Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The hum of the refrigerator. It is impossible for you to describe—even if you wanted to—this toneless sound. It does not sound like anything. It does not remind anyone of anything. It does not change or communicate anything. It does not respond to anything. It is the loneliest sound you have ever heard. It is the only thing you have ever heard, and yet you are not listening to it now; it is there all the time, and you are hardly even aware of it.

  If Hanum is dead, still the Princess must live on in that tower. At least you can think on that, when the days grow too weary, and the nights too unanswered. You never stopped believing. Yet sometimes you’re not sure what it is that you believe, now that you so badly need something to hold onto. There is no life in that image. It’s just an image. It does not reach out to you. It never leaves that tower, out in some nowhere sea. Something is wrong! Anguish you cannot define, inside this numb, well-dressed body. Suppose someone rescued that princess: would she save everyone then? But no one ever will. No man you know would do such a thing.

  You’re cold, so you turn the knob on the wall. A new hum rises up, plateaus, and continues. The heat comes on, from somewhere. Not heat from the sun, not the heat of the body. What is it? What is this house made of? Where are you? But you do not ask such questions. The heat comes up through the floor, through the dust, a sickly ghost. It does not soothe you. It makes you restless and irritable. You pace. If it gets too hot, you can turn on the cold. But it does not matter. You wear sweaters indoors in the summer, shorts indoors in the winter. And nothing answers the restlessness inside you. You can change your environment in any way you please, and yet no matter what you do, you hate it. Maybe you almost welcome your endless discomfort, for at least it is a feeling you can identify. Cold. Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold.

  Oh, if only you would stop and notice even for a moment; if only you would wonder, how did you know you were cold? What does it mean to be cold?

  But you cannot remember, because it ended before you were born, a time when a house was heated by a living, breathing fire at its heart that could keep people company all night. For fires are dangerous, aren’t they? How could one live inside a house?

  No, you cannot remember a time when houses had souls.

  For a few precious moments, the boy’s body is like a sleep that surrounds and dissolves Delilah’s mind. Grains of sand roll imperceptibly over her lips. The desert air contracts into cold night, but she is safe inside the oblivion of flesh—flesh in place of food, in place of love, in place of self.

  Then suddenly she needs to breathe. He must weigh twice as much as she does. She strains against him to turn around, resenting the effort it takes. She heaves him away; he is soft and sluggish with the expenditure of life force. He clings to her as he rolls, his eyes opening.

  She closes hers. She doesn’t want to look at him yet.

  She tries to ignore a familiar ache in her uterus that tightened even as she relaxed, as if to deny her the rare pleasure she’d captured. She was holding the bleeding in, trying to keep it from touching him. A long time ago, only the first day of her period was painful. Now it is every day, and sometimes even when she’s not bleeding. And though the pain has always come, every moon, even when she lived in the City, now she feels some other sickness creeping in too. It’s something she doesn’t recognize, that turns her unrecognizable to herself. Now she is someone who feels tired nearly all the time, who cries out, sometimes, when she moves.

  It seems she must look at this boy after all, because he isn’t saying anything, and that makes her uneasy. The look in his eyes startles her. She wants, already, to run—but he is so close, it feels dangerous to do so.

  “You’re bleeding,” he says.

  Unprepared for this bluntness, Delilah starts. “So?” she snaps.

  “Does it hurt?”

  She stares at him, dragging herself backward with her free arm. “No.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Delilah.” She doesn’t want to know his. But he tells her anyway.

  “They call me Dragon.”

  “Who does?”

  He hesitates. “The women who kept me.”

  Delilah laughs, in spite of herself. “Kept you? Like a pet?”

  “I don’t know,” Dragon answers, his breath audible and heavy.

  “So what’s your power, god-man?” she says, feeling her own power respond to his desire, remembering his hard hands swinging as he walked across the desert. She’s annoyed now at this strange vulnerability, and wants something that she cannot name.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re part god, aren’t you? I can tell. What can you do?”

  “I don’t know.” He looks at the sky, draws his red eyebrows together, scowls. “You’re right. I am a god. What can I do?” He looks back at her. “What can you do?”

  She laughs again, or tries to. “I’m human. I can bleed. That’s my power.” She meant to do away with that pity in his eyes, but her joke makes it worse.

  “If you’re bleeding, does that mean you’re going to die someday?” he asks gently.

  She stares at him, again. Is it his godness that makes him unrepulsed by the smear of blood she’s left on his body? She tries not to care. But it repulses her that he doesn’t. Suddenly he raises himself up on one elbow and cups her face in the other hand, in a gesture so intimate it freezes her. “Delilah,” he says, “isn’t it hard, being human? I try not to want this… I try not to.”

  “It’s not hard for me,” she says, turning away with relief. “It’s hard for you, because you’re part god.” Partly just to quiet him, she climbs onto his rising hardness, laughs, and grabs his lips in her own. She rubs violently against him, weakening him instantly, and her brief moment of fear wafts away without a trace into the desert infinity. He grips her breasts and molds them into the longings of his hands, and she rides him while he plays with her body, surrounding him with her hunger and rolling him inside her until he fills it. She cries out just to hear herself—a singer, a dancer, someone with power. She hears his gasps and pushes at him harder, just to hear the way his will breaks—to hear a kind of helplessness in his voice which she would never and could never allow herself.

  She doesn’t fully come but it’s good enough. She has one of those deep, inner pseudo-orgasms that never peak but only roll slowly into nonexistent heights, beyond her capacity to experience. She buckles over him, forgetting the dance, hovering on the edge of pain. When he’s done, she’s more sore than satisfied, but the pain ends her hunger just as well.

  While he sleeps, she walks naked around the night, lifting her arms like lazy wings. Some pains force her to be still, but this one she feels in her womb at the dark moon is eased by movement. The bats come tickling around her with their lovely, inaudible sounds—glimpses of darkness within darkness, ideas she cannot hold to. She feels them calling, feels them hearing her presence as their calls bounce back. She walks round and round, her hands slicing the silence, forgetting, forgetting. But when she lies down on the earth and closes her eyes, she still knows exactly which direction he lies in. She knows the infinity of this place like the map of her own body.

  From what other men have told her, she knows there is a rumor, far off where she came from, that she is a demon goddess, a dangerous enchantress able to survive alone in the desert for years. But she isn’t. Nothing has ever been more clear to her than that she is human and nothing more. Her secret is only that she doesn’t care about what other people care about, or need it. She does have one friend, though, and that friend is a god, though she never knows when she’ll see him again. Without him she would surely have died. She misses him all the time, especially now, when her humanness seems to haunt her more and more in the form of headaches, backaches, sleeplessness, exhaustion. She’s eaten almost nothing but meat for ten years. Maybe whatever magic Moon gave her is finally wearing off. Maybe her body is finally startin
g to give in to the reality of a place in which survival ought to have been impossible.

  He would know what to do. Sometimes in those hours of strange madness before dawn, lying awake after the hunt, she whispers to the bats and begs them to send a message to Moon, wherever he is. But they do not travel more than a half a night’s walk from her cave.

  Maybe she can’t sleep because she feels that terrible grey noise coming. Maybe the City is finally coming for her after all these precious years she’s escaped it. Pain creeps up from the roots of her body the way the road sneaks out across the desert, the concrete hardening layer by layer and inch by inch. Delilah has lived in the desert for seven years but she is only human, after all. No power in a human being can win against the City—against that grey noise, that grey dust, that blur of directionless motion that overpowers the mind.

  She lies still for a long time—too long—and tries not to think about why her heart weighs heavier inside her, as it always seems to after sex. Without meaning to, she falls asleep for moments at a time, and in her dreams she is tiptoeing around Dragon, picking up the pieces of herself that scattered when he entered her. They glow in the dark, and when she looks at them closely, they are scorpions, their ancient bodies resembling crustaceans from the deep sea which Delilah has never seen.

  Just before dawn she hears coyotes laughing, and she jumps up and looks with scorn at Dragon’s sleeping form. She’s restless now, and hungry for the hunt. But soon the sun will rise, and at the same time she is so tired—always more so at this time of the moon. When the eerie, faceless smile of that moon sets far away over the City which she will never, ever go back to, she returns to her cave. The cave entrance is small, just big enough for her little black form. All her life, wherever she is, she has found spaces to hide in, where she can find safety in the peaceful apathy of darkness. To recover from the chill that’s crept into her, she buries herself beneath layers of animal skins, disappearing beneath them. Her womb relaxes a little. The base of her spine aches with a vague, rhythmic pulse. She feels each step downward into sleep, her mind resting beneath the weight of the skins, and she dreams wild-animal dreams.

  The horse carries Lonely all day through space.

  She does not know how to guide him, and so must surrender to his nervous whims. Frequently, he pauses to nibble, then bolts forward again, trots a short way, then twists his neck as if to watch for someone behind them. Yet she barely notices. There is too much wonder all around her.

  For a time, she forgets the mountain, though the sound of the sea recedes behind her. The grasses give in to the wind with absolute trust; they stroke her bare feet, tender and curious, as she rides through them, like a worshipful populace who have long awaited her coming. She cannot help the pleasure of her skin against them. Is it godness or humanness that feels this, like color blooming in the body—wetly, slowly exploding? Her throat trembles as she breathes.

  Is this love? she thinks, overwhelmed, and the sun smiles, a contraction of brightness in the air.

  You can have anything you want, says the wind, making a sudden crescendo to match her passion, and she believes it. She does not notice its contradictions. She is too much astounded by her own joy.

  The day expands, and the heat of the sun clings to her face. Lonely is young and full of divinity—she is invincible. The rasping love song of crickets leaps inside the grasses.

  I want you, they call to each other. Take me. Back and forth they call, and her body memorizes their voices. She closes her eyes and imagines her prince riding toward her. She imagines the relief of his knowing, his answers—the way he will finally find her and everything will make sense. Take me, take me, take me….

  When the horse finally stops and swings his head to the ground to graze, Lonely shifts on his back, surprised, and finds her body still pulsing with his rhythm. She remembers her aloneness. In the near distance, naked sky meets the hills, and she cannot see what lies beyond them.

  I want you, I want you.

  Impatient, she slides off.

  Now the sunlight grays just slightly, the wind blows colder, and the meadow turns serious as she begins to walk upon it. Her hips feel dizzy and heavy as they swing over her own two feet again. The crickets’ rhythm feels like almost the same thing as her heartbeat now. She wanders aimlessly, touching her own body, confused.

  I am the earth, says the earth. I am always with you. You cannot leave me.

  Lonely doesn’t know if this is good or bad. The earth is not as soft as the touch of the grasses would have had her imagine. It is bony and dry, like something very old, and sometimes it is spiny, and hurts.

  She leaves her horse behind her, not thinking, leaving him in his communion with the grass. She does not yet understand such space. She does not think to keep things with her, or know that a thing can be lost. She does not know whether or not she needs the horse, or whether or not he needs her. He is like the sun and the grass and the birds to her: a sensation, a wonder, knowable by its immediate touch but without future or past or meaning.

  Lonely does not see that crack of white in the sky now, the waxing moon rising above the far mountain—though it sees her, and its light touches her head with the echo of longing and the foreshadow of memories she does not yet have but is making, as she stares back at the sun melting into the hills they have come through. She can no longer hear the sea. The cricket-song beats in her, intimate and close.

  The sun falls and falls into the hills, and Lonely watches, fascinated. It is like a fire that, when it hits the earth, somehow does not burn it, but instead spills over it in an agony of color. Somehow it gives up its fire, gives up its hunger, and surrenders to the deep knowing solidity of the one Earth. Lonely hopes that love is like this surrender: the way the sun surrenders itself to earth, which makes it dissolve into sky and disappear. Then its memory fades from blood red to a paler pink, like blood flushed beneath white skin, and then to grey, and then to blue darkness reflecting the jewel of the earth. She imagines it falling into the cold sea, falling through darkness until somehow—she cannot yet imagine how—from its falling it begins to rise.

  The beauty of it thrills her, and because she understands this beauty, it seems to her that she will find love at any moment now. It seems to her that at any moment, she will somehow arrive.

  The horse whinnies—a sound like a high anxious wind.

  Lonely looks over and sees him, his tail flowing. The air is silver and eerie, and she feels hints of death riding inside it that she has not felt before. She remembers night on the island, the old woman’s face stiff and certain before her like fate. Fearful, she runs toward the horse, who lowers his head and allows her to climb on.

  They walk on as one being up the hill. Moonlight undresses the darkness before her and parts the grasses. Her body rolls against the moving horse. She closes her eyes and leans forward again, an unnamed urgency tensing her legs as the horse heaves upward, his mane brushing her forehead.

  When she opens her eyes, her breath is heavy, and she casts her gaze over the edge of a high cliff, and sees below her the thousand stars of The City.

  When Delilah first came to the desert, she did not look back. She was holding Moon’s hand, and she felt calm inside for the first time she could remember. On her back she carried her school backpack, filled with four T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, two sweatshirts, a big knife and a small knife, and a roll of twine. In her right hand she carried a single jug of water. Her muscles were strong from working out and fighting, except for her left shoulder, which was still weak from what had happened the year before—when they took Mira away. But she wasn’t thinking about that. She kept her mind blank.

  They crossed over that purple ridge, a sacred boundary, and Delilah started breathing again. Moon was playing his flute as they walked, and it felt so good that she started laughing, and then she started crying and couldn’t stop. It was awful. She felt the way she’d felt
the first time she gave herself an orgasm—as if she’d just broken something inside herself that could never be mended, and that she had not even known was there. She didn’t know about crying; she didn’t know how to be someone who cried; and she didn’t know how to stop it either, so she cried through gritted teeth, hissing and swallowing, choking back angry, animal sounds.

  But they kept walking, and Moon was cool, his eyes gentle and averted, and her crying finally stopped as they entered into clear hazeless sunlight, and then veiled themselves in pure shining darkness, and curled up to sleep in a silence that made her feel, for the first time, safe. Moon held her in his familiar arms. She knew he would take care of her. He had a magic bow and arrow he would give her, and a little marijuana. In her dreams she felt her mind open up into the possibility of actually living. She could not remember ever dreaming before. But now it seemed like she could, in fact, become someone who dreamed. All the things she had to fight before—and all the people who did not understand her—didn’t matter now.

  After Moon went away, she wasn’t afraid. He had taught her how to hunt, how to survive. She didn’t let herself think about whether or not he would ever come back. She was alone, and she owned her solitude in a way she had never owned anything in her life. No one had ever let her own something this big before. She could not perceive the ends of it. The power of it dizzied her.

  The silence won her trust almost instantly, the way no person ever had or would. The more she loved the silence, the more she spoke into it with her own voice and felt it listening, and the more the creatures of the silence began to trust her back.

  Raven. Coyote. Serpent. Tarantula. Desert owl. They watched her with their hungry, independent eyes from the horizon, and left the gifts of their tracks in the sand outside her cave in the morning. She started to sleep during the day like they did, and wake in the cool night to follow them, and after a while she no longer felt she had to apologize for her presence. She had never felt tenderness for anyone before, until she met these animals. She had never felt humbled by anything, until the big desert silence flattened out her mind and glowed around her voice and woke her every night with its clap of nothingness. The dusty winds scoured her body and emptied her out. For the first time she did not feel angry any more. And that lasted for many moons.