Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Delilah looks at him. To his delight, he sees her face open to him a little more, her eyes softening, and he sees the weakness there, and again he wants terribly to hold her. “Green things,” she murmurs.

  “Yes,” he nods, though his lips feel full of water. “Green things.”

  But he can feel Dragon looking at him, and the look makes him turn away from her again.

  Delilah sighs. “It’ll take us years to get there,” she says.

  “But we have to,” says Dragon, determined. “It’ll only take a moon or two.”

  Kite sees Lonely’s horse step forward, her toes impossibly light, and bend her head toward Delilah’s body, and again he seems to see that cord of electric light, now between her forehead and Delilah’s heart and belly. Delilah closes her eyes. Again Kite’s mind goes blank. He tries to figure it out, but he can’t remember what it is he is trying to figure.

  “Mira will keep you alive,” says Dragon. When Kite looks at the white horse, something happens to him, like a revelation he continually forgets, and continually re-remembers. There is a connection between her and Dragon. As if Dragon could not be here without her, nor she without him. But like every thought in connection with this animal, the origin of this thought cannot be explained.

  “Let’s make some headway before sunset,” suggests Dragon, an easy leader.

  Kite stands on shaky legs and tries to find, behind the rain clouds, the sun in its late afternoon stance. Time has ceased to hold real meaning since he came to the City. Back at home, the course of the day was marked by real events that could only happen at the times they happened: the light creaming over certain mountainsides in its regular golden order, the crowing of the rooster, the opening of flowers, the warming of the day, feeding times and mealtimes, the times the deer came out to graze and the times he felt stronger or more peaceful. Also the seasons could easily be seen and felt. Here, where it’s light at night and grey during the day, where concrete never changes, he is not even sure if spring has already begun, or if it ever will.

  He stands now, and does not feel tired. He stands with a sudden hunger for home so powerful it stills his heart—to know again where he is, and when it is, and what is real.

  12th MOON

  For a whole moon, the waters do not fully recede, and the rains keep coming. The fire is out, but now you slog bewildered through fields of water, through curtains of water—veil after veil of falling water into caverns of desolation. You emerge from the pieces that buried you, or from the libraries or parking garages—those few sturdy buildings whose basements sheltered you—to find nothing of the world you once knew. No trace of your loved ones. Naked bodies, anonymous, piled by wind and wave beneath a bridge. The objects you held most dear in life swirl around your thighs and hips, together with the things you threw away, and they cannot be told apart. Your homes have been torn limb from limb, and what remains of them mingles with trash unbuckled from the depths of the earth in the quake, freed from dumps in the windstorm, and turned toxic in the fire. Dead people float with dead dogs. A dish set, a clock, a wedding gift, a fancy tire rim, a plastic sandwich holder, a broken phone, are all meaningless now and make sharp edges under lost, bare feet. But suddenly last year’s fashions are useful, like a skirt thrown away in the garbage that, floating to the surface, you grab up eagerly to tie as a bandage around the arm of a child cut open by falling glass.

  Out in the desert, Coyote chases his tail around a dried-up pool, then lies back and sings a song up into the black hole where the new moon is not. If human beings are all destroyed, the Earth will gradually heal. The skies will clear, the rains will run pure again, and the river will no longer cry. Salamanders and frogs will breathe easily again in fresh running water, birds will reclaim their migration stops, and tortoises will be able to hear each other again in the quiet that is left behind. Trees will get to grow, once again, many hundreds of years, and when they fall the earth will drink them in, and fairies will rise in joy from the mushrooms that bloom in otherworldly colors where they rot. Ecosystems will make sense again, and every creature will recognize every other creature, and be able to find its way home. Rabbits and prairie dogs will once again have noble names for their fears—Eagle, Coyote, Weasel—instead of terrible, nameless fears that come without purpose, tearing up the land with machine and poison. The Earth will be young and new again: the sweet, proud virgin that Coyote remembers from when the world was born.

  But as Coyote watches his own weird and lonely song play out across the dark canopy of night, he sees the City, as if in reflection, in the silver clouds. He sees those people wading there, pressing urgently through water as if water were air, cold and missing the fire now though only days ago they screamed for it to stop. He sees a starving man, who didn’t get to tell his wife that he loved her before she disappeared, rescuing a puppy and carrying it with him everywhere. He sees people standing inside the wreckage of houses, staring as blankly at a floating sofa cushion as at the body of a beloved pet. He sees a woman who gave birth in the burnt-out kitchen of someone’s house—a kitchen with only two and a half walls now and no ceiling—her head cradled in the arms of two other women she does not know. At her side: one iron pot and an old can filled halfway with dirty water. He sees people clutching things to their chests, crying, not even remembering what those things are. In the whole expanse of this make-believe, ridiculous place, he hears things that have always been heard since humans began—things you wouldn’t think could still be heard, like whistling, drums, and even laughter. Inside people’s minds, those strange, incredible human miracles are still happening—miracles like forgiveness, realization, mischief, self-questioning, nostalgia, and wonder.

  And he knows that if humans disappear forever, if they don’t survive their own stupidity and the elements come back to reclaim them, all the other animals and plants and even the mountains and the rivers and the clouds will probably be terribly, terribly relieved.

  But Coyote alone, for no reason he can name, will miss them.

  The group decides to walk around the south side of the City; maybe, once they reach the purple ridge, they can walk that straight up into the mountains.

  “I came this way,” says Delilah.

  “So did we,” says Dragon.

  Up here in the meadows, it feels at first as if nothing has changed. The sparrows and wrens sing as if they’ve never heard of the City, and the grass tilts lazily to and fro in the sun. But where people have never bothered to come before except as children or in drunken teenage frenzies, dirty starving forms now lurk, and half-naked families huddle around the first fires they have ever built. Delilah and Kite work together to find food, their eyes quiet with unspoken admiration for each other’s skills. Delilah, who stashed and later recollected her pack from a desolate beach somewhere, still has the basic tools of survival as well as a change of clothes—which she lets Kite wear, since they’re men’s anyway.

  Though Dragon seems to lead them, and though they all need that strength and determination to uphold them, Kite sees that really it is the horse they all look to for guidance. It is she who senses where danger is hiding with a gun or a knife, and leads them around it. It is she who knows where fresh water lies. It is she who, when the light begins to fade, keeps circling around them, forcing them close together despite their shyness of each other, scanning the fields for hungry eyes. She is their intuition.

  Who is she? And who is Delilah? To Kite, Delilah is the whole mystery of womanhood, both beautiful and ugly, abundant and frail, loving and wicked. He can tell that her angry, fast jokes are aimed at denying her own weakness, and holding at bay the pity they keep holding out to her. I am one of you, the jaunty fierceness of her walk says, and yet there is a grace in it—a falling back in her shoulders, a softness in her hair that she cannot hide, a hidden womanness all the more powerful to Kite because he feels he is seeing it on the sly.

  “I think I’ve becom
e a new man on this journey, Kite,” Dragon is telling him eagerly today. “When I left the desert, I was so desperate for Yora, I couldn’t think. I didn’t know how to survive without her. But now I can take care of myself, see? I don’t need her any more. I was able to let her go. And it feels so much better, for both of us! Because you see, I am the lover of the world. Although in a way, she will always be my one woman—even though I can’t have her like that, she is still my true love in spirit, my Goddess. By being dedicated to her, I will always stay on a good path, and do right by women and the people I love. Because I do it for her. Everything. Even though I’ll never see her or touch her again. Do you see what I mean, Kite?”

  “Sure,” says Kite. It sounds romantic to him, Dragon getting carried away as usual on some dream of what he should be. But he has to agree that something has changed in Dragon, that he seems lighter.

  “Then I realized,” Dragon continues, “that I kept meeting women like Yora in my life, because that’s the only way I could understand love, the kind of love that made me lonely by abandoning me over and over. That’s what my mother did, see. But now I’ve gotten beyond all that.”

  “That’s good,” says Kite, tired and already hungry again. He imagines how tired and hungry Delilah must be, pregnant, and is amazed by how uncomplaining she is. Why doesn’t she ride the horse? He wonders what it is that Dragon obviously intends her to overhear in his words, and he wonders if she is hearing it and how it affects her. There is a certain concentration in her, and he doesn’t know if it’s about what Dragon is saying or just about her own survival, the baby inside her, or something to do with the horse and the silent bond that runs between them. What happened to Lonely? He keeps wondering. He’s thought of asking Delilah if she knows the original owner of that horse, and yet he senses somehow that the question would be offensive. Delilah’s bond with the horse is so deep and obvious, Kite begins to question whether it is in fact the same horse Lonely once rode. Yet how could he be mistaken? He remembers that mark on its head. How many horses could have that same mark?

  By nightfall they’ve reached some of the higher, newer developments that escaped the flood and even the fires. But they are abandoned, or else the people in them, with no electricity and no food, are hiding.

  “I’m not staying here tonight,” Delilah says, as she and Kite share a small meal of a quail he killed with his slingshot, and its eggs. Kite gives her all the eggs and half the quail, feeling proud.

  “Let’s go up to the ridge tonight, then,” says Dragon, but he glances at the horse uncertainly. She doesn’t seem to object.

  “I wonder what’s happening in the City,” says Kite.

  Neither of the others says anything at first, and he wonders if he’s brought up a subject that can no longer be mentioned.

  Then Dragon says, “They got into that building. The one at the Center, where all the knowledge was supposed to be.”

  Kite looks up fast. “They did? What happened?” He feels Delilah looking at him curiously, her gaze mocking, tired, and gentle all at once.

  “Nothing,” says Dragon. “There was nothing there. Those powerful people in there weren’t powerful after all. They’d run out of fuel for all their operations, they had nothing, they were hiding out in there eating all the food that was left because they didn’t want to share it. I think the mob ended up killing them.”

  Kite shudders, but he notices that Delilah does not. He decides never to tell them what happened to him in there, or that he was in there at all. He still doesn’t know what he himself feels about it, and he doesn’t want their feelings and reactions to confuse him even further. If he told them, wouldn’t they think he should have done something more than what he did?

  “What will happen to them?” he murmurs.

  “What, their bodies? No one—”

  “No,” says Kite, “I mean everyone. The people of the City. What will happen to them? They have no food, no homes. They’re turning into the wilderness, shooting whatever moves, desperate. Right?”

  “Right,” says Delilah.

  “Then what? Where are all those people going to go?” But he already knows. They’ll go into the mountains. They’ll have to find food. They’ll have to find materials and fuel to make new homes. Little by little, everything will be destroyed. Because they don’t know how to live without destroying. Anyway, there isn’t room for them all, is there? He doesn’t even know how much world is out there.

  Delilah is staring at him, smiling her wicked smile. “We could say it’s not our problem, but it is our problem, isn’t it?”

  Kite shakes his head. “I don’t even know who they are,” he says, “after all this. I didn’t find what I came for. I don’t even know what I came for. Sometimes I think I could help them more than they could help me, if I knew how.”

  “Come here,” says Delilah suddenly. Startled, Kite obeys, ducking his head as he sidles up next to her and lets her arm encircle him, lets her lean her small head against his and stroke his back like a mother, sighing. Her body feels like a hot snake beside him. He’s glad of the darkness, but he can feel Dragon watching him.

  That night, Dragon sleeps spooning Delilah with his arms around her belly. Delilah encourages Kite to stay close, and gives him their one blanket to take with him when she sees that he won’t. He wants to be by himself and think. He finds a spot on the hillside where the horse lies still in the grass, hiding her whiteness as if she knows she might be stolen, but with head upright and alert. He doesn’t know why, but he feels safer being near her.

  He lies down in the grass and feels for the first time as if he could almost be home again. He’s glad at least that he will be back in time to help his family with the spring planting. He misses having something useful to do with his muscles and hands. He misses being needed.

  He lies awake for a long time, thinking. He thinks about the boy he met at the college, who had been learning so much all his life, and wonders if that knowledge will help him now. He thinks about the expressions on the children’s faces as he, Kite, cooked an animal over a fire. He thinks about the panicked voices in the dark inside a tower of steel, and how terribly sad that was, to find out that they were the only answer—the only conclusion to his long journey in search of the City’s truth. He thinks about his own wonder when he first used the computers in the library, which were free for anyone to use, and how those computers could connect him, with a tap of his finger, to anyone in the City. That’s why he believed there was no such thing as a god, or if there was, then human beings were gods, because anyone could create and use this kind of magic. With this magic, he could type in any word, and find all the information in the world about that thing. But there was so much information, he needed a lifetime to learn and understand it all, and a lot of it he could not understand because he hadn’t been learning all his life like the boy in the college. He couldn’t print out the information on the machines that printed words, because he had no money, and he couldn’t stay in the library all day because he needed food, and he still hadn’t learned—he never learned—how to survive in the City.

  He remembers the cars, which he’d longed all his life to see, and which he has still never been inside. But he has walked close to them, when they were parked, and looked inside them, and felt their eerie magnetic presences still cooling from the whir of the machines inside them, like great animals without souls.

  He tries to piece all of these memories together into something that makes sense. He still believes what he believed before he came here: that human beings have so much power, and that energy is magic, and that he and his family and everyone in the City could do anything with it if they wanted to.

  He’s not sleepy at all now. He rolls over and takes from his pocket a tiny flashlight that Dragon found as they were leaving the City. It doesn’t work any more, of course, and the plastic of it is dented and worn, but Kite insisted on keeping it. Now, caref
ully, he takes it apart by starlight and holds the battery and the tiny bulb in his hand, and reads the poetic words on them—“ever-ready, everlasting”. He’s seen lights like this before. He knows they can light up a whole page of a book, or a whole person. And yet this one has died, and cannot be re-lit. What gave the light? What changed about that substance that makes it unable to give light now? Did it really come from the bodies of prehistoric creatures, and could those creatures have been dragons, after all, as Dragon once begged him to believe? He never found out.

  He’s lost his book, of course. The sea took it. Or maybe it’s layered under the rubble somewhere like a fossil, and someone years from now will find it, and wonder at it, and be inspired to look again at what was once forbidden and forgotten. Surely those people in the City are more desperately in need of such knowledge than Kite is. But when he rolls onto his back again and closes his eyes, he can still turn the pages of it in his mind. He’s read it so many times, he can even recite some of the words. And in his imagination now, he reads about how the light of the sun can make the electrons inside an atom spin faster, and how that is energy, and how a building can drink in that energy to make every part of it function without the work of human hands, like a tree turning the sunlight into life. He reads about how energy can be made from the rising and falling of waves, and from the falling of water, and from the decomposing of dead things—how from the heat of death itself, new life can be created. Just as nature does this on its own all the time, people can make it happen too, and they can control it and make it faster.

  But something that Kite always noticed in those explanations was that they did not seem to have a way of creating this energy without also destroying. The technology would make noise under the sea or pollution in the air, or it would stop up the rivers and flood the land, and millions of animals and people would have to leave their homes or die. Everything changes when people take nature into their own hands. And this, he knows, is why his mother is afraid.