Rich Ives
The Rules of Engagement I found unexpectedly at my feet a stick of chewing gum. It was an exotic flavor that I no longer remember the name of, tangerine or clove perhaps. I had no intention of chewing it, for it had been thoughtlessly (I could not bring myself to say cleverly) abandoned. Still, it appeared fresh and I could not convince myself to ignore it. I placed it in the left hand pocket of my coat and carried it for several weeks until it had become mashed and worn and I could no longer read the label. Its fate had once more been altered. It seemed worthless and I discarded it without a second thought. At least that's what I thought I had done. It was not the beggar who saw me first but the man in the linen suit, very fashionable yet cool in the raging summer heat. The suited man was asking for donations for an important and fashionable cause, which, I believed, deserved the support he was asking for on its behalf. That was not the reason I gave him three dollar bills. I did it because I wanted to see if he might give one to the ragged man sitting next to him on the sidewalk with a tin cup. I wondered if the two of them were uneasy with each other over sharing this desirable territory where so many people were passing. I did not really expect that the man would give the beggar even one of the dollars, but I wanted to see if I might be wrong. I was not. But the man in the linen suit, who, it now seemed, was a mute, held up a handwritten notice of thanks in front of me so that I could read it without actually taking it from him. It explained in a few ungrammatical cramped sentences how the donation would support benefits far beyond the immediate cause to which I had donated. I could understand that much without even reading the whole thing. When the man in the linen suit could see that I had tired of deciphering the notice he was holding, he placed it in the beggar's tin cup and quickly walked away. It's true that I had chosen the blue door because of the woman who had entered during the long, painful and confusing process of selection, which had been placed so deliberately before me. Of the several doors before me, many, but not all, had been opened and entered by others, both men and women, and I told myself that I was choosing the blue door because of the qualities of character that I had witnessed in the woman's approach, particularly her manner of hesitating as she made her choice. In fact, as I approached, finally, the door of my selection, I did so just as she had, hesitating in the same place and in just the same manner. I did not understand which of the many decisions that lay before me I had just made. It was a time in which I had been confused by love, alternately ecstatic and miserable and unable to understand how much I was enjoying my misery. I was preparing to take leave of a love, which I did not really believe was over. Nor did I then believe that the events that I imagined might soon be before me could actually cause such an end. I believed only in my own acceptance of the idea of completion as a legitimate cause of change. But I also felt that as long as the acceptance of the events was under my control the events would only appear to take place. As I made my way towards the most current transient residence of the one I had allowed to ignite my desire, I passed a procession in the streets, which had formed behind a figure held up in the air on a long stick. As I neared the head of the procession and could see the figure clearly, I was shaken to the core with the likeness it bore to my own adored and worriedly thin beloved, raised high now by a man whose exaggeratedly smiling expression appeared to have been painted onto the pillow of his face. I did not know what the procession was for, but I guessed quickly that the figure would be burned and the followers would celebrate the burning. I knew then that I could no longer meet my love in the manner in which I had planned. I could no longer pursue what I had been seeking. I wandered the streets for many hours until, near morning, I again encountered the procession, returning, it appeared, from the lengthy ceremony, which it had apparently been formed to complete. And yet the figure on the stick was intact, unburnt, and still smiling its slapstick grin. The followers were subdued, tiredly trudging back to wherever they had come from. One of them seemed to recognize me from earlier and put a hand on my shoulder, yawned and shrugged. "It doesn't do much good to protest, but we do it anyway," he said, and continued tiredly on his way. There was a time much later when I had been walking, forever it seemed, along a dusty country road and came upon an old friend I had not seen in many years, a friend from my youth with whom I had shared many hopes and dreams though none had been realized before circumstances had taken him from my life. He too had shared his desires for the future with me, and as I struggled to remember them, he sat down on a large stone and gestured for me to sit next to him. He seemed to desire nothing more than that I sit there beside him. He did not speak and did not seem to want to speak. We listened to the wind moving through the rows of corn beside the road as if it were a child unable to resist making the leaves rattle as it passed. The child crossed the road kicking up a small cloud of dust and entered the corn on the other side, moving off into the cornfield that seemed to tick and tick again as silence attempted its return and failed. A pheasant crowed in the distance, a sound like a supremely confident rooster, unleashed upon the willing air as if it existed only to carry the noisome rattle and crank. It projected a raw cracked gurgle from the hollow of the bird's chest over the cornfield with a deep rasping climb. After an unexpected pause, to remind us it seemed, of our own presence, a few crickets were tricked into their own greeting of the still absent dusk by a large passing cloud. My friend stood and brushed the dust from himself just as the now missing child seemed to have done not long before and he raised his arm in a slow gesture of acceptance that left his hand extended and open, with his palm upwards as if he were holding something that might choose to fly off if he did not move slowly and carefully. I observed him as carefully as I could and attempted to duplicate the gesture. I did so with great care and concentration, and by the time I had finished, he had turned and was continuing upon his way. I too agreed that we had been fortunate to have failed in so many foolish dreams and arrived at just a few we could fully appreciate, the ones we might not have noticed if we had been more successful. I don't understand when it happened, but I remember I was contained in a large room with a group of people laughing and talking in the part of the room that was lit by a number of large candles that offered more light than one would expect from them. The candles were assisted in their hopeless task by two small holes in the ceiling through which the light of the sky outside was descending in aggressive if futile proof of the clarity, which the sky had to offer if one were not subdued by the equally aggressive heat. The people were certainly not restrained by anything as familiar as their endlessly repetitious environment, but the close air and clinging warmth of the chamber thrust a torpor like an old musty blanket upon me as I tried to make out what the people were saying. I failed in my task and turned my attention to the candles, which were swaying slowly in the wake of the air disturbed by one of the guests who had left the group to stand alone and observe me. He did not approach, but instead stood as if in meditation and, politely as it is possible to do so, addressed himself to a study of my being. Whatever his study revealed to him, it seemed sufficient, for he shortly returned to the group where he again joined their conversation, which I still could not make out, as if he had not left it and was not returning with anything new to add to it. It was impossible not to feel a sense of disappointment though I could not discern in myself even an inkling of its source, and I turned my attention to the light dripping down from the holes in the ceiling. The length and contour of the light struck me suddenly, as if two yellow broomsticks had been thrust through the ceiling. I did not want to approach the light, for that would have destroyed the sensation building inside of me that the light was solid, something I could most certainly touch, something I could perhaps break off and strike someone with so solid did it appear. The people in the room had stopped talking. The softest of whispers permeated the space between us in a manner I can only describe as the conversation of dust, the same dust I could now see was giving its slowly turning body to the light descending from the two holes in the ceiling, the dust which was now moving in a gently rolling hint at the passage of some larger body. Yet no one had moved. I imagined various ill-defined qualities of the world outside that I perceived as desirable if only because I did not know enough about them, and I imagined by what means they might use the two holes to enter the room, to enter the room without being conspicuous, not by their own design but through the natural and unpremeditated actions of nature, which I perceived to exist only outside the room. It had not yet occurred to me to wonder how long I had been in the room. There was a rasping in my chest when I breathed that reminded me of descriptions I had heard of dying men, but I did not feel like I was dying. I had a fever, but it made me warm and led me easily into dream. I felt as if my nerves had been put on alert and my body was more awake than when I felt healthy and energetic. Whatever I thought seemed actually to be happening, and I thought of many strange and questionable things, which gave me great pleasure. I even seemed to know as I experienced them that I would not remember what I had experienced. Several days later, it seemed, I awoke to a great sense of wellbeing and gratitude. I was relaxed and very comfortable, and surprised to find my family gathered around my bed as I opened my eyes. The look in their eyes as I gazed at them, still steeped in my own deep relaxation, brought me quickly to think about if not actually feel a great fear and they were all talking at once and touching me as if I had only that very moment entered into life for the first time, and the miracle was shaking them from their complacent lives. I seemed to be the only one that knew that neither the death they had feared nor the birth they had felt carried with them any greater meaning than the deeply nurturing night of dreams and rest that I had passed while they suffered such changes. There existed in that room, I realized later, a moment in which no movement at all could be perceived, and had I not witnessed the group of people on the other side of the room long before that moment, I would not have known they were alive. I might even have thought that the bars of light falling from the two holes in the ceiling were really poles placed there for some purpose I had not yet surmised but which had, most likely, something to do with climbing out. I had not yet, at that moment, imagined anyone wishing to remain in the room. In time I realized it was no longer me they were talking about. I had been afraid of leaving such a world, and then I watched that world leave me. What I had thought was still, awaiting my actions, was moving forward, and it was I who had become still. The seductive hole I had once feared being placed in, back in that other life, which belonged to someone else, had slowly filled, and plants were growing from it while I had been walking away so slowly that the idea of it had caught up to me and then continued on, leaving me to imagine how much better those sad plants might have grown with a little more fertilizer nurturing their roots. And the time came when the candles began dancing, and I wondered what event of Nature had now found its way through the two holes in the ceiling and affected the dense air holding the candle flames erect. Then I could see that the people across the room had begun dancing. They were moving in a slow languorous appreciation of each other's gestures that I wanted to describe as generous. I watched them, thinking I was causing them deep anxiety at my inability to decide what would happen if I attempted to join them. And yet I chose instead to climb onto the table around which the candles were mounted and assert my authority and power, as none of them had done before me, by putting my two eyes to the two holes. On the other side of those holes I saw another room, drenched in sunlight, with two shafts of darkness as solid as poles rising from the floor and a group of people talking in great animation and apparent pleasure while the shadows of leaves parted and swayed in clear definition like dark flames across the brilliant bright green table, at which a lone figure sat. I felt myself falling even before that figure stood and began to climb onto the table. I knew then that I had been here before. I knew that the woman I had chosen to follow had also been here, but I did not know that that woman had been watching me, that she had selected me because of some mannerism or gesture in which she had placed value. Perhaps she could more easily merely select a man who appeared to her likely to make a choice she could not make herself. But I did not yet realize that she had anticipated my appearance and selected me because of this perception. Did this make her one of my kind or did this make me one of hers? I did not know. It had not occurred to me that she was the only one watching. It had not occurred to me to wonder if she was really there. Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com.
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