Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Everywhere they go, they make the summer come. Lonely makes the plants bloom, and Sky calls out the animals, and many of the animals follow them for a while at a little distance, as if caught up in their wonder. For the first time, they feel their power together. They feel as if they could remake the world and make it real.

  At the end of the day, Sky kisses her long and slow by the edge of the lake. Then he looks out toward the white birds, and she imagines she sees his shoulders droop a little, and a heaviness come over him. She tries to keep her mind from the question of how long he will be gone.

  “Sky,” she says out loud for the first time. All that has passed unspoken between their minds and hearts today has passed easily because they seemed to be one in all their thoughts. But now she asks a question to which she does not know the answer. “Who are the animals in this place? They are not like animals down on the earth below. They are like spirits.”

  Sky nods. “They are spirits. They came here long ago when the Unicorn called a great Council. They are the representative soul of every kind of animal and every kind of plant. Like each being in a dream of itself, in which it knows itself—knows beyond its own life.”

  “What was the Council of Beings?” She has not told him that she spoke with the white birds, and she doesn’t know if she ever will.

  “The Unicorn brought together the souls of different animals that were bewildered, whose homes were destroyed by humans,” answers Sky. “She told them that all the animals of the world would have to come together in order to understand what was happening, even the predators of these animals, even the ones they feared. Then when all the animals came together, she said they had to invite the spirits of the trees and plants, too. Finally, she said they had to invite the humans, and so they invited us, the Dream People. The animals were afraid of us, and when we came they demanded answers. But we had no answers, because our homes had been destroyed, too. Then they understood: human beings were not only destroying other life but also themselves.”

  He looks at her. “The Unicorn did that for us. She brought all the world into communication, and helped us to understand how we suffer together, how we are all connected in a greater Love. She taught us the language we speak in dreams, through which any being can understand another. That is how you and I can speak to each other, even though our peoples speak different languages. The Unicorn taught me how to speak to you, because she knew that you would come.”

  The wind flutters against them, touches their ears, rolls by their sides in the grass like a happy dog. “So that’s how,” murmurs Lonely.

  Sky touches his lips to her face and closes his eyes. “I told you,” he whispers. “We have always been coming to each other. I am the only man, and you are the only woman. But sometimes we forget. Everyone is forgetting what the Unicorn taught us.”

  “What happened to the Unicorn?” Lonely asks, clinging to him as the day darkens.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is the Unicorn female?”

  “It is both male and female, and neither.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “It is immortal, but our people were the ones who performed the ritual of its rebirth. It was born and born again from our waters. Now those waters are gone, and it is lost somewhere.”

  Why are you afraid, then? Lonely wonders. Why did the birds say something terrible lived in the water? But her intuition tells her not to ask, not now. She wants to hold onto the feeling of this moment, which seems to circle back eternally into itself, into its own perfection, in which she and Sky are together and that togetherness is meant to be.

  “It seemed to me,” she whispers, “that I followed a Unicorn’s horn into the sky, and that’s how I came to be here. When I first arrived at this mountain, I couldn’t see the way up and I almost lost hope. But then I saw the Unicorn, and after that I didn’t have to think anymore.”

  Sky squeezes her ever so slightly. “They say a Unicorn appears to a person when he or she has lost hope—or when a miracle is needed.” His voice is very quiet, because they are so close and because their hearts are so connected that speech feels hardly necessary.

  They continue to hold each other for a long time, and when it comes to her, Lonely is not afraid to speak her next thought out loud. It doesn’t sound crazy to her. “A doe told me,” she says, “that you and I could call this Council of Beings again. She said that we—together—were like the Unicorn somehow. Do you know what she meant?”

  Sky pulls away then, in a thoughtful way, and looks out at the water. Lonely turns to him and tries to read his mood but cannot. “The union of masculine and feminine,” he says, as if speaking to himself. When he looks back at her, she is surprised by the watery uncertainty in his eyes. “The Feminine was lost to us for so long,” he says, “after our world was destroyed.”

  She takes a deep breath. The mood has shifted and the moment has changed, but it is suddenly clear to her that this must be said, and she is the one who must say it. “Let’s call the Council again.”

  Sky sighs.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?” She is surprised by her own impatience. Somehow she senses that if they can do this successfully, he will let her in. He will let her stay forever. And maybe it’s a selfish longing. But she tells herself that their love—this love she shares with Sky—will begin to heal the whole world and all the sorrow her father created. She’s sure that deep down, Sky can feel that, too.

  “How is it done?” she asks now, as if it’s already been decided. “How is the Council called?”

  “The original Council,” says Sky, “was held inside the lake. Because the top of the world mirrors the bottom of the world, where I come from, where the water was sacred. The animals still know it. That’s why they come here to drink. The Unicorn blessed this water, and within it, everyone can understand one another again.”

  Then why are you afraid? Lonely wonders again, but now she thinks she understands his hesitation to hold the Council: he doesn’t want to enter the lake. She squeezes his hand.

  “It’s okay,” is all she can think to say. “I’ll be with you.”

  It happens on the full moon.

  They gather around the lake at dawn—all the animals—and then one by one, they descend.

  Lonely and Sky sit between the two outcroppings and watch. Sky wants to make sure that everyone is there. Animals come from all directions, including from behind and around them, and everyone is silent. The weasel passes near the rabbit, and the fox near the squirrel, but nobody pays any mind, and no one seems afraid. Soon the doe that Lonely knows passes close by her, and Lonely calls out a soft greeting, but Sky pulls at her hand.

  “Hush,” he says. “Don’t speak now.”

  This irritates her a little, for her secret journey with the doe feels like her own proof of belonging, and it is something she claimed on her own. But she swallows the irritation back. She wants to be holy today. She wants to be the goddess who stands with her god, and allows this great thing to happen.

  They watch the animals wade into the water, and it’s so strange, to watch them go down. They do not hesitate, and they do not swim, and they do not flail about as Lonely did. They pass smoothly, directly in, and are gone. The squirrel takes only a few short bounds. The rodents come en masse, and the ravens and wild turkeys wade like the four-legged animals all beside each other, their beauty incongruous and exposed, shifting at different paces into darkness, in the eerie magic of the rising sun.

  When the last turtle is submerged, Lonely looks at Sky. “Will we go now?” she asks.

  But Sky’s brow is clenched. “Where are the spirits of the trees and the plants?” he asks. “Do they not know they are invited?” He jumps up. “I will go and speak with the Spruce.”

  “I’ll come with you,” says Lonely.

  “No. I�
�ll go alone.” Apologetically, she thinks, he turns and gives her a cursory kiss on the cheek, then bounds away.

  She waits alone by the lake, trying not to feel left out, trying not to think. She wonders what the animals are doing down there, waiting in confusion, but she sees the white flock turning over the surface as if guarding them, so everything must be all right.

  The sun has lit the field evenly and sits comfortably in a nest of clouds by the time Sky returns. He stops before Lonely, looking lost.

  “They won’t come,” he says. “None of the plants will come.”

  “Why not?”

  “The tree spirits say we have decided too hastily for them. They don’t feel that we are ready. They say they do not feel that things are stable enough, rooted enough, to hold this Council now.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know. I think…things between you and me.”

  Lonely turns cold inside. She looks away. “Did they say we shouldn’t hold the Council?”

  “No, they didn’t say that. But they said they won’t come.”

  She looks back at him and waits, her gaze hard. He shakes his head. “It doesn’t feel right,” he says. “The Council is for all beings. It isn’t complete without them.”

  “But they’re already down there,” she pleads. “All the animals are already down there.”

  She sees him hesitate, and she knows that he, too, longs for this. She sees the childishness of that longing—that child part of him that is like her—wrestling with his more serious sense of responsibility. “It’ll just be a beginning,” she says. “We can hold another Council later, when the trees are ready.”

  Sky takes a deep breath, and she can tell it’s against his better judgment that he says, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Heart rushing forward, Lonely takes his hand again, and in a moment they are at the water’s edge. Sky walks in fast without pausing, as if to prove that he has nothing to fear, and when she looks at him she sees his jaw set rigid. But then the white birds surround them, and everything feels easier, and Lonely leans toward him and wraps him in her arms. She feels the thick beingness of the water, so much heavier than she is. The birds rise into the air around them in a stir of quiet wings, tickling their faces. Lonely looks at Sky, and he laughs, and she laughs, too. Then she sees the sadness in his eyes, and she sees the pain of his humanity: raw, hot skin all alone among the feathers, rich colored body alone and barren in a long-forgotten world. She remembers his face from her vision in the tower, the strength and the struggle she saw there, and understands again that she is the first human he has touched in physical form since the City was made.

  Then the white wings turn to darkness, and Sky and Lonely are underwater, as Lonely once walked underwater long, long ago, traveling from nowhere to nowhere beneath the sea. This time her lover’s hand holds hers tightly. And there is a light at the center of a circle, though she can’t yet see what forms the circle or what makes the light. She notices now that she is breathing the water. It fills her with that strange weight she remembers from the sea, slows her thoughts, and changes her, and she doesn’t need to suck breath in or let it out. The water flows through her, is part of her. Because she has no air to push out, she cannot speak, at least not with her voice.

  The more she breathes the water, the more she is able to see who makes up the circle. Their images waver in and out of her vision: some of them made more of color, some made more of movement, and some made more of light. They are all the animals she has ever known, and more. Animals she has never seen on this mountain, from all over the world. So many animals—so many they should make a circle bigger than this lake, bigger than the mountain—and yet every way she turns, magically, the face of each animal appears near her, as if the circle is close enough to touch. Whiskers. Dark, flaring nostrils. A canine gleam of tooth. Antennae. A hundred, thousand eyes. A hooked beak. Her own body surges inside itself. Out of a deep sea of memory, she remembers drum beats, a spiraling tongue, the press of bony horns. But under the lake in the silence, even her own feelings are slow to form. They linger slowly, and they move slowly.

  Sky squeezes her hand. She turns to look at him and sees again the painful, naked form of the human being. The shame of it. His fine, vulnerable face, its detailed language of shape, shadowy with secret pockets and twists of age and the small liquid softness of the mouth. His neat, hidden row of teeth. His eyes full of lonely, unspeakable mind. His elegant throat. His body reaching upward toward the sky, like trees. The helpless, dead curtain of his hair.

  In his sad eyes she sees that it is a punishment for him, in his mind, to have remained human. To be the only one. To stumble about alone in a form that no longer has any meaning in the world he has chosen, high up in the sky. No wonder he won’t surrender to that form and make love to her. How can she ever convince him of its beauty?

  She squeezes his hand back. She feels the animals looking at her, but she doesn’t feel afraid. She feels the water welcoming her, all of her—her body, her heart, her mind. It makes her insides warm, though perhaps the water itself is cold. Later, she won’t be able to remember.

  They sit down in the silken earth, and at once seem to float just above it. Lonely takes in the silence that is like no silence she has ever heard, with no air moving inside it.

  “Is she human?” asks the cat finally.

  A spider crawls over Lonely’s knee. She pauses at the highest point, as if resting at the top of a mountain. “I can’t tell,” she says.

  Lonely hears panting in her ear. A dog worries his nose against her chest, and she offers him her hand. This one is grey and graceful, his nose polite and powerful. She doesn’t understand how he breathes like that under the water. She doesn’t understand how he can smell her.

  “I think so,” says the dog. “I think she’s human.”

  “I’m still deciding,” says Lonely, though she doesn’t say it with her voice. In fact throughout the Council, everyone speaks and understands, including Lonely, and yet later she will not remember how. The first time she speaks, the faces and their thousand gazes seem all to come into focus, for an instant, as if the whole world’s eyes are upon her.

  “In this Council, she is the embodiment of the Goddess,” says Sky. “Since the City was made, the Feminine has been lost to us. Now we appear before you, God and Goddess united, to hold space for this Council as the Unicorn held it long ago. We hold space for you to speak again of your wisdom, your memories, your experience of the human world—the suffering it creates and what we can do to alleviate that suffering among all beings. You are safe here to speak what you will, as you will, in this Circle.”

  Nothing is said for some time. Lonely feels the sorrow that sits around her, filling the lake. And she doesn’t know why Sky’s words do not make her happy. Something in him still sounds far away to her, as if it hasn’t caught up with his words.

  “Why be human?” asks a snail after a long, silent moment, her lip-shaped body recoiling into her shell. It seems to Lonely that the question is directed at her. “It seems very difficult. Very complicated.”

  “There are too many humans,” murmurs the fox. “But each one acts like the only one, and uses up the whole world. I want my fields back. I want my running.”

  “They are everywhere,” says the eagle, his eyes hard, his head turning to sweep the circle as if he recognizes the touch of humanity in every animal here.

  “Their poison in the sea,” says the starfish, lifting one arm.

  “Their noise, shaking us, under the earth,” says the lizard.

  The deer begins to cry. Lonely knows that she is crying because she herself is crying, though the tears are meaningless within the water. “I can’t stand the noise,” the deer says. “I can’t stand it.” And the whale, whose bigness runs deeper than all of them, deep into the lake and perhaps into the very earth beneath it—whose voice is bigger than
the lake—says nothing, but her tiny eyes are wracked with sorrow, and she rolls her white belly away.

  “Why do they make so much noise, all of the time?” cries the rabbit. “It frightens me. It hurts me. I can hardly think any more.”

  “It’s because they cannot be happy,” says Coyote. “They want to change wherever they are. They cannot stand to be inside themselves. They want to be somewhere else, wherever they are.” At the sight of him, Lonely stifles a desire to flee, while shame and fear drizzle down her spine. But his seriousness surprises her. There is no mockery in his voice now. He looks at the rabbit not even with hunger, and not with cunning, but with something like tenderness.

  “Why would you want to be human?” the fish asks Lonely, and when Lonely looks at her, the fish’s body is like a mirror, silver and wordless.

  “For love,” says Lonely. “And maybe, for laughter.” That last part surprises her. Laughter. She thinks of Fawn, in a warm valley of cut wood and vegetables and summer sun, so far from here.

  “What is laughter?” asks the cat. “I have heard it, and I do not like it.”

  Lonely looks at Coyote; he looks back at her and grins, and Lonely feels herself blushing. But the subject is not mentioned again. None of the other animals understands laughter.

  “But we know about love,” whirrs the hummingbird, her body tiny and royal on a throne of colored motion.

  “Human beings can love with a love bigger than any animal’s,” says the dog with quiet awe, standing up and quickly sitting down again. “And they can hate just as big, and destroy. It is so powerful, what humans feel. It takes you over. You don’t know why it affects you—you just feel it. It’s terrible and exhilarating and—and—” He stops, panting, wordless.

  “It’s true,” says the spider. “You never know what’s going to happen when you come in contact with a human being. Some animals go their whole lives without ever encountering one, and they never have to question anything. But maybe, once in your life, a human finds you. I don’t know how it happens. There isn’t a certain place or a certain time. It can’t be predicted, not at all. But one day you are lifted into the sky as if a bird caught you, or you are trapped inside something you don’t understand. Maybe you die instantly, as you expect to. Or maybe you are tortured first. It has nothing to do with hunger: they don’t really want you, and you don’t feel their souls in the killing, and you can’t understand. But maybe, if you’re lucky, something else happens that doesn’t make any sense. I can hardly describe it. The human carries you, and then you are somewhere else. Or it keeps you for a long time, and then, for no reason, it lets you go.”