Lonely in the Heart of the World Read online

  LONELY IN THE HEART OF THE WORLD

  by MINDI MELTZ

  LOGOSOPHIA

  Logosophia, LLC

  Copyright 2013 Lonely in the Heart of the World by Mindi Meltz. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book can be utilized by any means, either electronic or mechanical, excepting brief passages used by reviewers or within critical articles, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Logosophia, LLC

  90 Oteen Church Road

  Asheville, NC 28805

  www.logosophiabooks.com

  This book is a work of fiction, and thus of the author’s imagination. None of the characters, places or incidents represented within have any real connection to any actual persons, places or deities, living or dead, beyond the coincidental.

  First Edition

  Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

  Meltz, Mindi

  Lonely in the Heart of the World

  ISBN 978-0-9815757-6-6 e-reader edition

  ISBN 978-0-9815757-4-2 paperback

  Cover design and layout by Susan Yost

  Cover art by Brian Mashburn

  Calligraphy and illuminated lettering by Krys Crimi

  Back cover and interior art by Chiwa

  This book is dedicated to my father, who taught me the

  languages of water, silence, and unconditional love.

  Contents

  Without

  Fire

  Earth

  Air

  Water

  Within

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  The mass illusion of this mind

  connecting reality with lost time,

  going back where the silver river runs,

  remembering when we danced upon the sun,

  and the golden painted ponies, they raced upon the land,

  and the brothers and the sisters, they joined the gypsy band,

  and the crocodile he slept well into the day,

  and the kookaburra she wept, for she had something to say:

  She said kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, what have I done?

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, I’m the only one.

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, my family left me here.

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, I’m alone, I fear.

  Well the flamingo he stood upon his webbed paw.

  He said Kookaburra, why are you crying?

  Is there no one left at all?

  And the kookaburra looked up with a tear upon her cheek.

  This standing, wise flamingo was a soul she sought to seek.

  And the sky he opened up, where an eagle-bird did soar,

  and he swept across the mountains, to love the earth once more.

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, I see it all so clear.

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, your family is right here.

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, wipe your tears away.

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, we are here to stay.

  Well the blue heron, he waltzed along the oceanside

  to the song of a banjo-violin and tears no longer cried.

  And the dolphin, she thought, without a single word,

  about everything and nothing and how walking is absurd.

  And the kookaburra she smiled. She turned her frown away.

  And her eyes they changed to laughter; she had one last thing to say:

  She said, kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, coo coo beh-da beh-dam doo da…

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, coo da-n-doo da-n-doo dee da…

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, sah endoo endah dah-n-dah dee da…

  Kookaburra kookaburra coo coo, coo coo coo…

  “Nothing of the Sort” by Utah Green

  shape of the rocky island around the tower, the churning of the salt and sea around the island, the changing textures of a faraway shore, the cries of the City. She heard only the muffled thump of the wind’s blasts against the glass’s curve, and beneath that the hollow drone of infinity.

  The day her father did not come, she never thought to call out to him, for she had never thought beyond this room. She sat still and tried to remember the stories he had told her, and what would happen next.

  Sometimes the wind hissed outward, and sometimes it sucked inward. Sometimes it wound like a soft ribbon around the tower, and at other times it came battering and beating as if the tower were the only thing that stood in its way, and she did not know whether it raced toward something in the future or away from something in the past.

  She did not yet know what she was.

  “Someone will rescue me,” she remembered, whispering it. “Love will come.”

  She tried to draw comfort from her father’s promise, but she did not understand what it meant. Her own voice in the silence horrified her. Though she stood at the top of the tower and faced out, still she saw nothing but herself. For the glass was not a window but a mirror, and the mirror surrounded her.

  What did you mean, when you imagined a princess?

  Not someone who would rule one day as queen; no one with any power.

  “Princess!” you cried out as children, when your eyes could still track the movement of light off a worn path into the wilderness beyond, and you meant that anything was possible.

  “Princess,” you giggled in the locker room when you were older, and you meant someone who wanted too much, who expected more than she had been taught to hope for.

  “Princess,” you sneered when you were older still, and you meant a kind of beauty that could never apply to yourselves, a beauty which seemed foolish now that childhood was over.

  “Princess,” you muttered, shaking your heads years later, and mistaking habit for wisdom you laughed at the very idea of innocence: nobody was ever that good or that guileless, and your age—if nothing else—had taught you that much.

  But of course the truth is that there was a god once, who destroyed the old, beautiful world—and then he was sad, because the new world he made disappointed him, and he did not know how to reclaim what he had lost. So he locked his daughter up high in a circle of glass, in order to preserve her. He kept her apart from you, so she would never know what he had done.

  In her he saw what he had intended from the very beginning. He told her she was his goddess and would live forever. Princess, he called her. For he did not want to endanger her with something so human, so specific, so partial as a name.

  “You’re too old for this,” you say to your son, taking the toy sword from his hand. “Do your homework.”

  So the boy, somewhere in some house, bends his body into the chair, and takes the tiny sword of the pen in his hand instead. Inside, his body still swings with the rhythm of the movement he was making. He stares at the numbers and questions written on the square paper on the square desk. And he thinks about the shape of girls.

  You go down the stairs, unaware of increasing your closeness to the earth. You do not touch your wife.

  Once there was a story about beauty, and the heroism it took to live such beauty.

  But that story is no longer told in the City.

  So now you—man and woman, in some house somewhere—sit on different couches and watch the TV, because you want to know about the world.

  But what is this world?

  You think the City is reality. You think this is the world. You would say the story begins here, where all the people are.

&nbs
p; The City is made of rectangles, and what the rectangles are made of is no longer recognizable and has no name. It is hard and shiny, and it does not change with the weather. Also the City is made of people, and all of your thoughts and feelings, and your belief in a god who fed you on promises.

  The City smells like fuel and trash and sterilization. It sounds like alarms and curses and motors, sudden stops and the songless hum of machines. It tastes like black metal dust, and it feels like nothing.

  The even ground in the City makes your bones clatter dryly against each other when you walk. The lights stay on all night. You step out of buildings and into cars, and then suddenly you are somewhere else, and you cannot remember what you were thinking of, and then you get out of the cars and step into buildings. And you cannot remember how your bodies did that. You all have jobs, and your jobs have nothing to do with living, and yet you need them to survive.

  The City is never dark and never quiet. In the offices, in the schools, in the cars, you must sit tight and never move; yet at the same time, there is never any stillness.

  It goes on like this. Comfort is bright lights, crowds, the inside of a car, big rooms up high. Excitement is loud noise, the idea of sex, and anything new. Happiness is a new Thing, and sorrow is being without It. The arms of the City do not embrace its people, but reach outward in ever-expanding roads, clawing desperately at the Earth.

  This is the world, you think.

  You do not ask yourselves what planet you live on. You do not ask yourselves where you are. You do not ask yourselves if this story is real.

  But if you could look down from the sky, you would see how small the City actually is. It would not look real. It would look like a clumsy child’s drawing: amidst richly hued hills that change with the light, the City would seem to break into those curves with a flatness that hollows your belly out to look at, leaving a plain of shattered pieces defined only by grey, thickened lines.

  The god who drew this City believed he could re-make the world. He thought his drawing was realistic, more realistic than reality. He was wrong, but he was so powerful that even this ridiculous drawing could begin to destroy everything around it in only a hundred years.

  You do not ask yourselves what lies beyond the City. You do not want to know because you are afraid of what you have forgotten, and because you miss it so much, it might hurt to remember.

  Yet suppose that only a day’s walk from the City (though no one walks any more) surged the sea. Suppose that across that sea—whose lengths could not be counted in days and nights—pulsed this tiny island, and on the island stood a glass tower. Suppose that in the top of the tower lived the fairy tale you had forgotten, that dream you had stuffed away. Suppose she was still alive.

  Now the woman in the tower, who knew only that she was younger than her father, and older than she had once been, began to hear the soft, heavy echo of her own heart in her ears. At first it terrified her, like something creeping up on her from inside. But once she got used to it, she began to trust it, and then she listened to it, and then suddenly she felt attached to it. She tried to locate it, sensing that this sound kept her alive—afraid that, if she forgot it for an instant, it might stop. Wouldn’t it ever tire? She had never thought about this before; she had never thought about anything ending.

  But now her father’s coming had ended.

  For as long as she could remember, this god who was her father had been her only company. Every day he had come to the tower.

  “This is the sun, and this is the moon,” he would tell her, though it was not the real sun and moon, but a dream of these things that he played out for her, with his magic, on the round glass walls. “These are the eagles, and these are the deepest forests. These are the green lakes, and these are the deer—see them running!” The Princess had watched it all. She had seen the water and the fields, the focused opening and closing of flowers. She had watched her father’s dreams with him in the glass, wanting to be near him, wanting to go wherever he went—though as he spoke his voice receded and fell quieter, and often he seemed to forget she was there. She had watched the landscapes unfold before her, and the distant, wandering animals.

  “When will we feel that meadow, that sky?” she had asked her father once. “When will we go there?”

  But her father had shaken his head. “Someday,” he said, “he will come and rescue you, and he will take you there. I cannot.”

  “Who will come?” she had cried, for she had heard this promise before and could not understand it—this idea of someone else besides themselves.

  “The one from the green water, who walks in the tops of the trees…” he had murmured, but his voice came even softer then, so that she could barely hear it. And she did not know if he was telling the truth, for when he dreamed that place in the glass for her—where carpets of green lay over the water so thick they seemed like meadows you could run across, and giant trees made a rhythm in space like music, and long-necked birds with masked faces fanned their wings in a hot, weighted stillness—he would cease to speak to her at all, and he would hold his face in his hands sometimes and whisper a word she did not know:

  Lost.

  Her father’s eyes were a sharp and painful blue. Later she would remember how, when she asked him questions like these, they seemed to answer her with surprise—the pupils filling them like greater and greater unknowns—and something else she did not want to see there, a tightness she would learn later (from other eyes) was the pinched crease of pain.

  His hair was clean and yellow, like her own, but there was a rougher tangle of hair growing beneath his mouth and over his cheeks, like the faces of the animals she saw in his dreams, and she liked to touch that. His hands were warm.

  But on this day he did not come. Nor the next, nor the next.

  He would never come again.

  The first feeling she could identify, beneath the sound of her heart, was an absence of feeling—the strain of a dull weight in her gut, like a slow falling of loose grey sand.

  You would begin the story with the City, as if the City were the world. But I will not begin it there. I will begin with the real world, which is at once a body and a dream.

  This body is familiar to you, and yet it is not human. It does not begin head on top. It begins with the womb, which is the sea, and the womb is not a piece of the body, but rather the body is held and changed within the sea—the rest of the body constantly born and born again from those hungry waters of creation.

  From out of the sea come the sands, and the sands are the face of the world, constantly changing expression beneath the moods of the sea. Then come the fields and the deserts, which are the sad, quiet feet of the world, and at the same time its flesh, and at the same time its lungs of wind. Then come the forests, forever digesting themselves, which are its belly. Then rise the breasts of the mountains—hundreds of breasts, rising and rising, and at the same time deepening, their valleys rich and scented, their slopes falling so fast that the light weeps over them. And these highest peaks, cold and eerily peaceful, sharply braving the sky—these are the mind of the world.

  The trees its boundless arms. The grass its nerves. The hot springs its lusty mouths. The rivers its arteries and veins, running everywhere, not only through the soil and stone but through the air as rain and mist and snow. The parts of this body are not arranged like your body seems to be, and they are constantly changing. Yet you remember. You remember the path this nameless goddess will walk, from the womb of the sea across the fields and the desert, through the forested mountains and into the sky—this path that will also carry her all the way back again, on the other side of her dream. You remember.

  You remember, almost, that the City was built upon what once was the heart of the world. Maybe that’s why the City feels so important.

  Yet you cannot remember any more the landscape of that heart, before the City was made.

&nb
sp; The Princess in the tower also remembered the world, though she did not know how. The bed she had slept in forever was not made of glass, nor of otherworldly magic. Where did it come from—this crinkly softness that, had she understood it, would have felt like real autumn leaves from some real, living forest floor? How was it that the pillow she laid her head upon to dream felt so deliciously slippery; what else has the texture of silver, if silver were a sensation, but the feathers of real birds? It seemed she slept upon the depth of water and the softness of rotting earth, and that she covered herself with the thickness of clouds or meadow grass. If this were true, where had these things come from, and how was she able to recognize them? Yet older than time seemed this bed to her, and more familiar than dreams, and more comforting than death.

  Though her father had told her that her body was unimportant, that she was a goddess and did not need the things the animals needed, she began to wonder about it now that he was gone. What were the little impressions, like empty pools, inside her hands for? Why did her elbows bend, and her wrists, so that if she brought her fingertips together she could form a circle? She lifted one foot into the air, then the other. What was this for: the roundness of the boneless belly? The undulation of a foot’s sole? Her breast felt cool with the heart hot beneath it. She lost her fingers in the folds of the dress. A sudden spiral of sensation made her close her eyes.

  Maybe the Princess had always known her father would leave her. Maybe that’s why she had cried sometimes, though she cannot remember that now, or what it felt like.

  “He will come for you,” her father had said, “after I am gone.” Hadn’t he said that? But it brought her no comfort now.

  The wind did not blow every day, and on the days it did not blow the Princess in the tower felt safer, and tried not to think of anything. But on other days it beat about the tower continuously. Sleeping, she would fall into the sound, the pillows of its gusts engulfing her, but then she would jolt awake suddenly as its movement seemed to double back behind her, bucking like a trapped beast. Its crude shoves jarred her out of oblivion, and she rose from the bed and paced. The future seemed to be rushing toward her through invisible space, coming and coming at a faster speed than she could understand. She could hear it, outside, and it was here already, and yet it was not.