Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  She is feeding Lonely. She is so different from the way Lonely remembers her when they first met in the desert. But maybe Lonely is, too.

  “When I was younger,” Delilah says once, looking down at her hands, “these other girls used to say I was like the Dark Goddess, that old hag in the sea, who drags men to their deaths. Just because I wanted men, wanted sex, or because I was tough, or because my skin was dark— I don’t even know. Because I was something different, I guess, than what they thought girls were supposed to be. Even now, people say the same things about me that they used to say about her. That I eat men, or something. Because they’re afraid.”

  Lonely just listens.

  “I used to fear you that way,” Delilah continues. “That’s why I hated you. But I don’t any more. It’s so hard to look at someone and really see them. But I think as long as we don’t, we just keep following the same roads that were carved out for us and feeling the same things over and over again, and we’re always alone.”

  After that, Delilah doesn’t look at her again, and Lonely knows to stay silent, so that Delilah won’t feel ashamed of those words it cost her so much to say.

  Every night Lonely eats of that boar—that boar who died in that forest which isn’t really there, which is also a dream now, because her own father Hanum destroyed it. His men destroyed it long ago, clearing it for lumber.

  When Lonely gets to where she’s going, maybe she won’t ever see Delilah again. But when she wakes from these dreams she feels the boar running inside her, beneath her, with its white horns curling not from its forehead but from its hot, roaring mouth. The dark unicorn.

  And that nourishment she takes—I take it too! That goddess of the dark unicorn, sister of the pain—I know her. All these moons, all these years, rising hidden and trembling up the mountain, waiting alone and white and invisible at the peak, coming down broken, I have needed her strength. That constricted soul has waited for her, unable to breathe fully again until she returned. How I have needed her, to protect me!

  The more Lonely drinks of that blood—the more she takes from Delilah’s hands—the more easily I can carry her, and the more closely Lonely and I entwine. I feel what Lonely feels. Yes, whenever Lonely bleeds, it is that black unicorn that tears her open, and Lonely will think of Delilah, lighting her fire in the darkness. Sometimes when she is lonely, she will remember Delilah’s aloneness. Sometimes when she tries to deny her own need, she will remember Delilah devouring her portion of the meat across the fire, the juices dripping shamelessly down her face. And whenever she eats she will thank Delilah—for her humanness, for her life.

  Dragon finds her awake at sunset, leaning over some object, pieces of meat hanging in the wind around her. When she looks at him, he remembers again what humanness looks like. The way life makes a story on her face. Her skin lined a little like the desert earth, its darkness full of depth like a windless night sky, her hair longer now, dreaded, and coated with dust. Not like Yora, whose face could quench the thirst of the desert with a single gaze, and controls his mind and his body and his very breath with its beauty. But when Delilah looks at him, her eyes dive straight into his, quick as falcons.

  It’s been so long since they’ve stood face to face. Dragon sees her tremble under his gaze, ever so slightly. He’s caught her off-guard, and the power of it makes him happy. He draws his breath, and lets it shiver down through him, containing himself.

  She turns back to the thing in her lap now, wrapping her psyche up neatly again, a step removed from the nakedness her eyes revealed. “This backpack,” she says, not looking at him. “I carried this backpack into the desert so many years ago and it’s only got a couple of holes. That’s the glory of man-made things, Dragon.” She laughs with that laugh he can’t understand—the one that holds no joy, but sounds like a bird shot out of the air, dying. “They never return to the earth. People wanted to make themselves immortal but all they could make was immortal junk.”

  “What’s it for?” asks Dragon. But she doesn’t answer. She stands up and turns her back to him, taking up an animal’s skin that was lying on the stone and stretching it in her wiry hands, this way and that way. There is a bandage around one of her wrists, but she uses both hands as if they are strong. He can see she won’t honor his presence there unless he makes her, and that angers him, but he tries to ignore the anger. He isn’t here about her.

  “Delilah,” he says, and tries to make the word a command, thrusting himself into the weight of his own voice. She turns and eyes him curiously. “I want to talk to you about Yora.”

  He sees the secrets flickering in her face. He sees he was right to come. But he doesn’t know how to stand. He wants to sit down with her and talk, but he doesn’t know how to ask. It’s so confusing now—this landscape that lies between them. It’s like a place once lush and green that’s gone without rain for too long, and lies abandoned and still. The ground between them is sharp, covered with fallen spines and bones.

  “I know you talk with her,” he begins sternly. “I want to know what she’s keeping from me. I want to know where she goes when she leaves me. I need you to tell me.”

  Delilah draws her eyebrows together, apparently pretending not to understand, although he draws some satisfaction from the frozen posture of her body—the intentness of her listening as she holds the backpack loose in her hand. “Keeping from you?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

  “Well I don’t,” she snaps.

  “Where does she go?” he breaks out, and then hisses at himself inside for giving away his desperation.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve only ever seen her by the river.”

  “No,” he says, gritting his teeth. “Not by the river. I’ve been everywhere, up and down the river, across the valley, everywhere. I can’t find her. Every day she leaves me—where does she go?”

  “Does she come back?”

  “Yes. Eventually. But—”

  “Then what does it matter?”

  Dragon holds himself still, trying to slow his breath, and searches her eyes. Women are so subtle, so deceptive. They have ways of interpreting and expressing things that he doesn’t understand. He wishes he knew that language. How to trick Delilah into revealing her secrets. How to stalk her from the side, instead of just coming out with it like this. But he doesn’t know how else to express his thoughts except by saying them.

  “I want her with me,” he says helplessly. “Why doesn’t she stay with me? Where does she go? Who is she with?”

  Delilah laughs. “Who? What, you think she’s having an affair? What, with Coyote? Trust me, if there were another man out here, I’d have him before she even saw him coming.” But something about her usual bawdy confidence seems fake this time, and he doesn’t know why.

  He clenches his fists. “Don’t mess with me, Delilah.”

  Delilah shakes her head now and bends over her work again, but he can see the tension of her anger, which means something—he’s just not sure what. “Yes, well,” she says. “You’re dealing with a goddess, Dragon. You don’t own her, you know.”

  “So you do know where she goes.”

  She looks at him, but just when he thinks she’s about to give in, she says, “You’re crazy, Dragon.”

  He can’t stand it. He is so sick of all the denials—every woman he’s ever known pushing him away. Anger closes the distance between them: it is only a few steps to where she stands, and he’s there in an instant—his body on top of hers, pressing her into the sharp stones, his hands squeezing her wrists. His erection between her thighs is a knife he will use to tear her open—force her to reveal everything, force her to her knees.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Instantly, he lets go. The image of the Unicorn flashes before his eyes, as if it’s happening all over again. He remembers the evil inside him
. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, covering his face with his hands. When he opens them, he can see her still looking at him, and the fact that she hasn’t moved from beneath him—that she’s not afraid, only outraged and, perhaps, a little curious—breaks his heart with gratitude. He wants to fall into her arms, but he knows she won’t hold him. And he won’t betray Yora, even if she betrays him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Delilah whispers.

  Dragon closes his eyes again. It’s so difficult. He’s so tired of trying, so tired of fighting himself. What is that endless, cruel secret they all keep from him, that secret of womanhood? Even when Yora’s with him, she’s not with him. She is somewhere else, always.

  “She’s not with anyone else, okay?” Delilah is saying, her voice steady and slow, as if he’s stupid. “She’s trying to find herself. She’s lost herself and she’s trying to find herself again. Herself. Not anyone else. Don’t you understand?”

  But why won’t Delilah hold him? Why won’t she love him? Why won’t she care for him?

  He doesn’t realize he is clenching his hands into fists until he feels Delilah’s small palms pressed to his knuckles, drawing them with the slightest pressure of her fingertips downward, away from his eyes. Her hands are hot and dry, and slippery like thick desert leaves in the sun. She pulls them away almost before he can draw any nourishment from the tenderness of that gesture, and says sharply,

  “Step back.”

  He does, his arms like dead things at his sides.

  “Sit down, please. You’re scaring me.” But she doesn’t look scared. Her black eyes follow him as he lowers himself. Then she sits halfway down on the stone across from him. Her legs splay on either side of it like a boy’s, and her chest curls inward as the top of her spine rests on the rise of the rock behind her. She’s wearing that little brown cloth around her hips like she did the day they met, and its open edge falls between her thighs. Autumn in the desert is hot as ever.

  “Okay,” she says. “So we’re friends, right? Didn’t you say that? So tell me.” Her eyes don’t leave his face, but she looks doubtful, like she’s not sure she’s going to be able to understand whatever he says.

  “I love her,” he says dully. “The only time I can feel my heart is when she’s with me. When she’s gone, I can’t feel it, Delilah. It doesn’t belong to me.”

  “And you think that’s romantic?” says Delilah. “You think it’s beautiful, don’t you, that you let your heart belong to someone else. Well Dragon, if you don’t own yourself, you own nothing.”

  “I don’t,” he says sullenly, that darkness rolling over him again, like it does whenever Delilah challenges him. He doesn’t know how to be angry, he realizes suddenly. He doesn’t know how to feel anything. “I don’t think it’s beautiful.”

  “You’re idealizing her. I can tell. She’s not—”

  “No, no, I idealized the first Yora, the young one, the one who came in the spring. I idealized her because she was made of air, and she made me burn hotter and hotter. She just fueled me, she made me so hot I couldn’t bear it, I was going crazy. But this Yora, the real Yora—I feel I have known her forever, Delilah. She’s made of water, and that’s why I long for her, that’s why I need her—because I need her to soothe me. I can’t stand that fire in me any more, Delilah, I can’t stand it. I look at her, I feel her: she’s so peaceful, without desire. She doesn’t suffer with herself, she only is. She only loves. Oh, Delilah, it’s something you and I could never feel, that peace inside her. But I want to feel it, I want to feel it even a little, because I can’t stand it any more, this fire—”

  He loses himself here because he’s crying, and it horrifies him with shame, so that he must muffle his face in his hand, stop his mouth, stop his own breath. He can feel Delilah like a shifty flicker of energy, moving where she sits on the rock, hesitating, and then moving toward him, but in a zigzag, halting way. He remembers the hummingbird in her—her whole being so light, so essentially good. He can feel her nervous love as she kneels before him. When he opens his eyes, her hands are balled tightly in her lap, tense and unsure, and she’s leaning a little toward him, her eyes wide and urgent and without a trace of the mockery he saw there before.

  “Dragon,” she says, in a way that no one has ever said his name before. She says it like it’s a precious stone she has kept for a long time without knowing what to do with it, smoothing and polishing it every day, exploring its form with her fingertips, as if she knows it is sacred and someday she’ll know what it’s for.

  He looks at her silently and lets the tears continue down his face, under his chin, over his neck.

  “We have to learn to trust this fire, Dragon,” she says softly. “Maybe someone told us that we couldn’t be loved, that we weren’t lovable, because of this fire. But we have to love ourselves. We have to give in to this fire and let it teach us.”

  Dragon hears her, but he wants to touch the gentleness in her face—and her small breasts, the way they swing, full of love and yet unaware of themselves as she leans toward him….

  “But I need—” he begins.

  “I know,” says Delilah, smiling. “It’s what we need, but it’s also what we are.”

  He stares at her, not understanding.

  She bows her head. “When I was a kid,” she says, “my father was broken. He used to be powerful, but his manhood got taken from him somehow.” She laughs a little—a laugh without sound, that same, mirthless laugh. Dragon watches her carefully, looking for the wings inside her, the wings he knows are there. “It’s the same with those men who come through the desert,” she says. “They’re weak, they’re desperate, even though they think they’re strong. I make them give me what I want, but I hate them all the same. And I hate Moon, too, for being—I mean when he lets himself be weak, when he—” But she can’t seem to explain it, and her breath catches.

  “I love you,” he says.

  But she doesn’t seem to hear him. He watches her work her jaw against her own tears, her hands open now in her lap. “Remember when you made that fire,” she says, “that burned all on its own? That first night?” She’s looking at him now. “I was so turned on by that. That fire that didn’t need anything.”

  He remembers the way in his cave she rolled under him like a summer flood. He’s hard again, now, with a flame that roars up from the bottom of him as if right up through the earth. For a moment the fear of not being loved is gone, and when the fear goes a barrier dissolves between his pelvis and his heart, and the fire shoots right up there and fills it up like the sun, and the desert shouts its rainbow all around him, and the sky blinds him with joy. He shuts his eyes and lets go, and the fire pours right upward into his skull, into that halo of humble, hopeful prayer above him that he never knew was there, and his whole being opens wide to the heavens. And he laughs with gratitude—that he has so much life inside him, that the desert is so wide and beautiful, and that this strange, amazing woman sits before him, trying to understand him.

  He holds out his hands. Delilah laughs, shakes her head, and crawls onto his lap. She nestles her pelvis into his, so that he slides right into her. He hears her let out a breath of relief, and he hears the pain in that breath—a gentle, naked pain. He slides his hands up her thin spine, feels its strength and its barren hunger, feels its tightness and its crying out.

  “It’s okay,” he whispers, caressing her. But what he means is, I am a god, and I can feel that, finally. He is rocking her body against his. He realizes why he suffers so much for Yora. It’s because there is nothing he can give her. Nothing that she needs. Not food, not pleasure, not listening, not touch, not even love. But it’s so plain what Delilah needs, even if she doesn’t always ask, or admit to it.

  Delilah leans back and kisses him—her lips swift and impulsive. Then it just feels right, so he lets go. He sees his own fire go shooting right up through her, an upward cascade of light through he
r dark body, releasing every string of pain, healing every part of her.

  It happens very quickly. Afterward, they rest that way, against each other, as the morning gets hotter, sweat slinking lazily down each other’s backs.

  When Dragon opens his eyes, he sees her backpack, discarded on the ground, its dark pocket open and foreboding.

  “You’re leaving,” he says, suddenly understanding. “You’re going away.”

  She pulls back and looks at him, and he sees her eyes reflect inward for a moment as if checking on that place inside herself that he can never see.

  “Yes,” she says simply. “I have to.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Soon.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She hesitates, again. It’s so new, to see this uncertainty in her. It attracts him and frustrates him at the same time.

  “Tell me,” he says, trying to be gentle.

  “I’m going—” she begins. He watches her. “I’m going to find the Unicorn.”

  He can feel his own face stiffening. “What Unicorn?” he growls.

  She stares back. He can see her trust fading. He can see her remembering her walls. He can see the shame creeping over her, for letting herself open to him again.

  “Delilah—”

  She releases him from the grasp of her body and stands, shaking herself out.

  “I’m coming with you,” he says desperately.

  “No. You’re not.”

  They face each other for what seems to Dragon an interminable time. Then Delilah says, “Dragon, I’m sorry. I have to go.” She begins to climb up toward her secret caves.

  And that’s how it ends. Just like that. Cold and sudden as that white shining horn. Dragon turns away, hulking off into the brittle morning, ready to search again for Yora.

  Someday, he swears, he will hunt down that Unicorn, whatever it is, and kill it.

  Then there will be no more walls between them. Then they will both be free.