Lonely in the Heart of the World Read online

  The absence of her father—her aloneness without him—was so loud it hummed. It was so loud she had to cover her ears.

  Circling her glass room, she replayed the love story in her mind—the one her father had dreamed out for her, over and over on the glass wall. The man on the white horse rescued the woman from the great teeth, the great jaws, the great darkness below the water, below the earth…She knew it might take a long time, because the man always had to battle so many demons before reaching the woman. But in the meantime she slept with her feet curled tight beneath her on the bed, unable to see through the glass floor, imagining what might lie below.

  Over and over, she tried to remember the end of the story. She tried to understand what love was, and what happened when the faces of the man and the woman finally drew close, and blurred, and spoke.

  Please rescue me, she prayed. She thought of the beautiful white horse, and wondered why it was necessary in order for love to happen, and though she did not know what a horse was, she wished she had one of her own.

  She missed her father. She missed his dreams, which had made so much sense at the time, and had been her only reality. She did not yet have a language for the things she felt inside when she thought of her father and lived in his absence, day after day, or when she tried to remember the last time he had come to the tower, and what had happened, and why. The hours she spent curled like a question mark on her side, her knees digging into her forehead, what she felt—no, she would not remember those times later. She would refuse to ever think of those hours again.

  But the wind would name her Lonely, all the same. We are not named for just anything. We are named for what sets us apart.

  In those foggy glass walls wrapping round and round her, she began to dream dreams her father had not taught her. Waves of color in a sea of lights, colors running in and out of doors, tensing and releasing, bringing pain and pleasure at once. She did not understand what she was seeing—that it was people, that it was crowds and masses of so many people she could never see all of their faces in her lifetime. She saw straight lines for the first time, and they were terrifying, like a neck snapped and broken. She saw buildings made of lines that lasted longer than stone, that stretched higher than the sky, built on layers of waste. She saw those masses trudging through a maze of hard, greenless hallways whose walls hemmed them close.

  And then the nightmares began.

  No, we are not named for just anything. We are named for what separates us from others.

  Now the glass, emptied of dreams, was nothing but a mirror, dreamless and merciless, on all sides.

  She saw the wilderness in her own eyes, and she saw that her eyes were not like her father’s, but very dark, despite her pale face and yellow hair. She knew then that something inside her was not like him, and maybe that was why he had finally left her.

  Because later she would never be sure if her dreams changed before or after her father was gone. Could it be that he stopped coming because she was not the Princess that he called her after all—not inside herself, where her own dreams were made?

  But she had to rise now—she had to—and did not know why. She was a goddess, her father had told her, and she did not need food, and she did not need water, and she did not need touch, and nothing could ever happen to her. Yet this movement began inside her body, lurched forward in her empty gut. A bright space in her mind; a wind in her mouth. She must rise and exist today, and every day, for some reason she did not yet know. She paced again around the room. Her face was reflected so many times over, it lost its meaning. The Princess fell to her knees and poured her vision into the glass.

  “Ya!” she called out, trying to be brave. Wasn’t there anything beyond herself?

  It seemed then that her father’s face appeared behind her, but before she could be sure, it changed.

  It became a new face, youthful and elegant, with brave eyes that leaped right over her confusion and into the abyss of her—right into that place from which the unknown came. She felt sure it was the man with the white horse, whose image seemed now to kneel down behind her, whose face now tilted toward hers, his lips smiling and parted against her neck. She closed her eyes and shivered, and when she opened them he was gone.

  “Come back!”

  She would never forget that face. She knew the struggling shine inside his eyes belonged to her, and that he, too, was frightened by the heartbeat in his ears. She knew by the tremor in his smooth jaw that he was lonely too, and that his lips had opened to take her in. She felt his loneliness in her hips; she felt it in her heart falling like a silent avalanche between her ribs; she felt it seize up the muscles of her thighs. She ran her fingertips over her scalp, her cheeks, the wetness of her mouth.

  She kept staring at that mirror all day, but he never came back. She stared until the image of her own face overcame her, and she fell asleep on the cold glass floor.

  In her dreams, a terrible old woman was chasing her around and around the glass room, and she herself could never take a different path than that same repeating circle, and she could never get out. And the princess had never seen another woman, but the broken crazy shuffle of this old woman behind her was familiar—and the worst nightmare she had ever had.

  She kept dreaming, on and on after that, and her dreams ran together, and when her mind finally swam toward waking, she could not remember them. She remembered only the smell of them, like bodies hot in the darkness, putrid with sweat and cramped tight and still for too long. She remembered someone crying gently below her, the cry echoing up through endless angles of stone and glass. She thought it was someone very young.

  When she woke for real, she was lying on the floor, and it was night. She breathed in, and she could smell her own body for the first time, sweet and alive. She rolled over onto her back, looked up at the glass, and saw through it for the first time to the stars.

  She was not afraid. She did not feel lost or insignificant. She felt, in a way, as if she were still looking at her reflection, but as if her being were somehow far bigger and more wonderful than she had ever realized.

  The sky looked rich and somber, with every color fallen and merged inside it, as if when colors died they all returned to the night to decompose into this fertile blackness. And through it came the white pricks of the stars, sharp as pain—faraway beams of no-color. Clouds spread across in smears of silver, each one silent and serious, cushioning the beauty of the stars as if to keep them from bursting.

  Then she saw that the sky surrounded her, and was everywhere. She stood up. She turned around and around looking at the sky, whose black was so shiny it seemed to hold a brightness deep within, like a singing in the silence or a smile through tears. She spun around, just on the verge of dancing. Then she went to the glass, because the mirror had finally become not a dreamscape or a mirror but a window, and through that window where she’d seen reflected her mysterious lover’s face, she now saw a mountain.

  She could not tell how far away it was, because she had not yet learned distance, beyond the distance of wall to wall. She could not imagine a distance such as this. From here its peaks were merely a calm, cryptic pattern, glowing faintly white. But the mountain made her feel that her life extended somewhere beyond her. She thought she might understand, for the first time, for just a moment, what her father meant when he told her she was immortal.

  She looked at the mountain all night and never grew sleepy. She pressed herself as close as she could right up to the glass, staring out. The longer she looked at that delicate, eloquent line of the mountain’s edge against the sky, the more it started to look like something written, a pattern in some language that she was ever on the tantalizing brink of remembering. She knew for the first time what loneliness was, and she knew that whatever was written there was the answer to that loneliness. The world itself was her mirror, and she herself was the world, and everything was possible.

 
; As her vision followed the rivers of snow downward, and along the patterns of stone and tree so far away that they were only shades of each other, her hands drifted unconsciously over her own peaks and valleys, the patterns of her own body that she had never before explored. When the dawn came, she felt tense and desperate in a way she did not understand. She pressed her bare limbs against the glass; she pressed her face to that image; she cried out to it and licked it hungrily with her tongue.

  But when she touched the glass it shocked her, like a deathly silence that cut right through her bones. She jumped back and looked at her knees. They were red, and when she touched them, they were cold. She looked back up and saw her own face, and the mountain was gone.

  Then a scream began, and the scream must be coming from her. Inside the scream were all the sounds she had never heard, as if she held inside her all the world that she had never seen: gulls and rain and laughter and wind, waves breaking and fire crackling, coyotes and thunder. As she screamed, her breath hit the glass hard. The image of her face collapsed slowly inward. The mountain appeared again where a hole opened in the glass before her, as if reflecting the widening cavern of her own open mouth.

  For it was not glass after all, but ice.

  In the City, there are the familiar square ceilings, the familiar angry lights. There are the signs and the words, the suits and the high-heeled shoes. There is the dog waiting outside on the concrete, his head in his paws, sniffing half-heartedly at the passing feet.

  You sit in your rows of desks, raising your hands. Some of you want desperately to be seen; others want to disappear.

  “Who created this world?” asks the teacher. “Who made the City and gave us all the things we need, and made us all-powerful, so that we should never suffer again?”

  “Hanum,” you answer. “Hanum created the world.”

  “Are there other gods in this world?”

  “There is only one god: Hanum.”

  In the stores, in the malls, in the catalogs, the idea of a Princess persists: Hanum’s unattainable, mythical daughter. On a clothing label, on a bottle of shampoo, on a box of ready-made health crackers or a can of fruit. She shows up in commercials, on the hood of a car or drinking a soda.

  The image is everywhere, and yet no one speaks of it. The hunger that creates this image is not taught in schools, and the worship of this image is silent. You do not name her in the churches, and yet she is the reason you go.

  In the schools, in the lunchroom, you laugh. Maybe someone betrays his innocence by speaking of the Princess in the Tower as if she is real. And you laugh, using your vulgarest words to express your contempt, your embarrassment.

  Of course you do not believe in that image any more. That kind of beauty. Skin as smooth as still water and flushed like the first hesitant color in a pale winter dawn. Yellow-white hair shining down her shoulders like a memory of childhood sunlight, brighter somehow than the sun you see today. Eyes deep as galaxies, lips forever new. Her body at once proud and yielding, like a sapling grown without cover in an open field, her bones strong and her curves definite but muted beneath a hazy gown of changing silver….

  In the schools you only say, “Hanum created the world.”

  “And why do we seem sometimes to suffer?” asks the teacher. “Why do bad things happen?”

  “Because of the Witch,” you say. “A woman from the old world, who tricked Hanum into marrying her. She fights the magic he made. She wants to take the world back into chaos, into wilderness.”

  For something is wrong. Once Hanum walked among you, and magic was made before your eyes, and the purpose of things explained. Roads had a destination, and the City Center, where food and energy come from, was open to everyone and understood by all. But now life is done out of habit, and no one remembers exactly why. Money, the magic current of the City, gets dammed up in certain buildings and does not reach everyone. Some people do not live in buildings at all but on the streets. Some people are not functioning properly.

  Behind the schools, skipping class, you give the Witch another name, a name you dare not speak in public: Dark Goddess. You whisper that She killed Hanum, after all.

  And the Princess in the Tower is only a symbol now, though women still wear fake faces over their real faces in their effort to look as they imagine she looked, for they cannot believe that such beauty—that kind of beauty that unfolds from a body out of pure, raw life—is naturally possible. She is chaste, and they are not. She has no needs, and they do. She is beautiful, and they are formless, constantly aging despite Hanum’s dream of everlasting life. In your manufactured world, you have never seen beauty that is not fake, and so you no longer believe in it.

  The City is full of contradictions. It is shameful to make love to any one person more than once or to miss anyone after they have said goodbye. Yet it is forbidden to lust after anyone but the person who is bound and promised to stay by your side.

  Families are sacred, and yet no one has a family. No one wants to be anywhere near the people who bore them or remembers where they came from.

  Animals are the only ones who love unconditionally, but they are not prioritized in emergencies, and in a pinch they are thrown away.

  Everyone tries to be different, but everyone is different in the same way.

  Drugs are forbidden, but they are easier to get than love.

  Every woman, when she wakes in the morning, imagines for a split second that she is the Princess. She imagines she is that passive perfection of which all men dream. Or she imagines that the god Hanum comes for her alone, and what it would feel like to make love to a god.

  Every man, in the moment of waking, before he remembers his life, imagines that he is the one to claim that Princess from the old stories—that he is the hero who will take her in his arms, the light of her redeeming eyes focused upon him.

  But none of you remember, as you trudge through your days, that you imagined or longed for such things when you woke.

  Nor do you realize that everyone else longed for them, too.

  Now the wind came hurtling in.

  The Princess whirled away from it, curled into a ball, and whimpered. The scent of her own body flamed stronger, and it was calling to her, and she did not understand what it was saying, and she wanted it to stop. For it was something her father had never mentioned—this body. Here it had turned the glass to ice and melted it. She did not trust it. There was something wrong. Something was coming for her—in the wind, in the pounding of her heart—and it did not feel like rescue.

  She lifted her head and opened her eyes. The wind filled the room, and now the room was cold and meant nothing any more.

  She crawled to the hole and poked her head out, and as the dazzling freshness of the air sparked against her face for the first time, she saw the rocky island around the tower, and—down below—the old woman from her nightmare.

  Surely it was the Witch her father had always warned her about, who guarded this tower and who kept her from leaving! She stood there right at the bottom, her grey form turned toward the sea.

  The Princess stared at the Witch in shock while the wind spun dizzily around her head, and the Witch did not move, did not turn her head. The girl was afraid to see that face. But finally she gathered her courage and cried, “Let me out!” Her voice shook her, so that she reeled back and hit her head on the ice, but the old, gray woman did not seem to hear.

  Why? the wind asked, and she understood its voice for the first time. It was so cold. She could not connect its force with the echoes she had heard from inside the tower, when it had blown around harmlessly like a distant philosophy of life. She pressed her hands to her ears and pursed her lips, which felt dry and bruised now.

  Why leave? the wind repeated carelessly.

  “Because I’m lonely in here,” she murmured, as if to herself, but the wind whispered back.

  What do you
want, then?

  “I want love.” The girl let her breath out hot in the face of the wind as if to blow it away, though its ability to speak to her—the only time anyone had ever spoken to her besides her father—unsettled her. She closed her eyes and let the wind touch her for a moment, helpless to the pleasure of it. Even when it beat against her in violence, it felt good to be touched.

  “Hey!” She waited for the Witch to turn around. She was ready. “Can’t you hear me? I want to get out now! You can’t keep me here.”

  It was only a dream, said the wind.

  No. The girl tried to ignore the wind now, panicking as she looked out hungrily across the sea. Distance. Space. It made her mind buckle.

  The Witch did not move. The girl looked down for what seemed like a long, long time. The space around her head was terrible, but to turn back into the room seemed worse.

  At last the wind nudged her again. It would not leave her alone. So who are you, that you think yourself worthy of love?

  She shivered up and down her spine, and could not seem to stop. “I don’t have to prove myself to you,” she said to the wind. “I’m the daughter of a god. Who are you, to ask me such questions?”

  The wind laughed, in a way that was at once cruel and kind.

  I do not need to prove myself, or name myself.

  “Why not?”

  Because there is nothing I am seeking, and nothing that I want.

  The girl sensed perhaps a judgment in this, and responded a little defensively, “Well, it’s not that I want so much. I’ve been trapped in a tower all my life, and I ask for love. Is that so much to ask? I’m lonely, is all.”