Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Shortly after he arrived, he began to see this girl more and more, and often there were other women gathered around her, touching her and ringing her round with flowers as if worshipping her—and then the men gathered around her too, and the magician was so jealous at their closeness to her that his whole body hurt all the way down to his toes. He had already decided he would convince her to run away with him somehow, when the terrible thing happened.

  “It was dawn. They all gathered on the central bridge. The girl was crying—beautiful tears that seemed to call the tears out of the sky, for right then it began to rain. All the people surrounded her, so that they covered the bridge and spilled out onto the decks and bridges around, and some of them hung from the trees, and the children sat on the branches. The women were singing a song that chilled him to his heart, and weaving round and round her with garlands of white feathers, and the feathers had come from birds who had been devoured by the Dark Goddess. The magician knew this because he had seen an old woman gathering them after a bird had been taken just yesterday, lowering herself deftly down on a rope to pluck the floating feathers right out of the water.

  “Then the girl he adored climbed over the rope railing and stood on the other side, just barely holding herself to it with trembling fists, and all the people went silent. And the magician understood, suddenly, that they were going to sacrifice her to the monster.

  “He had heard about human sacrifice, it seemed, long long ago. It was something he’d thought no one in the world did any more. But in that moment the understanding came rearing up into his mind as sudden and real as the monster herself, as if sacrifice were an intimate piece of his body’s unconscious memory of human history—as if the horrible idea of it had always lurked inside him, waiting to become real.

  “The magician was young then, and at the peak of his powers. The anguish and the loneliness he had held in for so long, and the magic he had hidden from people who feared it, and the passion he had struggled to hold down in these long days of watching this beautiful girl he desired—all this exploded forth in him now as incredible, unstoppable energy. He strode forth from his invisible glass ball, and walked right across the air toward that swinging bridge, and he sliced his sword through the air and cried, ‘No!’ His voice was so powerful that the rains stopped at the sound of it.

  “Of course the people all turned in shock. As he continued to stride toward them, many of them bent down in fear and the women covered their heads, for they were a peaceful people, though acrobatic and strong, and they had neither weapons with which to fight nor any knowledge of fighting in their bodies. Some of the elders stood their ground, too old to be afraid, and just watched him come with a sad, silent resignation in their eyes, as if they had expected this all along. But the girl herself did not even turn around. She was still holding onto the rope railing and leaning out over the water, facing away from him. The magician thought it impossible that she could not hear him, could not feel the commotion all around her, and so—remembering the look she’d given him once when she’d stood on the bridge alone—he could only surmise that she had known all along that he was coming. She had known all along that he would rescue her.

  “As much as he longed for a world of eternal life and happiness, this magician was so full of pain that without thinking too much about it he sliced his sword in a circle all around her to clear the way, wounding several people. For now he hated them and thought them all murderers. He gathered the girl up easily in one arm, and to his joy she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his shoulder as he leapt off the bridge and back into the air again. The feel of her body surrendering against him made him feel he could do anything.

  “But as he reached the tops of the trees and was about to fly off with her somewhere he did not know, something clamped around his neck and began to choke him, pulling him backwards, downwards, toward the water. For a horrifying moment he thought that somehow the Dark Goddess herself had risen up to take what belonged to her. He thought he had violated some ancient magical law—for though he had faith in the invincibility of his own magic, something about the mysterious songs and prayers that supported this people’s magic had always made him uneasy. But as he twisted and struggled in that grasp, grabbing hold of tree limbs with one arm and still clutching the girl close with the other, he became aware that what bound his throat was only small human arms, and that what pulled him back was only a human boy. Then that nameless fear which had weakened him for a moment dissolved, and he was able to throw the boy off, and in the branches of the treetops he faced him.

  “The boy was unarmed, but he was wild. His eyes filled with a deadly fury that seemed foreign to this peaceful people, and which the magician had not seen in any other pair of eyes here. The magician was vaguely aware of the wailing and crying behind him. Because he was a magician, he could dance in the air, but the boy could step and leap nimbly over the branches of the trees the way other people can move on solid ground—so nimbly that sometimes it seemed to the magician that the boy stepped on nothing but leaf and shadow. The boy did everything in his power to make the magician let go of that girl. He bit the magician’s wrists with his teeth. He leapt in his face, screaming. He poked his eyes and his throat and punched him in his vulnerable places. At first the magician was so startled by such mad, senseless courage—a kind of violent determination that he had never witnessed before in anyone but himself—that his magic faltered. Even though he was a grown man with a weapon, it was difficult for him to fight without his other arm for balance and with the boy ducking and dashing so expertly beneath each blow of his sword.

  “But then something happened that changed everything. The girl spoke to the boy. The magician did not know what she said, of course, for it was spoken in their language. Her voice was gentle, and what she said seemed only a few words long—made at once of animal hisses and angelic song—but when she said it the boy’s face fell, and he stood still and his arms dropped listlessly to his sides. Then he took a step back, and the magician saw shame in his eyes, and pain, and loss, and all the emotions he himself felt which he never wanted to feel again.

  “It took another moment for the magician to recover from his shock and realize that the boy was no longer fighting him, and that the girl he longed for still clung to his side. And then, with a cry of victory, he rose into the air and disappeared.”

  Lonely pauses and takes a deep breath. The children, her only anchor now to this reality, say nothing, but she can hear their soft breathing, and how light they are—not heavy enough yet to fully occupy a space on this earth, still half in that other world from which they came, not yet grown big enough to encompass all of their spirits with their bodies. And so their spirits hover around them, big and wide, watchful and listening.

  Tell the truth, those spirits say. Tell the truth.

  “Hanum,” she says, her throat closing for only a moment, and then relaxing. “Hanum and his bride traveled aimlessly, then, through deep jungle, the deepest darkest jungle which surrounded that marshland. Sometimes Hanum thought that they would never find their way out. But he was in ecstasy for he was no longer alone in the world. He had his bride, and he made love to her day and night, and she gave her deep eyes to him and held him, and though he could not understand her words, he imagined that she loved him back. The more intensely he felt the thrill of that love, the more he began to believe that the magical secret of that place—and indeed the secret that powered the magic of all the world—lived in this young woman, and now belonged to him.

  “But by the time they emerged suddenly from the tangled depths to a bright day on a desolate beach by the sea, something had begun to shift. He could feel the girl drifting away from him. She no longer responded when he touched her, and her beautiful eyes were often elsewhere, and sometimes she would not eat the beautiful fruits he brought to her or wear the beautiful flowers he picked for her. On this beach, ever encroached upon by the sea, cover
ed with the sun-bleached, twisted corpses of giant oak trees and the hard delicate blossoms of a billion tiny snails, he followed her round and round for days, helplessly watching her weep. Finally she sat down at the edge of the waves and looked out into the infinity of the sea, and would not rise again. He had talked and pleaded with her for so long, without receiving any answer because they spoke different languages. But now, without looking at him, she spoke one word in his language:

  “‘Home.’

  “Hanum froze. ‘But they were going to sacrifice you,’ he said quietly. ‘They were going to kill you!’

  “‘Home,’ she said again. She would not move, and she would not follow him any more.

  “But still he believed that she belonged to him. Still he made love to her, and still he felt himself the owner of that secret magic that he had stolen from the hidden depths of the swamp. That’s when Hanum, in his desperate fear of losing this woman’s love, began to remake the world. It was easy for him, once he set his energy to it, to gather people into the thrill of his dream. He would make a world without darkness, without solitude, without death or loss. A world where people would eventually live forever, and could have anything they wanted, at any time—any food, any thing, any reality. A world where people were always surrounded by other people, and always showered with the thrill of new things, new wonders, new discoveries, new pleasures. A world of magic where no one was ever lonely.

  “He gathered a crew—an army—of builders, transformers, developers, initiators. The first place they destroyed was the swamp. Hanum did not go with them. Never again did he wish to come near that darkness, or hear those eerie songs, or meet with that strange, disturbingly vulnerable people who worshipped monsters and fought with teeth and fists. In their submission to that monster they both disgusted and terrified him, but more than anything else he wanted to forget that boy, and the hatred in his eyes. It was easy for his army to lay flat that place, fill in the waters and disintegrate that more primitive magic. They had weapons and machines now, and a magical, thick grey lava that filled watery and empty places and turned solid as stone. He never knew what happened to those people or their monster. But he turned that place—whose magic still seemed to emanate up from the very core of the earth—into the Center of the City, where all Things were invented and created, and from which the City was controlled and ruled.

  “It was true that many lands had to be destroyed, in order to create this new world, but Hanum believed his world was better. His memories of the swamp convinced him to do away with all that was unpredictable and mysterious, to do away with ancient rites, to do away with tangled jungles and watery depths. In his world, people would not move about in that strange, slow wonder. Instead everything moved fast, things happened fast, and there was too much going on to think on the past or to remember what was lost. To make sure that he would never again have to think of the Dark Goddess, he encouraged the men of his people to go out and destroy all the monsters of the world; he made heroes of men who slew dragons, to make sure that not one remained to haunt him or steal his beloved away.

  “With each new creation, Hanum returned to his bride on that lonely beach, and said to her, ‘Look! Come see what I have created for you! A world without darkness, even at night—a world without frightening mystery, a world where nothing will ever harm you. Come see this wonderful place, because I’ve done it all for you, my love. It is better than that place from which you came.’”

  Lonely barely pauses, but she notices the eerie coldness of her own voice, and how far away it sounds.

  “For a long time the woman never spoke. She did not even turn her head to look at him. She would only look out upon the sea forever, as if she saw something in that nothingness that he could not see, and rock and hum to herself, and wrap her arms around her belly. One day, after searching for her and not finding her and then finally dragging her out from a cave far down the beach, while she cried and tore at him, he forced her to come with him. He made her walk those streets with him. And everywhere, he stretched out his hand to show her the glory of what he’d made.

  “But she did not seem to see what he saw. She looked around and her dark eyes darkened and brewed with storm, and she pointed to things he had never noticed before—mistakes that he couldn’t explain and didn’t realize had happened. Children in rags, people with haunted lonely faces at windows, women crouched in alleyways bleeding, mass graves where peoples who had resisted the encroachment of the City had been buried, and animals in cages.

  “He could not bear her criticism—her noticing only the flaws in what he’d done. He was furious. So in a final explosion of pent-up frustration and pain at her rejection, he cast her off and left her to find her own way out of the City.

  “He returned to the beach. In his anguish and sorrow, he believed that she must be keeping some secret from him, and he was determined to find it out once and for all. Something had made her turn away from him. Something had made her turn against him—perhaps there was some other that she loved, some secret lover in the waves! But he went to the cave where he had found her, and inside it he found a baby.

  “That baby was his daughter. He had been so occupied with his creation of the City, so desperate in his pleadings with his bride and his violent, lonely attempts to make love to her, that he had never even noticed when she became pregnant—never noticed that her belly grew, or that she hid from him more and more, until this day, when she had actually given birth all alone. He found that baby on the brink of death, and he realized that she was going to keep it from him; she was going to hide it from him in this cave and never tell him that he had a daughter. When he looked at this baby, he saw all the beauty he had first seen when he looked upon the woman in the marsh, for that baby looked back at him with that same wordless innocence, untainted yet by the knowledge of the monster he now saw that he truly was.

  “And he wanted to be better. He wanted, at all costs, to keep his daughter safe, to keep her innocent, to keep her from ever being touched by that terrible world he’d created or even knowing that it existed.

  “So he fed his daughter on magic instead of milk, told her she was a goddess, and took her out into the sea. He made an island in the sea. With his magic, he removed all of the unsightly, suffering, rebellious people that his wife had pointed out to him that day in the City—all those who made the City seem less than perfect. He would continue to remove them, and he would charge others to help him remove them, as the suffering in the City increased over the years and the mad ones became more numerous. He trapped those mad ones under the island where they could never be found or heard, and put them to sleep. And on top of the island he built a magical glass tower to hide the darkness beneath it, and there he kept his beautiful princess daughter safe from everything: the emptiness he’d left behind in his first world, the longing he’d had to suffer, and the great creation that he himself had made to fill that emptiness—which had ultimately brought the same destruction all over again.

  “It took his wife years to find her way out of the City. When she did, she was much wiser and stronger, and she knew the suffering of the people there, and she had learned the language that they and Hanum spoke. There were many who secretly remembered her after she was gone, and for a long time after called her name in their dreams to comfort themselves in that bright, harsh world. She came back to the beach and looked first for her child. When she could not find her, she swam across the sea, riding dolphins and whales, until she came to the island, and she pounded on the door to that tower. But his magic kept her out. In her years in the City she had become old beyond her years, wearied and bitter and ugly, and when he saw her, he no longer loved her. And so she haunted the island forever, circling around that tower, and the hatred between her and Hanum grew, until the woman’s bitterness encompassed even her own daughter—whose beauty seemed now like her own youth stolen from her, and who distracted Hanum from the truth. Over the years, that old woma
n came to be called a witch, and maybe the Dark Goddess claimed her somehow after all, because in the City, sometimes, they called her that—though they did not remember what the words meant. They said she was the Dark Goddess: that old, angry, broken woman, who had once been a virgin of the light.

  “But Hanum, too, suffered in that tower. He saw that he had not created a perfect world after all. He saw that his loneliness was greater than ever, and that no one in this world had ever truly loved him except for his daughter. So he hid who he really was, and all that he had done, from his daughter, so that she would never stop loving him—but then he had no one to confide in, and that brought him such pain. Worst of all, he felt that he was dying from the inside out, and he was afraid, for whenever he thought of death, he thought of that watery depth where the monster lived, and it still lived on in his dreams with its long glistening jaws, even though all the dragons of the world had been destroyed.