Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Maybe it was the fawn already part of the boar that got into her dreams somehow when she ate of his flesh: maybe that’s why she still dreams of a deer, every day, and thinks of her while she lies awake. Sometimes she thinks the boar’s spirit is whispering to her the story of that fawn, who lived briefly huddled in dappled shadow and died in a confusion of terror and infantile grace. But the memories of these dreams are vague and broken, not solid and lusty like dreams of boars. The story of the deer is some other kind of story that Delilah doesn’t understand. Soft, glassy steps. A silence made of spider silk. Their movement as invisible as the coming of night. The fear they chew patiently in their neat, square teeth. The deep, turning cups of their velvet ears. Their modest yet shamefully honest gaze.

  She’s afraid the forest won’t yield up anything else until she’s found that deer and killed it. And she’ll have to do it, or starve—a doom that has haunted her since she came here.

  Maybe it was the tension between her shoulders from that moment when she waited, without wanting to, frozen with her arms in the air, for the boar to take her life as she had taken his with the knife between his shoulders. Maybe it was that tension that somehow spread into her body even after it seemed gone, and sent currents of pain up and down her spine, lodging first in her neck and then later in her tailbone, so that even her hips hurt. It only happens on certain days. On other days, she doesn’t think about it.

  But when she lies awake she wonders if the pain came as punishment, after all. What if Mira was right not to eat meat? What if that boar was meant to kill Delilah, before she killed him? How many times has she asked herself these questions, and dismissed them, because hunger rules her first and foremost? And how she misses Moon, in whose presence everything made sense.

  When she closes her eyes, she sees the deer turning toward her, its eyes soft, but not as soft as forgiveness.

  Today it hurts just to climb down the lip of the cave to the spring. Dragon is there, painting strange, white women and luscious, seductive flowers on the sandstone wall with damp pieces of colored stone. She slips a little, distracted by her pain and not anticipating his presence—his ready muscles, his hot innocent eyes turning toward her.

  “Are you okay?” he asks. She hears the sweetness in his voice, and it makes her head spin. He’s leaning toward her, and his breath sounds wet and clumsy. She can’t believe she ever wanted him. She can’t believe he is still here.

  “Get the fuck away from my water,” she says tightly. “This is my home. Get out!” She dips her head to the water and begins to drink so fast she almost chokes. Then she looks up and spits a mouthful in his face. “And don’t fucking watch me!”

  He doesn’t look away, just licks the water that landed around his lips.

  “Go away!” she screams. “Go away!” She knows now that she can’t walk back up to the cave; she’s in too much pain, and she’ll have to crawl. She ignores the anger swinging in his arms as he rises and turns away. She closes her eyes and tries to breathe.

  When she gets back to her cave she tries to find a position that doesn’t hurt, where she can look out on the valley and watch the animals appear and disappear through doors of shadow. But her back chooses a position for her, locking her prone to the ground with one arm slung over her head. She tells herself she will feel fine by tonight, when she can hunt by an almost full moon. She feels the weight of the pine forest hanging over her, like death.

  In the City, you wake in your bed surrounded by noise. Horns honking, dogs barking, sirens wailing, motors revving, brakes squeaking, people shouting. You wake surrounded by sounds of emergency, anger, and upset. But this is normal. This is what everyone wakes to in the City, and what everyone sleeps to, and what everyone hears all day long, as they attempt to work, think, and love.

  The little earthquake is over. The flood waters have receded. Everything is okay now, isn’t it?

  You think of your upcoming day, a day like every day, laying asphalt for the long, straight road into the hills. What is beyond the City? Space, you have been told: wild, empty space. The City will expand, become greater. Some people say that the god who made this city, who ordered the road built, years ago, is dead. But you don’t care. You do not listen to your wife when she goes on about some princess, who must be rescued in order for the magic of the City to survive, who is the City’s soul. You know nothing about souls and care nothing for the fairy tales of women and children. What you care about is money to feed your family, because money is the magic of the City, the magic that keeps the City alive. Food is manufactured out of money. Houses are built out of money. It is an all-powerful substance that can turn into anything.

  Long ago, your mother used to say, food came from the earth. But how could you understand what that means? How could food come from dirt?

  Some people say, it was the god Hanum who created money. If Hanum is dead, then money no longer means anything. It’s just pieces of paper, which can only mean something if everyone believes in it. But everyone does believe in it. People talk, but no one stops believing, not really. They cannot afford to. Not only because, as far as they know, everything they need to survive is gotten with money, but because money has become the life blood of the City. Money has become the breath, the energy that flows between people—the only thing that touches, uncleaned and unbleached, the sweat of everybody’s hands, cycling through life after life like the life force itself. It is the only thing that truly connects you. Without it, you would be alone, floating away into that empty space beyond the City, that nothingness.

  You find yourself in the kitchen now, not remembering how you got there. The kitchen is a place of shining surfaces and humming appliances, where food comes from but cannot be seen. You do not eat. You do not drink water. You drink something black to wake you up, to make the headache go away. Your body is a painful nuisance to you.

  “If everything is made from money,” your daughter asked you when she was a child, “then what is money made from?”

  “It is made from trees,” you told her distractedly, because that is what you had been told when you were a child.

  “What are trees?”

  “I don’t know,” you said.

  “They must be great gods,” she said, “because they are the ones the magic is made from.”

  “No,” you said impatiently. “Hanum is our God, the one who made the City.”

  “But I think the trees are gods,” she said again, pouting a little. “Because they make the money.”

  Your daughter never saw a tree. Now she is all grown up, and she seems cold and strange to you. And you wonder why she does not seem to know you, and sometimes you miss that trusting way she used to look at you, when she was a child.

  The morning chill wakes Lonely from a thick, dreamless sleep. The air is fresh and empty, cleansed by the death of night’s final, blank hour. The sun caresses her. The lizard is gone.

  She walks out into the silence. The wind still blows, on and on. Lonely feels changed by it, as the stone has been changed by it over millions of years, her edges smooth and soft. Her skin darkens around the whites of her eyes and her frayed, paling hair. She still feels like a goddess. The fire of the sun does not burn her. She isn’t hungry for food. She misses water but can do without it. Her mind feeds on color and light. She wakes herself with the sweet honey of yellow stone and sun, and quenches her thirst with the sight of green plants in the distance.

  As she walks among the cacti and little skeleton trees, she begins to feel okay again, surrounded by birdsong. She can tell that what the birds are saying is simple and real; each call is meant for another to hear, and the others are listening and calling back. She doesn’t hear any other animals talking, only the birds. They seem to love conversation. And their conversation comforts her with its busy-ness. Other animals whisper in silence and mystery, or cry out when they are afraid, but the birds actually talk around her, all the
time. They ground her from the eerie confusion of realities that haunted her during the night; they drown out the memories of wailing, unheard human voices.

  Yet even now, when she stops to look at them—for they do not hide themselves, but bounce ever-vigilant from tree to tree in ribbons of flight, arching low near her head and then snapping their wings with bright explosions of blue, red, and yellow—she is lonely. For they seem so much a community, and they spend all morning telling each other who they are and where they are, and what they want and who will answer. They have so much to say to one another, and she has no one to talk to, no one to call her name. The spaces behind the curved arms of cacti or the curtains of the leaves are whole rooms to them, within the mansions of little thickets and the mazes of stone. And she has no home, nowhere to return to, nowhere to keep her safe.

  She must walk endlessly upon the ground, and the stony, thorny earth tears at her feet. She never thought about her feet before. She never saw them as having much meaning. Now she sees that they are her only connection to the earth. And they seem so fragile, their pads so thin, their balance nearly unbelievable. The idea of crossing so much space astounds her. Every time she looks up from her feet, the images around her are different, a miracle which both terrifies and excites her. She realizes how little she understands of her own direction, her own destiny. Yet, if she focuses all her mind on the contact of her soles against the earth, one and then the other, she can keep the fear manageable.

  In the late afternoon, she comes upon three vultures huddled like old women in great black capes around the carcass of an animal she cannot identify—just an arrangement of flesh and bone. They look at her but do not seem to mind her. When they shift their weight to the side and heft themselves with a brief lift of wings to another part of the carcass, their waddling gait is awkward but huge somehow, and it chills her to see.

  “Are you death?” she whispers to them.

  not us, they say. we are only guides.

  “But do you know about death? Do you know where my father went?”

  who are you, that we should tell you?

  “I loved my father.”

  then you know where he went.

  But Lonely is angry at their riddles. “What do you know,” she retorts. “You’re ugly. Your heads are naked and wrinkled, like the old woman’s.” Then she feels afraid, expecting their anger.

  our heads are naked, because when you look into the face of death, you must do so with honesty. you cannot try to cover yourself, or make yourself more than you are.

  Lonely stares. They keep ripping at the flesh until it is no longer recognizable as flesh.

  “How do I know I’m alive?” she whispers now, as a new fear occurs to her. “How do I know I’m real?”

  we know. we can smell you.

  “What is smell?”

  smell is taste before you can taste it. smell is longing. smell is something changing. smell is how animals talk, and how death calls for its release. They say all these things at once, at the same time, without any words.

  Lonely sniffs the air where she stands, and the smell of the carcass says, leave me alone. i am being undone. leave me alone to feel the pain of letting go. And so she leaves, but as she does she keeps watching the sky where the vultures float and tilt on towers of heat, and they look beautiful, and she thinks wistfully, How easy! How far away death is! But she doesn’t understand it, because she does not yet understand what life is.

  Rounding a corner, she sees two men tying her horse to a tree.

  She shrinks behind a rock, her heart shaking in its shadow. Instinctively, she pulls her dress down over her. Then from her crouched position, she tilts her head to see them, keeping the white of her face hidden from the sun. In her dizzy vision she tries to pull the pieces of information together. Wide solid backs and hairy cheeks like her father’s, but eerily unknown faces, human yet unfamiliar. Their hands act instead of feeling; their movements are efficient and forceful and quickly over.

  Lonely feels strangely still inside. Their bodies look fast and harsh, with no way in, and their scent speaks a language her own body does not seem to know. She does not remember now the way her body burned against the back of the horse, dissolving her like smoke up into the sky; she does not remember now how her body became the moon when she touched it, and turned the hills to song—or the fantasy of love washing over her. She does not remember the brush of the grasses against her toes, or the caress of the wind. These beings before her are nothing to do with any of that. Her body does not recognize them, and her heart beats fast, saying only, danger.

  “We’ll find some way to tie him to the truck on the way back,” says the older one. “How do you like that? A treasure already, and we haven’t even started digging. Someone’ll buy ‘im. Show horse, maybe. What’s he doing out here in the fucking desert though? Didn’t think horses lived in the desert.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave him some water?” asks the younger one.

  “Good point. Wouldn’t do much good to us dead. Not that we can spare any.” The man places a tray of water at the horse’s feet. “Wish they’d finish that damned road so we wouldn’t have to drive out over the sand. Takes so damned long, even without a horse to pull along with us.”

  Lonely was so shocked she did not even notice the vehicle, which they climb back into now as if climbing onto the back of a nervous, unwieldy creature. It is still until they touch it, and then it shakes and roars as if in agony. She feels for it, because it looks even lonelier than she is—its lines simple and stupid, not fitting with the reticent complexity of the landscape, not fitting with the silence. How awkward it must feel, she thinks.

  Then it bumps and bumbles away, swinging around the rock formations, quickly out of sight but leaving a violent sound and a burnt stench in the air. Lonely is lost in these sensations until it disappears. Then she stands up trembling and goes to her horse, who has begun to drink the water.

  “How did you let yourself get caught?” she asks him as she unties him. The horse doesn’t answer but hangs his head and presses it to her knee—an intimate gesture that he has never made before. He lets Lonely climb on.

  She rides holding tightly to his mane. She cannot stop thinking of the men, and her own relief at leaving them behind worries her. Wasn’t man what she came looking for? But they terrified her. She remembers the nightmares in the tower now and wonders if her prince was not a man after all, but something different, something gentler.

  “I’m sorry that I left you,” she whispers to the horse, more to comfort herself than him. “But how will you find water?” she adds with sudden fear, remembering the thing the vultures surrounded—the thing that was once an animal. She remembers what the men said about leaving the horse without water.

  the river is here, says the horse.

  “What?” says Lonely. She is surprised somehow. The horse has never spoken to her before this. Did she imagine it? For the first time, she wonders how she knows when an animal is speaking to her. Was it the ripple of skin that twitched along his spine? Was it the gesture of his head toward the green life around them? Was it the smell of his aliveness, as if his blood was singing through him, calling to the water with its own full, wet life?

  If he spoke before, he does not speak again, not that Lonely can perceive. But he begins to follow a trail of green through the desert. Flowers bloom from almost every cactus and from between the stones, their delicate colors saying over and over, water is love.

  And Lonely knows that somewhere under the earth, the river must still run, and somehow they will meet it again.

  Yora dissipates in the sky, a ghost of water, a dream of water—water forgotten. Water was not enough. Love was not enough. She could not love people into wholeness again. She did not have enough love to purify them. She has failed, and she cannot bear the weight of their suffering any longer. So she dissolves. She loses herself in th
e sky of forgetting.

  And yet the weight remains. She cannot remember herself, but the weight of their suffering remains, and she cannot forget that. She has no body with which to resist it. It gathers her together again, and her particles attach to the minute dust of their suffering which still rises out of their factories and into the sky. She darkens and contracts into a heavy, brooding cloud.

  “You’re going to break, Sister,” Moon says, watching her from a mountaintop. “You can’t drift like that forever. That pain is a birth that has to come, sooner or later.” But he won’t force her. Water doesn’t use force, and it is not forced. Water simply follows itself, freed by heat today, following gravity like longing tomorrow. What can it do but flow?

  She doesn’t answer. Moon blows a breath out to her, a warm wind to carry her along, to soothe her for a while before she’ll have to return to the earth. He would help her but that isn’t his job any more. All he can do is pause here, arrested by her beauty, the mysterious fog of her silence. He could look at it all day: the white unattainable tears pouring into oblivion, inside that gray cloud. He could listen all day to the pale, wailing melody he hears inside its silence.

  He closes his eyes and quietly covets that melody, tries to imagine what tears feel like—where they come from in the body.

  For he must go now. He must rise and then descend into the rainless desert, with nothing to give, and Delilah will try to get him to live again. He will say he cannot—but maybe, really, he just doesn’t want to. Dutifully, because she deserves it, he will submit to her love, but he won’t be able to feel it. And even for Delilah, he doesn’t know how many more times he can bear to go through that.