Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Lonely,” says the old woman. “I want you to tell me about where you come from.”

  The eyes meet Lonely’s, and they wait, at once firm and trusting. This old woman is different from the one Lonely remembers. Eva’s skin is a maze of lines just like that of the old Witch by the sea. But Eva’s lines don’t stretch her skin painfully over her bones, or stretch her mouth into a thin line, or pull down the corners of her eyes. They seem woven by a different hand, the same one perhaps that wove the spider webs of the forest. As with the spider webs, the more Lonely looks into them that night, the more they seem to weave the world together. Just as she begins to lose herself in the maze of them, they break, curling around Eva’s eyes and mouth in a design that seems more familiar to them than any other: a smile.

  “I’m sorry,” Eva says. “Sometimes I’m so single-minded in what I’m looking for. My daughter says I can be too controlling. One of the flaws of an earth person, and not one borne easily by an air person, which is mostly what you are.”

  Lonely stares at her, surprised at the accent of her words, which she notices now is different than anyone else’s in the family—and by how many words she uses, after all the silence that Lonely has lived in for so many days. Eva rises, her body graceful and lean in a simple, faded robe, and hands Lonely a cup of tea which has been sitting on the table.

  “Please drink this. It will calm you and ground you. It’s a little cool now, because I have been waiting for you.”

  Lonely doesn’t drink, though she is embarrassed now of her own stubbornness. Eva sits with her hands folded in her lap and waits.

  “I told you,” says Lonely, “I come from a tower, on an island, in the sea.”

  “Yes. How did you come there?”

  “I don’t know. I was always there. For as long as I could remember.”

  Eva nods. “Go on.”

  Lonely looks away.

  “Girl,” says Eva, her voice harder and more certain now, “you owe us an explanation of who you are. We have taken you in, we trust you. I know that you have no wrong intentions. But you do not know yourself, and you are not paying attention. That can make you dangerous. We want to be kind to a lost stranger, but I will allow nothing—nothing—to threaten the integrity of this family. Do you understand?”

  Lonely, who looked down while Eva spoke, now looks sharply up. She doesn’t ask what Eva means. She cannot speak.

  “It’s all right,” says Eva, her voice softening again. “You know so little, poor girl. Don’t be afraid of me. What do you remember in the tower?”

  “My father,” Lonely says, swallowing tears. “He lived there with me.”

  Eva nods encouragingly.

  “He used to come to me every day. Then he stopped coming.”

  “He stopped coming?” asks Eva, leaning forward.

  “Yes, that’s what I said.” But the tower is behind her, gone. It doesn’t matter now. Without meaning to, despite her fear of Eva, she thinks again of Rye. It is so much easier to think of him than of this.

  “Where is it that you would rather be right now?” says Eva.

  Lonely doesn’t answer, but her body flushes.

  Eva leans back in her chair and considers Lonely. “Girl, you cannot seek your future until you know your past. If you don’t know your past, you will fall into a future that you do not understand and will have no control over. Please drink some tea. Take these plants into your body. They are wiser than you are, and you must begin somewhere.”

  Lonely takes a sip of the tea and leans back in the chair, her body feeling sore, and the chair begins to rock her, guided by her weight. Once she begins rocking she can’t seem to stop, for the rocking is that familiar rhythm that soothes her—the rhythm of the horse between her thighs, the rhythm of the sea waves carrying her and finally birthing her onto the earth. The rain drums into the hill, quieter than it sounds inside the house, but with a deeper tone.

  “Please tell me what you remember, Lonely.”

  Lonely opens her eyes. “My father stopped coming,” she says, throwing her words out quickly, to get them over with. “I thought I was trapped in the tower. The Witch guarded it. I—I was lonely. I needed to get out. One day I saw the mountain through the glass. And I saw—I knew, I felt that someone was calling me. That the mountain was calling me.” Lonely stops, remembering this, remembering the face—one she has never yet seen on this earth. “I made a hole in the ice. The glass was ice. Then I had a dream, and the tower disappeared.”

  “And then?”

  Lonely stops rocking, startled by Eva’s lack of surprise or reaction. “Then I spoke with the Witch. She was—” But Lonely finds she cannot describe her, or that place, or that time. The horrible face looms in her mind, and the eyes hold her frozen and stop her voice.

  “What did she say to you?” asks Eva.

  “That I had to find my true love within thirteen moons,” answers Lonely dully, finally, feeling defeated, as if she is admitting to her worst flaw. “Or else she would bring me back there.” She lowers her face into her free hand to catch the tears that she feels rising and then finally falling from her. She can’t help it. All the fear, all the longing never answered, building and building inside her through dinner, through the day, through every day before this, since before Rye took her in his arms, since forever—the tears come, shaking her body with the same release she just felt from the touch of her own hands. “I don’t ever want to go back there. I will always be alone there, forever,” she cries.

  Eva’s voice is soft and steady. “This woman holds you back and pushes you forward at the same time,” she observes.

  “What?” says Lonely, her face still hidden, confused by Eva’s easy description of the Witch as “this woman,” as if she were no more than that, not a witch, not all-powerful at all.

  But instead of answering, Eva asks a different question. “So you are journeying to fulfill this woman’s demand?”

  Lonely lifts her head. “No, I am journeying to find love, because I am lonely.”

  “Are you sure?” asks Eva. “Going toward love takes no effort. It is as easy as a river flowing naturally to its source. It is not painful and desperate.”

  Lonely looks at Eva. Her hands are shaking, so she puts down the tea. What do I want? she thinks for the first time. What is this constant longing, tormenting me?

  “Who was your father?”

  “I don’t know,” answers Lonely. “He was…my father.”

  “Was he a magician?”

  “Yes. He made my tower for me, that’s what the witch said. And she said that he died.”

  “Ah,” says Eva, and she closes her eyes.

  Lonely leans forward, stopping the rocking of the chair. “Do you know something about me?” she asks. She doesn’t know what it is that she needs to know—just something that would still the anxiety deep within her, that fear she felt from the moment the tower disappeared and she clung to the dark rocks, that swirling emptiness of not knowing. Suddenly it seems that all the desire she has felt has been only a distraction from this emptiness, from its inevitability.

  “I know less than what you will find by looking into yourself, child. But I can tell you a story that I think will be important to you. You must be brave, because this story will hurt. But I can see that you are ready to hear it, and that means you will survive it, and it will help you, I think, in the end.”

  Lonely has never heard a story before. The things her father told her were not stories; they were only fragments of lost places and lives she would never live. She doesn’t know that a story is like music, the way it takes control over your heart. She doesn’t understand how a story can hurt, or how it can hurt even more when left untold.

  “Are you listening?” asks Eva.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?” asks Eva again, after a moment of silence, leaning forwar
d.

  “Yes,” says Lonely, surprised again. “I am listening.” She doesn’t feel impatient any more. Thoughts of Rye have been swallowed temporarily by the dark cave of this room, which more and more, the longer she has sat here, has begun to feel eerily alive.

  “Then I’ll tell you. This is a story that everyone in the world knows, except for you, because you are at the center of it.

  “Everyone knows a different version of the story, or sometimes only pieces of it, distorted over time. I believe that my version is truer than many, because it was passed to me by the spirits of my ancestors, whose intention is understanding, rather than by those whose intention is fear or manipulation. You will know if this story is true by how it feels inside you. A story that is true for you feels like nourishment, even when it hurts.”

  Lonely swallows, opens and closes her hands. She tastes garlic on her own breath, and the sweetness of berries on her tongue. She stares at the earth floor, which she cannot see.

  “Once there was a great magician, who was mostly god, with a little bit of humanness mixed in. No one knows where he came from. Some say he came from the air—a sky god. Some say he came from the other side of the world, the other side of the great mountain, where everything had already been destroyed and the earth was all used up.

  “When the power of a god comes through a human being, it frightens him. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t know how to surrender to it. And someone who is part-god, part-human can be dangerous, because he wields the power of a god with the small-mindedness and greed of a human being. Being part human, he also understands people—their longings and fears—which means he can control them if he wishes to.”

  Eva looks away to think, then back at Lonely with a testing glance. “This magician, whose name was Hanum, was able to gather many of the earth’s people together and put their human skills to work to create a great masterpiece of his design. At that time, people lived very differently than they do now. They lived more like we do, close to the earth, only they also had a sense of community and connection which we have lost now. They knew and trusted one another.

  “But then Hanum gave them special powers. He gave them the power to make and run machines, which are like people without souls. He gave them the power to create a virtual world on top of this world, separate from it, and he told them they could live in a world of their choosing, where they would never have to suffer from drought, disease, hunger, or loss, and that this world could be self-sustaining. In this new world, they would not be dependent on the earth, which sometimes yielded sustenance and sometimes did not, and which made them dependent. Maybe the people were not unhappy before, but Hanum convinced them that they were, that they needed more. Actually, he wanted them to depend on him, instead of on the Earth. So he gave them these incredible powers, to transform reality at their command, but he did not give them the humility, patience, or insight with which to use these powers wisely.

  “This magical world that Hanum created is called the City. I have spent many years dreaming into this story, trying to understand his motivations. It could have been that he was a god of pure Air, whose dreams were not grounded in reality. It could have been insecurity, which translates into lust for power. Or it could have been real artistic inspiration, which, as often happens with the influence of the divine in a human being, overwhelmed him to the point where he became drunk with it—terrified of his own flawed humanness in the face of such beautiful dreams, and ever trying to escape from that humanness by building the dreams bigger and bigger. I do not know. It is terrible when something is set in motion that you cannot trace to its roots. It is very difficult to stop.

  “There was a time when people worshipped the Earth, and the gods they saw moving through it, and they had advanced ways of communion between their spirits and the spirits of the elements. We no longer know many of those ways, since so many of our people have been lost, absorbed into the City. We who still live here in the mountains do our best to be grateful for all that the Earth gives us. To us, eating, bathing, drinking, and everything we do in connection with Earth is a sacred act. We grow in our spirits through understanding its cycles, and when we feel suffering, we listen the best we can to the wisdom of the elements and creatures and plants. That is the best we can do. Most of us who are left in the mountains do not trust in gods, since we saw what Hanum did. We trust only in what we can feel and work with our hands.”

  Eva takes a deep breath. “I myself once lived in the City,” she says. “I was raised there, and grew up there, and Fawn was born there.

  “I know you have not been there. If you had been, I do not think you would have survived it, because of how you are made. In the City, spirit is a relic of the past, something now laughed at. Instead of Earth, they have technology: that is their god.

  “It is so hard to describe what the City is. It is made of Things. In the City whoever has the most Things has the most power. When a person feels a longing in her heart, she seeks a Thing to answer that longing. The Things take her further from what she wants, but she does not understand this, so she seeks more Things. Here in the forest, it is hard to understand how a Thing can have power over a person. Here we know what things are, and where they come from, and what beings made them. But in the City, people do not understand what Things are made from, because they are so complicated and were made by secret, destructive means, and they do not know what hands have made them or what hands they have passed through. And so these Things wield power over them—and even more so because a person calls a Thing ‘mine’, and whenever you claim to own anything, it also owns you.

  “The City is a vast web of illusion. Truly it is the greatest magical feat of any god or man. In this illusion, food seems to appear spontaneously and ready-made from nowhere. Waste seems to disappear without a trace. The people travel in vehicles more huge and dangerous than any wild beast, yet they enter them daily without a thought, and they feel completely safe. Hanum had them believe that everything could be done by machines and computers—everything. That youth can be extended forever, and should be. That pain and winter and disease and death are all evil and can eventually be stopped. That every want can and must be satisfied, and that only constant noise and bright lights will bring us peace. Most importantly, he wanted them to believe that humans have total control, that they can do absolutely anything.”

  Lonely is frozen, still leaning forward toward Eva, her hands curled awkwardly like helpless baby animals in her lap. She remembers her father’s words: You and I are gods, and our bodies need neither food nor touch to survive. We are beyond all that….

  “Of course none of these things is true,” continues Eva. “The truth is that the people in the City are terrified. It terrifies them to think that they can do anything, because to have such power is awful and incomprehensible. It feels to them as if nothing they do really matters, as if there is no god who cares about them enough to stop them when they do wrong. No predators hunt them. They cannot remember what it felt like to be humbled by something larger than themselves, or by a web of life greater than their own lives. The only thing which can hurt them now must be of their own making. Sometimes they do hurt themselves. They hurt themselves and each other, because they long so much to feel anything at all. In the world Hanum created, they have nothing to fight against but themselves.”

  “Stop it!” interrupts Lonely. “Who are you? You’re not making any sense. This—” she stands up. “I know what you’re trying to say. This is not my father. It’s not.”

  Eva looks at her, her expression unchanging.

  Lonely feels hot—and too big for herself suddenly. She wants to throw off the blanket but is ashamed of her nakedness. She needs to kick something or throw something. She whirls away from Eva and paces around the rocking chair and back. “My father wouldn’t create that terrible place,” she cries, furious at Eva’s calm wordlessness. “My father was good and gentle. You’r
e crazy. You don’t know him. You don’t know—” She stops because she’s crying again. You don’t know what it’s like to have only one person in the whole world who ever loved you, is what she means to say. Don’t take that away from me.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t good,” says Eva. “And I didn’t say he didn’t love you. How could I know that?”

  “But you’re saying—you’re saying—” Lonely fumbles, her mind out of control, her heart bleary and wild as if melted by the endless rain. “Why wouldn’t he have told me? Why didn’t he tell me any of this? Ever.”

  Eva’s eyes seem to shrink a little, and they look more human suddenly, the eyes of a tired old woman. “I don’t know,” she says softly. “Please, try to breathe.” It’s the compassion in the “please” that makes Lonely sit down again.

  “Do you want me to continue?”

  Lonely nods. No, she’s thinking, and the No keeps ringing through her brain, but Eva’s voice carries through it, like the voices of the animals when they speak—gently and without force, but with absolute certainty—into her mind.

  Eva takes a deep breath. “Hanum had a daughter. No one knows for sure who bore her. But when Hanum first held this child in his arms, something changed in him. He remembered something pure and innocent, something sweet in his heart from long ago that was his first sensation of magic, before his dreams got out of his control.”

  Eva stops and looks silently at Lonely. When Lonely won’t look at her, she continues. “I think when Hanum saw you, he felt frightened of the great illusion he had created, and he saw the evil in it, because of the lies it was built on and the violence that was beginning to take hold of it as people acted out the emptiness inside them. Quite suddenly, he abandoned the City. Through technology, he fed his voice into it still, his voice echoing the lies that kept it going, but he no longer appeared there to inspire the people to keep building, seeking Things, and making themselves greater. He had a government of rulers who could carry on his work for him now, a quiet fortress in the heart of the City that no one thought about or questioned. The last command he gave, before he disappeared, was to build a great road out into the wilderness. For he perceived that the earth around the City was running dry: they had sucked all the life out of it and would need more. He did not tell them that. He only told them that their power must ever expand. And, I suspect, he no longer wanted to be responsible for it.