Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  In the City now there comes a breeze that never falters, never dies. It brings dust from the wastelands around you. It brings the smells you paid good money to live away from. It bolsters itself; it grows; it begins to howl.

  That night and all the next day, and the next, it is a dry, desperate windstorm, its gusts like curling tubes of light. It knocks you against the walls. It shatters windows and rips off clothing, blinds your eyes with dust and makes holes in rooftops. Neat potted flowers that were only kept alive by water pumped from far away or underground fall easily off balconies; abandoned cars tip against each other. Asphalt shingles sling sharp through the air like weapons. The houses of the poorest people are half gone, their furniture tumbling down the street. They run to your houses, and some of you open your doors. They rush in raving, like madmen, and you pity them, but increasingly your pity turns to fear. Outside your windows, you can see the neighbors’ trash come smashing against your walls. Later, you will never be able to sort out whose trash was whose.

  Caught in the street, you circle up and gather your children into the center to protect them, like a herd of bison—only you face inward instead of out. With your faces tilted into the warm security of other bodies, into dark anonymity, your backs are open wide to the wind, and all the stored angers, resentments, and swallowed longings you rolled up tight all your lives in your spines are released now, given voice. Terrified, you clutch each other tight, as you hear the hinges break from doors and the screams of people wounded, and yet at the same time you are holding your own breaths in the hope of some barely admissible relief, ecstatically biting your own lips in the expectation of that final orgasm of chaos.

  Some of you want it so badly, you are running loose and alone, making it come. You are torching houses, bashing windows, shooting guns, stealing whatever you can and then destroying it—as Delilah once did. Violence pants beneath the very concrete of the streets like a lustful monster too long chained up.

  Oh, that everything might come undone! That you might let go of everything you thought you wanted! For though you wanted it so much, it was difficult to clench your teeth constantly in failure, to try so hard, to feel undeserving, and to be so afraid of losing it. Oh, that you might give up what you thought was most important! That you might be able to survive after all without it! Or that you might not, and it would not matter.

  In the dark hollow of your collected center, where the children move restless and frightened and look up at you with dazzling new eyes, questions you never allowed yourselves before begin to move and talk. What if Hanum’s world can break after all? What if what has always been known is not so? In that cave of possibility surrounded by the round white erasure of the wind’s roar, Imagination begins to wake again.

  See, children, I am stirring it there in your center: round and round and round.

  11th MOON

  On the night of the new moon, Delilah finds the sand castles. She lets go of the knife, forgets to close her mouth, and drops to her knees. She hasn’t cut her hair for a long time and it lolls around her face; she has to keep tucking it behind her ears. She can barely see in the darkness, and at first she doesn’t believe it, but the sea is a mirror, and gives her all the light it can.

  She bends over the tower and the walls around it, the hidden hollow inside, the moat and the gate—all made of sand. Then she sees a man and a woman with a baby in her arms, each of them about half the size of her littlest finger, walking wearily up to the bridge and beginning to cross.

  “I don’t think anyone else is here,” the woman is saying. Then the bridge begins to collapse beneath her feet, and the man, rather deftly, wraps his arms around both her and the baby and manages to pull them after him. He takes the baby and they run the rest of the way across, the bridge collapsing behind them.

  “They never build them right,” says the man bitterly, as they turn to look back. “They’re not made for real people.”

  “Now what will we do?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Solemnly, they turn and walk around the castle. They seem unaware of Delilah’s face hanging over them. They are searching for a real opening, a real room inside the pretend structure, to lay down and rest for the night. At the top of the castle, they find a little turret with a clumsy window big enough to make a small cave. They sit down, and the woman takes out her tiny breast and nurses her whimpering baby.

  Delilah stares in horrified wonder. She wants to pick up the little people and hold them in her hands, see if they feel warm, take off their little clothes and see if they’re real underneath. Now they are staring out listlessly at the sea. There is something wrong with them. The woman says,

  “How long do you think we have?”

  “Not long, this one,” says the man, and then neither of them say anything. The waves are soaking Delilah’s calves and knees, already wiping away all trace of the moat and the bridge, smoothing out the west castle wall. She looks beyond them—why do they stay?—and yet now she sees many more sandcastles, dotting the shore along the edge of the waves. She sees the lights of hundreds of tiny lanterns, some of them in ones or twos and others in clusters of many, moving toward the various castles, finding ways inside despite the waves that are even now destroying them.

  “But why?” she cries helplessly, unconsciously holding her belly in one hand.

  “They want so much to have a home,” whispers Yora, and Delilah looks up to find her human-sized, human-shaped, beautiful friend at her side. “Every day, every night, the castles are destroyed by the tides, and then they are rebuilt, and every night the people come again, but nothing ever lasts.”

  “But who makes them? Who makes the castles?”

  “The children.”

  “What children?”

  “The children who live here.”

  Delilah glances swiftly around her. She seems to see shadows crossing the path she just made. She seems to see small, stubborn eyes looking back at her and then disappearing. She remembers the voices she’s been hearing for days now. She thought she was going mad.

  “The children do not realize,” Yora says, her voice slippery like a black fish in moonlight. “They think it is a game. They are only children.”

  “But who are these tiny people who never get to stay anywhere?” says Delilah, feeling sick again.

  “What do you mean?” asks Yora, who was smoothing the falling sand with her hand but now looks up at Delilah. “Do you not know them? Are they not familiar? Have you never felt this?”

  Delilah looks away. The man and the woman are holding each other now, with the baby in between them—standing up and holding each other as the water collapses the levels below them—and they are crying.

  “Come, friend,” says Yora and takes her hand in her own. It’s cold, but dry. “Do not stay here at the edge forever. There is only suffering here. It is time to decide.”

  “I have decided,” says Delilah.

  “Have you?”

  Yora turns and wades into the sea, keeping her human form all the way, as if to show Delilah what it will look like when she follows. Delilah shivers and can’t stop shivering. Yora wends her way, like a river through rivers, in a curved pathway between the bones of dead trees and the looping, leering, hole-riddled remains of giant stones that once were part of the shore. Beyond all these, when all that’s left to be seen is the goddess’ white head floating in the misty drift of her dress, Yora calls softly into the wind,

  “If you are ready, come after me. When you are too tired to keep going, I will carry you.”

  Then she is gone.

  “I don’t know how to swim!” calls Delilah. But there is no answer now, not even the screaming of the gulls. There are no nocturnal animals at the seashore, at least not above the waves. She looks around, ashamed of herself.

  “Fuck,” she says. After all, courage is all she has. She walks in fast, thoug
h the waves, rather than reaching to devour her, seem to resist her now, as if she’s walking upriver. By the time the water is up to her thighs, they almost knock her down. But when the water reaches her waist, it just shakes her, and when it reaches her chest, it doesn’t move her at all, only tugs at her legs down below. Delilah is so scared she thinks she might be peeing, though she can’t tell. She has never entered into water so deep, so endless, and something about it engulfs her with familiarity, memory, and premonition at the same time. Just before she goes under, she realizes she isn’t breathing. Then with a start, she remembers that all this held-breath, dizzying tension of courage she’s clenched inside herself isn’t so that she can drown herself, but so that she can survive. That’s what courage was always for.

  She knows what swimming looks like—she’s seen dogs swimming in the filthy river—and so she does that now. It doesn’t keep her from mouthful after mouthful of terrifying, choking darkness, but it does keep her afloat, at least for a moment. She can’t tell if she is moving forward, but there is no going back now, so she tries not to think about what will happen when she tires. Then she does think about it, and the fear, finally, is too big for her. The dream she couldn’t remember flashes in her mind for an instant and then is gone. Flailing, she spins around, finds that her feet can’t touch bottom, and finds that the shore is so far away she can barely see it, undulating faintly white in black space. And then she is no longer Delilah; she is no longer anyone she ever knew or wanted to be; she is only fear in the blackness, the cold water speaking inevitability all over her forgotten body, screaming, “Help! Help! Help!”

  Then the entire earth, warm and slippery as the inside of a woman, seems to rise up beneath her.

  “Hel–Hoa—” she gasps, gripping it, riding it, dropping her forehead against it in relief before she can even breathe enough to wonder.

  A fountain of air bursts up with a great squeaking sigh in front of her, as if to celebrate the miracle of breath. She cannot grab hold of any part of the smooth roundness that supports her, and yet it carries her sturdily, her hands flat pressed upon it, her legs spread wide and helpless around it like a child’s. It disappears back under the water but remains near the surface, so that Delilah’s head and shoulders stay above water as she looks all around in shock at an emptiness bigger than the desert.

  They speed forward.

  Then the whales begin to sing. Deep in the earth-black water, they sing an ancient song about the fire-charred sky, the broken-open universe. They sing about where they’ve been and where they are going, and how it is the same. They sing about the sad human heart who rides the great aching body and still does not believe. They sing the answers to all the questions that will ever be asked. They sing their love for each other, their family memory of each precious, long life, each child born and each death. There is no unrequited love among whales. There is no warfare, no forgetting, no jealousy, no doubt.

  And Delilah, though she cannot understand, closes her eyes in laughter, because she understands for the first time the freedom in surrender. She understands what she wanted, when she wanted death. She laughs to keep from crying, because the whales, more than any human society she knows, understand true community. Through their song she understands that—though she, Delilah, does not know how to do it—it is possible to live among others, even among those you love, without this constant, constant pain.

  Back home, Kite used to study each element, trying to understand its secret. He lay in the sun, stood inside the push of the river, closed his eyes in the wind, thinking with his mind and his body. He learned a lot about motion, heat, and force, simply by feeling them.

  But these people in the steel tower, whoever they are, whatever they are doing, cannot feel the wind or the sun, or watch the movement of water. How, then, can they understand energy?

  For two days, he has watched this scene from the rooftop of a vacant building, living on nothing but pigeon meat. The guards have gradually disappeared, slinking off into the shadows like lofty statues shape-shifting back into degraded human form. People arrive in growing hordes, banging on the closed steel doors, and demand answers: lights for their homes, food, water. The City is breaking down.

  Yesterday Dragon said to him, “You want knowledge. You think that’s what you came for. But what is this knowledge? You have love. All these people that you left behind love you. I would do anything for such love. For a family.”

  “Then go and give it,” Kite said, a little too sharply. “If you want love, you have to give it. Stop complaining.”

  They both shut up then, Kite with his arms around his knees, Dragon stiff and frowning in an upright lotus. Kite felt sorry but he was irritable from constant hunger, malnourished and homesick and disappointed in his own foolishness, frustrated to know he had endured all of this for nothing. His sense of himself and the peace he’d always taken for granted erode more and more quickly in the violent cacophony of City existence. But he can’t turn around and go home, not yet. Not after everything he’s gone through to get here.

  He and Dragon did not say anything to each other all day. Then that night Dragon said quietly, “You’re right.” He stood up and climbed down the metal stairway, and Kite, too surprised to move, watched his proud, vulnerable figure make its way down the street to be lost in the crowd. By the time the terror of aloneness hit him, it was too late.

  Then he knew why he’d left home. It was this same nameless anxiety—this hovering, seeping, everywhere mist of anxiety that floods the senses of all the people in the City, that moves them, stops them, and makes them lost. It made them drive their cars incessantly until their cars stopped, made them yell at their children, made them smoke up their apartments and take off their clothes for anyone who asked, and it makes them pound now on the steel doors in fury and terror. This same anxiety haunted his family, even though they knew how to survive, even though they had everything they needed—even then. It was different at home perhaps, more subtle and tucked away, but he could hear it in his mother’s questions, in the nervous conversations about the future when Jay’s family came to visit, and in the way they all avoided strangers and would not travel beyond each other’s homes. What was this awful, nameless fear that human beings lived with, that could never be outrun? It was to quell that fear that he had come looking for knowledge, for light, for answers.

  Now he stands up and stretches his cold limbs. He wants to yell down to the people, “Stop pounding at the door! Food, energy—it doesn’t come from there! They don’t own it. No one owns it. It doesn’t come from them!” But they wouldn’t listen.

  At the bottom of the metal stairway, he kills a rat with his slingshot. But Dragon isn’t there to make him a fire. So he carries the thing through several blocks of wreckage—still within sight and hearing of the mob—until he finds a fallen tree in the rubble of what was once a park, and he breaks off the sticks he needs, makes his bow drill, and starts twisting it fast between his palms. It works faster than he expected, because everything is so dry. He skins the rat while the fire is building, spears it with a stick, and roasts it. He’s already wondering where he’s going to get water, because he’s been out of it for a while, and clean water is hard to come by since the City stopped working. Faucets don’t work, and all of the bottled water has been stolen and used already. The more he thinks about it, the thirstier he feels. He’s feeling so frustrated and sorry for himself that not until the rat is almost done cooking does he notice he is being watched on all sides. First it’s the children, some huddled in groups and some alone, with arms hanging at their sides, mouths open, eyes hungry but also curious. Kite makes himself look them in the eye.

  “What are you looking at?” he asks gruffly, but he’s scared, because the adults are coming, too, now. Why are they staring at him like that?

  When he starts to eat, he hears a little girl cry, “Ew!”

  He jumps up, the meat in his hand. “What are y
ou looking at?”

  The people shuffle back slightly, but then regroup and come closer. They move with the mad, fearless tension of the desperate.

  “Are you a god?” asks an older man, staring into his eyes.

  “Of course not!”

  But he hears them whispering to each other as others join them: I saw him kill that animal, and then he made a fire without matches, out of nothing, and then he cooked it and ate it. I saw it!

  “Here!” Kite cries, stepping toward a young boy who’s staring open-mouthed at the meat, “take it! Do you want it? Take it! Eat!” But the boy stumbles backward into the bodies of the adults, his eyes panicked.

  “He’s a god!” come a new chorus of voices. “He makes fire from nothing. He makes food from rats!”

  There is a great swell of voices then, like aspen leaves clattering in the winds before a thunder storm. Kite stands there, bewildered. Once someone came to these people and offered to build a life where they would never hunger and never thirst, where everything was made for them—and they thought that person was a god. Now they look at Kite, who does what they once knew how to do, simply making his own food, making his own life—and they think he is a god.

  “Hey,” someone says, “if he’s a god, maybe they’ll let him in! Maybe they’ll listen to him.”

  “Yeah, send him in!”

  “Make them open the doors! Make them open the doors!”

  Kite’s protests don’t matter now, as the tide of human hands swells around him, lifting and carrying him, touching him everywhere, thrusting him forward toward their singular purpose: the great steel door. Kite turns and faces the crowd, his back against the cold metal, crying, “Listen to me!” and it’s a nightmare, because no one is listening. He closes his eyes, waiting to wake up. He can feel fists reverberating against the steel around him: Let him in! He’s a god!