Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “One day it might not be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One day it might be completely gone. Can you imagine? When trees are just a legend—giant plants that once ruled the earth. No one will remember any more.”

  “No. I couldn’t bear that.”

  “No. Nor could I.”

  Lonely can see where the desert begins. She can see its whole formation now: the cliff running along the south where Dragon and Delilah live, rising up into seemingly endless forest, and the ridge running all the way along the north edge, between the desert and the City. The river is forced to fork on either side of that ridge—one branch running secretly under the desert and the other running through the City and into the sea.

  “Sky,” she asks, thinking suddenly of something she has never thought of before, “do you know what’s on the other side of the mountain where you live? How far does the land go? And where does it end? And where does that dark forest above the cliffs end?”

  “It doesn’t end,” says Sky. “The earth is round.”

  “What do you mean, round?”

  “You know. Like a seed, or a fetus. Like a baby’s head. Like the way cats curl up to sleep.”

  “But it’s not round when you walk on it.”

  “It is round, but you can’t feel it, because it is so much bigger than you. That’s how life is. No one knows. If people could be aware of that big roundness all the time, how big it is, and how it completes itself over and over— Well, things would be different.”

  “Do the animals know?”

  “The animals know.”

  “And the plants?”

  “The plants know. They know it and they live it. They live that way, in a round way.”

  “But still, what is on the other side of the mountain?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the same. Another world like this one, where people and gods make magic and love and hate, where they forget themselves and destroy what gives them life.”

  “Is there another City?”

  “There are many cities.”

  Lonely is silent, aghast. Could there be more than one Hanum, and more than one Lonely? It dizzies her to think of, and at the same time feels like such a relief—if she could only understand it.

  “There are so many possibilities,” Sky continues. “Life is infinite. But the people in the different cities don’t know about each other. They are afraid to know each other. If they did, they would not see each other as reflections of themselves—reflections to teach them about themselves, the way dreams do. They would hate each other. They would fight.”

  “But why?”

  He pauses for a moment, his face caught in a net of sorrow. “I don’t know,” he answers finally. Lonely aches for him, that there are sorrows too great for him to understand, that she can feel his light being struggling to soar beyond, and failing. She nestles closer.

  “Do you have a mother and father?” she asks him, surprised that she never thought of it before.

  “My parents died. They were killed, when Han—when the City took over.”

  “But I thought your people all escaped….” She hesitates, aware that she is drawing on Eva’s story, not sure how much she is allowed to know.

  “No. Not all of them.”

  Lonely looks at him: this random form in space, the only human left after all others are gone, the only one she wants.

  “Did all your people have eyes like yours?” she asks. “So blue?”

  “No,” he says. “Most of them had dark eyes, like yours.”

  She tries to smile. It is good, she feels, that she should remind him in one small way of his people. For she sees now that what keeps him from her, when he seems far away, is this mystery of a lost people—this other world she has still never known, from which he draws his meaning and his life.

  Yet they lie together here, two orphans in space. They turn their faces toward each other, choosing the infinity of each other’s eyes over the whole expanse of the universe. Birds fly in formation far below them. The sun throbs inside the fog of ice clouds above them. Lonely ensconces herself inside his eyes, inside the protection of their warmth which saves her from the chill of space. Lonely and Sky are so far from the earth. They might keep drifting, higher and higher into forever. She must hold him close, and stay beside him, to survive.

  But still the old woman by the sea will not leave her. Not even after what Sky told her, not even when he holds her in his arms. That nightmare face waits for her at the end of thirteen moons, and what then? Lonely will not go back. She will hold onto Sky with all her being, and nothing will tear her away. She will die before she returns to that place. The woman’s demand echoes in her mind—the question that must be answered: What is the proof of love? And she will have to ask. She rushes in before doubt has time to stop her.

  “Sky, do you love me?”

  To her surprise, he answers easily. “Yes. I have loved you ever since I saw you in a dream, in the tower.”

  Almost, she feels easier then. Yet the doubt does not completely vanish. His voice feels cloudy somehow. Is he talking about the same kind of love that she is? What kind of love did the witch mean, anyway, and what is the proof of it?

  “What do you mean,” she says, “by love?”

  He looks at her, his eyes a little distant, but still warm. “Don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know. How do I know? How do I know you love me?”

  But it’s a strange question now. It feels different—inside her mouth, inside her ears, inside even the air around them—from anything she has ever said to him before. It scrapes the sensitive skin inside her throat. It must feel different to Sky, too, for he pulls away from her in a way he has never done before—lifting himself up on one elbow and looking down at her with eyes cold and scrutinizing. They are still open, yet they seem closed. Deep inside her, so deep she can’t even locate it in her body, Lonely feels again the subtle beginnings of fear.

  “What do you mean?” he asks. “Why don’t you believe me?”

  “I just want to know,” she stumbles, not understanding the hurt in his face, not understanding how this question she asks could hurt—though it hurts her, too—and not understanding (though she will, a long, long time from now) that the hurt, itself, is her answer. “I mean, you don’t know if you want to be with me. Forever,” she says, though she wishes she would stop, and wants already to take it back.

  “Love isn’t defined by forever,” he says. “Love is—love. Here. Now. I love you. That’s all. What do you want forever for?”

  “Because—how do I know if you love me enough?” she asks helplessly, knowing it doesn’t make sense.

  “Enough for what?”

  To still the fear inside me. To make the old Witch let me go. Lonely is silent. She cannot explain. He seems to know everything, as if he has always been with her ever since that first moment when he lifted her heart from her chest. But that wasn’t her first dream. Before that dream that saved her, there was the nightmare of the Witch chasing her round and round. And does he know that? Could he understand what haunts her? She remembers again those words: It’ll be as if you’d never left, and all that happiness you found in the great big world was just a dream.

  She strokes his back. “I’m sorry,” she pleads. She wants him to turn to her, take her in his arms again. But he lies down on his stomach and rests his chin on his folded hands, gazing out at nothing. She is alone in the sky without his eyes to hold hers in their depths, without his gaze to make meaning out of thoughts. She lies beside him, looking out as he does, trying to be still and at peace, but her heart is running so fast it could travel around the whole world and back before he turns toward her again.

  He will turn toward her again. The conversation will lie as if forgotten. But it is not. The dead, silent interruption of it in the otherwise shinin
g path of their history together—like a break in time, like a hole in space—will become part of her, as every moment of her life has become part of her, as if her body is a written story of herself. Each sensation, each cell, corresponds with an emotion she once felt, something she could not name at the time.

  And someday she will have to go back over each moment of her life and fill in all the spaces that were left blank.

  6th MOON

  The moon falls away, then begins its hopeful return. These days with Sky pass so quickly, and yet much later, they will seem in her memory like a whole lifetime.

  At first, she will remember everything. She will remember several layers of each word he spoke to her and the shape of each kiss. She will remember the way he sat beside her and traced the bones of her hand, or lay on his side and traced her spine—full of wonder, as if he had never before touched another person. She will remember where his hands reached and where his hands stopped, the fit of his hips against hers and the way he held them back.

  She will remember how he came to her once as a stag and once as a frog, once as a hawk and once as a cricket. How it became a game to find who he was, to chase him, to wonder when he would surprise her finally, as coming around a bend in pursuit she would find not the animal but the warm arms of the man. She will remember how, more and more, he forgot to be an animal first—how he began to trust her. How he took her hand and led her over fields of rainbow lichen, and onto and off of the clouds, and through expanses of stubby, needly trees and bare stone, and into a cave of ice, where they made simple sculptures by carving with stone. She will remember how she thought of sculpting with her tongue, and the look on his face when he saw that—how the smile got lost in desire, how he came and wound his tongue around the icicle to reach hers. How he pressed himself against her there in that cold place, gasping with the thrill of it—but would go no further, and she did not know why. She did not know why she, too, was afraid.

  She will remember the dreams he told her. How he was a butterfly in the dream of an old woman, locked away in a sad grey building in which people store elders until they die. How he lightened that woman with the innocence of childhood. How he showed her that as an elder, she is transforming into pure spirit, more beautiful than she has ever been. How she will see that elders have purpose and beauty in the world, as butterflies are useful in a way that caterpillars are not.

  She will remember—as if she were inside it—the dream of a teenage boy who took himself so seriously. That boy isolated himself, and his body grew pale and withered. He wrote dark, empty poetry that brought him nowhere. In his dream, the boy was underwater, drowning. Sky smiled beneath him, a dolphin, and carried him up above the waves.

  She will remember the dream where Sky was a flock of ravens, surrounding an arrogant man who pushed other people aside like things. Sky formed a black mass around the man and called his eerie call. He let the man turn round and round, gazing with panic into that winged blackness, knowing for the first time that he will return from whence he came.

  She will remember the way Sky’s voice cradled the stories of these people, which he could not help telling after all. She will remember the tenderness in his voice, and how she knew that each dream was an act of love.

  She will remember how this prince of dreams introduced her, Lonely, to all the different birds of the air. How they joked with the squirrel, and shivered at the ancient, haunting tales the wolverine told them one morning during the first blizzard, when Sky used magic to keep them warm. She will remember the first snow she saw lying upon the earth, and how Sky translated the footprints of the animals for her, and turned them into songs that he sang in a sweet voice she had never heard before, shyly, under his breath.

  She will also remember how on many days, he did not come until the afternoon. How if she got angry and asked questions, he would turn cold. How it seemed that the days he came latest were the days after the most intimate evenings, when he had revealed to her some feeling, or when he had felt to her, in his easy laughter or the surrender of his body against hers, more human than ever before.

  But all those memories will fade, and eventually, some of them will disappear altogether. One day all that will remain are pieces: a single expression, a single touch, a feeling of longing and joy and loneliness all at once, as she gazed with him at a snowflake on his finger whose pattern she will remember forever.

  One of the memories that takes the longest to fade is the first day he doesn’t come to her at all.

  On that morning, she has been thinking only of making love to him. She feels that they are coming closer. Last night, they played a game. She touched him in a way she wanted to be touched, and then he had to touch her back in the same way. Then it was his turn to touch her in a way she had to mirror back upon him. She liked his turn the best. She liked watching him grow serious, afraid of his own longing, and feeling his suddenly shy fingertips reach beneath her dress and play around the hair below her belly, again and again, until on his final turn he slipped his fingers inside her and she was so slippery she felt she would slide into nothingness and bliss. And then she copied what he had done, by caressing that silent limb of desire that had already risen and revealed itself through his skirt of feathers. Last night, for the first time, there was no place on each others’ bodies that they did not touch. Yet still they did not remove their clothes. Still he had to leave her as the night grew darker.

  This morning, she imagines that finally the snakeskins around her hips are loosened; finally the silver strings that bind her throat are torn. The dragonfly wings will lift their veils as she opens the truth of her body to him, and spirals him down to her center. It is for him she has waited. It is for him she has resisted the temptation to be broken by anyone else before this.

  And yet as she lies awake in the mossy bed where he left her, she hears for an instant the thunder of the men with their knives, their inevitable stomping of boots. For an instant she wishes for the comfort of her simple bed in the tower, which she never thought to question, and where she never wished for anything. What is inside her? What will he find there? What will she feel like, to herself, when he enters her? She tries to imagine the striking instrument of his maleness. Instead she imagines Dragon, whose fiery hands hurt her. She remembers Rye’s desire as it hovered tensely above Fawn’s. How she longed for it then, but now in her memory there seems something cold and unforgiving about it—something unyielding in his urgency, the way that lust consumed his eyes, the way his face changed from the one she knew.

  She rises and begins to wander, as she does every morning while she waits for him. Somehow he always finds her, so she doesn’t think to stay in one place. For the first time in her life, on these mornings, she travels with no reason, no endpoint. The wind offers her the scent of the spruce trees: an old, oceanic smell. Rather than overtaking the earth with her steps, as if swallowing up the land in her passage toward a goal, now she allows the land to emerge into her. She surrenders to it.

  The fields twist and turn, as fascinating in their contours as the desert. She feels as she did in those days before the mountains, when she did not yet know hunger or thirst, and there was nothing to mark her hours or tell her when to stop. She begins to feel lonely when the sun passes the midpoint in the sky, and then the hours pass more slowly. And then as the sun shrinks and brightens toward the western mountains, she begins to feel heavy with the fear that shocked her that first night in the cloud, when he left her for the first time.

  When he still hasn’t come by the end of the day, she sees again the vastness of these mountain ridges, and how far she is from any knowledge of real place. She is not even sure in which direction the lake lies. Though she has come to know that the spruce forest and the rocks she explores with him do not actually disappear when he is gone, still there is something elusive and fickle about this place. Even now, after all the time she has spent on this nowhere mountain, she seems to find the s
ame places again only by chance.

  She stops. She realizes her absolute helplessness. He must find her, for she can never find him.

  To calm herself now, she stoops down before a plain of snow, and examines it. This is the light I saw from across the world, she tells herself, from the tower.

  She presses one bare foot into the powder of it, just thicker than a cloud. It bites her with cold like the ice of her father’s tower. She kneels in it, ignoring the chill in her knees, and lifts a handful to her face to taste and smell. This is water. This is water in some other form, some other lifetime. Is this what happens to water when it dies? She thinks of Yora, the faraway look in her eyes. She thinks of the ice of the tower, how it melted into the sea and then she was born. This is water stilled, turned inward and dreaming. She licks it and it reincarnates on her tongue, reborn into a trickle of life that pours with neither urgency nor resistance down her throat.

  When she stands up again, the force of her own panic makes her stagger. What will happen to her if Sky never returns?

  She walks to a bare rock that still holds a window of sun, and curls upon its warmth like an animal. Where are the animals today? No one has spoken to her, as if all of them are keeping themselves secret—all of them a part of him, absent when he is absent. Quietly, she cries herself to sleep, hoping that when she wakes she will find him beside her.

  She sleeps in little bursts, sinking into cushions of yellow warmth that seem to press over her eyes, and then tripping into nightmares of endless loneliness, in which she is trapped in this cold crystal world forever, never able to find him, never able to return.

  But in her final bout of sleep, she dreams something wonderful that she cannot quite hold onto when she wakes. Refusing to open her eyes afterward, she keeps her body perfectly still, trying to remember it. Something she’d forgotten, at the beginning of her life. Something that did happen inside the tower after all, or something that the tower was made for. There were stars all around her—she could feel them speaking to her. There was a free communication in all the universe, in languages she cannot remember, and the tower caught it and channeled it into her mind. She and her father used to stare together up through the glass ceiling into space—long before she was grown, long before he was gone—and watch galaxies form and undo themselves, spinning fabulous designs and singing songs made of light. Didn’t they? Didn’t it seem so clear then, how the two of them were only a tiny part of a galaxy among galaxies, how their tiny lives and struggles were not the point at all—but rather the designs that all the galaxies together wove in the sky in their harmonized union of motion? Only the beauty: that was all that mattered. It seems as if long ago, she and her father were friends. For he understood something so big, something bigger than pain and bigger than fear—something he’d been trying to live up to, and had failed. But he didn’t completely fail. Because he had her, his daughter. Because she understood his soul, and the beauty in it that no one else had ever seen. She, in her small, child’s heart, understood what no one else did.