Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Come on,” Delilah says, pulling her. “You’re not leaving.” Maybe she’s being selfish. Maybe she only wants to keep her close for another little while.

  Yora sits down on the bank with her, and then folds over, her face on her knees. The dress is flowing everywhere, clear and useless, and her body looks naked in the twilight. Delilah guesses she is crying, though she can’t hear anything and can’t see her face.

  “Tell me,” Delilah says, “what’s in the river that you’re afraid of?” Even though, in a way, she does not want to know. Even though nothing has ever frightened humans more, throughout time, than black depths of water.

  “Suffering,” says Yora in a muffled voice. “Suffering so thick that the fish cannot breathe. It chokes off all the life. It takes and takes and takes.”

  Delilah waits. She feels like she is walking into pure mystery. But she’s done that before, hasn’t she? The desert, the pine forest, a life of solitude. If there is one thing that can be said for fire, it is certainly brave.

  “The river only has so much to give,” Yora says. “The river is a body, with a beginning and an end, like a person’s. Like yours.”

  “But why? Why does it suffer so much?”

  “It does not suffer. It is filled with people’s suffering. Suffering that does not belong to it.”

  Delilah thinks about this for a long time, her mind gentled, trying earnestly to put into words what this un-human creature cannot. “You must mean pollution,” she says finally.

  But maybe Yora doesn’t hear her. “When the river became too heavy with this suffering, I went deeper,” she says. “That is what water does. It flows deeper and downward. So I went down, down into the center of the sea, inside of the island where the heart of all the suffering lay. It was calling me there—this place. This center of darkness, where all the pain was held. You know. Like the place in your body that always hurts. The place that holds all the pain, so that the rest of you will be okay. So you can go on about your day and not have to feel it.”

  Once again Delilah wants to stand up and walk away. The impulse has never been stronger. Run, it says. But then the deer moves inside her. Listen, says the deer. Be still.

  “They wanted me to take the pain away. They wanted the river to wash it all away. They wanted to be cleansed, and they wanted to be loved. The suffering was filling the space where the love was supposed to be.”

  “Who are you talking about?” demands Delilah, but her voice comes out a whisper.

  “The people there,” says Yora, looking up now, her eyes murky like the eyes of a human being. “The people He keeps under the island.”

  “The people who keeps?”

  “The god. The one who made the City. The one who took the people away from the Earth.”

  “Hanum?”

  “He had all those people taken away. The ones who held the suffering for everyone else. The ones who spoke it aloud. The ones who said the world he had created was not real.”

  Delilah is silent, gripping the stones. No, she thinks. But when she closes her eyes, the deer’s eyes are looking back at her, as if they are her own, as if the inside of her mind is a dark pool that reflects her own eyes back to her, over and over.

  “But I could not help them,” Yora says with finality. “So many years I lived down there in the darkness, trying to love, trying to wash all the pain away. But where would it go? The rivers of the world go round and round, and nothing can ever be lost. It just comes back around again. The pain has to transform somehow. Become something else. But I could not transform it. It is not in the nature of water to transform. Only a human being can do something like that.”

  Or fire, thinks Delilah, against her will.

  “It did not matter how much I loved them. Still they suffered. Still the world was not right, and they knew. Still they were trapped there, and there was nothing I could do to free them. Still they clawed at me, reached for me, drank from me and were never, ever filled. And even as they drank my love, endlessly, they could not feel it. Because they would not let their suffering go.”

  She looks suddenly at Delilah, her voice pleading. “Why wouldn’t they let it go?”

  Delilah’s face feels frozen, her eyes very still. She can barely move her lips. “Because it was all they had,” she says. “They were afraid of the emptiness, if they lost it.”

  Yora nods. “Now you tell me your secret,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You know. Why you hate yourself. Why you won’t let yourself be loved.”

  “Oh,” says Delilah, as if she’s just remembered, and then she feels foolish. “Oh, well …Whatever. Fear of abandonment, I guess.” She tries to smile.

  “No,” says Yora. “I mean, why you don’t think you deserve love.”

  Delilah looks at her. It is too much effort to pretend she doesn’t understand.

  “I had a sister,” she says sharply. “I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t protect her. She went crazy. They took her away.”

  And my father, she thinks. And my mother. And the meadow.

  Yora nods. “She wouldn’t accept your love.”

  Delilah looks away. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I know how to love.” But she can feel Yora’s eyes on her. She knows they are talking about the same thing.

  “I know where your sister is,” the goddess says.

  “Stop,” Delilah whispers. “She’s gone.”

  Yora doesn’t answer. Delilah knows it is not in the nature of water to argue. She is having difficulty breathing. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you love someone, okay? They’re still crazy. You can’t fix them. You can’t love them into sanity again.”

  She didn’t even mean to say that much. It doesn’t matter, because they took Mira away, and Delilah searched and searched for her, and pounded her fists on the desks of the officials, and yelled until they dragged her away. And none of it mattered; none of it had any effect. She closed that door a long time ago. The deer is a dream. A memory, an association. That’s all.

  But when Yora does not respond, Delilah turns to her again. Her face has that quiet, knowing look that Mira’s always had. That look so full of wisdom that she wasn’t going to force on anyone—wasn’t ever going to speak aloud. A look without judgment, but merciless in its knowing. Mira was beautiful. She had eyes like a female deer and long, slippery brown limbs and virgin-black hair. Delilah wonders if she would have grown up to look like Yora. More beautiful than anything real. She will never be able to say aloud how much she wishes that Mira could have gotten a chance to grow up beautiful, to emerge gracefully into womanhood. To make men long for her, and walk with pride, and live the life that Delilah never could.

  “You remind me of someone,” Yora says.

  Delilah keeps looking at her, but Yora is looking into the river.

  “Someone much older than you. Someone who closed up her heart from bitterness. She lives on that island still, and perhaps she will live there forever. But you have not gone that far yet. You are still open.”

  Delilah hears her. She does. But she doesn’t think she wants to talk about where Yora comes from any more. “How did you end up here?” she asks, feeling tired again. Both of their voices are very quiet now, as if each is so aware of the other’s listening that there is no need to put any effort into communicating. As if they are one being, speaking within itself.

  “I do not remember exactly. I was in the sky for a long time, lost. But water always has to come back down. And then there was Dragon.”

  “Dragon.” Delilah doesn’t know what to say.

  “Dragon,” Yora says again, and the corner of her mouth lifts.

  Delilah smiles before she realizes it, and Yora lets out a little explosion of breath. Delilah did not know that a goddess could laugh. Then quite suddenly, from nowhere, she is laughing, too. It’s such a relief
, to let it roll through her, breaking up all the tension with a pain that isn’t painful—just ironic and ridiculous.

  Yora reaches for her hand, and her dancer’s face is stretched by her smiling in an eerie, poignant way. She clasps Delilah’s left hand. “He takes himself so seriously!” She laughs, shaking as if she, too, feels relief.

  Delilah’s smile fades a little with the shock of Yora’s hand in hers. “He does, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh,” says Yora, and now she looks a little sad along with her smile. “I should not laugh. It is so painful for him, to be so important to himself. To need so much reassurance.”

  Delilah’s laugh is drier now. “He’s full of himself is all.”

  “Yes,” nods Yora seriously, as if Dragon’s ego is an affliction that merits compassion. Then they are both laughing again, and Delilah has to laugh at herself, too, for still feeling desire when she thinks of him.

  “I think,” says Yora sadly, “like everyone else he wants something I cannot give.”

  Delilah says nothing, so the two of them stare at the river again, with the darkness softening their forms. Winter in the desert is so much more subtle than in other places. No ice, no snow. Just a bigger emptiness.

  “I envy you,” says Yora. “I wish I could feel the fire you feel, and then I could give Dragon what he needs.”

  “Dragon doesn’t need more fire. He needs love, like everyone else.”

  Yora doesn’t answer. Maybe she already knows she is good at loving but is too humble to say it. Because that’s what really loving people are, thinks Delilah. Humble. Not like me.

  “What is your name?” asks Yora.

  “You can call me Lil,” she surprises herself by saying.

  “Lil, what are you thinking about?”

  “About envy,” Delilah says. “I envy the river. It always knows exactly where it’s going. All it has to do is flow downward, wherever downward goes. It never has to make any decisions, and it can’t make any mistakes. There is only one thing it can do: flow down. It doesn’t matter what happens to it—a great fall over a cliff or getting bashed against the stones—because nothing can hurt it. So it doesn’t ever have to be afraid of what’s coming or figure out what it wants. It doesn’t have to want anything. That’s how I wish I could be.”

  Yora squeezes her hand, and Delilah doesn’t pull away, even though it terrifies her—because that hand doesn’t want anything from her, not sex or love or anything at all. The mountain lion challenged her to be brave.

  “You will be like that,” says Yora. “I promise. There will come that time when you know. When there is only one thing you can do. When you cannot help it. You can only go.”

  In an apartment building in the City, a pipe breaks somewhere, and there is no water today.

  How angry you are! You call the landlord. Where is the water? Bring back the water.

  The landlord is angry, too. He doesn’t want to be bothered. Who are these people? he thinks. What connection do you have to him? You do not live on any land—you live in a nowhere lot, marked by numbers. He does not know your names.

  He calls a plumber. Where is the water? Bring back the water.

  You are fuming. How will you go about your day? It’s so inconvenient for you. The water must come out of the faucet, like it always does. That is where water comes from. But now your dishes sit in the sink. Your toilets are stinking. Your hands and teeth are dirty. You never realized, before, how many times a day you turn that knob—how many things depend on—what is it? Water. What is it? You never thought about it.

  But now, without it, everything sits in filth. Stagnant.

  Of course, you do not need water for drinking. You have other things in your refrigerators for that.

  Still, you sit furiously, stewing in your little, dirty rooms, looking outside and thinking how beautiful it is out, but you cannot go out because you cannot possibly go anywhere without your daily shower. But what a beautiful day. Is that a cloud up there? You hope it doesn’t rain. It hasn’t rained for many, many years, but still how hateful it would be if it did. The rain is so dreary, and today is so beautiful. But you can’t go out without your shower.

  You are having such a bad day, and have been having such bad days for so long, that—alone in your room—you begin to shed tears. Feeling so angry, you begin to sweat.

  Oh, you know there is water everywhere. You learned it in science class. Water comes out of your bodies, flows in the river, falls from the sky. But once water has touched a body—once water has come anywhere near a life—it is dirty. Life dirties water. Life is dirty.

  Only water with the right chemicals in it—chemicals that purify water—is clean. Call the landlord again. How long? How long will you have to wait for the water—does he have no respect for our rights? You are so angry. You are so angry about the water that has abandoned you. You are so angry to be forced, finally, to do what water has always asked you to do: to surrender.

  But water does not come from the landlord. Nor has it abandoned you.

  You are made almost entirely of water. There you are—the gush of you: your water arm reaching, your water head turning, your water legs stretching, your water mouth opening and closing. How amazing, that water can be made into such meaningful shapes! You can do anything with water.

  Yet how stiff, the way you shape it; how unwillingly you seem to carry it. How carelessly you sully it, with your colored drinks and your angry thoughts, while you glower at that faucet, and demand what you cannot control.

  How murky and sad it becomes: that beautiful water which is you.

  The next day, when we lie down to sleep, she asks again, “Who are you?”

  I look at her, and then I remember—at least part of the answer. “I am somebody’s soul,” I say.

  “Whose soul?”

  “A little girl’s.” I look away and try to think. No, perhaps she is a woman now, or an infant. I don’t know. I don’t understand aging. I always forget which direction it goes in….

  “But—why are you here with me? Doesn’t she need you?”

  I shake my head, making eddies of white light in the air. “It is not safe there.”

  “Not safe where?”

  “There. Inside the girl. A girl’s body—it’s not safe. Nothing to protect it. It grows and grows, and people can see it.” Isn’t that obvious?

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want to talk any more. I haven’t talked in a long, long time.” My body is crying, all the silver falling from it, glossing the red leaves. That night I have to stand away from her on my own to sleep. I cannot bear to be touched. I go silent again.

  Is my voice confusing? It confuses me, too. I am the Unicorn, who speaks all languages and makes all voices one. Yet also I am the safekeeping of a single soul. I am, somewhere inside, the soul of a single voiceless girl, who forgot she was the universe and knew only pain. Though it was her pain that brought me forth into the world again, it is also her pain that holds me back. It is this pain that draws me apart from Lonely. It is this fear….

  “Unicorn,” she says the next day, startling me, “I’m starving.”

  Her body, her body, after all this time—bringing her back, drawing her away from the dream she left behind.

  In the middle of the day, I stop to rest, and Lonely slumps against my back, not bothering to climb off. Ladybugs land on us, one by one, their tiny legs shivering against us, harmless and intent. They roll over and stand up again. They slam into our bodies and then begin walking, gently, over Lonely’s skin. More and more of them come, in careless abundance. She begins to cry.

  All she has left is her tired body and hunger. Now she is hungry all the time. Her beloved was not human, but she is. Now she can’t eat the colors, or the air, or the light. She can’t eat the leaves or the earth. Soon the memories blur, and the sound of the river
haunts her.

  I’m going as fast as I can, knowing she will not last much longer.

  Delilah enters the pine forest for the last time.

  But she doesn’t know it is the last time until she meets the old boar.

  He is older than anyone Delilah has ever seen. Except maybe Yora. The boar is blind, but his glassy eyes look right at Delilah. The spiny ridge of hairs on his back, like the spine of a dinosaur, is pure silver, and the silver spills over his shoulders and dusts the course hairs around his chin and mouth. His snout is wrinkled and dry and cracked as the desert winter, and his body arches with thinness—a thinness unnatural to a boar. When he moves, Delilah can see the pain in his joints; she can see the way he rides it, sighing as he goes.

  His tusks, made of the same stuff as Unicorn horns, arch toward the ground from the sides of his mouth.

  He doesn’t say anything to Delilah, but Delilah knows he wants her to walk with him. Cradling her bandaged shooting arm in her left hand, she stands from where she has been sitting—for hours and hours, being still with the pain, waiting for some sign because she had to come back here, finally—and follows.

  They walk for a long time. Delilah can feel the heat of his body and the gruff mortality of his hoarse breaths, keeping her anchored in the continual immediacy of her own legs thrusting one after another, like a thousand legs, across the earth. Sometimes, when the brush grows dense, she holds the low branches out of the way for the boar to pass, out of respect, even though she knows that, if the old one has lived this long, he surely knows how to move past these things on his own. She feels the boar’s tired sorrow, the peace inside the sorrow, and the strength inside the peace. The boar, blind, knows exactly where he is going. His shoulders reach almost to Delilah’s breasts. He never trips or stumbles. He never shows any sign of weakness, and yet the peace within him is humble. Delilah feels utterly at home, walking beside him. They are like two warriors who have always known each other, treading the land they have conquered through sheer endurance.