Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Is her intangible grace, her foggy peace, too awesome for him ever to grasp or enter? Does she leave him because he isn’t powerful enough to keep her? He looks for her every day but has not seen her now for a quarter of a moon. The loss of her terrifies him. He never sleeps.

  The rains come: winter rains, sudden and long but noncommittal, just as suddenly gone again. There is no compassion in them. Dragon stalks along the riverbed, glowering into the water that has returned there, searching its deepest places. He sees Coyote drinking from the other side. The subtle sensuality of Coyote’s lips over the water makes him angry. He can see the muscle of Coyote’s throat pumping up and down. A dry breeze passes upriver between them. Coyote’s eyeballs roll up to meet Dragon’s, but he keeps drinking.

  Delicious, says Coyote.

  “Raawww!” yells Dragon, hurling a stone, hating Coyote for his ability to satisfy a simple need. Dragon has no human needs, no purpose, except for the one need which is never satisfied.

  Drink then, says Coyote and walks away.

  Dragon kneels, seething.

  He bends low, his face close enough to the water to feel the icy aura of its passage. He glances up, to make sure that Coyote is gone. A bird cries out, and he freezes. Is it talking about him? He’s so lonely out here that sometimes he thinks everything is speaking to him, in a language he can’t understand.

  Now he looks at the water, and the water changes, as if by magic, and seems to still. Maybe Coyote left some magic behind. Now the water shivers to a pause, in a way impossible for it to do, the rushing around it blurring on the edges of Dragon’s vision, and now he sees a face emerging in that stillness—and he’s panting like Coyote himself in his eagerness, because he’s sure that Yora is finally appearing to him again.

  But it is only his own face, which he has never before seen.

  A beast there, unbearable to behold. Not a god, not a man, but a mad demon of desperation, hairy and red, his eyes rimmed with black, the whites of his eyes blinding.

  He stares in horror yet cannot look away. Who is that other that overtook him, when he plunged into Delilah for the first time? Who is that other who drives him furiously onward after Yora, wanting her so badly that the wanting is murderous, merciless, unfeeling? Who is that other who has no heart, who eats his heart into darkness whenever he starts to feel it?

  Without meaning to, he is leaning so close now that he feels the water on his lips, and then his tongue. It doesn’t feel the way it feels against his hands or his legs. It moves again, the moment he touches it, and it pours upward against his inner mouth.

  Something is coming at him in that water—something that could devour him, erase him. He pulls back swiftly and stands, then glances around once more. His reflection is gone, and he doesn’t want to see it again. He doesn’t want to remain here, on the outside, looking in. He strips off his magical pants, his hands trembling unaccountably. Clenching his fists, he enters the river, and stands with feet wide apart, as if straddling it. For the first time in his life, he feels vulnerable in his nakedness. He kneels again, this time inside the water. It reaches his belly. He has to hold onto the stones to keep from being swept backward by the current. He bends down and tries again to drink.

  The water enters his mouth faster than he can decide it, and he swallows without even trying. Something wakes inside his rib cage; something dawns.

  She’s inside the river, he thinks.

  But where? How? How to get inside? He buries his head in the layers of cold. He can feel the water battling him; it closes his ears. He breathes it in and breathes out fire, and the water boils momentarily and keeps going, bubbling past him. He screams her name, but underwater it comes out in a language he doesn’t know. He can’t see.

  His determined fury makes him crawl against the stones, dragging himself forward.

  But this cannot be Yora—not this roaring, fighting thing, not this wildness. How can she be so angry, so violent in the face of his need? He begins to cry, the tears of an orphan abandoned in a den of dragons—his tears the first tears that come from drinking real water—but his tears, too, are swallowed up in the river that bore them. Please, he cries soundlessly. Come back to me. Come back and hold me. Mother.

  Then he has to let go, and the water rushes him backward so fast he can hardly remember himself, or the story of where he came from, or why he is here in the desert, all alone. It tumbles him over and over, crashing him against the stones until his blood reddens the rapids, and he’s aware of pain but moving too fast to know where it comes from or where on his body it strikes, or even that he has a body, with any form at all. Then the water drops him into a pool that deepens and deepens, or maybe he is only deeper beneath the rapids, in the depths she has always hidden from him, that he never knew were there.

  He opens his eyes in the blackness and sees, alone in an open space, the single, small body of a girl, wrapped up tight like a pebble. Her skin reflects an opaque light, from nowhere. She seems so far away, but when he reaches out, she raises her head and opens her eyes. Then she unrolls herself and crawls toward him, swims toward him and over him, and she is at once human and fish, and now bigger than the moon.

  “Yora!” He calls her name to save himself. She will engulf him. He will die inside her. Yet this is what he has always wanted. She comes over him—is everywhere, but untouchable, unseeable, like the goddesses of his childhood. She comes over him, a grey mist of confusion, not knowing him, her eyes as cold as the eyes of snakes, and also everywhere.

  He waves his limbs with the unfocused randomness of fear, like an infant.

  Yora chills against him. Liquid flesh, she rubs his warmth, spills around him, seeking him. Something like rage moves her. Something like rage makes her so cold she might freeze, so lost she must cling to him, so determined that she will not let him go.

  He has something that belongs to her.

  What is it? She cannot even remember. She circles him, as if water could be a predator.

  Something inside him.

  Like a human being, she sings the song of her body against his chest, leans back, lets her hair stroke his neck. Breasts, nipples, she brushes him. She will feel something. She will remember. In the touch of him she will find it.

  He sits perfectly still now, trembling, a fetus in its original waters. “What do you want?” he whispers.

  But Yora has no hands, no feet, no words. She wraps her tongue around him. She slithers her body against his—each crevice cupping him, pinching tight his flesh—and a movement that belongs to neither one of them is opening her in circles. What is it? A motion, a rhythm they are trying to remember, to which their lives were once aligned….

  Be still, she tells him, when he reaches for her. She will use him if she has to. She will use the longing in his eyes, the tension in his muscles as she touches him, to remember herself. She moves against him until she is lost inside that motion, until she cries out inside it, until it—not he, not her memories, not her fear—owns her, and then he is moving too, desperately, and in that movement she does remember, after all.

  She feels it now, as she whips her endless tail: she is the river. She is the mystery. She is the bottomless source.

  Long after he is exhausted, long after he has forgotten, long after he has crawled like a tattered impression of himself to cling to that shore which is precious to him—that world which is all he needs, though he never knew it—that movement will continue inside her, and will carry her on.

  For she, the river, cannot linger. She remembers now. She has gotten her self back. She takes it in her mouth and runs.

  Moon meets the Unicorn in a dream. He has never seen a Unicorn before. Nor does he see her now; instead she comes to him as music. Music as delicate as silence, and then coiling forth in a rich thicket of bells.

  Then it is thunderous, and then waves, then notes as close together as raindrops but with the
spiral of a single, deadly melody vining its way up from the center.

  “You sound sad,” says Moon.

  “Because I remember you,” answers the Unicorn, in words made of glass, “and you don’t remember me.”

  No, thinks Moon. I have never heard anything so beautiful. No wonder Delilah was afraid to search for you after she dreamed you. She doesn’t believe she can face up to such beauty.

  “Never mind,” says the Unicorn. “I came because I am looking for someone.”

  “Where am I?” asks Moon suddenly. He isn’t aware of having a body. Only consciousness, thrusting urgently into the white music of the Unicorn.

  “I don’t know. You are dreaming. You left your body somewhere. Be careful. I know where I left my body, a long time ago—and it isn’t going anywhere. But your body—do you still want it? Do you know where it is?”

  “I don’t know,” answers Moon, though far away he can feel the weight of it, the pain of it, the muck of it. “Do I need it? Does a god need a body?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” answers the Unicorn.

  Moon considers. “I keep breaking it,” he says softly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s still alive. Why? What does it want from me?”

  “Perhaps it loves you,” says the Unicorn.

  Moon has a glimpse of fur—a flank, a soft spine. He wants to touch something, but he can’t because he has no fingers with which to touch. “My body?” he repeats, not understanding.

  “I do not know,” continues the Unicorn. “I left mine long ago. But lately I have been like someone else’s body. I have carried her. I have felt her hunger and her thirst when she could not feel it. I have made her come alive. As her body, I have come to love her.”

  Moon follows the spire of the Unicorn’s horn with his listening, round and round and into the blue and lavender ethers. He is fascinated by her words. He wants, with his soul, to move in the direction she is going, whatever that is.

  “Who did you say you were looking for?” he asks.

  “I am looking for my father,” she answers. “And I am looking for you. I am looking for the man who desires the River, and wants to conquer her. I am looking for every man who denies himself, who fears his own heart, who destroys what he loves because he is lost from himself. I am looking for him, as he looks for himself—as once he looked inside me, to find himself.”

  Moon nods. He understands, more or less.

  “Do you know a boy named Sky?” she asks.

  Moon shakes his head.

  “I thought you might know him,” says the Unicorn, and he can see her eyes, which remind him of Delilah’s, “because you are a rain god. You come from the sky.”

  “But I haven’t seen the sky for so long,” answers Moon, and as he says it he feels that it is true. He no longer lives there. Maybe he left to escape his father’s fury. Or maybe his own hopelessness pursued him, after his father denied him and refused to give him the rains. Maybe he left to escape himself, or the role he was supposed to play, a role he didn’t believe in any more—even if his father would let him—because no one on the earth believed in it, and it no longer seemed like his gift to give. But for whatever reason, he left the sky behind long ago.

  “If you see him,” says the Unicorn, ignoring his denial, “tell him a Unicorn is looking for him. Tell him I request his presence in a dream.”

  Then the Unicorn, from wherever she is in that music, bends into him, pours her horn into his heart. He feels it pouring into every molecule of his soul, as if that soul stood there in the wind with her in the same form as his body—that same perfect, star-shaped human form, with its wild legs and its waving arms and its shining head. He feels parts of his body that he didn’t remember were there, as the numbness of forgetting sifts out of them like dust. He is filled with joy, as if joy is nothing more than that pure hope of the flesh: that hope he was born with, that each person’s body emerges into the world with, when it still believes it can do anything.

  “In you there is rain,” says the Unicorn. “It is like new life inside you, untainted by anything on the earth. It is a fresh start. And if you can get up into the sky, you can send it down. Start giving people love instead of trying to take away their pain. That’s the job of rain. It’s the part of the water cycle that gives. Don’t you remember?”

  Moon stands there on nothing, his soul smiling foolishly.

  “Go and find your body,” the Unicorn says in a fading voice, “and tell it what I told you, before you forget.”

  Moon wakes instantly. His limbs rush inside themselves and his toes are tingling and his penis stands erect and happy. He had no idea he and his body were so closely connected. He lifts his fingers before his eyes and stares at them. He misses his flute. Where did he leave it?

  “I love you,” he tells his body. That seems like the main point of what the Unicorn was saying. When he says it he remembers something: another time when he felt like this, when he felt alive again—really alive, like the whole universe manifested through his being. It was when he traveled with that girl through the rainbow.

  He remembers how she stood to meet him at the waterfall, how she took his music inside her. How she stood and came toward him, her heart like a sky. How his little kiss transformed her. How such little love as he could offer filled her with hope. It was she who carried him through the rainbow, on the lightness of her wings, though she thought it was the other way around.

  He needs to be that light again now. He needs to be up in the sky, if he is ever to let the rain down—which right now, for the first time, feels possible again. How water shimmers in the air, how gifted and excited it is to carry every color in the world in its prism! And what music—what music it makes. He can almost remember what that’s like.

  But how does water reach the sky? This he cannot remember. How does it rise?

  A flame lights the darkness. For a split second it is the original flame—the flame in the Unicorn’s eyes, the flame he remembers from too long ago to remember, the first flame that humans ever invented, and the surprise of that new world exploding into being in the once-eternal blackness of some deep, lost cave.

  Then he remembers where he is. A room somewhere. The dull mask of a passionless face leers toward him in the dim light, and smoke makes him cough. He smells chemicals, old clothes, rotting food. A human hand reaches toward him in the dark. But he sees Delilah’s eyes, from somewhere far away, and her sadness for him. Why has he never allowed her to truly reach him? Why has he kept himself away from the scorching truth of her love?

  “Fire,” he says out loud. That’s how water gets into the sky.

  He stands, shaking himself like a dog in the cold room, and makes his aching way to the door. He has to get back to her. Back to his own dear sun, Lil, who will finally dissolve him back into the heavens.

  A fire burns constantly behind the grate, and Lonely stays by it as much as she can. She doesn’t go outside if she can help it. The sorrow of her long journey down the mountain endlessly chills her, and it seems that all she wants, all the time, is to be warm. Hunger, too, makes her cold, for though there is food, there is never quite enough of it.

  It seems clear that Kite’s bed will remain empty—not to be used by her—as if its very emptiness might bring him back. Lonely doesn’t mind sleeping downstairs, though. Most of the time she only wants to be alone. Eva’s presence is so light, so clean, that it barely disturbs her. She has to concentrate to hear the old woman’s breathing, as she herself sits awake through most of the night, mesmerized by the flames.

  During the day Lonely tucks herself away wherever Fawn is not. If Fawn is working outdoors or in the greenhouse, Lonely huddles by the fire, imagining herself invisible in the shadows. If Fawn is working in the kitchen, Lonely curls up in the greenhouse swing, closing her eyes and listening to the sweet talk of plants in sunlight who think it’s still summer, until she falls asle
ep.

  Indoors is different in the winter. In summer, the inside of the house was a brief space of repose, where the ongoing thrills of the outdoors were concentrated and savored within the live circle of family. But in winter, most of life happens within this single room. The house breathes slowly, hibernating but conscious. Upstairs in the morning, the secret family—the family whose deepest intimacy is hidden from Lonely, and which she envies above all else, even in its sorrow, even with its wound, even with the hole that Kite left because even that hole implies with its pain how much love holds them together—all wake beside each other. The scent of their bodies is thick in the air. Lonely is always awake already, though she doesn’t want to be, while Eva keeps breathing deeply and Chelya tiptoes down the stairs. Sometimes she can hear Rye and Fawn, still up above in what she imagines to be the coziest of winter beds—the bed on which Fawn once made love to her. But their voices are always tense.

  “Of course,” Rye told Lonely right away when he came home that first day, “you can stay as long as you need.” But he sounded tired, and that morning Lonely had woken to the sounds of him and Fawn arguing—she’d never heard them yell before—and Chelya had stood crying at the edge of the room, her hands over her mouth. Lonely had gone to her and put her arm around the girl, moved out of her own self-pity by tenderness. But though Chelya did not move away from Lonely’s touch, she did not seem to feel it either. Her body kept shaking with heartbroken cries, and Lonely knew again that she herself was not a part of this family—and that the ties of family hold stronger than any ties of friendship, or any laughter spent together in times long past.

  Rye had found Kite. There was little doubt that he would; he was such an experienced tracker that he knew the pathways, kinships, and life stories of over half the animals in the forest. The forest didn’t need to speak to him to tell him who had traveled where, and when. But before he came upon Kite, Kite had turned back and confronted him.