Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  She lifts the pot and pours the water.

  “I found him,” she says simply.

  Eva nods. “And then you lost him.”

  “Yes.”

  Then she tells Eva everything. The journey up the mountain. The dress Chelya made, the Unicorn at the waterfall, the dream she woke in. The lake at the top of the world, the nights in the clouds, the dreams he left her for, the white birds. Flying. Crying together. The meadow she made bloom for him, the Council of Beings and the loneliness of a single perfect human being who would never return to the earth. Making love, and the long fall, and the Unicorn again, and the heartless colors of autumn. Every word she speaks frustrates her. Every word spoken belies the hugeness of her emotion, the shadowy romance of her memory, with its music-less simplicity. Eva’s reaction, calm and unsurprised, doesn’t help.

  “And now I’ve failed, after all,” Lonely says finally. “She’s going to bring me back to the island. And I’ll be a prisoner there forever.” She bites her lip to keep from crying.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Eva, and Lonely looks up from the wet sheets she’s squeezing furiously in her fists, shocked. “It’s still your life, after all.”

  “Maybe I don’t want it,” Lonely says dully, looking down.

  Eva snorts and shakes her head. “Lonely, we are earth people. We know and believe in our lives right here, right now. This house, this earth, this family is everything to me. This is what is real to me, and all I can give you—”

  “You don’t believe me!” Lonely cries. “You think it was all a dream.”

  Eva shakes her head again. “You’re only naming your own fear. I’m saying that you must begin where you are, right now. Where are you? You don’t even know.”

  Lonely punches the sheet into the water, balls it up, presses it back in and punches it again. Her hands are red.

  “I’m sorry,” says Eva, but her voice—again—sounds more irritable and cold than the voice of comfort and wisdom Lonely remembers from her journey up the mountain long ago. “I know you want answers, and I can’t give them to you. But you’re hiding out in your sorrow. You’re taking the easy way out.”

  “It is not easy.”

  “Lonely, you haven’t even begun. Actually drink from that bitter stuff inside your heart and you’ll see. Follow that sorrow and you’ll see. Go out into the winter and see what it feels like! See if you can love him even after you’ve lost him—love him here and now, in this life. What does it mean to love, Lonely? Forget this old woman who has told you to bring back proof of some illusory thing. I tell you, she is leading you astray with her own mistakes. The point is to prove if you can love. That’s all that matters. That’s what makes you real.”

  Lonely stares at her. She remembers the doe in the fields of winter, and her gentle endurance. She feels held by some familiar warmth that floats around her, something she’s always felt, perhaps, when she’s paid attention: something she felt in the first meadows of her journey, and in the tower and in the sea and on the earth and in the sky—everywhere. Yet it is so vague . . .

  She keeps staring at Eva, but Eva keeps chopping vegetables, not bothering to look up.

  Dragon can see Delilah’s lover haunting her empty cave. Or the boy she said was not her lover, but he doesn’t know if he should believe her.

  Dragon has never seen another man, and he’s suspicious. He watches Moon’s arms, his legs, his swift torso, his silence. He doesn’t trust the boy’s brooding face. He doesn’t trust the careless darkness that swings in those muscles. He doesn’t trust the emotions of the boy which, unlike Delilah’s, remain unseen.

  For days, Dragon hides and watches from among the pink-gold archways of stone, those same archways under which he once fell to his knees before the mystery of Delilah. He doesn’t want Moon to see him until he is strong again. For he can see that this boy is a god.

  Sometimes, lately, Dragon thinks that he has never really known himself. Rising up in the Garden, tearing down the mountainside, stumbling through the desert, clinging to Yora, crying out in boiling caves—he never knew what he was. Now he has been consumed. He has been devoured by the very woman he trusted, the very woman to whom he sought to give his soul. She has emptied him out; she has almost destroyed him. He feels weak, his bones clanking inside his human body, his flesh wasting away as if with hunger. He has stayed near the river, a slave to it now, always thirsty since he took that first, fateful drink.

  At first Yora was a relief to him. He braved her turmoil and she drew him in, and finally she swept over him and took him, welcomed and laid to rest his fire just as he had always wished her to do. There was such peace then. Or was there? Was it peace, or only a dry desert inside, which began as emptiness but ended in terror—his fire spent and sucked out of him, his selfhood lost? He could not feel himself. He woke alone, and the fire rushed upon him all over again, filling that vacuum of space, and he was more desperate for her than he’d ever been.

  He wants to kill the Unicorn that he saw thrusting its brazen horn inside the river—blinding him with its light as if whatever passed there was not meant for him to see. Ever since the Unicorn walked out of the absence of moonlight, out of the winter darkness—while in that stricken silence Dragon lay on the sand, too weak to move—and stepped past him, ignoring him, unafraid of him, and sunk its horn into the river, he can no longer feel Yora’s presence. He seeks her in the river. He seeks her everywhere. But she is gone.

  Only when he sees Moon, the boy god, shimmering in and out of his consciousness like a rainbow around the immobile, wordless blackness of Delilah’s cave, does Dragon remember Delilah again, and realize that she, too, is gone. They are all gone. The first Yora and the second, and Delilah, his first love. Just as the three mothers—human, beast, and goddess—abandoned him, one by one.

  The landscape inside him feels so dry now that the fire catches on nothing, and burns hotter the longer he focuses upon it. The boy called Moon hovers in the air outside Delilah’s cave, going in, going out, and then holding still like the morning fog in the deep thickets of Dragon’s youth, untouched by the sun.

  Dragon steps into the light. He tries to feel the way the sun makes him glow, makes him mighty. But it makes him nauseous. He coughs a flame at Moon, steps forward, curls his fists in and out—but each time he closes them, they close on emptiness.

  “I know who you are,” he tells the boy, and he makes his voice blank and hard.

  Moon turns slowly, his form solidifying a little. He floats down to the ground to face Dragon, and this gesture of politeness irritates Dragon terribly, like pity. He feels the grey peace inside the boy. He feels the subtle apathy of his thoughts, impossible to know, and the strength of his secret patience. He hates him for these things.

  “I know you,” he growls again, unsure of himself, impatient for a response.

  “I don’t think so,” says Moon, and his words betray only a cool, thoughtful consideration, but Dragon can hear the unspoken challenge. Dragon is nearly jubilant in his fury now, the fire tumbling out of him in fast-peeling petals of flame. This boy is a water god. Dragon realizes this and is stunned. He is drawn to the boy as if his very life longs for its own death.

  “Where is Yora?” he roars. And that name includes all of them. It is all the same loss and the same deception.

  “Where is she??” He flames toward Moon. “You are only a little boy, you are a girl, you are nothing. You are nothing. I will destroy you.”

  He cannot see the boy’s face. In his fury he is already crushing the watery form of him in his own skull, and the waves of his own heat blur Moon’s image. But he expects the boy to deny his accusations. He expects him to say he doesn’t know where the woman is—that he has not taken her, that he is not keeping her secret. Just like Delilah denied it. He expects this and waits for it with an inexplicable anxiety. When he receives no answer, he keeps yelling, just to d
rown out the frantic suspicion that what stands before him is nothing but a mirage.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know where she is, you coward. You—don’t tell me you only love boys. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it!”

  Then he feels the first blow. The glory, the relief, the instant redemption of that first hard fist against his madman’s faceless face! He had no idea that it was possible. He had no idea that this little water god could hit him. But now all faces, all words, all thoughts fall away and there is only the tumult of flesh and pain over his body, and his own body reacting, transforming with the boy’s punches and punching him back. The boy’s skull in his hands, the boy’s knuckles in his ribs, the boy’s bones meeting his bones as if the flesh around them were inconsequential and always had been.

  All the lovemaking—the surrender of falling into Delilah, the sweet friction of the first Yora’s virgin skin, the luscious pleasure of the goddesses who came down to his cave, and the melting relief of the second Yora’s ancient wave—was all so precious, so needed, so wildly good. Yet nothing in his whole life has ever made him feel more alive and more real than the simple, unfeeling violence of his body interlocked with the body of another man. He throws his fist into that body and it does not get devoured, does not surrender, does not lose itself in the mystery, but rather bounces right back off the hardness of resistance—the other man just as angry, just as sure.

  Now, for the first time, anger is real. He knows what it is. He knows its language and the taste of that language in his mouth, metallic and red and striped with gritty darkness.

  They fight all day, and all night, and all through the next day.

  Finally, Dragon, in a roar of frustration at seeing his flames die and die again in Moon’s cold embrace, opens his mouth and bites down. He feels the flesh of Moon’s shoulder come apart in his teeth. He hears Moon’s uncensored, un-silent scream—like the most primal pain of manhood, like the first question, the first injustice, that high, gut-risen cry. He lets go.

  Moon stands and gushes blood. Dragon did not know a god could be wounded in this way, and he feels at once proud and envious. He wants something he cannot name. He wants to say something to the boy but has no words for it. The feeling pulls up his chest, beautiful and broken. He wants to give the boy something.

  For the first time in his life, he wonders who his father was. And as soon as he thinks it, he wants to know so badly it makes his knees shake.

  “You win,” says Moon simply, and then he begins to dissolve into vapor, and then he is gone.

  But in that last moment before he disappears, Dragon sees Moon’s face clearly. He sees the anger, still there, still fully alive. He sees the red fire born within Moon’s watery depths: that very first rebellion, that very first No. Dragon remembers it from his own birth: he remembers, even before the scream he screamed in the cave of the dragons, his first scream upon exiting the womb, his very first fury against life.

  No, say Moon’s eyes, with an anger so hot it is cold, an anger so deep it dissolves him before Dragon’s eyes. And when Dragon, suddenly silent and exhausted again, reaches into the place where it seemed Moon stood, he finds only the faintest impression of coolness there in the sand under his hands, as if the circumference of a person standing—not much bigger than a heart—was shadowed for just long enough to lower its temperature by one, maybe two degrees. But in the time it takes him to realize for sure that Moon is gone, the sand is hot again.

  He understands that Moon wanted him to wound him. He came here for that. He needed to feel that—he needed so badly to feel something, to know he was real.

  Dragon understands, because he needed that, too.

  Kite has always loved the winter.

  He loves the cold. He loves the quiet elegance of it, its tactful calm, its thoughtful steadiness. He loves even the clench of cold around his skull, like a helmet, and the way it crawls over the skin of his head, pressing at the pressure points of his mind.

  He is happy to be walking through the mountains when the first snow falls, because he knows he’ll miss that in the desert and in the City where no rain or snow ever touches. When the flakes begin to fall, he lifts his face into the silence and lets each one imprint his face with the careful importance of its design. He closes his eyes and sees visions of things he’s never seen—creatures that haven’t evolved yet and the vague thrust of human minds toward the future for the sake of the future itself, whatever it is. In winter, the world dreams up what it will be, or what it could be, or what it never was, or what it could have been. Kite loves the possibility inside this silence. He feels the trees ache with its poignant weight. He feels the wise thoughts of the earth and loves the mystery of them—that bigness too big to understand. That freedom of the unknown.

  He turns back to the rabbit runs, searching for where they converge. It takes a long time to travel when he has to stop so often to hunt for food. He crouches with his slingshot and decides to wait. As the snow thickens, the rabbits will begin to move toward their burrows. He’s not far from where he left his pack, where he plans to make a fire and camp for the night. It might be the coldest night yet, and it scares him a little, but he planned on being scared sometimes, so he figures he can handle it.

  Kite has been planning this journey for so long that he can’t remember when he started. He was planning it long before he finally decided to do it—long before he felt himself old enough, strong enough, ready enough to do it. The City has fascinated him for as long as he can remember. There is knowledge there that will make their lives easier. There is knowledge there that will bring light and security and warmth, and it will make that nameless, floating anxiety that his mother feels—that she makes everybody feel—go away.

  He left at the end of autumn. It was that summer when he finally decided for sure. It was, in fact, that night he stood close to Lonely in the basement. She had leaned toward him, her body smelling of the sun. She was the mystery of all that he had yet to discover: all the excitement of other people, other powers, other lives out there that he’d been forbidden. His mother was afraid of her. Kite was afraid of her, too, but something about her eyes that night, and her questions, and her hesitant hand on the pages of his book, and the quickened, fervent smell of her nearness, made it so that the life he knew could never fully satisfy him again. He felt that he had to act on his dreams immediately.

  So he decided then, but he waited until his family didn’t need him as much. He waited through all the summer and fall harvesting. He was trembling on that last day they gathered the hay, as they closed up the barn, as they brought in the horses, trembling at the nearness of his journey and at the guilt of not telling them. But he never doubted his decision.

  While he’s waiting for the rabbits now, he tries to stay focused on the sounds of the night and the presence of things coming and going. But he thinks, too, of where he is going, and the great mystery of what he hopes to find. He shrugs his shoulders, which ache a little from the weight of his pack. He couldn’t resist bringing one book with him—the one about solar and wind energy. He is fascinated with the idea of energy. What is it? What part of him can feel it? Sometimes he searches the air with his own aliveness, trying to sense its presence. He knows that the life of the animal passes into him and gives his own life when he eats it, but what is that? It is not the animal’s spirit, which leaves it before he takes its body into his own. It is something contained within the cells of life itself, even after it seems dead. And how is it that the wind, too, can be made into life, and the light of the sun can be eaten by the trees? How is it that these things, too, can make a house alive, can make it live and breathe and light up like an animal?

  Nothing excites Kite more than this: this raw, absolute power which cannot be seen or sensed in any way, yet is more real than spirit, more lasting than life.

  The night shrinks colder, and he sees no sign of the rabbits, but he smiles to himself in
the twilight.

  Back on the mountaintop where Lonely first recognized her, the Unicorn studies the shapes of the clouds for many days. Every shape of cloud is new and random, completely unrelated to any shape that came before it. The clouds have no system, no theory, no future. Watching them is the easiest way she knows to forget the past.

  Everything on the mountaintop is frozen now. The grasses are frozen so the wind cannot turn them. The stream is frozen in mid-thought. The highest mountain, above her, where she sent Lonely once in a dream, is as frozen as it ever was. The ring of wetness around the waterfall is frozen, like a gleaming mouth. The broken chrysalis of the butterfly is frozen, and the butterfly is dead.

  The Unicorn doesn’t sleep or eat. Her only need is to watch the clouds, her body hidden, waiting. Finally, one day when the clouds have lost their design and amassed into a pregnant grey ceiling, and the snow begins to fall with lacy, anticlimactic slowness, a crow lands on her back.

  She turns her head so that she can see him, because she can barely feel his weight. There is pride in his upright stance, his full chest, his glass eyes. But his claws on her bare back are gentle. She senses his respect. When she shivers, he doesn’t let go; he rides her shiver like water, and remains standing firm when she settles.

  She turns away from the clouds and walks. She walks fast—and then she trots—and then she runs. Then she slows, circling the waterfall, her white hooves sure like little picks in the ice. The crow remains.

  He stays all day and all night. The Unicorn doesn’t look at him again but she feels his presence, his spirit bursting with air, his body intensely calm, his mind as patient as the desert. He frightens her. He haunts her like a shadow that rides above her body instead of below. His darkness, his undeterred stare, imply to her some curse she has tried to forget, some inevitable distress.

  “What do you want?” she asks finally, in the morning as the sun advances behind them. It seems ridiculous to her that this bird should ride her. He, a creature whom the sky itself can carry, sits down here on the back of someone who stumbles over the earth on four legs. He must want something then. Everyone does. But she cannot imagine what she could give him.