Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Kite thinks how the people of the City—though someone in the City, somewhere, sometime, did write that book—do not seem to know about all of this. How in a way, he knew more about these things than they did, before he even left home. Maybe he came here because he wanted to know more than this. He wanted to know more than where energy comes from, more than how all the parts fit together in the long path between the simple sunlight or the decay of ancient creatures and the computer in the library. He wanted to know why. He wanted to know the root of this magic. He wanted to know what makes the world run. And he wanted to know if it is truly wrong for humans to change the face of the world.

  He opens his eyes again, feeling suddenly alone. To comfort himself, he thinks of Delilah and Dragon nearby and mentally thanks them for their kindness, feeling shyly gratified to know that they want to see his home, that they believe it must be good for them and want to follow him there. He feels proud of his home for the first time. He imagines his mother meeting them, and it almost makes him laugh out loud.

  The moon is thin, recently reborn, but the stars are ecstatically bright. Their brilliance seems to babble happily about the world a billion years before, from that world they lived in a billion light years away, in a language this world no longer speaks or understands. Kite watches them, thinking he is too cold to sleep, until sleep takes over after all. But before it does, he has the funny thought that before he came on this journey, he never would have liked a girl like Delilah. He would have been wary of her, turned off by her sarcasm and crude toughness. Now she dazzles him.

  In his dream, the elements speak to him one by one, each one a god. Now they are no longer the soulless forces that overtook and nearly killed him. Or maybe they are, but there is a stillness within them, too, from whence they gaze at him, and speak to him, and there is once again a sense of meaning in the universe, even if it turns out that there isn’t any mercy. He won’t be able to remember, later, exactly what they said. The water goddess, her voice echoey and her dress flowing clear over her breasts, seems to say something like “it does mean love,” but he can’t remember the context of what she is saying, for that context has no beginning or end, like the story of a mountain stream. The fire god, young and dauntless and lusty like Dragon, makes a flaming frame around the wickedly smiling Delilah. The air goddess is Lonely, swinging her bare legs in the sun off the edge of a cliff, and while Kite waits breathlessly for her to leap, she looks thoughtfully upward and slowly asks questions of the wind. “What do people use energy for anyway? It’s so beautiful, but used for such boring things! Computers, refrigerators, lawn mowers? What are these things? What is money for? Why do they leave the lights on all day and all night long?”

  The questions make Kite nauseous. He wants to touch her, and he knows he will never reach her, that she is only a dream. Then he hears the earth goddess, and he does not know who she is, but her voice is the voice of his mother, and it makes him weep.

  “We’re all here,” she says. “The earth, the wind, the water, the sun. We have so much to give. But the people are not ready yet. They do not have respect, they do not have gratitude. Whatever they are given, they waste and forget. If they learned to use the power of the sun, they would clear all the trees to get it. If they learned to use the power of water, they would dam all the rivers and turn the world to desert. Whatever they use, they use selfishly, and without wisdom. It is their hearts that must change, Kite. The knowledge itself is not so important, for it comes easily to them. They have the knowledge to do whatever they wish to do, but they have nothing to guide their choices but desire, and even they know that desire is not enough.”

  The dream seems to carry on forever, and Kite’s mind is frustrated with its whirling attempt to understand, his hands lost and numb in his thin blanket, and only his heart at peace. Finally the dream Delilah reaches her hand through the fire, her eyes watery and vulnerable, her breath hot, and grips his painful erection with her small, knowing hand. “I’m scared,” she whispers.

  He wakes coming inside his pants, inside the blanket, and now he has nothing else to change into. But before he can worry about that, he wonders if he is truly awake after all, and then decides he must not be, because there is a beautiful girl he has never seen kneeling beside him.

  She is like Delilah, and at the same time not like her at all—more like another form of Delilah, a gentler shade of Delilah in the dark. As if Delilah were the earth, fiery and alive and pregnant and tormented, and this girl were the moon—a ghost version of a girl, a girl immortalized in time.

  She gives him a sad smile, her lips so slippery they don’t seem able to hold solid form. Her eyes are the eyes of a deer, if a deer could truly love, if a deer could feel compassion for the predator that hunts it. Her brows, black and full like Delilah’s, are at once more delicate, like porcelain, and her hair, black and thick like Delilah’s rich mane, falls straight and sleek as an underground river. Her mouth and the curve of her lashes at the outside of her eyes are a girl’s—but her eyes are an old woman’s, and he doesn’t feel ashamed as she gazes down at him where he woke from his passionate sleep. Nor does he feel tormented by the need to touch her, though he desires her more than anything he has ever desired.

  For what seems like many moments, she sits still and gazes down at him, her long fingers pale in her quiet lap, her whole body cloaked in something dark, so that her face—though only a little lighter than Delilah’s—above that darkness glows. He tries to understand what he sees there. Longing, curiosity? Is she telling him something? It’s a warm feeling, and yet fragile, so that he dares not move a muscle in his face or his body. She is a dream, perhaps, of all the elements merged into one. The delicious weakness, the soft falling caress of water. The intensity of fire in that gaze he could never turn away from if he tried. The far-off wisdom of air. The silence of earth. Remembering the dream, he does not reach for her; he does not ask for anything. This gift has come to him, on her own, and he simply gazes back, not even trying to understand but only to love this moment with all the love he has, letting her presence change him in whatever way he must change.

  He doesn’t remember falling asleep again. He doesn’t remember her leaving. Yet suddenly he is waking in the morning, and Delilah is already standing and stretching her arms in the sun, and his pants, as if by magic, are dry and clean.

  The next night, the moon girl comes to Kite again.

  It’s the same as before. Delilah appears first, and this time with a mere brush of her downy hips makes him come. Then again he wakes and lies still in the moonlight of the young woman’s eyes, and again he finds himself waking again in the morning with his pants strangely and conveniently dry.

  Then the next night, the whole thing happens again.

  He is distracted during the day, even as they travel further from the barren roads, and the silence of the hills settles around his mind. He begins to wonder, though he cannot understand it, if the real Delilah is coming to him in his dreams on purpose, making sure that he comes before waking to the sight of this beautiful girl—making sure he has already spent himself before he sees her. But why would that be? The mystery of it obsesses him, and he considers asking Delilah even casually, “Have you been having any dreams?” Because maybe she knows something about this sweet silent girl who comes to look sadly at him every night, whom he longs for but in whose presence he is afraid to move or breathe, lest he frighten her away.

  But even the word “dreams” embarrasses him, and he cannot.

  After Sky let go of the first woman he ever loved, after he felt her float away from him for the second time into the ethers, he walked out onto the island alone. He took the fragile, driftwood chair in his hands, broke it into pieces, and scattered the bones into the sea. Then he sat down on the cold stones and tried to remember why he was there, how old he was, and why he was lonely.

  At first he felt simply relieved. I have done it, he thought. Finally, I
have fulfilled my duty, my promise. I can call myself a warrior again, without shame.

  He had come out of the dark hole and smiled, and the sea was nothing to him, and the wind was nothing; there was only this great empty relief. I am no longer afraid, he had thought.

  And yet…

  And yet what?

  Yet there was another promise to be kept. A promise you made to the Unicorn, said the wind.

  Time passed imperceptibly. The sea, pacing a cold rhythm against the shore of endless night, was no help. A fog curled in and wrapped itself around the island, then around his shoulders and around his ankles, like a stubbornly loyal dog.

  It is I, he thought finally. It is I who must go down to the Dark Goddess.

  The thought did not startle him. He thought of the Unicorn and the darkness below. He knew he must go. Yet for a long time—in fact for a whole moon, growing and dying again—he has felt no urgency in this knowing. He has sat here on the surface of the island, or at times he has stood and walked, but he has needed nothing and has felt no sense of past or future. He feels beyond sorrow now and beyond hope. He knows he must go, and yet what will make him go?

  Perhaps, in the end, it is a kind of curiosity. Something nags at him. Someone is down there, below him, deep down within, and she has something to do with him—something important.

  So he stands and walks, the stones sharper this time against his airy feet, and comes again to that hole between the stones with nothing to mark it but a simple blackness, a mirror of the dark moon, and he tries to remember. He tries to remember who she is, down there.

  There is something else beneath the stubborn memory of his distant past in the swamp that he has lived with for so long, something more real and more painful. For so long, he feels now, he has been avoiding what is down there, and he cannot remember why. He squats and looks into that sad, black hole, like a wound, and feels tenderness like new spring grass begin to break its way through him, but of course the breaking through causes pain.

  To calm himself, he tries to count the stairs as he goes down. But it is impossible. He loses track.

  Though he came here before, without the old woman standing before him the darkness is different, bigger. When he arrives, he thinks at first that he is inside the lake. For there is that kind of darkness, the kind that listens, with a listening both comforting and terrifying. There is that impossible light too, though he cannot quite look at it yet, for he cannot tell where it comes from—the way sometimes one cannot tell the source of a sound, though one turns and turns.

  He blows a breath, speaking to the wind in his own language, and listens. But there is no answer. The wind is not here.

  He steps. His footsteps make no sound.

  He sniffs. He smells a green vine growing, somewhere near, and wet earth.

  The first thing he can see clearly is rainbows. Here and there he sees them: frames of rainbow as from a crystal, bouncing and shaking, appearing to his right and then to his left, and then gone, and then there again, and there. Yet, for there to be rainbows, there must be light and water. For rainbows to dance, there must be wind blowing the thing that made them. For rainbows to be visible, there must be light behind them too, or a thing they shine against—and yet there seem to be no walls. There seem to be none of these things. Only the rainbows.

  He reaches toward one of them, and it flits away. But his hand brushes leaves.

  He is hardly aware of taking a direction, until he realizes he is moving toward the light. For there is a light, though when he tries to focus upon it, still he cannot exactly find it. He only knows that it guides him, this physical, moon-like light. It is not really like light at all but like milk that pours over things.

  Just barely, it illuminates a garden.

  Now he is walking through reeds, that whisper as if they have almost forgotten their song, and over a wooden bridge, and into a great breathing place, encircled not by walls but by interlacing ivy, whose sharp-edged leaves cut into the soft light. And in the light he can see another room beyond, and his eyes, following the rainbows, glimpse even a room beyond that, silken and rose, and beyond that a door.

  If this were a dream, he would say that he could hear, even fainter than the voice of the wind which is not here, the voices of women singing, soaring high, as if in prayer. If this were a dream he would say, I am inside the body of a woman. This garden is the body of a woman.

  But he cannot go further, into the deeper rooms—not yet. For the light is here. Right here, in the chamber of the heart. The only sound now is the sound of this fountain, from which the light bubbles forth: not a leaping geiser of spray, but a smooth, lava-like churning of water and light, water and light, rolling forth in an endless froth of rainbows.

  All around the fountain are the bodies of sleeping people. But they are so quiet, so still, so utterly peaceful, that they seem like stones. They look and even feel—for he kneels and touches one now, with tenderness, for he can tell they were forgotten here—like the kind of gnarled and ancient stones that have come tumbling through every cavern and storm and quake of the world, to land finally in some still place at the very bottom, even lower than the sea.

  There in the center of them, in the center of that circle of stone people like a silent council, is that light, so familiar to him. Yet it is not a Unicorn’s horn after all, that makes the light, as in the Council of Beings beneath the lake.

  It is a woman who makes the light.

  He feels foolish now, seeing her there, as if all the animals—and all the beings of the world—knew this obvious truth that it has taken him all this time to learn. It is she who makes the light. It is she who waits at the center of the darkness.

  He stands again and walks cautiously to the pool of the fountain, which bubbles slowly in the center of itself and hardly disturbs the surface. He looks in.

  There he sees her: the woman who loved him is floating there, like the thing they all spoke about for all those years without ever saying its name, without ever really looking at it. Now she is all he can look at—literally the only light. She floats curled on her side with one arm under her head, tangled in her strange yellow hair, and the other arm drifting, her fingers curled as if she reached for something sleepily before she closed her eyes. She is naked, though the moving water above her blurs her form. In sleep her eyes are hidden, but her body is alive and moves as if with breath, though she breathes underwater. And he sees her. He sees her like he saw her when she slept brand new and innocent in the tower, and when she slept, sweetly calling him, by the waterfall on the mountaintop, and when he came to her each morning in the places where the animals told him he would find her.

  How accustomed he is, after all, to approaching the soul when it is sleeping. How much easier it is to come in the dark like this and not be seen!

  Without noticing what he’s doing, he leans forward, trying to see where the light in her comes from. He curls his hands over the stone ridge of the fountain’s edge, clumsily, like paws.

  He misses her. It’s true! He breathes out suddenly and smiles, wanting to call out to her. But something stops him. What is it? He leans forward, so close now that he can smell the water, and it smells like her, and he closes his eyes. The silence of the garden around him is so gentle, the flickering of the ivy so secretly alive, it seems to cradle his thoughts like sacred embers, blowing on them faintly with its own mysterious breath. He remembers unwrapping such beauty, such fresh joy, from a cloud in the morning when he returned from sad dreams, and feeling her hot, damp arms curve around him, her fingers on his spine. He remembers that surprising warmth in a cold so familiar he had ceased to wonder at it. He remembers the trusting grip of her smooth hand, the openness of her eyes when he spoke, the love in her voice when he cried, and, most of all, the luxury of that oblivion, that terrifying melting, that wild deliverance, when he brought her body down into his arms on the shore of the lake tha
t final night.

  But something stops him, for there was something wrong. For the first time, he tries to remember what it was.

  Why did you leave her? the silence seems to ask.

  He always felt there was some reason. Perhaps she had done something he could not forgive or had proven that she could never truly understand him, or perhaps she had betrayed him in some way? They had woken that morning, and there was something wrong. Yes: he had slept, and the lake was silent. His people were gone, and she could never understand. She could never save him from that loss.

  But that isn’t it.

  The silence is so loud now, he is forced to open his eyes again and look at her. His heart jumps. No, he realizes, it was because he would disappoint her. Because he could not give her what she wanted!

  She kept asking something of him, over and over again, which he could not give, and she was angry with him, and it hurt him so much that he could not even bear to be near her. He remembers. When he woke that morning, he saw it would only be worse. When she opened her arms to him, he felt empty. He saw only his own failure.

  So he had to run away into the past, into the loss he knew so well, into the familiar grief. He could not give her what she asked for: his whole heart. He had not even looked at his own heart for so long, and he did not know what was there, and he did not want to know. Not then.

  Is that all? he thinks now.

  He folds his arms upon the rim of the fountain, rests his head upon them, and gazes in. He lived in this death-like stillness for a hundred years. He could rest here for a hundred more, only gazing at her, and what would it matter? What if he still cannot rescue her? What if he cannot give her what she needs? The truth is she is braver than he. The truth is that he fears the things she will feel, the things she will ask of him, if she wakes.

  Yet how lonely it is—how lonely it has always been—to be the only one thinking, the only one awake!