Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “You asked me to come,” says the crow, bowing. “Don’t you remember? I came, and now I ask a favor of you.” It is apparent to her from the readiness of his answer that all this time he was only waiting, out of respect, for her to speak first. In her heart, she trusts him. But it is not in her nature to come out of hiding. She would like to help him, but cannot imagine how to do this without risk to herself.

  Yet it is true what he says. She did call him.

  She turns in place, as if she could come closer to him by turning, but of course she cannot, because he is attached to her. It occurs to her that he, like herself, does not wish to be looked upon directly.

  “I want you to take me to the other side of the world,” says the crow. “If you will do this for me, I will do anything you ask. I will give you anything. I will give you my soul if you ask it.”

  “What would I do with your soul?” asks the Unicorn.

  The crow bows again, as if it is nothing. “Whatever you see fit.”

  The Unicorn looks toward the white mountain. It’s still there. It didn’t crumble or fade into memory when the people who thought it existed for them lost their dream of what it was. It is there—right there—for anyone. “Just go,” she whispers. “Why can’t you just go? You can fly. What do you need me for?”

  “I cannot get there on my own. If I could, I would have gone long ago. But I am too much of this earth. I am too much attached, after all, to what I love, what I want, what I am. My—my memories.”

  The Unicorn shakes her mane. She can hear the breathlessness in his voice, the human mind rushing faster than wings into hope. Already, she is crying with pity for him. She turns away so he won’t see. This is how they claim her. This is the way they always claim her. It isn’t fair.

  “I would have gone a long time ago,” he repeats, “but I’ve never seen a Unicorn before. Only a Unicorn can see beyond the realities we believe in. Only a Unicorn can cross between worlds. Not only between the sea and the land, or the earth and the sky—but to the Other World. Did you not know this?”

  “I knew,” says the Unicorn bleakly. His words are so familiar. Only you, Mia; only you can comfort me. She stares at the mountain which hides the Other World from this one—obliterates all thought or idea of another world with the dazzling dream of itself. One sees only the mountain, and is so desperate with the idea of reaching the top, one never wonders at the possibility of anything beyond it.

  “But you don’t want to go,” the crow observes.

  No. It does not matter which world. They are all the same. One sees only what he wants to see, no matter where he goes. “You told her it was the same world,” she says, angry now, “on the other side of the mountain. The same, you said, over and over again.”

  “I lied,” says the crow.

  Suddenly she knows why he has taken the form of a crow. It is only the most appropriate and safest clothing for the journey he wishes to make, and for the place that they will find there.

  She considers. She made a promise, after all, to a woman. A woman who still knew how to love, without being destroyed. She wants to believe in that woman: in Lonely.

  “If I take you there,” she says, “however far into that world you wish to go, I want you to make me a promise.”

  “Anything.”

  “When you get there, you will know what you have to do. You will know where your heart calls you. And I want you to go there, where your heart is.”

  The crow is silent.

  “I know who you are,” she adds, by way of explanation.

  When the crow finally responds, it is the only time the Unicorn will ever hear his human voice. It has nothing to do with the pride and politeness of the bird. It is weary and desolate, as brittle as autumn leaves crushed on pavement. It is so frightened, like the bewildered calls of the boy Moon to his friend Lilah in the meadow after Lilah left and never came back. It is so small inside its bigness, like the barely contained sobs of the ruined medicine man the night he raped his own daughter, when he sat beside her lifeless form on the bed and hid his face in his hands as if he could hide it forever.

  “Okay,” says Sky. “I will.”

  So the Unicorn sets off, toward the path that leads under the mountain.

  Delilah knows the river will lead her to Mira. She knows because of what Yora said, and she knows because Mira is everything you have to return to in the end. Chaos. Madness. Home.

  Besides, she knows the animals didn’t give her their lives for nothing. They didn’t give her their lives so she could live her own life as if dead, and be responsible for nothing but herself.

  The blissful silence of the desert did not make her feel alive after all. Relief from humanity did not make her feel alive. Even the suffering of deprivation and loneliness did not make her feel alive.

  Once sex made her feel alive. But now it is pain that makes her feel alive. Not the pain that used to hold her tight, cringing and growling along her spine, but a different kind of pain, as if something new lives inside her. It shifts uncomfortably at the base of her, and pushes for more room. Sometimes while she walks along the river, she has to stop and fall on all fours, and throw up.

  She tries not to think of what lies ahead, or of where she will actually end up, or of whether or not she will actually find her sister, or of which outcome frightens her more, or of what she will do, what she will say—and what Mira will say back, or not.

  She hasn’t had to think of such things for seven years. She tries not to think of them now but she thinks of them constantly. Only the pain brings her back to her body. She is grateful for it. In its own way, it feels like home.

  When she lies down on the earth to sleep, and lays her mind down inside the river to dream, she feels the same networks of pain within the earth that she feels within her body. The underground system of the prairie dogs’ escape burrows are like a network of pain where the earth was dynamited. She feels the terror of the lizards as the earth shakes. She feels the massacre of desert tortoises, their helpless falling only a few inches to the ground. She has always felt this pain in her body. Maybe it was only a premonition of what was to come.

  She tries to avoid the noise, and keep herself hidden from the men. But the river can’t help where it flows. She pulls her layers tightly around herself and walks in darkness, lest they see her, though once she would have walked straight up to them and hungrily opened herself. One day, sleeping fitfully too close to the noise, she dreams of the Great Road, completed and with cars speeding down it—covering in less than a day the distance it will take her a whole moon or more to walk, disappearing in puffs of deadly smoke into the mountains. In the dream, the sound of the river is the sound of the cars, and she is inside that river somehow, as if trapped inside the pavement, and she knows Mira is inside one of those cars, but she doesn’t know which one. Delilah screams until the road cracks open around her body, her scream louder than dynamite and completely unexpected, and she is there, shattered and heaving, as the car doors open and naked men stumble out, their bodies vulnerable and soft without that steel speed to surround them. They are so lost. They open their hands and look around. They look at Delilah, but they don’t recognize what she is. No one has heard of women any more.

  She opens her eyes into the bitter sun. She remembers the fire in her body in high school, how she squirmed with it in her little square seat at her little square desk: her nipples, her hands, her tongue, her throat, the hunched shoulders of the boy in the seat in front of her, how beautiful it was, and how she had no idea—no idea of what it meant, or what she should do with it.

  The idea of not having sex again, which always terrified her in theory, now that she has committed to it, astounds her with relief.

  In the absence of that desire’s determination, she feels things she thought she had lost a long time ago. What it felt like to love. What it felt like to see Moon cry. What it fe
lt like to hold Mira in her arms. The magic of knowing she had been born, and believing that life was a fairy tale in which she had an important, central part, and believing the story had an ending, and a point. Maybe sex hadn’t been a release after all but a black hole, into which she had stuffed every part of her life that had ever felt like anything. Because for some reason the feeling of sex had become the only feeling she believed in.

  She thinks of Dragon sometimes. She thinks of him fleetingly, like the shadow of a desert fox over the sand at dusk. She is surprised that the memory of him weighs so little, and yet tastes so sweet. She realizes she does love him, and that surprises her a little. She wishes she could have helped him, but she has never really been good at loving and wouldn’t have known how.

  And she thinks of death. Her only fear of the strange sickness inside her is that somehow she won’t live long enough to reach her sister, now that she has determined it must be done.

  Wouldn’t that be the universe’s best and final joke?

  The snow has come, confident and complete, in the night. Lonely breathes in, and the cold air brightens her mind. For a moment she remembers the unknown that exists beyond her thoughts, the possibility of a future.

  Chelya takes her hand in the morning, like she used to, and Lonely’s eyes are wide, like they used to be. Full moon tonight, though they’ll return before it rises, because it’s so cold now. Lonely wonders if Chelya’s tree spirit can hold her like a human, can keep her warm.

  “I’m so happy you’re going to meet him,” says Chelya. The sun focuses like a narrow eye above them, piercing the edge of Lonely’s vision, and the snow reflects its light like metal. The air is absolutely open. The trees shut off their colors and surrender to whiteness. Lonely doesn’t look at the mountain behind her.

  Winter is a place, Lonely decides, connected by only the thinnest of threads to summer. Is it possible for that thread to break, or has it already broken, inside her alone? Will winter end, as summer did? She never thought about summer. She took it for granted—that soft easy tide of color and song that buoyed her whether she was happy or afraid, peaceful or longing, loving or lonely. Beneath everything she felt, there was that thoughtless richness: there was life, free and without obligation. Now silence grips her by the shoulders, and the cold glares hard into her heart, and the stillness all around will not allow her to forget her pain. Everything, as if holding its breath, says Pay attention.

  The red cardinal. The blue space between clouds. The yellow stain of the fox who left his mark in the snow. The twilit summer green of Chelya’s eyes. Each color bewilders Lonely, impressing itself urgently upon her mind like an image from a dream she’s forgotten—a dream that still contains the seed of her life, and the memory of why she should live, if only she could remember it.

  They walk through white fields, their feet laced in fur and deer hide. Lonely is already shivering, and Chelya puts an arm around her. Lonely feels the full, uncontrollable joy of the girl’s body.

  “We have to be careful in winter,” says Chelya. “I mean, we can’t stay out here too long, because it’s cold, but indoors—You can’t stay in there too long either, can you?” She laughs, but it’s a strained, confused laugh, like the ease of her nature has begun to question itself over time. “I feel like I’m going to suffocate in there if I stay too long, you know?” she says, a little too fast, and then rushes forward down the hill.

  Lonely stands frozen for a moment.

  “Come on!” cries Chelya, snow puffing around her boots like smoke. Lonely comes slowly, imagining Kite out there in the snow, wondering if he made it down to the warmer desert before the deep cold set in. If she wonders it now, Fawn must wonder it every day, every moment.

  She follows Chelya into the silver shadows, into the heavy mind of the forest, and she feels Chelya’s urgency now, her hurry toward the one she loves.

  They walk a long time, and then it happens without warning. The silence when the two come together takes Lonely’s breath away. There are no words of greeting, no calls or even preliminary smiles. Chelya’s hurried step, nearly a run now, simply ends in his arms, which are open for her, waiting, for she knew exactly where he stood, and he knew so much more than Lonely can know: exactly how Chelya was feeling, exactly what she needed. Chelya collapses into him with such relief that Lonely sees the weight of sorrow and desperation that had driven her forward to this place—feelings Lonely wasn’t even aware of, so well did Chelya keep them hidden beneath the habits of her laughter and kindness.

  He is looking over Chelya’s shoulder at Lonely, and for a moment he has a face, but then that face is gone. Lonely cannot remember the features, only the surprising, slow passion of the eyes—passion like every emotion pulsing as one, as if emotion were life, no more and no less. The face shines by her and turns to shadow again, like one of a thousand faces of a world that keeps turning and turning, and for whom one moment is nothing. Yet it is personal, too, that look—as personal as the world can be when it seems to freeze around you in time, bringing your attention swiftly into yourself with a sudden, echoing boom.

  Suddenly Lonely, who never knew her own age, feels that she is so much older than Chelya. She is very, very old.

  The tree is a tree: its limbs the arms of the earth itself, its heart innocent and ever-growing, its tears invisible. Yet the tree is also a man, who bends, from love, out of his given form and embraces Chelya, and as her body is swallowed into his, she, too, becomes like a tree: lush and rooted and evergreen. Lonely sees this. How each becomes the other.

  Introductions are made. Lonely is allowed to hug the tree. She leans into him. Chelya doesn’t mind that he presses Lonely’s heart to his for a moment, but Lonely does. She breathes in his fresh green peace, but his love is so warm that he feels like a man. She can feel the excitement of his youthful growth. She can feel the aching sincerity of his deep ancestry. He reminds her of Sky, only with more hope and more joy. She pulls away.

  “Welcome,” says the tree spirit. “Welcome to my Community.”

  “How big is it?” Lonely asks, looking around.

  “It doesn’t end.”

  Chelya laughs. “He’s young still,” she says. “But he’ll be taller than anyone else one day. It’s a lot of responsibility. That’s why he’s so serious.”

  “I’m not serious,” says the tree, brushing Chelya’s cheek.

  “I have to go,” says Lonely, in a panic, but they don’t seem to hear her. She can see the man’s face again, bearded and wide, his cheeks gentle hills. Broader and more yielding than Rye’s face. Sturdier and more masculine than Kite’s. He smiles and raises his eyebrows.

  “How does he become a man?” Lonely whispers.

  “For me,” says Chelya simply, with no trace of pride, but perhaps a drop or two of sorrow. “For me, he can become that.”

  Lonely nods, remembering the night she said goodbye to Chelya—how fast she turned from Chelya, how she always felt sorry, how she promised herself she wouldn’t resent Chelya again for the love she received and deserved. But maybe her own sorrow will always make her selfish.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to go. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”

  She turns.

  “Lonely!” cries Chelya, as Lonely pushes aimlessly through the trees and away, aware of each one’s potential spirit, wondering if she’s being rough with Chelya’s lover’s friends. But she doesn’t respond to the calls. Who would respond to such a name? Who would turn around and come, to the call of such a word? If she turns and comes back to that name, it will claim her again.

  Nameless, she drowns herself in the sound of her footsteps in the snow. Nameless, she places distance at once intently and thoughtlessly between herself and the lovers. Not that life for her any more. What is left? White silence, still space. Nameless, she finds herself somewhere familiar. Nameless in a place of spirits….

  A coyote ho
wls at the moment she enters, unexpectedly, the fire circle.

  Or maybe it’s a wolf. It sounds far away and she doesn’t know one call from the other. But she hears the moon in that voice. She hears the great sorrow of the predator, who cannot live without killing, who cannot survive without taking something else’s life.

  The emptiness of the fire circle astounds her. She almost doesn’t recognize it. But even pressing against those dancing bodies, even surrounded by heat and sound, she had felt that emptiness. It was that emptiness that had driven her dancing, and her desperate, futile joy.

  Silence, and the beaten ground where the dancers danced is white. There is a chill where the fire once was, and clumps of ash make the snow cover lumpy. The trees lean in. No one is there. Lonely stands opposite the point where she first emerged with Chelya, so many full moons ago. She looks to where she stood. She looks at the hunger she came with then, a hunger she could not fill because she herself did not understand yet what it was.

  It seems impossible that she could be alone here. Why her, among all the lives and spirits who were there that night, and every full moon night in summer? She has no importance, she realizes suddenly. All that gave her importance was this name: Lonely. That’s what made her stand out. That, perhaps, was the name’s only purpose. She shivers, and closes her eyes. The clearing seems to shiver around her. Somehow the heart of the drums still beats, even without the drums, even without the sound. The movement of the dance still moves, even without dancers. She can feel something talking, low and wild, the way rivers talk, beneath the silence. She can feel the touch of spirits who are passing between each other on another layer of reality. Is it actually happening all around her after all, but she can’t feel it, because she came here alone without Chelya’s magic? Or is it just the memory she feels, of a time long forgotten by winter, the way night is forgotten by day?