Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Suddenly she feels the warm shape of her only love enclosing her from behind. He squats, bending his knees around her thighs where she kneels. “Close your eyes, Beloved,” he says softly.

  She does. She hears the jeering cry of the gulls, angry, happy, and wild, and she feels the precious breath of Sky on her cheek. She remembers all her other names, the names this life gave to her: Princess, Beloved, Yora, Meadow, Daughter, and that name in her mother’s language, which no one but she ever heard or ever would. But she wants a new name, one she doesn’t associate with any one person or loss, one that everyone can speak..

  She smells the lusciousness, the depth, the pain of the sea. What is that smell? That smell that makes the sea more than water, more than just the cold nameless element from which the first heartless, soulless life was born. It reminds her of the first time she breathed the fresh air through a hole her own breath and body had made in the ice of her tower wall. It reminds her of her own sex, hungry and delirious with pleasure. It reminds her of the taste of Sky’s human skin. It reminds her of everything human. It even reminds her of being born.

  “Salt,” she whispers.

  “Salt,” he whispers back.

  She opens her eyes and looks out over the silver nothingness. “But is it wrong of me to claim such an important word? Isn’t it as important as the wind and love and loneliness?” She bites her lip, holding back the thrill of it, feeling selfish.

  “I guess so. But you came to it in a different way. Not from your mind. Not from imagining yourself bigger than you are, but from your body, your heart, and from being here in my arms.”

  “But someone else could be Salt too. How could I claim it for mine?”

  “Someone else can be named Salt. I’m sure someone is. You don’t claim it. That’s not what a name is. A name is something that claims you. A name is what you give of yourself to the world.”

  She sighs. The breaking apart inside her, the stretching she felt, is happening, but the collapse she expected never comes. It doesn’t hurt so badly after all. She feels like she’s done this before. Her new name grows gently over her, like fur.

  When she opens her eyes, the name has taken a physical form, a new gown around her: simple, a little rough but flowing, nudging alive her most sensitive places, protecting her bare skin.

  “You look older,” he says, and she remembers the way he first saw her, at the spring at the top of the world. How far they have come! Now they stand close together, broken and cleansed, at the other end of the water’s journey—the deep end of that long fall.

  He takes her hands. “Salt,” he says.

  She smiles, full of joy.

  Then he says, “Salt,” again, and she realizes it is the beginning of a sentence, that he wants to tell her something. “I will come with you to the City. It is my path, too, I know. Coyote was right. I must face the nightmares.”

  Not understanding the suffering in his face, she reaches to touch it, and opens her mouth as if to speak, but doesn’t know what to say.

  “Salt,” he says again, and he grips her shoulders in his hands. His eyes are such a pale and wild blue, not cold after all, but so crystal-bright they are like fire—like the extreme heat at the center of a flame. “I want you to understand. I—”

  She freezes, waiting in the flame of those eyes, for never before has he hesitated over words like this; never before has his voice stumbled through his body like this, as if that body were some unexplored, rocky terrain.

  “I want you to understand that, if we stay here on this island forever, I think we will be happy. I would stay with you forever. I could keep us alive in some magical way. We would speak with the gulls and the terns, the passing migrations. We would learn about the sky, and we would listen to the sea all our days, and a long time from now, we would even be able to understand the language of the stars. There would be only us, inside our love.”

  “But,” cries Lonely, forgetting her new name, alarmed by how quickly she can feel herself falling into the temptation of such a dream, “I thought you said we couldn’t live only for ourselves—”

  “I know,” he whispers, and he pulls her swiftly against his chest and holds her tight there. “But I would now. I would live only for us. I would.”

  She sinks into the deep bliss of that holding and allows herself for a moment to think nothing, only to rest in her own longing. But the song of the wind around them sounds sad. Beyond his shoulder, she sees the others, the others who woke with her. They are mostly still for now. They sit in a daze, huddled apart from each other in the wind, their eyes white and bright. They look like the stones. Slowly, slowly, they will wake and remember. She has not truly looked at them yet. Soon she will have to. And so will Sky.

  “If we leave here,” Sky says, his lips close to her ear, “I don’t know what will happen to me. I want you to know that. I can’t promise anything. I can’t even promise I will stay with you.”

  “Why not?” she cries, pulling away and looking at him. “What difference does it make, where we are?”

  But the anguish in his eyes is so powerful, it brushes that little bit of anger away from her heart like dust. “I’m trying to tell you the truth,” he pleads. “I’m sorry to give you this choice, but I don’t know what will happen to me if we enter that world.”

  She lets her hands fall from his arms. She feels the old weight all over her. “I know what is right,” she sighs, looking down. “I know what I have to do. We are not the only ones who woke, Sky. You do not know, still, the darkness that is part of me. They are like my own blood, these people who woke with me. They are nothing but human. They are hungry, thirsty, cold, lonely….”

  But he lifts her chin in his hand, and for the rest of her life she will remember the tenderness, the utterly selfless urgency in his eyes as he answers, “I do know them. I do see them. You mistake me—and them. Don’t you see the wisdom that is in them? Don’t you believe yet in magic? Listen to me, Lonely—Salt—don’t do what you think you should do. Do what you long to do. It is more important than anything—for you, for me, and for the whole world. Follow your longing, and things will come right for everyone. You are the goddess of longing. Without your longing, I wouldn’t be here. I would be in a place so distant, so unreal, so unattached to anything, forever—” He stops, his voice full of tears, and shakes his head. “Far worse than anything that could happen to me in the City. Worse than death.”

  So she takes him back into her arms again. She strokes his back, crying with the memory of his silent tears in the meadow, his heavy walk across the lake to her, all the invisible worlds she could not see, that he had to break through in order to get to her. The name Lonely, too, will always be a part of her, and she sees that. But she imagines this life now: whole in their aloneness together, alone with the whole universe singing to them, forever. His heart forever warm and human, beating against hers. Finally.

  “This isn’t a decision I can make,” he says. “I have made the decisions I have needed to make, and I surrender now. Whatever you choose, I promise, will be right.”

  We were born into a world that had no story.

  It had no reason for being. It had a Creator, but we did not know the story of that Creator, why He had created this place, or if He had ever loved us.

  Every people, the Prince told us in the end, must have a story to sustain it. We must have a story to teach us how to live, why we matter, where the beginning and the end lie, and how to resurrect ourselves when we fall. The animals, he told us, all come into this world with stories already given to them, stories their ancestors have lived out forever. They know what to do. But we, the people, are gifted with the ability to write our own stories.

  Our human story, he said, must have gods in it. Gods are not separate from us, he said. Gods are simply what we call the heroes of our stories, so that those people can be larger than life, so that their actions will
live on and keep teaching us forever.

  We, the children of the City, came into this world without a story. So we, who are still young but will one day be old—who will one day, ourselves, be the ancestors of the young—write this Chronicle now, of what happened when the Princess came to our City, and our City was reborn. This will be our Creation Story.

  Our story begins with destruction. Everything that came before was broken.

  We had what we called a series of natural disasters.

  People will tell it differently, the order in which they came. It may be that the wind came first. We had hurricanes. Anything lighter than a building or a car was torn from the ground, and traffic swerved off of bridges. Pieces of our houses flew through the air and wounded us; some of us were killed by flying trash. Streets were so scattered with debris, we could not drive on most of them. It was dangerous to walk out of doors. Yet we were desperate to get out, for we discovered that within our houses we had almost nothing that we needed.

  There were studies that had predicted for a long time the coming of windstorms over clearcut forests where the roots were torn out. But there were other studies that said these studies were meaningless, that the winds worked differently, that our cycle of winds always came from the sea. There were other studies that said hurricanes were not possible in the valley we lived in, because of the shapes of the land around us, and so on. In the end, none of those studies turned out to be important.

  Sometime during or after the first storms, we ran out of fuel. We did not know such a thing was possible. Our cars stopped running and our machines stopped working. Our houses went dark and our supermarkets stopped receiving food. We became very afraid. It was rumored that groups of men who had once worked directly for Hanum, who knew about the fuel and where it came from, were making expeditions into the mountains to get more of it. It was rumored that for a price, food could be bought from the City Center, and that price was the fuel itself. People began searching for these secret expeditions in the mountains, killing each other over whatever that secret stuff was.

  While officials dispatched from the City Center, along with many other people whose names were never known, were still cleaning up from the chaos of the hurricanes, the earthquakes began. There were three quakes over a period of four and a half days, and the first was the biggest. Entire houses were swallowed into the earth. Bridges fell. Roads fractured and factories collapsed into heaps of rubble. Thousands of people were killed or never found. There had been no preparation for such a thing. No one had ever imagined it. Each person or family fought only for their own survival, and there was no count of the dead, and no help coming from anywhere. There were no more officials. The City Center was closed.

  We never knew or thought about what energy passed through the wires that wove our City together, or how it worked or what it meant, but as things began to fall, the wires fell and broke and tangled, and the energy inside them sparked out and turned to flame. At the same time, lightning struck and lit our structures—so dry after so many years without rain—on fire. The wind fueled the fire, and the fire began to eat the City alive.

  Then the flood came. The sea, which most of us had never seen, rocked back in response to the quake, and then came tearing forward. It washed over the City, drowning the fire and many of our people and everything that was left to us. When the waters finally receded, our City was unrecognizable, and there was no one alive who did not know great grief.

  All that we had made, both beautiful and ugly, was destroyed. Sewage flooded the streets. There were so many bodies, we had to pile them in pieces of houses and send them out to sea to stop the spread of disease. But disease came anyway, and it killed half the people who were left, and many of the others died from drinking filthy water, for there was no fresh water to be found. The rats attacked us in our sleep, and children died from their bites.

  What these events did to us, and what they made of us, is hard to describe. We are not who we were before all this happened. These disasters created who we are now more powerfully than our old god Hanum ever did. They made us question who we were and what the City meant to us. They made us feel things we had never felt before; they made us value our lives and our families as we had never valued them before.

  This, then, is the beginning of our Creation Story.

  In the Beginning, there was only chaos and death.

  In the Beginning, the people of the City were barely human yet. We had grief, despair, anger, and lust; we had desire and even moments of joy—such as when one of us found a loved one who was thought dead. But these feelings ruled us; we did not rule them. We did not yet seem to have souls. We crawled the earth in search of food, and sometimes we killed each other for it when we found it. We ate animals that had once been our pets. We disowned our friends in order to justify not sharing what we had. We did not yet know what food was or where it came from. We only knew that we needed it.

  But there came a time, in the early days, when we reached a sort of savage stability, a plateau of survival, in which tiny groups of family members or friends scraped together the barest of livings in various pockets of the City. We built fortresses out of rubble, or slept under tarps or out in the fields. It was spring, and growing warmer, and the question of surviving in the cold had not yet presented itself. It turned out that the City Center had not held all the keys to survival after all. There were people who had once worked there but had left or been fired, and there were smaller, secret groups who had raised food animals on their own and who were now willing to provide it to others at a price. Of course, there was not enough for everyone. But we found other ways. Some of us found food out in the fields around the City. The rains were coming regularly now, and that made things grow, and since we didn’t know what could be eaten, we ate everything out of desperation. Then more of us died, from poisoning and malnourishment. Many of the most sensitive, the most gentle people died first. But some of us lived.

  There were strange tales being told at this time. One told of a god-like, fire-breathing man who needed neither food nor water, and who helped to pull people from the rubble after the quakes—and who healed them with his touch. Another told of a boy—back when the entire populace was gathered around the gates of the City Center, begging for their survival—who did not seem to care, and who roasted a rat over a fire, which he then ate. Some said he was a god, and they thrust him then toward the locked doors. And where no one had ever before been allowed inside, he was let in. When he emerged, he brought nothing with him—no food, no aid. Yet the moment he stepped outside, it was said, the first rains fell. This was seen by some as a sign of renewal from the heavens. Though no one at that time would admit to believing in gods before all this happened, many people fell on their knees in gratitude. They filled whatever containers they could find and had water to drink. In their momentary hope, they even shared with one another. But nothing came after that. They were still hungry, and the gates never opened. When the initial joy of the rains had faded, the questions and demands came flooding forth again, but the boy was nowhere to be found. He had slipped away.

  No one knew what to make of these tales, but they were something to tell, and had something different in them than the daily misery that everyone knew. They had at least a hint of miracles in them, and that kept some of us hoping. And people learned from these stories. We started hunting the animals of the City the best we could, and we tried to cook and eat them. This was very difficult, and we did it at first with anger and frustration, without gratitude or knowledge.

  There is disagreement over when this change began, and to this day no one knows how it happened, but by some miracle, the river at some point, for no reason, became pure. Then we drank of it, and we did not die.

  It was during this time of early human life, this time when we had almost won our daily survival but still lived in brutal darkness, that another stranger came to the City. We did not know at first that she was a
woman. Before we heard of her, we heard of the people she came with. These people were monsters, or so we thought. We thought they were our own shadows, come to draw us down finally into the evil darkness that seemed to be overtaking the world. For most of us still thought we were living at the End of Days. We did not yet know that this was the Beginning.

  They came quietly and secretly through forgotten streets, and their voices were like growls, and they spoke terrifying words or no words at all. They had a kind of horror in their eyes that mirrored our own, and they were filthy and smelled of decay.

  It is hard to define what frightened us so much about them. There was something eerily unprotected in their faces and in the way they held their bodies. That was what made us turn away, cover our mouths and our eyes, and whisper “don’t look” to our children. They stood with such helplessness, looking back at us. The oldest ones among them lifted their shaking hands toward us and tried to form words. The young ones hopped excitedly from foot to foot and clutched at the others near them. Even the frightened ones were frightening in their stiffness, their eyes devouring us from within their senseless skulls. These people reached out to us with gestures so innocent in their blatant need, that they filled us with a pity verging on disgust.