re a god.”

  “Oh, Lil,” says Moon, finding a smile and turning toward her as he senses a way out. “I’m not your father.”

  But she isn’t distracted. “That’s right,” she says. “My father didn’t give a shit about me. But you do. You’re the only one who does. So don’t leave me. It’s much worse watching a god die, much uglier, because you’re so beautiful.” Her gaze mesmerizes him, more powerful than the desert in its love, its simple need. “Moon, without rain, everyone will die.”

  A hint of fury rises in him for barely a moment and then falls. He never has the energy for it. “There’s nothing I can do, Lil,” he says coldly, as if she doesn’t know. “My father won’t give me the rain. I am nothing to my father either. You know that.”

  Lil looks at him. “Is it because you love human beings?” she asks gently. “Or is it because you love men?”

  Moon shakes his head, turns away. Maybe he doesn’t truly love anyone. He hates the tension in his own voice when he speaks. Why does she make him speak of these things, again and again?

  “Anyway,” she continues. “That thing about your father—I think it doesn’t matter. You’re refusing something. Can’t you feel the rain inside you?”

  I can’t feel anything, he thinks, but he doesn’t want to hurt her.

  “Something’s wrong,” she whispers. “It hasn’t rained in the City for twenty-five years. All around it is desert—not this kind of desert, that’s alive and full of color, but just an empty land of broken tree skeletons, land with no roots to hold it together, lost dust-storm land.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” answers Moon, feeling settled now into a familiar dullness. “People pump their water in from far away, or from under the earth. They don’t need the rains any more.”

  “They do. They need you. My mother told me about rain in the City. She said it used to happen when she was young. She said it would make children come out to play, and adults would watch them, and forget their important roles, and laugh. She said she’d come running into one of those cold City places, a bank, or a grocery store, or a department store, and she’d be all mussed up—her hair out of place and her face streaked with water like tears. Her clothes would stick to her body, and she’d be laughing because she’d feel silly, and because she was running. And everyone would look at each other, all dripping and sexy and humbled by these forces of nature that for once they couldn’t escape—because they came from the sky—and they’d feel connected for a moment, and they’d really, you know, see each other, for once. And time would stop, and they’d forget about building that big stupid dream of destruction, they’d forget about money, they’d forget about the roles they were supposed to play in Hanum’s plan, for a moment. That’s how she and my father met, in the last rain that ever came. That’s how they always remembered each other, and that’s why they were drawn back to each other. Because, I think, they missed the rain.”

  “Lil,” Moon says, “you’ve told me this a million times.” But it touches him a little, because it’s the only time she ever speaks of her parents with anything other than contempt. It’s the only time she ever speaks of anything with something like idealism.

  “Well do something, Moon. Bring it back.”

  Moon is silent, but his whole awareness is filled with Lil beside him—and the knowledge that he hurts her, again and again, and never means to. It is her he cares for, not the City.

  “I know,” he says finally, though it is not easy, “that I forgot about you. I get lost sometimes. But I dreamed a bat came with a message from you. So I woke up and left the City, and I came back.”

  Lil looks at him, her eyebrows raised.

  “Well, okay, I didn’t come right back. I took a sort of roundabout route.”

  She grins.

  “Lil! Come on—I don’t take straight lines to anywhere. I followed my music. It took me through the mountains.”

  “I followed my music,’” she imitates loftily, and they both laugh. Then she holds him, rocks against him.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she says.

  Delilah and Moon play in the desert together that night, chasing each other through the darkness like rabbits. Coyote watches them, not hiding himself, smiling. Moon finally stops their game and holds out his hands, and Coyote comes warily over and sniffs them, his lips pulled back. Then Coyote stands on his hind feet and dances with Moon, while Delilah laughs and laughs.

  The desert glitters in the remains of its own heat like an undiscovered jewel that as yet has no name, spinning its life in the darkness. To Delilah the starry sky is like the roof of a vast underground chamber, Moon’s secret pala
ce, in which he paints a paradise of drunken life. When he plays his flute, prairie dogs emerge from their burrows, sitting stupefied and silent on their beanbag haunches, because in all their repertoire of sounds for every predator and every need, they have no name for joy. The jackrabbit turns his complex, heavy-jowled face toward them, his eyes like tall dark windows; he is frozen by the music, and forgets the fear which is his essence. He forgets to be afraid of Coyote, who forgets to want him. A thirty-year-old tarantula makes love for the thirtieth time and is, for the first time, in such an ecstasy that she forgets to eat her mate. Tortoises emerge from their underground burrows, march over the land with heads raised like a herd of fast dinosaurs, and drink the music from the air. A green whipsnake coils around Moon’s feet and then rises, swaying thinly, her tongue lapping up the music. Deep beneath the earth, the seventeen-year-cicadas, still in their youth, dream of the day that they, too, will rise up upon the breast of the world and give their lives away to song.

  And Delilah watches. It is the only time she is happy being still, when she listens to Moon play his flute. Like the other animals, she forgets herself. She forgets what she has to be angry about, or afraid of, or sorry for.

  She used to think sex was something she would never be able to deny herself. She thought it was something she had to have, because she got everything from it: beauty, magic, comfort, pleasure, satisfaction, peace, relief, confidence, everything. All the things that were impossible to find in the rest of human interaction, in the rest of the world she left behind. That was why it was the one thing she missed. Because there was ugliness and shame that she carried with her always, and sex could take that away. Nothing else could take it away, not even the desert.

  Then the morning she said no to Dragon, she glimpsed something else—a possibility. The next day she barely slept. She lay on her back in the sun until it burned her, and then she walked all the way to the river and waded in, splashing like a child. That no turned out to be the key that unlocked a strange garden of forgotten life within her: things that had been locked up inside the need for sex—the only need she would allow herself in the City—and magic she had never believed in and never known she wanted to believe in, and games she had played with herself in the meadow as a little girl, before Mira was born—games she can’t quite remember, but almost. She thought she remembered a time when she’d understood what animals were saying. The first animal that ever spoke to her: a crow. The way that crow made her laugh, and they had whole conversations then and understood one another. The way she was happy once. And the feel of Mira’s baby skin. Her sweetness, in the beginning. The pictures she drew for Delilah, of unicorns. All of this, like a whole life she’d forgotten, Delilah remembered all at once that day, and the river passed over her body like some luxurious material she’d never thought she could afford.

  But every day since then, the memory of all that has been a little less clear. She had glimpsed that other, remembered life in the river that day, but never fully entered into it. Sometimes the gate stands open still, and she stands at the door, but she doesn’t know what to do. Most of the time she doesn’t feel changed at all, and she doesn’t know why she said “no,” or what she was trying to prove. Listening to Moon’s flute now, she’s still just hungry and horny and sad, and if Moon weren’t here, she’d even be lonely.

  “How long are you going to stay?” she asks him when the music is over, and they lie together in the sand, staring at the stars as if they’ve just made love.

  “How long do you need me?” he answers, and she smiles.

  “That’s a good answer. But you don’t mean it.”

  The wind sweeps over them, dry, as if it doesn’t remember ever bringing rain.

  “If you love rain so much,” asks Moon, “why do you live in the desert?” But she knows he’s only teasing. He is the one who helped her make her home here. He knows the rain is more beautiful here than anywhere else in the world, because the desert’s whole life is built on the longing for it. Delilah knows that, too, but she can’t bring herself to explain it.

  “Moon,” she tells him, “things are happening to my body that I don’t understand.”

  He is silent.

  “My back. It hurts, in all different places, almost every day. My shoulders.”

  “Didn’t you get hurt, a long time ago? Didn’t they hurt you, when you were trying to save—”

  “No,” says Delilah sharply. “That’s not it.”

  “But I think you hurt your shoulder then.”

  “But it never used to bother me.”

  Moon is silent again. She knows he’s not buying it.

  “A snake came to me,” she says, to keep him from thinking about that. “He stood up—I mean he raised himself up. I think he was telling me something, something about my spine? Something—I don’t know. It sounds stupid.”

  “Your spine is the pathway of your life, the pathway of your spirit upward.”

  “Why upward?”

  Moon thinks. “It sounds like growing old to me.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never grown old. It’s just a feeling. Pain means something, though. Sometimes it’s the only way your body can make itself heard. Maybe there’s a way you have to travel inside yourself to get older, rising up toward your spirit. You can get older by accident or older on purpose, but you’ll get older either way, you know.”

  “Are you sure you’re immortal?”

  “How would I know for sure? If I’m mortal, that I’ll know for sure, eventually.”

  Delilah laughs. But she knows he isn’t. Life isn’t kind enough to make them both mortal, to let them both share the same story. Moon comes from somewhere so far away from this earth she doesn’t understand it. His father is—what? She thinks maybe the sky itself. Whoever is in charge of rain. Whoever makes it.

  “I was thinking,” she says, trying to sound casual. “This sickness. I don’t feel well sometimes. I get cramps even at the wrong time of the moon, and—I mean, could it be some man gave me a sickness, when I fucked him?”

  “Yeah. You can get diseases.”

  Delilah hesitates, frustrated and awkward with her own ignorance. “What are these exactly, then—these diseases?”

  “They’re all the angers and hurts people pass between their lovers, because they fuck each other without caring and they don’t want to open their hearts. So they pass this pain and anger from lover to lover, unconsciously, not admitting it to each other or themselves. The kind of men you fuck—they’re more likely than any to pass on this pain. It might have nothing to do with you, but you get it anyway: someone else’s pain.”

  “I don’t care,” says Delilah, her voice low, “anyway.”

  “Yes you do,” says Moon. “Don’t try to act like me. Besides, you’ll pass the pain on to others then, and that’s not fair.”

  “Well it’s too late now,” says Delilah, bitterness grinding softly in her throat.

  “Maybe I can make enough magic to heal you, if you promise to use some kind of protection from now on.”

  Delilah shakes her head. “Maybe I’ll never have sex again,” she says, letting herself feel the way the wind blows through her when she says it, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time—the idea of losing everything. Even though she doesn’t mean it.

  “Yeah, right,” Moon laughs.

  “You know”—she takes a deep breath—“I did say No. The other day. I said No to Dragon.” She listens to the way the words sound.

  “Oh yeah?” But she feels the distance in his voice, like he doesn’t understand the importance of what she’s saying. Like he doesn’t want to, because it is something he hasn’t ever had the courage to do himself. She shouldn’t have said it aloud. She should have kept that no a secret within herself, a hidden power, fragile and potent, like a new virginity. She shouldn’t have told him. But always before,
she’s told Moon everything.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she says now, frightened. “Please.”

  “Okay,” says Moon, but she knows he won’t talk about himself. That’s why this conversation is so much easier for him than the one in the cave when he first arrived. Because it’s about her. “Tell me about the animals.” he says. “How are the boar people?”

  “Oh, that’s another thing. I keep having this dream. About a deer. The deer is the one I’m supposed to hunt next. And I’m running out of food. But I’m not going to kill that deer.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll sound crazy. I can’t explain.”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “The deer. She reminds me of Mira. Her eyes.”

  Moon waits a moment, knowing she’s struggling with some emotion, but he doesn’t wait so long that she’ll feel ashamed.

  “I think you have to do it, Lil. You know that. You’re going to have to hunt it.”

  Delilah closes her eyes. It’s so painful having someone to talk to who really cares, but she needs it—she needs to be broken like this. It’s almost better than sex. But it hurts so much she would never do it with anyone else. One friendship this deep is enough. One heartbreak a year, for this comfort, this love she feels, is worth it, but no more.

  “Maybe your sister’s calling you,” says Moon. “Maybe she needs you to connect with her in this way. It’s like I was saying about your shoulder. I think it always comes back to her.”

  “But I’ll feel so awful,” says Delilah, her eyes still closed.

  “Maybe this is why you hurt. Why you feel tense. You’re holding something back.”

  “I’m holding back because I’m afraid of hurting her.”

  “No, you’re holding back your love.”

  “But, Moon,” says Delilah, feeling furious. She squeezes her eyes shut. The crying is like saliva in her mouth that she has to keep swallowing back. It makes her lips wet and too soft. In the City she was so unhappy, but at least she never had to feel things like this. She didn’t have time and space, like she does now, just to think. For hours. For days. For moons. And something is happening to her. Something has changed, after all, and it’s not magical like that morning in the river. She knows why she stands at the door and doesn’t go in. There are other things in there, things she doesn’t want to feel.