Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Why—?” But Dragon stops, something choking his voice that he does not want the old woman to hear. He stares at her hard, and her eyes finally open as if he willed them to.

  “It is not right for you to stay here longer,” she says more firmly. “You distract the women from their prayers with your desire. Even when I speak your name to them, I feel that womanhood begin to simmer, as if some humanness begins to form inside them. We work for the world, not for ourselves; we put all of our energy into prayer. But human beings are fascinated with the body itself. Human men glorify the beauty of the female body in a different way. I fear that in the presence of your longing, we may become attached to our own human forms and the feelings they give us.”

  “Then why did you take me in? Why am I here?” he roars at her, lunging up to loom above her, raging in response to these women who he knows can feel his power, and whom he can never, ever touch. He forgets all his calm. “Why?”

  She doesn’t pull back, doesn’t react. She looks at the wrinkled hands in her lap, and he looks at them, too, and feels afraid. “It was arrogant of me,” she answers softly. “Twelve years ago I took you in. I thought we could raise a boy among us. I thought we could teach you a sensitivity that so many men do not know. I thought perhaps you could share that with the world. Maybe you still will. But it isn’t up to me. We are torturing you now, though we do not mean to.”

  Her gentleness weakens him. He sits down beside her again, longing for her touch—not the touch that draws out his forbidden fire, but the touch of Mother, the touch he will never have again. “But am I a god?” he whispers.

  She looks away from him, into the shadows of the ivy. “I think you are part god.” She pauses. “These days, gods and humans mingle. But humans do not believe in gods any more, and so they do not recognize them when they see them. And the gods long for the love of humans, so they sneak among them, and pretend to be them. But it is forbidden, Dragon.” She looks back at him suddenly. “Sometimes a human woman might give birth to a child that is half a god, and everyone else—though they claim not to believe in gods, you understand—feels somehow that he is something Other. There is a terrible suspicion around him. Then perhaps the mother wants to hide him, or even destroy him, because if the people find out, they will fear and hate her. They will think she must have traveled into the wilderness, and done wild things that they do not believe a woman should do. Especially if the father was a god of fire. Do you understand?”

  Dragon shakes his head, the stone of fury hardening inside him again.

  “What I believe is that one day everyone will be a different mix of god and human. One day, everyone will have at least a little humanness in them, and everyone will die. But death isn’t the hardest part of being half-human, Dragon. The hardest part is to learn how to use and control the god power in you, when so much of you is human, and longing to fulfill your needs. This desire you feel is human, and it makes you weak. But that same fire is so much power, Dragon, and magic too. You do not even know it yet, but one day you must learn how to use it wisely.”

  Dragon looks into her eyes, clenching his jaw, and all his need is in him—insistent, definite, more real to him than anything in this world.

  “What you long for here…” She shakes her head, looks down again at her hands. “These bodies you see, Dragon, this ecstasy—it is all illusion. It is all a dream of the real world below. Now you will go from here, and you will enter that real world. What could be more wonderful?”

  She looks up at him then, for he curves toward her as he rises, baring his teeth, the shape of his body clinging for a last hopeless moment to the empty space around her. He tears the robe they dressed him in down the center, its white edges floating away from his hard fast limbs. He feels his head smoldering above his body as he walks away with nothing in his big hands, his nakedness a furious rebellion against her rejection. See me, say his swinging arms as he walks away. I am a god, with nothing to sustain me but passion. He strides through the belly of the garden, through the rose-tinted womb, through the lower chamber of bliss and desire, and comes to the doorway he entered when he was six years old. With a howl, he breaks down the door. He bursts in a shower of petals through the lowermost gateway of the Garden, through which man both enters and leaves—entering as a seed, and exiting as a birth into this world.

  Her father’s eyes so blue—a painful, skyward blue. Hair on his face, like an animal’s hair, hiding his expression.

  Lonely remembers her father sitting on the end of the bed, his voice the only sound. She remembers the assurance of his weight, and sleeping against his warm arm, and waking to his dreams that flickered across the glass like fire. She remembers the sound of his voice reciting to her the stories of the world, a sound she felt as a comforting vibration in her belly.

  He used to say to her, “Princess, I give you this blessing. We are magic, you and I. And I tell you, little goddess, you will never hunger. You will never thirst. You are blessed.”

  She did not know about hunger or thirst. In his words she felt the comfort of their togetherness, of their one world together, the only world she knew. But she shivered at the sound of the word “never”: a cold impossibility. She felt the loneliness of that word in her body.

  “But why do you look that way?” she asked him once, or maybe it was a thousand times. She meant the pinch around his eyes, the tightness of his lips, the thing that was wrong that she could not name.

  “Because,” he said, and then stopped. She remembers waiting through that moment, feeling him already leave her. There were places in her father’s eyes that she wanted to go but could not reach. Her father’s sorrow was all around her, all the time, heavier than her whole being. Always when they watched the dreams of the green water, he would whisper that word: Lost.

  “Because I am tired,” he answered her finally, and would say no more. But then he wrapped his arm around her and held her close.

  And that was enough, then.

  Now she is alone. Now she walks beneath the sea, breathing water. Her feet spin like paddles, and water floods her ears with silence.

  She waves her arms about but the water slurs their motion. Everything she tries to do happens slowly. She isn’t sure if she’s moving forward—or anywhere. She cannot feel her body, and she does not know if it’s because she is dreaming or only terribly cold.

  Maybe time floats by. As in the tower, there is no difference between day and night. Living things shoot around her face in bursts of bubble and light, or maybe she is only watching her own thoughts explode inside her mind.

  The sea weighs her down and buoys her up. It freezes her and bobs her along. It carries her faithfully and forgets her at the same time. She doesn’t yet know what anger is, but when the fish pass by with their heartless eyes glinting black at her, a heat burns helplessly in her cold limbs and she claws the water in slow motion and curses the Witch with words that are only mouthfuls of darkness. The water follows her hands, easy and invisible, trapping her. She presses against it and it is nothing, falling away. She tries to turn, to move—but she is only trying, going nowhere.

  When sunlight, first clear and then blinding, tumbles down in pieces through the creased layers above her, somehow inside herself she becomes lighter and begins to float upward. Her face emerges like an old memory from the blank surface of the sea, and she gazes out at great distances of light and sky. She sees now that loneliness is made of eternity, and though she does not yet know the word for sorrow, she sinks below again, and keeps sinking.

  The light thins and disintegrates. Something brushes her, disturbingly soft. She no longer knows that she is cold; the darkness feels hot and close as easily as it feels empty and far. She keeps sinking. She thinks of her father. She remembers the look in his eyes, and there is this sense of finality, as if he was wrong about something, and he knew it all along. But she does not know what. She thinks she remembers that he lo
ved her.

  Now Lonely is walking at the bottom of the sea, and because she is a goddess, she can breathe underwater, and because she is a goddess, she needs nothing. She will keep walking forever; she does not care. She has no choice, because her heart is so heavy, or the sea is so heavy upon it, weighing her down. She hears voices now, crying. Perhaps one of them is her own. Sometimes the darkness takes form, wrestling with itself. Sometimes it is red as blood, or blue as ice, and sometimes it throbs inside her mind, wailing and sobbing, until she feels her skull will burst open. Then sometimes she feels nothing again, and does not know if her eyes are open or closed.

  The nightmares return, the same ones from the tower. More real than her father’s dreams. They go like this:

  Animals hold each other down, tear each other apart, eat each other in mouthfuls of raw flesh. Men stomp toward her with heavy boots and sharp weapons. When she sees them, she knows that they, too, have killed. They killed those women, instead of rescuing them, and they will kill her. Their bodies hunch darkly; again and again their eyes claim her with brutal certainty. She cannot understand their faces but she can see every muscle in their metal fists. And then all at once they leap upon her with a hollow explosion that is almost like sound, and she screams but cannot hear herself, and she breathes in water.

  But she keeps on walking, through the nightmares, because she has no choice. There is almost a comfort now in having reached the very bottom. She can sink no further. She feels how the water supports her. She feels a warmth against the soles of her feet, as if she is walking on light.

  Someone takes her hand.

  She shoots upward, too fast, and cries out soundlessly. The water rushes by her, ripping off her numbness layer by layer until she can feel the cold again like a song against her skin—flickering behind her elbows and knees, pouring over her forehead and down her nose—and she can hear the water roaring in her ears, and she can taste the salt in her mouth, and by the time her head bursts again into the light and the pale weightless air, she is choking and coughing.

  “Hold onto me,” says a woman, and Lonely reaches around a body like a planet of warmth inside a universe of cold. She wraps her arms around the squeaky-wet skin, her arms making a circle the way arms do, thinking just barely, “oh, so that’s why they’re shaped…,” as she presses her head to a pillow of silver hair and rests.

  The wind, beginning everywhere and nowhere, beginning in dissonance, in restlessness, in the discomfort that moves toward change—beginning where layers of warmth and cold slide across each other, beginning where the earth’s rhythm is uneven, where there is question—twirls up over the disturbed sea, flies across the grey meadow of the waves, and then over the treeless land.

  Songless, it breaks against the towering corners of the office buildings. Over the factory, it makes beauty out of smoke. It tallies in a bit of clothing, but is squeezed out by frantic smoothing hands. It invites the bound hair to dance, but the head escapes inside a glass door that keeps winds out.

  It rushes up the straight line of one street and down another, and swerves into fields, into desert—where the bodies of trees no longer hold the world together, where nothing holds or stops or meets it. It rushes as if seeking, as if panicked, as if lonely, as if driven by the same desperation that drives you to violence—the desperation of knowing that you can do anything, that nothing will stop you, that nothing you do matters. It makes a chaos of dust in its path.

  But what makes you hopeless is knowing that the wind is not desperate, or lonely, or seeking, after all. It is only the wind.

  Dragon skids down the mountain, wild with the feel of his own new nakedness, both terrifying and delicious. His breath comes in quick, furious hisses as he swings from ledge to ledge, scraping himself raw. His body plummets through pain, uncaring. Everything makes him angry. Each twisted thicket, each blade of stone, each slippery slide of mud, seems to want nothing but to thwart his passage, confuse him, swallow him into its lonely abyss. He grabs and tears, stumbling, rolling, and falling downward all night, racing into gravity, wracked with emotion but unbeaten by it, moving too fast to see it—too fast for it to catch him.

  By dawn he has reached the bottom of the mountain and started walking. He has already forgotten who he was the night before, the evil grip of his own shadow, the way he ripped trees from the earth and tore them to pieces just to prove he existed. The way he ground the flowers into the earth with his bitter feet, the way he chased the deer through their own thick wave of terror, baring his teeth, meaning to wrestle down the body of the doe and rape her.

  Today he is holy. Today he walks tall and strong, and tries to breathe the way they taught him, up and down the length of him, and the soles of his feet meditate against the earth with each step, and he looks upon his own soul with awe.

  He walks to the west, in the direction of the sea. To the north of the river lies the City, and the nothing all around it. But Dragon veers the other way, away from the main body of the river, across the desert toward a high cliff wall to the south that he remembers. Once he passes near a road, and another time he has to cross one. He crouches in the brush, the muscles of his arms wound around his knees, shivering at the smell. The cars passing mean nothing to him: they have no life, no form, no answer to his need. They are only blurs of wind that interrupt his journey. He waits impatiently for a space of stillness and then runs across the unfeeling pavement, his feet burning. The housing development he passes in the distance, at the end of one of these roads, likewise means nothing to him. It looks like a pile of debris on the land, and he is unaware of its relationship to people. The noise of traffic fogs his mind, so that he cannot concentrate on anything but his single idea—not even a desire but the only idea he can think of—to reach the caves of his infanthood. The further he walks to the south, the more that noise—a noise he could not define and cannot remember once it is gone—fades behind him. This part of the desert has not yet been reached by the City. Dragon keeps walking, following his instincts now.

  As he walks his body stretches taller, his spine lengthening within him. His voice drops into his chest and waits in the darkness of his lungs like a coiled serpent. He feels the big muscles of his thighs swinging, hard with power, his walk carrying the weight of his heart now like it’s nothing. His hands hang curled at his sides. His penis, thick and heavy, bounces off to one side, and sometimes points ahead as if leading him insistently onward. Sometimes he stops and yells into the silence. He yells his own name, to hear it come back to him.

  Naked, he has not yet imagined new clothing. He has not yet imagined the different costumes he could appear in, the identities he could take. His dark skin drinks the sun and does not sweat. Food and water are unknown to him. But the cries of the birds as they call for their mates are familiar.

  The desert lies down under him, surrendered and bare. The desert is nothing but a song about absence. Once it held the ocean, but the ocean retreated and left it behind. It was the bottom of the ocean, and now it is the bottom of no thing, the empty space around a thing that is gone. Dragon doesn’t know about the ocean, but he knows about loss. He keeps on walking through the blur of the sunlight and reaches for the ghosts of water though he does not thirst.

  When he reaches the high cliff he walks alongside it, east to west with the sun. The canyon is so wide that in the afternoon he cannot see the other end of it through the haze of dust. As the afternoon yawns into evening, the dust surrounds him more thickly in the increasing wind, and he no longer knows direction, but only his own movement. He feels he is walking in place, and he walks harder, pounding his own form into the nothingness like a sharp mold into clay.

  He presses closer to the cliff wall and climbs up along a ridge, seeking the highest point, the most dangerous route. He walks along the narrowest ledge just to feel the challenge of death swinging below him, and he throws stones into the nothingness, so hard he almost loses his balance.

/>   There is a smell that tells him he’s close: an obscene, sulfuric smell mixed with ashes. He presses himself closer to the cliff wall, searching its stubble with his hands for a memory. Without seeing them, he finds the caves he was first raised in. He sits down in the cold air that blows from the mouth of the biggest cave, its opening eroded but still hiding him from the wind. He curls his knees to his chest, making himself small like a boy.

  The stone around him swirls with color—ages worth of color, colors echoing the many phases of the sun’s retreat into night. This day’s sun has already set, and the desert night is coming for him.

  By starlight as the wind clears, he draws pictures of the dragons on his skin with shards of red sandstone. He tries to make their eyes but the mere dust of the stone cannot make them as bright as his memory of them. He presses a blade of the stone harder against his skin in frustration, and blood blooms around it.

  Dragon was given his name by the goddesses who found him, because they knew he was raised by dragons. It was a dragon who left him at their gate, and in the morning they saw her tracks—tracks that had not been seen in this world for longer than any human could remember.

  Someone—perhaps his birth mother, in an agonized fury at either her god lover or herself—had cast him into that cave as an infant, sobbing, “Go! Go back to that fire.”

  He had lain in the total blackness of that cave, listening to the long drops of water from faraway lands come trailing through the earth and hurtling down to the stone. Somewhere in the distance, he heard steam. Then he began to yelp and whine and scream, as if his voice itself were fire that would burn his fate to ashes. The dragons came, sliding their heavy leather feet against the cold stone, slowly swirling their endless tails around the sculpted curves of tunnels, surrounding him without speaking, gazing at him with diamond eyes. He grew quiet, but was not afraid, and when the white flames came leaping from their throats, they did not burn him, though they turned his skin blacker. In fact, the dragons cradled him in a nest of fire, lifting him off the cold floor, their flames meeting beneath him in a ring. They carried him deeper into their cave, deeper into the earth, where the stone was always wet and warm, and the fire was always soft and slippery against his skin, and the damp round walls were always lit, patterned with shadows like a moving echo of these most ancient monsters.