"Cave Man" by Rich Ives

     Thomas the Younger begins to wonder if the people in his head are different from the people outside his head. Perhaps he has not even arrived at the world but only imagined himself into a place in it. Where Thomas lives, the people are seldom what they seem. Their stories are histories of disguise, disguises of history. An ordinary couple next door are eating TV dinners and watching Sea Hunt, their offspring are upstairs, the bathtub is overflowing with rubber noses. The children’s temporarily complacent bodies begin huffing nasally as they slip under the bathwater with joyous abandon. Below them, in the middle class glow of the black and white television program, their parents abandon their meal for the whisper of skin, the fresh slick muscular slide of carnal indulgence, the reliable permissions of their contentment. Does it make it more exciting that their children are upstairs and they might get caught? Or does it seem more natural to give in to the impulse that made those children, knowing that they will be busy at their play and making enough noise to be easy to keep track of, with a safe distance to allow for recovery and putting on appearances should they need attention?

     How did such a scene get into Thomas’ head? He doesn’t know any neighbors well enough to be told such a story. Has he watched from outside their house? Did he put the scene together from fragments of stories and memories, from imagination? Is it a moment of safety and pleasure, of fitting in, that any angel might long for? Is it a moment an angel cannot have without transforming itself into a human?

     Thomas was born here, but it takes a life inside a body you have learned to grow comfortable with, a wingless body, to complete such a scene.

     Most of these people would assume young Thomas built the cave because of Howard the Prophet's predictions, and they would be wrong.

     Early morning. Smoke issuing from the mouth of the cave.

     Does anyone notice?

     When the sheriff comes to question Thomas concerning the continuing disturbance reported by Thomas’s neighbor Desirée's ex-husband, who, despite expectations, has not moved out, Thomas gives the sheriff his journal and refuses to answer any questions.

     To his neighbors the sheriff is known as Joe. Just Joe. Because Joe lives alone and leads a peaceful life. Joe’s lawn is just as meticulously manicured as his hair, his fingernails, his life, and Joe’s garden holds prize-winning dahlias and miniature tea roses, a small pond with two turtles and yellow marsh iris, statues of Buddha and a lion as well as several cherubim and a wooden owl to keep pigeons from moving in to the eaves of the garden shed.

     When Joe is not working, or in the garden, he can often be found at his desk, at home, with a precisely measured and brewed cup of any one of a dozen specialty coffee blends as he peruses the latest additions to his stamp collection. Recently he has added a set of three-dimensional aerospace commemoratives, the kind that change the image when you view them from a different angle, just like the crackerjack rings he remembers being given by his father as a child. The stamps were issued by an obscure African protectorate trying to boost its international presence with an eye to eventual independence, a hope that failed to materialize as tribal wars led it to attach itself to a larger neighboring country.

     Among Joe’s favorite stamps, the ones that he often turns to after a difficult day, are the miniature reproductions of famous paintings. Last night, he fell asleep contemplating the one from Poland of a painting with a stamp in the painting, eyeing the stamp in the painting with his magnifying glass to discover if the stamp in the painting had another painting in it with another stamp in that painting too. Fortunately the sun is not available at this moment to focus a dangerous pinpoint of light through the sheriff’s magnifying glass and start a fire like the one that once burned down the sheriff’s father’s garden shed. Joe has not forgotten. Joe would not make that mistake again.

     The sheriff reads the journal slowly. He feels frustrated at the lack of dates and the lack of concrete evidence. He reads at first like a detective, the thorough reliable detective he would like to become. He thinks of Jack Webb on Dragnet and the way he says, Just the facts, Ma’am. Soon he begins to feel instead as if he has intruded on someone's most intimate moments. Even though no one is there to see him, he blushes to be reading something so personal. He makes a perfunctory entry in his logbook, returns to the journal, and falls asleep in his chair.

     Over the years Joe’s dreams have grown ragged, but he no longer fears them. He reads and drifts off, reads and drifts. An angel rises from a postage stamp and speaks to him in one of the dreams. A postage stamp lifts off from its gelatin hinge and attaches itself to the last entry in his logbook as Joe shifts in his chair, half asleep now, slumping down to a position he can stay in the rest of the night.

     The stamp is a map of an island in the middle of a large lake in the middle of a small country that may not exist. This is what the sheriff was thinking, or shall we call it dreaming even though he is not yet asleep, as the angel grows quiet and descends from the clouds.

     The sheriff returns momentarily to consciousness with a sudden electric kick of his right leg as a tiny angel, whose dreams are still too small to be noticed, lands on his forehead and climbs to the forest of his thick graying hair. He wonders vaguely if he should brush his teeth and prepare for bed, but instead he continues reading in the journal, tired and suggestible.

     I don't know why I decided to dig a hole in the side of the hill behind my house.  It just occurred to me one day that it should be there. As I dug, I justified my actions with practical considerations. I could store things in the cave. Even if I didn't choose to secure the opening, I could use it to keep wood dry. Secretly, I thought of building a fire inside it, watching the moonrise and listening to the animals late at night. I joked with a neighbor who explored caves as a hobby, a spelunker traveling sometimes for days to find a new cave to enter. I imagined that his wife had asked me to build it, hoping to store building supplies to keep him closer to home.

       Then I wondered, "How does one build a cave?" A cave is the emptiness left when one finishes digging a hole. I could build a pile of rocks and dirt in front of a cave, but I couldn't build a cave.

     My neighbor, the spelunker, laughed at my cave and joked about a place to keep dry when our wives kicked us out of our houses for our craziness.

     The hole grew larger.

     When the sheriff arrived to question Thomas, did the journal really already exist? Could an angel have filled the journal later, after giving the sheriff an empty one, making up a suitable story to explain what is not explainable to a mind looking only for facts? And if an angel were to record his thoughts, could they really belong to the angel, who we think of, after all, as our own creation?

     After a few months I began to say that I had not dug the cave. I had simply found it and decided to claim it as my own creation. I invited friends to see it. No one came.

     Howard the Prophet, weeping at the funeral of an elderly man he didn’t know:

                             The price we pay for death is life.

     He was quoting a Burma Shave sign sequence he saw between Aberdeen and Groton, South Dakota. Or was it some preacher’s imitation of the Burma Shave signs? Could somebody have stolen several Burma Shave signs and rearranged them?

     One day I found a dead rabbit in my cave. Another day a sack of garbage. Then a child's broken "Big Wheel." Then a mound of grass clippings. Then a cracked Styrofoam ice chest.

     I put up a No Dumping sign and the gifts stopped. Except for the dead rabbits, which appeared every three or four days. At first I was afraid to touch them, but gradually I got used to roasting them.

     I brushed the hair against the grain as I waited for their bodies to cook on a spit over a small fire at the mouth of the cave.

     A Japanese commemorative stamp, 1983. Traditionally dressed merchants carrying bundles of produce over an arched bridge with a carved railing. The railing follows the arch unevenly, as if the wood were still growing. No pavement. No cars in sight. Only the date on the stamp reveals the deception. One of the larger figures is stopped, turned back over his shoulder to see who the photographer could be. The face does not look Japanese.

     Joe? Joe? Are you awake?

     By the time of the second cave-in, I had stockpiled two months’ supply of food and water and enlarged the crack in the ceiling all the way to the surface where it emerged in a blackberry thicket so it wouldn't be found. The air was still not the best, but I could breathe through the tube I inserted and I could shove a rubber rod inside it if I wanted to seal it. I had several masks and a respirator.

     Have I become trapped by my own invention?

     In the life before, the traps were not of my own making. I must imagine deeper. I have not yet descended far enough to reach my own body.

     “Ignorance is never empty, but ignorance does not know this is true,” said Howard the Prophet out the window of the ventriloquist’s rusted piss-yellow pickup.

     The hitchhiking traveler did not know if this meant he could climb in the back or if he was merely supposed to be grateful for the wooden oracle’s wisdom. He offered the ventriloquist an orange from his dirty knapsack and waited for another ride.

     As if arranged there in the center of the cave, the soft white body an incongruous miniature snowdrift of feathers until you turn it and see the red eyes and the two gnarled feet.

     Warm.

     Motionless.

     I awoke and built a fire and my shadow on the cave wall was immense. It flickered, threatening. As long as I was careful not to create too much smoke, the smoke escaped through the tube as if the tube were meant for this purpose. I still worried about someone spotting it from above, but not as much.

     I was scared and happy. Then moody, introspective.

     I loved the smell of dirt and stones. I imagined the next night that some other cave dweller had built the fire that charred the bone-like pieces of wood near the cave mouth and I sat down to wait.

     I disguised the cave’s opening. I placed enough stones there to make it look like it had caved in. I built another fire. I roasted another rabbit.

     I waited for someone to offer the rabbit to.

     I thought about what I would ask them.

     I tied my hair behind me with twine and a rabbit bone.

     I sang a song I remembered from childhood about the wisdom of a hare.

     I dig and I dig. For weeks I haul out wheelbarrows full of dirt, and the smaller hill in front of the cave grows larger. I pile dirt and rocks on both sides of the opening, and it makes the cave seem even larger. I take away the earth, and inside there is room for something I need.

     Cave paintings. 1964. A French commemorative series honoring primitive paintings recently discovered. Each one appears to have been painted in relation to its own rock stains, painted slowly over more time than any painter ever hoped to have. Have they been modified as the stains grew and changed coloration? Research has revealed that the paintings are the work of, first, the natural stains of the cave wall, and then, over a great deal of time, many different artists adding enhancements. But the paintings don’t pretend to accuracy, not the way you might expect from a primitive scene. Not the way children or beginners try to draw. There is no pretense to realism here.

     Some of the figures are in exaggerated motion, fighting the clan’s enemies or trailing wounded prey. Each figure, animal or human, has developed over time into a repeatable set of stick lines and simple shapes, reappearing as needed in other drawings, even in other caves. Were the paintings planned on the floor of the cave with branches and sticks before they were painted? Was some grouping, some portion of the whole planned out in a series? Are the drawings some kind of tribute to the strength and longevity of the tribe? Were the ideas for these plans then handed down? And if time hadn’t altered the brightest points on the rocks or allowed the intrusions of water to continue their shifting, would these scenes still amount to a kind of communal Rorschach test, unconsciously constructed from the earth’s relentless repetitions?

     In places the lines don’t hold the colors in, but overlap them, staining into new shapes, straining at the figures, as if the stamps themselves were becoming stained, altering the shapes of the images printed on them, continuing the slow process used by time to bring harmony to the war between the inside and the outside.

     Or at least this is what passes through the sheriff’s mind as he submits slowly to another night’s dreaming, his collection of captured miniatures mounted to the transient (Would he call it “pure?”) white paper wall inside the binder. He considers how in this way time appears partially frozen, and begins to compare that time to the time contained in the journal’s cursive temporality, constellated into patterns the sheriff has yet to understand with this kind of intensity.

     “After the glimpse of sunlight at the window and before the opening of the door, life passes,” said Howard the Prophet.

     The neighbors call me “survivalist” and laugh, but this is only their way of making room for their own dreams. A prophet can fire a beautiful arrow, but we must choose what target to place in front of it.

     I am not here because I fear disaster.

     It’s never enough to merely survive.

     Inside the earth I am inside myself and contain that which contains me, being within a being within a being . . .

     My neighbor (Must I give even you a name, my questioning participant?) has heard that spelunkers have a saying: "Each cave has a life of its own."

     My neighbor is outside, staring at the sky, but we exist in the same cave. And this animal that surrounds our cave as if it were made of the heavens, as if it were made of an earth containing the heavens, is the same unbelievably large and complex creature filled with cave after cave after cave, everywhere on earth, empty space inside empty space inside empty space.

     What an astonishing complexity emptiness is responsible for. Think of how much room for us there still is.

     Italy. 1981. The International Festival of Barrels. The sheriff vacations among his stamps, with a glass of wine, cheese, Scotch whiskey, pickled herring. From stamp to stamp he travels like a greedy tourist. Against the wall of a drinking house, on top of two of the barrels, two Breton sonneurs playing bombard and biniou koz. The sheriff does not know what the music sounds like or how loud it is. If he knew the biniou koz was a type of Breton bagpipes, he might have already considered a tour of the more than a hundred countries with their own versions of bagpipes. With a warm memory of the touch of the librarian who helped him locate the painting reproduced on this stamp. With a smile at the tightly held pleasure she shared at her knowledge of the instruments.

     The lovely librarian held up her hands, wiggling her fingers with her thumbs to her mouth, as if playing a trumpet, and explained the loud double reed of the bombard (“warm, it remains warm to the ear”) and the high-pitched bagpipe that kept the tune going while the bombard darted in and out of the melody. She even drifted into speaking a little French, caught herself and uttered a short flushed giggle as she explained she had visited Brittany after college to exercise her French major only to discover the Breton language there and try to learn it from the older locals, who avoided speaking French.

     Olive oil warming in the pan. The dark wood of a cupboard door open like the old worn wooden lid of a shipping barrel. A small keg of pickles pried open with the thumbs. A salty burlap bag of apples to help combat scurvy. How long would they last on an ocean voyage? A forged hammer, wooden box of rusty nails. What freedom.

     To imagine the contents of barrel after barrel of gifts.

     A shipwrecked world of bounty washing up on the shore of your island with every wave as the sun breaks through the storm clouds and the disastrous commerce of others offers unexpected reasons to indulge today what may be gone tomorrow.

     My work has slowed. I thought I might need to blast away the rock in the ceiling of my cave, but I dig around it and pry it and chip it and it comes loose. Always, there is a seam where there seemed to be none. I hit the ceiling with a sledgehammer, anchoring the blow with my fat thumb, and it comes down. I sputter and my skin breathes dirt, but gravity prevails. The roof falls to the ground and the walls fall down and I remove the barriers.

     Earth falls to earth. I sleep with dirt in my hair, peaceful. The years pass quickly, but the deep anguish of reaching into your own body, so slowly sensing your need . . . It seems always more than I can bear, yet bear it I do.

     You cannot imagine the torture of watching this baby reach for itself, just as I do, its parts screaming welcomes while you wait and try again and wait some more, one tiny piece at a time.

     “There is nothing closer to the earth than a sagging river or a trailer-park,” says Howard the Prophet.

     Does anyone listen anymore?

     The ventriloquist’s throat, raw with strain, and swollen. He’s a bird trying to fly to the sun.

     How much can one say without forgetting to breathe?

     On my way to the cave, the birds scatter and scold me. It is not just that I have disturbed them. They have been disturbed in this way for weeks now. It has become familiar. But now they have realized that I disappear into the earth at the end of the path, and I do not always return with the sun. I am going somewhere they cannot understand. It frightens them. I am not predictable in a world where creatures behave according to patterns.

     After several nights by the fire, I knew that my cave was more than a shelter. It was an opening in the earth that linked me to the internal sky. What I had taken out of the mountain had created a space for my own acceptance, like the earth’s acceptance of the firmament. What I seek is inside me. Like most of us, I have long suspected it. But I must continue my journey outside. Now I can see that it too is inside me. I am that which I fear and I am that which I seek. In the cave this understanding is not so hidden. In the cave I am a piece of myself accepting a conversation with the whole, a raised thumb pointing back towards the body.

     Howard the Prophet says, “We are mistaken enough to assume our reality.”

     A white feather shivers in the small pool of water where the crack in the ceiling drips, even when it has not rained for weeks.

      I cannot know when my cave will, for the moment, disappear. I have not learned to be a physical man. I have learned to think. Often it means I am left waiting. The answers come more slowly than actions, but I am seldom left regretting. This is not my pride but my necessity. It points the way like an imaginary finger pointing beyond the end of a reaching hand.

     Is the pointing reach the real insult?

     Must one stand alone, and turn, and curl, beckoning, in order to be accepted?

     Inside the fist, one is alone. Place your other hand there and another part of you exists inside. Place a tool there and a cave is possible. Place someone else’s hand there and the external becomes internal.

     As I continue work, the dirt and stone that I have removed from the hill continue to create a smaller hill, which is growing quickly, outside the cave. If I do not remove it first, someday I will want to put a cave in it too.

     Perhaps this has already happened.

     How many worlds do we live inside of?

     Russia. 1974. A commemorative set of doll stamps. One of them shows the famous Russian doll that holds another doll inside and another doll inside that doll, and there are seven dolls that the sheriff can count.

     The sheriff reaches for the magnifying glass, wondering if there is a traditional number of dolls or if it only depends on the craftsmanship of the doll maker. With the little finger of his right hand, the one holding the magnifying glass, the sheriff holds the now flipped stamp while he licks the index finger of his left hand, picks up a stamp hinge with its wetness, licks the other side of the hinge and places it on the back of the stamp. He licks his index finger again and touches it to the back of the stamp, beneath the hinge, allowing the hinge to hang loose where he can lick the other side of it, turn both stamp and hinge, and place the stamp carefully on the white page.

     One of the voices I listen to inside the cave is the voice of silence. I find it relaxing, what my neighbors might call “fulfilling,” to listen to the voice of silence. What it says, of course, cannot be repeated.

     Another voice I listen to is the voice of lost children. They do not know they are lost. That is the wonder of their innocence.

     Again the sheriff has fallen asleep at his desk, stamp book open under his slumped form. He breathes softly, almost silently, but he must have moved while he slept. A faded blue stamp in the shape of a triangle is attached to his eyebrow. There is a mountain with a temple in front of it on the stamp. Perhaps India or Afghanistan.

     Beside the open stamp book, the journal too is open.

     Another voice I listen to in the cave is the voice of stone. It is the voice of change. Slow gentle restorative change. It answers you when you speak to it. It tells you what you have really said.

     The voice of stone breaks only if you are sure of yourself. You must come to it again and again.

     The blue water, which has entered the cave, slowly spreads. It has spread across the ceiling. It comes down on all three sides. When I build a larger fire at the opening, one with too much smoke for my little ceiling hole inside the cave, sometimes light from that fire sparkles in the water moving along the ceiling farther back in the cave. I go back to that part of the cave, deeper in the earth, and I imagine that I am in the outside world looking up into the sky, seeing stars without realizing that they are merely sparkles in the water on the ceiling of a larger cave.

     In this way I do not know if I am sleeping or not.

     But I know that I am receiving the fingers of light.

     First I find some green pine boughs and place them in the fire. After they have blackened, but before they have burned out, I retrieve a burnt limb from the fire. I draw a landscape on the ceiling. I extend the landscape along the curves of the cave walls to the place on one end where the drawing falls into the cave floor, and on the other end, I draw the edges of a cave entrance around the opening to the outside world. Then I step into the outside world, and I turn and step back into the cave, which has already begun to change me once more. I return the limbs to the fire, and then I sleep.

     When I wake, I will step outside, into the morning’s new world, and there will be the landscape that I drew on the ceiling.

     “When you throw a stone into the cistern, it’s never happy until it hits the bottom,” said Howard the Prophet.

     When I woke this morning, I forgot that I had moved the cave. I stepped outside, and where my house had been, there was a large dead tree, blackened and leaning away from itself. The tree frightened me, but beyond the tree was a vast plain. I think I can see farther now than I have ever imagined.

     Canada.1986. A bright blue commemorative in honor of the Palomar Observatory. The night sky seems to be swallowing the dome that houses the telescope. Perhaps there is someone inside who has grown small as a result of his studies. Perhaps he is amazed and growing more insignificant as he discovers the universe to be so much larger than he could have known.

     Perhaps he will take up another profession. Perhaps he is on the wrong end of the astonishing instrument this stamp is meant to honor. Perhaps if he discovers none of this, it will not matter.

     This is the stamp under the sheriff’s right eye, which has begun twitching now for no apparent reason.

     “Irony is simply hypocrisy delivered with consummate style,” said Howard the Prophet.

     Nothing moved. I sat down at the mouth of the cave and noticed several tiny creatures crawling in the dirt. The insects appeared to be ants. They didn't move like ants.  Each one seemed intent upon its own course. Nothing at all like the regimented order of the ants that had lived in my own back yard. The ants at the mouth of the cave seemed bewildered by morning light, climbing the sky, as if they had lived inside the cave and only come out into this new world now, for the first time. Then I realized that my drawing on the ceiling had moved the ants too, like the cave, and they were exploring unfamiliar territory. In its previous home, the mouth of the cave had been protected by deep shadows.

     This time it took longer to find enough scrub brush for the fire to create the smudged ceiling I needed to draw another new home for the cave. I tried to imagine as clearly as possible what kind of a world the ants would feel comfortable in, and I began to draw it on the ceiling of the cave. I don't know how long it took, but before I finished, the light from the dying fire had become almost useless, and I decided to sleep for the night, to wait for the next morning to finish the drawing.

     That night I dreamed the ants had crawled up the walls of the cave to the ceiling and were finishing the drawing themselves. In my dream they gave me a clearer view of where it is they would like to live. But in the morning when I woke, I had forgotten the scene from the dream. Until I started drawing. Then it came back to me. But as I finished drawing the image from the dream on the ceiling of the cave, I realized I couldn't find the ants. I walked to the mouth of the cave, and it was so hot and bright there that I had to shield my eyes and stand still for a very long time in order to be able to see anything at all.

     Finally the sun began to cast a shadow through a dead tree and very slowly the shadow crawled across my foot. By the time that first shadow had crossed my foot, it felt as if the shadow had actually brushed my foot in hundreds of tiny points. I looked down and the ants were there. They were moving even slower. I felt as if my foot had become a part of the earth. I had no desire to move it. The ants appeared to be looking for something on my foot. I could not imagine what it could be. That made it more interesting to watch.

     Then a second shadow slowly crept across my foot. It too felt like the ants, and at first I assumed it was. Until the shadow finished moving across my foot and I was still feeling the hundreds of tiny points. The ants were gone.

     I went back inside the cave and made a few changes in the drawing on the ceiling. I fell asleep again, and when I woke, it was still dark. I stepped outside the cave, and there below were the lights of a house. I had not drawn those lights in the picture.

     I left the mouth of the cave and climbed down towards the lights. When I reached the house, I looked inside, and there at the kitchen table sat my son and my wife. They appeared to be eating. There were plates and forks clicking and tapping. All the motions of eating. They appeared to be carrying on a conversation.

     But when I looked more closely at their plates, they were empty. The forks were moving up and down from their mouths to the plates, from the plates to their mouths, but they were carrying nothing.

     I put my hand against the window, and my son got up and matched my hand on the other side of the glass, his hand against mine. My wife watched this, smiling, and my son sat back down. I went back into the cave and placed the shape of my hand into the picture on the ceiling. Again, I fell asleep.

     When I woke, it was not yet dawn, and at the mouth of the cave, I could see my house again. The kitchen lights were on, but no one was in the kitchen. I descended and entered the house and sat at the table and imitated the motions of a fork, as I had seen the night before. When my wife came into the room, I told her that my son had touched my hand through the window-glass last night. Of course my wife would already have known this, but I told her anyway, to see if what I knew was what she knew, and she said to me, "Thomas, we don't have a son."

     "We will," I said to her, and she took my hand, her hold loose and welcoming, letting her grip slide to my middle finger, which she used to pull me towards her.

     My dearest Joe,

     Our marriage has been the most unexpected joy of my life and I worry when your job seems to be consuming you, as it so easily can for anyone who has to deal so constantly with human weakness. I didn’t tell you, but the journal you have been reading has worried me. Not because I ever thought it was anything other than your work, but because you didn’t tell me about it. Several times, as you slept at your desk with your stamps and the journal you didn’t know I knew about, I was tempted to try to slide it from underneath you without waking you. I didn’t do that.

     But today you left it on the file cabinet, and you were so obviously exhausted that when I helped you to bed, you didn’t wake to go about your nightly routine of preparations (including hiding, or should I say “putting away” the journal). You seemed barely to even know I was putting you to bed and fell back to your dreams almost the second you hit the pillow.

     By now, as you have been reading this, you must have realized that this time I have read the journal. I was wrong to do so. I know it. I am sorry. All I can say in my defense is that I felt then somewhere, in some place deep inside me that I cannot name, that you need my help now. Perhaps it was a selfish impulse, as I have feared, and not a desire to help you at all. I no longer think I can know the answer, except by offering what help I can to see if it has any value. I can so easily understand your fascination with both the allure and the danger the writing represents. I stayed awake all that night. And I do share that fascination, though in time you may come to realize how differently my interest grew as I read.

     You must also be expecting me to be angry with you for hiding your fascination (dare I say “obsession”) from me. I knew it was your job, but you didn’t have to bring it home with you, and once you did, you didn’t have to keep from me your fascination with it. I can think of only one reason for you to hide it, and to hide it so carelessly, as if you wanted me to discover it, to know. You couldn’t tell me, except by tempting me to discover it for myself, and you didn’t know how I would react to it any more than you knew how you would.

     I am guessing by the placement between the pages of the glassine envelope containing the stamps with the religious paintings of angels on them that you have not finished reading the journal yet. Please finish. And please talk to me when you are done.  I am not angry. Your instincts are better than you know. There is something we need to discuss that I have in common with the author of the journal. Perhaps you have already suspected it.

     I’m not sure any of us really fully understands who we are, but we can talk about it and discover more. Together.

Yours in life, in dreams and beyond,

Angela

     The sheriff replaces the letter in its envelope, thinking for a moment of its pure white container that did not need his name to claim its intention. And then, once again, he opens the suspect journal. As he begins reading, he remembers how he once thought of his job, so many years ago, when he began protecting his idea of a good life, at work as well as at home, an idea of life he now finds naïve and childish, if not quite ignorant. It had not occurred to him then that violence might not be the only threat to that life. His body had brought him to what he had and what he would protect. He knew its limits, and he accepted them.

     Now his life seems to be inventing new limitations. Then, it seemed so simple to just accept what his friends and family believed about the end of a life. Not that he thought he was close to that yet, but it certainly no longer felt so easy. How much of his thinking had been created by the simple, seemingly relentless surging of fresh blood through his wide-open veins? How much would be restrained by the narrowing of the channels of possibility experience brought, good, bad or indifferent?

     It had not occurred to him then that experience might expand what could happen to him.

     “My greatest regret is that I am not a savage,” said Howard.

     I made love to my wife, thinking about my son and the softly lit table, deep in the night of the ants, and my skin tingled as if each caress my wife gave me contained the touch of hundreds of tiny feet, and every gesture was a line in a vast drawing of the place we would soon live.

     After we had held each other for a while, I took my wife’s hand and led her outside and up the hill to the cave. She gave me a look that said, "Why?" but when we got inside the cave, the fading fire was still reflecting warm light off the walls, and the tiny pinpoints of light in the ceiling made it feel as if we were outside, just as I had been when I imagined this, seeing my wife and son at the kitchen table.

     This time we made love with more muscle, as if some necessary animals created by the firelight had entered our bodies. My wife crawled on all fours to the pond at the back of the cave and scooped up a handful of the red mud. She painted my face with it, and her thumb snuck into my ear. Then each of her fingers. She lingered over the one that held her ring. I did the same to her.

     I heard a groan that seemed to come from the entire cave, but I could see by the expression on my wife’s face that she had made it. I tried to imitate the sound, and at first my imitation was weak. But as I tried once more, I was able to repeat the sound again and again.

     When we finished mating, I pointed to the ceiling, and she added a ragged man-beast to the drawing there. My pleasure was obvious. But how could anyone understand the movements of the cave? A mountain in our back yard, the edge of a vast plain, and last night, the cave had entered our house.

     As we mated again, our house took up residence in my wife’s paw. And when I woke inside it, there was very little fuel left to feed the fire. The opening seemed to be blocked. What would I do if I couldn't complete a new picture on the ceiling before the fire went out? I fell asleep thinking about it. When I woke, the fire had died. But on the ceiling of the cave, the shape left by the soot from the dying fire had created a map. It looked like a map of our house.

     And when I stepped outside the cave, I was in my own living room. Our neighbor, Desirée, was standing there, staring at me. I realized that I still had red mud on my face. I had not put on any clothes. I smiled and asked her where my wife was.

    Desirée smiled back. At first she didn't answer, but then she said, "I hear you're building a cave."

     I answered, "No, I'm just finding one. It's always been there. I only uncovered it."

     Desirée smiled again and said, "My husband thinks you're crazy. He thinks you are conducting some kind of primitive sex ritual."

     I answered, "They aren't rituals."

     Desirée smiled again.

     My wife came out of the bathroom and stopped suddenly in front of the door when she saw us. Her cheeks were rosy where she had been scrubbing them. She wore no makeup. Her hair was hanging straight down, the way it used to when we first got together. She hadn't worn it that way in years. She turned and stepped into the kitchen. I could hear her taking cups from the cupboard.

     Desirée's eyes drilled a hole in my chest. I kneeled on the floor and slowly laid my body forward with my arms outstretched. My wife walked into the living room with two cups of liquid and gave one to Desirée. She sat down in a chair at the edge of the room, a position from which she could not see me. She and Desirée began talking. I held very still.

     Today I moved the cave inside Desirée. She didn't know it was there, but she could feel it. I left the cave inside her all day. All day long Desirée grinned. Desirée's husband began getting irritated with Desirée. He thought she was laughing at him. He said, "You've been spending too much time around that woman living with the crazy man."

     Desirée smiled.

     Each time Desirée smiled, I felt the cave move. Desirée did not know that I felt this, but once when I walked to the entrance, I could see Desirée standing in her back yard, looking up at the mouth of the cave. Did she know this was part of her? I don't think Desirée could see me, but it seemed as if she knew I was there. I knew Desirée wanted to come inside the cave, but she couldn't. The cave was inside her.

     Slowly. Delicately. A thinly grained hinge of gummed paper. His tongue tentatively caressing the pattern then his little finger lifting off the hinge and sticking to the space below, his wrist turning to hold out the view of the two images of winged creatures with human features, their colors muted with age, their edges ragged with the touch of fingers along the perforated edge, the pastel remainder of ink faintly revealing the outlines of wings, no longer white, as if outside the world of the image. Where the light came from, that world was very very gray and reluctant to enter this world, inside, with the shading of the stained glass holding back the parts we are not ready to receive.

     Like a lover, an idea of grace, the smallest finger enters the opening between these two aged depictions of the artist’s imagination and places a third possibility, a pair of wingless creatures suspended between sky and earth, holding something larger than themselves but imperfectly rendered. Is it the earth they hold now, its bright modern light placed into the aging stamp by the little finger carrying an image from another source? An image veined with imperfections in the stained glass it captures, meant to represent bodies of water? Is it the moon with its craters the size of continents? Impossible to know. Even if its maker had left a record of its meaning, could we trust it? How much of what we create is merely passing through us rather than beginning with us?

     With the softest of separations, the finger’s skin releases the sticky skin of the ink, the surface of this unwitting traveler. The object is to place the stamp in order to give it a relationship, an understanding from its new place in the ordered world, an understanding of its compared meaning, an understanding of the past from which our understanding of it must arise. To do so without removing any of its “presence.” And so to place another image, a modern one, in an old context is to violate the world the stamp inhabits. Or to question our own.

    This time the sheriff does not sleep though perhaps he continues to dream.

     The next day I moved the cave again when Desirée came to visit my wife. As I stepped out the back door, my wife asked where I was going. I gestured as widely as I could, as if to say, "Out into the whole world."

     Desirée took a step forward towards the back door, as if she too intended to go, then caught herself and stopped. My wife took her hand, and they followed me up the hillside to the cave. I don't know how I understood that I should lead this time, but it felt as if there were some kind of a bond that needed to be strengthened between my wife and Desirée before they could enter the cave together.

     As we moved slowly to enter the cave, I confessed to Desirée, "Yesterday I moved the cave inside you. Today I moved it back here."

     My wife and I led Desirée into the cave, to the center of its space, and gestured toward the ceiling. Desirée startled in recognition and began to say, "That's . . ." but she didn't finish the sentence.

     I said, "Yes."

     My wife stepped towards Desirée with a handful of the red mud. Desirée disrobed, kneeled. When my wife was finished, Desirée went to the pool at the back of the cave and brought back another handful of red mud. She painted my wife’s unclothed body with the red mud. Then they did the same to me, and we crouched at the center of the cave by the fire, thickened, glistening figures wild with a new kind of hope. As the ceiling darkened from the smoke, we took turns adding to the painting above the fire. I felt as if I had returned to a world devoid of gender.

     Or was it only the idea of such a world that we needed?

     The next morning we found a large rock with a manila envelope tied to it with rough-looking twine like a primitive missile catapulted into our living room. It had broken the largest pane of the front window. It was, of course, from Desirée's husband. He had placed his intentions inside the envelope before attaching them to the stone. The envelope had no stamp. It didn’t need one. But it did have an equally unnecessary interpretation of the envelope’s destination. Addressed to "Salem Cave Dweller's Society," it held a formal letter notifying Desirée of his intention to file for divorce. It also contained a small drawing. The drawing pictured my wife, Desirée, me, and several anonymous others dancing around a fire, naked with pitchforks and torches. The fire had been colored with orange and yellow crayon. The women's genitals and breasts and the men's genitals were drawn very large. They were highly detailed and enhanced with fire-engine red and odd small streaks of blue. The sex organs appeared almost to be separate creatures, angry and burning. Desirée’s hair was wild, even redder than its natural intensity. Orange snakes, tangled like briars from her entire upper body, their heads larger than their thin bodies would have allowed, advanced on the viewer. From the mouth of the largest snake, an arrow pointed across the page, all the way to the edge. Taped to the back-side was a bright Polaroid photograph of Desirée's house with her husband standing on the porch, looking out across the lawn, pleased with himself. Desirée's clothing, a blue suitcase and the valise of cosmetic supplies Desirée used for her work at the funeral home were scattered across the front lawn. It looked like several people had deflated and melted into the lawn. It reminded me of The Wizard of Oz, the illustrated version I had read to my wife, feeling childish, but she had encouraged all the voices I had indulged in. I overacted the dialogue and enjoyed being so many exaggerated people. I wondered which character I was supposed to be. I wanted to be all of them.

     I replaced the letter, drawing and photograph in the manila envelope and wrapped the twine around it and the rock. I placed it just as we had found it. I wanted Joe to understand what had happened. I thought about letting him read the new notebook I had started.

     Angela quiet. Angela dreaming. Angela outside her body. Angela trying to imagine what it could be like not to remember the past. Angela remembering the past. Angela feeling surprised that she even has a past, trying to get over the feeling that it was somebody else’s past that she remembers, the feeling that her own past was more than a lifetime ago.

     Angela remembering her ex-husband, his disappearance, her life after, while the authorities gradually gave up and finally allowed the divorce. How skittish and frightened of anything physical she had been after her most physical desire, the desire for a child, had been thwarted. How she had wanted to remain outside her body, until Joe slowly brought her back to it, so far into her body that it began to feel as if it was Joe who didn’t inhabit his.

     Angela remembering the one part of her past that always seemed to belong to her, the boy next door, Thomas, the son of Robert and Margaret Chandler, the only one she still felt connected to from that time although she had not seen him since leaving, had not thought of him as still living even, not as the man he would be by now, as if he could stay the child he was. He should have been her child, she thinks once more. If he had been, perhaps she could have let him grow up. Perhaps she could have let herself finally grow into her own body.

     Angela remembering the scars on her ex-husband’s shoulders, how sensitive the nerves on the surface of the wound were, not like other wounds she had heard about from returned soldiers. How ironic it was for her to think of them as the marks of lost wings since his war wounds had come from shrapnel that had found him in the sky.

     Howard silent. Howard listening. Listening to what? The ventriloquist has not spoken for weeks. Is it too late?

     We helped Desirée collect her things. Her house was dark and silent, as if no one was there.

     I write this now after a month of angry silence from Desirée’s almost-ex-husband. Desirée met a young artist and began modeling for him. The artist drew Desirée as a thin, angular, nearly staccato figure. No fire, no pitchforks, no torches. The likeness was unmistakable, though Desirée had become more Rubinesque than her contemporary artist chose to render her.

     Desirée was delighted by the drawings. They were nearly life-size and artist began framing them with large intricate arches. It made them look as if they had been done centuries ago. The elaborate textures he created for the arches contrasted sharply with Desirée's smooth flowing body.

     Desirée still visits, but only when she is sure her almost-ex-husband will not be home. They still live in the same house, but ignore each other. They’re both developing separate lives, but have not yet been able to fully let go. They talk openly about the change, but do not encourage it, except to spend more time elsewhere.

     One day my wife commented on the arches the artist had added to the drawings, and Desirée said, "That's the entrance." When she left, my wife handed her a heavy Tupperware container. She saw the look of surprise on my face and explained, "It's from the cave."

     Later we heard from another friend that the artist was becoming very obese and very successful. Desirée began painting pictures of him as a very skinny lithe little gnome using a heavy impasto of earthy reds and sooty blacks. Her paintings began to sell and an art magazine reported that she ground her own pigments. Then we received a package of blue dust by mail. We took it to the cave and spread it on the pool of water that had formed at the back when we made it bigger. After the dust had settled to the bottom, we could see that it had contained small crystal structures, and now the fire, reflecting from the ceiling, was also reflecting a soft midnight blue from the bottom of the pool.

     The sheriff seems to be thinking of something else, thinking of something not there in the room, staring down in front of him vacantly, until he once again opens the stamp book and runs his finger across the columns, stopping at the first of five stamps from Belgium depicting statues of bird/humans, mirrored on the opposing page by five more from Bhutan. Softly, gently he places his left little finger on the first stamp and then his ring finger on the second. He rolls all his fingers from little finger to thumb as if striking a chord across the five stamps. Then he rolls the fingers of both hands across the ten stamps and pauses.

     Is he listening? For what? Is he casting a spell?

     Like the light before it, the dark has descended. The stamp book is closed. The journal is closed beside it. If there is no one in the room, can the room then exist only in our imagination? How easy and tragic it would be if we could not imagine such things.  If the light did not fall, it could not rise.

     So the sheriff returned to the cave, deep blue and dark red, like the faded dreamlike scenes on his most valued, aged stamps, like the cool pull that still soothes the ache beneath his shoulder-blades.

     “The river was waiting for me and when I got there, I knew I had been waiting too,” said Howard the Prophet.

     Thomas begins filling the hole with soft damp earth made heavy by all the tears that have fallen from heaven. The hole is empty except for a few small feathers and the sweat that has fallen from Thomas’s tear-stained back. Something is going home. Something is returning.

     Harold’s heavy low-slung creaturely sway and pull adds a three-legged syncopation to the rhythm of Thomas’s shovel as Harold slumps forward, onto the side of his oversized head, and scoots the earth back behind him with his unevenly placed hind legs, erratically supplemented by the unstable effort of his one front leg.

     One at a time, each night, a new entrance to the earth performs its mysterious function. Are they tunnels whose entrances have been sealed? Is there something contained in them that is not apparent, perhaps not even visible?

     Opened and closed, opened and closed.

______________________

Rich Ives story "Red's Paradise" appears in AlteredScale.com 2.

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, 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. His story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, was one of five finalists for the 2009 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. In 2010 he was a finalist in fiction at Black Warrior Review and Mississippi Review and in poetry at Cloudbank and Mississippi Review. The Mississippi Review finalist works appear in the Spring, 2010 issue of that magazine and the Cloudbank finalist appears in the Spring, 2010 issue of that magazine as well. Contact author.