by Mindi Meltz
They fly as vultures fly, or mosquitoes—their bodies still and quivering, as if balanced upon precarious peaks of air. They soar over the green mountains, over the falls, over the river that succumbs to the desert and then splits into two—two choices but it did not make a choice, only gave in to both. One of those paths leads into the valley of the lights, which during the day is only a grey fog.
The cloud they land upon is small, and very high. It seems flimsy to Lonely, but is the only cloud for as far as they can see today.
“There it is,” says Sky, and everything has changed. He’s let go of her hand. He sounds like somebody else. “There is the land I come from.”
“But that’s the— Isn’t that the City?”
Sky nods.
“But—”
He looks at her.
“It was there,” she says quietly. “That’s where it was.”
She sees the pride in his eyes, the pride of his own suffering, and she is so sad, to realize that she can never go there with him. His green haven—he could have taken her there, she could have shared it with him. But the suffering that remains after it is gone—that, she can never share.
“I don’t want to get any closer,” he says. “I can’t stand the smell. I can’t breathe when I get too close.”
“But don’t you come here every night?”
“That’s different. That’s when I’m a dream.”
“I thought you said it was the same thing.”
He looks at her, his eyes like fists now. “Is it, Lonely? Is this still life, what we live up here? Or are we only ghosts of what we were? Dreams can’t fight. Dreams can’t make love.”
Can’t you? she worries. But the anguish in his voice is so powerful it stills her. She just looks back until he turns away, and looks down again at the grey place below.
“Why is there no color?” she whispers, following his gaze.
“Because that is a lifeless place. That is a place without dreams, without spirit, without feeling.” The tone of his voice echoes the same colorlessness.
“You see the shapes there,” he continues. “How they hurt your eyes, how cruel and sudden those lines are. That is how they seem to us, because they are written in a different language than the forest and fields are written in. The natural places we know are written in curves and subtleties so minute that when a person of the City looks at them, they seem all a blur. They seem either boring or frightening, depending on the person, and how that person chooses to defend himself against them.”
“But why?” Lonely asks, remembering the tiny, fairy-curl marks on the paper Kite showed her, wondering how those marks could be easier to read for some people than the free hand of the universe.
“Because they are afraid of mystery. The lines of the City tell one thing, and they tell it clearly. They do not have other meanings, designs within designs, hidden patterns that change with the light. All the angles are the same. That way people don’t have to think, or enter into something which their minds cannot control.”
They sit for a long time, and Lonely looks down at the tight, clumped angles of the City. She imagines the deafening noise of it, too far for them to hear. The City doesn’t look that big from here. She wonders about the dog she met, and if he still lives, and where he runs, and if he is succeeding in loving. She wishes she had asked him to tell her more about loving. He was so easy, happy, and warm. Nervously, she inches closer to Sky, and to her giant relief he takes her in his arms, and settles in against her warmth.
“Sky,” she whispers, feeling encouraged by this gesture. “Tell me about it. The green water place.”
Though he holds her, she can just barely feel his presence.
“It was there in the center of the City,” he says. “There where they built their Center, where the greatest power lies.” He swallows against her. “The Swamp, they called it.”
“What is a swamp?”
“A swamp is a place…” he begins, then hesitates. Lonely waits.
Maybe the City isn’t a place, she thinks. Maybe it is a terrible idea, that—even though it seems small now—has already taken over places. Maybe it is an idea that destroys places.
“A swamp is a place where water and earth sit together,” he says finally. “Where water and earth understand each other. It is the place in between the earth and the sea. Without it, the sea and the land forget each other. The sea will soon flood over the earth, without the swamp to draw it down and bring it peace. Once, the swamp purified the waters; once the waters were reborn there. Now they are filled with despair. The swamp was the love between the sea and the land. The Heart of the World. Now it is gone.”
But this isn’t enough for Lonely. “And you lived there…” she begins for him, encouragingly.
“I lived there. With my family and my people. Also the most ancient of creatures and plants lived there, who will never again be found on this earth.”
“Not anywhere?” asks Lonely. “Not even on the other sides of the world, where other possibilities are?” She thinks she understands what he said about the world being round. Perhaps nothing is truly lost, and no thing is the only one of its kind.
But he doesn’t answer her. And she thinks that the heart, perhaps, sometimes forgets this truth. In Sky’s heart, he has lost everything. Nothing can replace it. A chill passes through her like the ghost voices in the desert, like the bottom of the sea.
“What was it like?” she insists.
“The water was protected by a sheet of silent green life. A boundary between worlds. You could see the eyes of ancient creatures just breaking through the surface from the deep. The trees were hung over with curtains of moss, and these, too, hid worlds within worlds, and were like the beards of Unicorns. There was a constant mist, revealing and hiding and revealing again all the faces of the gods in the trees and the water. You could spend a whole lifetime seeking the nests of the white birds. Like that white bird I was, when I came to you. I appeared to you as an animal that doesn’t exist any more.”
“How did you live? Did you live in a house?”
“We lived in houses, built of sticks on poles above the water. We traveled on bridges above the water, or we swung. The elders spoke with the birds, who were the guardians of the place. They learned to shapeshift . . .”
“Go on,” she tells him, when he stops.
“Lonely,” he says. “If words were all we needed to bring a thing back, to bring a life back to reality—” He doesn’t finish but Lonely thinks again of the written language in Kite’s book. Those were words. Those little marks—they did not stand for lives or things or feelings, but for words. And the words stood for things. But that was so hard to understand. So far from the thing itself. Was there something the people of the City were trying to remember with their words? Something they were trying to bring back to life with their books full of tiny, colorless lines?
“After we changed form,” says Sky, “to escape the destruction, I was the only one who could still turn back into human form at will. I don’t know why that is. Why I kept this ability to be human, and no one else did. The elders say the future is in me. The chance for us to be reborn as a people. Or that I will carry out the work we still have to do in human form. It is up to me to keep us alive, by keeping the dreams of the people alive; it is up to me never to sleep, to stay conscious, because they say my mind is the eternal flame which, if I keep it burning, will keep our wisdom alive, our spirit alive—I must keep us alive—”
His words come faster and faster, and then he stops. Lonely squeezes him. He remains perfectly still, but his tears burn the skin of her neck.
Later she will know: it was in this moment that he finally owned her, this moment when he was weakest. Ever since she left her tower she has been searching for him, and when she first saw him she loved him because she had dreamed him, and he had dreamed her, and they recogn
ized each other as if from forever ago. But now he cries, now she feels his tears on her skin, and now she knows she loves him as if she never knew it before. She loves the person living inside this body, whom—she realizes now—she barely knows at all.
How long has the City stood? A hundred years or more? Sky must be older even than that, if he was alive when it covered all his people’s land. But he still feels like a little boy in her arms—whatever age he was when everything was taken from him. When he traded his own life for the responsibility of an entire people.
Now he seems to gather himself and pulls away from her to hunch reluctantly over himself, as if his own body is a kind of exhausting punishment. He turns his sleepless face upward toward infinity. She watches that face, a landscape more complex than her whole journey here, and forms her heart into the shape of its pain. She smooths back his hair. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“How old were you” she asks, “when you lost your family?”
“I was thirteen. My little sister—was four.”
His little sister. Inside her chest, Lonely feels such strange silent tears for these words. He never mentioned a sister. He never mentioned that she, too, was killed. And Lonely doesn’t know what it feels like to have others made of the same stuff as oneself. But she feels, intuitively, the sense of tenderness Sky might have for a female relation who was at once very young and very vulnerable. She imagines a love so beautiful—a blood-sure, unshakably devoted love that he can never give to Lonely. This sister was innocent. This sister was always good. This sister did not doubt Sky’s love or make any demands of him.
“The birds in the lake—those are my elders, my grandfathers,” says Sky. “They are the most important, because they hold all the knowledge of the ancestors. More than I could ever learn. When we first came here, after the swamp was destroyed, they helped my soul to survive. They explained to me that even the things which are most sacred to us, even the very fundamental reality of all that we know to be true—the earth, beauty, harmony, family—is illusion, and can be destroyed and reborn whenever it needs to be, and that the truth of it does not die. They told me I had work to do still, but that someday I would see my family again. They taught me that Hanum’s people were not evil, and that things are more complicated than they seem.”
Lonely tries to imagine them: a council of white birds that soothed his horror, his red-hot grief, his bewildered pain, with their fanning wings. She tries to imagine their holy logic, their wisdom, their calm.
“Sometimes I think they are weakening,” says Sky now, with a kind of abstract thoughtfulness that sounds eerie to Lonely. “They rest in the lake nearly all the time, and do not fly far. Sometimes I am afraid they will die. I don’t know if they can die. Many have already disappeared, one by one, as if they were ghosts who could only last in this form for so long, and the elders who remain will not tell me where they have gone. They say I am not ready, that I will not understand. But I wonder if maybe the only reason we’ve been able to exist in this form is because people still dreamed. Because we were able to stay alive in their dreams. Maybe our whole lives are dreams—even my love for you, my time with you, maybe all of that is a dream.”
That’s not fair, thinks Lonely, wanting to stop him. I’m real. Don’t drag me into this. Don’t deny my love. But she wants to let him speak. She wants the trust he is giving her, so she stays silent.
“Now people don’t believe in dreams. They remember their dreams less and less. They deny them. They say they do not remember. And I’m not talking about remembering images they saw in their sleep. I’m talking about that part of us that dreams, that part of us that keeps the soul alive. They are forgetting that. And when they do—when they do, maybe, we die.”
She feels it again—the loss, the deadly weight of grief—and his fear that it is not yet over, that the loss will continue happening again and again. He is not feeling it now, as he speaks; she can see that, as he stares upward, his body squeezing itself shut to resist the wave that roars over it when he speaks these words. She feels it for him. For years, she thinks, this pain has been washing over him, daily, but he has been squeezing himself shut, trying to keep it out, trying to stay dry.
For the first time, she understands how far away he is. She was so mesmerized by the gift he gave her with his tears, the way he offered himself to her like that and let her hold him. But what he is saying—it isn’t about their love. It isn’t about Lonely. She doesn’t own him. His people own him. And when they die, maybe he will die, too.
“When will I meet them, the white birds?” she asks, her voice broken and harsh and careless.
“I don’t know. I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. I fought for my people, for the land. I was one of the few who fought. The elders told us not to. At the time I was angry that they would not join us, but now I see that the fighting only made it worse, only brought the inevitable on more strongly. My people respect me, but they are all my elders, and so I respect them far more.”
He pauses, and in the seriousness of his silence, she feels all that he doesn’t say. That he belongs to them utterly. That he would do anything for them. That he will never quite measure up to his own respect for them, and that whatever they ask of him, he will do. That he lives to serve something that was lost—more than to love her, more than for anything.
But then to her surprise, he turns to her and kisses her. He kisses her harder and harder, and then he is coming down on top of her, kissing her. Not like the sweet rainbow kisses they shared in the clouds. Not like the cheerful waking kiss at sunrise. Not like the blissful interlude of kissing between words. This time he is made of metal and fire, his hands clawing down her body with a desperation that shocks her. It belies all his words. It belies all his distance and the lightness of the great sky itself—this hot black dive he takes into her flesh, the careless determination of his tongue cracking her open. She hears her own hard breath as she clings to him, trying to open herself wide enough to take him—like a parched desert wanderer who is suddenly showered with waterfalls of rain but is washed away in the flood before having a chance to drink.
Under her dress he is already pressing to get in, and she feels it there, and it is beautiful. But she wants to touch it and look at it first, and it just wants to get in. His head now bent over her chest, his breaths furious, his body rocking against her as if he were weeping, pressing to get in—and she feels his fear.
She cries out as that thing that is his begins to crack her open where she’s not ready—still dry, still new. Her cry has anger in it, because something is not right. He stops.
“I’m sorry!” he cries back in anguish, dropping his head into her chest, not looking at her.
“No, I want—” Lonely pauses, bewildered. Didn’t she want this?
“I’m sorry,” he says again, more softly, and the lonely resignation in his voice is even worse. He rolls off of her, rubs his hands over his face in a gesture she has never seen, and then lets his arms fall to his sides and stares up at the sky.
“How can such a personal, selfish love not take me away from my duty to the world?” he says after a long time, his breath still coming hard. “It distracts me, to think of my own need for you. How can I be with you, and be joyful, and make love to you, when my people are dying? When all people are dying—inside?”
“Sky—”
“Lonely,” he interrupts, and she hears the bitterness in her own name, for the first time. “I could not save my parents or my sister. I could not save—I could not save anyone, yet. I have not yet proven myself. I don’t know if I’m ready to love.”
“But,” says Lonely, willing herself to be strong, not to let the fear take her as it has taken him, “you already saved someone, remember? You saved me.”
And even though you don’t know it, she thinks, you called me here, so I could save you. Now look at me.
He does. His eyes are so hopelessly blue, unlike those of his people—and she thinks she sees the secret hunger inside them, the only gift he has to give her.
But he doesn’t return the next day.
Or the next.
On the first day, she doesn’t go anywhere. She sits by the edge of the lake and watches the white birds and the other birds that mingle among them. The ones that are Sky’s elders are like swans, only slimmer, and when they come to shallower water they stand up on thin spider legs and wade. They do nothing quickly. They never come near her.
She is sitting close to where the little spring enters the body of the water and loses itself. As the day grows old and quiet, she tries to draw comfort from its sound, to understand its language. But when she closes her eyes, she feels only the weight of the water in her heart. She feels its darkness, moving slowly beneath the rushing patterns of light on the surface.
She begins to feel the cold in a new way. She begins to understand that this place of white and brilliant stone and painful sunshine is not only magical but also the coldest land in the world. Everything is cold. The raw, barren peaks, the steely grass, the faceless snow. It feels cold and it looks cold and its silence, glorious and endless, is cold.
Today she feels too heavy to walk or to wander.
I can’t believe that after last night, you wouldn’t come to me. Last night you trusted me. Last night you were almost mine, after all.
Sitting by the lake, she is able to watch, for the first time, animals coming one by one to drink. After all her days wandering the barren slopes that emptied into sky, filling up her vision with windy stillness, she had never imagined there could be so many animals here. Where do they come from?
The mice and the songbirds come in the morning. The elk come at midday. The raccoon comes in the late afternoon. The weasel and the fox come at twilight.