Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Sometimes Mira still remembers these moments, when she cannot remember anything else.

  How she loved being small! If only she could have stayed small forever. To the earth she would always be small, because it was so much bigger than she—her growth so insignificant.

  She loved seeing the people pass by and knowing they could not see her. It wasn’t that she wanted to watch them. The only people who came to the fields were the older boys who frightened her, their whoops of laughter hurting her ears, the smell of beer turning her stomach. But she loved sensing this danger all around her and being able to save herself again and again with her invisibility. It was the only thing she could control: this stillness, this ability to make nothingness out of her own body.

  It’s okay, she would whisper to the spiders and the ants. She felt that she lived here, in the fields—that this was where she belonged. The boys who came were intruders, invaders at a disadvantage because they did not know the secrets of the land. They did not know about the insects that crawled beneath their feet, slipping easily away unseen. They did not know the languages Mira knew, of the birds who cried in their nests. They had no patience, and they could not hear the silence, and she knew that eventually they would go.

  Only Mira could hear the silence, even amidst the noise. It was older than noise. Even though, as Mira grew older, the noises increased—so that not one moment of the day or night passed without the sounds of trucks, people, construction and destruction, dogs, and stereos indenting or breaking its peace—she could still hear the silence. There were sounds, far more subtle sounds, that referred to that silence. The gasp of the wind awakening the grasses, and the songs of wrens or doves, held the silence in between them. These sounds existed solely to dress that silence in beauty, so that at the instant of their ending one’s attention was so alert, seized by rapture, that the silence afterward shone that much more brightly. By focusing on the language of nature beneath the language of the City, hidden there in the pattern of the meadow, Mira could always find the silence. It was a living entity that breathed even while the noise persisted.

  She stayed safe there, in that silence. And one day she would learn to speak it herself, and when that day came, it was the only language she would ever speak again.

  Lilah used to come there, too, long ago when Mira was too small to think yet of hiding herself. Lilah did not know the language of the spiders, but the wild spirit of the meadow itself knew and loved her, and Lilah ran with it, and Lilah used to run also with a young god—a boy who was gentle and girlish and did not frighten Mira, though still she preferred to play alone. She was happy to know that Lilah and Moon played near her. In those days, she would walk out in the open, or crawl through the grass with her ear to the earth, knowing that the tough fire of her sister, wherever she was, would keep her safe. Moon knew the language of silence, too, and he could play it on his flute, and he never asked Mira any difficult questions.

  But the time came when Lilah no longer came to the meadow, and Moon, sad and lonely, dissolved. Lilah stayed now in the alleys with the other boys. Mira did not understand what passed between them as well as she understood the languages of the spiders and the flowers, but for some reason she found herself hiding from her sister now, just as she hid from everyone else.

  Except for her father, of course. He was the only one who could always find her.

  Mira’s father was a holy man from another place long ago—a place ruled by tall shadowy gods and tusked goddesses that the City men later razed to the ground. Alone without his people or his land, he had only Mira to confide in. He taught her everything she knew. He taught her the languages of the animals and how to speak to them with respect. He taught her about the Earth trapped beneath the City and how it longed for the rains of the sky, its lost lover. He told her about shape-shifting, though he no longer knew how to do it himself. He knew all about hiding, because everything beautiful and good in the world was hiding—hiding in these pieces of meadow marked for development, hiding in people’s breath as they slept, hiding in the unmarked graveyards of dustlands that once were forest, and hiding sometimes—perhaps—in the body of a girl.

  He told her about the Unicorns, and he told no one else.

  Once, he said, there might have been thousands of them, flowing through the night, and every ancient culture had a story about them. Maybe Unicorns came from the sea, or maybe from the sky. But he could not remember, any more, what they looked like, or how to find them.

  She was his last hope, he said.

  Her father could always find her. And why would she want to hide from him? He was her father and knew everything. He understood her, and she understood him. He loved her, and he needed her as he needed no one else. He loved her more than Lilah. He taught her his secrets. Why would she hide from him? For she could tell that he was dying inside. That this world could not sustain him—that his day, whatever it contained out in the grey haze of the City, flattened his spirit, flattened his eyes, made him come home wild and possessed by other spirits that were not his own. She knew about the medicine spirits, contained in sacred plants, that could connect him with the other worlds. But there were other spirits that turned his eyes to fiery spirals and his words to curses and her mother’s expression to fear. Only Mira could save him at those times. She was the goddess for him, the goddess his people used to honor, who had been taken from him. He took her into his arms—he would save himself in her.

  Why would she hide from him? She needed him. And yet she trembled now, when he came.

  She who became so skilled at watching, so skilled at silence, watched the women in her family carefully. There was something she did not understand, something that frightened her, but how could she be frightened of her own father, who loved her as no one else did?

  She watched her mother, who never touched her father, and who was never touched. She watched her mother, bewildered, as if from a great distance, for the sound of her father’s entrance was a roaring in her ears that made it difficult for her to concentrate. He always knew where Mira was. His spirit sought hers before he even entered the room. And her mother’s eyes were always upon him. Sometimes she said to Mira, Go and comfort your father. He’s always calmer when you’re around. So Mira went to him, and after a while her eyes burned whenever she looked at her mother, and what she felt toward her mother—a fire that could kill her if Mira let it out—had no name and frightened her.

  She watched her sister. She watched the things her sister did with the boys in the alley. She thought her sister was happy doing those things. She did not feel the burning toward Lilah; instead she felt cold whenever she looked at her sister. She knew that Lilah was stronger than she was. She knew that Lilah had found some way to survive, some way that Mira could never know, and she knew that Lilah would not teach her.

  Mira did not want to grow bigger, but she did. She couldn’t stop the growing, except by eating less and less—and even then, she grew. Then they began to mow the meadows every year, and the grass no longer hid her. So she stopped speaking, but even then she could still be seen.

  Only after her father died did Mira realize the hatred she felt inside her. When it came, stinging her throat with its acid tide, making her scream and wail sometimes beyond her control, she felt such terror—to know that she had hated her father so much, perhaps it was this very hatred that had killed him. She could tell no one. She only wanted not to exist. Every part of her existence was painful. The spirits that her father had spoken with haunted her, babbling accusations in her ears until she could not hear her own thoughts. Even the earth seemed to hate her now, stabbing her feet like broken glass with every step, for she had betrayed him. She feared the creatures that once had trusted her, and she feared herself—her own rage and her ever-growing body, her breasts that men would look at. There was the guilt of knowing she had not fulfilled the one role that made her worthy of her own life: to save her father. And she hated
herself, for she missed her father—without whom the world was alien and cruel—and it was her fault that he was dead.

  The strange thing is that now she is hidden again, after all. She is more hidden than she could ever be in the open meadow or the corners of the apartment. She is hidden in a place where no one in the world can ever find her. Not even the animals. Not even the soft voices of the wind. She knows that she deserves to be here, that she is safe here. She knows that she is crazy.

  But underneath all that craziness, hidden even deeper than this most hidden place, deep inside herself, she understands everything.

  She understands the way her mother lost herself. She understands why Delilah will never forgive herself. She understands what her father truly wanted. Mira, Mia, my own….

  Sometimes on days when she felt brave, she used to creep to the edge of the meadow, to the edge of the world—not where it overlooked the City, but where it overlooked the River Yora that ran out of the City, away to the sea. Mira never went down there, never touched that hurried water with her hands. But she liked to dream her way along its currents from up above, for from there its passage looked slow and silver. She knew somehow that the river was the way out—the way out of everything, and the way home.

  Later, after she was locked away here, she met the goddess of the river Yora in human form. But by then, such beauty only hurt her. She no longer wanted to be rescued. So she gave the river her soul, so that she wouldn’t have to keep it. Mira gave her soul away in the form of a fairy tale, something that would stay safe in the realm of imagination and dreams, something she didn’t believe in any more and that she would never have to feel inside her again. It would pass on forever in the river, she thought, always moving, always escaping away.

  She did not understand then that the river would return in the end, as all water does, to the place where it was born.

  “Delilah!” Dragon calls. It’s him, again. But she doesn’t move.

  The desert is no longer safe.

  She stares fiercely into the darkness of her cave, her body rigid, and into that darkness she follows the spiral dance of the grouse, and deeper into the depths of herself—still awake, still not dreaming, no—she can feel the deer, her sister, the one who recognized her.

  You thought you knew darkness, the deer’s eyes say, but you were wrong. It lies even deeper.

  “Delilah, I know you’re in there. I came out for you. Come out for me.”

  She holds the boar tusk tightly in her fist, but in that gripping there is pain.

  For seven years the desert’s silent winds have wrapped Delilah in forgetting. The animals have distracted her with their ever-present lives, waking, hunting, and dying with no memory or question. The desert has daily opened before her, season after season, pages of infinity. Every day is blank. Every day there has been only hunger and solitude, and the purity of these two states of existence has kept her safe from pain. Almost.

  But now the men are coming, in the distance, paving a road before them. On clear days Delilah can see their black insect forms shimmering in the heat waves on the horizon. On still days she can hear the low hum of machines, almost an octave lower than the hum of the river.

  On the last full moon, when her body’s old lust for the violence of men overcame its various pains one more time, she walked out toward them, richly glowing in that honeyed light of the moon’s ripeness. The cold night air ached, and she did not know what she would do.

  But when she came within sight of them she stopped and could not go on. The men—working at night because, like her, they could not survive the heat of the day—moved with a cold finality. They didn’t have that innocent brightness like they’d had when they came wandering across the desert in search of things. Even then, she realized, when they’d come to loot the jewels of the land she loved, they’d at least brought with them a sense of wonder—a yearning for mystery, even if that yearning was misplaced. Now they only wanted the road: a way to cross space, a way to get through it and past it—destroying it as they went—and get to another place where a new City would be built on top.

  That was what Moon meant, she realized, when he spoke of disconnected places, the way cars sped people from one place to another, with no sense of what lay in between. This was what lay in between. Delilah’s home, and the whole universe around it. But the road would erase it. For the people, it would only be an empty space between one City and the next.

  That night Delilah watched the men lay explosives in a part of the ridge that stood in their way, and that formation she’d known for years—that certain pattern of reality, of earth that softened and pinkened in the sunset—disappeared in a puff of moonlit dust. Delilah felt that explosion in her own spine, as if the bones of the Earth were the bones of her body; she felt it at the roots of her, where she had, only moments before, longed for the sword of that male body to slide in and fill her. The explosion filled her instead, sending a ripple of pain up her spine that dropped her to her knees, where she sat for hours with her chin tilted forward toward that gruesome wreckage as they kept working, silent tears stroking her face in mockery.

  She’d been fooling herself all those years. She was so lonely, she’d convinced herself she was a goddess, that she had the power to turn men’s hearts away from destruction with the touch of her little black hands. But she didn’t have that power. The truth was, she’d done it for herself. She’d done it because her own need was so great. She still felt that need, pulsing and pulsing from that soft, ridiculously vulnerable nest between her thighs, and she cried because nothing could fill that need but more pain—and she could not accept any more pain. She’d had enough.

  “Delilah,” he whispers now just below the opening, as if whispering into her breast, and she shivers. “I need you. I’m so alone.”

  These days she can’t remember her dreams because when she wakes the first thing she thinks of—eclipsing all memory of sleep—is the men coming slowly toward her, dragging the road like a great blindness behind them. As soon as she wakes she strains to hear the hum of it, wondering how long it will be until they lay an explosive right outside her cave.

  She doesn’t go to the pine forest. She learns to catch fish in the river. She digs for them under the mud. It takes most of every night, and sometimes into the morning, but it’s easier now in the dry time of autumn, when fish get caught in shallow pools or wriggle panicked in small channels where the water barely still clothes them. She’s not very good at catching them, especially when the delirium and irritability of constant hunger make her clumsy. But there is a carelessness about her now, as if this won’t go on much longer. There is some decision forming within her before she is fully conscious of what it is. She sees the helplessness of the fish who are stranded, and thinks it is not so bad after all, to put them out of their misery.

  Whatever Dragon thinks he loves in her, he is making it up. He is only desperate, because his goddess leaves him day after day, and he cannot find her (Delilah knows this, for she has watched him). He thinks now that, because Delilah spoke to him once in an unguarded moment, because he made her come, he has some kind of power. Or maybe he feels sorry for her. Maybe he has some ideal about his love, how it’s going to heal her, how it’s going to turn her into a sweet and colorful winged thing. But she doesn’t want his pity.

  Days before the moon forgot itself in darkness again, she could already feel the blood that would flow from her, a song of loss waiting to be sung. A body thin and angry and starving cannot support a child, and it knows no love will come to it now.

  Her bones hurt when she crouches so long in the water waiting angrily for the fish, and her wrists hurt when she supports her weight as she leans over her little pool to drink. The pain that began in her spine has spread through her body. Maybe she is growing old, like Moon said. Maybe she has lost track of the years, or maybe time passes differently in the desert.

  But when she l
ies awake in her cave during the day, she can still feel the animals move inside her. The ones she’s killed. She feels bigger then, with a whole universe of creatures possessing her. The great boar slashes pain through her body with his tusks, but there is no malice in his gesture—only a sense of inevitable opening. The gentleness of the rabbit, too, at once nervous and steady, one blade of grass at a time, brings her inward, making her want to hide in her cave all through the time of bleeding, wrapping herself in the black moon of solitude.

  yours will be the hunter’s death, the deer had told her. But if the hunter’s death is starvation, she won’t accept it. She won’t accept that humiliation, that emptiness—so much worse than the quick surrender of the prey to its killer’s jaws. There is at least romance in such surrender, and some satisfaction in the union of two bodies, whereas starvation will be long and painful, full of weakness—days and days of helplessness to the needs and agonies of the body. One cannot even control when the ending will come. There will only be nights and nights of failure, of disappointment, of loneliness when she knows that the great web of life itself has abandoned her.

  She is trapped. The road will keep coming, and there is nowhere else to go. Every night she wakes hungry and dreamless, with the taste of fear in her mouth, and knows this: the desert is no longer safe. The desert is no longer home. Her dreams have abandoned her, the animals have abandoned her. Because the road is coming now, and she can no longer deny her own humanness. She can no longer deny that she is no better than those men, who do nothing but destroy, and for whom she has lusted and lusted again.

  But still, she refuses to die this way. She refuses.

  Each day the ravens pick at the fish heads and bones that she scatters on the sand. They are loud and excited, talking about the treasures they found in the trash heap on the edge of Delilah’s horizon—a heap that grows almost as quickly as the road. To them there seems no distinction between human and animal, bad and good magic. They can take their nourishment from the debris of the City or a kill in the road just as easily as from the leavings of an ancient predator. It doesn’t matter to them. It all comes from and returns to the same darkness.