Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  He slides his hands under the water, up her thighs and under her dress, which slops wetly over his wrists, and his palms are smooth and sure and innocent of their perfection. She parts her thighs as his thumbs draw near, her body moaning open to the water as he traces its contour ever so slowly and with the same motion raises the dress over her head.

  Like something that is no longer needed. Like something she needed to draw him to her, but now she has him, and will never need to cover herself again.

  With a sigh, as if something in him that he cannot hold suddenly broke—like he knew it would, like he feared it would—he falls as if through some inevitable darkness into her arms again, dropping the dress into the water behind her and enfolding himself in her nakedness. Her flesh unwinds, and his body is an extension of her own heat, an extension into the universe, as if through his body her body enters the universe—a direct link. Before, there was a line between herself and the universe, thin as a thought but unbreakable, and now his body has blurred that line into nothing, like the lake dissolving the earth beneath it.

  The tower of her prince’s being—the young, firm tree of it, the fountain of it, the earnest cry of it—at once encloses her and sprouts up inside her. Her mouth falls open and his mouth falls open on top of it, so that they become an openness together, widening and widening, wet with the tight wetness of rain—where there is no separation between the wetness and the skin. He seems to swirl all around her—his hands, his lightning, his soul, his mouth—until pleasure makes her lose control of her face, makes her bump blindly against the softness and hardness of him, her body weeping against him, aching to let go.

  He begins to walk her backward toward the shore, his thighs sweeping between hers. She can feel their wiry fuzz on her tenderest skin—their rough thrust, with each step, communing already with the depths of her. When the water reaches only just above their knees, he falls on his, and, to her wild bewilderment, hooks that tiny spike of need between her legs with his tongue, pushing at it with his own wetness. He grips her thighs so hard that she stumbles against him, holding his head like a magic ball, doubling over and sick with ecstasy. She feels the peak of pleasure she experienced with her own touch speed past her like an old landmark that no longer matters on the way to her true home, and then the feeling loops upward into a spiral that is neither pleasure nor pain, only purest, absolute intensity—something she could never name but which seems the endpoint of all need.

  The untraveled road opens. Her body is a luxurious passageway, laid out in the jewels of her wetness for his coming. Desire is, she realizes, when pleasure is too much, too much for one body to bear on its own. The spirit of her body is bigger than her body itself—big enough to encompass two beings who smear their flesh together in a ridiculous chaos, two beings which in their twoness are the complete universe, as if two is the biggest number there is.

  Now he lays her gently on the stone, and she looks up into the shifting, arched canopy of a willow she never noticed was there. The water still laps up their calves and their bent knees, as if they are creatures only partly evolved from the sea. She can feel, in the falling thrusts of his legs between hers and his body into hers and his tongue into her, the urgency he has held back, and his unspoken reverence for the goddess in her that can be touched by human hands. That longs for the touch of human hands.

  What is that other, that live humanness that wants to come inside and be reborn into god? It wants to come inside her. It seems a part of him and not a part of him at the same time. It is like someone else who has been present but ignored, or maybe it only now makes its presence known. This simple, earnest being between Sky’s thighs that presses teasingly against her openness—it is almost funny somehow, with a humor that brings her relief and pleasure at once. It is so simple, really. She wants to laugh because she feels so helpless in this incredible desire, and he too is helpless with it, panting, gripped by its emergency, when really it is so easy. She pulls apart the feathers that hide it. It seems so obvious to her that this presence should enter her, when it obviously fits perfectly, when obviously that is what it is made for. Like a piece of her that was taken out for just a brief time, for no reason, that now she will pull back in. Come in, she calls with the cradle of her hands, gripping his hips with the muscles that once gripped the horse, come in. There is no glass, no ice, and the tower will melt inside her. It seems so easy.

  “Lonely,” he says.

  It is not quite easy. First there is pain. Pain like the earth. Pain like climbing the mountain, when she climbed hard and impatiently, and pain pumped through her tired joints. Pain like pain is simply part of her, part of the road into her life. She has been feeling the pain of his absence, for so long, and the pain of love’s brokenness. This is only the pain of the body, which now she can bear.

  That is why first you have to love, the wind might have explained, when she fought to refuse Coyote, when she knew inside herself that though love was more complicated than the needs of the body, she needed to be held safely inside it before she satisfied those needs. She needs him to hold her and hear that she cries out, feel the tenderness of his self-restraint as he pulls back and goes more gently, less deep, and then deep again, slowly, breathing out his relief. They do not fit as perfectly as she expected. At every point of contact there is at once the shock of agreement and the clash of disagreement. She pushes more desperately against him and at once scrambles at a thousand tiny nerve endings to escape. The need to get closer and the need to escape feed each other until she is crying out in a frenzy of desire for nothing that could ever fill her. But sometimes he does fill her. The deep clouds of flesh that line her, inside, do not feel touch like the skin of the outer body. Inside, sensation is a formless wave, at once full-bodied and ghostly, flushing her whole inner pathway with indefinable, needful goodness all the way up through her chest and her throat and her mind.

  Sometimes she is thinking. She wonders what will happen when it ends. She wonders what will happen tomorrow. She wonders what he is thinking. She wonders if this is enough.

  They roll over the earth. She sits on him, her breasts lifted proudly in the free-riding air, and rolls her hips in circles, pressing her own erection against the bone above his—and the creature of his desire struggles inside her, nudging her inner walls, wanting the quick rhythm of linear friction. But in his face he loves her, watches her in awe, rides the wonder of his own need with patience. She wants him to reach that peak. She wants everything for him. She wants him to allow himself the purest of joy. She kisses him slowly, and he kisses her back, filling her and filling her as if the pleasure of eating could continue without stopping, without ever being hungry or ever being full. Now he rises up, pushes back against the earth with one hand and encircles her waist with the other. He closes his eyes, his mouth against her breasts, his thrusts serious and intent, and she presses and slides in an arching thrust at once forward and down, pressing every part of herself against every part of him. He feels longer and longer, slaying her with pleasure, sucking her inside out, until that single point that was the center of all desire is tossed up into the vast galaxy of her body—vaster than she ever knew—and scatters into stars, and she doesn’t know who is inside whom, or who makes the rhythm that rocks them. But for a single instant she is higher than this highest mountain, riding her own, immortal unicorn through crazy fields of forever, and she can feel the joy shocking upward through the pound of her hooves, and the joy flying through the sunlight of her hair into the wind. Then she looks down as her beloved shouts his hot breath between her damp breasts, and then drops his forehead heavily against her shoulder, his face shadowed and handsome and etched in a design she has never seen, his cries quick and as fragile as the baby fish that are tickling their feet in the darkness. And she understands why he feared to let his body speak its truth, why he feared to release himself into the hands of such merciless love.

  Then they fall in a tangle of limbs that cou
ld never be undone, and let the high mountain water, still rocking faintly with the reverberation of their passion, wash them with its cool hands into sleep.

  She wakes once during the night. She sees the humanness in his collapsed form, as if his bones became soft; she feels his surrendered weight against her and sees his eyelashes long against his face, flickering with the torment of consciousness lost beneath them. She cradles him against her. She strokes his back, that part of him he cannot see. I will stay awake for you, she thinks. You who have stayed awake for a hundred years—I will keep the flame burning tonight, so that you, finally, can rest. Rest inside me. Let go, finally, beloved.

  Then she looks up at the stars: the night sky that knew her before anyone knew her, when she first saw through the image of herself into the universe.

  She watches that sky for a long time, and she knows that sky, and that sky knows her. She feels the wind touch her cheek—very slightly, just barely, only a whisper in the stillness—and that wind knows her name.

  In the unconscious clinging of Sky’s sleeping body, her own body dreams, and her mind tiptoes off into memories of long yellow fields that stretched unhindered from dawn to dusk. The infinity of the sea behind her; the promise of the world before her. The beat of the horse’s rhythm against the humming earth. The sun melting into tomorrow. The sight of the desert from the high cliffs, and the things the wind told her, as if she were its secret and only friend.

  Standing on the edge of the cliff overlooking the desert, she was dizzy with the fear of falling, but even then she’d known that what she truly feared was her own desire to fly.

  All those days riding her horse through the meadows, walking upon desert, climbing the hills, pressing through forests—all those days she’d ached with such a pain of longing, yet those days had been hers alone. They had belonged to her and to no one else. Even her longing had been pure somehow: somehow whole in itself, somehow holy.

  What if just as Sky fears his own need, she fears equally her own longing for freedom?

  Because she now finally holds in her arms the man she so longed for, she allows herself for one instant—an instant she will forget later—to ask herself this question. She wonders what her life could have been like without this destiny laid upon her. She remembers what Rye asked her out in the simple, peaceful fields, when she held fresh soil in her hands: What would you do, if you didn’t have to go to that mountain?

  It isn’t a painful question, or a question that must now be answered. It is only a question, as passing as the breeze.

  The dead cold night chills the water tight against her skin. “Sky,” she murmurs gently, and tries to roll them together out of the water onto dry land. He murmurs back, grasps after her with his arms as she shuffles awkwardly onto the ground without rising, scraping her hips on stone. He reaches for her, clutches at her and then relaxes again into sleep. She sees him anew, a boy who has lost everything—who tries in his proud, earnest, childish way to be the prince that was left for him to be, and to stand tall and godlike in the place of an entire people who are gone. Now he is clinging to her as if somewhere in her body, somewhere in her womanness and her loneliness and herself, she knows something that he, in all his knowing, has forgotten—something he needs to survive.

  She wants to be good, to do everything right. When he opens his eyes in the morning, she is waiting. She holds his gaze tight in hers.

  Love is the first thing that wakes there. Love wakes like a revelation in his eyes; she can see the memory of the night there, and the inspiration of another life he could live, a life all his own where he is free to love again.

  The fear wakes second. She sees the nightmare of it begin to dawn. That he—the dream god, the one whose wakefulness would keep his people alive—has slept. That he surrendered. That he let down his guard. She feels the echo of that fear inside her. She reaches, quickly, for his lips with her own, but his mouth is slow and cool, distracted by something.

  “It’s okay,” she whispers to him, because she knows it is. How could it not be? How could love ever be wrong?

  He keeps looking at her, and she can feel the fear creeping up inside him, filling him, making his throat run dry. He’s still waking; he’s still recalling the consciousness of who he is and all that he must be. He is still dizzy with the love they spent with each other last night. But she needs him to say something about it, before he separates from her again. She needs him to name it. Why is it so important, what her name should be, when this event of love that passed between them has no name? Why does no one name this—this love that they became when they were two, when they were not themselves but an action, a gift, a ceremony of embrace? What was that?

  He comes closer, grips her in his hands. But she thinks his small, lonely smile looks strained, as if while he holds her tight, something is pulling him inexorably backward and away.

  For this instant he gives her his smile—so soft, like a ripple around the memory of their great plunge, last night. “When I was inside you,” he murmurs, “I felt like I was home again. I felt the softness, the depth, the sturdiness of those earth-waters where I was born. I saw those creatures again. I felt that magic, inside you.”

  Then stay, she wants to say. But she doesn’t, because to plead with him would be to admit the awful feeling she has—that this is the end. A feeling she cannot justify or explain.

  “I want you to meet my grandfathers, Lonely,” he tells her, his voice slow. “Really meet them.“ But he is so afraid. She can see it all over his face. He wants to love her, she knows. He wants to be with her. He wants to believe that it doesn’t matter that he fell asleep. But he is afraid, and his voice is cold.

  “Sky—” she begins anxiously. “Promise me, before you go to them— Promise me—” She tries to hold his eyes with hers, but they leave her.

  He seems calm as he rises. Calm as he sits and pulls his knees to his chest, staring out at the empty lake.

  For a moment she thinks he will be okay. There is no panic in his motions. He stands up, his human feet lapped by the ghostly water. Then he throws back his head and makes a long, eerie call that reminds her of twilight falling over uninhabited hills. Then he stills himself and listens, and keeps his head tilted back as he watches the sky.

  Then comes the long white flow of silence over the sky above him, and the stillness that rises from the too-smooth lake, over and over and over. The birds are gone. Before either of them can react or feel anything, she already knows that nothing she can say, nothing she can do, will ever convince him that it isn’t his fault, for surrendering one night to personal, human love.

  He stands up fast.

  They are gone like the dream that they were. He has slept and now he has woken, and they are gone. He is alone now, like she was, in the beginning. Without people. Without place.

  Lonely watches, behind him, as he makes the call again, and again. Now he doesn’t stop between calls to listen. To Lonely he sounds more than ever like a wild thing, as if the human form she knew him in was only an illusion she created with her longing—as if he never belonged to her, as if love was only a distraction from this haunted call of emptiness, of incompleteness, of the loneliness which is truly life. She scrambles to her feet and grabs ahold of his arm; she tries to turn him back toward her, needing to see his face. But when she touches him, he bolts. She runs after him, her legs tripping against the heave of the water that bears its weight against her, stumbling and splashing, while he—in the grace of his grief, in the release of falling into that fear which has always haunted him and now finally claimed him—flows as easily as a spirit toward the center. And still the water will not let him in, though he turns and turns, though he kneels inside it, though he calls and calls—the skin of his arms needling into wings, his form slimming and shrinking into the distance, into desperate, splashing flight.

  Through black, heavy fear she runs after him, runs and sinks, terror
bleeding through her body—and his face is hidden from her as he lifts from the water. The center of the lake sucks her deeper, and then the sun burns its surface pure white, and then the surface is gone. Then again she is moving as if under the sea, only this time she is trying to run. The water fills her lungs, leaving no room for voice, no air with which to expel the cry of his name, only water which speaks the silence of all the things they will never say.

  It is she who sinks, and she sinks alone. For Sky is a bird now, small and black with muscular, angled wings. He flies above the lake, high and away into the airy sorrow of forever, while Lonely—as if she is whatever he feared down inside the water—falls deeper and deeper into darkness, until she breaks through into a paler, warmer sky, and keeps falling, back to this earth far below.

  When Mira was small, she used to hide in the fields above her neighborhood, a hidden stillness contained within her. The details of the grasses made a net of safety that held her, a kingdom so minute that the great shouting world could never reach it. Masses of ants swirled like the cosmos. An inchworm—arching into a miniscule mountain and then flattening out again—was eager and hungry, but its urgency was manageable for Mira, its path fitting neatly into her span of vision without her having to turn her head.

  She listened for footsteps or noises in the alley below, feeling delicious in her secrecy. She closed her eyes to feel her invisibility swallow her like a warm cup. When the rude sounds had passed, she might open her eyes and see, in the little haven of her immediate and close-up vision, a brown spider riding low on its bent legs—running out from under her hair, blurring under her nose. It paused on the arch of a bent grass blade, slowly lifted two legs on each side, and balanced on its remaining six legs like a dancer.