Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  But this dead center is what humans lost, when they threw their trash in the sea and forgot their past. Because for them age is only loss, memory only refuse, and the past only waste—because, for them, nothing lasts, and history has no value—they cut right through the center of this tree, its heart.

  So Lonely falls.

  The earth begins to embrace her, but she cannot return to it. They are chaining her; they are dragging her away. Her body kills as it passes.

  She knew so much in her life as a tree. But now she knows nothing. Now the different parts of her body are ground and mixed into pulp. Now she is pounded and bleached. Now she is paper. Now she is stamped with the faces and symbols of a dead ruler named Hanum, and his princess daughter, and now she becomes the instrument through which their empty memory rules.

  Now she is money.

  And through all those lifetimes in which Lonely changed form, she thought it was enough to shape-shift, not knowing what she would become. She thought it was enough to surrender, because whatever change happened, it always brought her back again to her love. When carried by nature, because nature is love, surrender makes sense. But the shape-shifting of men has other motives. She will not find Sky again in these hands, these pockets, these hurried streets. Love is not the purpose here.

  Now she enters cold, closing hands, in a pile of other bills that look just like her. Now she folds into darkness, and soaks in the nervous sweat of a forgotten hip. Now she unfolds into the hands of another.

  Now she lies under a mattress for a year, as it shakes and groans over her, not feeling the emotions and dreams that bend it. Now hands fight around her; now she whirls into dead air and falls, and is caught again. She is never let go, never free. She is always held, or placed between surfaces that hold her. Now she is piled in metal. Now she is balled up in a fist. Now she is torn and smoothed and kissed and thrust angrily; now she is sat on and torn and stained with blood, saliva, and sweat again.

  But nothing transforms her. She does not remember herself. She does not provide nourishment, or give anything, or ever become anything else.

  Something is changing in the City, in the world. The people can feel it. So many people are whispering about Hanum’s death that the whispers have gotten too loud to be called whispers. They are like voices that the City hears inside its head, voices it strains to ignore for fear of being diagnosed with madness. People forget their work and stare out their office windows, fearful and distracted.

  Money changes hands faster and faster, and people die for it, but Lonely never knows.

  Unwillingly, Delilah stays at the temple for days, once again too sick to continue on. The old warrior cares for her, brings her food, and wraps her in blankets when she is too weak to rise. His silence and his respectful distance are a relief to her, and she is grateful. But it makes her uneasy the way he looks at her sometimes when she’s sickest, like he knows something she doesn’t—something she ought to know. She wonders if he cared for her mother this way, when she was dying. Then she realizes she can’t imagine anyone taking care of her mother. That wasn’t her mother’s role, to be taken care of by someone else.

  The other people who sleep here call the old man “Chief,” though he doesn’t act like chief of anything, and rarely talks to anyone. “He seems harmless,” a woman tells Delilah once, “but he’s killed men before. He used to fight for the rulers when they took over this land, but now he protects us. And he’s got a sixth sense. He knows when they’re coming for us.”

  Any day now, the people say, the temple is going to be overtaken. The City is going to turn it into a museum, and the people will have to find another place to sleep. But no one comes. Something strange is happening in the City. Plans are on hold. Order is gradually, with clumsy secrecy, falling apart.

  Across the street from the temple is a gas station. This is where humans feed their cars instead of their bodies. One day the people gather to watch an argument happening between two men at the pump, soon joined by another man, and then a woman, and then a crowd. Everyone is yelling, so that it is difficult to understand at first what the problem is. Some of these people at the gas station have wads of money in their hands, and are thrusting them toward one man, the one who works there. They are thrusting their money angrily, like a weapon, trying to get him to take it—but he won’t take it, which is a very strange sight to see.

  The old warrior chuckles to himself. Delilah turns to him, unnerved. She’s never heard him laugh before.

  “What?” she says. “What’s going on?”

  “They’ve run out of fuel,” he says.

  “Well obviously,” she says, irritable and nauseous and in no mood for enigma. “That’s why they’re at a gas station.”

  “No,” says Chief. “I mean everyone. The City has run out of fuel. There is no fuel left. Now all of the cars—” He begins to chuckle harder, and Delilah can’t help but smile a little. His face changes, and his whole body shakes with his now silent laughter. “All the cars,” he cries, “will just stop!”

  Delilah shakes her head. “But how could they not know?” she says, staring at the angry crowd. “How could they not see this coming? Who do they think they’re angry at?”

  “This is the first lie that will come undone now,” the old man says sternly, all trace of humor leaving his face as suddenly as it came. He says no more.

  And though what he said, in some way, gives her a sense of thrilling, disbelieving satisfaction, it also makes Delilah uneasy. She understands the panic of the people at the gas station. She understands the eerie silence beneath their screaming, as they realize. It is what she always feared too, in the City, and what the City makes everyone fear, and why she never wanted to come back here: that feeling of being stuck, like she was stuck for eighteen years, and like she’s stuck now. These people, now, will have to sit with that feeling, and they will have to sit alone with themselves in the isolation boxes of their cars, in the middle of the maze, and realize that there has never been anywhere to go. They will have to realize that the eternal life and happiness that Hanum promised will never come—and that with all this getting they are not getting anywhere. They are still right here, where each street looks like the next, and each one leads right back to where they started. They have no past and no future, but only grief, anger, and deadly fear.

  A couple of cars speed past now. They don’t know yet. Delilah tries to imagine the stations posting their “Closed” signs one by one, and all the cars coming to a stop, right where they are. At intersections, on highways, at the exits of parking lots, on neighborhood streets two blocks from home, the lights will turn green, but no one will go. Everything will simply stop.

  It won’t happen instantaneously, but it will feel like that. Even once they know there is no fuel left to be bought, people will keep driving anyway, because they won’t remember how not to. It is, after all, a funny image, Delilah thinks later, that the old man must have had in his mind. Maybe when their cars stop, these people will keep staring out their windshields in shock. Maybe they will honk their horns, as if it’s the cars ahead of them that are to blame.

  Then they will step out of their cars and look down at their legs, and then they will look at the people around them who have stepped out, too, and wonder where they came from.

  Sky knows the world is about to radically change, because suddenly everyone is having the same nightmare, though of course they don’t know it.

  Everyone is dreaming that they are going down into the basements of their homes, even if their homes don’t have basements. In the back corner of those basements full of junk—all the stuff they thought they threw away over the course of their lives, but which has remained right here beneath their feet all along—they find an animal in a cage. For some people it’s a cat, and for some it’s a dog. For some it is a bird, a mouse, a horse, an opossum, a rabbit, a wolf, or a raccoon. Everyone has their own animal.
And this animal, living in the filth down there, is starving and on the verge of death. They have forgotten to feed it. In fact, they have forgotten they ever owned it. They have forgotten that when they were children, they captured it because it was so beautiful and wild and mysterious that all the delight of their souls desired it.

  In their dreams they feel horror, because they realize that if they weren’t going to care for it, they could have set it free long ago to fend for itself in its natural way. But they kept it in this cage, dependent on them, and now it is dying. In their dreams they are panicking, because they don’t know what to feed it, and they are searching their houses, flinging open cupboards as it cries and cries now from down below, not knowing what it eats. Now it is eating its own body. It is eating all the things in the basement, and it is eating the house, and it is eating their children.

  People are waking up from these dreams, their bodies exuding water from their eyes and from every pore, and trying to remember why.

  This isn’t a dream Sky is part of. Sky doesn’t enter dreams any more. He no longer has that responsibility. But he knows about it anyway.

  He sits on a cloud, with a white bird perched on his shoulder. I’ve come to tell you that we’re not really gone, the bird told him when it came.

  “How long will you stay with me?” Sky asked desperately.

  Until you no longer need me.

  But the bird has not spoken since, and it does not comfort him as once his elders did. Sky sits on the cloud, unable to move, watching Lonely play out a karma that has nothing to do with her—a cycle of greed and suffering that began long before she was born. As a thing, she has no choices. Even when he and Lonely were alive, he thinks, they were still like things, tossed about by an ancient destiny that they did not design, torn apart by forces beyond their control and yet blaming each other for their pain.

  “Unicorn,” he says into the nothingness, laying his human face in his hands, “I am a coward.”

  The Unicorn is not there and the white bird says nothing, but beneath him, he feels the cloud move. He’s not sure of it at first, because it seems impossible. The cloud seems to roll, pressing up against him ever so subtlely, as if there’s a body in there. But he waves his hands through the mist below him, and there is no body.

  He rises up on his knees, wary. His muscles twitch restlessly, and his feet tingle. Loneliness lies over his skin like a thin cover of new snow.

  The cloud begins to curl around him. Tentacles of mist nuzzle his thighs and creep up the back of his spine. In one move he leaps to standing, spreading his hands as if to fight something unseen. For a hundred years he has ridden the drift of clouds, walked and lain upon them and even, for those few precious moons, wrapped his beloved in them, without ever feeling them to be alive. Without ever thinking about them. Now he feels the kiss of the cloud’s cold water rising to meet him, rising up around him, enfolding him in fog. He feels the weight of it, the weight of rain unfallen—like the weight of his own sorrow, which he thought unbearable, and yet here the empty sky alone seems to carry it. Without meaning to, he closes his eyes, and the cloud strokes his arms, his legs—

  The cloud, like the physical body of a dream—passion of water mixed with holiness of air—feels familiar somehow and unmistakably masculine.

  “Who are you?” he whispers.

  “I’m the rain,” says Moon, caressing his ear with a tongue of dust and vapors.

  “Show yourself, Rain.”

  “I can’t,” says Moon.

  Sky doesn’t ask why. “We have to,” he whispers, his breath caught inside some furry place in his throat. “We have to become ourselves. We can’t be afraid any longer. It’s not right that we should hold back our love from the ones who need it.”

  When the cloud doesn’t answer, Sky begins to shake. His eyes feel hot. The cloud holds him, supporting his emptiness—that empty husk of a life, so far up in the distant sky, so lost from anything of this world. Sky Sky Sky…. “It’s not right,” he says again, though he can barely understand his own words. “I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel my own heart. I can’t feel it.” Shaking so hard now, his words breathless, as if someone is fighting him.

  “But you’re crying,” says Moon.

  And Sky, still crying and not knowing that he is crying, feeling nothing, says, “Please. Enter me.” Because he can feel that the cloud wants this, and he wants it too. He wants to feel the pain of water inside himself, between the walls of his own body.

  So Moon, first tentatively, and then in a wave, harder and stronger than a cloud and harder and stronger than the rain, flows into him from the bottom up. Sky’s body is ripped in half and yet it stays together, and his high, mortal cries crack open the heavens in jagged zigzags that fill instantaneously with light, and then close up again in darkness and thunder. He tries to catch his breath, and then stops trying. He feels his heart trying to break through his chest and be free. But it can’t get out. So he clutches his hands against it, trying to hold it, trying to offer it some kind of comfort.

  The sky buckles and explodes, surrounding him. Sky isn’t aware of anything for what seems like a long time, and yet he is aware of himself. He is aware of the hard pain inside, and the incalculable relief.

  Slowly, he tries a long breath in. He can feel the cold aliveness of the cloud filling his chest. He can feel the waters of the marsh itself filling him in—and all the beauty of its love, the love of the Dark Goddess herself devouring him from the inside out, all the world inside him weeping and weeping—and then he breathes out. And Moon releases himself into the air again, and faces him.

  “It feels good,” Moon says softly, “to be felt.”

  “It feels good,” says Sky, “to cry.” And he bows, with the tears still on him.

  Moon bows back, almost a man, but also a ghost in a haze of indigo.

  “Be brave, brother,” says Sky, smiling. “We are gods. There is no shame.”

  “Can I carry you somewhere?” says Moon. “Is there somewhere you need to go?”

  Sky shakes his head. “Down. Only down.” He turns to his right, and then to his left, and sees that the white bird is gone.

  The City. Day 20.

  Apartment Buildings

  −hallways: straight narrow passages lined with doors.

  −hundreds of people who are not related and not friends, each with their own apartment.

  −televisions: images of people that are not really there, and the people living there do not know them.

  Food Markets

  −Where does the power come from to light, heat, and cool buildings?

  −Where does all the food come from?

  −People look lost and confused here, not sure what they want.

  Shopping Malls

  −What are the walls, floors, and ceilings made of?

  −Many kinds of computers, but they are not for everyone, only if you have money to buy them. Like the food.

  −There are places you can buy food that someone you don’t know has cooked for you. It is cooked in different ways and given different names.

  −People are laughing here, and are in a hurry, and don’t look at me.

  Office Buildings

  −People wear uniforms here.

  −People are serious here, and in a hurry. They don’t look at me.

  −Inside each room, someone sits all day behind a long counter, and waits for someone to come in. Sometimes there are lines of people waiting to get in. The people in the lines do not wear the uniforms.

  The City. Day 21.

  Dragon has found where he wants to be. With the Artists. They live in the streets or in small messy apartments. They forget to eat. But they have a special purpose, to explain what is real in some beautiful way. They paint pictures on walls, under bridges, or on paper. They make shapes out of trash. Sometimes the
pictures are of animals or the mountains, sometimes of the City. The pictures do not look like those things, not really, and yet they look right. They look like the truth of those things. Very difficult to explain. Chelya would understand. She would love it. And Grandmother would understand too, because it is like dreams. I think it is good what these people are doing. I would like to see them paint pictures like this of the place where I live, or of something beautiful I know, like the old oak tree or the first snowfall or Lonely.

  Dragon says he is an Artist, too, and says that is a kind of god. I think it is true he is supposed to be an Artist because, since he started painting, he is calmer and not angry any more. He focuses on what he is doing. He does not think of women so much when he is painting. His paintings look like fire, full of color, and also lots of white and black mixed together, and they are pictures of dragons, unicorns, and goddesses. They are frightening, but they make you want to stand and look at them for a long time.

  There are so many kinds of people in the City, who have learned to do so many different things that we do not do, like the Art. But the hardest part is understanding how to survive here.

  No one will answer my questions about what makes everything run, and where the energy comes from. They all walk around as if they know everything, but they will not tell me. It takes so much of their lives just to see all the sights and do all the things, perhaps there is no time for them to care why.

  I still have not found the Center.

  “Why is he so quiet?” one of Dragon’s girlfriends asks Dragon one evening, and Kite looks up from studying the letters on his pen. She and Dragon are smoking what Kite calls, in his journal, “the stupid medicine.” He calls it that because he can tell they need it like medicine, but it makes them stupid, and he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t like when Dragon smokes it, because Dragon becomes unable to answer simple questions or make simple plans, and, worst of all, he forgets how to make fire when they need it. But Kite keeps his opinions to himself, telling himself he is lucky to have the protection of Dragon at all.