Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Then there is a point when she feels she must stop running, for his gaze casts some invisible separation between them—not close enough for their hands to touch if they reached out, but close enough for her to see every detail of his face, a face it will take her a long time to take in. A prince stands before her, someone she has seen as if she knew him forever, in her dreams, utterly familiar and yet utterly strange to her. That face will seem to change each time she looks again. This first time, her mind grasps at details that surprise her, like his bright teeth and the way his cheeks slope in tight to the point of his narrow mouth, and the tangle of lines at the edges of his eyes. He wears nothing but a skirt of black and white feathers, and a pale crown of lichen. But what startles her most is the strangling sorrow in his expression, a sorrow that she feels she would never be able to reach, were she to stay here with him for a hundred years.

  She stares at him and doesn’t know what to do. She can hear songbirds in the grass now, and their calls seem to happen within her, a ringing in her skull. Then she notices also the sound of water, and sees that a spring bubbles up from near his feet, and flows downward toward the lake, as if water itself begins here at the top of the world. The man gazes at her and betrays nothing; he could be a statue, except that as she looks deeper into him, she notices a tension that is pulling his shoulders inward, freezing his arms and hands at his sides. She sees that he is, almost imperceptibly, vibrating with that tension, that he is halfway between coming toward her and bolting, and that this point in the middle is not peace but a wild, fragile, temporary pause.

  As soon as she realizes this, she feels desperate. It is not even a desperation that comes from longing, but rather a sense that the world will collapse if they separate, and that, more importantly, he needs her. So she calls out clearly, because she can think of nothing else to do, “What is your name?” At least if you leave me, she thinks, I’ll know how to call you back.

  For a moment, she thinks he will not answer. Then he lifts his right hand and gestures hopelessly toward the infinity beyond him. “Sky,” he says.

  Then he is gone.

  She scrambles up to stand where he stood. She looks beyond it.

  It seemed to her that he simply turned his back and jumped, though it happened so fast she could not be sure. She looks to where he disappeared. Beyond the stone outcroppings is purely nothing. She stands at the edge of a cliff, whose gashed side—nearly vertical—falls beneath the clouds that stand in a dense bank below her.

  “Sky,” she tries, tasting his name in her mouth, feeling an incongruent joy to finally know it. “Sky!” It seems impossible to her that he will not answer. “Sky!” she calls at the top of her lungs now, because it doesn’t matter, there is no shame—there is only the actual sky, vacant before her, endless, like a joke.

  Now the man she saw seems as absent as he ever was before. “Come back!” she shouts, her voice hoarse. “I came all the way here for you! You told me to come! You told me! I came across the world for you! For you! Sky! Sky!”

  She stops, breathless with her own fury, but in the echo that comes back to her she thinks she hears him listening. It seems to her now that he is the sky, and that the whole sky becomes suddenly textured and close, like a living thing that is afraid or cannot move, and it is him. “Sky!” She stands up tall on the stone; she leans out over the edge. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but that she is with him, and wherever he goes, she will follow.

  It has always been this way, and always will be.

  She lets herself fall. It doesn’t feel like falling, but rather like the wind sucking her in—as if finally welcoming her into its secret center, the face behind the voice—and then it stops, and she tumbles over and comes to rest face down against feathers so thick she cannot feel any warmth beneath them. But she knows a white bird is carrying her, and that it is one of the birds who revealed that human form in the lake, except there is a wide slender freedom to this one—something even lighter than they were, with their fluffy masses. As she raises her head, panting, to look at it, it disappears beneath her, leaving her lying alone upon a cloud.

  It is nearly impossible to stand. Though something must support her, for she does not fall through, nothing presses against her hands or her feet as she tries to push up from it; the cloud is air against her flesh, helpless and unhelpful. By the time she makes it to her knees, clawing at the white wisps, she is nearly crying with frustration. “Sky,” she says, “please. Where are you? Sky!”

  “Shh, it’s all right.”

  She turns in the bleary mist to see his face even closer to hers than before, and he holds out his hand from where he kneels on the cloud just above her. “Come here,” he says gently. She reaches for his hand, and struggles in the stuff of nothingness, unable to get there. “Oh where are we? I can’t—”

  “Shh,” he says again, still holding out his hand. His voice is very quiet, as if he doesn’t trust it. “Don’t fight. Come toward me.”

  The kindness in his voice makes Lonely feel her heart so acutely, it seems to press out from her ribs. She lifts her chest, and her body follows, and it seems that as soon as she makes this movement forward, the air carries her forward a little more. She moves her hips and her legs, not trying to walk but simply moving toward him, and each movement she makes is increased and carried further by the air she moves in, so that quite suddenly she can grasp his hand. It comes like a waterfall into hers. He squeezes it, and in the same motion turns and pulls her.

  They rise up into the palace of the sky, on tiers of clouds. Somewhere, in her wonder, she loses his hand—or he loses hers—but he is still close beside her when they stop. For as far as she can see in one direction, there is only a flat field of clouds, thick and white and lumpy. In other directions: sudden towers of cloud, spiraling like the Unicorn’s horn into a broken ceiling of clouds above, split through in places by sunlight so bright she fears she would disintegrate under its rays.

  There is absolutely no sound. There is only Sky’s breath, and hers, brushing lightly past the insides of their throats and their mouths. His hand seems a universe away now, and he no longer looks at her, though his not looking, and the tilt of his face a fraction toward her, feels more utterly attentive to her presence than when he looked directly at her down below.

  “Where are we?” she asks as quietly as possible. Again she isn’t sure if she’s speaking aloud or only inside her own mind. The mass beneath her does not feel solid, and yet they do not fall.

  Her question makes him turn a little away, gazing beyond the mysterious question of their two bodies in space.

  “We’re in the clouds,” he says. “The clouds are dreams. They are part of the circle of water that started at the beginning of time. They are the dream of water before it is reborn. Ideas of what life will be, before it is begun.”

  “Whose ideas?”

  Sky hesitates. “Everyone’s. Everyone that breathes.”

  Lonely stares at him, watching his face from this new angle, its bony cheeks and sharp jaw and the way his hair swings against his lips when he turns. His slim chest is bare, his casual posture belying the tension of his muscles. She wills him to look at her, but it seems the one thing—with all his magic—that he cannot do. Yet she does not feel angry any more. She is beginning to feel the vaguest shadow of that sorrow that overwhelmed his face down on the mountaintop, and that still covers him now, silently all over him, like clothing.

  “Are you all alone up here?” she whispers.

  He doesn’t answer. She can feel the heat between their two bodies, and that great question and emergency that hums there in that space: a live heat of longing and terror, an animal quality that perhaps the sky has never felt before. She feels that heat. She feels him feel it. She feels him want to bolt from the nearness of it, but hold himself still.

  “I have not spoken to anyone for a long time,” he says finally. “I have never s
poken in your language before.”

  His words are food to Lonely.

  “Are you one of the Dream People?” she asks.

  He nods.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Down below there. You saw them. The birds.” His voice is neither cold nor distant, and yet it is far away. She keeps looking at him, unwilling to stop looking. His body is shaking.

  “I didn’t think it would be like this,” she says.

  He looks down. “What?”

  “The land you lived in. I thought it would be like—what my father dreamed of. He told me you would rescue me. He told me you would come from a place—not like this. A green place, shadowed by giant trees. A place where the limbs of the trees were so big that a grown-up man could walk and run across them. I saw it in his dreams. There were bridges, and everything was bigger. Birds as big as you. Animals whose chests were taller than my father. And white birds rose up from the water—”

  She stops. She thinks he is shaking harder than before. She wanted to wake him with her knowing, wanted to see if he would admit, like she does, that they have seen each other before in dreams. But now she feels that her words hurt him, and she cannot bear it.

  “I can’t show you that place now,” he says, and his mouth twitches as he speaks. “Someday, perhaps, I will show you.”

  For a moment, Lonely is wild with the joy of that someday. The great expanse of that word, which stretches out their future together for so much longer than just this moment, so much longer than she dared hope for, though she knew it must be so.

  She allows herself to turn her gaze back to the cloud castles around them then. They begin to turn color, colors that don’t exist in the real world. Pink like the inside of a body, but fluorescent. The color of the kiss that woke her below—the kiss that must have been his, though it seems forgotten now and forbidden—shot through with a long blue cry of longing.

  The turrets seem to sink below them, or perhaps she and Sky rise above, through raining layers and wet pink tufts, and finally into a high universe of deep blue cold. Lonely is not afraid. It is a relief, finally, to see the color of her own loneliness, to see in clear darkness a mirror of her own emptiness—that emptiness she always knew about that lay beneath all the shifting realities of her life, beneath her hopes and dreams, beneath her pathways through colored fields. Only maybe it wasn’t really beneath her after all but above her. She feels relief to be sitting here finally before it, with the person she wants to love here beside her, the only real person in the world. That emptiness didn’t belong to me, she thinks. It was the world’s emptiness. It is a part of everyone.

  The moon is so big here—far bigger than they are—that she can tell it is a sphere, not a circle. She can see its blemishes, its bruises, its face.

  “It’s not a light after all,” she says out loud, feeling somehow that he will know what she means. “It’s a thing. It’s a world.”

  Her voice is not loud. This isn’t the kind of silence that feels empty, that a sound can fill up.

  “When the Earth was born,” says Sky softly, “she had a twin. While the Earth was rich and fertile—” He pauses and swallows, as if the words are too wet in his mouth. Long silences lie between his words, but Lonely doesn’t mind. Time is no longer important to her, and she can tell that each of his words is given as a gift, meant only for her. “The Earth was rich and physical, giving birth over and over to color and laughter and the million lives, but her twin was barren and cold, tossed to pieces by the brutal nothingness of the universe. That twin, too, had a soul, and though her body was broken and barren, her soul was rich with dreams, and she carried the longing and wisdom from the beginning of time. The Moon is what remains of that twin, and they gaze at each other—the Earth and the Moon. They are sisters.”

  Each of his words comes nakedly intent, as if with an ecstatic and aching wonder at its own sound. She has never heard such a voice before, that calls her attention as vividly as if these words are the last she will ever hear. For no reason, she thinks suddenly of the Unicorn, and her moon-soft glow. What became of her?

  “The Moon is like another world beside this one,” Sky says. “When she shines full like this, people get tempted by other worlds, memories and dreams they have forgotten. She pulls at them. She pulls at the ocean, and she pulls at the water inside the people and the animals. They remember things. But it can be dangerous, too. They might want to leave the Earth behind. They forget their bodies. They forget what they have and what loves them.”

  But other people’s lives don’t matter to Lonely any more. There is a tiny, downy feather caught by his ear, and she reaches out and catches it between her fingers. As she pulls it out, feeling the damp threads of his sleek, warm hair, he turns suddenly toward her, as if that simple gesture was something his soul recognized and was waiting for. As if, in their hearts, seeds waited thousands of years for the right signal—the exact expression or gesture remembered from hundreds of lifetimes before—as a seed in the forest waits for a rain or a fire or the long days of spring to begin growing.

  She shines her eyes into his, and something wakes there, something new beneath the sorrow.

  “It was you,” she says. “You were the bird who carried me just now. And you were the bird who lifted my heart when I could not see the door. You did rescue me from the tower, after all.” She feels it as she says it, her heart lifting again, as if he holds it aloft to the moon, and beyond the moon to the sun that lights it.

  He says nothing, but with fast hands grasps her and pulls her to him. He melts hot into her chest, and smells like the first scent of wind she ever breathed off the sea. She can feel his breath by her face, delicate, like air woven into fine lace. The texture of it against her skin is like no other air she has ever breathed. She can feel the design of the body it passed through, the shape of his depths. He has no idea of his own beauty. He is gripping her with the power of a god and trembling. No one has looked upon him for countless years. She has only now found him, and he has only just now spoken for the first time, and she must save him.

  So they kiss, and they taste tears in their kissing—a long winding rainbow, a wet luxurious pathway of kissing, of soft bottomless lip and tongue, of one mouth. Their minds are eclipsed inside each other’s hot throats. Lonely reaches up his thighs with her hands, and he bucks toward her with clumsy animality, driving his tongue deeper. His hands mirror hers.

  But this single kiss exhausts them, and they collapse against one another. As the night completes itself around them, they rock together like infants, never speaking another word, for a long span of time into the night, until finally his body seems to trust hers, and in response she relaxes and falls asleep.

  In her dream, he touches each part of her dress and names it.

  “Moonstone,” he says with a singing tenderness, tapping the beetle-sized, fog-white stone in the hollow below her throat, which hangs on a thread of silver between her shoulders. “For the moon that guides you inside.”

  Then his fingers trace a string of glass beads that hangs from the stone and falls between her breasts. “Glass,” he says, and smiles for the first time. But she can’t see the smile clearly, because it is a dream. “Glass because you are innocent, because you see through—because you can see me, and no one else can.”

  “It was really ice,” she murmurs.

  Hummingbird feathers fan a circle in the center of her chest, tied with spider silk, at the point where the V of the dress dips down between her breasts. “For the joy that hums there,” he whispers against her ear. “For the language your heart speaks. Oh Lonely, dreams are so big. How can I ever tell you all that is written here? You are so young.”

  “But aren’t you young, like me? Aren’t we like each other?”

  “No.” But he smiles at her still, and his fingers float lighter than snow, which she has never felt, over her breasts. There is a ba
nd above her waist, and one below, of snakeskin. He kisses her as if her mouth is a well of desire which somehow feeds his own. The joy of him flowers in bursts within her skull.

  “Butterfly wings. The transformation from hunger to spirit. Dragonfly wings. For passing between worlds.” His hand trails down over them, over the very center of her desire. He does not stop. His words make her restless now.

  “Eagle and gull feathers,” he points to the designs over her legs. “For illumination. For the ocean where you come from. And this,” he pauses at the deep magenta designs, formless and aimlessly swirled, like something simply spilled over the grey-blue silk. “This is blood.”

  “Blood? But why? Whose blood?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe your own.” He pulls away his hand, and Lonely is afraid.

  “I don’t understand. I didn’t bleed,” she protests.

  “But in dreams, things happen differently. There is no time, no past or future.” She sees the wrinkle on his brow deepen. It’s the thinker in him that she does not yet know, which forgets her for a moment and goes within himself, and through himself as through a portal into another world.

  “But am I dreaming?” she asks urgently, shaking him.

  Sky sighs. “Lonely,” he says with a passion that changes him, makes him suddenly like a boy. “Let’s try to find each other. It will be confusing sometimes. It might be difficult, seeing each other through all the different realities. But let’s try. Will you stay in this world for a little while, do you think?”

  “I’ll stay always,” cries Lonely, feeling lost and shocked at the distance from which he seems to speak. “I have nowhere else to go. Don’t you know that? I came here for you. I’ve known you forever.”