Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Well, ma’am,” says the same polite, eerily gentle one. “What’s inside this mountain makes the whole City run. We’re all out of it, see?”

  “How do you know it’s in here?” says Willow.

  The man shrugs. “Don’t know for sure. But we got no other options now. Can’t bring the road further, because we’re all out of fuel. That’s the problem, see.”

  “Yes, I see the problem,” says Willow, and Fawn, who does not look at her, can imagine the lightning in her eyes. “You raped all the other land around, and you used up everything you had. And you’ll destroy all this, and then what? You’re a bunch of stupid boys who can’t see past your noses is what you are. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

  Panicking, Fawn reaches back and grabs Willow’s hand. “Shh,” she whispers fiercely, because she is afraid of what these men will do—afraid for the baby. But the man who spoke only shrugs, and his careless response makes Fawn a little angry, too.

  “I think you should all go home,” she says.

  “You’re the ones who should go home, Ma’am,” says one.

  “I am home,” snarls Willow.

  “Don’t you have families?” asks Fawn. “Don’t you have wives, children?”

  Most of the men nod ever so slightly.

  “You should go home and care for them,” says Fawn. “How is what you dig up here going to make you happy? It will only last for a little while. Then what will you do?”

  They shrug. One of them looks back at the man with the gun, and that man has balled his fists up tight around the gun, but he isn’t holding it like a gun any more. He’s holding it the way a child holds the only toy that belongs to him when a stranger frightens him.

  “How long will this—whatever it is here that you want—how long will it make the City run?” And when they don’t answer, she keeps going. “Why are you going to kill each other over something like this?”

  More silence, and then one man blurts out desperately, “We need it. We need it. We have to eat!”

  “Then,” says Fawn, “you learn how to grow your food in the earth, instead of destroying it.” And though she doesn’t want to, she adds, “You come home with me if you want. I’ll give you something to eat, and I’ll show you what to do.” It sounds ridiculous, childish, but she means it. She can’t think what else to do, how else to save these people. She’s more sorry for them now, almost, than she is for Willow’s land.

  The man with the gun looks up at her. With every moment that goes by, he seems to Fawn another year younger, another year further back into childhood. She wonders if he even remembers how to speak. Far off, for the first time, she notices the sound of the river, like a memory that nearly brings her to tears.

  They all wait there—the men and the women—not knowing what will happen next. Then, unable to bear her own fear any longer, Fawn walks straight toward that man. Instead of pointing the gun at her, he pulls it up toward his chest, holding it tight. The other men scatter backward, with a fear equal to hers that astounds her—and that she will never be able to explain.

  “Give that to me,” she says to the man, and she holds out both hands.

  The man keeps looking at her face, not at her hands. His face, she sees now, has many years in it after all, maybe as many years as Rye—the face of someone who has watched children grow up, and maybe grow up hungry. Its lines are complicated and beautiful.

  “Come on,” Fawn says, quietly now, and nods at the gun. She doesn’t have a strategy. She only feels absolutely certain that this thing cannot be trusted in his hands, or in anyone’s hands.

  The man hands her the gun. It’s warm and heavier than she thought it would be.

  “Do you want to come home with us? Do you need something to eat?” says Fawn gently.

  The man looks down, shakes his head.

  “You go home then,” she says, because it seems to her that the man needs some direction. She holds the gun clumsily in front of her. “Some bad things are going to happen in the City very soon. There will be storms, and many things will be destroyed. People will die. You should all go home and stay with your families. Keep them safe.”

  The man freezes for a moment longer, then turns and sprints across the clearing and into the woods. The trees crash in his wake, and then he is gone. Fawn turns back to the other men, and knows it was for fear of them that he ran. But they, too, turn their faces away from her.

  Nobody says anything for a long moment. Fawn doesn’t think they are going to go home. But she doesn’t want to stay around to watch what they will do to this place. She turns to Willow and sees her face for the first time. She was still picturing Willow’s angry eyes burning into the men, imagining having to drag her away. But Willow’s body is standing soft, and she’s looking at Fawn with an expression Fawn has never seen before and cannot read.

  “Do you want to go?” she asks Willow. For it is, after all, Willow’s land.

  Then she notices that Chelya, standing near the machine, is crying. With her face in her hands, barely able to stand, she is shaking with sobs.

  “They don’t know where they are,” she cries, her voice low and waterlogged. “They have no idea. They can’t see.” Though she is the one with her hands over her face, tears clouding her eyes.

  “Hush,” says Fawn, coming to her and taking her arm with gentle firmness. “Maybe they will see,” she says, loud enough for the men to hear, and as Willow turns to go, she glances back at them one more time. They are looking at the ground. They are looking at the earth, not realizing how the sight of it comforts them—how throughout time, people have always looked down toward the ground whenever they have felt uncomfortable or sad or afraid. Whenever they have wanted to turn back inside themselves for the truth but not known the way. “Maybe they will see.”

  On the walk home, the women are silent for a long, long time. Chelya has not stopped crying. Fawn walks with her arm around her, and they walk slowly.

  When they do begin to speak, they speak with a strange, quiet confidence, as if they knew all along what needed to be said, as if the events of life are connected, after all, with some sense of meaning. They talk about the number of people living in the City now, where Hanum has tried to do away with death through artificial medicine—a number none of them can conceptualize. They talk about the meadows where their farms nestle and how few of these meadows are left, formed by fire thousands of years ago and maintained by the tillers and the grazing of animals. If everyone lived like they did, if food were needed for all those people, wouldn’t whole forests have to be taken down? Would it be wrong to take them down? And would it be wrong, then, for those trees to be used for building? Certain trees were cut for the building of their houses and the making of their fires, but those trees were chosen carefully from within an ancient community of trees. Fawn cannot imagine clearing away a whole meadow. She has always left such things to the elements.

  They talk about everything but what happened, and what the men are going to do—or not do.

  “What are we going to do with that?” says Willow, and Fawn knows she means the gun.

  She thinks for a moment. “Give it to Jay. Maybe he can take it apart, use the pieces for something.”

  Willow nods, and Fawn looks at her. Will she do it? Or will they keep the gun, not telling Fawn, and secretly store it in case of “need?” She shakes her head and looks away. She doesn’t want to think such thoughts.

  Right before they reach Willow’s house, Willow stops. Fawn and Chelya stop with her, and then suddenly the silence is filled with the memories their words were avoiding and with the wonder of what Fawn has done. Chelya smiles and takes her mother’s hand, looks at her, and gives her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Sister,” says Willow softly. “You don’t have to be afraid any more.”

  Fawn looks back at her and sees in those eyes the familial, intim
ate understanding of all the fear that Fawn has ever carried, that has haunted her family all their lives. She sees the reflection of her own courage. It is not advice that Willow is giving her; it is acknowledgement.

  Then she thinks of Kite in the middle of that sad, messy place far away from her, and for an instant feels so proud of him—because he always knew what was right, he always knew who he was and what he wanted, and surely he is being smart and doing what he should do. Maybe he is even helping those people somehow, or teaching them something with all that he knows, with all that her family has taught him. For the first time, she thinks back to the words in his note that Eva read to her, words she memorized and repeated back to herself in her mind a thousand times but which she never truly heard until now: “I love you all. I have to go and discover the truth about the City. I’ll be safe. I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry about me.”

  Why did she take those words as the end? Why did she take them as hopeless? Only because she had forbade it, only because she had always believed it so unsafe, did she assume those words to be meaningless. And that’s why he could never tell her. Because she wouldn’t have believed him.

  “I know,” she says to Willow.

  Willow smiles, her eyes jeweled at the edges with tears.

  They walk on toward the house. The boys are crouched on the step, leaning over some little contraption, Blue directing Morgan’s hands. Jay comes to greet the women.

  “Where did you get that?” he says at once, reaching for the gun.

  Willow looks steadily at him for a moment. He’s looking back and forth between her and Fawn, his eyes shocked and then gradually darkening, swirling. Setting his jaw, he looks past them with a violent eagerness, as if ready to attack some hidden assailant.

  “We just found it,” Willow says quietly. “We found it on the old land.”

  Later, asleep in her own bed, Fawn dreams that the man with the gun shoots it, and somebody dies. It is her own son, her own Malachite. Her own boy is crying out those words, “I need it! I need it!” as if it is the lack of something that is killing him, and she shakes him, sobbing, “What? What do you need?” She would give him anything! What did he have to go so far away from her to find?

  But somewhere behind her, she hears the river, and she knows in the dream that the river is coming, and will one day cover all of this. And she knows it doesn’t matter, that this land doesn’t belong to the City or to Willow; it belongs to no one. Then she feels a tap on her shoulder, and she turns around, and Kite is there, alive and well after all, so much younger than the man with the gun, and she remembers it isn’t his time yet to die.

  “It’s okay, Ma,” he says. “I know what these things are for.” He moves the giant machines as if they are toys, moves their giant limbs, arranging them, examining them. And she sees now that they are magnificent, that they are wondrous ancient creatures—only she couldn’t tell before because they were in disguise. “They’re just in the wrong place,” says Kite. “We just have to remember what they’re for.” And they crowd around him like a herd of beasts with their groaning metal shoulders and their heavy rolling feet and the tinted windows of their eyes, looking toward him for guidance, and she knows that he will lead them. He will know what to do with such power. She knows that he will help them return to their true selves. He will do what a man ought to do.

  She looks back to where she thought Kite lay, and Lonely is standing there, and her brilliant eyes are urgent.

  “They’re coming,” says Lonely. “They’re coming up the mountain. The people of the City.”

  Fawn knows it is not a warning, but a plea. Those people are lost and afraid, with a fear that she understands. Those people need her.

  She reaches up, and Lonely grabs her hand, pulls her up fast into waking.

  Kite wakes to the stench of sewage and the face of a woman he has never seen. The clothes were ripped from his body by the wave, but he is wrapped in something warm and dry now, with concrete bracing his spine and head. The woman’s eyes are too big for her face, which is like a child’s except for the fiery eyebrows and sharp, determined bones. A strand of her shaggy hair tickles the edge of her half-smiling, sensuous mouth. Kite can’t read the expression in her eyes.

  “Shhh,” she says, reaching out to him, though he didn’t know he was speaking, and she touches his cheek. No sooner does he feel that touch than tears are burning his face. He swallows. Her little girl face moves him to pity, but at the same time he reads motherhood in her eyes and sex in the mischievous twist of her lips. He would do anything for her to hold him in her arms.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “Dragon is coming back with food.”

  “From where?” he starts to say, but it’s too much for him, and before he knows it, he is sleeping again.

  Now there is fire again, and water, but in those forms more familiar to him: Dragon’s gentle, warming flames in the center of their circle, and water in some kind of container being tilted to his lips. He struggles to sit up, ready to be strong again. Outside the half-room they’re enclosed in, it is raining again—that steady kind of rain that is not going to stop for a long time. He leans forward, trying to understand where they are. He sees that the room is not half a room after all, but rather a room with half the building missing from it, and the building is lying on its side—though once it nearly touched the sky—and they are sitting in what once was the twentieth or thirtieth floor, but is now just a step above the ground.

  “Mm, pigeon,” says the woman sarcastically, taking the meat on a stick that Dragon holds out to her. “My favorite.”

  “Mine, too,” says Kite, smiling. He sees now that the woman, though beautiful, is not well. She’s got that pallor in her face that everyone in the City has, only it’s less obvious in her than in many because her skin is dark like Dragon’s, and she is already so small that her extra thinness is painful to look at. Still, he can’t stop looking at her. He sees that she is pregnant.

  “What are you staring at?” she says flatly, not looking at him, and he looks away fast and blushes. Out of the corner of his eye he can see her smile.

  “This is Delilah,” Dragon says, “my—” He stops.

  “His ex-lover,” says Delilah, but there is no love in her voice.

  Kite sees the familiar storm shifting behind Dragon’s darkened face and looks nervously back and forth between them. “This is Mira,” Dragon adds, motioning. Kite sees suddenly, behind Dragon, standing outside by herself in the rain—but clean and shining as if no storm or ash or sea has ever touched her—Lonely’s horse.

  He recognizes it instantly, by the strange, circular black mark on its forehead—like some eerie birthmark. Yes, he remembers that horse. He used to catch that horse watching him sometimes out in their fields, the way no animal watches a person. He thought he remembered it being male, but he must have been wrong. He’s still dizzy from waking and surviving. But there is something about the horse, like Delilah, that keeps him from looking away. It’s like she’s electric. It’s like there is something plugging her in, a cord that runs from her forehead into the sky. But why did he think that? He narrows his eyes, trying to focus. She bows her head.

  “Never seen a Unicorn before?” Dragon mumbles.

  Kite pulls his gaze away. Unicorn? His mind goes blank. Dragon is poking at the fire, staring furtively from under lowered brows at Delilah. Delilah is engrossed in tearing up the meat with her predator teeth. Kite has never seen anyone so hungry. Watching her fascinates him so much that he forgets the horse and even his own hunger, though the grease of his meal runs down his shaking hands. But as she starts to turn toward him again, he turns to his food and looks away. Before he can even taste it, he has eaten it all.

  “We have to get Delilah out of here,” Dragon informs them when they’ve finished eating. “We have to get her out of the City.”

  Some emotion falls fast as water through Ki
te’s chest and down into the cold hardness that holds him. He tries to focus on what’s around him. The City seems strangely silent. He sees that what he thought was the pavement just below their broken shell of a room is actually a channel of floodwater, still and colorful with the combined refuse of animal bodies, trash, and slicks of fuel—what is it, after all?—and other unidentifiable substances. As he watches, an old man floats past on a piece of roof, trying to row himself with a broom. He nods to Kite with eyes like coffins, and turns away. It may be the first time any stranger outside the buildings of the City has acknowledged Kite in passing.

  Kite tries to pull together the pieces of his strange journey: the constant hum of automobiles, the dizzying towers, the angry wake of people, the great warehouses of too much food, the locked gates, the wailing crowds, the rains, and the loneliness unlike anything he’d ever known when Dragon left him on the rooftop. He tries to remember setting out on this journey—that innocent excitement that propelled him forward, the first snowfall in the mountains beyond his home.

  He looks out at the giant mass of ruin beyond him, where everything, in rubble, looks the same now, and shapes are meaningless, and everything is trash, a scrambled and ruined language which to Kite is no more decipherable than the City was before it fell.

  He realizes that the emotion falling through him at the sound of Dragon’s words is relief.

  “She needs real food, she needs nourishment,” Dragon is saying. “She needs medicines, or whatever women need when they’re—” Again the pause.

  “Pregnant,” finishes Delilah, and Kite can see the tightness in her face.

  “My mother would know,” Kite finds himself saying. “My grandmother, too. They know all about those things. In the mountains there is everything you need, if you know where to find it. And plenty of food there, too—not just pigeons.”