Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Delilah doesn’t know where to begin when she realizes this. She lowers her head into the Unicorn’s body.

  “Lilah,” Mira says, and her voice is softer, and seems to come from the Unicorn this time. “Where will we go?”

  It’s another question that Delilah never thought about. All she could think of, once she finally surrendered to it, was the goal of finding Mira and rescuing her. But what is a rescue, if there is no place to take the rescued to, once she is rescued from? There is no meadow. The pine forest must be destroyed. She can’t take her to the City or even, for some reason she can’t define right now, the desert. It must be somewhere they can truly live—not on the brink of survival, not in endless self-denial and escape, and not that half-life they were taught to live.

  Then she remembers something, after all, from that dream she had by the river. She couldn’t put it into words if she had to. The memory comes like someone she knew once, and cannot put a face to. But she thinks suddenly, Return to the Earth. She feels that place calling, wherever it is, though she has never been there—worlds and worlds away, beyond the desert, where the land embraces valleys of green. And for a moment, her fear is gone.

  “I know where we’ll go,” she says, suddenly smiling with the thrill of her own wild leap of faith. “Trust me. I’m with you now. I’ll never leave you.”

  She does have the strength, after all, to carry Mira, to save her, to love her no matter what, because somewhere out there, there are people—whether human or god—who love her, too. And they have people who love them. It is this connected chain she never admitted to before, which makes everything possible.

  Now she stands up, and the Unicorn is safe in her arms, and Mira—she feels sure—is somewhere inside the magical illusion of that light. Now she turns around, and, with all her strength—not thinking of their father, not thinking of anything—begins to walk back around the sleeping bodies, trying to sense her direction in the dark. She tries not to feel fear at the sight of the nothingness before her and all around her, so that she has no front and no behind, only blackness circling and circling. With relief she stumbles over a body, seeing the old woman ahead of her. There she is after all, small and firm and waiting, her black swirling dress reflecting the Unicorn’s horn.

  The old woman’s eyes are not unkind. They are only older and sadder than any silence Delilah has ever known, as Delilah stops before her and cannot go on. Only this elder, this guardian, can navigate through such blackness back to the surface of the world.

  “No,” she says to Delilah now. “You cannot take her. The others are still sleeping.” Delilah whips around in surprise, takes in the sleeping darknesses, turns back.

  “But I don’t care about the others,” she says, her own desperation making her honest.

  “You have to,” says the old woman, “because she does not exist without them, nor they without her.”

  Delilah stares, her heart breaking through her body.

  “I’ll take you out,” continues the old woman, “if you wish it. But you cannot take the Unicorn with you, as long as the others still sleep here. She is their only light. She is all that keeps them.”

  Go and find your flute, Sky said, in the place where it lives. It will have found its way back, to that place where you first used it to bring someone joy.

  Go and stand in the wind, and breathe in deep. You will be breathing someone’s soul into you. Then face the sea, and breathe it out, and make of that breath the music that only you can make. The music that brings the rains.

  There is a parking lot here now. Abandoned cars, their doors hanging open in shock, stand still with the wind whistling through them. A stray cat, without surprise, watches what looks like a rain cloud lower itself until it almost touches the pavement, and then it becomes a boy. The boy wavers for a moment, and then walks in the direction of the cat, where she sits tight beneath a dead bush in a corner of the dark building. The cat is not surprised because she can feel that underneath the pavement is a meadow, or the memory of one. She can tell that the boy is looking for the thing the girl left for him, and that they have some shared memory of this place—as if together they make a single ghost, who once lived here when it was alive. The cat cries softly and runs away, leaving the boy to find the beautiful thing which lay beside her.

  No one sees him pick it up. No one sees him fly to the top of the building with a few modest, careful steps through the air, and stand there, feeling the direction of the wind. No one sees his delicate chest swell, or sees him close his eyes as he opens his mouth.

  He remembers when Lil saw him once, so long ago, closing his eyes and opening his lips like this, taking the hardness on his tongue. How she turned away, scared. And he wanted to tell her that he did it just to make the other boy weep. To make him break down with longing and ecstasy. It had nothing to do with power. He only wanted to be able to see the sweetness, the vulnerability inside a boy that no boy would let him see. He wanted the impossible. He didn’t think Lil would have understood, but of course she would have; she wanted the same thing.

  Please, Sky said, taking his hands. Do me this favor. I cannot go into the City again. Send my love to where the Unicorn lies, and I’ll find her there.

  Remembering the love he felt for that man with the lonely chest and the feathers at his thighs, now Moon blows, and the song takes form, as if it is something that already existed in the air and was only waiting for his breath to make it move. And as the song flows through that sacred instrument—that song that is the sound of the rains before they come—he realizes it isn’t his breath, and it isn’t his song. Rather it is something else that comes through him, and all this time it hasn’t had anything to do with him. All this time, he hasn’t had any responsibility, or anything to fight, or anything to do differently, other than just to stand here, and breathe. Just stand here, and not be ashamed to be.

  The rains do not answer right away. But the clouds are gathering; the clouds are thinking. In the City around him, the hearts of men lurch forward, and women look up. The Earth, hearing his song, remembers, and begins to shake with longing. She shakes so hard that the walls of banks and jails, offices and convenience stores, begin to crack and even crumble. The pavement heaves up and splits, and water bursts through in fountains. Harrowed and starving, you scream as fissures open up into black mystery. You lean in, clutching at each other to keep from jumping. Something calls to you in there. Something misses you. And you didn’t know! All these years, you did not even realize that you were walking upon the Earth. You see Her bare Her dry teeth, raw and bitter and dusty in the cracks, and a few of you remember: this is where food came from once, and this was how we survived, long ago, when we owned our own survival.

  Soon the rain you did not know you were waiting for will come shattering down like glass.

  And Lonely, no longer the wind but now a breath, no longer a breath but now a song, begins to fly—even though it isn’t even time yet, even though she doesn’t have to, but because she chooses it, because she knows somehow that the love she seeks is right there, at the very center of her loneliness, where the longing itself began—back to the island.

  Inside there is only blackness and a deep, tense cold. Kite blinks, steps back and fumbles for a door handle, but the door has slammed behind him and he cannot find it.

  Then he hears the breathing again, a little quieter now, but close.

  “Show yourself!” he says, not out of courage but out of terror, though he does not know how someone could, since there is no light. But it feels hauntingly familiar, all of this. The cold nowhere room in the center of the unconscious City. The faceless breathing in the darkness.

  When no answer comes, he turns and fumbles wildly at the knobs of cold metal. “Let me out!” But instantly he stops himself. Panic won’t help, says a very clear voice inside him. He freezes, wondering which way to face, which way to hide his back, and it seems he hea
rs the breathing all around him now, like raw space ripping apart.

  “Who are you?” comes a voice finally from the darkness, and the voice is calmer than Kite expected, and it sounds tired or maybe just very old. It’s a man is all he can tell for sure.

  He turns toward it.

  “Are you a god?” The voice sounds neither curious nor hopeful, and yet Kite is afraid to answer, because he doesn’t know yet what the voice wants or even what he wants. He’s not even sure if it’s the same voice that spoke before.

  “Why is it so dark?” he asks.

  “They’re saying you are a god,” someone says, and it’s definitely a different voice this time, though it sounds the same, because it’s coming from another part of the room.

  “Why is it dark?” Kite repeats stubbornly, his voice unintentionally cramping into a near whisper. “Why are you so afraid to open a window?”

  “There are no windows,” says one of the voices.

  “Why not?”

  Silence. Then, “He’s not a god. Just a boy.”

  “Throw him out.”

  “No.” Gruffly, and from a greater distance. “He’ll tell.”

  “Tell what?” says Kite. “I can’t see anything!”

  “But now you’ve heard our voices, and you know.”

  “Know what?!”

  “That this is all there is.”

  More silence then, while Kite feels his courage rising, and hears the echo of fear in those words, whatever they mean. When he can’t stand the nothingness breathing any more, he steps forward carefully and reaches out, trying to stay oriented to the door behind him.

  “Where are you?” he whispers, stretching his fingers out in front of him. Closer than he expected, things crash together and clatter to some hard metallic floor, as the person nearest to him stumbles backwards to get away. They are afraid for him to touch them. Why? Suddenly he hears the fear again, which he heard so clearly when first he heard the breath through the door, and he can feel it and smell it and taste it too—acidic and tingling on his tongue, pulsing in sweaty waves against his body. How many of them are there, sitting in the darkness in silent panic?

  “Who are you?” he says, trying to keep his voice calm, trying not to catch the contagion of that feeling. “You’ve just been living in here, in the dark?”

  “There were lights,” says one, after a pause. “But they went out. Don’t you know?”

  Of course. The City has no power. In the City, light does not come from the sun, but from something else he does not understand—something, it turns out, that even the people of the City do not understand. “Even here?”

  He hears a long sigh, a sigh that spans from the top of the room to the bottom. “Even here, boy.”

  “So why do you stay here? Why don’t you come out?”

  “They’ll kill us.”

  “But just tell them you don’t have any power either.”

  A sound like laughter then, but not quite. “We can’t tell them that.”

  And with more hissing laughter—“No, no,” echo the other voices, and now Kite knows for sure he wasn’t imagining their numbers.

  “But…” Kite can feel the danger in what they’re saying—the danger for himself—and he knows he should be quietly working his way back to the door, working his fingers around the knobs, trying to work out the lock. But he’s too curious. He has too many questions. He is finally here, inside the Center of the City’s knowledge. He wants to understand everything. Systematically, his mind begins to organize his questions, and the organization calms him and excites him at the same time. When he begins to ask those questions, he finds that the objectivity and the logical order of them seem also to calm the people in the room, for they answer readily, their voices perfectly even.

  “How many of you are there?” he begins.

  “Ten.”

  “Are you all men?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you make—You brought the energy to the City? You made the food? You made everything?”

  “Yes. This machine. This machine made everything.”

  “What machine?”

  “This machine you’re in.”

  “And it doesn’t work any more?”

  “We have no more fuel.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’ve run out.”

  “But what was the fuel?”

  A pause then, but only briefly. “It comes from inside the earth, from things that died long before humans existed.”

  “What things?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter!” says Kite, frustrated. “It matters where we come from. Those are our ancestors, the ones who came before us. We need them. That’s what you’ve been living on. History. That is the wisdom.”

  Silence.

  “Is it—is it all gone?”

  “Gone.”

  “And you didn’t know it would run out?”

  A shuffling now: discomfort in the dark. Bodies slide against themselves, fidgeting. Kite wonders what they are wearing, what they look like, how old they are. “We had no choice,” someone mumbles.

  “But we can get energy from other places. I know. I’ve read about it and I thought you knew about it here. The sun—”

  The laughter-like sound again, at once uneasy and patronizing, like a nervous hand patting the head of a vicious beast. “No, that’s mythology, boy.”

  Mythology. Kite tries to remember this word, what it’s about. Isn’t it a kind of story? An explanation of things? The basis for meaning in existence?

  “But,” he starts again, wanting to continue the thread but unable to see it. “But I read about it,” he repeats.

  “We don’t allow those writings here,” speaks a clearer, firmer voice, a little closer.

  “But why not?”

  “We don’t allow them.”

  Kite can hear the quickening tension in that voice, so he stops. No one speaks for some time. He feels hopeless, suddenly. He has learned nothing, after all. These people at the Center of the world’s knowledge—they don’t know anything.

  “Do you have food here?” he asks quietly. “How will you survive?”

  A long, long pause. “We have a little food,” comes the wary answer.

  “But what happens when it runs out?”

  “We can’t open the door,” explains one voice, with the first hint of emotion Kite has heard. “They would take what we have left! They would kill us!”

  “But you need them!” cries Kite, for it’s suddenly so clear to him. “This is the answer, I’m telling you. You need other people. You need to work together. Human beings can do anything! We can figure this out. Just go out there. Tell the truth.”

  But the silence that greets his words is empty. The men don’t understand him. It seems as if he is speaking another language, and they cannot do what he asks. Why? Why not?

  “Is it—” He tries to understand what is holding them here. “Is it Hanum? Your god?”

  “Hanum?”

  “Don’t you believe that Hanum, the man who began the City, was a god? Don’t you serve him, or something?”

  “No. We run the City. Hanum—that was a long time ago. It is this machine that runs the City.”

  “But not any more,” says Kite.

  A silence, and in that silence is breath again, and in that breath, in that very hopelessness—almost—there is something like the opening of wings. “No.” Quietly. “Not any more.”

  Kite senses his chance. “Come on, then. Let’s go,” he says gently. “Let’s go outside.”

  “But what’s out there?” someone whispers.

  Kite hesitates. “When was the last time you went outside?”

  No answer.

  “The world,” Kite says, impatient now.
“The world is out there.”

  But then the things go knocking together again, because someone is lunging forward, and not at Kite, but at someone else. Some filthy, rotting anger has been broiling in the darkness, unseen and unheard, and now there are strangled cries, and now there are shouts—sounds foreign to this closed metal room, and the layers of metal rooms above it, and the mindless limbs of the machine.

  “How dare you!” comes the first choked voice. “How dare you speak of Hanum that way! He will return. He will return and take this City back. Then we will see—we will see who survives!”

  Then all the men are arguing, things are toppling, and the bodies who feared Kite’s touch are slamming together in violence. The building itself begins to shake, rattling its insides to pieces and hurling the bodies like refuse into piles, and Kite falls down, scrambles up, and falls again. But that solitary, calm part of him takes over—the part of him that turned his face stony toward the distant horizon when his parents argued, the part of him that walked comfortably alone through the wilderness, the part of him that walked away, as if easily, when Dragon got mad. Quietly, he gropes his way backward, shutting his mind to their panic and his own.

  Maybe this whole great building is a machine, and maybe every part of this machine is operated by a tangle of complex wires and triggers and codes and electrical stimuli, like a body, if a body had no soul. But the power has gone out, and it is dead. This door that let Kite in had not let anybody in or out for how long? When was the City created? No one has ever used it. No one even remembered it was there. So there is no complicated, coded system for keeping it locked. There is only a rusty iron bar that scrapes like the latch on an old barn as Kite lifts it, and then the light blinding him.

  He steps out, forgetting himself, looking up in wonder. The first tremor of the first earthquake has just passed. No one has died yet. The crowd cannot foresee what is to come. They only help each other shakily to their feet and look toward Kite, who emerged as the earth came back to stillness. Then they follow his gaze—as if he himself made the miracle—up toward the sky. The rain is coming for the first time in twenty-five years.