Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “But there was a tower,” sulks Lonely, and will not back away though she trembles under the woman’s blind gaze. “The door was frozen shut. It was.”

  “Then how did your father get in?”

  Lonely thinks for a moment. “He was a magician?”

  The witch seems to think on this also. “Yes,” she nods after a moment.

  “So it’s not real? You won’t really bring me back here?”

  But the witch laughs. “You named yourself Lonely,” she says. “And I tell you, Princess, you’ll bring yourself back.”

  Then she pushes Lonely into the sea.

  The dream god Sky never dreams his own dreams, until one night he does.

  One night as the darkness turns toward him, something makes him draw in his breath sharply—his own breath, which he can hear, suddenly, in the blackness, as if he were more than a dream, as if his human body floats out here alone in the freezing night.

  But Sky is not human, not any more. He is only dreams, and his people, now, are only white birds floating over a still lake at the top of the world, where no one can ever reach them.

  Every night he hovers, nothing but idea, outside someone’s mind. He waits until the flashing lights—sometimes painful in their frenzy, their frantic knots—go out. He waits until breath is deep and singular, sure and steady as if breathing were the only thing that person has to do. He waits for the opening in the darkness of the finally peaceful mind. He waits for that question—not desperate, not heavy, but only curious—about what else life could be besides suffering.

  Every night Sky raps at the window of someone’s mind, calls out in a whisper. The darkness turns toward him: a subtle shifting he can feel, softer and more vulnerable than the beginning of the world. That darkness turns toward him, like an eye.

  Every night, for the sake of the people in the City—for their dreams, though they will not remember them in the morning, though they will not believe them, though his people, who have already died once, are dying again for the lack of that belief—Sky surrenders, and becomes what is needed.

  Sometimes a gruff roar opens inside him, a roar that expands his shoulders into massive form and steels his jaw and thickens his skin with coarse black hair.

  Sometimes the darkness feels like water, and he slips inside it with fins waving, skin full of rainbows.

  Sometimes his body becomes three simple segments—one for the head, one for the heart, and one for desire—and he greets the dark human mind with the terror of too many legs and too many eyes.

  Whatever is needed. It is not he who decides what creature he will become, but the mind itself. The need decides. Someone else’s need, to recover the animal within the soul—the animal that knows the way home. Even Sky himself does not know this. He is only a vehicle.

  But on this night the darkness recognizes him. It turns and looks at him through a cold, familiar window.

  There is something wrong. As if he is the one dreaming, as if someone else entered his dream—but that is not possible, because he never sleeps. He holds the vigil for his lost people. He keeps the dreams alive. He can never sleep.

  But it feels like his own dream. Which is not possible, because to dream one has to want. And he does not want anything. He is not human like that any more.

  Yet he is not becoming any animal this time—only himself. It’s just like a dream, the way he tries to claw his way out of it, the way the walls of it seem made of some unyielding yet ever-stretching cloth, the way he cannot get his voice out of his body, or find his hands.

  And—he will always remember it—this darkness is a woman.

  The soft breasts in which a child might nestle his head and sleep.

  The mother arms, reaching.

  The little girl who was lost forever, whom he could not save.

  The beautiful woman he was too young to save, who laughed at his simple, handmade spear, and walked willingly away with her captor.

  The tears that were not cried, the water-soft heart, the warm caves inside woman where all is broken and forgiven. That place he was never admitted to, before everything was lost.

  And the ultimate darkness. That mystery, where man gives something of himself that he can never get back.

  It’s all locked up there, where he hid it away inside himself, inside some high doorless room of his mind. But now he sees that the room is so fragile, made of glass, and if he moves—if he even breathes too hard—it might break.

  And she is calling to him, her mouth stretched wide, and she is pounding on the glass walls, trying to get into his dream.

  For the first time in the hundred years since the City was made, this dream god—this bird-boy of the sky—feels an ache in his feet, and longs to wrap them around the body of the Earth. He feels it there, pulsing against his soles, like a heart, and he remembers.

  He cannot look away from her, though he shivers inside himself with the effort.

  “Why did the people of the Old World believe in so many gods?” a student asks. “Why were they so afraid of these gods and goddesses of water, who would throw up the sea or hold back the rains?”

  “Long ago,” you explain, “these things mattered to people. People got their food from the sea, and from land fed by the rain. But we don’t need those things now, of course.”

  “But why did they have to have a god for everything? A goddess for the river, a god for the wind, a god for a stone….”

  “Because they had no control, then, over the elements, the way we do now. They wanted to pretend that someone did. They wanted to believe the changes of the weather and the seasons had meaning. So they made up gods.”

  When you were young, and desperate for your own manhood, perhaps you stole away in the night, borrowed a car, and went out into the wilderness in search of your destiny. Maybe you braved starvation, the elements, and the spirits and gods of the old world, of whom your friends still whispered. Maybe you even dug into the ancient caves, or the ancient lakes, in search of the old riches—in search of something you could not name and yet needed then, in order to prove you were real.

  “Did you see any ghosts?” your friends joked when you returned. “Did you get attacked by any demon women in the desert, who tried to eat you up?”

  You knew they were only jealous, but you did not answer them, because the answer was yes, and you were ashamed.

  Sometimes, now, your family takes a trip into the country—for the scenic views, the distant images of mountains. But you stay inside your car, with the air conditioning on. You have a vacation home built on a mountaintop, a place you like to go to get away from the messes you’ve made, so you can look back on all that ugliness from a distance and imagine it beautiful. The house is so big that you almost never have to go outside. You have everything you need inside that house—like a little city in there, with entertaining images and entertaining food and entertaining sounds.

  “Don’t you have to be careful out there?” friends ask you when you return. “I’ve heard there are still people living out there in the mountains—primitive people. Who knows if they might steal one of your children away when you aren’t looking?”

  “Oh, but I’m told they’re harmless,” you answer confidently. “Very simple people—they have no modern technologies at all. They’re more afraid of us than we are of them. We never even saw one. The more we develop the mountain, the less we’ll hear of them. Or they will finally come down into the City, like everyone else before them—if they’re even still out there.”

  Your own children, too young yet for bars, steal their liquor and make fires in alleyways. In the rest of the City, the only memory anyone has of fire is electric ranges, toasters, microwaves, heaters. Teenagers and homeless people are the only ones who still know the power of this element—the way standing around those flames and drinking that heat can make them feel alive inside again. But they cann
ot think what to do with such power.

  “I’ve seen the wilderness,” a boy boasts to a girl. “I’ve walked the desert and climbed the mountains. I’ve even sailed into the sea. This here—” He takes a jewel from his pocket and drops it into her palm. “This is the eye of a dragon.”

  She looks down at it, then fast at his eyes, not wanting to look foolish, wondering whether or not to laugh. He is grinning, and she gives him a hesitant smile. The flames are hot near her belly, the crowd is loud around her, and she wants desperately to ask if they are real—the dragons, the gods, the goddesses, the magic that catches in her throat sometimes that she has no name for, that hurts.

  But she doesn’t know if he, or you, or anyone is telling the truth.

  Listen.

  I know you don’t remember who I am, and you do not know if you can trust me.

  I can barely remember myself.

  And yet I know you, and I know the stories. I am telling them now to remind you. I am telling them to find you. Always, I am listening for your listening. I am echoing between you and your heart.

  For the City was built on the Heart of the World, and I am trying to find my way home.

  1st MOON

  The smooth white bird, with the slim neck as long as his body, flies from an island in the sea, back over the land, and up. With ten flaps of his wings he has reached the edges of the waves. With five flaps he has crossed the brief sands and the golden meadows, and the whole of the City he covers with four flaps more. With twelve flaps he crosses the desert. With nine flaps he rises up the flanks of emerald mountains, his vision set, as always, on the highest high, the farthest far. He disappears into clouds and is gone.

  Somewhere in the recesses of those mountains the bird crossed over without looking down, in a place no one knows about—not even the people who still live in the mountains—on a mountain rounder and lower than that piercing white peak of Lonely’s dreams, there is a garden where prayers are grown.

  The women who live there are goddesses, and that means that they do not hunger or suffer the way humans do, and they have no bodies that define them. It is their job to communicate between the elements and the people, and to embody the very world the humans long for.

  They can take the form of women. And they do, in order to make their prayers. In human form, they pray for humans, so that their prayers become real. To manifest anything, they must become it.

  Likewise the form of the garden in which they pray, in which their rituals are held—that, too, is the form of a woman. At its base, the vagina: flowers the colors of fire, their layered mouths hanging open in invitation to the hungry bees, their velvet petals falling to the ground in piles of extravagant bliss. Above that, the round sunroom of the womb, its glass tinted rose, filled with deep cushions of silk.

  Then the belly of the garden, where food is grown—not for the goddesses themselves, who do not eat, but spirit food for manifesting healthy crops everywhere, and for praying that the people will learn once again to draw their nourishment from the land.

  The heart of the garden, a breathing green place. The walls made not of stone but of interlacing shrub and ivy, so that when sunlight breaks in, it breaks the thicket open. In its center a fountain, whose waters connect all parts of the garden together. And then above the heart, the throat: a bridge of wooden boards over an underground room of echoes, a room full of string and wind instruments which they play upon when they wish to give voice to the voiceless or to pray in song. Breezes pluck through a thicket of reeds above it.

  A river runs through the garden from head to toe, and that river is the garden’s spine. And that river connects everything. Not only the head to the womb and the heart to the vagina, but the top of the world to the bottom. The goddesses hold the end of this river like the end of a rope, and at the other end—far away in the ocean, in the bottom of the world—the Dark Goddess holds the other end. Even though that rope is frayed almost to breaking now—most of the water held in a reservoir for the City’s use, with only the smallest trickles escaping to the sea—the river has secret passageways that the City has not yet closed. Together the Dark Goddess and these Bright Goddesses on the mountaintop listen to the vibrations and changes of the world through that river that runs between them, and wait for the world to awaken again.

  One night the Bright Goddesses look into the pool of the fountain and see the face of the Dark Goddess, just as old as she ever was, her eyes focused eternally inward, and through her very self to the other side. She speaks for the first time in many years. She says,

  “She has left the tower. She is gone. New Moon, I have lost her again.”

  In the uppermost mind of the garden, there is only stillness and calm space.

  And in the center of that space stands a single giant oak, in whose branches the birds gather to bring messages and intuitions from the the City below and the spirit realm above.

  It is in this quietest, most enlightened of spaces, beneath this gentle tree, that someone not quite boy and not quite man, not quite human and not quite god, so often comes to meditate and try to be at peace with himself.

  But it doesn’t work.

  For from the mind of the garden, this boy-man they call Dragon can also creep to the edge and look over the rock wall to the rest of the garden—the shape of woman stretching out below. He sees the goddesses in their human form, making prayers. He sees them kneeling in circles, their long hair brushing their knees. He sees them dancing, calling out in soft wails, calling to the souls of women far below to remember themselves, to remember their bodies, remember their power. He sees them caressing each other, sending prayers of healing to human women through their motions and their murmured songs.

  He sees these things in secret, with one hand moving fast, the other gripping the stone. The goddesses who raised him, who have touched and caressed and loved him all his life—they do not touch him now that he is almost a man. They do not come near him in their human form.

  Often, to comfort his loneliness, they have appeared to him as other, easier things. A crystal of sound from the flute of some bird’s voice, a shadow across the fountain’s pool, the yellow of a flower splashing in its own light, the design of mist floating in the remnants of early morning and stepping down from the cold shelf of the air to almost press warm against him. A column of sunlight, the dust within it spiraling dizzily.

  But Dragon watches them when they are women: when they are flesh and skin, abundant with curve and lip and the hidden in-between. He has smelled them, like the weighty soil where flowers grow. He has watched them when they toss open their faces to the sky, their throats naked, to call down its power, and when they lay their hands between their own breasts or each others’, speaking to the hearts of the world, and when one of them lies down in the petals or the beds of lush moss and receives the others’ healing touch.

  Day after day, he traces the inner walls of the garden that has nurtured his life since childhood. The sound of the river rushes continuously through him. He wanders through heart-shaped leaves that tickle his shoulders, and the bees rub their bellies in nectar that will carry the longing of one flower to another. He rests his face in a bundle of blossoms, plain pink and whiskered in the center but wild with sweetness, and breathes in and in and in, his body almost heavier than he can manage. Loneliness crawls over him like ants. All his life he will feel the presence of woman in the life of nature: delicate things that ripple in the wind, and the roaring release of water, and the round, secretive earth, and the wings that tear into song.

  All around him, forever, lies the hidden presence of the goddess, disguised in busy, unpredictable beauty, unresponsive to his heat, oblivious to his desire.

  On this day, as he sits in the heart of the garden with his head in his hands, he hears someone walking. He hears the crunch of leaves underfoot, a sound the goddesses never make. He looks up. Just like a heart, some days this
central garden is misty and dark, and other days it is shining and full of new growth. This evening it seems uncertain under a slow cloudy sky, the fountain’s song dulled and the ivy’s leaves bowed in a thick humid air. The oldest goddess of the garden, the one who first lifted him in her arms when she found him outside the gate at six years old, is walking toward him. She is older than he has ever seen her, just like a human being would be old—not desirable at all but frightening in the weakness of her step, the falling of her face toward death.

  He stands up trembling. “Are you all right?”

  She smiles and nods, sitting down beside where he was sitting, and the fountain mists her cheek. “I am the same as always. Only I wanted to come to you in this form, so you could understand how old I really am. In fact, I am older even than this. There is no human form that could express my age. And yet today I feel human. I feel the pain of a human being, for having to say what I must say to you.”

  “You’re going to send me away,” says Dragon. And in this moment—though in other, desperate moments he has torn at those vines and scratched at these walls, swearing he would leave them, cursing them for ignoring him, for leaving him alone among them like this—at this moment, he feels only a hard fury in the center of his chest, to know that his third mother in a row is abandoning him. He feels it as if he always expected it. He feels that fury, very calm, very sure, in the center of his chest—and he holds onto it like a secret weapon, as if it makes him strong, as if somehow he will be able to tear it out and win after all. Only later will he realize that fury is useless.

  “We love you,” says the old woman now.

  “And what will I do?” says Dragon evenly, thinking himself calm, thinking himself a man. He can feel the muscles in his face twitching. “Where will I go?”

  She closes her eyes and breathes a slow, careful breath out. “Listen to the river, Dragon. It flows out of this garden, and through the forest and the fields, all the way through the desert and to the sea. Into it we lay all of our love, all of our prayers, and send them down to the people. We do not know what will happen to our prayers, or how they will be used. We only give them. In this way, we give you to the world.”