by Mindi Meltz
“I see now,” says the man beside him, “that the job of the original people was simply to guard our wisdom until the next people were ready for it, and that these new people will do what they will with it. They will carry it on into a future we cannot control or dictate—any more than a mother can dictate the future of her child.”
He turns toward Kite, and the sorrow Kite sees there he will remember for the rest of his days. He will carry it with him wherever he goes, and no matter what he does, no matter what he tries to create, he will always respect it. “This is the first time I have appeared to anyone in a dream as myself,” says the man. “I was waiting, for so long, for the world to turn back to the way it was. But it is never going to turn back. I must surrender to the future. There is something beyond what the City was, and also beyond what my world was. It goes on and on. And you are the bridge, Malachite and Kite. You stand in between.”
Kite looks back and sees his mother’s house and the fields of his childhood behind him, and he looks forward and sees the ruins of the City and the people picking through the remains, trying to begin again. The man with the sky in his eyes is gone now, and in that disappearance, Kite feels the soft weight of the man’s surrender. As he breathes out and wakes, he feels at once the relief and the gentle burden of finally being free.
That freedom he longed for so deeply as he sat in the oak tree and looked out at the City far away—that freedom finally came, at a price. The price was the sad, irreversible wisdom that comes with remembering the suffering of the City, that he will always have to carry now.
He wakes knowing, with a clarity that will not leave him, that he will return to the City. That he is not yet finished there. And that the next time he goes, he will go not to find answers, but to give.
Now Delilah is awake and eating the food he left for her. She has the wherewithal to share a little of what remains with him for breakfast, but he is frightened by the look in her eyes. He cannot even see the Delilah he knows there; her pupils are like lean, focused fists of determination floating in a sea of glazed delirium. She says nothing as he helps her to her feet.
But as they wander along the base of the cliff, he begins to recognize the plants he knows, which also grow around his home. He picks the ones that can be eaten and offers them to her. Looking a little amazed, she takes them from his hands with docile clumsiness and chews them slowly—and then more quickly. He keeps picking them. He sees the warmth return to her face, and when, after a while, she turns to him and he sees her familiar grin, he is so relieved he exhales audibly.
“How do you know all these plants, little mountain boy?” she asks him teasingly, and of course he does not mind her calling him that, though coming from anyone else it would infuriate him.
He shrugs. “I’m not stupid.”
“But who taught you?” she insists, looking at him more intently.
“I don’t know. My grandmother, I guess.” He reflects a moment, and then adds, “I think you’ll like my grandmother.”
Then they see, at the same moment, the way up. It’s a dusty, slippery path made by deer, twining through brambles to the unseen top. Kite looks at Delilah uncertainly, but she braces her shoulders in that familiar way and says, “All right, then.”
So they start up, Kite climbing protectively behind Delilah, though he cannot imagine catching her if she falls. He watches her focused, cat-like limbs grip and turn slowly with the extra weight of her belly, and her bare calloused heels poking out from her broken shoes. She’s told him she lived alone in the desert for more than seven years. That is all he knows about her.
When they reach the top, she is avoiding his eyes again, as if she intends to keep her energy to herself for a while and simply endure. They walk on in that familiar silence. As they rise higher into the mountains, the air turns refreshingly cool, and the world turns back in time: the trees here are still beginning their spring blooming, and the early lilies are just now opening in their shade. A light wind blows a feeling of mingled suspense and quiet through the evergreen branches and over their skin, and brushes long clouds across the sky. Kite recognizes the rotting trunk of a giant poplar that fell in a storm two years ago, and he recognizes the slope that rises up from it, and the angle with which the sound of the river finds his ear. He veers toward it. When the brush gets close and difficult, he walks ahead and breaks a path for Delilah the best he can.
By the afternoon they are following the familiar creek again, but have been unable to find anything to eat except for greens. Kite glances at Delilah constantly out of the corner of his eye.
“We’re almost there, Delilah,” he says quietly.
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then responds just as quietly, “What does that mean? Almost.”
“We’re really close,” he says. “I know where I am. We’ll be there way before nightfall. We’ll eat when we get there.” He feels a surge of surprising joy.
Delilah doesn’t say anything, but he notices she walks a little faster now, as if with renewed strength.
“Kite,” she says.
“What?”
“Do you think they’ll like me? Your family?”
He looks at her abruptly, but she’s watching her feet, and then she looks up at the sky with a tight expression as if she’s trying to figure it out.
“Of course!” he cries. “Why wouldn’t they like you?” He realizes how proud he is to know her.
She shrugs and gives him an unconvincing half-smile. “I’m just a City girl, after all.”
Kite looks down. He knows what she means. She is another world from his family. He cannot imagine her settling anywhere, working food quietly up from the ground, or sitting at the same table every night. He cannot imagine her sitting at his table. But she has to have her baby somewhere safe.
“Don’t you have a family?” he asks.
“No. Only Mira.”
While he wonders what to say next, she changes the subject.
“Why did you go to the City, Kite? Why did you leave your family?”
“I wanted to know what it was like.”
“And what is it like, do you think? What will you tell them?”
Kite shakes his head and smiles to himself. “I don’t know.”
But he keeps thinking about the question. It makes him anxious, not knowing how he will put it into words for his family. It feels to him essential that he do so, if he is to remain independent of them, and not lose the clarity of his memories and impressions over time. He wishes he still had the journal he kept, though he can’t remember now if he wrote anything of importance there. There is something he must express to them, something he wants them to know about the City. But at this moment, the intensity of Dragon’s presence, the beauty of Mira, and the mystery of Delilah beside him all seem more tangible than his own opinions of what he has seen.
Delilah says nothing more, and he is left to think on her question for a long time. He lets that question float along beside him in the wind as he walks, and fit its shape to the shapes of the trees and slopes he recognizes, which gradually fill their surroundings the closer they get to home, like an image coming into focus around him.
At the crest of a hill, he stops and turns to Delilah. She stops, too, and he looks into her eyes, which is hard to do. He is surprised to see in those eyes not that sweet, mocking confidence which first impressed him, but a nervous reticence, and beneath that, fear. For the first time, he understands that where they are headed now, which is to him a comfort he takes for granted and even tires of, is to her a place of dark unknown where she cannot imagine belonging. For the first time he understands what Dragon always told him: how lucky he is to be so loved he never even thought to imagine what it would feel like not to be.
“It’s the same,” he says suddenly.
“What?” she says.
“I mean, what you asked me. What I t
hought of the City. I think it’s the same or, at least, not so different from here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve realized something about community. We humans are so vulnerable—just skin and bones, you know?—and when we’re all alone in the wilderness, we get scared. We try to stay safe by keeping to ourselves, being suspicious of anyone we don’t know. And the people of the City, they have the same fear. They just learned to deal with that fear differently —by trying to control the elements, trying to conquer them. But that was an illusion. You can’t be in control like that. Long ago people didn’t survive that way. They survived just by depending on each other and working together the best they could. Right? That’s what we all need to do.”
Delilah sighs and looks down.
“I’m going back to the City one day, Delilah. But first I’m going to go and find the other people here in the mountains, the other farmers who are left. Our people. Our community right here. We have a kind of wisdom, here, about how things are connected—something they’ve forgotten in the City. But the City people have another kind of knowledge, and if we could put that wisdom and knowledge together, we could do anything, Delilah.” It seems so much clearer to him now. He can think better, now that he’s back in the quiet, light air of the forest he knows.
But Delilah still won’t look at him. She looks into the wind coming from the valley they rose out of, as if she can still see the City from here. “Kite,” she says, with a gentleness that irritates him—the first time she has ever irritated him. “The City is falling apart. There are people headed up here right now, coming up the mountains in search of food, in search of a new life, desperate. People who went mad long ago are trying to get sane again, trying to remember what’s real. Everyone is going to want to live like you do now, don’t you see? Everyone will clear a bunch of forest to make a farm or a home. Trust me, I know that desperation. People live by destroying.”
“No, you don’t know,” interrupts Kite passionately. “You lived there, but you missed it. You missed seeing all that people can do. You missed the art, you missed the books, you missed the great beautiful buildings and the magic people create, you missed the wonder of it all, all the choices people have. You forgot to be amazed.”
Delilah shakes her head. “I didn’t miss it, Kite. I just—” Then she looks at him and smiles, and he sees the caring in that smile and forgets his irritation. “Sorry,” she says. But he feels sad, to think how hard he has had to fight everyone to get them to see what he sees. Only Dragon understood.
“Why did we stop?” she asks after a moment.
“Because,” says Kite, turning to look down the slope ahead of them, “we’re here.”
He feels Delilah freeze beside him and, impulsively, he takes her hand. “Come on.”
They inch down the steep hill together, grabbing the trunks of saplings to steady themselves, until the grade becomes more level and they can see the meadow ahead of them. They pause to peer through a row of birch trees which are all that separate them from the view of the house, like white columns rising into the sky. They are familiar to Kite, but he sees them differently now. They remind him, for an instant, of the columns on the deck of the great, marble-laced building in the center of the college, through whose doors endless rivers of young students came and went.
From a long distance away, Kite can see his father, a figure in a mist of tall grass striding swiftly from the gardens toward the house with his quiet, decided gate, swinging a bucket in each hand.
Then much closer, suddenly, but as if in slow motion, he sees his sister and mother leave the house with bowls of food in their hands. His sister moves more slowly than she used to, not without energy but as if with more thought, or heavier thoughts. She looks entirely like a grown woman. His mother, to his surprise, looks much smaller than he remembered. When he sees her bend over the outdoor table with the food, the tired slope of her shoulders pains him. She looks so old.
But for some reason Delilah says, catching her breath, “Is your mother a goddess?”
Kite laughs. “My mother?”
They stand still for another moment, watching. Chelya, with her efficient grace, turns immediately back toward the house after laying down her load, but his mother remains at the table a little longer, quietly arranging things. Before she goes, for no reason, she looks up toward the forest where he and Delilah stand.
In that moment—when he cannot yet see the expression on his mother’s face, but only her hand dropping to her side and her body leaning toward him, and she is calling out the name he chose for himself—he hears Delilah’s voice again beside him.
“But I think she is a goddess,” she says with the same breathlessness. “The goddess of this mountain, maybe. I—I know her, somehow.”
As they go forward from the trees, and Fawn begins to run, Delilah laughs a quiet, amazed little laugh. “Kite,” she says. “You’re right. Maybe everything is going to be okay, after all.”
FIRST SUN
One morning a woman is sitting dreamily on a ledge that was once the wall of a great building, overlooking a garden where five children play. Around her, walls of crumbling concrete keep crumbling, their helpless greyness that has never meant anything to anyone turning slowly over the years into oblivion. She is thinking how beautiful these once heartless walls look now that they’re in pieces, now that the grass sprouts from their cracks, moss covers their flanks, and their dying forms assume the shapes of natural things—asymmetrical, unpredictable.
But she doesn’t have much time to think, because it is her turn to watch the children. The people living in this part of the City take turns watching each other’s children while the others work on building, planting, and holding meetings to discuss the future and how to handle the immediate needs of the people. They have barely emerged past a state of emergency. People are still learning to talk to each other and work together. There is a lot of anger and a lot of confusion, even amidst the wonder of new life. It tires this woman, who prefers to watch the children now, even though she has no children of her own, nor wants any for now.
At this moment, the oldest boy is explaining to her why the youngest girl is crying: her sister won’t share the seeds and let her plant some. So the woman goes to the girls and kneels beside them, but even as she does so, she sighs. She notices the detachment of the boy, his awkwardness in explaining the girls’ feelings, the way his eyes wander over the edges of the buildings and beyond them to unknown people, unknown questions, unknown skies, as if he dreams of being a man already and following a path beyond all this silliness. She knows how he feels. As the children continue on with their careful, clumsy planting, and the shy, rough pats of their hands against the soil, she remembers two little boys long ago to whom she told a story, and how that story was her own after all.
She remembers their uncle, kneeling across from her in a field high in the mountains, and how he said, “What would you do if you had no obligations to anyone, if you could do anything?”
But for this moment she only kneels to work as she did then, now beside these children, gathering what they scatter behind them in their playfulness—the trampled tools, the spilled bucket of compost. As she works, she feels the happiness of her lover who lives now within the deep ground. She remembers the promise the earth made her long ago: I am always with you. You cannot leave me. It is the only promise that has ever been kept.
The first food that grew from his bones, from his blood, from his breath, was not like any food the people remembered. It nourished their bodies down to the core, right down to their spirits. And they dreamed delicious dreams.
When the woman who loved that god lost him and began to live among the people, they asked her her name. When she said it for the first time, it made her cry. Her own tears washed over her, as if she knelt beneath Moon’s waterfall all over again, and the rainbow finally overcame her and she was d
rowned. For when she had discovered that name like a gift for the first time in the private embrace of her beloved’s arms, she had never imagined that she would only come to use it at a time when he was gone from this world forever, a time when she had shapeshifted yet again, into a princess, and then into a simple person among the crowd. This last was the greatest transformation she had experienced yet. And what was a name, after all? It seemed nothing to her when she first spoke it to a stranger. It did not make her special. It did not save her from loss. It did not give her any answers. It only made her ordinary. It only made her one of the rest.
Yet it was something to hold onto, too. Even now, it keeps her anchored amidst the storms of her grief, which have not yet abated. She longs for Sky every day. She longs for every moment she remembers, and every lifetime they will live together that has not yet come. Only her name still belongs to her and cannot be taken. It has given her this place among the community of people and of life. Every day she is grateful for that community, with a gratitude as unconscious and necessary as her own legs.
Yet also, she has begun to think again, lately, of solitude.
She has begun to think again of a time before people, a time before Sky was anything but a dream, a time when she and her horse and her own longing were her whole world. The voice of the wind was clearer to her then. She did not notice back then, long ago, how natural that solitude felt. Those moments, now, feel like the most solid happiness she ever knew.
She has begun to speak to the wind again, bit by bit. Sometimes, she does not wait for it to find her. She catches it unaware, teases it back, and wakes it even before it has woken.