Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “I don’t know who my mother is,” she says, knowing it, feeling the sorrow of a whole lifetime in which she never even asked herself the question, never even knew what was wrong.

  “Come on,” says Chelya. “I have something else to give you, and then we’ll go inside.” Lonely rubs her hand across her face, stumbling dutifully behind Chelya, and when she has wiped all the tears away, Chelya is coming back from a wooden box with insects vibrating the air around it, her hand outstretched.

  Lonely smears the honey off Chelya’s fingers, onto her own fingers, and then she licks them clean. The sweetness is a burning ecstasy. “That’s what love tastes like, too,” says Chelya, licking her own fingers. “Only that’s the love between the flowers, like the love between lovers.” She says this with her eyes shining boldly into Lonely’s, and Lonely wonders if Chelya, who seems so young, already has a lover—if love is as easy for her as she makes it sound.

  “The bees all have one mother,” the girl adds. “And we do too, really. We all have one mother, you know?”

  Lonely doesn’t.

  Then there is a house. It’s like nothing Lonely has ever experienced. She goes inside it, and all the sounds of the outside go quiet. It’s like going inside her own mind. But it is nothing like the tower. There are all kinds of shapes around her, but they are still, not like the shapes outside. They have a carefulness to them, an intelligence in their placement. They all mean something, something Lonely does not have time to figure out, because now another woman stands here before her.

  Behind the woman is a fire. Not like Dragon’s fire, but enclosed in`earth and metal. The woman is not like anyone Lonely has seen before. She has much more body than Lonely—rich slopes of it, both soft and solid. She looks comfortable, snug inside her own flesh, and Lonely’s first thought, though she will forget it in an instant and not allow herself to think it again, is that she wants to be enfolded in those arms.

  “Her name’s Lonely,” Chelya tells the woman, taking Lonely’s hand again and looking up into her face. Lonely is taller than either of them. Chelya’s warmth in her hand brings Lonely rushing headlong back into her own flesh, her life of a thousand hungers. Emptiness spills messily inside her. The woman keeps staring at her, her face full but reticent, her simple brown hair falling straight around it. Lonely feels drawn to the mystery of that face, a face she cannot know by looking at it only once. It takes her a moment to focus in on the woman’s eyes, and when she does she has to take a step backward at the look she finds there. She remembers the old woman on the island, and her heart clenches and shrinks small. There is something wrong with her: Lonely. Some reason she is not wanted anywhere she goes.

  But Chelya says, “Please, Ma, she needs food. We have to feed her before she goes, at least.”

  Then she is outside again, with Chelya’s hand the only thing real, and then later the woman is there too, but despite her painful gaze she says nothing unkind. Everything is a sunny blur now, the heat and the sweetness dazzling. They eat breakfast in the grass, with the clover and the violets and the pollen and the ants. The food anchors Lonely to the ground. Eating is like an actual place she discovers, a nest of earth, as if all those days she wandered free but lost, confused and yearning, in the open fields coming from the sea, she had kept missing the heart of life right beneath her feet. She had had nothing to make her stop, nothing to bring her to stillness. But this is what the hunger was for. To take her own life in her hands, and bring it into her. To take of the earth, and become it. And everything—the body of man, the body of woman—is made only of this. The tastes of other bodies, other lives, surge upon her tongue like answers.

  Her own body sucks her inward, and the stubborn spunk of humanness centers itself in her belly where the food is welcomed and warmed and transformed. All her days after, long after she has come to love these people, long after her love has become too much and she must leave them, and later when she wanders alone in the high dream of a mountain, through empty fields and emptier skies, she will remember this breakfast in the grass, on the earth, with the two women of sun-worn skin and curvy weight. This breakfast seems a place that happens eternally into the past and into the future, a place that seems always right here, right now—if she can only center herself, only bring herself down.

  “Where did you come from?” asks Chelya. “Tell us, please! Who are you? Where are you going?”

  But Fawn murmurs, “Not now, Chelya.”

  Maybe, she will think later, it was Fawn—though she did not love Lonely then, and would barely look at her—who provided that sense of eternal home, that sense of a stable moment in time at the center of the earth, where nothing ever changes, and life is given and received over and over again.

  Today Fawn doesn’t ask Lonely any questions, but she gives her fresh eggs and bread, and slices of sweet tomato, and leaves of herbs.

  Moon has traveled every part of the Earth’s body, and he knows that the City is built on Her heart. Maybe Hanum made the City here because he, like everyone, loved the Earth. But maybe Hanum, like almost everyone, did not actually know how to love someone other than himself.

  Moon doesn’t mean to keep coming back to the City, but he has to. He doesn’t mean to come into these dark, blurred places, windowless and hidden beneath concrete, where the tuneless sound from the speakers is so loud it numbs him to all memory of the earth and the wind, cocooning him in thick blank space, laying waste to his mind and making him weak as a human being. But he has to. He has to have something to stop up the emptiness, if only for a little while. Not the dreaming plants that Lil and he used to eat to make themselves wiser and clearer, to become more intimately aware of each droplet of thought and feeling and how each connected to the other. No, he needs the opposite. Something to make it all stop. Something to clear him out like the death he will never get to have. A drug that makes a god out of a human being and a human being out of a god, that blurs the distinctions, makes him irrelevant, without responsibility or purpose.

  Moon comes to the City after days of walking through the fields, ignoring the kisses of the grass stems and the beckoning of the breeze, hating himself for leaving Lil again, hating himself for fulfilling her fears and doing what he promised he wouldn’t, knowing he let down not only himself but the only one who truly loves him. His father’s hatred roars in his ears—his father, a god of sky, whom he let down long, long ago, merely by being what he is. There is nothing he can do about any of this. He can feel the City like some awfulness walking beside him, like a shadow that walks forever with him, copying his every step in a chilling, clownish mockery.

  Maybe Lil is right about rain. Maybe it would melt people’s hearts, soften them, call up their longing and their memory of music. Maybe the City needs rain. Maybe that’s all it would take. But the shadow walks ever beside him, steely and cold, and he has no faith. The City is bigger than he, and stronger. It overpowers him every time.

  The first glimpse he gets of the City, as he enters it, is of loss. The debris of it sifts out to its edges: unwanted things, unwanted people, unwanted animals. Empty cans make metallic ghost music, plastic bags dawdle in the wind, homeless people huddle, the same color as the trash, and stray dogs trot tirelessly among them, noses to the ground, until they drop dead. Their vacant eyes show that they have long ago given up hope of ever being satisfied, but only keep searching out of habit, out of compulsion. Surely someone has forgotten something here? Surely someone’s long-ago lost love, their dream denied, their childhood treasure abandoned, is here now waiting; surely they will soon come wandering through, a surge of color and hope, seeking it in the rubble? But then, maybe no one remembers where to find what they have lost. Maybe they don’t even know they have lost it.

  Moon wants to stay here. It is quieter here, and when he crawls through the empty streets he can press his ear against the concrete and try to listen to what cries far beneath it. There seems to be someone calling h
im, someone always alive but endlessly dying, someone to whom he belongs and to whom he owes his life. Someone trapped, who needs his help. But the voice sounds so far down, and for all his godness, Moon cannot do anything important, cannot lift the concrete, cannot blast through it, cannot melt it away. What powers do gods really have? Magic tricks fit for children. Moon takes his flute from the inner fold of his cloak and tosses it behind him, not looking where it lands but hearing it echo—a dry, clumsy, hurting sound, nothing like music—against the unforgiving pavement. He will lose it here, where everyone loses something, where everyone loses. If he ever actually needs it, he thinks, he will find it. If not, it doesn’t matter.

  Beyond this outer realm of the City, where the grass is brown at the boundary between civilization and wildness, there is a graveyard. Moon used to spend days there, listening to an earth filled with death, trying to understand what it meant to be human. There were no spirits there; ghosts who refused to pass on to the next life had other places to haunt, places that had meant something to them in their lives. But Moon used to lie between the graves and try to understand death. Was it something about this ending that made humans afraid, that made them turn to evil? The place felt peaceful and the tombstones held no malice. But today he passed that place by with his head turned away. Lil’s talk of pain and sickness reminded him of what he always tries to forget, that she is mortal. He cannot look there without thinking of Lil someday dying, though he knows of course that she would never end up caged in some graveyard. She’d rather be thrown to the vultures. He wishes he could hold onto her forever, for when she is gone, what else will hold him to his sanity? He wishes he could make her immortal, but that would be selfish.

  She doesn’t know how lucky she is to be mortal, to be able to own her own pain, to be able to feel it, so certainly, so constantly. Moon would give anything for that.

  In the outer ghetto of loss, Moon curls up around a heap of rags, humanness sick on itself, folded in on itself, and the heap turns out to be a man—barely. If he pushes Moon away, or beats at him or sticks him with a knife, Moon doesn’t care. He wishes something could kill him, but it can’t.

  The man doesn’t do anything, just shivers, and keeps shivering, as if Moon is cold rain. He mumbles in his sleep. Deliriously, he takes hold of Moon’s hand, but Moon feels like the man is holding his heart, and he has trouble breathing. A dog comes and stands before them, sensing Moon’s aliveness, his mouth hanging open. Moon can feel the dog’s hunger and the man’s hunger, and he has nothing for them. Through the body of the man he can feel the anguish of the silent earth far beneath them, and when the wind comes, it carries the loneliness of all the people of the City, who do their jobs without knowing why, who never feel quite loved enough.

  He feels the soft flatness against his heart where the flute should have been. He feels a little sorry, suddenly, for leaving it, because Lil will be sad. Ever since they were children, he’s played it for her. He’s played it just to watch the different expressions cross her face: that special human mix of passion, nostalgia, hope, and all the others. When they were little, he used to wander the City collecting all the beautiful sounds he could find inside his flute, so he could play them back to her: laughter, birdsong, a lover’s whisper, the turning of dry leaves over empty streets. He believed in beauty back then, or at least he believed in what beauty did for Lil: the way it softened her face, the way it made a girl out of her. He loved to watch that. But now he would not know where to find such things. Though he still plays his flute for her every now and then, he doesn’t feel that sense of wonder for the world any more, even when he tries.

  When the pain of the sick man becomes too heavy against Moon’s dull heart, Moon drags himself through the streets, seeking the throbbing depths of it, seeking to lose himself in that great cauldron where the pain is made. But even in those screaming caverns beneath the streets, where music is only violent sound and people are only flailing bodies, and his mind collapses beneath the lusty demon of the drug, still the emptiness is bigger. Then all he can do is offer himself to them, for if he cannot die, if he can do nothing for them, the least he can do is take their pain. He wants to feel that pain inside him. He wants to feel that he deserves it—that he at least deserves this. This man he drinks with now can do whatever he likes to him, can hurt him any way he likes, if it will make him feel better. It makes Moon feel better. It makes him feel justified in his helplessness.

  Somewhere out there in the dark, the river is always running, but in the City, it is too polluted to sustain any life. It pours forth its suffering into the sea. What would rain be anyway but the same poison falling down again? It seems to Moon sometimes that people don’t even want water. They pump it in with their machines from lakes far away, and then pour it over their cars, letting it disappear into drains while they stand talking, and they distill their urine in it and then flush it underground into chambers of filth. It is an overabundant substance that they take for granted, always pouring forth when they need it and conveniently disappearing after they’ve sullied it. It tastes dull, too subtle for their strung-out senses, and they dose it up with chemicals and sweeteners until drinking it gives them the high they’ve become accustomed to.

  But in a room somewhere, this water god Moon lies in the arms of the man who chained him and fucked him until he bled, and the man is crying.

  And still Moon feels nothing.

  All around, the deep forest hovers in its own shadow. In the center of the field sits the strange wooden square of the house, high in the middle and low in the front, with windows of glass. Paths of stone wind out from it, and wind into bushes and flowers, and the flowers twine into vines, and the vines erupt now into birds as Lonely watches.

  She didn’t think of following the mother and daughter back into the house when the food was gone. They carried the bowls and wooden utensils back with them, and she didn’t know what they would do with them. She didn’t know what would happen next or what to do. She found herself walking across the field to where she saw her horse grazing, lifting his head in greeting. She cried again when she touched him, when he brushed his warm head against hers. But then the house called her gaze back. She didn’t realize how hard she was gripping the horse’s mane in her fist until he shook his neck fiercely and pulled away.

  Now Chelya is running out to her, and now standing next to her, her presence full of breathing and laughter. She follows Lonely’s gaze.

  “Who made your home?” asks Lonely.

  “My father. He built it for my mother, when she was pregnant with me. I guess to prove to her and my grandma that he was serious.”

  She takes Lonely’s hand and looks into her eyes with longing. “Please, will you stay a little longer? Come see inside. Ma won’t mind.”

  So they go back into the house.

  “This is the greenhouse,” says Chelya, leading Lonely over the small footbridge that crosses the stream just inside the entrance, “which keeps the baby plants warm all winter.” She stops and sits with Lonely on a swinging hammock shaded by young fruit trees, still holding her hand, and they listen to the stream echo intimately in the round, glassed room, a comforting tapestry of small, manageable sounds that relieves Lonely a little from the weight of her journey.

  “This is the basement,” says Chelya, now leading her down the stairs outside the main room. “It’s the belly of the house, where we keep all of the food cool. Deep down in that hole, it’s always cold, and that’s where we keep meat and things that have to be preserved.” Lonely stands for a moment in this secret cavern of nourishment, and something that seems like a memory tumbles through her mind, but she can’t catch hold of it, because it is not a memory of the past but of the future. She follows Chelya back up and they pass the mother, who is leaning over a bucket, washing something. Chelya squeezes Lonely’s hand.

  “Ma,” she starts, and the woman stands up. Lonely sees her wide brown hands draw togethe
r over her belly and then drop to her sides again, unsure. The gesture reminds Lonely of herself somehow, and she wants to smile but stops herself. This woman doesn’t want her here. She feels sure of it.

  “Ma,” says Chelya softly, “can’t she stay, just a little longer? Let Kite meet her. It’s fun to have a visitor, don’t you think?”

  The woman looks down at her hands, then brushes them against her hips and looks away. “Wait until they come home,” she answers, her voice betraying nothing. “Wait until your grandmother sees her. We’ll see, then.”

  Chelya nods and pulls Lonely away, while Lonely trails her thoughts behind her, still tangled in the woman’s expression and the question of the word “grandmother.” We all have one mother….

  “It isn’t that she doesn’t like you,” Chelya is saying, leading her back out into the sun. “It’s only that she’s afraid of—” She seems to stop herself and her eyes toss an unreadable question at Lonely. “She’s afraid of what she doesn’t know. We never see other people. We don’t trust strangers. So much has been taken from us.”

  “But you trust me?” Lonely isn’t sure what it means to be trusted, but it sounds like a good thing, somehow akin to being loved.

  Chelya looks at her a long while, and Lonely, who until now had seen Chelya as younger than herself, now thinks about age for the first time and wonders for some reason if this is true. “I trust you,” says Chelya.

  “Why?”

  Chelya looks off into the forest as they wade through the field. “When my father brought you home, a white horse followed him. The white horse stays here in the fields, knowing you are here, and—”

  “And what?”

  Chelya shakes her head. “There’s something magic about him, right? About that horse? I feel like it’s a good magic. But I don’t know what it is.”