by Mindi Meltz
When they come to the edge of the forest, they look out over the lake. The flock of white birds is there at the center again, glowing and moving in the grand twilit space of the grey mountaintop, spiraling around and around as if stirring some unseen power.
“Those are my grandfathers,” Sky repeats. “They are what keeps this place alive. You are safe here, always. They will protect you.”
But to Lonely, they look so far away. She squeezes his hand, feeling soundless tears spill over her face. Already she feels alone, yet he holds her now, and now he kisses the tears with his rich, warm lips.
“Sleep and be at peace,” he tells her. “I will find you.”
When she opens her eyes, he is gone, and the whole flock lifts together off the lake. It spins upward into the darkening clouds, and then it spins down again, landing without a ripple.
She wakes curled like a fox in the shadow of a fallen tree, in the early morning. She remembers waking beside him the day before, and the shape of his body. His belly dipped in restrained surrender between his narrow hip bones. His slim chest lined thinly with muscle swelled outward—not with flesh but as if his breastbone itself were huge with heart.
She cannot bear to be still and wait. She stands up, trying not to feel afraid this time, and walks aimlessly across the broken field around the lake. Even if she did not love him, there is a way in which this land would force her to need him—would lead her every thought and feeling toward him, as if he were the endpoint of all things. For there is nothing else here. There is no barrier—no interpreter—between the land and the sky. Nothing moves but the wind. She remembers something incongruent, and therefore desperate, in the warmth of his body. For here there is nothing but low winter grass, transparent shadows, and thoughtless handfuls of tumbled stone.
Snowflakes crawl softly down the hills of the air and melt upon touching the ground, but Lonely doesn’t know what they are. A creek spills from the lower end of the lake, and widens into a small river, leading her through scattered boulders and the tiny fuzz of hardy tundra blossoms. All around her, the land wings out into nothingness; nothing and no one but herself stands higher than a flower. Cloud shadows murmur continually over the expanse, like the shadows of whales on the bottom of the sea. There are no mountains visible beyond the land she stands upon. There is nothing but sky. Sky…
good morning, says a small gold songbird, and then, to his mate, i love you, i love you. They fly together to their nest in the stones.
Lonely stretches her mind toward any life around her, yearning for some connection. The miniature white and yellow blossoms have the still, preserved quietness of those who must endure over hundreds of years. They are too low for the wind to touch, but Lonely can touch them.
“Do you know about love?” she asks them.
After a long time, they seem to answer, or perhaps the answer was there from the first, but took her some time to understand. everything knows about love, they say.
“It doesn’t feel like I thought it would,” Lonely says, sitting still. “It felt easy in my dreams. I never thought I would feel lonely again.”
The whole tundra seems to sigh. what is ‘thought’? what is ‘lonely’? Yet it doesn’t seem to her that anyone but she even wants to know. The tundra offers these questions up to the day, turning them in the light, to be considered at leisure by the clouds.
“Don’t you want anything?” Lonely asks the flowers sadly. “Don’t you long for anything, the sun or the water?”
we do not long for anything, they say. we only express the Earth. we only say what is. that is for the animals, to want and fear.
“I am an animal then,” says Lonely, remembering how each person in her life has named her—by her smell or by her beauty or by whatever they longed for—as human or goddess. She walks to the river and sits down beside it, comforted by its continuous sound. She rests her chin on her knees. I will lay this heaviness in the river, she thinks. I will lay down this heaviness that is in my heart, and it will float away, because I don’t need it, and he doesn’t need it. He is so light! He doesn’t miss me. He doesn’t worry.
But the longer she sits there, her mind immersed in the low strange sound of water—like ongoing breath and soft tumbling stones at once—the more she wonders why he hasn’t come back to her yet, and the more she feels afraid, and the heavier her heart feels, in contrast with the lightness of the airy mountaintop and the way that yesterday—when she walked with him—her feet sometimes left the ground.
“Why won’t he tell me again that he loves me?” she murmurs. “Was it a dream? There is some distance, some mystery—Why won’t he be human, and stay with me, now that I’ve finally arrived?”
all you can do, sighs the river, is open your heart more. open and open and open. it is all you can do.
maybe he doesn’t trust you yet, says another voice near her, and she turns to see a little rodent with round haunches huddled among the rocks. we don’t know what you are. to be human, he has to leave us. everything will change.
“But what is this place? Aren’t you real?”
what do you mean? The little creature looks startled and slips away, as if her voice has become too much for him.
Lonely walks back up the river toward the lake. She walks all the way around the lake, searching for the spruce forest she slept in with Sky, but she cannot find it. She begins to panic. How could an entire forest disappear? The fog is closing in. She begins to run, stumbling through marshy ground, searching for the spring or the forms of the two stone outcroppings where she first stood before him—or anything she can recognize.
Without warning she hits the warm body of Sky, and his arms come around her.
She pants into his shoulder and falls into the open bowl of his chest, curved to let her in. She feels such a lifetime of joy in that moment that everything she thought or felt before seems foolish and unreal.
When he pulls away, she is unable to speak. She watches his smile spread like a miracle over his face, and devotes herself to him over and over again without even being aware of it.
“I’ll stay human with you today,” he says, and when she sees the happy determination in his face, she feels sorry for all her doubt. “I will.”
He kisses her, then takes her hand and leads her back toward the two stones where the spring begins. As always, they move very quickly, and are there before she can even imagine arriving. They climb into the midst of the waving grasses at the top of the world, and they are not tired. A cloud floats around and around that highest peak, as if in worship, and they step from the rock right onto it.
“See,” says Sky, as if this is the answer to all her questions, snuggling into the mist with her. “This is how light we are. We don’t weigh anything.”
They lie still, and Lonely feels utterly at peace, and nothing seems to matter but now. She thinks about where he has been in the night, but without pain now, for she has him back again.
“Tell me about the Dreaming,” she says. “Can you? Tell me about the dreams.”
“I can’t. Each person’s dreams are a secret, that only they can know.”
“But it’s your life too. You enter those dreams, and I want to know you. Please, tell me what you did last night.” Bravely, she wraps her legs around him, feels his body pulse there, feels his mouth brush her neck and holds back her desire like a mouthful of water. She presses her breast into his hand. His thigh slips upward between her legs, where she is bare beneath the dress, and together they gasp. Then he is still, holding her tightly but steadying his breath.
“I was a bear,” he whispers, “last night.”
Lonely listens, breathing in with his words as if she can feel the beast he speaks of rising inside her.
“I came in the dark forest, I opened my jaws.” His lips move against her ear, and she shudders repeatedly toward him like waves bursting upon the shore. “She r
an away. But I come again. I come again and again, night,” he breathes in, “after night. Inside my great belly—the great blackness of my lungs where voice rises— She needs to know that instinct is the only knowledge of right and wrong. She needs to rumble and mountain her way through those people without fear, and know that her hunger—” he breathes out, and Lonely cries out softly as his hand grasps her, “—has meaning. I will protect her. I will devour her, and then she will be safe, and she will know what it feels like, inside me.”
Lonely pulls back and looks into his eyes. The wind blows strong, and the cloud that holds them drifts far from the peak. I love you, she thinks, but cannot say it.
“Tell me another one,” she says.
He closes his eyes. She watches him this time and sees the tremble at his throat, sees the struggle he undergoes to remember, to bridge the distance between the Dreamworld and now. Perhaps the fire they made between their bodies, when they held each other close, melted him as it did her, and made it easier. Now his voice strains a little, and he doesn’t breathe quite enough.
“I was a kitten. The kitten was dying. I cried, so that the dreamer would rescue me. At least if he would only think of rescuing me! Then he would no longer mock the other children, he would no longer force them to give up their innocence and swear their allegiance, if only he could hear my cry, and remember—”
He opens his eyes and shakes his head. “See, I can’t tell it without telling about the person too. I am all intertwined with them. I am part of them, when they dream me.”
Lonely draws her fingertips up his thigh, aware suddenly of her power. “Please,” she whispers.
Sky grasps her hand, stops it. But he goes on.
“There is a man,” he says, this time looking into her eyes, his voice seizing her, “who can no longer feel his body—whose whole life is a connection between his mind and a computer. This man has no time to feed himself real food, or to remember what real food is. He does not remember that he has a body. Nor does he have a spirit, for even his work does not nourish him, does not inspire him.” Sky sighs again. “I was a dog in this man’s dream. I licked the man’s hand, licked his body. I ran with the man, tried to show him the pleasure of scent—the scent of bodies, the scent of closeness. I sniffed at a turtle in the road, trying to show him life. I sniffed at some food in the garbage, food that the man had forgotten he needed. Soon this man will become ill, but he doesn’t know it yet! I sniffed at the place where the cancer will begin, and I growled.”
“When a dog comes in a dream, it means we must connect with our bodies?” asks Lonely, who feels a little lost now, who does not understand what kind of “work” this is, or what computers are.
“Sometimes,” answers Sky. “Dogs have many things to say. They have clear things to say that everyone knows because everyone knows dogs—they live closely among people.”
“A dog came to me once, outside the City,” Lonely says, “but that was real, not a dream.”
“It is the same thing,” says Sky. “And if it is real, as you say—more real than a dream—then it is even more important! Why would dreams have meaning, if real life meant nothing?”
Lonely smiles. “I like the dreams though. They’re different somehow. Tell me another.”
“No,” says Sky. “It’s too tempting for me. It feels too good to have someone to tell, to share—” He stops, but she can hear the rest of his thought.
“Is it a burden? The Dreaming?”
But he is silent for a long time.
“For one woman,” he says softly, “I was the color blue.”
“What do you mean?”
“Blue. Blue for breath. Blue for peace. Blue for forgotten romance. An elegant, graceful blue, like the feminine softness she’s lost inside herself. I filled the whole dream. The whole dream was blue, nothing else! A beautiful blue.”
“But I thought you were always an animal?”
“Not always,” says Sky.
Lonely kisses him. “Why won’t you come into my dreams?” she asks.
“This is my life,” answers Sky with a sharpness that surprises her, and hurts. “It isn’t for fun. It’s my work. As long as I can find people who still have hope living in their hearts, and give them a dream to awaken it, then dreams survive. We—my people—survive. The future survives, and the wisdom that we took with us is not lost. This is my calling, my purpose.”
“Then what is mine?”
“I don’t know. You were born of the man who created the City—”
“Stop.” Lonely doesn’t want to hear that story. She is tired of the curses that hang over her, tired of the voices of all her elders—even Eva’s—which laid upon her this weight. “It’s not my fault what my father did. I don’t want to be part of that. I will never go to the City and I will never save the people from what he did. What if my purpose is only to—” She stops, afraid again to say the word love. “To know you. You’re the one I’ve looked for, Sky, forever.”
“But that can’t be your purpose in the world. It doesn’t help the world just to care about one person. You have to do something for the larger world.”
“Why? Because you’re not important?”
Sky shrugs, looks away. It’s so easy for him to turn away from her, with the whole sky, for which he is named, there before him.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he amends quietly.
But Lonely doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want for him not to care. And she knows that he needs her love. Maybe he needs you to rescue him, Eva had said. But he doesn’t know it.
So she kisses his neck, teasing his skin. She feels him soften, his lashes falling against his cheeks as his warmth leans back into her. He pulls her close with both arms, hooking her mouth in his. For a moment they swim like fish in an embrace bigger than the sea. Then he pulls back and gazes at her—she who is a garden blooming in the rain, who is the only woman, and only woman, over and over again for him.
“What will we do today?” she asks, feeling her own desire. But again she looks into his eyes, and again she sees that he is afraid. What will happen to this god-animal of Dream, if he allows himself to become more human?
“Let’s just stay on this cloud, and see where it takes us,” he answers. And this is enough for her, because the mystery of him—the mere mystery of his distance, what he keeps hidden, and what little by little he reveals to her alone—is, to her, like flying.
Sky wrestles her foot playfully with his. The cloud smokes around them in a noncommittal way, an unkempt nest of water and air—deep feeling diluted by dreamy, abstract space.
“I can’t remember my real name,” Lonely says, trailing her arm down into space, and brooding a little still on their conversation about her destiny.
“I can’t remember mine either,” admits Sky to her surprise. “Maybe no one can.”
“So what do we do?”
“We live,” he says. “We befriend the names we have. We learn to understand them, and maybe they will help us. Didn’t your feeling about your name change as you journeyed? Didn’t your loneliness change?”
“Yes,” says Lonely. “At first it was scary, and then it was pretty and hopeful. And then I was ashamed of it. Then I was proud of it and determined to find my love. Then, in the end, I let it guide me.”
“See,” says Sky thoughtfully.
“What about you?” Lonely says. “What about your name? What does it mean to you?”
“Oh—how can I explain?” He makes his silent laugh, and she can feel it—the crumpled, vulnerable gracelessness of it. “How can I explain the sky?”
She smiles at him. “You have to. For me.”
He looks at her. Their faces are so close, their noses almost touch. “I know I had another name,” he says, and his smile fades, and he looks down toward the earth below. “Once, when I was a little boy. I was someone
else then, perhaps.” She waits a long time for him to continue, holding her breath, trying to picture what he is remembering in his mind, or not remembering. “Maybe when we came up here, and began living in the clouds, my name changed to Sky so that I would remember my connection to the universe. So that I would no longer be one, helpless human being suffering from the loss of personal connection to other humans, but would identify instead with—everything. Possibility. Dreams. Freedom.” Without knowing it, perhaps, he breathes in and then sighs a great sigh. “This is my life now.”
Lonely keeps staring at him. There is something wrong with what he’s saying. There is something about it that makes her afraid, deep in her belly, but she can’t identify it. Something she doesn’t believe.
But when he looks back at her again, she relaxes. “I know,” he says to her, as if he can read her thoughts. “I’m afraid, too.”
“What? Of what?”
“Of love.”
“But—”
“I’m just telling you. What we feel—it feels like the universe, like the sky, like me, but I’m afraid too. Because I don’t . . .” He trails off.
“Did you ask them yet?” she whispers, terrified of the answer. “Did you ask them if I can stay?”
He shakes his head.
“But don’t you want me to stay? Why couldn’t I?”
“Because everything is different with you here,” he says, and that sudden sharpness is there again, and it shocks her so much, she doesn’t dare ask anything more, so she tries to forget.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs after a little while. Lonely says nothing.
They drift on a while, looking down. The earth twists and turns below them like an old wrinkled body.
“Look down there.” Lonely says, trying to be easy again. The cloud is moving, over the course of the day, across the whole landscape she has travelled. “I think that’s the valley where my friend Fawn lives. You see the field? Like a little eye in the forest. And there are the fields I traveled through. There are so few fields—the forest is so vast!”