Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Sometimes they cannot see the river right beside them, and sometimes it makes no sound. But they keep track of it by a cool breath, a feminine softness, a relieving openness which all things around it lean toward for reassurance. Sound is again made up of birdsong, but the bird calls are all new, wild and hot-blooded in the night, laughter and screams. Trees bend and tangle any way they wish, not only upward but also sideways and even downward, angling and curving so that it is impossible to tell which limbs began at which trees, all of them clothed in vines and connected like one being that sweats and pants in the late summer heat.

  It is hard going, but the going itself makes Lonely feel strong, and her heart proud in its determination. Most days, the old woman’s curses seem more distant, and that island in the sea so many moons behind her. She does not imagine that anything could ever stop the simple power of her legs to carry her forward, the power of her desire, the loyalty of her horse who walks beside or beneath her. The story that haunted her—the father who built that terrible dream, the people oppressed beneath the illusion of it, the woman he forgot, the secret buried beneath the island—all these seem pieces of a life not really hers now, not part of who she will become. She is all her own, a soul he never saw clearly, on a journey of her own making which no one understands but she and the one whom she seeks.

  This is what she believes on the days she believes, when she sees her prince’s face in the river, his smile in the sky. Then she knows there is someone else out there who knows her, who will love her, and her glimpses of him in the patterns of life around her tell her which way to go.

  But sometimes, at night, the forest seems endless in all directions, even upward. The sounds frighten her, and none of them sound like her name. There is no wind here, only stillness and heat and the invisible pull of the river’s depth. Sometimes when she drinks from that darkness, something changes inside her, and she wastes hours crying by the river’s edge, overcome by a sense of loss and hopelessness that she cannot define. She thinks of the love between Fawn’s and Rye’s bodies, and knows that no one has ever felt that way for her. Then her own body begins to weigh her down.

  She thinks of the empty sea and the homelessness of her life, and when she tries to remember the mountain—its cool, idyllic shape—she feels only a chill deep inside, as if the word “lonely” echoed like a stone through every layer of what she is, bouncing pointlessly from wall to wall into a black, waterless abyss. She both misses her father and hates him, and she wishes he would come back to her somehow and tell her if she is doing the right thing, or if she should have stayed in the tower, as he told her to, until her prince came to rescue her.

  As she lies awake on those nights, she feels the curse of what her father has done, and in her sleep she tosses as if to free herself from the bonds of it. Sometimes she sees the horse awake, too, pacing under the trees.

  But in the morning she shakes it all off. Whatever she was to Dragon, that was not real. Whatever she was to her father, that was not real. This, only, is real. This climbing the mountain in material sewn by Fawn’s hands, and the tender face in her dreams, and the strengthening ache in her legs.

  She still eats whatever she finds, which now includes nuts and fruits of all shapes and sizes, and leaves both hard and soft, crispy and wafer-thin, juicy and bitter. But her horse, she notices, eats less and less, and begins to shine.

  It is hard to notice that they are traveling gradually upward, since this tangled nest of jungle dips them up and down, up and down, the land as complex as the shapes of the trees. But after five or six days of this, the river thins again, and ahead of them they can hear the sound of water falling. The trees finally open a breathing space above them, where murky clouds brood and swirl in a silver sky. Massive boulders meditate between trees, sparkling with flecks of mica and whispering about the great mountain they fell from long ago. The hope of rising spurs Lonely onward and makes it easy for her to scramble up a rock face, her body thrusting opposite the rush of the falling river beside her. Several times she must stop and wait for her horse, who often hesitates. She feels they are closer—much closer. Perhaps they are almost there.

  Yet by the time night falls, still she cannot see the mountain! Though the bird songs are sweet and easy again, low, muscular trees with flowers in colors of the heart lean low all around them, hemming them in. The flowers are heady with sweetness, but Lonely feels claustrophobic as she lies down to sleep, wondering if they are going the right way after all. The ground has leveled out a little. She lies awake for what seem like hours, intermittently talking to the horse. Since the vision of the horn, the horse has not spoken to her again, but Lonely asks her questions anyway, to comfort herself.

  “What’s your purpose?” she murmurs. “Why are you coming with me all this way? Why did you come with me at all? Why would you want to climb such a mountain?” She remembers what Chelya said about the horse, and what Moon said, long before that—how that horse could always find her way back to her.

  “Other people know something about you that I don’t,” she muses. “Something strange about you, but I don’t know, I trust you. I think you’re like me, somehow, aren’t you?”

  The river tumbles through her sleep. She dreams she is back in the tower, pounding her fists against a wall stronger than ice, stronger than glass, while the sickly face of the old woman laughs outside, as if she’s already won. Lonely wakes furious and afraid, and falls asleep only to dream the same thing again.

  By morning she is shaken and exhausted, but grateful simply for the light of the sun. She walks another day through the endless forest. The river, only a stream now, tiptoes through. Moss softens their step.

  In the last gold handfuls of day, thunder breaks through the distance, and the horse lifts her head and bends her ears sharply. At first it is only a rough powder of noise tossed far away and high above, but soon it asserts itself more grimly in the closer distance, as if bearing down on the swaying roof of the woods. The wind grows grey and hurried, and the trees, just faintly, begin to wail.

  “Come on,” cries Lonely to the horse, bending forward in the first raindrops, which are far icier here than in the meadows she came from. She does not feel now as she felt in the house, with Fawn standing sturdy behind her in the kitchen—as if she knew that despite Fawn’s fear, nothing terrible could possibly happen in her presence. Now there is no Fawn; there is no kitchen; there is no house, no bed, nothing warm but the horse, whose mane Lonely grips as she searches frantically for cover.

  She hopes for some cave—some leaning bank at least, some cozy darkness. But the rain is coming on so hard now that they cannot continue further, and must settle for a dense thicket, into which she tumbles and rolls herself into a shivering ball. How was it that she felt so wild, so frenzied by passion, that night with Fawn when she stood in the lightning and rain and seemed to hear the thunder shout her name? She thought she must break away from Fawn then. She thought at the time that Fawn’s fear held her back from the full moon ecstasy, and yet now it seems that the soft safety of Fawn allowed her that courage and freedom to feel, without which she would never have run out into the rain.

  The horse stands over her, only partly covered by the brush, her hard legs and caged chest far sturdier than her ethereal grace so often makes her seem. She seems bigger than she is, her body somehow covering Lonely completely, so that Lonely does not feel the rain. But the thunder comes loud as if it will break the earth, as if it is the ending of all stories. Like a child, Lonely grips her own knees against her chest and stares wide-eyed out at the thrashing nothingness. She remembers how it was, that night with Fawn. How the sky darkened before the sunset and closed in the world. How the trees became a nightmare. How Fawn trembled and cried against her, and how this life seemed to have utterly changed—the sunny fields and the laughing dinner further away than a dream—as if nothing could ever again be the way it was. Yet in the morning, when Lonely found herself al
one in the forest again, the birds were singing and the world went on, the storm forgotten as if imagined. And in that darkest center of darkness, inside the room within the house, inside the rain and the obliterating thunder, inside that roaring night, she—Lonely—had felt and lost the most intimate closeness of her life.

  She remembers that now, as the sky seems to crash to pieces around her, and the world seems to end again, and though Fawn was so quiet, so meek, so small in her voice, now the walls of rain around the horse fall like the whole world is Fawn’s body, Fawn’s tears.

  Lonely does not remember the end of the storm, nor falling asleep. But she dreams of Delilah standing on the lip of cliff outside her cave, her tiny, warrior’s body silhouetted in the ruthless desert sun. She dreams of the City spread out before her, and the dog’s friendly face beckons her downward, but then turns snarling and fierce when she takes a step toward it. She dreams of Yora’s face under the water where she bathed with Fawn, the sadness of those eyes holding her there until she can no longer breathe.

  She wakes up gasping, feeling that someone has grabbed hold of her hand and torn her upward from the mire of her sleep. Come on, he seems to say, I need you, and she’s sure it is her prince calling to her, but when she wakes, it is only a squirrel, his miniature hands scrambling in the dirt near her to collect a nut that’s fallen there in the night. When she lifts her head, he darts away instantly, then sits on his haunches at a safe distance to survey her while eating his meal with hyperspeed motions. The rain is gone, the sun clear and everywhere. She leans forward and stares at the squirrel, certain there is something familiar about him. But at this he leaps off, running in quick grey puffs, and like a fountain of weightless fur leaps onto a tree trunk and spirals up it. From the lowest branch he shouts down at her, bright and happily incensed.

  get on with it. move on, you! we’re busy, everyone is busy with their life’s work, and no time for lazy dream and sorrow. this is my place, where i find what is mine, and you—you get on, get going, go find what is yours. do you think life lasts forever?

  The squirrel’s chatter is a relief, almost like a human voice. She stands and brushes the golden needles from the dress she took from Fawn—now threadbare. One day soon, she’ll have no choice but to open the bundle Chelya gave her, and wear whatever is inside.

  As she stands, the wind passes over, and Lonely remembers its voice in the storm last night—the first time she’d heard that voice in so long. The heads of the trees swirl together in a chorus of expectancy, like the swish of two realities passing each other by, where one scene is exchanged for the next.

  Missed me? The wind asks.

  Secretly, Lonely feels a rush of gratitude, but she lifts her chin. “I know I can’t depend on you,” she says carelessly.

  You can’t depend on anything.

  Even my prince? Lonely thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud, because she’s afraid to hear the answer. “Anyway,” she tells the wind, “You are only air. You can’t carry me to where I’m going.”

  I’ve carried you all the way here, says the wind, and in the silence afterward, Lonely is tempted to believe it.

  “Am I going the right way?” she asks, suddenly vulnerable.

  You’re going the only way you can go.

  And Lonely, relieved for those few moments until she begins to doubt again, mounts her horse and continues on.

  Yora walks to the river on the full moon. It is the first time she’s walked so far on these legs. She goes because the moon’s face is familiar, and because she remembers her own name.

  There are so few things she remembers. Like the sound of the river, which must mean something. It has so many layers—the outer roar, the many folds of music, and the twisting secret passage at the center—just as her body has many layers, layers she keeps uncovering, deeper and deeper in. At the core is something she remembers, and it has to do with the direction of the river and freedom. It has to do with the moon’s white face in the center of the black sky. She turns her head from where she kneels, fists in her lap, and blinks as she gazes down the river’s path, which squeezes between stones in the distance and disappears.

  She cannot remember where the river is going. It is somewhere bigger than this human form she’s in can comprehend. She closes her eyes and weeps, though she feels nothing. She takes the tears on her fingertips and places them in the water. The river will know. The river will know what to do with these.

  She came here tonight because she remembers her name and because of Dragon’s sweet eyes, and the beauty she sees reflected when he looks at her, and the beauty she feels when he touches her. His eyes tell her she is someone who has so much to give, but she can’t imagine what. The thought of it tires her. At the same time, those hands and kisses awaken something within her that frightens her, and so she takes that feeling to the river, to wash it away. The sound soothes her. It drowns out the voices in her head, which are familiar and anguished and full of a need she cannot fill.

  She came here because he calls her Yora. She doesn’t know, or can’t remember, what that means.

  But when she speaks it in her mind—Yora Yora Yora—it sounds like the river.

  She watches it. Sometimes she thinks the stones are moving, surging backward through time, while the river is still—just shivering and pulsing in the light. Sometimes the rocks look so sharp, slicing through the smooth flesh of the water, that she must close her eyes to stop the pain, though of course water cannot feel pain. Sometimes the music of the river becomes a wail, like the din of so many screams they are no longer recognizable except as a haunting blur of sound.

  They are almost there, Lonely can feel it. In the trees, and in the rain that falls grey and steady for half the next day, she still can’t see the mountain. But she draws hope from the cold clarity of the air, the blue tinge to the evening, and the angelic quality of the birdsong.

  She can feel the stillness, a stillness even within the breeze—more still than the desert, a stillness like the bottom of the sea. She can feel the mountain as if it is coming toward her.

  Walking becomes easy, and the wind is thin and lightens her. She no longer needs to eat anything. She only drinks occasionally from the stream, which is barely moving now, and whose taste is primal and windy.

  They pass through a forest of aspen whose roots are all one, who are all one tree and who sing a clattering chorus of wind. Their white trunks shock against dazzling beds of green moss. Lonely can glimpse the sky, leaning down through the treetops, so close she can see its dreams written across it in clouds of such intricate and varied architecture they would take a whole other story to describe. Sometimes their mist swings low into the very branches of the trees, and even the wind hushes itself in awe.

  The last trees before the sky are a stately mass of solemn spruce. Lonely walks more slowly now, winding between them. They are very straight and tall and quiet. There is a loneliness in their dark spaces, in which Lonely must fight the fear that her lover is nothing but a ghost, after all.

  That night she dreams of her father’s touch. His hairy arms encircling her, pillowing her small head. His big hand in hers. When she wakes she knows, for a moment, that that was all that ever mattered. Not his godness, not his dreams, not his mistakes or his illusions or his power over the world, but only his humanness. Only his touch. Without that she would never have thought to search for love. She would never have left the tower.

  She walks on, her body weak with emotion and yearning, and there is light ahead. Abruptly, the spruce trees end. There are no more trees. Lonely steps into a yellow field that ends at the sky.

  Beyond it, what was one mountain is many mountains, or a mountain with infinite sides. It is made entirely of beauty, some material that human beings have never invented. From a distance it had been a simple silhouetted pattern that formed a story Lonely couldn’t read, like the spider webs in the forest or the black marks in
Malachite’s book. But now, as if she is already inside that story, the mountain is no longer a simple outline but countless crooked angles turning in and out of her view, into the nests of far valleys and the shoulders of other mountains around it. In mysterious spaces high above her, she can see meadows with smears of color languishing inside them, swaths of white snow, and a series of peaks that disappear into ringlets of clouds.

  I’ve done it, she thinks slowly. This is the mountain I saw from my tower, on the other end of the world. What chills her is that it looks just like the tower. Cold, icy, remote. As if she’s come all the way around the world and come right back. As if maybe all this time, her prince has been trapped in a tower of his own.

  The air is so still. No birdsong. No old woman cursing her, no one stopping her. Nervous for no reason, Lonely turns around and looks back, for the first time, on the distance she came. All the mountains she never explored, with all their hidden recesses and tempting peaks, their steep rocky outcroppings untouched by human hands and their hidden valleys with hidden houses and families—they sheathe themselves now in a smooth painting of green, hiding the tumult and decadence of the jungle and the darkest lengths of the deep river. Through fields and valleys she has never walked, she can see the river winding and winding away.

  She cannot see the valley that was her home for two and a half moons, and the desert is only a distant white mass dissolving into the horizon. But the expanse of all she has crossed shocks her with a kind of staggering exhilaration. Why does being above something make me feel powerful? Why do trees spend their whole lives reaching up? For when she traveled among them for so many days, they had told her as much. We are going where you are going, they had said. We, too, seek the sky. Whatever the reason, it must be why her father built the tower.