Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “The ocean talked to me,” she says. “The Dark Goddess spoke to me again, through the ocean. And then through the ocean and through the thread of the river, the Bright Goddesses on a faraway mountain began to talk to me, too. We talked about the cycles of the world, and I understood that what was happening would not always be happening, that though I might die in misery, someday beyond me the world would turn again, and things would be right again. As I did in the beginning, I denied everything human in myself. I denied that I had ever loved. I denied that I had ever been a lover, or a mother.”

  “Don’t they call you the Dark Goddess? Why do they call you that?”

  “Because I understand Her. Though I ran from Her, it was that very darkness that made me do so, and I know who she is, and I know her power. I came back to her in the end, without even trying. We always come back to our fates anyway, daughter. Hanum, running away from destruction, only created it again on this side of the world. You, running away from this island, came back. And I, fleeing the Dark Goddess, became Her.”

  “And the Unicorn was born of it after all.”

  “Maybe so. But this Unicorn was born of pain and suffering, a sacrifice forced upon her—ah, something you should never have to know.”

  “But Mother, listen. What if you didn’t do anything wrong? What if you did exactly what you were supposed to do? What if everything you did was your way of meeting with, living with, experiencing that darkness within yourself? What if you were sacrificed to the Dark Goddess after all, but in a different way? Haven’t you suffered enough, Mother? What if all you have to do is forgive yourself, and it will be all right?”

  The old woman bows her head. Maybe, maybe. But soon her daughter will be lost to her forever, again. What else matters? And she has not told her daughter that she killed Hanum herself. It is too much for a child to bear.

  Now they are silent, and the old woman feels desperate, knowing her daughter will soon be asleep and all will be lost, wanting something sweeter than all this darkness, wanting to lift herself out of it but overpowered by her own grief, as if she lies prone at the bottom of the sea.

  Lonely says, “I wonder who he really was.”

  “Who?”

  “Sky. He did rescue me, after all. He was that white bird that opened my heart so I could see beyond the tower. But I still had to make my own journey, and I had to come back here, and go deeper, and understand the truth of things. Sometimes I think of him now, and it seems so long ago, what we shared, that I wonder if I still remember him right or if I ever really knew him. The longing, sometimes, feels more real than he does. But then, sometimes I remember little moments—looking into each other’s eyes in a cloud, holding hands while we flew, hearing his stories of dreams, seeing his tears in the meadow I made bloom for him one perfect morning, touching and forgiving each other in the lake—and I think, that was so much! I had everything then! Why wasn’t that enough? Why did I always want more?”

  “There is no such thing as love.” The old woman says it again, because it is the only advice she knows to give. “At least not the kind that people imagine.”

  “But there is. There is, Mother. It’s just so hard to let it in. It takes courage. It takes the bravest kind of person to be happy.”

  The old woman sighs. “Perhaps. I never was brave.”

  “But now I know where I got my courage from,” cries her daughter with renewed passion. “I got it from you. I jumped into the unknown like you did. And I had the greatest adventure. Nothing could stop me—I traveled so far!”

  The old woman strokes her daughter’s fluid, milkweed hair. “It is foolish to go running after love, child. That is what I tried to tell you. We think we see love, but we do not know what love is. We see only a silly fantasy, a mocking mirror of ourselves. Hanum and I, we never saw each other, never knew who we were.”

  “Then why did you push me off the island,” insists Lonely, “and challenge me to go after my dreams?”

  The old woman is silent. She does not know.

  “Come down here,” says her daughter quietly, “and hold me.”

  So the mother wraps her body around the daughter, crying as she does so because she realizes that this is all she ever wanted, but she was afraid to do it without being asked, afraid her daughter would no longer want her.

  “Did you have a name for me?” is the girl’s final question, the question the old woman has been expecting.

  “Of course. What mother does not name her child?”

  She feels the girl take a wild, surprised breath, suddenly more awake again. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  The old woman sighs. Because I thought I had no more love to give. Because I thought my motherhood had been taken away from me. Because I could not bear to love you. I could not bear to hope again. “Because it is in another language,” she says. “My language, from where I come from.”

  “Is that Sky’s language, too?”

  “Yes.” She feels the sadness of this, for her daughter—that Sky kept his own language secret from her—but she doesn’t know what to say.

  “Tell me my name,” whispers her daughter. “Tell me my name, as I fall asleep.”

  “Our language is different than yours,” begins the old woman. “It is made of different sounds. We did not use our voices as much as you—as much as the people of the City do. The breath that makes voice was sacred to us and saved for sacred purposes. When we talked with each other, intimately, person to person, our language was made instead of sounds that we formed with our mouths and hands, without voice.” She says a couple of things for Lonely, to show her. I love you, she says. You are so beautiful I can almost see you, she says. She says these things with soft sweeps and clicks of her tongue, her lips, her teeth, her fingers tapping on the ground. There are some words that cannot even be said without the earth or the elements to make sound against with one’s body. And all of these kinds of words are awkward for her, because this personal human language was not one she ever used in the holy life that was given to her.

  “Our voices we only used for sacred communication,” she continues, “like prayer, or to speak of sacred things. Usually, a person’s name is a little bit of both. A little bit of voice-sound, for the god in them, and a little bit of human-body-mouth sound, for the human in them and all the other people’s love for them that makes them what they are.”

  She takes a deep breath, hears only silence from Lonely, and continues quickly.

  “I don’t know much about naming, because I only ever heard a few names in my whole life. But I named you the best I could. Your name—it’s like this.” Then she says it. It starts with a light kissing sound, and flows into a long wailing “aaaaiiiii,” and ends on a low, contented hum. Then she has to struggle harder to explain, because saying the name aloud has made her begin to lose her control over Hanum’s language, the language she learned more recently. “It means—It means something like hope. Where hope begins, where it takes you….”

  But her daughter is silent, her breaths deep and even, and the space between each breath is as dark and final as the sea.

  So the old woman says her daughter’s name, over and over again, and the sound of that name is the sound the waves have always made against this bony shore on stormy nights, over and over, though she never admitted to it until now.

  And she herself does not sleep, and she does not die yet after all, and when—a long while later—she hears footsteps coming lightly, slowly, down the stairs, she knows why.

  The water rains down. Finally, like a god that is no longer a cloudy dream in the sky but closer in—closer to the center, here among the people—it slicks you down, pressing you to the earth.

  Who was he? you ask yourselves, as reality falls away beneath you and bares your hearts to fear. As the quakes begin again, most of you run; a few of you stand still.

  Who was he? you ask as you h
old each other in streets you once recognized by name, and as reality transforms, solids breaking apart and crumbling while the wind rolls into liquid form.

  The rain has stopped now. But not the wind. The rain did not rain long enough to dampen the sparks that ignite from the wires, that fall when the ground shakes itself loose from the concrete.

  Who was he, whom we trusted without question, and for whom we gave up the life of our ancestors—a life we can no longer remember?

  Husbands and wives are buried beneath this wreckage—they have been calling out for days. Computers, which had no programs for survival, freeze like prehistoric jewels, and then fade and pile up in the rubble. You must return to recognizing your friends by their faces alone. What happened to the elders in the old people’s home? No one can get into that building. The teachers who tried to keep the schools running now gather their weeping flocks in the broken classrooms and try to remember their first aid lessons.

  Who was he, that he could cage the imagination of an entire people?

  In the hospitals that still stand, and even in the ones that do not, there are those of you who are staying alive to help other people, to save each other. You are not trying to be heroes; it is just what you do.

  Who was he? Did he truly love us?

  Was he a man or a god?

  What did he want?

  Do you wonder it with hatred, with bitterness, or with tears, like children betrayed? Those few of you who never fit in, who were strange and sensitive, who could never quite manage in this world—though you will be the first to die—wonder it with a tenderness you can neither explain nor defend.

  In his lifetime, he had everything: ultimate loss, courageous adventure, romantic bliss, ecstatic love, bitter disappointment, the dizzying power of success, despair, nostalgia, desire, the touch of his own sweet child, the beauty of his own dreams. He got to feel everything, and yet nobody knows him at all, and he died alone, and he died weeping.

  Hanum. You know only his name.

  At first the old woman will not look up. Stubborn with shame, she follows the lines of his feet, the bent grace of the bones that crease a knife’s edge between his ankles and his elegant, golden toes. She waits for him to speak, but when he doesn’t, pride she did not even know she still had fountains up her spine, and before she knows it she is looking into his eyes. Then she realizes she is looking. She can see him, all lit up and pure, as if the room were full of light.

  She drinks in his face, his whole body. She recognizes the vulnerable stretch of skin over his thin breast bone—a design she held in her memory since that first and only moment she ever saw him, without realizing that she remembered it, without realizing that she even saw it. She sees the swell of his breast and remembers his young shoulders stretching apart, his body thrust forward in challenge, his murderous eyes. But now his hands are soft at his sides, and beneath that boyish breastbone she can see his heart trying to hold still. She can see right into him.

  She can see the surprise in his eyes when she lifts her head, the recognition, and then the door that shuts over it. And as soon as he shuts that door in his eyes, she is herself again: a blind old woman in a black cave in the middle of a nowhere sea. She cannot see him any more. But she knows he is there.

  “Prince,” she says in their language, “will you help an old woman?” She holds out her hand. Stiffly, he takes it in his, and she feels the force of his body in the pull. But she cannot stand like this. “Aaagh,” she cries out, her spine cracking.

  “Sorry,” he whispers hurriedly, apparently coming to his senses, and kneels to help her up bit by bit, her body slung over his shoulders in a tangle of veins and skin and hollow bones and wrinkled-up heart. By the time he has finally brought her to standing, they are holding each other as intimately as lovers. She feels his gentle, respectful lifting and turning, his polite hands, the hidden heat in his chest and pelvis, and she nearly falls again with the weight of this new, hopeless longing. Ah, it could have been like this. This could have been mine. Or could it? Then she remembers. He would only have rescued her for death. He would only have carried her into the waiting jaws of the Dark Goddess.

  Now he stands back awkwardly again. “You’re still young,” she says dryly. “You haven’t been living down here, on the earth, like me.”

  “Grandmother,” he begins, using the respectful term for an elder, as if he does not know her.

  “Oh, stop,” she tells him irritably. “Don’t pretend you don’t recognize me.”

  She feels him shift his weight. She focuses her blind eyes on the spot where she thinks his heart is. She waits. But he doesn’t respond.

  “What? You are angry with me. I turned you away, yes? Tell me.”

  Silent.

  “Sky,” she says softly. She hears him draw in his breath, feels the anger in that breath, anger at the threat of his own feelings, perhaps. “That is your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your real name?”

  “Sky,” he says again, his voice hard.

  “Sky,” she shakes her head, “you torture yourself over nothing. I did not reject you. I was only afraid. I was young and stupid. You came to claim me for my own death, did you not? I was only afraid. Can’t you understand that?”

  Silence. And then: “Yes.”

  “Why did you try to stop me?”

  Silence.

  “Why?” she repeats.

  She hears him take a deep breath. “Because it wasn’t right. Because if the rite wasn’t completed, the world— Everything would come undone. I had to fight—”

  “Oh!” she cries out, lifting her arms. “If the rite wasn’t completed. Be serious! You stand there, hurt. Tell me the truth. Be brave, boy! Tell the truth.”

  She feels his tears coming, feels them wash over him. “Because I wanted you for mine,” he whispers. “Because I was jealous.”

  “There,” she says gently, taking him in her arms. “There now, it’s not so bad, is it? We were only silly and young. It’s not important now.” But in her heart she is so tired. He is just like Hanum. Another childish boy who thought he knew what was best for her, who, terrified of his own feelings, hid them behind grand statements of righteousness and worldly purpose. Another boy who wanted to decide her future for her. Well, she decided her own future, in the end. Even if it gave her nothing, even if it yielded nothing but years and years of empty sea, still she had chosen.

  “Now,” she says, standing him back again, feeling him square his shoulders between her hands and obligingly letting him go, “what did you come here to fight for this time?”

  “For love,” he says.

  The old woman feels her daughter’s breathing, that warm sleep behind her in the blackness where he cannot see. She knows she can feel her own daughter’s presence in a way that Sky never can. But she nods. “Good. It’s foolish what she is doing. It is too long that women have had to pay for the sins of their fathers and lovers.”

  They stand there silent now, and in only a moment they are both young again, neither one of them understanding what will happen now, both full of passion and without wisdom. Or so it seems to the old woman. Fear begins to close around her again, that familiar damp cloak. She stares sadly into the beautiful boy, feeling the darkness of her own eyes.

  Finally, she says, “I suppose you will have to do something with all of that.” She gestures behind her to the mess of bodies there—her own mess, she feels now, a mess that she made and is unable to fix. “I suppose you will know what to do, warrior prince. But first—” She swallows. “What will you do with me?”

  For now she wants to go back; she wants to give up that choice after all. She wants to be, for the first time, in a way she never allowed herself to be since the day she first saw Hanum, humble. She wants to believe in Sky. She wants something, at last, to surrender to.

  “I will rescue you
,” he says. Then he lifts her, easy as a handful of flowers, into his arms.

  Then that chosen one, who once was light, who once was pure, who once was virgin and unafraid, leans her head into his shoulder. Now he will return me to that destiny I ran from long ago, she thinks. Now at last I will have to meet that darkness; now at last I will be swallowed into it. But at least for these few moments, I can feel the pleasure of his warm, living heart. What pleasure is greater than this! And she almost forgets her daughter, Hanum, the City, the island, and her whole story, for the sake of absolutely melting into those sweet earnest arms.

  In a moment, she feels the familiar steely cold of the winter sea around her and hears the sound of the waves circling and doubling back on themselves, reinventing themselves again and again. She hears the cries of the gulls, flashing white in her body. Perhaps he will toss her into the sea, as she did to her own daughter. Where, finally, does that Dark One await her?

  But he is holding her aloft, as if she weighs nothing. Indeed, her bones now to her seem to weigh less than flames. The heat of his arms and his hands consumes her. She no longer feels the cold.

  “What are you waiting for,” he whispers in their language. “What are you waiting for, my love?”

  She opens her lips. They are the lips of a young girl. They are lips which want to taste what the eyes could once see, lips which press eagerly against the call of death, lips which cry out and refuse. But she says, “I am waiting for Her to take me.”

  “Ah, Grandmother,” he says. “You have already been taken. You have been taken and devoured, broken and washed clean. You have surrendered, and you have come through, and here you are—just born, and finally knowing how to love. Isn’t it true? Hasn’t the Unicorn been born, after all?”

  The old woman begins to laugh, and she laughs and laughs, knowing it is true—knowing that what she always feared has already happened. With each laugh she is bounced higher and higher, like a laughing baby in his arms, and he laughs with her, until, with one final laugh, she flies out of his arms like a bird of smoke into the impossible air, into the impossible sky.