Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  And Mira. Does he love her, too? He wants to know what she thinks of him, because somehow knowing that will determine for sure if he is the man he feels he has become. But he hates needing that from her. And though in that moment under the wave, when she was the Unicorn, he did understand—for a moment—their oneness, now that experience is only something he can describe, not actually feel. Now they are separate again, and he fears her a little. Because he can tell that Delilah would defend her from him with tooth and claw, he is afraid that he might want her, even though he isn’t sure that he does want her, any more than he wants any woman.

  He would like to look at Mira more, now that she has taken the form of a girl most of the time—at least for the last couple of days. He wishes she could know that he knows what it feels like, to enter into your body for the first time and feel so bewildered by its sensations, so frightened by its powers. How he wanted to reach out to her when she first appeared before them in human form, holding her hands at her sides like objects that frightened her, stepping carefully as if she might spill. I know, he wanted to tell her. I know. But she always walks behind him with Kite, the two of them whispering together occasionally like new sweethearts, shy and fascinated—even though they are not lovers, because, as Kite explained to him, she is much older than Kite, and anyway Kite feels he is not yet worthy of her. Some nights, now, Delilah sleeps holding her, and Dragon cannot get close to either one of them, but it’s okay, because these late-night talks with Kite might be the last talks they ever have, for all he knows.

  He loves Kite, for sure. Loves him like his brother, like his son, even like an elder. Kite is sacred to him. How, then, can Dragon also envy him? How is it that he constantly wishes him gone, for fear of losing the love of women? He doesn’t want to feel that way. He wants to be loyal to Kite, because that is the only way to be loyal to the man in himself—the only way to be a real man.

  And still, always, there is the question of loving Yora. She waits for him in the bottom of his soul, in the corners of his mind, in the unseen, unformed layers of his dreams. Always he is aware of Her voice, Her knowing, as they walk beside the river toward its source. And on the last night before reaching Kite’s home, he needs to be with Her. He feels that something is about to happen. He doesn’t know why, but he feels it deep down, that he is not going to go all the way with them. Whatever Kite’s home is, with its food gardens and its family and its warm beds, is not for him. He feels that something is about to change forever, and it is not—it has never been—under his control.

  It’s the first time he has tried to speak with Her, since he lost Her in the desert so many moons ago. He has boasted to Kite of Her presence, how their love continues despite all his humanness, how he has learned to understand Her love now, how he has learned to take it as it is. But as he wades into Her slow moonlit waters this night, comes to Her center and stands facing the slick froth of Her, he does not know for sure if the love he’s convinced himself of is real, and he realizes that all this time he has avoided finding out.

  He kneels, immersing that lower half—that tragic, ever-difficult, ever-yearning half of himself—into Her blurry depths. She’s still as cold as the winter, and he closes his eyes, feeling that familiar loneliness—how She winds around him as if he were an obstacle, winds around him like fast snakes more important and knowing than he.

  But when he opens his hands under the water, he feels Her fall in.

  Yora, do you forgive me? Do I still belong to you? Do you still love me?

  And again he remembers his mother, whom he cannot remember—a bitter emptying of hands, the echo of her cry.

  She—whoever She is—does not answer him, at least not in words.

  But other things happen in this night. Dragon listens to the river as it rolls past him, ahead of him and behind him and forever. He feels the dew taking form and clinging to the bodies of solid things. He feels his great father, the sky, watching him from inside the darkness—and as the sky soundlessly, formlessly, ceaselessly makes love to the earth all night long with His black airy body, so too does the water wait for her lover, the fire, to return. In the morning he will rise in the east, clearing away all memory, all the suffering she carries, all the color that history creates. The sun will rise and make a new world. He will blaze down upon the river and drink her up, and she will lose herself in him and rise up into the sky, where everything is pure and fresh and eternally young. Then he will let her go, and everyone in the world will come together in the shared sorrow of rain.

  Dragon listens to the river and feels her cold comfort. He listens to the river and feels how his flame inspires her, how her droplets climb his skin, how he drinks her in and rises inside her and bursts her back out again. All night, he and the river make love, as all night the world makes love with itself all around them, without fanfare, without speaking, without promises, without end.

  In the morning he walks back toward his friends, full of gratitude, full of peace, dripping and naked, but when he sees them in the thicket, he suddenly wraps his body in a dark cloak—for Mira’s sake. His compassion for her overcomes him now, and overcomes everything else he feels. They are standing in the thicket: Mira and Delilah. They are holding each other silently, rocking ever so slightly, like seaweed at the surface of the sea. When Delilah pulls away and faces him, he can see she has been crying, though her eyes are dry now.

  “Before we go on,” she says, “my sister wants to say something.”

  He sees Kite now, sitting by himself in the clearing, with an uncharacteristic fog of sorrow in his eyes. Dragon sits down in the clearing, too, and the women sit with them, and they all wait, while bands of rose-yellow sunlight loop over their legs and arms like rope. Mira closes her eyes and opens them again, her face contorting and rearranging itself as if she were only now being born. Dragon longs to tell her that whatever she says is going to be okay, because she is surrounded by love.

  “I will go a different way now,” she announces finally. Then she pauses, looking down at her hands as if seeking the next words there.

  Dragon glances at Delilah and Kite. They are both perfectly still.

  “The people of the City need now the wisdom of animals, and the plants, and the elements. They are missing this.” Again the struggle inside; Dragon glimpses black aching space, as if he can see and feel inside her mind. “I must go and gather them. There will be a Council. This is the last task of the Unicorn.”

  In Delilah’s eyes, gazing fixedly at Mira, there is some tired question pulsing, some question perhaps that she has asked many times, and wants to ask yet again, but finds futile. Maybe it is the sound of the river so deeply embedded in his mind, or the fluidity of his Goddess lover in his body, but somehow Dragon feels like he knows what everyone is feeling, with only the briefest glance. Then suddenly, he knows what he is feeling, too. It is not love but something else that feels equally good. It is a feeling of being absolutely certain of what is right—so certain that this knowing is like a river carrying him, so certain that he can relax inside himself with absolute faith, finally, and accept himself without question. It feels exhilarating, like freedom.

  “Mira,” he says, standing. “I will go with you. I will be your protector.”

  He says it without asking first, because he knows it is right, and nothing else but this can happen. It is the only thing that can happen. He knows his intentions are true. Mira looks at Delilah. Delilah smiles at Mira.

  Then Delilah stands up and walks to Dragon. Trembling, Dragon stands, too. He doesn’t know what will happen. He is sure she will test him somehow. But she only looks into his eyes, her face strangely frozen.

  “Come back,” she says in a small voice. “Come back to me someday, Dragon. If you want to.”

  Dragon reels. Then with predatory fierceness, he pulls her against him and kisses her. He loves her. His body flushes hot with gratitude. With the force of the ocean, he reali
zes how much more he could love her even than he already does, how close he could come to staying with her forever. But for now, all he can do is let her go, hold tightly to her eyes with his own, and nod.

  When he looks back at Mira, she is already changing. She does not rise up into the form of the Unicorn, as he expects. Instead she falls down into it, surrendering into a pool of white light, from which the body of a horse struggles through.

  The Unicorn looks into Dragon’s eyes.

  And in this moment, Yora answers him, after all. Dragon knows he’s been forgiven.

  Perhaps we thought that this time of miracles would last forever. It never occurred to us that our pain, finally, would be healed not by happy miracles but by another kind of pain—a sweeter pain, a pain that made us believe in our humanity again.

  This was the pain of watching a god die.

  When we first saw the Prince, his hair was as black as sleep, his skin smooth as morning, his limbs as flexible as late-day sunbeams. He leapt from wall to wall as easily as if he could fly, and his rare thoughtless smile, when it came, made women forget themselves—and then remember themselves again. Sometimes he would take the Princess’s hand and they would run over the ruins like goats,and we would chase them laughing like children into the fields. We loved to see the two of them together, young, brave, and beautiful.

  But that time did not last for long. Within only a few days, he seemed to move somehow more slowly than at first, and once we saw the Princess catch his arm as his legs buckled under him for a moment, and he almost fell.

  Within a couple of weeks, his hair was grey, and within one moon, it was white.

  By the summer solstice, his skin wrinkled around his eyes and his mouth, making him look kinder somehow, more experienced, and more like one of us. His muscles were thinner, and he often walked leaning on the Princess’s arm instead of holding her hand. But she never showed surprise at this change. We never knew anything of their relationship. We did not know where they slept or what they did when they were not with us. We only saw them when they appeared, more and more in the same places, by the river or in the fields. Sometimes many days went by when we would not see them. But we were holding our own Councils now, trying to form some kind of government, trying to decide how to direct our energies in an organized way to rebuild, trying to teach each other what little we knew of how to survive.

  The Prince aged faster than it is possible for a human being to age, and yet the more he aged, the more human he seemed. The men among us were astounded by the courage of his vulnerability, the way he walked just as proudly even when he could barely walk at all, and smiled just as broadly and more frequently. The elders who had emerged among us, the ones who had admitted themselves to be shamans of the various peoples of old, nodded their heads knowingly. They said this was a human being once turned god, and now turning back human again. He was catching up for all the years he had missed. Now that he had come among us and accepted this human life, his lifespan would pass all in a moment, they said, and would soon be over.

  Yet we could not quite believe this. The Prince and Princess seemed eternal to us, because of the love we could see between them—an innocent kind of love that, prior to their coming, we thought we had forgotten. This beautiful summer, which in retrospect we see as the time of the Prince’s dying, was the most magical time we had ever known. We felt more alive than we had ever felt. Though we still had nothing, though we still did not know how to find or create enough food to keep our children healthy or even to keep everyone alive, time seemed to pause in the middle of the year and take a deep breath; it seemed to cradle us in some forgiving embrace. An awed silence moved with the Prince wherever he went. Though we knew there was so much we needed to do to fix our lives and our City, many of us spent days and weeks simply following the Prince and Princess through oceanic fields, overcome with the beauty we saw, as if for the first time, everywhere they led us. The closer the Prince came to the end of his life, the more a light seemed to radiate around them both, and it engulfed all of us, so that for a brief time, we, too, felt like gods and barely seemed to need food or water. When they passed the trees, the trees seemed to sing, and when they passed through the grasses, we saw animals hiding there that we had not seen before, and instead of killing them for food, we heard them whispering to each other. We were comforted because we could hear in those voices that what we had experienced was not so terrible and had always been going on, in some form or another, since the beginning of time. We could hear hints of those stories that came before us, and they gave us a sense of belonging to the world, after all.

  It was a strange time, a time that our children, upon hearing of it, may not be able to imagine. It was as if all the knowledge of the world lay open to us, and the doors of other worlds lay open, too. We stood in the fields and opened our eyes, and we could see through the wind to things we had never seen before. We heard voices, as if all of us were the Mad Ones. Deer, lizard, owl, weasel, raven, butterfly—these were like the voices of elders we had never known were there for us, gentle examples of how to live in a wilderness we had once thought alien and inhospitable. By listening to their stories, we learned that hunger, death, loss and fear could all be borne and had their right place among us.

  What made it so? What made it such that, during that brief time, we could understand the other beings of the world and feel compassion for them, as if we all spoke the same language? Perhaps it was the magical sphere which the love of the Prince and the Princess for each other created, or perhaps it was the transformation of the Prince’s dying—a dying that taught us, finally, the magic that can come after everything is destroyed. Or perhaps it was that time between times, when we had lost everything of the past but had not yet built the future, when we were more present than we had ever been or will ever be again.

  All of us began to remember our dreams then, as if they were lit up in our sleep, too brilliant to forget upon waking, even brighter than the day. We spoke of them to each other. We held whole Councils on nothing but our dreams, for it seemed to us that they held messages of great importance. We were dreaming of the lands beyond the City. We were dreaming of the places we had not thought of for many, many years, except in nightmares or in fairy tales, or as places where the reckless young might go for adventure, or as distant views for people on some brief, protected vacation. It seemed as if we recognized those landscapes now, as if they were in fact within us.

  We wanted to see those great lands that we saw in our dreams. We thought of exploring, and we thought of spreading out and forming new communities in other places, but we were still afraid. Besides, we knew somehow that this time of miracles was nearly over, and we could not leave yet, for we felt that we were needed here.

  The Prince could have gone off on his own somewhere to die. He could have disappeared like our old god Hanum did, hidden himself away in his suffering or simply chosen to be alone in his last moments. Given that the Prince had always seemed so private, mysterious, and other, that is what we expected.

  Yet the closer he came to the end of his life, the closer the Prince seemed to come to us. When we were bent with sorrow over the loss we had suffered or the people we missed or the hopelessness of the abyss that seemed to lie between us and any kind of future, he would come and sit beside us. He would rarely touch us or speak a word, but we felt his soft presence and the way he cried with us inside; we felt his compassion so deeply that it brought tears even to those of us who could not remember ever crying. When our children were sick, he would come and whisper to them, and sometimes the joy that suffused their faces at whatever words he spoke —whatever secret worlds he described—would revive them. When we lingered at the places we once knew, seeking again and again for the things we had lost in the rubble, sometimes he would come and search with us, or he would pray with us over the people we had buried and the little monuments to those who were never found.

  We knew the Prin
cess came from a lonely tower and was the daughter of Hanum. But we did not know where the Prince came from. We only knew that when he died, he died among us, on purpose, and for that we will always be grateful.

  We followed him beyond the fields that we knew, over the hills, and into a young forest north of the City that no one ever knew was there. Maybe fifty years or so ago, it had been cut down for building and paper, and then abandoned, but it had since regrown. On his last day, the first day of Autumn, we followed the Prince and the Princess through that forest. We gathered the plants they showed us to gather, and in the evening we had a small feast of leaves and berries, which would not have sustained us had we not been under the spell of that strange, miraculous, brightly lit time.

  The Princess sat beside him with her head bowed. We had seen her walk beside him with her arms around him, as if he were still her young lover, though his youth was gone and his back bent and his limbs crooked like the old trees. We had seen her sit proudly beside him as if he had never changed. But we had never seen this sorrow in her. We had never seen her hide her eyes from us as she did now.

  The evening was gentle and the sky seemed to lower its hazy, blue-grey mirror right through the treetops and into our midst. The thrushes were calling in careful, unhurried voices, as if lowering a fragile song leaf by leaf in secret down into our minds. There was a deep peace among us. We could hardly remember who we had been even six moons ago, and yet we remembered things from far before that now, things from before we were even born. The Prince looked out at us and said, “I want to tell you three things.”

  “First, I want to tell you to remember your dreams, and to keep them by you, even if you do not know why.