Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Delilah,” says Dragon one more time, and she wishes that wasn’t her name. “I’m not leaving until you come out.”

  She throws a stone out the opening and hears him swear.

  What a ridiculous thing to say, she thinks. Of course you will leave. Everyone leaves.

  And she is right. By the time she has finally made up her mind about what she will do, and she cautiously peers into the light, he is gone.

  What you might not know, what you might forget, is how strong you are.

  You are stronger than any other creature. Even though you live the myth of the City—the myth of ease and pleasure—your lives are harder than anyone or anything else’s. The hardest part is that you can never admit to it.

  Teenagers who enter the streets at a certain age and never leave them again: you have the strength to make your own rights of passage, where none are provided to you and you have not one elder you can respect. Office men and women who have no time for lunch or headaches: you are strong enough to live completely independent of your bodies. Rich people who turn your heads away from the beggars and clutch your money tight to pay for the new addition to your house: you are strong enough to completely deny your hearts. Beggars: you are strong enough to throw away all of your pride.

  Wives who are never touched, and never touch yourselves: you are strong enough to keep smiling, even when everyone knows those smiles aren’t real and no one cares. Children who are beaten for being who you are: you are strong enough to become someone else—to completely shapeshift, in order to live. Husbands who have nothing to believe in: you are strong enough to stoop low during the day, and stand tall and stern when you come home at night.

  Everyone survives. Later—when you see the waves coming, when you feel the wind tearing you apart, when you smell the smoke, when you feel the touch of a dead hand, when you recognize someone you loved in the dark crowd that will rise out of the sea—you will shake and cry, you will think yourselves lost.

  But you are so strong. You can survive anything. Anything. If only you could see yourselves, as I do.

  Yora kneels by the river, listening. It has not rained again since she came, and so the river has shrunk thinner and thinner, starving. But this, too, is familiar. The river will shrink to almost nothing, but the space of it will remain. As it grows thinner it becomes more detailed, no longer a single roar but a complicated web of individual pathways; its sound becomes more like language, more like words. She recognizes this language, faintly, but she cannot understand what it is saying.

  Yora, he calls her. He will be angry. She feels his anger reverberating in her stomach. But what can she do? The sound of the river washes away her path. She can hardly remember how she got here, or how to return.

  She did not mean to come to the river again, but something drew her back. She cannot remember now what, exactly. Her breasts are hot and sore with the pressure of his hands. Her mind feels warm and liquid with his eyes sharp inside it. Her thoughts form around their need. The air she breathes is misty with his sweat. She cannot see clearly. She feels slow and soggy, dragging her body like a grey weight whose end she cannot perceive.

  Maybe she falls asleep. Bird cries flash in the air. The breeze riding through the trees follows the water. She can hear the heartbeat of a lizard. She can hear even the sand—the tiny grains nestling between each other toward gravity, settling toward the center of the earth, and then lifting at random with the wind. Falling and rising. She remembers this. She remembers, somehow, that to understand the language of the river, one must listen to everything at once.

  But now—what?—she hears a sudden sound, disrupting the flow. She is momentarily erased. All of her being flips back into the safe haven of forgetting. She opens her eyes.

  The sound was only the subtlest turning in the path of the river—like a single hair turned backward. A tiny trip in that seamless flow, whose rhythm she is beginning to know in her body. She looks up and sees, far away, hands reaching in, interrupting the river. This was why she came, she remembers now.

  The dark girl’s hands enter the river, her motions surprising the motion of the water and changing it. No, not surprising—for the water has no expectation. It is Yora who is surprised. Why? Why does the girl surprise her? Yora has seen her before, but she is surprising every time. Unconsciously, Yora brings her own hands together in the air, hovering in front of her belly, one hand cupped inside the other.

  The dark girl disappears behind a tree of green tears. Then she emerges on the other side, squatting down again with her hands in the river. Yora can see the way her body closes in on what it wants, fitting around the shape of its desire. In a few moments, the girl’s clapped hands rise up with a fish. The fish is twirling, still alive, but the dark girl does not hesitate in her grasp. She pulls the fish between her knees, and holds on tight.

  Yora envies the girl’s simple wanting, the plain hunger that drives her hands into the water and brings them back up again full of something clear and alive.

  The dark girl, Yora thinks, would know what to do with Dragon’s desire, which only confuses Yora. She does not mean to anger him. She does not mean to make him cry. She always gives in to him, in the end. She lies down under him and lets him move over her and into her, and it does not hurt her. But still he cries.

  She wishes she could want him back. She loves him. She loves the deep cradle of his voice, which finally allows her to rest. She loves the warmth in his eyes and his heart—the way it dissolves her. But sometimes when she looks into his eyes, the beauty she sees reflected there hurts so much, she has to look away. She doesn’t understand what he sees inside her. She cannot see it. She sits by the river and listens, listens for the sound of her name.

  The dark girl stands up with the dead fish inside her hands, clasped to her belly, where Yora knows it will go inside. Humans eat other life. They take it inside. Yora wishes she could get that close to something. But she does not know the feel of hunger.

  Now the girl is looking across the curve of the river between them, through the shadow of the blowing, crying tree, through the hot dry air. She is looking at Yora. Yora can see her eyes from here—can see the fire, which she wishes she could feel, and beneath that the pain, which she can feel, so deeply that she must look down, close her eyes again, and wait until the girl turns away.

  No, she does not want hunger. She does not want need. Not Dragon’s need, not this girl’s need. Yora remembers need, now, from long ago—the abyss of it, the abyss of eyes that would not let go, and the begging voices. Even the merest taste of this memory exhausts her.

  Need was never a simple question, something nameable in a clear waking dawn: “I want love.” Turning from the sea toward a high mountain, riding a Unicorn toward the horizon. No, it was never like that.

  It was anger. A face aged far beyond its years, contorted by demons of rage, leaning close up to Yora’s face because if you have no sense of yourself, how can you recognize the space that someone else needs around her? I hate you. I can hate you if I want to. You don’t know me. You can never understand us. You’re too beautiful, too perfect. Fucking goddess. You don’t have any idea who we are. Yora would cry later, not because the words hurt her, but because she could not answer the need she felt inside them.

  Need was a smell. The cramped, doubled and redoubled stench of bodies unwashed because the spirits who lived in them did not love themselves—had no reason to be clean, no one to be clean for, no one to love.

  Need was in the blood that ran from slashed wrists, and in the hands that clung to her in the night and would not let go, and in the stiff, death-like stillness of bodies once Hanum had drugged them into sleep.

  Yora does not remember why she came there in human form, but she knows she was there to help. To fill that need. And she did fill it—every day with kind words and listening and even, sometimes, touch—but every day it was there again, bigger and wi
der and deeper. Until she realized she could never fill it.

  She was ashamed of the way she took comfort from the little girl. That was not her role—to take comfort from one of them. She could not allow herself to rest that way. But the little girl understood her, and asked for nothing. Even when the girl screamed sometimes and tore her fingernails against her face, she was not asking for anything. Yora held the small body in her arms, held it still, and when the screams were over, the girl neither thanked nor blamed her. Her body did not yield into Yora’s touch—only bent over into itself, cracked and brittle as dry winter grass. But her huge black eyes understood Yora. You come from some place beautiful, they said. Why are you here?

  Yora leans over the river, breathing in the fresh air that rushes over it. Why is she afraid to reach in, the way the dark one did? Why is she so afraid of what she will find?

  Come back, I say, and I don’t know if I am speaking aloud. I don’t know what it feels like to speak, and I don’t know the difference between voices that sound and voices that do not. I hear them all.

  But I say to her, Come back. Please. I tell her about the yellow fields we used to walk in. I tell her about the deep home of the forest. I tell her about the river, how it filled her and filled her! Doesn’t she remember the valley, and the bees in the summer?

  I can feel her sad little head on my belly. I think she is the only person I have ever trusted in this lifetime, though still it has taken me this long to speak. A red leaf and a yellow leaf spiral down together, and brush her cheek before coming to their final rest upon the quartz of the mountain. She opens her eyes and freezes. I can tell now that I have spoken aloud. I lower my head, expand my spirit, and make room for the sorrow that is about to overcome her.

  There are no more flowers around my forehead. The sky is thin and grey, and already looking forward to winter. She has heard voices before from those certain sounds of nature that are infinite—the wind, the river, the fire—and she doesn’t trust my voice now, or the sound of the thin waterfall behind me. She is still waking.

  Her first motion is to lift the edge of the dress before her with one hand, slowly, her eyes not turning. That dress is lying across her now where once another person lay, and it’s all open and torn. The patterns of wings half-lost and asymmetrical, the snakeskins gone, the red swirls at the hem blurred and cloudy. Blood. Still she does not understand what it is for, what it means. Is this the proof then? These tatters and frays? The things lost? Is this the proof of love? she is thinking.

  “No no no,” she whispers, closing her eyes again. For she knows now. Where she is, what just happened, what is gone.

  Yes, I say, because it is urgent that she stay awake. We have only just begun. You thought the journey was going up the mountain. But the real journey, for both of us, is going back down.

  “No,” she sobs again. “No.” That last no is so pained, it sounds like a question.

  I touch her with my horn.

  I am going to save her.

  story—because it is my horn their thoughts are spiraling, trying to reach the sun. It is not that I am wise. Only that I know all of the stories; I was born knowing them.

  Lonely wants me to take her back up there into that dream, but I can’t now. It wasn’t me that did it. I was only a ladder that she climbed.

  “He’s gone.” She sits up suddenly and faces me, wide awake. “But is that true? How could it be? I know he loves me. He does.”

  “Love,” I repeat back to her. My voice comes from somewhere in me, not my throat. Perhaps from my spine. Or from my eyes. The word sounds dangerous to me. Something impossible to pinpoint or trust, like the moon. “What is love?”

  She drops her head in her hands and begins to cry. I can’t bear it.

  “Come,” I say. “I will carry you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she cries, but she shuffles over to my body and wraps her arms around my neck. I can feel the melting of it. Ah, I think, and remember: this is love. I wish I could take her into me, with all her love, but I cannot. I cannot yet quite stand the pain again.

  “He’s gone,” she repeats, and I feel her listening to herself, trying to understand the words. “Why?”

  And I am silent. Perhaps I am only an animal, after all. What can I know? Our bodies are warm, that is all.

  “Let me carry you,” I say again. “I am asking you. I have never spoken to anyone before now, that I can remember.”

  “Where will you take me? Can you take me to him? Do you know where he went?”

  But her questions confuse me. “I will carry you,” I say. “I will bring you home.”

  Lonely begins to cry again. She doesn’t know what I mean. Sky is the only home I have, she is thinking. Sky was always where I was going.

  And I don’t know what I am, exactly. I am an animal, but I am spirit at the same time. I know exactly how she feels and why, and yet her words hold no meaning for me. I don’t know why I am afraid of what I am, or why her innocence frightens me. But I did come back to this form, finally, for her. Because she needed me to get her up there and back again. Because her longing—though it makes her suffer, though it is mistaken and misplaced—is like the center of the world to me. Like the only feeling that means anything, if I could remember what it means.

  Delilah doesn’t know exactly where the mountain lion lives. She’s never seen it since she followed those tracks seven years ago. But she did find tracks two other times, in other places, and had the sense to leave them alone. The mountain lion’s range covers such a great expanse of earth, including desert and forest, valley, hill and mountain. Delilah has never seen her, but she is the greatest hunter that Delilah knows; there is no one more purely solitary, more absolutely certain of her power. Delilah has often thought of her.

  During that special pain of her dark moon bleeding, Delilah turns the tables on life. Instead of stalking her prey, she stalks her predator. She stalks her own death. Because she is not going to watch herself slowly weaken beneath it. She is going to track it down and demand it.

  How bad could it be, after all: the pain of the lion’s teeth at the back of her neck? Could it be so much worse than the fire of the pinched nerves in her neck and spine, the throbbing of her womb, the terror of slow death, the agony of hunger? Could it be worse than the unknown of aging? Who would she become if she allowed herself to grow old? Her mother, wailing in grief over a selfish man who probably never even loved her?

  But she feels stupid when she finds no sign of the lion in any of the places she’s seen tracks before. Why would she? The lion is surely more interesting than that. Delilah is determined she’ll do anything to find it, and yet she has no idea now where to begin.

  When the bleeding makes her weak, she lies down under a hot, dry tree to rest and quietly whispers her plea into the sky. She lets the blood run out between her legs; she dips her fingers into it and paints her throat and belly and heart for the lion to scent out: take me here, open me, kill me. I have nothing. I have no one. My life is pain and hunger, and is worth nothing to me. Take it. I give it to you, great hunter, great queen of loneliness. You know what to do with it better than I, and you are worth it. You are worth the lives that surrender to you.

  The shade of the tree swings slowly over her, and the afternoon sun melts her without mercy into the stone. Above her, winged shadows spin under clouds as brightly chiseled as Dragon’s body. Without noticing, she rolls into a dream.

  In the dream the mountain lion stands over her, straddling her body like a man, her face small and fierce and elegant compared with the huge grace of her body.

  you insult me, growls the mountain lion, her jowls curling back, her white teeth like little prisms of violence inside her mouth. i am a hunter. i don’t eat what’s already dead. leave that to the vultures.

  Delilah aches. already dead?

  your life is worth nothing to me if it’s
worth nothing to you. you call this courage?

  Then fight me! Delilah swings her fist at the lion’s head, determined to meet her death head on, as she promised. The lion catches her wrist in her jaws, lightly, barely closing down, but the teeth are so sharp they cut almost to the bone. Delilah screams. She screams and screams until the lion’s roar drowns her out. When the lion opens her mouth, Delilah’s arm falls out, landing on her belly where her hand dangles in a widening pool of blood.

  are you afraid of me? the lion asks, while the ridge that separates them from the City still reverberates with that keening howl.

  No, Delilah says.

  then you are not facing what you truly fear. and until you do, you are a coward.

  When Delilah wakes, she sees for the first time that the tree above her is covered with velvet pink blossoms. A hummingbird hangs in the air, its mouth deep in a flower, its wings a lullaby hum of blurred sound. It is so small, so fragile, so perfect.

  Then she passes out from the pain.

  When she wakes again, she will find herself in Yora’s arms.

  Autumn is crows. Their calls like gravel in our stomachs, like fists.

  The trees seem lit from within, glowing and blowing, holding in their branches wild lanterns of color. Lonely doesn’t notice the colors at first; her eyes are closed. Even once she opens them, maybe she wouldn’t have seen them if she’d walked on her own, eyes downcast to the ground. But because I carry her up high, she cannot ignore this fire all around her.

  We are going back down the mountain, and everything else is going down with us. The leaves are falling. Animals are burrowing into the ground. She is thinking now that the dream of reaching upward—the dream of the sky that the trees spoke of when she climbed this mountain—was a lie. But it wasn’t. It is only that up wasn’t everything. She has followed the river before, but now it is time to follow it forwards.