Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Your breath comes from trees,” the tree explains. Then, as if the two ideas were connected, it says, “I know Sky, too, of course.”

  Lonely pulls back sharply. “You do?” she cries.

  “Why are you surprised? You know him too.”

  “But I—But, how do you know him?”

  “The way I know everything.”

  “What way?”

  “The way everything knows everything.”

  Lonely closes her eyes. The tree breathes out, and she breathes in, and her body shifts. Beneath her, that tiny vibration runs through the surface of the earth. It makes a hibernating insect turn over in the cradle of its cocoon. That friction melts a drop of water, and that drop of water is drunk up by the roots of the nearby grass. Then the drop of water travels up the blade of grass and evaporates into the air. The wind, in a force of randomness, tosses it back and forth between its billowy hands and then slings it off toward the forest beyond. It joins with other droplets, and the droplets make the air heavy, make it drop. The wet air sinks and gets colder in a black hollow under a stump where a weasel is crouching, and the weasel twitches once, to warm itself. The moonlight catches on its fur, and the movement catches the eye of the owl who was watching, trying to determine if what it saw was alive. The owl pounces and kills the weasel with a quick squeeze. It carries the weasel back to its nest and calls to its mate to come eat. The call of the owl wakes a woman in an isolated farmhouse in a valley nearby. She lies awake and thinks of her daughter, who went to work in the City and never came back. She has no phone, but she thinks so hard about her daughter that the daughter catches that thought—in a way that sometimes happens between human beings who are connected through blood or deep emotion—and her daughter, working late in an office far away, looks up, looks out the window. She stands up, sees the moon, and tries to remember something. The motion of standing sends invisible waves of dust—skin and hair and particles of her life’s path—swirling into the air. Some of them contain the scent of salt from the sweat of the people who sat in the same seats she sat on in the subway that day. The salt smells like the sea, and she remembers suddenly a day she spent with a lover once by the sea, and she wants that moment back, suddenly, now, so she picks up the phone and calls him. He isn’t home, but as she leaves a message on his machine, her voice travels through the telephone line under the feet of the shivering starlings, and they clasp their feet tighter around the vibrating wire, but a few of them fly away. They fly over the moon for a moment, casting a shadow over the path of a moth, who shifts its direction to get back into the light. And the moth, veering in its path over the marsh where it lives, is seen by a fish lurking under the water, and the fish leaps up and catches the moth in its silver jaws. As it leaps, the splashing water catches the light of the moon, and the woman rocking her baby on the open porch of her little hut looks up and smiles. Then she looks back down, and gives her little boy a name—something beautiful that this single, soon-to-be-lost-forever moment inspired in her mind.

  Lonely can’t remember that name, because it is only a dream.

  But she knows the baby is Sky, and maybe the past and present and future are all connected as easily as places are—though they seem unreachable. “But why is he only a baby?” she asks, crying.

  “For the same reason that I am only less than a year old,” says the tree. “In the other world, I am over a hundred years old, and I am dead, and you are sleeping under my roots which once held the earth together. But you are dreaming into the past, because you are searching for how things began. You are searching for your name.”

  “I love him,” Lonely says, remembering the baby’s face, which was very serious, but not sad. “I have to find him again. I will.”

  “Yes,” says the tree. “Everything is connected. Everything knows everything else.”

  “But how do I know where to go? I don’t know what world he’s in, or what form he’s in, and even if I did, I don’t know how I would get to him.”

  “It’s not so complicated,” says the tree. “I, for example, love the light. Right now, the light is easy. It’s all around me. But even when I’m older, and other trees grow up faster around me (because I’m the sort that takes my time, but I live longer than the others), and I can’t see the light any more—or only in glimpses—I’ll never have to wonder where it is. I’ll simply keep moving toward it. I’ll change my direction, I’ll wind and turn. I’ll grow any way I have to just to reach it. I never have to think what to do or where to go. I have only to keep growing. And when it’s time to grow leaves, I grow them, and when it’s winter, I drop them, go silent, and wait.”

  “But you have an instinct in your body,” says Lonely. “You know to grow upward.”

  “You have an instinct in your body too,” says the tree. “And I’m not just growing upward. I’m growing downward. For every branch I send up, I have to send a root down, or I’ll fall.”

  “That’s why I came back down the mountain. Because you can’t go up without going down.”

  “That’s right. Now you and Sky are part of the same tree—part of the same growing. One of you is the roots and one of you is the branches, and you’re growing at the same time—that’s how you keep each other alive, on opposite sides of the world.”

  “But then we’re growing in opposite directions!” Lonely cries.

  “Don’t worry,” says the tree. “Life is a circle. There are no opposite directions. Please, don’t think so much.”

  Then Lonely wakes up.

  She wakes up through layers and layers of earth, as if rising from the clay into the richest soil, into the leaves still decaying from ten years ago, five years ago, and one year ago, until she opens her eyes with her head cradled in the noisy youth of the still whole, dry leaves who died only two moons ago. But she can feel the richness of centuries pillowing her head.

  And oh! The moonlight in the snow all around her looks so curvy and sexy and wild, she wants to laugh. “It’s beautiful!” she cries out, but her cry makes no sound. For a split second, she feels every tree and being in the forest connected in joyful anticipation, leaning in as if with love, holding tight together as if with hands.

  Rye is lifting her up. “How many times do I have to rescue you?” he smiles at her, but she sees a tense concern in his eyes, and that longer hallway of sadness behind it, deep into the rooms of his hidden mind. She can see everything. But she can’t speak. Nor can she feel the ends of her body—the tips of her own branches, where the leaves would sprout in spring.

  As he carries her home, again, his body gradually warms her, and the first sensation she feels of her own human flesh is excruciating pain.

  Dragon listens to the dragons whispering, as they do sometimes. Since he came here, their ghosts have not given him wisdom, nor answered his questions, nor taught him what to do with that great fire within. But they have kept him company, and he is grateful for that. They have understood him. How he longs to be deeply among them, to live carefree among the wild and the lustful, to live unjudged by other creatures who live so naturally in their fire that they never question it, never fight it.

  But he cannot live among them. He is all alone and human. So he tries to be brave, takes a deep breath, and says to Coyote, “I must learn to conquer this need. I must no longer need this. Do you hear me?”

  “Then do not be afraid of sitting with desire, not knowing when it will be satisfied. Why are you afraid? What will happen to you, lonely boy?”

  Dragon closes his eyes. It feels like a force that will overtake me.

  “But what can it do to you?”

  Dragon breathes. He sits with it. He stands up and walks around with it. This is his home, and he knows this hardness against his feet. Held in, the fire feels different. He doesn’t masturbate. He doesn’t try to raise it up into his spirit. He sits and he walks around and he sits again. He feels like he is holding a
breath in his throat. He feels calm in his decision, but he doesn’t know if the calm is real. Maybe there is anger behind it, that he still cannot feel.

  He feels heavy. His face feels heavy. His arm muscles, his belly. He feels joyless and calm. He tries to breathe into that area of his body, but his mind turns hazy, resisting contact.

  “It’s your thoughts that make you desperate,” says Coyote, without moving his face. “The thoughts make it worse.”

  Dragon thinks about his thoughts. There are other ways to look at the situation, surely—other than to think that the women torture him, to think that he is under their control, to think how unfair it is. But he doesn’t know what those other ways are.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh,” he roars. Coyote says nothing.

  To truly be in control, he must not think of revenge. He must not imagine them coming back to him and begging him, and himself holding back and keeping distant in order that they suffer what he has suffered. Because if there is anger in it, it won’t work. He can see that. If she never comes back, he can’t let that frustrate him. If it frustrates him, that shows she is in control—not him.

  The thought comes, as it always does: but why must he control it at all? Why can he not have what he wants? Isn’t it natural, what I want—and not evil, after all? This is the thought that has always stopped him before.

  “But it isn’t fair,” says Dragon.

  Coyote laughs out loud. “I know nothing about fairness,” he says. “I couldn’t care less about fairness. What is fair?”

  “Then what is the point?” yells Dragon.

  “You tell me. I know nothing about points.”

  Dragon sighs. The point is that he doesn’t want to suffer any more, and so he must learn to feel these feelings without suffering.

  He is strong, isn’t he? He can live with anything. He can live through anything. He survived dragons and solitude and abandonment. He can survive this. Nothing can hurt me, he tells himself. Desire cannot kill me. Frustration cannot kill me. These things just happen.

  “Shut up,” says Coyote.

  “I’m not talking.”

  “You’re talking in your mind. Shut up and listen.”

  “To what?”

  “To yourself,” says Coyote. “I’m bored.” And he disappears.

  Alone alone alone. Dragon tries to listen. He tries to watch desire rise up, tries to understand it. No, not understand it—not think. Just watch. Just listen.

  But eventually he has to listen to himself out loud.

  “What is this? This that I feel? What is desire?”

  “It wants to express itself. It has something it wants to say.”

  “What? What does it want to say?”

  “It wants to be heard. I want to be heard.”

  Dragon swallows. This seems like something. But the desire remains.

  “I want to put myself out there and I want you to receive me,” he tries again. “You, Woman. That’s it. I want you to hear me. I want you to see me!”

  Silence.

  “Because I’m alone. Because I have only myself here. That’s why.”

  It’s nice, talking to himself. He finds he can trust himself more than he realized.

  “But I feel lonely. I always feel lonely. Why does everyone leave me? Why?”

  “What is this. What is this desire. WHAT IS IT.”

  “Why does it make me suffer so much?”

  “Because I feel bad about it. That’s why.”

  Dragon sighs.

  “Maybe I have to love myself more.”

  “But I still feel lonely. Why?”

  “Enough with the why,” says Coyote loudly, and Dragon opens his eyes and finds him there again. “Try this, boy-man. What would you be without this desire?”

  Dragon looks up. He hadn’t realized he was looking down. When he raises his head, energy flows up his spine, connecting him head to foot.

  “I would be nothing,” he says, shocked. “This is my only purpose in life. Without this desire, I have no purpose. I don’t know why I’m alive. I don’t know what it means to be a man, besides this.”

  The realization falls into his stomach as if from a great height, like a boulder that had wavered precariously over his head for his whole life, and he hadn’t even been aware.

  “Okay,” he says quietly, after a long time.

  Coyote is silent.

  “What is my purpose then, if not this?” His erection aches terribly. It cries out. He wants to touch it, comfort it.

  “You’re a god,” says Coyote. “You don’t have to condemn the human part of yourself to be a god. But you are a god. So get it together.”

  Dragon closes his eyes.

  “Okay,” he says again. He will surrender because he has to. He did it once for Yora, and he can do it again for himself.

  Dragon meditates for another day, and another night. He doesn’t move.

  When he thinks he is finally at peace, Coyote appears to him once more. “What do you feel now?” Coyote asks.

  “Grief,” says Dragon, and then he puts his hands over his face, and out of nowhere, his body begins to shake.

  “Good,” says Coyote, and he is gone again.

  Dragon shakes so hard he thinks his limbs will fly from his joints, and his skin will crack like stone. The tears don’t even seem to come from his eyes, but rather like sweat from his face—his face twisting so hard inside his hands that his jaw and forehead cramp up and his hands are dripping. Then he begins to sob out loud, croaking and rocking into the darkness, and he can’t stop.

  He sobs so hard that rocks crumble in the mountains above him and loose themselves in helpless avalanches over the desert. He sobs so hard that the dragons, far below near the center of the earth, clutch at each other, and the women of the City turn in their beds, moaning and spreading their hands over their forgotten bodies, dreaming of the princes they glimpsed in their husbands’ eyes when they first met them. He sobs the sob of a warrior who has watched fellow young men slain at the most earnest peak of their manhood. He sobs until the sun bends low in the sky to see, peeking with its most vulnerable rays into the forbidden caverns of his home, quivering with primal fear. He sobs until, for the first time since the dragons of his childhood gave him up, he owns his own heart again.

  On the last day, he has a vision. He sees the form of a boy lying face down in the sand, on rolling dunes far from the river, where he himself first crossed over from the mountains. The boy’s hair is long and wild, like his own. And he realizes that so many moons ago, when he left the Garden behind, he also left some part of himself behind on the way, because it shamed him. The goddesses had abandoned him. But he made it worse by abandoning himself.

  Dragon stands up and climbs through the boiling water to the light of day. He feels calm and thoughtful, with the past and the future swirling around him, as if he’s standing in the eye of a storm. I am a man, he thinks. He thinks fleetingly of Delilah, and he knows that she knew this about him, and he knows again that he loves her, and this thought is happy and completely without need. But he puts that thought aside for another day.

  I’m a man. He closes his eyes and laughs.

  Then he sees, behind his closed eyes, the boy again. He sees the boy lying in the sand. He realizes suddenly that the boy is not only a symbol of himself.

  There is a boy, half unconscious, lying somewhere out there in the waterless expanse of the higher desert.

  The boy is human, and the boy is real. And Dragon must rescue him. This is his first task, as a man.

  Because of what happened to her, Lonely gets the bathtub to herself. She is the first one to enter the hot water, when it’s still clean, and no one makes her get out so that someone else can get a turn.

  The winter almost claimed her. She almost entered into it forever, so that if she’d lain under
that tree a little longer, all her body’s feeling would have left her, and for her it would never have been summer again. Winter is not a season to be fooled with, child, Eva had scolded her as she wrapped her in blankets while Rye heated the water. This is not the kind of courage I was speaking of—throwing yourself out into the cold with no intelligence, no intention, no respect, lost in your own selfish melancholy. This is not a responsible way to dream. But in her scolding, Lonely felt her love. She felt, too, the love of Chelya, who had left her beloved in order to search for Lonely, and who had come running home to tell her father that her friend was unconscious and would need to be carried. She felt the love of Rye, who carried her, and who gently poured the water, bucket by bucket, into the tub without looking at her or Eva. Even Fawn had watched solemnly from the doorway as Rye carried her in, and she didn’t look angry—only scared.

  Because of what happened to her, Lonely gets to relax all alone in the luxury of warm, loving water, the heat of the stove just reaching her through the curtain from the main room, and she gets to stay there as long as she likes. The warmth snuggles up to her muscles, curls up like a lover inside her limbs, makes her fingers and toes ache with life, and melts tension from her shoulders, her neck, and her face that she didn’t realize was there. But alone in the tub she feels sorry, for all the love she has been given and not returned.

  How much this family has done for her! And for no other reason than kindness. Despite all their fears, despite all their sorrows. She resolves, from now on, to be a better friend, to be the kind of person who is worthy of the love she wants. To find Sky, she must begin all over again with love. She must learn to love, starting here, starting now.

  She hears Rye’s voice on the other side of the curtain. “Lonely?”

  A feeling too fleeting to name rustles through her. Her stomach turns over gently. “Yes?”