Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  He wanted so much to belong, she finds herself thinking again. She understands it now, not with compassion but with a kind of sinking horror: that loneliness which was his, and which has ruled her whole life. That willingness to do anything—anything—just to feel connected to any people, or even to any one person, in this world.

  When Fawn finally takes Lonely’s hands gently in her own and pulls them away from her body, Lonely doesn’t resist, because those hands keep holding, and because she can feel that Fawn is crying.

  “I am empty, Lonely,” she whispers. Words made of nothing but breath. “Without my son, I am empty. Empty.”

  Lonely is silent, weak with exhaustion and emotion, listening helplessly with face still pressed against Fawn’s back.

  “All my life, the City has been coming. Haunting me, like it’s coming to take me back, coming to destroy the happiness we made. It has taken Willow’s old home. It has changed the seasons little by little, twisting the weather so that our crops fail and we fear one day to starve. Now it has taken my son. It is all I can do to hold on, Lonely. I have no place in my life for—that kind of passion. It only makes me afraid. Do you understand? It only makes things seem more—unstable.”

  Lonely tries to think of an argument. She wants to say something back. How can she argue with a feeling? But the horse keeps moving, moving, between her thighs, and she thinks, But how can you stop it?

  “I keep accusing Rye,” Fawn says. “I keep accusing Rye of wanting to go to the City, wanting to go there to look for Malachite. I keep saying that’s what he secretly longs for, an excuse to go there. He’s always longed for that. That’s why Malachite learned to long for it, too. I know that. But maybe it’s I who long for it, too, Lonely. When you’ve been afraid of something for so long, run from it for so long, sometimes finally you want to turn and face it—fall into it and let it take you! I mean, so you won’t have to be afraid any more. Sometimes I think that deep down, I just want to find out what it really is, now that I’m grown up. Because the truth is, I can hardly remember.”

  Lonely didn’t expect this. She expected talking about Malachite. She didn’t expect Fawn to speak about the City. Yet the City is always present, it seems. Everywhere. As if it’s already taken over the world.

  “What do you remember?” she whispers into Fawn’s hair. It’s a question she asked Fawn long ago, when they lay in the loft together, but that first time she received no answer.

  “Faces,” says Fawn after a moment of silence, “appearing for a moment in the light, and then dark. Light and then dark, light and then dark. There was a train that ran under the earth: this roaring no-place, an underworld with no color, no voices, only this roaring in my ears and the faces—hundreds of faces I didn’t know, appearing suddenly out of the darkness in bright light, and then blackness again. I thought they were the faces of ancestors appearing to us from death, but my mother said no, they were only other people, like us, trapped in this place that was forever moving but never going anywhere.

  “But we were going somewhere. That was the day we left. It seems like all I can remember now is that leaving. That long train through the earth, and then another, and then we were walking through fences and broken fields, and always I felt that my father was coming—always coming behind us—and I was so afraid of what would happen if he caught up to us, if he found us. But I can’t remember why.

  “I remember hunger, storms, and the cold. I remember this feeling of freedom, too. I remember I found—I don’t know, something greater than myself, something almost safe, inside those first storms. I can’t remember what it was now. I can’t remember.”

  Silence. The yearning in Lonely’s body never reached its peak, only turned to pain. She aches now all over; she aches against Fawn. Fawn says, “But I knew that my mother was leaving the City for my sake. I knew that she would do anything for me. I knew she gave up everything for me—her life, her friends, her love—and that nothing was stronger than the bond between us. Nothing is stronger than the bond between a mother and her child, Lonely. Nothing.”

  Now both of them are crying, each for her own reasons, but the reasons are the same.

  When they arrive home, it isn’t with the joy of having witnessed a new healthy birth into the world, Fawn’s own niece. Fawn runs—Lonely has never before seen her running—into Eva’s arms.

  It’s a strange, confused moment. No one says anything at first; no one asks about Willow or the child. The others are standing there, their lips slack and soft, and then Fawn gathers Chelya against her too. Only after many moments have passed does she turn to Rye. And then finally, very briefly, to Lonely.

  Lonely….

  The Unicorn carries the crow so deep, between buildings so tall, it is as if they walk inside the buildings, though they never pass through a door. Nothing grows here. The only things alive are people, insects, pigeons, and rats. The people swarm loud and hungry. The insects are quieter, but more successful in their pursuits. The pigeons stalk thoughtlessly along rooftops, everywhere and loved by no one; they have turned grey like the concrete, their grace lost in numbers and trash. The rats hold meetings and wage wars beneath the streets (the Unicorn can feel them whispering, even shouting), and they live like people—a greedy mockery of people—and the people hate the rats, because the rats are happier.

  The Unicorn carries the crow through strange, cold shapes, their surfaces—whether flesh or metal, concrete or glass—all alien and colorless like the surface of the moon. Every touch makes noise against this hardness. Nothing can be done silently. They walk and walk, and the noise never stops, and they never see the stars.

  The Unicorn carries the crow past the backs of buildings, where nothing grows either, and people are dying—sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, sometimes violently and sometimes imperceptibly. In these places, the stubbled asphalt shingles seem to whimper in their own ugliness, because though they can crumble and weather and fade and mold, they can never become anything else. These walls can never truly decay, or be reborn into anything better, because they were never alive to begin with.

  The Unicorn carries the crow through the few vacant spaces left between the City spaces—spaces not yet developed—where some things grow, but not the community of things that once was. The row of shrubs they pass through cannot be called a forest. Even the few trees standing, though the Unicorn bows and acknowledges them in passing, are disoriented and sickly, and the dialects once spoken in working ecosystems have all been lost. These spaces have been chopped too small, and separated by too wide a span of noise and car and street, to survive intact. Only certain animals, the hardiest and meanest, can live here. The Unicorn carries the crow through rectangular meadows, over which birds fly calling, searching for the shapes they remember. She carries him through fields made of only one grass or grown over with plants who long ago lost their place in the greater community, who now plunge along raging, unchecked, not knowing the rules—as confused and frightened by their own power as the people buying endlessly more Things in the giant indoor planet of the shopping mall.

  The Unicorn carries the crow through the outlying edges of the City, where voices die away and trash twirls ominously across empty lots, and the only buildings remaining are dark inside and half-fallen. It is some old part of the City, vacated for some human or natural disaster, that was never recovered. It has a difficult, sour smell. Then finally the lots peel away into stubbly brown fields overgrown with thorns, and the Unicorn pushes through them, threads of blood appearing on her white hide. Then they pass from thorns into thickets, and from thickets into trees, and they walk through the trees for days, but the trees are young and thin, with broken branches dangling. Wide, mossy stumps are all that remain of the older trees, and the sky now is scrambled with the impatient, thoughtless overgrowth of those kinds of trees that grow straight and easy after human disturbance. A few birds make feeble, echoing cries, but they are only the
most basic calls they must use to locate each other; they never sing.

  As the Unicorn and the crow come closer to the center of the world, there are barbed fences and signs. A Unicorn can read any language, but Sky cannot, so the Unicorn reads the signs to him:

  Nature Preserve

  Do Not Enter.

  This is the last remaining example of undisturbed Nature.

  Sky doesn’t understand what is meant by “nature,” but the words make his stomach sink, because “preserved” is exactly what he has been wishing for, in the depths of his heart. And the moment he hears the word, he knows it isn’t possible. Nothing alive is ever preserved or stays the same. Either they’re lying, or what’s inside must be dead.

  While he’s still puzzling over the word “nature,” the Unicorn walks right through the fences, as if they are made of smoke.

  Eva’s room inside the hillside has no stove, so in the wintertime she cannot live there. But in the winter, to respect her need for solitude and space—because she is their only elder, and because she is a Dreamer, a woman of medicine—the family leaves her alone in the warm loft all day, where Rye carries up to her as many books as she needs to last her through those cold, dark, indoor months. At night she sleeps alone downstairs by the fire, except for this year, when Lonely sleeps near her.

  Normally, she is still busy working with the dreams from last night by the time Fawn brings her morning tea. Dreaming during the night is hard work, and working through those dreams in waking life is even harder. Her grandchildren imagine her, perhaps, peacefully sitting over a stream of incense smoke or a bowl of water, divining in her mind as if dreams were spider silk to be woven with misty thoughts and then gazed upon in stillness as the light shifts over them. It is true she doesn’t often have the kind of nightmares—those sweaty, confused, repeating dreams—that younger people have, who have not yet come to recognize their dreams. But dreaming is still work, and it’s still a process of the body. It is work to enter back into the dreams with her waking mind, facing and uncovering the masks of the characters, changing them if need be. It is work to become those characters in her body, moving with the shapes of the dreams—both her own and the ones her family members tell her—so that she can feel in their dance what they are saying, what they want. It is work to dream out the suffering and yearning of the greater world, to feel all that inside sometimes, in her aging human limbs. It is work to go out into the fields and the trees, summer and winter, and focus her dreams into the shapes of leaves and wind, in order to translate those seemingly random patterns into meaning.

  Often by the afternoon she is exhausted, so she spends the hours until dinner soothing her body in the rhythm of her rocking chair, soothing her mind by skillfully turning it off. Once, when he was six or seven, Malachite caught her in the midst of this, and his eyes widened as he backed away—for surely he thought that was what dreaming looked like, that blank stare. But that was only Eva thinking nothing; that was Eva resting, so that by dinner she could emerge into the world again for that brief lovely evening-time, absorbing the innocent laughter and longing and love of her real-world, earth-flesh children and grandchildren, before it was time to return to the night and dream again.

  It’s solitary work, but Eva doesn’t get lonely. She dedicated herself to this long ago, when her daughter and her daughter’s husband finally began to take over the even harder work of living, and whatever spirits she had spoken to when she prayed to that distant mountain finally answered her prayers and initiated her into Dreaming after all. Those dream spirits, whether they be the “Dream People” or some others whose name she does not know, have kept her company now for a long time. They are there for her when the answers are too difficult, dowsing the flame of her mind in their deep pool that is at once the top and the very bottom of the world, bringing her back to stillness and reminding her that everything is sacred. Even when Eva was a little girl, something in her knew she was destined for this. She was an earth child, but she had stars inside of her.

  So she doesn’t need her family to know what Dreaming entails. She doesn’t need them to know how she spends her time up in the loft, or under the hillside, or how hard the work is, or how unwise she sometimes still feels. She doesn’t need them to know that sometimes, in the last few years, when they think she is up here Dreaming, she is actually rocking fitfully with the ache in her bones—an ache that comes from too many dreams of too many people suffering, that will never go away.

  Neither does she need them to know that more and more, when they think she’s up here Dreaming, she is actually lost—for the first time in so many, many years—in memory. That for some reason the memories flood back now, haunting her. Not the memories of her husband beating her, which she long ago overcame, or the memories of the City itself beating her—with all its harsh sounds and hard surfaces and callous faces, every day, even worse than her husband. She got over all that long ago, and knows better than to dwell on her own suffering, lest it become a choice she makes again and again, without meaning to. No, she chooses this life now: this earth, this family, this love. And yet the memories come back now of the other things she tried even harder to forget. Things Fawn never knew about. Memories even older, even more deeply denied than the faces of her two sons, the way they turned away from her, the way they toughened in imitation of their father, the way they learned to mock her as he did.

  No, the memories that come now are worse, because they are memories of pleasure. She doesn’t ever need her family to know the kind of magic the City held. The way she and her girlfriends could turn themselves into goddesses with clothing that shone and dazzled and squeezed up the most voluptuous parts of their bodies into fists of overflowing passion—and with glitter around their eyes and flower color on their lips. The way a car filled up with music could become the whole world, and the way laughter could bind you to your friends like the most precious secret, make your hips spin, make your lips so confident, make you bigger than the world. The way it felt to grope in that rhythmic, make-believe darkness, letting someone whose face you could never see slide his leg between your own and pulse there, like a god.

  She doesn’t need Fawn to know that she gave up everyone she loved for her, so that she and Fawn could have a life together, a better life, a life where they valued what was important and returned to the cycle of the seasons, a cycle they could always trust even when the supposedly sorrow-proof world Hanum created collapsed. She doesn’t need Fawn to know what it was like to leave her friends behind, leave her sons behind, leave them to the fiery thrill of that too-fast, too-hot life that would one day burn them out, that would one day betray them. She doesn’t need Fawn to know what it was like to give up touch forever, never again to feel the wonder and relief of another life pumping inside her, never again to feel the slick weeping of her skin when rough fingers softened against her thigh. She doesn’t need Fawn to know how for years she cried not only for the loss of her sons and their trusting arms, which she’d lost long before she left the City, but also for the loss of dancing in a dizzy crowd, for the loss of eager, thoughtless kisses, for the loss of a friend’s lipstick grin in the mirror beside her own. How in the middle of a thunder storm she would remember a lover’s breath. How alone in the most beautiful grove of aspen trees on a full moon, she would wish for cigarette smoke and the feel of thong underwear cutting between her legs, merely for the sake of seeing other human faces leaning out to her from the darkness and recognizing her as one of that reckless tribe of youth.

  But Fawn does know. She knows what her mother gave up for her. She knows the way all daughters know the rules their mothers make for living, not in their minds but in the very rhythms of their bodies. The things unspoken. The things assumed. The losses that are never mentioned, the truths that are not questioned, the innate, ingrained, physical understanding of what sacrifices have become necessary in this life in order for a woman to survive. Fawn knows. And Eva knows that she kn
ows.

  But there are things Fawn does not know. And that is why, on the day after Fawn returns from the birth of Willow’s daughter, Eva does not dream but goes to find her.

  The maple trees have always been closest to Fawn. Their sweetness—their deep, strong, quiet woman magic—knows her. They are happy to tell Eva where Fawn is. She is sitting up high, in the branches of that old oak tree, on the top of that hill.

  Eva lifts her skirts and breathes hard, one step at a time, carefully up the icy slope. When she gets to the top, she stands at the base of the tree. “Fawn,” she calls gently but firmly, in the manner of an elder who is accustomed to being obeyed. “Come down. I need to speak to you.”

  But Fawn doesn’t budge. She has always been stubborn, but it’s rare that she won’t listen to her mother, won’t even look toward the sound of her voice. She looks nervous up there, clinging with all her limbs to the branches, and she isn’t very high. It isn’t like Fawn to climb trees. But she won’t come down.

  “Daughter,” says Eva. “What are you doing?” The winter air is very still, and Fawn isn’t far enough up for Eva to need to raise her voice. She waits for Fawn to answer. If Eva stands here long enough, she will answer. Eva is just as stubborn as she is, and Fawn knows that.

  “This is where Kite used to sit,” Fawn says finally, in a voice so small it seems strange to Eva. No, it’s not the smallness of her voice; it’s the fact that she called him “Kite.” Now Fawn says it again, even more softly, as if to herself. “Kite.”