Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Then something began to itch at her from inside. She had a rhythm now, with the animals. She had even learned how to preserve meat by drying it in the wind, and had soaked and scraped and dried a piece of leather, in the hopes of learning to make wraps to keep herself warm when the winter came. Most importantly, she had in her power the greatest human gift: the ability to make fire. It was something she had learned as a young child from other children in the ghetto whose families were secretly the survivors of other peoples—peoples who actually knew what life was and what kept it going. Even in the City, all her life she had made fires—because it comforted her, and because sometimes fire was the only thing that seemed to recognize her. She knew stones that made fire. She knew how to use sticks to make fire. Fire was her kin; she could see where it hid and draw it out. As long as she could make fire, she could survive.

  And yet that very fire itched at her from within now. When the snakes came through her cave to enter their winter sleeping quarters, some of them passed right over her warm body, and after the passing of that slow caress she could not sleep. This was the only thing that frightened her: that flesh hunger, and not being able to fill it. The lack of human touch made her feverish, as if her body were leaving itself, seeking beyond itself for some other. She could feel her life force leaking from her, making her clumsy. She hated herself for this weakness, but the fear was greater than the hatred. It was a fear she could not name—would not name. She rolled restlessly against her animal skins during the hot day, trying to soothe herself with their friction and their illusion of living contact.

  Delilah did not miss love or good food because she had not had them where she came from. She did not miss things because things had never done anything for her. But she missed touch. In the City it was the one thing that had come easily, and it was the only thing that had made her feel alive.

  Delilah wasn’t like other girls. She never had been. When, after almost a year of desperation, she finally saw the first man riding across the desert in an all-terrain vehicle, she felt no fear at all. She followed the tire tracks until he stopped, wearing frayed jeans she’d cut to the tops of her thighs, and then she met him at the entrance to the cave he planned to plunder. She told him she could show him the way. Inside the cave, when she could not see his face and knew that she was finally in control, she took off her shirt and met his hands with her small, pointed breasts when he reached forward in the darkness to find the flashlight he had dropped.

  Over the years they came more and more frequently, in bigger and bigger vehicles. She hated them, but she needed them too. She made sure she always found them, and that they could never find her.

  In the tower Lonely dreamed of the City, but they were her own dreams, not ones her father gave her—and she does not trust those dreams.

  She doesn’t understand, exactly, what she is seeing now. She still sees it at such a distance. But there are movements among the lights. There are echoes. Longing pours fast up her throat, filling her mouth. The nightmares lurk in the back of her mind.

  The people are here. This is where the people live. The others.

  Now she sees that even the lights move, in rivers, from here as slow as a lullaby. Smoke, a continuous foul breath, spins upward as if from unseen mouths. The City’s shapes are jagged like a mass of broken teeth, and it wants her. It cannot be avoided. How the City shines! There is at once so much life and death—packed together in such frenzy—that Lonely can feel it pawing into her gut, surrounding her before she can fight it, turning her stomach over and over with excitement, delirium and colors pounded hard and fast together into blackness.

  And those lights! Is each one a soul? Is each one another human being, as wild and complex as her own great, mysterious life seems to her?

  Her father did not dream this place for her, no. Her father, certainly, did not want her here. She wonders if her father even knew that such a place existed. Did he foresee the hunger this would cause her—how those lights would call to her loneliness like a bold and frightening promise amidst the suddenly empty, too-quiet beauty of the fields?

  Lonely wraps her arms around the horse’s neck. She doesn’t understand him or know why he is hers, but she clings to his warmth to keep from falling into the abyss that pulls her. She remembers Yora’s words, and knows that Yora warned her against becoming human. Yet how could she not find an end to loneliness, among so many people?

  The cliff is steep below her but in places the slope has crumbled, making treacherous, winding trails downward. She urges the horse onward, thrusting her body against his and squeezing him with her legs.

  But the horse will not budge.

  “Come on,” says Lonely impatiently, “You don’t understand. I need people. We have to get down there, we have to.” She begins to cry. She is so lonely. It is unbearable, to be so lonely. Always before she had her father. Always before she was safe. There were no questions. There was no longing. It isn’t fair that he left her, with no explanation of what was to come, no way to ease the loneliness in his absence. “Please,” she says to the horse.

  She cannot hear any noise; it seems the City is silent from this distance. Yet when she speaks she can barely hear her own voice. For there are a thousand noises, which must have grown closer as she rode toward them, but so gradually that she did not notice them. Still they are so dim and low, they are all a blur, so that she is not aware of any one sound until she tries to speak and finds her voice drowned by the din of this noise so crowded and huge it sounds like silence.

  When the horse still doesn’t move, she slides onto the ground. She knows she can go on without him. She stands there, hating her own hesitation. Only thirteen moons, she remembers suddenly, winding her fingers restlessly into the horse’s mane. Here is where all the people live. Go.

  But she does not go. She stands still, her feet chilled against the earth.

  Then she is startled to see someone running toward her out of the corner of her eye.

  “Oh no!” she cries, without knowing why.

  But it’s only a dog, and now he’s come up to her, his breath hot on her legs, and he is grinning up at her with kind, sudden eyes. The horse backs up.

  “Where did you come from?” breathes Lonely, kneeling to press her hand along the dog’s happy head. “Do you come from people?”

  The dog is at once hefty and lean, like a wolf. i come from Wild, and i come from people, he says, speaking with his friendly, shaking presence, his controlled beastliness, the mild force of his weight against her.

  “Tell me about people,” Lonely whispers. She has never seen a dog before but some expressions are like a universal language, easy to recognize: the excitement in the wagging of a tail, the encouragement in an open mouth and lolling tongue, the trust in full open eyes. “Tell me something about this place.”

  i belong to people. i am their angel. without me, they have no connection to Wild. without me, they do not remember what it feels like to be Loved perfectly.

  “Does someone care for you?” Lonely asks, feeling now the fur’s mat and tangle, the bare places where wounded skin has healed roughly.

  i am here to Love, he repeats. i am their angel. i am their guide.

  “But don’t you, too, need to be loved?”

  yes, so that they learn how to love. i believe in them! i know they can love! i love them! He is so excited, his messages fast and panting.

  Lonely understands him without wondering how, and she feels his love—feels it all over her as he bounds around her. She has so many questions she wants to ask the dog, who knows everything of people, and who is the first other being she has met since Yora and the horse.

  “Why is it so loud?” she asks him. “Why can’t I hear myself?”

  the people all screaming, all screaming at once.

  “But why?”

  they cannot hear each other. they scream and scream. but they are n
ot listening.

  “What are they saying?”

  i do not know. but the dogs, too, are barking, crying.

  “Why?”

  they are locked up. they are tied up in the cold. all they want is to Love. maybe people, too, cry for that.

  “But why don’t they love each other?” Lonely asks desperately, feeling more and more confused. There is something wrong in what the dog is saying. But he does not answer now, only rolls his face against her hand, and rolls over onto his back, asking for touch.

  Lonely pets him for a long time, and then he runs back down the hill to the people he is in this life to love, and Lonely does not follow. Still squatting on the ground, she glances over at the horse, who has kept a wary distance.

  “What about you?” she asks, fascinated by something she hadn’t thought about before, feeling newly connected to life through the dog’s conversation. “Why are you with me?”

  The horse looks at her, his eyes close together from the front, and his big bulk seems to tremble but he does not speak—at least not in a way that Lonely can understand. But Lonely feels suddenly that she cannot leave him.

  At once afraid of entering the City alone and afraid to leave it, she curls up in the grass, hoping to sleep and dream some dream that will help her. Maybe the white bird will return to her. The wind ripples against her face, as if unable to relax.

  “What is this place?” she whispers, but the wind gives no answer.

  To comfort herself she listens to the intimate shuffle of moles inside the ground, clambering sightless through their simple, damp darkness. With her head against the earth she fills herself with close, obvious noises, trying to think clearly amid the din of the abyss. She can hear a moth shifting inside its chrysalis, and she imagines each wrinkle of its tight, brand new wings, immersing her mind in detail until it spins into stillness. She leaps with relief into sleep.

  But she does not dream. Not yet, not out here in wide open space with her mind hanging off the edge of the world, without her father’s dreams to guide her. For the first time, her body takes sleep for the sake of rest and forgetting—to clear away the day and make way for a new one. So much has happened.

  Sometime later she wakes afraid, to the sound of a shriek far below. She sees the familiar night sky—the same one she gazed upon from her tower—but around her the hills creep and rise, threatening to drown her in their depths. Space looms, and for the first time she does not trust it. What have I done? She thinks, rising up to clutch her knees to her chest—the careless joy she felt the day before astounding her. Panicking, she looks for the horse, wanting to get up higher. But he is gone.

  “Horse!” she cries, immediately on her feet, forgetting the City.

  Then she sees him, wandering down the slope along the edge of the valley, his nose to the ground. He is not moving fast, nor moving into the City. He is searching for the earth, is the first thing she thinks, absurdly.

  She trails behind him, afraid to go deeper into the depths of the valleys, afraid to lose sight of the moon or the stars. But, as always, he seems to know where he is going. He walks over the other side of a ridge, sniffing the air, sniffing the ground, and into a low cover of trees. They can no longer see the City. On this side of the ridge, the earth smells different—secret and dense. They enter the brush and it scratches and tears at Lonely, and she fights it, terrified, crying “Wait!” She hears a sound coming closer, and it sounds like something alive.

  Then suddenly there is the horse, and a stream flowing before him. Now Lonely remembers the sound of water. She remembers Yora, and she stumbles to the water’s side. The only light that can be found in the valley runs there, in the stream—runs in shy ribbons away, always away, but always there is more of it coming. The water is so simple in its downward motion, fleeting and glowing, its music alive and jubilant like incongruent life in a desolate world.

  Lonely kneels before it and drinks with the horse—just to connect with the water, just to remember Yora and the feeling of her warm body and kind eyes.

  But the water is cold, colder than the cold wind on the island where the tower stood. It slams against her insides like something solid and wakes her as if she had still been sleeping.

  Why are you so cold? she asks the water with her mouth.

  because i come from places, says the stream. and i am going places, and i never stop. because once i was solid, and once i was air, and will be again. you do not know this story yet.

  But Lonely doesn’t care about the story because suddenly she is so thirsty. The water brightens and fills every cell in her brain, making her mind float easy, and it swells inside her organs as if before they were only flaccid shapes that lay dormant and lifeless, but now suddenly know purpose. She tastes in that water the blood-wet taste of the earth and the dizzy height of the mountain. She feels the parts of her body begin to connect and talk to one another. She lifts her head from the water and sees the lush green that nestles all along the length of the nourishing stream.

  Yora. Yora with her moist, vulnerable skin and her eyes weighted from within by an overheavy love. Remembering her, Lonely wants at once to be held by her and to hold her, to be rescued by that love and to rescue Yora from it. Where did Yora come from, and what other landscapes lay behind her reticent eyes? There is so much Lonely does not know, so much still to be found.

  Comforted by the continuous sound of the water, she sleeps again on the hard ground, easily becoming dirty, hungering against the soil for some sense of companionship in the earth. The horse sleeps standing over her, as if protecting her. Inside the cricket song, the heartbeat of the meadow, and buoyed up by the shuffling song of the stream, she dreams of the City. She dreams it is a giant insect, and she understands that its call is one of desire—a desperate call for the Other, for the ideal mate it longs for out in the darkness that it can never find. But like an insect, its mind is so cold: she can feel its coldness encasing her, heartless, freezing her body and trapping her like the ice-glass tower.

  When she wakes again at dawn, she listens for a long time to the story of the stream, and though she does not understand everything it says, she understands that it is coming from that mountain.

  The City may hold all the people in the world, but her lover is a god. Her father said so. She decides she will find him on that high mountain, because the mountain is beautiful.

  But she does not know that one day she will return to the City, when she is no longer able to make such choices.

  In the morning the horse wakes early and grazes in the sun. He is careful in his movements, knowing that he is something simple and humble now, whom the earth speaks to and remembers. He did not know that, in this new life, he would be hungry. He did not know, before, this need to eat and eat, and never be filled. The earth seems to bounce beneath the weight of his hooves, and the sun sizzles over his back, baring him to the world. The grass smells like home.

  He did not know that a body could feel this way.

  Say I am male, the soul told the spirit of the river. Not female. Not female.

  When Lonely comes toward him, the horse snorts at her and hops a few paces sideways, his nerves snapping. Though he knows her now—though he will not leave her—he feels a nameless terror in her presence. It isn’t that she is dangerous, but rather something about her careless fragility, the lazy openness of her body as she moves through space, that fills him with foreboding. He doesn’t want to carry her like that, rising up from his body into the air. He wants to stay here, alone, in the safety of the anonymous meadow.

  His heartbeat slows a little when she crouches low on the ground and speaks to him in her soft windy voice. He catches that voice in the cup of his ear, to keep track of it. He is safe in his big maleness, but he is afraid of himself, too. It would be easier, perhaps, to surrender. He shivers with confusion.

  The grass makes sense, with its sharp green song for
his mouth. It means only one thing. And the wind makes sense, carrying messages of warning or fear. Fear is a constant spirit that hovers around the horse’s life. It is a sensor in his body, that he obeys always. He fears the mountain that he feels Lonely yearning toward. He fears what she will ask of him today. He fears her gaze as she sits and stares at him.

  When she rises again and climbs on top of him, he rears a little, but says nothing. He raises his head into the wind and jerks his body restlessly. He wants to run but cannot find the courage to do so. To stay still is terrible, and yet to burst out into the wind is also too much to bear.

  Not knowing what else to do, the horse lowers his head and keeps pulling at the grasses, bringing their airy freshness into his mouth. The grass tastes safe. Lonely’s voice is thin and high. He flicks his ears, catching it and batting it away from him. Her weight sinks into him and bends his spine, which tingles up and down with her warmth. He feels his own strength, and for a moment it comforts him. Yes, he is this now. Only this animal. He is safe. He keeps eating as the morning brightens. The grasses are the first of spring; they speak to his senses of a new world.

  After a while her weight also begins to comfort him—this softness weighing him down like a heavy sunlight. That weight centers him. Her patience comforts him. He lifts his head and again considers the wind, her presence, and the meadow. He does not like the smells from the land ahead of him: empty smells, bare and burning and ghost-ridden. But they are better than the scent of the City, which was deadly.

  He feels the heat of her body hungering forward, feels her press forward, feels himself moved forward as if he were a part of her. What else can he do? He lurches in a stumbling way, his head hanging down, uncertain. What is this, the urgency he feels within her body? Was there some purpose he had once, some calling to love something more than the grass and the wind? He feels her thighs press him, and though they are slim and light, their certainty moves him.