Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  His daughter sighs and looks off toward the higher mountains. He is surprised to see her hesitate. Then she says, in a calm, clear tone that saddens him, “It has to end soon, I think.”

  “Why?” He wants to go to her and comfort her, but already she is stronger than he, so much older in some ways, and he knows she doesn’t need that. He misses her laughter. He misses her at eight years old, like it was yesterday—the way she’d run to him.

  She takes up another log and swings. Crack. She stands back and looks at the two pieces. In the beginning, when he and Fawn first started fighting, she would cry all the time. Now she never cries. Now her face is closed to him. “Because it can’t last,” she says finally. “I mean, he’s a god. We’re not the same. We love each other, but we can’t— You know. We can’t go anywhere together, we can’t have children together, we can’t live the same life together. I want my own home, my own family someday.”

  “Do you?” he says, smiling.

  She looks at him. “Of course.” Then, when she sees him at a loss for words, she adds quickly, “It’s okay. I just need to end it soon, before it gets even harder. Before the spring, you know? But he was such a comfort to me. I needed him, during all this.”

  Rye nods. He starts stacking up the wood they’ve cut. All the trees they’ve taken since Chelya met her lover have been approved for the taking by that same god. The forest is healthier when thinned in the right way.

  “We’ll have to find you a human husband,” he says then.

  “How?”

  He stops and looks up, to find her staring at him earnestly, not angry or desperate the way Kite sometimes seemed, but asking him, seriously, to consider the question. It’s true. He knows why Kite left. He keeps telling Fawn, and he was telling her even before it happened. They are too isolated here. But what are they doing about it? Nothing.

  He sighs, tries to think of the answer she deserves. “We’ll travel around, you and me. We’ll go to each farm, and say we’re looking for a husband for you.” He grins.

  “But there’s no time. There’s always so much work to do. That’s the whole thing, right? If I had a family, and I made my own farm between here and Jay’s— See it’s like we’d start to form a chain, and someday everyone would be linked up again, a community. But because we’re so isolated, we can’t even begin. We have too much to do here on our own, to make it through each year.”

  Rye’s face falls. “I don’t know, Chel. I don’t know. But we’ll make it work somehow. I promise.”

  Chelya keeps chopping. He knows she doesn’t quite believe him, but she isn’t the type to press, and that makes him sad. He almost wishes she would challenge him, fight the answers out of him—wherever they are inside him.

  “It’s okay,” she says again, instead. “The last cold moons of winter aren’t the time to be thinking of answers.”

  “It’s so much harder with Kite gone,” Rye says suddenly, helplessly, dropping his hands. “There’ll be even more work to do in the growing season. You’ll have to work harder. We all will.”

  But she surprises him by saying, with certainty, “He’s coming back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. I mean, he went out there for us. To bring us back knowledge. Don’t you know that? Do you think he went only for himself, that he would abandon us forever?”

  Rye shakes his head. He doesn’t need to name all the fears, the endless possible calamities that could cause Kite to no longer have a choice about whether he comes back or not. “You always want to see the best in people, Chel. But I know what it’s like to be a young man, out for adventure. It’s not bad. It’s not selfish. It’s just where he is in life.”

  Then he can see Chelya thinking, deliberating over whether or not to say something. “Do you ever wish it was you?” she asks finally. “Do you wish it was you out on that adventure?”

  “No.” He shakes his head, and at the same time feels relieved to find that he means it. “I mean, it was me, once. But what I realized is, I stopped traveling when I met your mother because my adventure continued with her. I never knew how hard it would be, just to love—to love right. It’s harder than any of the traveling I did.” He sighs and laughs a little to hear himself say it. “But Kite will continue the journey I started. Because, Chel, I was looking for something a long time ago, when I was wandering on my own, only I didn’t exactly know what. Maybe Kite knows. Maybe he picked up that thread I left behind—maybe it wasn’t me who was supposed to carry it on.”

  Chelya nods, and he can see her pondering this. She starts to stack the wood and he starts chopping again. He feels lighter suddenly. How light the snowflakes fall; how light his arms feel, swinging in this rhythm they know so well! Winter is almost over. Already they hear the owls calling for their mates, and in less than a moon the tips of the branches will grow pregnant with the dreams of new buds. Already they are planting seeds for tomatoes and herbs and greens in the greenhouse, to transplant when the earth melts again. And every year there is this lovely longing, this delicious anticipation, for what it will feel like to eat the sweet fresh vegetables they’ve gone so long without, and even—every winter they almost forget what it’s like—the taste of fresh fruit.

  It is true what Fawn fears, that the world is changing. The seasons are shaky, spring starting too soon or too late, warm days in winter and cold storms in summer, things confused. It is true that the very atmosphere is changing; it is true that the river and the rains carry so much pollution sometimes that they kill the very things they have always given life. Yet the earth always adjusts. No matter how much is lost, something, somewhere—even if it’s not him, even if it’s not his family—will adapt. The crows, the insects, even the deer—or some creature hiding on the brink of existence, something no one has ever seen—will be ready to emerge and re-create the world. Someone will always continue this story that is life, and that comforts him.

  He pauses to rest and watches Chelya as she stacks the last logs, her brow slightly furrowed, her limbs intent and unselfconscious, her hands so capable and ready. He imagines how it would be to ride around the countryside with her, exploring all the lands he’s visited only in memory for so long, stopping at each farm to find out who’s left and to see if there is any young man worthy of her. How beautiful she is! He wouldn’t want to give her up, but he knows he’s never had to worry about her. Of course she would choose seriously and right: someone who values the right things, who is kind and hardworking, who respects her. But she’ll be forgiving, too. She won’t have to have the handsomest, the wisest, the strongest, the most romantic, the one who lives up to some ideal in her mind; she won’t have to travel forever to find perfection. She’ll be willing to love whoever’s heart is simply good enough to deserve her. Rye senses that she already knows what it’s taken him a lifetime to learn: that it isn’t the decision you make that matters, but what you make of it, and how deeply you commit to it. It’s up to her to love well, and she will.

  “I’m going in to help Ma with dinner,” she says to him now, turning.

  He nods and watches her go. He watches the snowflakes close around her as soft as eyelashes, like ceremonial weeping.

  Far from the flames, far from sound, far from hunger and violence and the pounding of feet against pavement and the crash of buildings, cushioned by the long, long landscape of the sea, the woman who was once named Lonely dissolves in the deep cave of sleep.

  How delightful it feels, finally to rest! There was something she wanted once, something she wanted so much that this wanting was her whole life, and yet she can no longer remember it. Someone was whispering something sweet to her, and that something was sort of a name—as much as the calls of the gulls over the black water are names for each other, or the barking of dogs in the night is the naming of love, or the hollow cry of the wind through the grasses is the name of time—and yet it is not exactly a name. It is
more like a sweet, blessed gateway into a high, golden room that feels familiar. Someone is waiting for her there, in the light, and she wants to go in.

  But she is distracted by someone else, someone whose tears wet her face. He cannot stop crying. “I’m sorry,” he is saying. “I’m so sorry, beautiful girl. I only wanted to keep you safe. I wanted to keep you safe from this terrible mess I made….”

  She can see her father, back there in the fog, and she wants to tell him it’s okay. That she is okay, that she forgives him, and that, though he is rocking her in his arms, though his tears fall all over her, he can let go now, because something else is already rocking her, already keeping her safe. Something else that is not her father, and not her mother, is rocking her deeper than the earth, deeper than the sea, deeper than the sky….

  Fire—mindlessly brutal, soullessly hungry, wordlessly roaring—runs faster than Kite does. It singes his hair. It makes a dance that does not include him except as fuel, like the universe’s great masterpiece made at the expense of hundreds of individual lives, for the sake of which nothing but merciless, inhuman beauty matters.

  But as he stumbles, his timed-out lungs expiring, the sea comes cold and oblivious from the opposite direction. It comes at the fire and does not see him, and he collapses backward in its wake, and emerges sputtering to deep breaths of smoke. Blackened water swirls around him, mechanically responding to the desperate thrashing of his arms, his heart. Then it falls over him.

  And it is not the life energy that beams out graciously from the cozy stove; it is not the peaceful crackling that makes its comforting, steady light in the winter. It is not the sweet melody that quenches thirst; it is not the cool summer relief; it is not the lusty relaxation of a warm bath. It is not the romantic dream in the evening to which music is softly played and stories are told; it is not the fresh awakening in the morning. It is fire, water, and air in a pure, loveless chaos, in that most banal, universal form. In this universe, he does not matter at all. He does not even exist.

  Why, when he thought of energy, did he think of magic? Why, when he thought of harnessing the elements, did he think of warmth and light, when the elements unleashed are nothing but those very things which return us to darkness?

  He wanted to quell his mother’s fear.

  He wanted, finally, to prove to her that these things could be controlled, and that they—their family—could be safe forever. Anything to stop that worry in her eyes and her voice, that tension in her coldness to his father, that tearful look on her face when he went out; anything to stop the fear that clamped their lives so tight together, so that he could never breathe out all the way, or breathe in with certainty. He wanted to go to the City and bring home light, and warmth, and control, so that she would finally relax, finally let him go.

  But now in this racing tide of the elements released, he knows that this is impossible. Willingly, he stumbles; willingly, he lifts his face; willingly, he falls into that bed of wild darkness. Because all he wants is not to be afraid any more.

  The sea finally recedes, and the fire is only a memory of black and dusty things, but even the wind slashes cold in his wet ears and ignores him as it steals away the last of his strength. He does not recognize the earth beneath him. His last thoughts before he loses consciousness are of Chelya’s laughter, Dragon’s heavy loving hand on his shoulder, and the sweet, throaty cries of a bright girl in Dragon’s bed as he, Kite, lay awake in a foreign, unknown city, in the darkness.

  The fires in the City rage for days.

  Mira sees herself a white Unicorn, cool and peaceful as ice, walking sad and slow through the crowd of flames and people, through the burning rooms, through the foggy smoke in its circles and curls, through the falling, nameless pieces of unidentifiable things. She cannot feel the flames. They mesmerize her like calligraphy against her skin.

  Then she realizes she is not the Unicorn after all but a girl screaming in her sister’s arms. She knows she is screaming by the tears in Lilah’s eyes, tears she can feel pouring down her own neck. She feels the tears and then she feels the heat of the scream, inside. The scream starts at the base of her body, where the wound is, and heads upward. She cannot seem to stop screaming, but she knows suddenly that Lilah’s tears will slay the fire. So she keeps holding on, waiting.

  Inside the scream—which does not even belong to her, which surrounds them like a red cocoon—she says to Delilah, strong and clear, “We have to find him. We have to tell him he has to let Her go.”

  At first Dragon feels completely free for the first time in his life. There is no question, no self-doubt, no loneliness. Everywhere, everywhere, he sees his own passions and furies mirrored back to him in flame. The City becomes flame—and becomes one with him. He feels the wild, rising heat of their mass bodies, and he feels their fear like the very serpent of life itself lifting them up, tickling his skin as they brush by him, infusing him with ecstasy as they press him close, pushing and pushing and ever-exploding forward. For days and nights before this, he has made love; for days and nights he has healed the lonely, the lost, and the desperate with his magic, sensual touch; for days and nights he has dug the people out of their own ruins, lifted concrete chunks that were light to him, tossed aside the debris easily and carried people in his arms without need of food or water or rest, because he is a god. Because he needs nothing but their love, their heat, their aliveness all around him. He would do anything to keep that fire of life itself burning inside them.

  Finally he, Dragon, who has always needed them so badly, has become the one who is needed! Finally, they started coming to him for help and for love, as they came to him in the desert cave—only more of them, women and men alike—and that ancient life force he had tried his whole life to hold back came rushing finally through him, inexhaustible and endlessly useful. And so he runs with the fire now, on fire with his own self, bigger than life, raising his arms and roaring with the craze of its drunken, joyous hunger.

  But eventually the human being in him tires, his running slows, and he begins to look around him. No one is sharing his joy. In a gradually awakening horror, he begins to see the twist of the people’s faces as they run by him, and to recognize that twist not as passion but as agony. He sees that the things the fire devours are the things that once housed the people or that are beloved to them, and some of those things are alive. He sees them running from the fire. Then all his old sorrow returns—the sorrow he himself has run from all these years—as he understands again why the women avoided his gaze in the streets, why the first Yora wouldn’t let him touch her, why the mothers of his youth cast him out. Because this fire could hurt them so much. But it isn’t what he meant to happen. He knows now, what it feels like to help other people. I am the god of this, he thinks. It is my job both to give it and to take it back, when it is too much for them.

  So it is that Dragon begins running again, only this time not making the flames or feeling the flames or rejoicing in them, but rather devouring them. This time he is taking them back.

  In the burning bedrooms, he eats the flames. In the abandoned buses, in the long hair blowing, in the falling tangles of wires, in the City Center itself, he eats the flames even as they eat the things. He takes them back inside and swallows. He feels them hotter and hotter inside, until they burn so hot he can’t tell his insides apart, and then he can’t feel the fire at all any more, because he himself is that heat. He is the dragon, who, when it dies, when it transforms itself finally into the next life, becomes a star.

  That pure fire follows its pure hunger toward that which has called him all his life, and which he has never understood, but which he has tried so hard to name.

  He flames over empty pavement, and abandoned lots which cannot burn.

  He flames out toward that something, that something he desires, until he feels that it, too, is coming for him.

  Have you ever seen the sea? Kite whispered to him once on a
cold desert night, when they lay awake and listened to the wind. I have always wanted to see it.

  At first the people do not run away. For at first it seems to leave them, receding from the beaches, contracting inward into the great bowl of the world as it has never done before. Young lovers, laughing—still thinking they are above all this and will survive it through brash will alone—actually follow it out as it returns to the center of the earth. All their lives, the world has been a show. The world has been made to entertain them—a great glamour of thrill and pleasure and everlasting life that Hanum made for them alone, the everlasting youth. They run toward it. Daring each other, they go chasing after the sea.

  But the birds rise crying from their hidden ground nests, and never see their children again. They know that glossy body is coming, and nothing will make them stay. They grew up with its sound in their ears, and they knew from the first that it never struck any deal with them; it owes them nothing. They knew from the first what they were up against, choosing to nest at the edge of the abyss.

  The wave rises, and the lovers begin to scream.

  But before it can get to Dragon, he is running toward it. He is running from the warm joyful flames into that cold empty coming, forgetting all his godliness, forgetting the salvation of giving, knowing only that She is all he has ever needed to survive, and that She will destroy him if he doesn’t take Her first.

  She is the water he learned to thirst for, whom he rises for at the merest thought of nourishing breast and pungent female sex, who lured him and sang to him and tormented him in the dry, abandoned desert. She is the mother whose love was his only hope of life, and who cast him into flames to destroy him. She is Yora who brought him to his knees with longing and nearly ended him. Now as he comes running upward into the last empty fields beyond the City, She is what he knew She would be: that one perfect, magical white creature who will elude him forever, who will deny him forever, who will mock his darkest, deepest needs and his wildest, beastliest outrage forever if he does not overcome Her now. If he does not destroy Her.