Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  It’s just me, says the wind. Don’t you remember me?

  Lonely closes her eyes, shakes her head. It seems like a hundred years ago that the wind last spoke to her, when she was young and hopeful, flying with Sky, and the world was made of light. Now it rocks cold around her and she feels its inevitability, how its loneliness owns the world.

  Stop, she says. I don’t believe in you any more. You lied.

  Don’t believe in me? But what did you think I was, to believe or not believe?

  She looks up. The sun draws its warmth in tight, in preparation for evening, as if in winter it has only so much energy to give, and must conserve its life force like everyone else. The Unicorn’s horn, which she keeps always against her body, begins to burn. Then it begins to hum. She reaches for it, and then he is there.

  Sky.

  He clasps her against his chest, his eyes quick and desperate, his mouth so close she can taste his breath. He whirls her halfway around, as if beginning a dance, and then he is gone.

  Then agony, even before the bliss has faded. She screams his name, clutching at the horn though she doesn’t know why. She screams his name, and then cries it, as she turns and turns in place, looking all around, for he is here, he is here—he must be, for she felt him in her arms.

  “Where?” she calls out to the trees, to the invisible animals. “Where is he?” Underwater in her own tears. They know, they know. “Please.”

  When she finally finds herself again in stillness, her face in her hands, and even her mind exhausted from crying out, the wind speaks to her again. This time it whispers warm in her ear, like a childhood friend she never had.

  Stop. You can’t find him now. It’s not time.

  “But I saw him,” she cries. “I felt him.”

  No. You were only passing by the same place, at the same time, on opposite sides of the world.

  Lonely opens her eyes, sees her own breath. She feels absolutely hopeless. She wants to lie down and let the winter take her forever.

  At the edge of the clearing, a great tree has fallen. She doesn’t remember it from the summer, but then again it was night then, and everything distorted by fire. Its black roots web the air, and where those roots still hook the earth, a black cave sucks at her vision. She feels the horn in her hands, feels the Unicorn nodding, the way the horse nodded to her one day long ago in the desert, saying There is water. The water is here. She is so cold, and the cold makes her tired. She trudges to the tree and lies down under the dark roots. She curls up her body against the frozen dirt, nestles close to the wood, lets soil collapse into her hair. She closes her eyes.

  Please, she prays to Sky for the hundredth time, with all the tenderness in her heart. Dream me.

  On the first day, Dragon lies still in the dry absence where Moon’s vaporous presence once stood, and dreams delirious dreams. He dreams Delilah comes down to him in her animal-skin cloth, and passes her naked breasts over his body the way she did the first day he came here, her mouth moving toward his hunger and her legs opening above his eyes into bottomless blackness. He dreams of Coyote, laughing. He dreams of the Unicorn, slipping its horn silently into the waters where Yora lived, and it must be drawing her soul out of those waters; it must be stealing her away, taking her from him forever in its wind of light. He dreams of Moon with erection in hand—twice the size of Dragon’s, reaching up to his chest—and when Moon comes, he comes blood. He dreams of fire coming at him from behind, but he cannot turn and face his great dragon mother, for he has wronged her somehow. He dreams of the goddesses in their cold white robes, and they open their robes and there is no woman’s body there, only the Unicorn. The Unicorn. And Coyote’s laughter.

  He feels thirsty for the river. He crawls to it. Yora is gone, but there is still water here, and it still quenches his thirst, at least for a while.

  “What now?” laughs Coyote. “What if you never find her, little boy? Can’t you survive on your own?”

  But when Dragon looks up with his mouth dripping, no one is there. He stands and begins walking home. No one loves him. He is completely alone. He has never before really allowed himself to admit this.

  On the second day, he just walks. He wanders like he did in the beginning, when he was waiting for Delilah to return each day, only now he’s not waiting for anyone, and he’s not looking for anything, and he’s not fighting or trying. All the desert is silent, listening to his footsteps. When he looks up, he can see his own face in the sky. When he looks down, he doesn’t recognize his feet.

  When he feels like it, he masturbates. He does it lazily, sometimes out of need, sometimes for no reason at all. He watches that part of his body in his hand, watches it grow tall, stretches its skin and toys with it, then does exactly what it wants him to do. He closes his eyes and indulges in fantasies of the bodies of all the women he’s ever desired, as well as women he’s never seen. He wallows especially deeply in images of the women who would not have him—the women in the white robes and the first, virgin Yora, forever unattainable—and in his fantasies they all fall under him weakly, and all the power is his.

  When he’s spent himself he lies still and stares up at the sky. He wonders vaguely about where he came from, why his mother threw him away, why he doesn’t remember his father, where the dragons went when they disappeared. But he has no feelings about any of these things. The thoughts come apart and drift away with the clouds.

  He walks on without intention, numb to the landscape, and sometimes, to feel something, he takes a bite of some piece of the land—the dust, the cactus—to feel the grit of it, but then he spits it out. Sometimes as he walks, he stretches his arms in imaginary punches, reliving his fight with Moon or imagining how he will kill the Unicorn. Will he strangle it? Break its horn? Spear it with a knife in the heart? Does the Unicorn have a heart? But his fighting stances fizzle out vaguely as he walks, because how will he find the Unicorn anyway? And anyway. Anyway…He can’t seem to hold onto a thought any more. He stops again and masturbates.

  On the third day, he’s still walking. The earth is flat; the sky is flat. The sand is hot; the sand is cold. Day, night, day.

  He realizes again that he isn’t even human. He doesn’t need anything. The only thing he needs is love. Is woman. He has enslaved himself to this one need. He has enslaved himself to Woman. And that must be why Coyote laughs.

  Then Dragon, half-mad with loneliness, laughs, too. He can’t stop. He has never laughed before in his life, and he feels like it might destroy him, but that’s what laughter is. It’s not caring. It’s realizing that what you thought was most important is not important at all—is, in fact, ridiculous. When he laughs, he seems to see his own face before him, and it is laughing, too.

  “That’s the only gift I ever wished to give you, bleeding lonely boy,” says Coyote, suddenly walking beside him. “The ability to laugh at yourself.”

  Dragon realizes that, all this time, ever since the first day he walked into the desert as a man, he has only wanted to win Coyote’s approval. He feels that he wants it even more than he wants a mother or a lover or an end to his own pain.

  He keeps walking, alone again, and without meaning to, he walks home. But when he arrives at his lair, the dragons’ boiling cauldron, all the water is gone. There is nothing but a black hole where the water once swirled, and coiled at the edge of the hole is a rattlesnake.

  What do you want? says the rattlesnake, his whole body moving at once, and Dragon freezes, unable to tell where the movement begins.

  “I want to meet my father,” says Dragon, without thinking.

  Faster than he can see, the snake rears up, flies into the air, and bites him on his shoulder—a wound to mirror the wound that Dragon gave Moon with his own teeth. It’s his left shoulder, the one that protected his heart. Dragon sinks to his knees, his eyes flashing colors, his penis convulsing up and down like the body of the snake itself, as
if the head of the snake had been severed and the body continued to convulse on its own—a mindless, spiritless, mechanical body. Then pain engulfs him and knocks him flat.

  He is dying. He knows he is dying by the way his body is carrying on like that without him, and he cannot feel it and has no control over it. He knows he is dying by the way all the longing of his life suddenly crowds up at once into his throat, so intense it will explode, and once it explodes—once it blows past that wall of resistance that is the reality of his life—there will be nothing on the other side but empty space.

  He thinks that never before in his life has he ever truly felt afraid. It had never occurred to him that he could die.

  He is inside his own lair but there is nothing there, no water and no earth, only that nothing blackness that doesn’t touch him, all around him. “Please,” he whispers. It isn’t the roar of his infancy, when dragons surrounded him and he should have been afraid, for he wasn’t afraid then. There was something then. And it isn’t the rage of his fire, or the rage that lurks beneath his silence with no way to express itself, when women keep their secrets from him. It is the voice of a childhood he never knew about, the childhood that existed in shadow behind the childhood he remembers where he was blessed and cherished and surrounded by flowers—the secret, unconscious childhood, in which all along he was terrified of being left again, and of what he was and of what he would become, the only creature in the garden with this strange, uncontrollable, extra limb.

  It is the voice of this child now, this silently terrified child. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

  “Give me a reason,” says Coyote, whose voice is the voice of the darkness, the voice he knew before he knew anything—before he knew the fire of sunshine, before he even knew his very first mother’s breast. “Give me a reason you should live.”

  “I don’t know,” says Dragon, astounded, and he doesn’t. He just wants to live. Isn’t that enough?

  “Oh well,” Coyote says dryly. “Make something up.”

  “Because I have to kill the Unicorn.”

  “You want to live so you can kill something!” cries Coyote and laughs. “That’s exactly right. That’s how we all live.”

  “Will I live, then?” trembles Dragon, who doesn’t understand the joke.

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” says Coyote. “It isn’t up to me. Are you, or are you not, afraid?”

  The question makes Dragon even more afraid. He is trapped in the nothingness now, with no control over anything—his senses useless, his body touching nothing. Quickly, he fights down a vomit of panic. Should he admit it, or not? If he gives in to it, will the poison overtake him?

  “Coward,” says Coyote. “You aren’t brave enough to be afraid.”

  “I am. I am afraid!” When he says it, he feels the power of it. “I am afraid!” he cries out into the dark. “I’m afraid!” He hears his own voice, booming back to him: not the scream of his infant self, the scream of helpless baby limbs, but the roar of manhood, with voice steeled into words, with certainty, with decision. “I am afraid.” He finds himself standing on two firm feet now, and the inner recesses of the cave wink at him from their corners.

  “How do you know you’re afraid?” whispers Coyote.

  Dragon opens his eyes wide. “My heart,” he says. His heart punching so hard at his insides, it lights up the darkness with the friction of its weight against his ribs.

  “Your heart is beating?”

  “Yes. So hard it hurts.”

  “Then you’re not dying, are you?” Coyote snarls.

  Then Dragon laughs again. He laughs and laughs, and his laughter sounds strange to him, like a wild dog barking its loneliness on a moonless night. The more he laughs, the more he feels alive, and the more he feels alive, the more the snake wound in his shoulder hurts, and he falls to his knees again.

  Coyote is on top of him. Coyote’s teeth are at his throat, Coyote’s claws in his shoulders. Dragon fights back with everything he has. He uses his teeth, too, and his claws, and he protects himself, like Coyote does, with a shield of shaggy hair. He snarls like Coyote, and when Coyote turns into a dragon, he breathes fire back at him. And when the dragon turns into a Unicorn, Dragon fights that Unicorn’s spear of light with his own hot spear of darkness.

  Then Coyote turns back into Coyote and then into Moon and then into his goddess mother and then into the father Dragon realizes he’s pictured over and over in his mind—someone who looks just like him, only cruel and distant and infinitely stronger—and then back into the Unicorn.

  “What is the Unicorn?” demands Coyote. “What does it look like?”

  “White,” pants Dragon. “It’s white.” But then he closes his eyes and knows what he means. White like the robes of the goddesses that I could never touch. White like the virgin’s skin, that I wanted to be worthy of but which forever shamed me.

  “What else?” demands Coyote.

  Beauty. Grace. Sad eyes, disappointed in me. Cold eyes…Dragon hangs his head now. The shame eats him up, both within and without, hotter than his own fire.

  “What about the horn?”

  Unbreakable. Unbendable. Holy.

  “And you want to kill it?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “I want—” But Dragon doesn’t know. I’m so tired of this shame, he thinks. “I want to be a man.”

  “A what?”

  “A man.”

  Dragon opens his eyes and there is Coyote, sitting coolly, his paws crossed neatly before him, smaller than Dragon but entirely confident. They sit there together, underneath the world. Dragon feels something spinning behind his heart, like fire and water at once, and he thinks it might be his soul.

  “Then you must no longer seek all your nourishment from women,” says Coyote.

  In the dream, Lonely is walking over white frozen fields. She has been walking forever, searching, following the fleeting shadow of someone who is afraid to be loved, and does not want to be seen.

  But she is tired. Her body is tired, and it is also hungry, thirsty, and weak. She falls to her knees on the ground. That’s when she sees the tree, the one she’s sleeping under in real life, but in her dream it’s less than one year old, long ago at the beginning of its life, and only beginning to grow.

  “What are you looking for?” asks the tree, in a voice full of wonder.

  Lonely brushes the snow from its tiny, leafless body, and sees the red wounds at its tips where the new life will sprout again in spring. She thought she was looking for a boy called Sky. But instead she says, “I’m looking for my name.”

  “What is a name?” asks the tree.

  “It’s what someone calls you by,” says Lonely, “when they need you.”

  “Ah,” says the baby tree. “But everyone calls you differently. It depends on the caller, doesn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the water calls me, it feels different from when the earth calls me,” says the tree.

  “But the water doesn’t need you, does it?” asks Lonely, distracted a little by her confusion, and also by her concern for something so fragile in such a brutal cold. “It’s you that needs the water.”

  But the tree sounds very sure. “No, the water needs me also. We call to each other.”

  Lonely looks at the tree and says nothing.

  “A moment ago,” continues the tree, “you could say I called you. I called you through the earth, and the earth called you through your body, and your body called you with its tiredness and hunger. But are tiredness and hunger your name? Maybe there is no call, but only a connection that connects us.”

  “How do you know all of this?” cries Lonely. It is only a little tree, only a simple life, with no brain.

  “How do you not know this?” asks the tree, without judgment.

 
Lonely is silent again. Because I didn’t come from this world, she thinks. Because I don’t understand where I come from.

  “Anyway,” says the tree. “I don’t know what a name is. You have to figure out what it is, and what you want it for. Is it something you truly need?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They sit for a little while. Lonely hasn’t moved. She is thinking. The wind is quiet. This is a dream, so she doesn’t feel as cold.

  “Do you remember how you began?” asks the tree after a time.

  “No.”

  “That might help. If you could remember how you began.”

  “How did you begin?” asks Lonely.

  “In a squirrel’s forgetting.”

  “In a what?”

  “A squirrel. He buries the seeds in the earth. He does it for himself, because he thinks he owns the earth, and he thinks when he puts them inside the earth, he will have them all whenever he wants them. But the earth takes us back. He can’t remember us all. And the forgotten ones—we are the ones who become something else. We become trees.”

  “You are the lucky ones, then. The forgotten ones.”

  “No. The ones who are eaten become Squirrel. We all become something.”

  “So it doesn’t matter what happens,” says Lonely slowly.

  “Of course it matters. Everything matters.”

  Lonely smiles. She spreads her legs and then crosses them, repositioning herself so that her knees surround the little tree and her warm body leans over it. She bends down and gently breathes over its tender form.

  “Does that feel good?” she asks.

  “Yes,” says the tree. “Does that feel good?”

  “What?”

  “My breath.”

  “Oh,” says Lonely, surprised. “I hadn’t noticed!”

  The tree is silent then, and Lonely feels sorry. “Thank you,” she says quietly. She breathes out, and breathes in. She does one and then the other, and then the first again, in endless alternation. But the tree does both at the same time.