Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “There is something strange about this weather,” Fawn murmurs, as if to herself. “The winds blow differently, or they speak differently, and the weather they bring is always wrong.”

  No one responds to this.

  Across from Lonely, Malachite finishes his meal hastily and doesn’t take seconds. “There’s a leak I need to check on,” he mumbles, and leaves the table.

  The companions of Dragon’s earliest childhood came in every color.

  There was an indigo dragon, an old male with gnarled muscles and a grizzled face but eyes like flowers. There was a pink dragon, small and catlike, who used to leap from spire to spire in the blackest depths of the caves, his body snapping like elastic in the light of the ever-shooting flames.

  There was a jade green dragon who could make fire in the shapes of animals, and a hot yellow dragon who used to wrestle with the boy and feed him flames from her mouth.

  The more Dragon remembers, the more he remembers more. Their spirits lap and hiss at the inside of his mind in his dreams, boil around his body as he rises to greet the day. As if they are still here, in the caves where they raised him.

  There were so many dragons, and sometimes their fire was terrible to behold, and sometimes it was like laughter. Some dragons woke by day and others woke by night, but once they stopped coming out onto the land, it didn’t matter, for they lived always in darkness. They had always been misunderstood. They were passionate, sentimental, and restless. Sometimes they howled like wolves, and other times they sang sweet songs like the lullabies of angels. They were unpredictable. When they made love, they stayed locked together like snakes for days and days, even moons.

  Once, they told him, they lived all over the world. They peopled this world. The remains of their magical flesh, chemically reacting and transforming into a slick chocolate oil—richer than the most nutritious earth—lie beneath all the landscapes of the world, and most especially within the mountains. It is this rich substance, once the bodies of dragons, that human beings pull out of the earth to fuel their great City. But they do not know what it is. Already they have used it up so fast—as fast as their forgetting—and already it is almost gone.

  In those final years when Dragon lived among them, the dragons moved deeper into the earth every year, and eventually they never saw the sun. Once they had lived all over the world. They had lived in all shapes and sizes, adapted to every climate. In the Heart of the World, the mother of all dragons had once luxuriated beneath a deep green swamp, haunting the original people there, who worshipped her. But the people who built the City, though so much smaller than the dragons, had found the power somehow to destroy almost all of them. Hanum made heroes of men who would slay them. Even now, men came seeking them with weapons, projecting all the ugliness in their own hearts upon them. Now they came with machines that were even greater monsters, that could tear apart the earth with their rusty iron teeth. They sought the precious stones under the earth which were the scales and the eyes and the teeth of the dragons themselves. They sought to kill the dragons, whose blood, when released, hardened into gold.

  Now people said they did not believe in dragons, and at the same time they hated them for still being alive, and their young men sought them secretly. Dragon could feel that hatred echoing, even deep down in the earth that housed him, even as a young child.

  When, in his sixth year, the dragons held their council and decided to move deeper into the earth than any man could ever go—so deep that the stone swelled and rolled into liquid fire, so deep that they no longer knew what they would become, and the lives they knew would end forever—they had to leave the boy behind. For even with his fire-loving young body he would not survive it, and they knew that one day in his humanness he would need the light of that greatest of all fires, the sun, and all the wonders that the lit world could offer him.

  So the leader of that last remaining clan, a woman dragon, risked her life to carry him from the caves across the desert, into the forest and up into the mountains. He remembers the terror of that journey. They were never safe. Finally, she left him at the gates of that Garden, a place ruled by women, where she thought he would be cared for. As she wrapped him in a shroud of mild blue flame to warm him through the night, and as he watched his second mother leave him, he felt the danger recede with her. He realized for the first time that it was the dragons who were hated, not him. And that as long as no one knew that he had once belonged to them, he would be safe.

  The goddesses loved him. But they called him Dragon. Why did they call him that? He was proud of his name, always, and yet he felt they did it to remind him that he wasn’t one of them. That one day he would be cast away from them, too, as he had been cast away before.

  Still he is part dragon, after all. He can feel it. It makes him feel powerful and it makes him ashamed, but what is it that makes him afraid? Why were the dragons hated? He tries so hard to remember, but maybe he never knew.

  When Yora left him and Delilah cast him out, he walked back over the desert to these caves. He knew exactly where he was going. There was no question. It was the sight of the Unicorn that made him go, that made him end up here. That creature inspired in him a terror more primal than anything he had ever known he could feel.

  Now, living beneath the earth again, Dragon is safe, and he feels the presence of the dragons, though they are not here. The fire is gone now, and instead the caves are filled with water. The water boils as if with fire inside it, and the water makes him soft with longing. He can remember, almost, what it felt like to live among such creatures. How easy it was to be touched, how they lived in nothing but body and spirit, roaring together, a constant friction of hot being. Sometimes now, he thinks they are speaking to him again. In his dreams they tell him stories, and sometimes when he wakes, he can remember them.

  The dragons were selective about their food. In the old days, when they walked upon the land, they sometimes ate fruit if they could find it—but only the sweetest, most unblemished fruit, at the exact moment of ripeness. Occasionally, they ate each other, but this was done only under certain circumstances in certain, ritualistic conditions which the boy Dragon neither knew nor remembered. Most often they ate virgins.

  No one understood what this was about. Everyone feared the dragons. They did not understand that the way a dragon took a virgin into his body was like the way Dragon now takes women into his boiling lair, into the belly of the desert. She comes of her own accord. Something moves in her, a gentle sea of heat lapping at the inner shores of her body, and her feet are naked against the bare, tossing sands. Dragon doesn’t know where they come from, these women who have come to him ever since he returned to the caves. Some of them are goddesses, perhaps, and some of them are women that the treasure hunters bring with them, or the dream selves of women in the City who leave their bodies in desperation, seeking some answer to the forbidden questions within them. He doesn’t even know if they are real. But it seems to him that they are. It seems to him that more and more, what the men who explore the desert and even Delilah do not know is that the women are seeking the dragons too. And what they seek is the same, and yet it is also different, for the women do not hate them.

  They pause in the onslaught of steam, touching their own skin, their small moans lost in the roar of the water.

  When the cavern devours them, they might feel pain, but only to the extent that they fear their own desires. The warm, pulsing water wins against their resistance immediately. Drawn slowly downward as if by the pull of Dragon’s own need—the pull of that Other who remains as yet unknown, terrifying and necessary—they are not burned. The pain is the pain of a sore muscle that is pressed to relax, the pain of tears that sting dry eyes, the pain of pleasure splitting open the seams of their bodies. The water leaves no part of them uncaressed. When they reach the center where Dragon awaits them with his worshipful hands, his slow tongue, his tireless longing, and his increasingly pra
cticed, patient body, their melted bodies shudder with relief. Their bones are made of fire. Their mouths have come unhinged, like the mouths of snakes. They shake their hair like manes and growl. They start coming at the mere touch of his breath.

  It was like that for the virgin who was devoured by a dragon. Inside the timeless paradise of his colorful body, she lived a life of bliss. Sometimes she would remain there for years, though it seemed only days. And then the dragon, finally restless, would cough her back up in a belch of fire, back onto the earth, and be hungry again for another. The woman, infected with that same restlessness, would wander the earth in a state of eternal agitation. But she would be confident and glorious, and she would walk in a voluptuous manner, and dance like a snake. Other women would tremble in her presence, feeling things they did not understand, and no man would ever be able to tame her.

  It was for this reason that men slew dragons.

  The indigo dragon has told him this, and the jade dragon too now, in dream after dream. This is the reason why dragons are hated.

  But what about the Unicorn? he asks them. Why did I recognize that terrible creature? Why do I know its name, as if from a story long ago?

  Days and nights are the same now, all darkness. Dragon dreams again. A story the red dragon is blowing out in bubbles of fire. Or perhaps not a story exactly, but images repeated again and again, throughout history.

  Two figures stand on opposite cliffs in the misty dawn of some primeval forest that no longer exists, a river running between them. They have been there forever. Dragon and Unicorn.

  The Dragon, who does not fear hunger because he always feels it, laughs, and the Unicorn, who does not fear hunger because she has overcome it, looks noble. In every way they seem to be opposites. Dragons are communal, whereas Unicorns live alone; in fact, some say that there is only one Unicorn that ever lived, a Unicorn both male and female, or neither, or that changes sexes every hundred years. The Dragon is musical and lively, whereas the Unicorn moves silently and has no voice. The Dragon is passionate, of expressive face, while the Unicorn’s face is ever still, its eyes deep wells of impassable peace. The Dragon enjoys the taste of blood, while the Unicorn eats nothing. The Dragon is born of fire, while the Unicorn loves cool water, and can make water pure with a touch of her horn. The colorful Dragon rises up from darkness, while the Unicorn is sometimes blinding in her white light. But inside the Unicorn lies the darkness of the whole world’s sorrow, whereas inside the Dragon burns an everlasting fire of joy.

  The Unicorn fell in love with the virgin, so the stories say, but it was a chaste love, and the Dragon, by contrast, always wished to devour her. So they fought. But why did the Unicorn always win? What magic in that horn could be any match for fire, teeth, and claws?

  Dragon doesn’t know, and when he wakes, longing snakes up his body, and gets caught in his heart because there is too much pain there. One day, he thinks, he will meet that Unicorn again. That Unicorn who judged him. That icy cold light that stood between him and the object of his desire, white as loneliness. That which has always stopped him. That which made him feel he did not deserve—would never deserve—to be loved back. The Unicorn seems male to Dragon. Its sword of white light harder than Dragon’s body-sword, and everlasting. Like some stoic god that holds Woman away from him, forever.

  Sometimes, in his dreams, he still sees Coyote far out in the desert hills. Coyote laughs at him from a distance. “Kill the Unicorn,” Coyote says simply. Or seems to.

  But then sometimes, he wants to hate the Unicorn and cannot. It makes him anxious. The memory of its beauty hurts him. Maybe he wants to meditate in the shade of that beauty like a holy man under a sad willow whose leaves are white feathers, and wake up better than he is—wake up calm and clear and never lonely again. Sometimes he dreams the Unicorn stood between him and that pure girl Yora—not Delilah—because that girl was too beautiful for him. Because he wasn’t evolved enough yet. And then he thinks, maybe the Unicorn was female.

  The more he remembers the dragons, the more he thinks of the Unicorn, though he does not want to. He cannot help it. The idea of the Unicorn is embedded in the idea of dragons; it is intrinsic in their consciousness, their closeness, the whole possibility of ever knowing them again.

  For days and days, Dragon does not see the sun. For nights and nights, the water spirals around him, round and round, and does not burn him. He dreams and wakes, wakes and dreams, and prays for the women to come.

  Walking to the hill of the old woman, Lonely feels her own body so strongly it pains her. The rain fills her hands, coats her skin, covers her back. Her nipples rub inside the pinched wet folds of her dress as she walks—this dress she has always worn, that holds her together, that separates her from touch.

  Now her fingertips fly against herself through the cloth, just lightly, because no one is looking, and the nub of her desire stiffens until it stings, and her flesh cannot hold itself together, like water overflowing. She wants to lie down for just a moment in the tall grass, just to feel the press of something against her body, just to be held by something.

  When the grass touches her back, it’s so cold in its wetness that she starts to shake all over, but then the rain keeps coming and blurs her skin, coating her in a water-shroud of her own heat. Rye did not press her leg back, did not look at her, and yet she feels certain that if she found him right now, he would take her, and they would hide behind these curtains of rain, enfolded in its drunken, blameless passion. Because Dragon wasn’t the one, and Moon wasn’t the one, but he is. He has to be. Because of the easy strength of his hands pressing her to his body as he carried her. The hands that made her real. The hands that made her human. The hands of earth that separated her—the only hands that can keep her safe—from the nightmare abyss beneath the tower.

  His kind goodness, unlike Dragon. His comforting sturdiness, unlike Moon. Maybe the dream of the mountain was only a dream, to lead her onward, to guide her up into these hills where Rye, in the truth of his love—oh, the way he looked at her that night he first came home—could find her.

  But he is in the kitchen now with Fawn, and anyway Lonely does not know what she would say, so she reaches down into her own mystery instead, bewildered by its urgency, and from the first time she touches it she cannot stop. Her hips, beyond her control, begin to spiral around her fingers, and a whirlpool sucks them inward, and deep within that whirlpool is a prayer—a prayer she needs to speak to someone but doesn’t know how. She knows only the sound of her own voice, coming in waves of windy crying, lost in the rain, and her own death billowing up from her insides in deep purple waves, and her mind overtaken by an urgency of sensation—the whole world overtaken by it, the meadows blurring and the sky rushing down upon her. In that sky she sees her own face, as if in the ceiling of the tower—her face over and over in a universe of the same face. She sees her own mouth open wide, her nostrils flare, her forehead crease, her cheeks redden and stream with water. She can hear her own gasps, like secrets released, and she rubs around and around, harder and harder, and with each circle layers of her are coming off, coming away, and when she gets down to nothing she closes her eyes, as her body seizes up like a twisted rope and then falls slack.

  She lays her hand on the cold ground and opens her mouth to that lonely water from so far away in the sky, and cries.

  “Lonely,” calls Eva, the soft voice beneath it all. “Come down.”

  Lonely can feel her everywhere, calling her inward, into the earth. She sits up, afraid. She cannot see past a wall of falling water. She stands and stumbles to the tent, but the tent is empty.

  “Lonely.”

  She turns and sees a small round door in the hillside. Nothing else—no windows, no structure of any kind—just a door. She opens it and steps in.

  Behind the door lies dry darkness like an animal’s burrow. Lonely has to crouch to get through, but once inside, she can stand on the earthe
n stairs, and light simmers up from below. The air is mellow and still.

  She closes the door behind her, and silence settles over her like when she first entered the forest. She comes down step by step, shivering uncontrollably. She has the strange thought that she is entering the inside of the moon. By the time she reaches the bottom, though only a moment has passed, she is surprised to see Eva’s face turned expectantly toward her from within a circle of candlelight; she had almost forgotten whom she came to see.

  But suddenly she wants to leave.

  “Sit there,” says Eva quickly, as if she knows, and motions to a rocking chair. “It might help.”

  Lonely sits. But she doesn’t rock. She is frozen now in the shame of what she has just done—something she cannot name that she did to her own body, something that has changed her. She fears what Eva will see in her. She fears Eva’s gaze the way she feared the gaze of the old woman by the sea, and she has only come here tonight because to disobey that gaze was more than she could endure. She had no choice but to come here. But she cannot imagine what will happen, and she is afraid.

  On the small round table between them, three candles are lit. The walls, which expand around them into surprising depths of shadow—the room bigger than she expected—are lined with shelves and piles of what seem to be vaguely colored blocks, most of which reach higher than their heads. Above them hang dried herbs that speak to Lonely’s senses of subtler, more mysterious things than her single-minded longing at this moment has patience for. She is still thinking of Rye. The thought of him falls endlessly through her.

  Eva sighs and hands her a blanket, and Lonely moves into the darkness and peels off her dripping dress, goosebumps making her skin feel less romantic than before. Then she wraps the blanket around her body and sits back down in the rocking chair across from those eyes.