Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Then he disappeared with you onto a distant island, separated from the City and the mainland by the vast, moody sea which all men feared. I believe he saw in you something pure and good, something he wanted to reclaim, but he didn’t know how to stop the evil he had begun, and being an artist at heart—a romantic, as all gods are—this saddened him almost beyond bearing. His one aim was to keep you separate from all of that, to keep you pure and holy. So he locked himself away with you in a tower, far from the earth and the people, where he could spin for you the dreams that comforted him, dreams he hadn’t been able to stay true to.

  “Perhaps he should have let himself be redeemed by you, Lonely. Perhaps with you he could have remembered a better part of himself, a tender and innocent part, and perhaps he did. But though he’d abandoned his City, he couldn’t let go of the dream. Though he kept you separate from the City, he also used you to rule it. You became, to him, more than just his child: you became a symbol of eternal youth, perfection, and that ethereal, immortal separation from the earth. You reminded him of the good intentions he had begun with, but he didn’t know how to use those intentions for good, for he was afraid to let go of his power. So as you grew older, he used the idea of you to keep the people loyal to the illusion he had created. He spread stories of your great beauty, without ever letting them see you. The idea of you became something for the people to worship, an ideal to make them believe they had something to strive for.

  “Now part of this story as it was told to me is that Hanum also had a wife or a lover. How much of her was human, and how much was goddess, I do not know. Only that in the beginning, in her youth, she fell in love with him for his big dreams, inspired by his passion and his power. Like so many, she was easily swept up by the persuasiveness of his belief in himself. But later she felt, long before he did, the pain that was swelling inside this grand illusion. She spent time in the City and she saw people who did not have everything, people who in fact had nothing, who were cast aside like the trash and conveniently forgotten. She saw animals abused. She saw that people denied their hearts and no longer knew how to communicate, except through money. I cannot sum up all that she saw. Someday you may understand. Layers and layers of silence and pain. Women, especially, were silent.

  “She grew bitter at Hanum when she saw all this, for he had disappointed her own ideal of him. She fought with him and criticized him, hating him for not being what she had believed him to be, until he retreated from her, because like an insecure little boy he could not bear to be faced with his mistakes. He pushed her away and would no longer love her, especially as she began to age—faster than normal because of the anger and pain she felt. Over time, she came to hate him. When he turned to you as his new ideal, perhaps she hated you even more—not only because you took him away from her, but also because you represented his denial of the truth.”

  Lonely begins to speak again but Eva holds up her hand, and she falls silent. “Now you say that Hanum is dead,” Eva continues, holding Lonely with her eyes. “My dreams tell me this is true. I dreamed something shifted in the web of the world; something broke. It does not matter to the people. They will continue on as if he is alive, for it is too terrifying for them to imagine that he who made them believe in their own immortality has died. But I think that soon, the structure of magic they have built, which is so great but so fragile, which has no soul or guiding light, is going to fall. Before it falls they will feel it tremble. And when it trembles, they will be so afraid, deep inside, that they will do even more terrible things. So, in a way, my daughter is right. It is a dangerous place to be now, even more dangerous than before.

  “There is one more part to this story, but this part is not clear. It is said that another reason Hanum built the tower, and placed you in it, was to distract the people—and himself—from what he hid beneath the island. I’m not sure what is beneath this island, but I have felt it in dreams. I believe it is something that people fear because it speaks what has been denied. That is all I know.

  “You say the tower is gone, but this place under the island remains. Hanum’s wife still remains, older than we can imagine and more timeless than he turned out to be. We don’t know where she really comes from, or who she is. But it is this place down below that she guards now, not the tower.”

  Eva stops speaking and silence overcomes the underground room, folding around it like the wings of a bat. The darkness pulses against the walls. Lonely stares at the candle flame, its light meaningless, and struggles to release her voice from under the weight of her heart.

  It seems to her that there is a whole world built around her that she never saw before. It’s as if she’s been walking in a landscape that was invisible to her until now: a land where people idolize her and hate her, where she is beauty and truth and innocence and lies and betrayal all at once, and all of it has been decided by other people, beyond her knowledge, beyond her control. As if what she is, whatever she is, has never been her own to decide. No wonder she has felt so confused, so lost. How could she ever find what is real, inside all those layers of other people’s dreams? How could she ever know her real name?

  And what did her father mean? That she was invincible? That she would never hunger? That her body would never ache for the touch of another? Is this what the people of the City believe of themselves, as if they, too, are gods?

  When she speaks to Eva her own voice sounds low, and very old. “That woman,” she says. “She is not my mother.”

  Eva considers her. “I don’t know that.”

  “But you said she was his wife. He never called her his wife. He never said she was my mother. She can’t be. She hates me.” Lonely finds some comfort in the strange slow weight of her own voice. No more tears now. She doesn’t know what she feels—not sorrow, not anger, not fear—though it is all of those things, too, and heavier than all of them together. Black and heavy and peaceful. Like truth, maybe, if truth were a feeling. Like earth.

  “I did not say she was your mother because I do not know,” says Eva. “All I know is that your father took you for his own, took you away into that tower and kept you for himself, away from the world and away from your mother, whoever she is. I think he thought of you, Lonely, as another of his accomplishments; you made him believe in himself enough to forget the great wrongs he had done. It would not be the first time that a man has denied a woman’s role in what he accomplishes. I think he denied that woman in every way that he could, because she failed his ideal of womanhood, just as he failed her ideal of manhood.”

  Lonely cannot speak. She cannot explain the sense of loss that she feels. She cannot explain the strange sympathy she feels now with this terrible woman who could be her mother and yet cannot be, as if she expressed some part of Lonely that Lonely never knew about—things she needed to say to her father but never said because she didn’t know the whole story. There was something wrong. There was something about the tower that frightened Lonely, always, but she didn’t know anything different, so she couldn’t have put it into words.

  And the way she felt with Dragon. Why she couldn’t bear to give herself to him. It was because she couldn’t bear to lose herself again in someone else’s ideal of her, when she had just barely begun to find herself.

  Then again she remembers how her father called her Princess. Again she feels that No—no, he cannot be that man, not that man that Eva describes! The full weight of losing him falls over her for the first time, completely and all at once, bowing her down until her face almost touches her knees. She needs to know if he really did love her, but Eva doesn’t know, and no one knows—and she needs to know, now, immediately. She will die if she cannot know.

  If only she could lie down on the cool floor and never get up, anchored to the earth by her heart heavier than buildings, heavier than all the world’s machines, heavier than that tallest mountain in the far east that once she longed toward. If only she could stay in this room forever, wh
ere the darkness dissolves her just a little bit. She doesn’t want to live and breathe and walk among people—every one of whom has heard of her, every one of whom knows where she comes from and expects something of her that she doesn’t understand. No wonder Delilah hated her. No wonder Fawn fears her.

  Thoughts like this flicker uselessly through her heavy mind, their meaninglessness making her nauseous.

  “Breathe,” Eva reminds her.

  Lonely feels the woman’s warmth in the darkness, and when she looks up Eva is standing there before her, her hands outstretched. Lonely stands, trembling, and sinks into her arms. Eva smells like smoke and flowers, and her hands against Lonely’s spine are very strong. Lonely cries, soundlessly, without tears, her shoulders shaking. Not because of the story, which is just a great murky weight above her, but because this is what her mother, whoever she is, ought to feel like. Because these are not the arms that reached out to her like claws before the raging sea and pinched her wrists as if to test her life. These are the arms that forgive, and comfort, and release.

  “I’m not that,” Lonely murmurs.

  “Not what?”

  “Not anything. Not—whatever he thought I was.” She thinks of all that is bad in her. Her desire for Rye, the way she abandoned Dragon, her weakness before the old woman of the sea, her fear, her selfish need.

  “Of course not,” says Eva. “No one could be.”

  “I don’t know who I am,” sobs Lonely, but it isn’t what she means to say; it’s the sorrow that’s killing her, the sorrow of her father falling away from her into the abyss of some distant story, a man she did not know, who loved someone who was not her. Lost, he used to say, over and over. Lost. She did not know then what it meant, but she knows now.

  “But you have some piece of that light he saw in you,” says Eva, as if she understands again what Lonely is thinking, holding her away from her body now and looking into the face that Lonely tries to hide from her. “I think you have a gift for the world: some piece of innocence, something he took from them when he locked you away and made them worship you from a distance. You were right to come into the world in search of your heart’s longing. It is through this world, walking upon this earth, that you will redeem yourself, and maybe them too.”

  Then Lonely feels angry. “I don’t know what ‘redeem’ is, but if he’s made this mess I don’t want to fix it. It’s not up to me. Why should I be cursed—” She stops, swallowing the emotion that erupts inside her from this single word.

  “You are not cursed, child. Nobody’s making you do anything.”

  “But she is!” cries Lonely. “That woman. Why did she send me to find love? Does she even want me to find it?”

  She wishes Eva would say Yes. And you will find it. You deserve it. It will come to you. But instead she says, “All I know is that up until now, you have done what you are told. You have tried to be the good girl for your father. You have obeyed his wife’s demand, allowing your heart to obey the fear she instilled in it. You are obeying a dream you don’t understand. But now you have a piece of your own story, and you will continue to grow into it, to understand it, and even to change it. Stories grow and live with us; they are alive. I did not tell you this story to hurt you. I told it to free you. Knowledge allows you to make your own choices.”

  “I don’t feel free.”

  “You will.”

  Lonely spends the night with Eva, who is so unaccustomed to sharing her space that she cannot sleep the whole night. She stays up with one candle, which, on this night of the new moon in a cloud-covered sky, seems the only light in all the world. She isn’t surprised when, as she lifts Lonely’s wet dress to hang it up, it disintegrates in her hands. She gathers up the pieces in a pile, thinking that perhaps she can use them to stuff her old pillow a little thicker. Who knows what that material was, but it certainly wasn’t made to last in this world.

  Then she watches Lonely’s beauty as she sleeps, clear and firm in the flickering light. Lonely’s face doesn’t move; her sharp cheekbones forever make their serious, dramatic arches behind it as if insisting upon a story of rise and fall, tragedy and redemption, that must be played out until the end. She’s still wrapped in the blanket, with her mouth open like a child’s. She breathes deeply and never stirs. The rain doesn’t stop until morning.

  Rye spends the night in Fawn’s arms, resting his head against her full breasts, his arm thrown across her waist. Before they fall asleep, he tickles her belly with his tongue. She smiles but lifts his chin away. She’s too distracted to feel desire.

  “Rye,” she tells him, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Something happened today. We learned something. We learned that Lonely is the princess from the tower.”

  Rye makes zigzags with his tongue up to her breastbone.

  “Rye, did you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” he answers. “Sure.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Of course. So what?”

  Fawn sighs, her fingers combing his beard. “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “She comes from something evil.”

  “Love, what does your gut tell you? Does she seem evil?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to know her for who she is, then, not based on some story about her,” says Rye. “I can feel that she is good, that she can love. She’s so young, Fawn. She’s afraid too.”

  “I know. But she has something secret inside her. Something unpredictable, something wild.”

  Rye leans over her. “So do you,” he whispers, and presses his lips to hers. She wraps her other arm around him but doesn’t kiss back. Her eyes are looking past him, into thoughts he cannot see.

  In the morning Fawn sits with Eva while she drinks her morning tea.

  “Where is Lonely?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” answers Eva. “I dozed off at dawn, and when I woke she had gone. I hope she doesn’t leave us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think she needs us right now.”

  Fawn is silent, breathing in the memory of rain from the soggy earth.

  “Why is she called Lonely?” she asks. “I don’t understand this name.”

  “Don’t be afraid, Fawn,” says Eva. “She needs you.”

  “I’m afraid of where she comes from.”

  “No one knows where she comes from, daughter, because no one knows who her mother is. No one knows in whose womb she spent the first, most important moons of her life.”

  Fawn thinks on that, and holds her mother’s hand.

  “There are other versions of the story that I didn’t tell her,” says Eva after a time, as if to herself. “Some of the ancestors say that Lonely is the daughter of the Earth. That what made Hanum crazy was that the goddess of the Earth Herself chose him, as a young man, for Her lover. They made love as the earth and the sky make love. But Hanum was also human, and he became drunk with the proud idea that he had conquered Her, and he thought himself the greatest man in the world. He thought that he could rule this world. So he abandoned Her to pursue his own greatness.” She pauses to think, and Fawn sees that familiar mixture of remembering, intuiting, and imagining in her bright eyes. “Then many years later when the City began to disappoint him, when he feared that his magic would fail him, he remembered the sweet love of that goddess and searched everywhere for Her. But that goddess had fled from him, as he built the City on top of the Earth and denied Her, keeping Her from the rains and from life. All he could find was the daughter She had borne by him—a half-immortal child who slept in a bed of leaves and clouds, and when he saw her beauty, he took her away with him to remind him of the love he’d lost.”

  Fawn shakes her head, almost angrily. “I don’t want to hear this talk of goddesses.”

  But Eva ignores this. “Others say,” she continues, “that her mother was a wo
man of the Dream People. Or those that call themselves the Dream People now: the First People, the ones who disappeared into the sky above the east mountain when the City was built on top of their land. They say that Hanum loved her but could not win her, and so he kidnapped her, or he destroyed her people out of anger—I don’t know. Both of those stories are muddy and confused. And overly romantic, if you ask me.”

  “But you said you didn’t tell her all this?” asks Fawn.

  “No, I didn’t, because I did not want her to make the same mistake as her father. Already, she feels the overwhelming drama of her history. Already the importance of her role in the world is burdening her too greatly. She needs to feel less important. She needs to be humbled by daily life. It will soothe her.” Eva turns to her daughter. “Be kind to her, Fawn. She won’t be with us forever. Give her work to do, make her feel useful, teach her gratitude. It is the best we can do.”

  Fawn is silent for a long time. “But what if Hanum’s wife was her mother?” she says finally, in a whisper.

  “What if she is?” says Eva.

  “But I mean,” says Fawn, “then Lonely has that inside of her.”

  “Has what?”

  “You know. She’s the Dark Goddess. You told me. Remember, Ma? Was it just a story? You told me once, before we even left the City. You think I was too young, maybe, but I remember. You told me about the secret garden in the mountains, the garden only women know, where the Bright Goddesses keep women safe with their prayers. Safe from the Dark Goddess, across the sea. That was Hanum’s wife, you told me. Not some beautiful earth goddess.”