by Mindi Meltz
He tries to see her. He tries to see her as if he has never seen her before, as if each detail of her body and each moment of her being were a gift made innocently and earnestly by a pure-hearted child. He tries to see her as if he were truly a god, and she were truly nothing more than what is.
He sees the woman who loved, though she, too, was afraid. He sees the helplessness of her hair and her flesh to gravity, the helplessness of her mind to sleep. He sees the good intention that led her here, the tender foolishness of her humanity, and the way her eyes move beneath her eyelids in search of the light and ever forgetting. He sees the shape of her: the hips that spread and circle to welcome and nourish love, the shoulders that hold and protect her, the breasts that offer life to him who would take it. He sees the lips that do not know themselves when they speak, the cheeks that fall sadly, the heroic and hardy feet turned together in rest.
The more he watches her—the more he watches that moonlight that comes from her and tries to understand where it is and how it arises—the more he wants to touch her. The urge lurches, breathless and heavy, through his stalled mind. He feels his own hand, like an undiscovered creature, crawl of its own volition toward the surface of the water, toward the place where hers is drifting. As it draws closer, he hears the ocean screaming in his ears; he feels his heart panting in his mouth; his ankles burn; his earlobes vibrate.
He stops when his fingers touch the water, for the water is so warm it is nearly hot. Then he moves quickly, suddenly knowing that he must rescue her again, that it is for this he is here, to wake her from this dream. He reaches through the warm water for her smooth waist and cups his hand beneath her shoulder. But he cannot touch her. She is right there, but he cannot reach her. Something is happening to her body. Rainbows flash on her skin as the light turns back on itself, playing tricks with his eyes. The more he tries to catch those rainbows in his vision—here at her throat, here in the crook of her elbow, here under her eyes, here burning between her breasts—the more they draw him in and the more they thicken. Like the fog out on the shore, colors surround her and hide her face—indigo, blood red, midnight blue, ecstatic yellow, lucid green, flaming orange, violet. Then he is spinning among them, and before he even knew he would go in, he is in—he is underwater. He is spinning lost in a whirlpool of color, and she is spinning, too, and still he cannot reach her.
“I love you,” he says. “I love you! I love you! I love you!” The words, underwater, bubble from his mouth. He paws at the rainbows, pulling them aside. He reaches for her body.
The colors merge into light. He sees her eyes. They are open. They are dark, like her mother’s—nearly purple in their darkness, but so bright.
She smiles. Lonely, the woman he loves.
He is kissing her. This time, he knows what he is doing. This time he means it, not because he has a dream of what will happen, but in spite of his fear of what could happen and all that happened before. How easily she touches him now! How easy he feels in the water, how much more real than he ever knew. She draws him in with her hands, her warm everywhere-ness, so fast it overwhelms him. How he missed her! How could he never know how much he missed her? With a giant need he did not even know was there, he is already inside her, so recklessly does the hot dark cave of the goddess engulf him. All his thinking gone, all his dreams—he is something else now. He is so deep inside her that he cannot see himself, and there is nothing to hold onto, and he rises above his own self and then falls inside the fingernail grip of her small hands on his shoulders, exploding before he even knows what is happening. He falls asleep inside her arms, inside the ocean, inside the world, before he has time to feel afraid.
Maybe she hasn’t rescued Mira after all. Because what is this silent creature, like an unsolved mystery, walking beside her?
They are following the purple ridge now, which is not purple up close but many colors in the changing light, bushy in all its crevices with gnarled evergreen shrubs and waxy serrated leaves. A stream runs between the ridge and the City, from which they draw water into a leather bag every morning. But it narrows more and more until they reach the place where several moons ago—though it seems many lifetimes ago now—Delilah watched the ridge blasted through to make way for the road. The road is black and shining with nothing on it. They cross it and continue upward, through ever-young, scratchy forest that has been cleared again and again, and through newly cleared wastelands of stumps and crows. Using Kite’s map, they find a new stream that is one of many forks connecting to the one Kite says runs right through his house, still a long way away.
In order not to let the sight of these forest wounds, these deep emptinesses, weaken her further, in order not to go mad with the silence of the Unicorn and the feeling of despair that sweeps through her every time she looks at it, in order not to weep with the frustration of her constant, ravenous hunger, in order not to think of all the things she craves, in order not to let her despairing bones collapse beneath her, Delilah tries to focus on love.
She knows that Dragon loves her. She knows that all she would have to do is ask, and he would support her physically with his strong body, even carry her, perhaps, every step of the way. It is too much for her to imagine such a thing, but she tries, little by little, drop by drop, to let herself acknowledge his love, even if she doesn’t show it, even if she avoids his eyes.
At first she hated to need their help; she hated for them to come quickly to take her arm whenever she stumbled. But maybe that is only something she has gotten used to telling herself. Maybe she doesn’t hate it at all. Maybe she only wants to hate it, because not to hate it feels selfish. These are the strange, delirious thoughts that come to her as they walk, when she is so tired she can barely register her surroundings.
Now she is listening to Dragon as he listens to Kite, as they talk behind her. She listens to Dragon’s earnest, serious response, and she can imagine his brows drawing importantly together, his head bent to concentrate on the words of this new friend he holds so dear. It almost makes her smile. Kite is talking about some girl he likes.
“…more beautiful than any woman I have ever seen,” he’s saying, “and I don’t know…” But she can’t catch the rest of it because he is whispering in a choked, embarrassed sort of way.
Dragon’s voice is a little louder. “What do you think she wants?”
“I don’t know,” Kite says. “I never thought of that. Maybe she wants something from me. But how can I know what it is?”
“Maybe she needs some opening from you, some offering.”
Delilah doesn’t know who the girl is, but she feels a silly little twinge of sadness, like she’s never felt before, that no one has ever spoken of her that way. With that kind of reverence and wonder for what is innocent and pure, that boyish desire which the boy holds back because he respects so much what is desired.
It must be the pregnancy that makes her so unpredictably emotional. Suddenly she loves both of them. But most of all she feels for Dragon, who has loved her, from the beginning, with an innocence she could not accept until now. She has wanted to tell him the child is his—she has wanted to and yet cannot. She does not want the burden of his pity, his sense of obligation to her, or whatever he might feel about it. She doesn’t want how vulnerable it makes her feel, as if somehow telling him would mean admitting to that last time they made love—as if somehow he would know, by her pregnancy, how deep he really got inside her that time, how deeply he claimed her, how vividly she always remembered the world inside his arms that day, and how vividly she always will.
What is the love of this life she carries within her, something her body acknowledged long ago even though her mind is still catching up—a different kind of love, a love no one has ever felt for her? The love of something that needs her, that would die without her, that is part of her, that decided, against her will, that she was good enough, whole enough, to grow up inside. She tries to be grateful for that, th
ough it terrifies her.
But Mira—is this really her? Is this strange white being who walks beside them any more or less her sister than the empty shell of a girl that Delilah shook by the shoulders so long ago, who could no longer form human words? That blessed moment on the beach where two sisters held each other and felt the skin over each others’ spines, where they spoke to and understood one another—that time, like a dream fulfilled, is gone now. Mira has not been human since, nor has she spoken, nor has she given any indication of recognizing Delilah, except by traveling with them now. Sometimes Delilah tiptoes to the Unicorn in the night, thinking she will stroke its back and whisper Mira’s name. But the Unicorn stands untouchable and does not look toward her as she approaches. Delilah always stops, her heart falling through her rib cage in sorrow, and cannot go on. She stops the way she stopped as a child before the sight of Mira sitting in their father’s lap, in the kitchen in the middle of the night. She stops because she feels she does not belong in the place where her sister is.
But is that really the reason? For she knows something more now, deep in her guts, something she never wanted to know about what happened in that kitchen between a man and a little girl. Is it Dragon’s powerful male presence, perhaps, that frightens Mira and keeps her inhuman? Or is it this thing still unspoken between Mira and Delilah? For in Delilah’s heart, there nags the thought that in their youth, as much as she swore to defend Mira and begged her to speak her secrets, still there was a question that Delilah never asked. A question she would never have acknowledged then, but which she is forced to acknowledge now. In Delilah’s heart, there nags the persistent possibility that rescuing Mira was not the final great act of courage after all. There is something still to be done, something Delilah is more than afraid to do, because it would require rebuilding the entire structure of her memories. It implicates her in a guilt greater than, as a child, she ever knew.
There is something else haunting Delilah, too, with every step she takes toward the mountains and away from the desert forever. It isn’t her painful and surprising nostalgia for the cave she called home for so many years, or the proud survival she staked in that place, or even the wind and the space of that freedom—that home, that land of outcast animals, that brutal place that loved her against all odds and that she misses against all odds now. No, it is what’s beyond the desert that haunts her. It is that forest of her dreams and all her nourishment, the forest of her father, which she promised to burn down and could not. Maybe she told herself that after her search for Mira, she would return to do it. But of course that was never going to happen. And the pine forest, be it a dream or not, is still there: she knows because she dreams of it almost every night, and she wakes with a coldness in her bones, for in the dreams there are no animals, no sign of life. There is only a sad, empty blowing through the abandoned spaces between the trees, like a song of loss, like the sound of betrayal.
Who has been betrayed? Her father, Mira, the forest, Delilah herself? Sitting on the ridge in the evening while the boys insist on cooking her food, she stares out toward the desert and toward that cliff she knows is out there. It is impossible for her to go there now. She’ll be lucky if she makes it alive to Kite’s house, with the little strength that’s left in her.
One night when the moon is full, with her head against a dusty, soft rock that reminds her of the desert, she dreams she hears the cicadas breathing in their cocoons where they nurse patiently from the nourishing roots of trees. This year they are going to sing, after seventeen years of growing in the dark truth of the earth. This year they have finally learned their song. In the dream she hears the silence of that shrill song before it is sung, and she knows you have to wait for age, you have to wait for wisdom, but if you keep drinking from the roots of things it will come. Then Delilah knows she will survive after all, and she knows the older she gets, the stronger she will be. She can feel spring breathing up from the ground.
In the dream the cicadas are telling her a story, which she cannot remember immediately when she wakes. But like the morning she woke from a dream in the desert where she slept in hopelessness at the river’s end, she wakes with a fierce clarity, and that clarity contains Mira’s name.
She creeps to the Unicorn, who is lying white in the grey, cold grass, eyes open. She kneels down. She grips the base of its neck between the shoulder blades and whispers sharply in its silken ear.
“Mira,” she says. She watches its eyes. “There is a pine forest beyond the desert. If you know where it is, take me there.”
With a jolt, the Unicorn stands. The hairs of its mane bristle like the hairs on a human’s cold skin. Delilah lets go. They breathe together for a moment of awkward silence, Delilah staring at the body of this animal, wondering at the lands it has traveled, remembering her father in the body of a boar with two white horns bursting out of his face. The Unicorn stands unmoving. It takes a great mental shift for Delilah to realize that she is not being proud or distant, but simply waiting for Delilah to get on.
Delilah hoists herself up easily; the Unicorn is small. Delilah has never ridden a horse before. She feels the animal’s belly contract with breath between her thighs. She wonders how they will get there. Will they run? Fly?
But while she is wondering, they are already there.
For the Unicorn moves the way dreams move. Or the way cars move. You are here in one place, and then all of the sudden, while you are thinking about something else, you are in another place. There is no memory of the between-here-and-there that connects the two places. For a dream is like a road, where we cannot feel the passing of the landscape, and the City, with its disconnected spaces, is and always was a kind of dream.
They are already here. Delilah slides off the Unicorn’s back and lets go. The Unicorn glows in the dead silence of the pine shadows, a glow that seems to communicate directly with the moon. Delilah feels the old sorrow and horror of the hunt fly like a distant scream through her bones.
“Mira,” she says, and Mira the Unicorn turns and looks into her eyes. “I killed a doe here once, Mira,” she says. “With eyes like yours.”
Then she realizes that she doesn’t have to figure out how to explain why they are here. Mira is the one person in the world who will understand without any disclaimers or explanations, the one person to whom she can tell a dream without apologizing for the disjointed elements, the confusion, the senselessness, the beings that changed form and the places that were more than one place. Because Mira is crazy.
So Delilah says without any preamble, “Our father came to me here, Mira. He came in the form of a boar. He took me to the heart of the forest, after I had hunted here for ten years. He told me I had to burn this forest down. But I could not do it. Do you know why?”
The Unicorn is frozen. She might actually be made of ice, she holds so still. Delilah cannot see her breathing. She is not still the way she was when Delilah came toward her questioningly in the night, back on the ridge with the boys. She is still like something so terrified that it hopes stillness alone will keep it from being seen. Yet how ridiculous it is to see this stillness in one whose light shines so brightly, so beautifully, that the trees seem to sigh in its presence and the whole forest rests with relief inside it. Filled with tenderness, Delilah rises up and wraps her arms around the Unicorn’s neck.
“I just remembered,” she whispers. “I remembered the story I dreamed. The story the cicadas have been drinking from the trees.”
The Unicorn twitches. Delilah is startled, suddenly, by the mirror light of her horn. If she looks at it closely, it seems to reflect rivers, forests, meadows….
“It goes like this,” she says, trying not to think, breathing into the Unicorn’s trembling shoulder. “A hundred years ago, Hanum, a desperate and lonely man, destroyed the heart of the world and built a City on top of it. He cleared forests all around it for wood, and he sucked the earth dry for the magic fuel of the ancestors that woul
d make the City run. The peoples who lived in the magical places were all driven out. Without their land, they could not make sustenance or meaning, and they lost each other. The only way they could survive was by finding jobs in the City and making money.” Delilah presses her forehead to the Unicorn’s back, for she feels foolish. She’s no story-teller. She’s no healer. Everything she’s saying, so simple and child-like, is nothing more than the basic history she and Mira have always known. In fact, Mira probably knows far more, more that their father revealed only to her….
But beneath her head, something is changing in the fur of the animal. It is thinning. The Unicorn’s body is baring its vulnerable skin—the way a man bares his head to the heavens as he ages, or the way baby animals are born bare, or the way humans bared their bodies to the Universe and gave themselves up, long ago, saying I will make my own protection or I will die. The Unicorn is evolving into a human being.
So Delilah keeps going. “A man who was once a shaman of his people, who once had direct communication with their Goddess, and knew the Unicorn by name, now lost himself in the anonymous monotony of factory work. Then one day, twenty-five years ago, it rained, one last time, over the buildings and the pavement, and when the man felt the tears of the sky he almost remembered. He wept for joy. He saw a beautiful woman coming toward him, and she reminded him of what he had lost. He thought that if he could have her, he might be able to begin again. He thought, This woman will embody for me all of the universe, all of the spirit which I have lost. I will worship this woman, and in her I will hide the secret of my faith. And so they fell in love, or thought they did, Mira. They got married. But they did not understand each other. The woman could no longer see in him the shaman she thought she had found. For he was beaten down, day after day, by the soulless work in the soulless factory. Then the man could no longer see the light in her. Instead, he saw only his own failure. Then they had two daughters, Mira—”
