Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  But now it is hard to tear herself away from the river. Walking beside its pain, she feels at home. When she walks beside the inevitable falling of it, her own pain feels more comfortable, and at once so much, so overwhelmingly much, that she can’t hold it inside any longer. The pain of losing Moon, the pain of the river, the pain of missing Yora, the desert, and even the old man who became her friend—losing everyone. Without thinking about it too much, she raises the flute to her lips.

  The first sounds are terrible, like crows at a trash heap. The next sounds are like baby birds, songless, crying for food. The sounds never get good. Delilah herself would not call them music. But through them she is able to say something of what she needs to say. And she can tell that the river is listening, and that it comforts the river a little.

  When the first snowflakes kiss her cheeks, she doesn’t even notice, they feel so natural. When she does notice, it happens so gradually, so gently that—though she has never seen snow in her life—she is not afraid, and she knows she has to keep playing. Slowly, the air fills with them: flecks of white bliss, like sparkles on the edges of some great, invisible god’s arms, as he reaches around to embrace her. The air turns blurry with them, like eyes tearing up, like mist. When it touches her skin, Delilah can tell that it is rain, after all, but rain in some other form—like rain’s memory, or the idea of rain before it dares to fully let go.

  Now the river, though heavy and slow as if with terrible age, feels like Yora after all. Delilah can hear her voice. She is not speaking to Delilah. She is whispering, Little Brother, let it go. Cry, Little Brother….

  No rain god would send the rain like this—no rain god but the most sensitive, the most tender, the most sweetly sorrowful rain god that ever lived. What’s crazy is that when she thought Moon was gone, Delilah didn’t feel anything, because in a way the experience wasn’t new to her. Throughout their friendship, he had always been leaving; he had always been dying; he had always been gone. It’s realizing that he is still alive, after all, that makes Delilah finally feel something—that makes her finally able to feel him, and herself, and all that they never allowed themselves to feel but tried to call up in each other anyway, out of love and longing.

  It snows for hours and hours, and by the time Delilah has almost reached the other side of the still, lost City at sunset, hungry and exhausted and cramping in her belly but still happy—feeling that she and Moon are talking to each other honestly, at last—it is still snowing, slow as a dream. All the grey is covered with white, the hard corners curved over with white. And the trash, the rooftops, and the ugly signs are all covered with white—a white that falls roundly, that undulates like primeval hills of wilderness over the contours of the City, insisting that once we lived like this; once we were shaped like this; once we dreamed like this. People have come out of their apartments, and are standing in the streets, looking more dazed than ever. They hold out their hands and even their tongues. Some of the children, knowing only this moment, begin to play.

  Down by the river, a tall young man in a suit, with sunken eyes and open mouth, holds out a shaking hand to Delilah. She lowers the flute and sees a dollar bill, limp and damp, half falling from his hand. Anger—habitually, obediently—begins to stumble up to standing inside her, its legs shaky but determined, but then she looks into his eyes and stops when she sees the longing there.

  She will never know what this man was asking for. At first she thinks he wants to give her charity, or money for playing, as if he thought her some desperate, badly-playing street performer, whose music was not much better than begging. Then, when she sees the longing there, she almost wonders if he wants to pay her for sex—even though she can’t delude herself into thinking, with her pale, sick face, her unwashed smell, and her tattered men’s clothing, that she could look in any way seductive—simply because she can’t imagine what else she has to give someone other than her body. Then she wonders if he thinks her some kind of goddess, walking apart from the rest, unafraid, playing an eerie flute along the river, calling the snows. Maybe he thinks she has the answers. Because it seems clear that everyone needs someone to have the answers; everyone seems so bewildered by what has happened, and everyone seems to understand that Hanum is dead.

  “What do you want?” she asks the man sharply.

  His lips tremble. He looks down at the dollar, then back up at Delilah, and he steps forward, and Delilah—though she doesn’t mean to—steps back in disgust.

  But the man keeps holding out the dollar bill as if he doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s as if this thing which used to be everything to him—used to be the very energy, the very sustenance, the very meaning and drive and reason for his life—has now become nothing, and he can’t understand that. He holds it out to her like something sick or broken, this machine that once ran his life. As if he hands her this broken dollar bill, thinking she is some goddess, and wants her to fix it.

  Delilah shakes her head. “I…” She’s been playing the flute all day, and now her own silence surprises her. Everyone else seems to notice that silence too. Behind the man, other people are coming toward her, men and women and a few children. They are all looking at her with that same terrible expression on their faces.

  “No,” she shakes her head harder. “No.” She doesn’t know what she is saying No to. Maybe it’s that same No she said to Dragon long ago, when he tried to—yes, she can admit it now—he tried to rape her. No, you misunderstand me. No, you are not listening. Her exhaustion begins to make her shiver.

  “Look,” she says. She takes the dollar bill roughly from his hand and tears it in half. He looks down at it quickly, and then back up at her, and his face crumples. Later, she won’t be able to imagine why she did it, but she steps forward and takes him in her arms.

  As they stand there holding each other, small whimpers can be heard up and down the street, like waking birds, and other arms are wrapping around other bodies as people fall into each other.

  The two halves of the dollar bill float apart between the delicate universes of the snowflakes—each flake a microscopic, webbed pattern that will never be seen, a new language that will never be learned—and Lonely’s spirit is finally set free into the wind.

  “Listen, Father,” says Moon. “This is what I remember.

  “The City was not always surrounded by desert. The Earth, my mother, was not always silent.

  “But then they covered her with concrete. They covered her breasts, her arms, her face. They covered her sex, her heart, her eyes. They covered her mouth, her ears, her skin and her hair. They covered her until she could no longer call to you, and no longer receive you. Your fertile waters ran in wasted rivers through gutters, and pooled in lifeless places, and fermented.

  “You were so sad, Father, that you turned the rains away. You thought she did not want you any more, like I thought the world didn’t want me. It made you bitter. It made you cold. When you found out I loved men, you denied me. You could only remember the love you lost, from the woman who once loved you, the Earth.

  “But Father, this is what I know. Everything must be turned upside down now, for the world to be right again. The world must be flipped over, and the concrete shaken loose. The Earth must rain into the Sky. You, Father, must also be the Mother, and Earth shall also be the Father. Women will love women, and men will love men. Because women, now, must learn how to love and believe in themselves, and men must learn how to weep. Everyone must be braver than they have ever been before.

  “Father, I am the love between you and the Earth. It is my job to call the rains. I used to dream of standing before you, challenging you, offering to fight you for the rains. But I am not a fighter, and today I understand: I do not need to fight. The rains are already in me. You will make love to the Earth again, and I will make that happen, in my own way.”

  Moon opens his eyes but there is no one there. He is still floating out here in the endl
ess universe, clouds and sky, feathers and light. But between the snowflakes, he can feel the whole universe listening.

  “Mother,” he whispers. “I am so tired of being nowhere. I am so tired of being alone.”

  He bows his head to catch the tears that fall into his palms, and in all his body—whatever and wherever his body is—and in all his spirit, he can feel the opening and surrender of Sky’s flesh, Sky’s heart, Sky’s manhood. He cries until he can no longer see, until his hands fill up and overflow, and then he can no longer catch all the tears, and they fall.

  On this, the full moon, Kite and Dragon reach the Center of the City at last.

  The concrete cluster of rectangles from which the rulers rule is so big, it covers several blocks. Kite cannot believe they never found it before. But when they arrive, they find it ringed around by iron gates, armed guards, and electrical alarms.

  Kite looks up, and the wonder of snowflakes touches his eyelids, his hair, his lips. He realizes that this knowledge which makes the City run is not for the people of the City to access.

  He realizes that they have not told him all this time, not because they wouldn’t, but because they did not know.

  Delilah arrives at the seashore at night, crawls into a cave, and collapses. She hasn’t eaten since that morning, but all she cares about is sleep. She doesn’t even care what happens after this or how she will reach the mysterious island. She hears the ocean nearby, a wall of giant sound like the calling of Death, and that is enough for now.

  But she cannot sleep. Voices seem to croon and cry in the squeeze of the wind through the passageways of stone. They sound like Mira screaming, Mira humming to herself and deaf to the world, Mira moaning, Mira whimpering that time their mother beat her for screaming like that at their father’s funeral. Mira whispering her name. Lilah. Hadn’t Delilah tried her best to take care of her: hadn’t she fought off the other kids, hadn’t she defended her despite her own shame when Mira sat and rocked, and the others snickered and whispered? But that was after their father died, when suddenly Delilah needed Mira like she’d never needed anyone, when they were sent away to school alone and had no one else. Before that, at least the kids in the outer City respected her. Maybe she didn’t have friends, but she had lovers and people who let her be herself. And before that, there was Moon.

  She can’t shake the feeling that all that time, when their father was still alive, Mira was calling out to her, and Delilah wasn’t listening because she was too scared to hear what Mira would say. Then by the time Delilah wanted to listen—by the time she was so desperate for the companionship of her sister that she shook her by the shoulders once in the middle of the cafeteria with everyone watching, and cried, and begged her to speak—Mira wouldn’t say a word. It was too late.

  All night Delilah cannot sleep, and she turns and turns, missing the mound of animal skins she used to sleep on that’s rotting away in her desert cave still, so far away and cold. All night she tries to remember a dream she had by the river before she heard Mira’s voice and set off for the City. But more and more, the fearful reality of the ocean—its tumultuous nothing—is rising up inside her, and the best she can do is try to turn off her mind.

  In the morning, the stone around her is black and salty and cold as a reptile’s insides. The base of her spine aches, like it does all the time now, and her belly bloats out hard like when she menstruates, only she hasn’t menstruated in almost three moons. Maybe she caught some sickness from one of the men, after all. She hasn’t exactly said it to herself, but the idea has begun to settle in, in the back of her mind, that rescuing Mira will be her final task—the one good deed for which she has remained alive this long—and that once she does rescue her, she will have faced all that she fears, and can therefore be justified in finally giving up this life. How tired she is of the fight.

  When she sits up in her shallow hollow, she sees with a shock of uneasiness that someone has left food for her. A fish. Did she sleep, after all? Wary, but too delirious from hunger to hold back, she stumbles around the tiny beach between the cliffs, gathering driftwood, and then she lights a fire with some matches she took from the City. She didn’t have to buy or steal them. The stores were a free-for-all now, and the only thing people fought for at this point was food. They hadn’t gotten beyond step one of survival yet; they hadn’t thought about needing warmth. They no longer remembered what survival was made of. They still took their whole lives for granted and were still getting over the loss of their cars.

  She cooks her fish and tries not to pay attention to the sea, because its presence overwhelms her. But she can’t help but wonder at it, out of the corner of her mind. Its sound reminds her of the song the desert sang, beneath its silence. As if the desert—all those long, lonely years—was only a veil covering this deep, luxurious abundance of living water. As if all those long hours she spent listening to the talking of the wind and the silent voices of the desert animals, and thought they were talking of hunger and thirst and fear, escape and hunting and sex, they were actually talking about the sea.

  She was too lazy to build a cooking platform over the fire, so she balances the fish draped over two sticks, which she holds in her fists and props up on each knee, her arms trembling with hunger. When pieces of it begin to crumble into the fire, she reaches right into it and pulls them out, shoving them into her mouth without feeling the burn.

  Around her are black caves, and above and beyond them, the black forest she just came through. She’s staring into that blackness, and then she realizes she has finished eating. The fish was huge after all, and it filled her, even if it wasn’t fully cooked. Almost instantly, she falls asleep. She dreams Yora is kneeling by her, in human form, laying fish upon fish on a fancy golden platter. She realizes it is Yora who is bringing her the fish.

  “Stop,” she murmurs. “I don’t need all that. I’m dying anyway.”

  “But it is a good dying,” says Yora.

  “Whatever.”

  “Why do you not come? The sea is right here, waiting.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You are afraid. You think it will not accept you. You are wrong.”

  When she wakes, the sun is already setting. She tries to work out the time. She’s lost track of day and night. She wanted so badly to get as far from the City as possible, as fast as possible, forever. Yet she survived it again, after all. It wasn’t such a big deal. No family, no boarding school. It was only the memories that scared her, after all. Now there is only loneliness to deal with, and that got easy a long time ago.

  Gulls pass over her like jeering ghosts, or they sit with other slim, crooked birds cloaked in black on bleached white driftwood trees. What will she do now? There are too many things in the wind she’d rather not hear. Something sounds like a woman crying, wailing. Or a baby. Or both.

  She cooks the next fish that was left for her, and then it’s nearly dark, and she stands up and paces the shoreline with one hand clutching the knife at her hip. She lets the water creep up to her toes. She has never seen water like this: water that comes toward her and then draws back, hungry and then afraid, threatening and then fading. It extends too far out to understand, then becomes one with the blackening sky. She remembers the stories she heard in childhood, the stories everyone knew, about how the Dark Goddess held the Princess captive on a magical island, and how her league of mad souls beneath the sea would howl and rock the waves when any ship came close, confusing its men, always sending them astray. Little boys Delilah knew would wave sticks like swords, crying that one day they would ride into the sea and save the Princess.

  But when they grew up, they forgot all of that. They believed in Hanum and the City he made, but they didn’t believe in the rest. Delilah has to admit she’s not sure if she does either.

  I am the wind, thinks Lonely, tossing here and there, roughing up the trees, spiraling the trash, and not knowing why.
/>   “Are you?” says the wind.

  She cannot see or hear or touch, and yet she touches everything: the animal’s fur, a girl’s ragged dress, the grass, the dust, a boy’s long hair, the lizard’s impermeable skin. She connects everything. Then just as suddenly, she is gone from it.

  “Don’t you know yet,” asks the wind, “who you are?”

  And Lonely remembers everything. She remembers the distances that loneliness has spanned. The hunger between predator and prey, the journey from water to land, the pathway of a river from mountaintop to sea, the open meadow and the labyrinthine desert, and most of all the tower, so far out to sea and so far up in the air. She remembers the distance between herself and her past, constantly changing, and the distance she once felt between herself and her future, and how once that distance closed, she had everything and lost everything in the same moment. She says to the wind, But who are you? You never tell me.

  “Maybe I’m only yourself. A voice in your mind.”

  Tell the truth. You come from somewhere else. Where do you come from?

  “I come from where the earth is uneven, from empty spaces, from the very restlessness of your soul.”

  But why won’t you face me?

  “I have no face.”

  But isn’t there anything that matters? Lonely cries desperately with whatever part of herself remains herself, through every life. Isn’t anything real? Isn’t there one true love, one true destiny, one name that is mine? Isn’t there one God above all other gods?

  In the distance now, she can feel the sea.

  “There is no above. Over and over, the people will try to build themselves higher, above all the rest. But the world is round, not flat. There is no above and no below. There is only further out and closer in.”