Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  He scowls now as Dragon answers the girl as if he isn’t there, though Dragon’s voice is respectful. “Kite is very serious about things,” says Dragon.

  “Like what?” says the girl, whose voice annoys Kite. He doesn’t find this one attractive, but Dragon has slept with her more than once.

  “He’s looking for the Center where Truth is,” says Dragon. “Truth,” he repeats, with philosophical emphasis.

  The girl turns and blows rings of smoke at Kite. “What are you talking about?” she says, as if Kite is the one who said it.

  “Where knowledge is,” says Dragon. “Where people know what it’s all about.”

  “You mean like school?” asks the girl.

  “What’s school?” asks Kite, who has heard of this but not quite understood it.

  Much to his annoyance, the girl begins to giggle uncontrollably. Kite waits awhile, but when she shows no signs of stopping, he repeats his question loudly. “Hey!” he adds.

  “Over there!” she says finally, and starts to giggle again, and this incites Dragon to smile and start groping her, so Kite gives up on them. But he stands and looks to where she pointed. The three of them are on the top level of an abandoned parking garage, and across the street from them, and a little further off, a cluster of lights shines from a green space that they passed earlier today. Judging by how things are going, he figures Dragon and the girl will sleep until halfway through the day tomorrow, so he resolves to go to sleep now, and get up early.

  The next morning, he takes the stairs down from the parking garage, and walks to what is called a college. It’s prettier than a lot of places he’s seen in the City. The buildings have interesting shapes and ornate, detailed edges, and are made of something like red clay. The windows make pleasing patterns, and it makes sense to Kite that wisdom should shine out of the faces of these houses, unlike the blank stares of so many of the blocky buildings that line the busier streets. Great old trees stand quiet and proud around these buildings, and he can hear more birdsong than he’s heard in all the rest of the City. He begins to feel excited, for there is some real conversation happening here, he feels—some real, elegant contemplation.

  He finds the quiet buildings a little intimidating. He doesn’t dare to enter any of them. He sits on a bench by a little dirt path, and takes up his comfortable pattern of watching, determined to figure this out on his own. He doesn’t think this is the Center. But it seems important, nonetheless.

  The first thing he notices is that all the people walking here are young. They walk with a relaxed, intent kind of grace, and they all carry books! They laugh together and seem happy. Before he knows what’s happening, a tall boy has sat down beside him. The boy smiles and nods at him, then takes a book out of his backpack and opens it.

  “I’ve got to stop doing my reading ten minutes before class.” He laughs.

  Kite stares at him, astounded. No one else in the City has greeted him with this kind of friendliness, as if he has a right to be here, as if they are all simply human beings in a common place.

  Perhaps aware of being stared at, the boy looks up again. “What happened to you?” he asks nonchalantly, glancing down at Kite’s bedraggled clothing.

  Kite shakes his head, still a little awed. “Nothing,” he manages.

  But the other boy can’t stop staring now either. Later, Kite will be unable to describe in his journal exactly what the boy looked like. His well-structured, pale face, his light brown or dirty blonde hair, his neat clothing—nothing stands out that Kite will be able to remember. “Do you go to school here?” asks the boy.

  “No,” says Kite. Then, to get it over with, he adds, “I’m from the mountains. We don’t have school there.”

  With that, the boy slaps his book closed and turns to face Kite with a big smile. “No kidding? This is great. Are you really?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  The boy shrugs. “I’ve never met a kid from the mountains before. I didn’t know anyone really lived out there.” He holds out his hand. “I’m Mark.”

  “Kite,” says Kite. He takes the boy’s hand, confused, and lets go. Then he decides to do something brave; he decides he wants to get the information he needs right now, before the boy can start hammering him with questions about where he comes from. He doesn’t even care if the boy laughs at him.

  “Please explain to me,” he says, “what school is.”

  Mark does laugh, but the laughter doesn’t sound unkind. Kite can’t understand how he acts so easy, when the rest of the people in the City seem so closed and suspicious. Maybe it’s because he is young like Kite. Or maybe this place is different somehow.

  “It’s where we learn,” says Mark. “Things we need to know, you know, to get jobs.”

  Kite fumbles around this answer, not understanding it enough to formulate a good follow-up. “What kinds of things?” he tries.

  “It depends. Me, I haven’t chosen a major yet. I don’t know what I want to do. It’s a pretty hard choice, if you ask me.”

  Kite shakes his head. Maybe this isn’t going to work. “What do you mean?”

  Mark sighs and sits back. “Okay. Look, everyone has, like, a specialty. Everyone chooses one thing they want to study, so they can go be that thing. Like a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or a social worker. Right?”

  “Right,” says Kite, hoping he’ll continue. But he doesn’t. “What’s a social worker?”

  “It’s someone who helps messed-up people, or homeless people.”

  “That’s a job?”

  “Yep.”

  “So you can only study one thing?”

  “Pretty much,” says Mark.

  “So if you’re a doctor, you can’t also help—homeless people?”

  “Well, I guess you can, but you can’t make money at it. You have to have a special license.”

  Kite thinks on this. “I want to study energy,” he says finally. “Is that a job?”

  “Yeah. An engineer maybe.”

  On an impulse, Kite rifles quickly through his bag. “See,” he says, pulling out his book. “Like this.” He holds it out to Mark.

  Mark takes it carefully. “Whoa,” he says. “This thing is old.”

  “It’s not,” says Kite. “It was written only thirty-three years ago.”

  Mark looks at him and smiles a funny smile. The expression reminds Kite of the kids in the apartment, and he wishes now that he’d kept the book to himself. “Uh, yeah,” says Mark. “That’s old.” The book jacket is gone, so he opens to the title page. “Alternative Power Sources,” he reads. “Solar, Wind, and Water.” He flips a few pages. “Yeah, I’ve heard of this stuff. But it’s not up-to-date. That’s not what people study now.”

  “Why not?” says Kite, who has been watching him anxiously.

  Mark shrugs. “I don’t know. We have better, more efficient, simpler ways, using the fuel we use. And it’s cheaper.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The technology for this stuff—solar, wind—it’s too expensive, too complicated. It’s not realistic.”

  “But who owns the technology? Who makes it expensive?” Kite asks helplessly, frustrated.

  Mark shrugs again. “The people in charge, I guess. The rulers.”

  Kite looks away. Money is a whole other subject he doesn’t want to even broach. He is ashamed by how much it baffles him.

  “Here you go,” says Mark, handing the book carelessly back to Kite as if it were a pair of old socks he had borrowed. He picks up his own book and opens it. The book is called Hanum’s Great Design: A Practical History of the City. The chapter heading reads, “The Uncivilized Territories: Methods of Expansion.”

  “How do you get into a school?” Kite asks quietly.

  “Oh, you have to go to school all your life, and then you have to take a lot of tests and prove that you’r
e smart enough and know enough to get into a college.”

  Kite looks at his lap, trying to hide the emotion he feels. At first it feels like frustration, and then he even feels something like rage—a feeling that, like the terror when he first arrived in the City, is completely new to him. He doesn’t think of himself as an emotional person. But he can’t believe he never knew about all of this. He can’t believe his parents deprived him of even knowing that this opportunity existed, and now he’s wasted his whole life not knowing it.

  “Does everyone in the City get to go to school?” he asks, still not looking up.

  “Most people,” says Mark. “Most adults have been to school.”

  “You will get to learn whatever you want to,” says Kite.

  Mark shrugs and looks away. “I guess so.”

  Kite looks away, too, and watches a group of girls pass by on another path behind them, murmuring to each other sweetly. He thinks of the grey masses that part around him out on the busy sidewalks. How is it that all those people possess the key to all the knowledge he has yearned for his whole life, and yet they look so unhappy, so lost?

  “Do you know where the Center is?” he asks Mark. “I mean, the heart of the City where they make the power the City runs on, where they know how it all works. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  Mark looks at him for a long time, and Kite can’t tell what he’s feeling or thinking. “Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about,” he says slowly. “Although I don’t know that it’s all that. What about it?”

  “I want to go there.”

  “Why?”

  “Why—why not?” Kite stammers, shocked by the question.

  Mark laughs again. “I’ll tell you how to get there, if you want. Although you’ll have to walk. Apparently there’s a fuel shortage or something, but I’m sure they’ll fix it soon enough.”

  “But where does the fuel come from?” asks Kite, seizing his opportunity. “Who will fix it?” Surely this boy, a person of learning, will know.

  Mark shrugs. “It comes from underground, I guess. I think from prehistoric animals of some kind, when they decayed.”

  “What is ‘prehistoric’?”

  “Before history.”

  “Before history?”

  “Before the City began.”

  “But—”

  “Look,” says Mark, sounding a little irritated for the first time. “That’s not my department. I’m not a biology major or whatever. You’d have to ask an expert. I’m not really into that kind of thing. Nature and all that.”

  Kite is silent, understanding that the conversation is over. Mark takes out a piece of paper and starts to write. Then he stops. “Can you read?” he asks uncertainly.

  The question makes Kite want to cry, though he doesn’t know why. “Yes,” he mumbles, looking down.

  Mark writes out the directions, and adds, “Here’s my number. Let me know if you—if you ever need anything.”

  Kite nods and takes the paper, though he doesn’t understand. What does it mean for a person to have a number? But now he feels a great heaviness inside, and he only wants to be gone from this beautiful place.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “No problem,” says the boy, watching as Kite turns and walks away across the grass in soft shoes that make no sound. Then he shakes his head and looks down at his book. He can’t seem to focus on the words. How he wishes he could walk away like that, with no weight of expectations or books on his back, and be free.

  For the last time, Delilah washes her body with paper towels in the gas station bathroom. She thinks there is nowhere more claustrophobic than this tiny, toxic room, that has never breathed fresh air since it was made. In this room people have not only eliminated their sickliest wastes, but vomited out their ugliest fears and hopelessness, sat on the toilet with their heads in their hands, smoked cigarettes and flushed down secrets and cried and torn at their faces in the mirror. Delilah tries to breathe as little as possible, and leave as quickly as she can, but what else can she do? This is the only free water. It was easier to get water in the desert.

  For the last two days, she’s felt better again, and she will not wait any longer. Chief told her, if she wanted to get to the sea, she could follow the river: the brown river of refuse, sewage, and sorrow.

  When she comes back out onto the street, the quiet is eerie. No revving engines, no idling, screeching, honking traffic. She can hear the pigeons cooing. She can hear a door slam, and someone talking on a television. She can hear the strange fallings, like uneven heartbeats, of everyone’s footsteps: some bewildered, some panicked, some tripping and tired, some running as if they will never stop.

  Someday, if they survive, people will realize what cars meant to them. How that time of sitting quietly, closed off from other people and the world, gave them the only peace they ever knew in their frantic lives. How cars became not vehicles but enclosed capsules of music, where they could lose themselves in the romance of their own unspoken feelings, the dreams of what they wished they could say or who they wished they could be. How safe they were inside their cars—how contained, how relaxed, no matter how fast they were going!

  But for now, the stopping of cars means thinking about survival, which no one has thought about for a long time. Without their cars, people don’t have that look any more, even walking—that look like they know where they are going, and have no time to acknowledge anyone else. Now they stare blankly, questioningly, wordlessly into each other’s faces, if they go out at all. There are so many stares from so many windows, all with the same expression of terror.

  In the temple, Delilah has been feeding her temporary friends with rats and pigeons she kills with her magic bow. She tells them it was given to her by a god and they barely blink. She tells them she dreams her animals before she kills them, and they nod blankly. They’ll believe in anything, but they are hopeless. Even out here on the outskirts, they depend on the City, like anyone else. Sooner or later, they will die like everyone else. Delilah wants to get out, immediately. She feels the hopelessness swarming around her like flies, clutching at her throat in the night.

  Soon there will be no more food in the stores, because the food was driven from somewhere else, and no one knows where that is. Soon people will run out of money, because they can’t drive to their jobs, and there are no more jobs. Soon money won’t matter, because there will be nothing to trade it for. Factories have stopped breathing smoke. Cars have stopped breathing, too, and some of the lights have burnt out, and no one is fixing them. So the sky has cleared, and at night a few more stars can be seen. The very atmosphere is changing, and it’s getting colder, as if, after fifty years or more, winter is returning to claim the City back.

  In the courtyard Chief tells her, “I have something for you, Delilah, before you go.”

  Delilah kneels down and takes his dry, warm hands in her own. She thinks he may be the first older man she has ever respected. If only she could have felt like this about her own father. His hands remind her of desert stones, and the comfort of them comes over her so fast, she has to close her eyes. For a moment, she is lying in the sun like a lizard in the grand empty silence, and the tortoises and bats and scorpions are singing their songs of silence all around her, and she knows she is safe.

  “Why do you live here, Chief?” she whispers, opening her eyes. “You don’t belong here. Where I lived, you could be free. You wouldn’t have to steal anything, you wouldn’t have to fight.”

  “I told you,” he grumbles. “I’m a warrior. I go where I’m needed.”

  Then he hands her Moon’s flute.

  Delilah’s face doesn’t move. She doesn’t let it. But her eyes open up and swallow the sight of that instrument, that magical creature—the only beauty beyond this world that she has ever believed in, that music. The only love that transported her beyond herself, ever.
And she knows Moon must be dead, just like she always knew he would die, despite his godness, despite what he told her.

  She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t feel anything. She doesn’t understand why the old man is smiling.

  “I found it,” he says gently, as if speaking to a child. “Look how lonely it is. It wants to be played. But I can’t play it. An old, hardened warrior like me has no music left in him.”

  “Neither do I,” says Delilah, her voice cold.

  “Take it,” he says, suddenly hard and stern. “I am telling you, this flute knows you. I’m not an idiot. I know.”

  Mutely, Delilah takes it, and then she stands, and her body is made of concrete, with no more life in it than the City walls.

  “Goodbye, grandfather,” she says. “Thank you.”

  He nods. “Play that thing, Delilah. You only refuse to play it because of what it will make you feel. That’s selfish.”

  She stares at him.

  “Go!” he says, and she starts, but then she sees the emotion there. He looks up at her and nods again, more kindly. “Go, friend.”

  She walks down the empty street toward the river, the flute swinging in her left hand. No one else is going this way. The river makes no sound. It doesn’t even look like a river, this crowded chaos of froth and refuse, its own weight pushing it ever onward. If Yora is anywhere here, Delilah cannot feel her.

  The air has turned very cold. It has drawn itself tight together, holding its breath, parting its lips dryly, unable to make a sound. Delilah pulls one layer after another out of her pack, until her pack weighs almost nothing, and her body weighs too much. In her very bones, she misses the plants she ate in the desert while she was traveling. Maybe that’s why she’s been so sick. In her belly, in her hollow chest, in her throat, in her mouth, she craves those certain colors and smells. She ought to steal some vegetables, before everything is gone.