Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

“Do you need any more hot water?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “But is it getting cold?”

  She hesitates. She wants to ask nothing more—nothing.

  “It’s okay,” says Rye. “I’ll heat one more pot.”

  Lonely is truly starting to shiver a little by the time he returns. He hands her the pot through the curtain, and she doesn’t see his face. She pours the water in, hands back the pot. She doesn’t hear any footsteps.

  “Lonely?”

  She doesn’t answer. She traces random pathways on her body with her fingertips, in and out of the water, feeling the way the line between water and air slips over her skin like a kiss. She doesn’t remember, any more, the exact pattern his hands traveled that day. She doesn’t remember the look in his eyes. She can only remember Sky now.

  “I wanted to tell you something.” She hears a deep breath. Where is Fawn? Upstairs, maybe. Already in bed. The house is very quiet, and she realizes he is the only one left awake besides her. His voice is so sad now, it seems, all the time. Since she came, she has not heard laughter. Not once. Suddenly she is amazed by his endurance.

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry for what happened that day, a long time ago, out in the field. For when I kissed you. It was wrong of me.”

  “It’s okay,” says Lonely, surprise making her breathless.

  “I was just starting to enjoy talking to you. I wish we had kept talking. I think I needed a friend, more than I needed—more than I needed anything else. I wish I had realized that then.”

  “I’m still your friend,” she says, and feels tears balancing on the lower edges of her eyelids, like dancers.

  “I know.”

  “And I didn’t leave because of that,” she says. Even though, in a way, she did. “I just had to. I had somewhere to go.”

  “I know,” says Rye. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  Lonely closes her eyes. “I don’t know.” She feels too tired to say more.

  But after a moment of silence, Rye answers, “I know. It’s so hard to make sense of things sometimes, isn’t it?” And she feels that he understands exactly, without her having to explain. For maybe his sorrow, though it is different, knows the language of hers.

  “You know how sometimes,” she says impulsively, “you call out to—I don’t know to whom—but you cry out, as if to the universe, begging for what you long for, asking why you can’t have it? Do you ever do that, Rye? Do you ever cry out and cry out, and not get an answer?”

  She feels his slow thinking on the other side of the curtain. She feels him weighing the question, turning it over, wanting to be sure, wanting to say his words right.

  “A long time ago,” he says finally, “I stopped praying to any god. I stopped praying to whoever and whatever I could feel around me, as if I could ask anything of everything, as if I could carelessly throw my wishes out into the world and expect them to be answered. I’m not saying it’s wrong to do that. But it just made me lonely.”

  “So what do you do? You accept whatever comes? You don’t wonder?”

  “No. I do. But I think now I only believe in praying to other people—and to other lives that I’m connected to. I pray to the crops to rise and thrive every year, and I pray to the clouds to rain when we need rain, and I thank the earth for what it gives us, and I thank our food. Sometimes, now, I pray to my son, or to the spirit of my son, to stay safe and come back to us when he’s ready. I pray to my wife, and to both our spirits, to understand each other better. I pray to the love that moves between us. I imagine it like a river that carries my prayers back and forth. I don’t pray to any god, or anything else. I pray directly to the person I’m praying about. Because I think our souls can speak to each other, and I think we’re in charge of our own lives. When we pray like that, we give as well as take.”

  Lonely is silent, because she knows she doesn’t need to say anything back, and there is nothing to say. When she hears Rye finally rise, she says quietly,

  “Thank you.”

  She hears him pause, then walk away. And she thinks, In that summer long ago, I did not yet know what intimacy was. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with touch. It just has to do with where you sit inside yourself, and where you listen from, and whether or not your heart is open to the prayers of another.

  The boy turns his head fitfully while Dragon tries to hold it still, dripping water into his mouth and over his body. But he does not murmur; he does not cry out. His skin is lighter than Dragon’s, but dark enough to accept the sun’s fire without burning too badly. It’s only lack of water that brought him down.

  The boy is younger and smaller than any other person Dragon has known, and has a backpack like Delilah’s, with an empty bottle tied to it with rope. Dragon looks through the pack while the boy sleeps. He finds dried meat wrapped in leather, objects he doesn’t recognize but with strong smells that tell him they must also be food, a shirt, a coat, a coiled rope, a knife. Dragon saw the same things lying by Delilah’s pack when she planned to leave. Perhaps they are the objects humans always carry with them: something to put inside themselves, something to cover the outside of themselves, something with which to tie things together, and something with which to tear things apart. But there is something else here that he has never seen before. Something square that opens like a flower—hundreds of thin white petals on the inside, detailed elaborately with black designs like the footprints of spiders. After Dragon goes out to the river to fill the boy’s bottle for him, he stares at this thing for a long time, holding it in his lap and fanning through the petals. The detail of the marks, the thinness of each white sheet, amazes him. He feels the sacredness of it, the effort of it, the reticent meaning of it, like a dream he doesn’t understand.

  “Can you read?” says the boy, his voice a little cracked. Dragon looks up, startled, but then he puts the thing down carefully and goes to the boy. He doesn’t bother with the question, which he doesn’t understand. He smiles. He likes the lack of fear in the boy’s eyes, and the willing presence there. He was afraid the boy might speak some other language or want to fight. Not that he would be difficult to fight, but Dragon would rather not hurt him.

  “Where are we?” asks the boy now.

  This also seems a difficult question, so Dragon says simply, “I’m Dragon.”

  “I’m Malachite,” says the boy. “Or Kite.” He turns his head, and pulls himself up weakly to sitting. Dragon hands him the bottle and the boy drinks all the water.

  “We’ll have to go out if you want more water,” Dragon explains. He’s a little dazed by the way the idea of water has suddenly changed, from something mysterious and holy and containing the secret of his beloved, to something easy and immediate for the boy—something a human being can and must take in constantly, an everyday encounter. He struggles with his envy. He doesn’t want to hate this boy. He senses he was given the task of caring for him for a reason.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” the boy says seriously, and Dragon nods back as seriously. He likes the boy’s simplicity of speaking and his honor for what’s important.

  “Where are we?” comes the question again.

  “This is where I live,” says Dragon.

  “Where?” The boy struggles forward, but he’s still a little weak for standing. “It’s some cave. Are we under the desert?”

  “Yes,” says Dragon proudly. “Once there was water all around, boiling with the fire of the dragons.”

  The boy looks at him sharply, studies him. Dragon meets his stare. “Who are you? You live here?”

  “I’m a god,” states Dragon proudly. “A fire god.”

  The boy shakes his shaggy head, then continues to gaze around. Dragon can see him figuring, waiting for his own mind to clear.

  “My mother is afraid of fire gods,” he murmurs, as if to himself.

  D
ragon nods. His mother was afraid of them, too.

  “What happened to you?” asks Dragon.

  Malachite shakes his head again. “I don’t know what happened. I had a good map. I got it from a book, and my dad made some corrections in it from what he knew by traveling when he was younger, so I thought it was pretty up to date. I brought it so that I would know where the water sources were, in the desert. But things must have changed. My grandmother has said that before. That the City has changed the sky, so the rains fall differently, and the ‘river goddess’ is missing, and the rivers are confused. But I didn’t totally believe in all that. I didn’t think it would make that much of a difference.”

  “It’s hard to predict the water, where it goes,” says Dragon sadly.

  “So what is it that you can do with fire?”

  “I can make it. You know, without—without anything. From nothing.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “Uh—it has to be at the right time. When I feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  Dragon shifts awkwardly. “The fire.”

  “You can’t always do it?”

  “I don’t know.” Dragon is surprised by this thought. It has never occurred to him to try to create the fire when he didn’t already feel it. Usually, he is so concerned with trying to hold it back or calm it. He never thought of it as something someone might need and ask him to call up on purpose. But then, isn’t that what the goddesses were always telling him? Wasn’t that the purpose of the meditation after all—to turn that energy into some kind of power? But for what?

  Dragon looks back at the boy. He likes him even more. There is no hiding in him, no teasing, no laughter unexplained. He feels that they understand each other.

  “Where were you going?”

  “To the City,” says Malachite.

  “Why?”

  “Because they have Knowledge there. They know how to harness the energy of the elements. And because I want to know what it really is. Not anyone else’s ideas about it. People all have different ideas and emotions about things, and they get muddled. I want to know the truth.”

  Dragon nods again. It fascinates him more than he can say—what the boy is saying. He wants to grab onto those words and the light in them, but he doesn’t know even what questions to ask. Truth. He works the word around in his mouth, wanting to say it aloud.

  “I’m still thirsty,” says the boy.

  “Come.” Dragon stands and offers his hand, feeling strong and proud. “We’ll go back out. I’ll take you to the river.”

  Dragon helps the boy to stand. Leaning with his thin arm across Dragon’s shoulders, he walks with Dragon up a winding dirt path, as pale and dusty as if there had never been water anywhere. Dragon helps him climb over the stones and into the sun.

  Dragon looks at him. Malachite stares straight ahead without seeming to see for a moment. “It was weird in there,” he states finally. “I couldn’t think clearly.”

  They walk together in silence—the boy thinking, Dragon wondering. The river is lower again since the last rain, its shallowness making it sound youthful as it twists through the sunlight. Malachite kneels, fills the bottle, drinks, and fills the bottle again.

  “What do you mean,” asks Dragon, “about ‘energy’?”

  Malachite stands. “Energy can be made from any element,” he says. “From water, from this river. Or from the air, the wind. Or from fire, the sun. My family knows how to draw energy from the earth. We have always known that. But there are other kinds of energy besides the kind that keeps you alive, the kind that keeps your body moving. People can make magic with those other elements. They can make lights. They can make hot and cold—they can make all kinds of things happen!”

  “But what if there are too many things?” asks Dragon.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Someone from the City once told me there are too many things there.” He doesn’t know what Delilah meant, but he knows it made her sad. Thinking of her now makes him miss her. He misses those first words she spoke to him—and her vulnerability then. All of her hesitation, he realizes suddenly, was out of fear for herself, her own heart. It was never because she didn’t like him. In fact she was the only one who seemed to understand and accept him right from the beginning, without ever questioning, without ever being afraid of him.

  Malachite is nodding. “My grandmother says that too,” he says, after a moment’s careful thought. “I don’t understand how the making of things can get out of the control of the people who are making them. That doesn’t make sense, does it? But that’s what I want to find out. I want to find out the truth.”

  “I would like to go with you,” says Dragon, deepening his voice, trying to bring forth the gravity that he feels. “I want to find out the Truth, too. I want to go where knowledge is. There are things I need to know.”

  Malachite looks at him with that same studious, unabashed gaze. Dragon’s heart is racing. Everything is different now. The constellation of his world has shifted. The patterns—the familiar thoughts, the familiar longings, the connections that bind him—have all shifted. There is nothing left for him here. The boy’s face is gentle, but with a hard sure profile, like a clear line of manhood running down the center. “Are you ready right now?” he says.

  Moon, where are you when I need you?

  When Delilah first came across the desert from the City, she didn’t follow the river and she didn’t follow a road. She followed Moon. And she’s not going back the way she came now, because she’s not going back to the City. She planned to follow the river however it goes, figuring it was the most direct route to the sea. She brought her two empty water jugs, tied to her backpack, mostly so she wouldn’t leave any trace of herself behind. She didn’t think she would actually need them, as long as she stayed by the river.

  But tonight, the river disappears.

  It’s about midnight when she comes to the place where it dives into a mouth of white, blocky stones, and the desert continues on above it, pale and graceful and almost completely barren. When she looks ahead, she sees no sign of the river all the way to the horizon. Maybe it’s because she’s so hungry right now, having not eaten since the morning, but standing at the edge of the end of water, she finds herself screaming into its passionate sound.

  “No! You don’t get to fucking leave me! No!” She sits down and flings her backpack at the ground, bending her head and pulling at her own hair because she knows she’s being ridiculous, that Yora has nothing to do with her, that the river has nothing to do with her, and that she’s let herself be tricked again into depending on the love of someone who cannot be depended upon. Yora doesn’t love her. Yora is a spirit, a goddess, belonging to another world completely alien to Delilah’s need.

  Of course it would come to this, eventually.

  She sits there for a long time, her mind spinning into its own despair, until her stomach begins to tug irritably again at the strings of her thoughts. Out of habit as much as necessity, she gathers her mind to find a rational solution, at least to the problem of food. As the river has gotten faster, she’s found fewer and fewer fish. Two days ago she broke her own rule about hunting in the desert and killed a jack rabbit. Tonight, it appears, she’ll do it again.

  She’s luckier tonight and finds three roadrunner eggs in a hollow in the sand. No dreams guide her: she simply knows where to look, and frightens the bird off her nest. She feels sorry, though. It takes so much energy to create life, she can hardly imagine. The roadrunner will return to the nest, find everything gone, and have to start again. Animals do this over and over.

  Delilah swallows the eggs raw and returns to the river’s end. For a moment she feels she will be sick again, but she concentrates hard on keeping the food down. I’m not going to waste all the effort and grief of that poor bird by hacking it back up on the ground again, she thinks furi
ously.

  She fills her two water jugs and sits down again to think. It’s almost dawn now, and she’s exhausted, but she can’t sleep until she figures something out. She has to get across this desert. This is the only thing left of any importance in her life. Just to get to Mira.

  It never occurred to her, coming into the desert with Moon in her heady escape, in her relief, in her driven determination, that she would one day be equally desperate to get back out. Or that the desert—her home, her salvation, the place that finally accepted her—might one day become her prison.

  She rests her chin on her knees and listens to the river, stronger now after another rain. She misses her little cave so much. She misses the fox and the bats, the snakes and the owls; she misses the shadows of the pines waving over her head; she misses her dark sanctuary and the power of knowing how to keep herself alive forever, without needing anyone. She misses the only place she ever honestly called home. And she feels this so much now, vividly, all the time: homesickness.

  Water is love, Dragon said once. She remembers those words suddenly. She listens to the water disappearing into the stone, disappearing over and over, drop after drop, like a scene of loss re-enacted eternally before her.

  The journey beneath the mountain seemed to continue for days.

  The earth lay cold both below and above; there was no sky, no light but the Unicorn. Sky held onto that light in the pitch blackness, curling his wings over her back like arms, holding on with all the strength of his life. He felt so sick inside, he could not think. He could tell that the Unicorn was not afraid at all, that her light could never go out, that she knew exactly where she was going. He concentrated all his mind on her, so that he wouldn’t give in to that fear—because the fear would make him fly, and if he flew he would be lost in the directionless blackness of the mountain’s insides, forever.

  Neither of them spoke. But he trusted her sure, delicate footsteps. He recognized and trusted her heart. Some things were very simple, and had always been known to him.