by Mindi Meltz
“So my mother is dead,” she whispers, stupidly, and now, truly, she feels nothing. Her breathing steadies, and her stomach tenses—the stomach of a warrior.
The man grunts again, and she supposes that is his best attempt at sympathy. Which is a relief, because the last thing she wants is that.
The City. Day 12.
Library. I got paper here so I can learn to write now. I’m keeping a journal so I will know later what was real.
The library is the only place you don’t need money for. I can read here all day, many books with every kind of information, also stories. I forget about food. At the end of each day Dragon finds me. I want to stay. But we can’t sleep here.
There are people here who don’t have homes and one of them showed me the library. It is a place you can stay warm, he said. He didn’t even care about the books.
It takes so long to write and I don’t have time to describe everything. There are beautiful buildings in the City. There are parts that were built a long time ago. They look like icicles or carved stone. Not like our houses. Not like anything my parents have ever seen. They are huge. Also most of the doors in the City do not lead to homes. They are places where magical Things are sold. Sold means you need money to buy it. You need money for everything here. It takes me a whole day to look at the Things in one store until they make me leave because I am dirty.
I can’t remember everything now. One thing that Dragon stole for me is this pen.
It is good that Dragon keeps taking me out of the stores and keeps us moving. If he didn’t I would stay all day in one place, and we would never find the Center. Dragon is more interested in the people than the Things they make or how they make them. He wants to make friends.
Kite wakes without knowing why. He’s on the floor, facing the bed, and the room is brighter than any place in the forest could ever be at night, even though the moon is not quite half full. At least, he doesn’t think it is. He’s started to lose track here. He rarely sees the moon rise, and the light in the City never changes.
He props himself up on one elbow, hearing something. But maybe it was only Dragon and the woman, moving against each other in the bed again. Silently, he stands up and walks to the window. He looks out at nothing. He can see only another wall, empty light reflecting against it, distant screams bouncing off of it. A couple of moons ago, homesickness was not a feeling that Kite had ever even heard of, let alone imagined. Now sometimes at night it makes his belly hot, as if he will be sick. He longs to be outside, anywhere, but in the City it isn’t safe to sleep outside.
In the beginning they did, because they had no choice. One night they were attacked in their sleep by four large men, who began to beat them when they were found to have no money. Kite did his best, but he’s slim and only fifteen years old, and Dragon—though ultimately victorious—received a knife wound to his shoulder that took many days to heal.
Kite hates living by stealing. He hates living by deceit, when he is used to working for his own sustenance, but he doesn’t understand the rules of this place. He understands that everyone wants money and will kill to get it, but he doesn’t understand what it is, where it comes from, why it is important, or if there is any way to get it besides violence. There is so much he doesn’t understand, still, and so much he has to learn.
At first, the effort of keeping Dragon calm was enough to keep his mind focused, and keep his own terrors at bay. For many days, Dragon was constantly raging. The pain of his wound made him angry. His lust for the thousands of women parading around him in their strange, body-accentuating costumes, and the pain he felt when they responded to his approaches with fear and coldness, made him angry. The rude silence of unhelpful people and his loyalty to Kite when anyone tried to stop him from getting what he needed made him angry. Again and again, Kite had to talk him through his anger. They don’t understand us, he would say, any more than we understand them. Or, They’re afraid, just like we’re afraid. Can’t you see? We should try to understand them. They don’t mean to hurt us. For whatever reason, Dragon—who was older than him, after all—seemed to respect him. He listened to Kite as if he’d never thought of these perspectives on his own. Kite decided that Dragon must have been so alone for so long, it had never occurred to him to try to think inside the mind of another person.
Kite has learned that one of the fastest ways to soothe Dragon’s rage is through praise and reassurance. He doesn’t give it untruthfully. He simply looks for Dragon’s power and tells him about it. When you use your fire, he might say, you light up. A light appears around your body. This seems to make Dragon very happy. Or Kite thanks him for saving them, over and over again. It isn’t hard to think of these things. There is a lot to praise about Dragon, and Kite is truly grateful to him. Yet it is amazing to Kite that someone so powerful could have so much fear. Kite has never met a person like that before, though horses are like that.
No one will tell them where the Center of the City is, where knowledge and fuel are kept. Kite can’t decide if the people of the City are keeping it a secret, or if he has been mistaken in his belief that it exists at all. There are books about the City in which he’s read of it, but he didn’t bring those books with him. Still, he knows that the food, the computers, and the power that powers the lights, the heat, the Things, and the cars must come from somewhere. Dragon continues to insist that it all comes from dragons, or from the bodies of dragons, but what does that mean?
They make slow progress through the City, for Kite is so quickly exhausted by the noise, the fumes, and the constant stimulus of discovery that he retreats as often as possible into quieter alleys or any space of green they can find. While they rest, they practice managing Dragon’s fire. Kite sits by him and asks him questions, fascinated even though Dragon cannot answer any of them. Dragon doesn’t know how he creates his fire, or else the explanations he gives are incomprehensible and senseless to Kite. Yet it is wonderful to Kite—this mystery. What power there is in the world and in people, and how much to be discovered!
The more Dragon works with his fire, the more he is able to create it at will, so that now they have it whenever they need it. Kite has learned a strange thing, which is that Dragon associates fire with women, or with his desire for women. Kite saw the way flames sometimes leaked around Dragon when he saw women he wanted, and the way his whole body began to glow. At first, the women he met were frightened by this, but the more Dragon has learned to control his fire and use it as he wishes, the more often he seems to meet women who are drawn to his glowing and his heat. And when Dragon and the women come together, the women’s bodies seem to glow that way, too.
Every night now, for the past four nights, Dragon has seduced a woman who then invited them back to her home for the night. Kite watched him do it each time, keeping quiet while he studied his map or worked on his writing. He watched Dragon sit down next to a woman on a bench, or call out to her as she passed, or lean beside her at the corner of a building. He watched the woman light up like a firefly and then move imperceptibly toward him. He watched Dragon’s easy, joyful motions, his newfound delight in his own power.
Kite had never seen so many women in so many different shapes or in so many strange costumes. There were women whose skin glowed rosy and moist as if just born, their lips bursting from their faces and their breasts splitting apart like fat mouths from the dip of their tight shirts. There were graceful women whose eyelashes left shadows on their cheeks, whose skirts played like sunlight around their thighs and whose long legs were smooth as melting ice. There were earthy women like his sister, with swinging hips and childlike shoulders, but wearing dresses that fit their bodies so tightly and smoothly, like a mere splash of color painted over them. Sometimes Dragon gestured toward Kite, after he and the woman had been kissing for a while, their hands squeezing the material at each other’s thighs, and sometimes the woman would glance Kite’s way—but Kite would look quickly down at his
book, or at his hands, or at anything but their eyes.
Tonight’s woman is small and fairy-like, with little breasts that dip downward and then point up, her nipples big and round through her tight shirt and her belly bare with a silver ring smiling from the middle. She reminds Kite of Lonely—her smallness, and the innocent, eager mist of her skin—except that she has curly hair, short, with a couple of ringlets falling around her face. Now, facing away from the bed, Kite hears her sigh—a sigh deeper and wilder than he would have expected from her or from anyone in the City. He hears the blankets twisting against themselves, and wetness touching wetness. Maybe they stopped when Kite woke up, and were waiting until he turned around again, and now could wait no longer. Embarrassed, Kite slips back under his own covers on the floor and turns away. He wants to drag himself further from the bed but he’s afraid they will notice.
There are still so many things Kite doesn’t understand, about the energy of life which so fascinates him. One of them is why every day and every night, the same City which seems to energize Dragon—seems to awaken his senses, his pride, his lust, and his simple joy in living—utterly exhausts Kite, to the point where when they reach a woman’s apartment he usually falls asleep instantaneously, even if Dragon and the woman are engaged in such throes of passion that they’re tearing each others’ clothes off right in front of him, crying out as if they will kill each other.
Another mystery is his own fire. For it is there, too, of course. Doesn’t everyone have fire? Yes, he has always known this: each person must have all of the elements inside him. The fire rises in him, too, and in its own way glows in the dark. It rose in the middle of the night when he was just a boy. It rose when he watched the goats making love. It rose for no reason when he was out in the forest, when a thunder storm was coming or after he bathed and lay on a stone in the sun, or when he slept alone in the forest for the first time—he had woken up then to that rising, a rising that kept rising until it overflowed, and in his innocence and amazement then he had wondered foolishly if there were gods after all, and if he were one of them. The fire rose again when Lonely leaned toward him in the basement, and it rose every night after that for a long time, when he couldn’t stop remembering her breath against his lips and her breasts eyeing him and her hips—the way they trembled, and the smell that came from them. Kite’s sense of smell has always been better than anyone’s. He can smell the rains a day before they come. And right now he can smell the passion of the woman who rocks against Dragon in the bed, and he can’t help but turn his face slowly into the pillow and then to the other side again to watch her. The blankets are all tossed away.
Never in his life, in any other context, does he feel such a concentration of pure life energy in his own body. It feels so powerful, so real, and it fills him with wonder. He would like to save it for whatever it is meant for—something as beautiful as this woman’s arching spine, something sacred. But it doesn’t want to wait. As he touches it, as he guides it forth with his hand and presses his face into the pillow, he knows that this energy—though it is a gift, though he wants to use it wisely—is something that wants to express itself, wants to come through, wants to be given.
He thinks he cannot yet begin to understand the connection between fire and the love of a woman, between energy and desire, between the body and the spirit. But as he lies there still now, hearing the woman’s soft cries crescendo and then break into tearful whimpers of secret exultation, he has the strange thought that the whole City, instead of trying to power itself with money, or with Things, or with sunlight or with earth, or even with knowledge, could power itself with this fire.
Whatever it is.
They cut the tree down.
Lonely knew they were coming for a long time. She felt the earth shaking with their passage: not the rhythm of something walking but the continuous unrest of a machine. Other trees fell around her, and then the sunlight embraced her for the last time, filling her more utterly than it had ever been able to do before. She felt every leaf: its perfect green reception, its perfect gift.
Then she felt the soil came loose around her roots, and the very truth and direction of her life felt unsteady for the first and only time. She felt them coming. She felt the absence of their souls in her slow, golden blood.
Lonely has been a tree for a hundred years. Her parents and children are somewhere near her. They have already fallen.
In her community, there were slow trees and fast trees, abundant trees, shy trees, and aggressive trees. Some trees were born in deep loam and others started in the merest dust of the topsoil and worked their roots down. Some passed from their parents into their own beginning through the transformative passageway of an animal’s body, and others dreamed as seeds along the motion of streams, and others nestled in hot fur, and others—like Lonely—rode the currents of the wind. Each tree, with its different beginning, its different original understanding of life, has a different personality. Some trees grow in opposite pairs, each to each, and some grow in spirals. Some remain forever in the pyramid shape of their youth, and others flip inside out and reach upward like open cups. Some peel constantly, like snakes, and others grow patiently and long, cell upon cell, coating themselves in rugged walls.
Lonely grew up carefully, slower than the eager aspens but faster than the ancient oaks. She has always remembered the wind that carried her, and her yearning for the sky is light and sweet. She began in the earth and the water, down below, and from these she drew enough strength to rise up into the wind again, and catch the elements from above—air and light—in a flag of green. From these four she made life, from the beginning and forever, every bright day of the spring and summer and fall.
She grew in twos. Each branch forked into two more. She knew the sacredness of twos: how wherever there is one direction, there is also its opposite. Also, for every branch she sent upward, she sent a root downward: as above, so below.
She knew that life is a journey—many journeys. She traveled in different directions at once, and learned to adapt to each new pathway. Here in this part of the earth, there was a lot to eat, so she grew fast and further. Here in this part, there was too much water, so she turned away. Here in this part of the sky, she was shaded, so she bent backwards and sideways to get back to the light. Here in this branch, she had grown too far, and was too heavy, and had to stop. Here in this branch, she was exposed, and the wind that once carried her now fought her, so she had to thicken. Life was an adventure. When she was injured by insects or storms, she could replace what was lost, though the new growth would never be the same as the old; it had lost that innocence. The wind and the snow had come, pulling downward, and the squirrels built their nests, and the antlers tore her bark. She was tough, and she worked hard. But she housed a symphony of birdsong in her branches, and she was happy. The twisting curves of her body—their maze and their tangle—were the story of her life, and at once the story of the forest that made it, and the years that changed and guided it.
Water was her intuition, her connection to herself. Through the movement and tension of water, her roots talked to her branches, and the branches talked back. Through Lonely, water rose into the sky and fed the rains. Through Lonely, minerals became food. Through Lonely, light became color. Through Lonely, wind developed language.
She was several years old, tall enough among her elders to take her first draught of unfiltered sunlight, when she bloomed for the first time. What wonder it was, to bring the elements together into flowers this time, instead of leaves! They were not for obtaining food, not for survival. They were for something poetic, something beyond herself, something that called out and was beautiful. The bees came, and they knew, and she let them know for her. Her flowers turned to fruits, and then to seeds, and she gave them to the wind. She felt how it was then: to give something back to what had brought her here, what had brought her home from her own parents to this earth that had raised her.
Years passed, and she came into her own; she made a shape in the sky, a round domed top, and now her leaf body lived in the sky and was a circle. Her leaves are a whole country now, talking to one another about the sun, helping one another, bending to let the light pass to the lower ones or to reflect the light back and forth.
When the machines come, Lonely is only one hundred years old, but her roots already have fifty million different pathways, and span the distance of nine men. Her children are growing up all over the forest. She is looking forward to the spring.
She has a mind, but it is all through her, not concentrated in one place. She knows in every part of her body what to do: whether to grow or not, which way to grow, what nutrients are needed, and what to keep out. When they start cutting, the youngest, most innocent parts of Lonely—the most recent years of her life, up in the sky, waving their jubilant hungry leaves—do not know yet. They feel a shaking but cannot understand that what has always held them will not continue to hold. Down below, in the thickest, darkest part of the tree, the blades are whirring. First, they cut through the newest layer: the growth she worked so hard to make this past year, even though the rains were late and few. Before she can respond to this loss, they keep cutting, through all the experience, growth, travel and loss, all the long, wind-talking days and nights of animal feet running, all the changes in the sunlight recorded in her, all the songs the water had to sing of far-off lands—all that she learned in that year, last year, cut through and now gone.
And now the year before, the year before that, and the year before that. The whole story.
They cut all the way through all the years to the oldest part of her being. They cut through to the dead wood that has been there since her childhood; they cut through to her heart, the place that no longer lives. This place no longer carries food or water, no longer talks. In this place, all that is discarded from past years comes to rest. But this place is the very structure of her being. This place holds the wisdom of memory, of history, the strength of age itself. Death is not nothing. Death is when the singular focus of living fades, so that the true meaning and complexity of life can emerge—like when the green of her summer leaves faded, and all their true colors multiplied and revealed themselves.