http://www.taosnews.com/entertainment/article_d16b410e-afa1-11e4-90b6-93bc339c7a9b.html
We paint signs on the gates so we can pretend to be able to predict what we’re going to find. Like: This field over here has a house that is usually warm. That one there has patches of quicksand but also some diamonds in the ground so take your chances. This is the kind of information we want in a map. Though of course, fields change.
For most of this century — which hasn’t been very long yet — the field up there northeast of town has been called My Field of Being Madly In Love. Like every field, it has rules. To enter there, I have to scratch my wrist against a bit of barbed wire sticking out of the gate until my blood runs down the wire as far as the rusty latch, and then the gate will open. Sometimes. When it does open, it’s only for one and a half seconds and if I haven’t run through it in that time a mallet will come out and will whack up and down on my head at least seven times though seldom more than a hundred and forty-four, and then I have to go away and come try again at some future narrow window of time that I may or may not be able to guess.
But when I do get into that field — and I have, more than once — Oh, it’s lovely. Because sometimes, after I’ve been accidentally shot in the knee by the automated alarm system, or bitten in the hand by the septic crocodiles in the moat, sometimes after that when I climb up onto Broken-Glass beach and apologize for all the blood, then the owner of the field comes almost all the way out of his house and he is so very, very sweet to me! I tell him I love him and he says “Thank you” in a voice so refined that I can tell he has been beautifully raised, and I can’t even dream of ever having manners as nice as his.
Well, one day about a year ago, a new path shows up and we all take a walk down to see the new field, just to be polite. It looks like a neat little garden. Kind of simple — the ground seems like just ground, I walk all over it and don’t spring one trap door; and the benches don’t have hidden snap-up blades or auto-cuffs, they are just benches, you could sit there and — I don’t know, breathe.
A few of us start getting invited to the new field, and then after a while I start getting invited there just by myself. And when I’m invited I go. Because there are a lot of hours in a day, and I don’t get into the Madly field very often. Though of course when I do it’s just sublime.
The new field — I don’t paint a name on it yet — turns out to be a lot bigger than it looks from the front, and not simple at all; there are all kinds of unexpected things you can’t see right off the bat, even though none of them seems to be punishment-oriented. It turns out the neat little garden has I don’t know how many secret gates all along the wall, and all of them lead to deeper gardens, all full of treasures.
There are fountains with violet and gold mosaic, there are pyramids you can climb up to the top of them and see outer space without a telescope, there are pools that look perfectly clear but if you jump into them and swim under water you suddenly pop up in another garden even more beautiful and quite a bit farther into the interior.
And within these concentric circles of ever-more-exquisite gardens, there is a field as vast as the starry universe, a field of openness and limitless possibility. Limitless — except for this one tree.
The orchards in this field are abundant. There is fruit that tastes like a mother’s gaze at her baby, there is fruit that tastes like smiling at your Friend when he is about to open a gift, there is fruit that tastes like the quiet right before the birth of a galaxy, there is fruit that lets you look into each other’s eyes and laugh in pure delight, there is fruit that heals you just thinking about it, and all of these we are allowed. Only the one spicy tree at the far end of the field is forbidden. There is a very old stone wall around the tree, and it is forbidden to cross the wall. That’s okay.
Every day I am more grateful and pleased to be in this field. When I come here, the owner of it comes and meets me at the gate and opens it to let me in. We smile at each other and he pours wine for me and I pour wine for him just because it is pleasant to do something for the other one, and I show him the gardens in my field too, we let the fields play together and they never fight.
One day, his hands tremble, and his cheeks go scarlet as he crosses healing candles at my throat — and there’s this little tremor in the field. Nothing anyone could notice, it isn’t on the news, but there’s some type of definite tectonic plate shift and when it settles down, I can’t help noticing there’s an entirely new idea in my head. All of a sudden I’m sitting up in the sky where I can see the new field and the Madly field at the same time, and I’m thinking, why did I ever paint “Madly In Love” on the gate of that field of painfulness? It should just say, “Field of Painfulness.” And not that I know anything about Being in Love — but if I ever did, wouldn’t it probably be something much more like this new field? Wouldn’t it probably be like this kind of deeply friendly Seeing each other, and every cell smiling welcome? Wouldn’t it probably be like this warm Sun shining out in every direction from the very center of the heart? Stretching itself like a big lion and saying, “Home. This is Home.”
Now I will tell you, what I don’t do while I’m up there in the sky looking at both fields — what I don’t do is scrape the sign off the Madly field gate and run over and plaster it onto the new field. That would be obvious and wrong and I don’t do it. Although. I was starting to realize. But all I do is look back at the old Madly field and think, “That was an interesting way to spend a few years but that is not Love.” And I look at the new field and think, “Thank you.”
After that I am even more careful about staying away from the spicy tree whose fruit we are not to eat. Because I want to be sure that the owner of the new field can see how I respect the absolute forbiddenness of the tree, and the authority of the old stone wall, even though the wall has no barbed wire and is not very high and there are openings in some places you could walk right through.
We don’t look at the tree, we don’t touch it. We do talk about it, but only to tell each other how true it is that the fruit over there is not really very satisfying or very wholesome, it goes right through you and you just want more. And there’s the whole rest of the field to play in and Oh, it’s lovely. There is no need to ever look in that corner or to go near that wall.
It’s easy to ignore a tree in wintertime. And in the spring, when the tree flowers, it’s easy to enjoy the blossoms from far away, flowers don’t fill you with wild thirst for fruit. And in early summer the green fruit is interesting but you know, it’s green. But by mid-July, by August — A low stone wall does nothing to restrain scent, and by late summer there are moments when there is nowhere in all the vast universe, no cave or pool or fortress or mountaintop that isn’t drenched and permeated with the scent of spicy fruit. And the singing, the fruit attracts singing birds or maybe serpents and their song is such as to pull your heart up against your chest.
Still — I am happy and grateful with this field as it is, and I say to myself, I will respect that wall for all of my life, I will never cross over it, even if it’s offered to me, I will even take the responsibility to guard it myself.
But before I can tell him this — before I can say to him, “I will always respect this wall, I will never reach for that fruit” — the field changes.
I think, any day now he will invite me to the field, as always, and we will talk in a sensible and kind way, as always, and we will be able to laugh and enjoy the fruits that are permitted, they are many and wonderful. But for days and weeks there is an impenetrable cloud where invitation used to be, which has never happened before. So even though I am a little scared, I walk up to the cloud uninvited, and I can see the field shimmering on the other side, and I can see him sitting alone on a rock, looking right at me but not seeing me through the cloud. I go up toward the gate but before I can reach it I bump into something cold and hard and invisible that knocks me back onto the floor in a world of hurt.
I think, that’s strange. I get up and look at the cloud. There is mean-looking electricity in there. But I have something to say, so I walk right into it, and it knocks me back again. I start to panic. Just a little. I go around the sides to all the different entrances I can remember and wherever I turn there is something hard and invisible that I can’t anticipate. Here is free air, and I take another step into more free air and then I take one more step and slam, there is a cold hurt I didn’t see. So finally I sit down where I am, curled up tight like a child to not disturb anything.
This is what I used to do when I met a wall: I used to get a shovel to dig under it, and a ladder to climb over it, and a catapult to bring it down and a depth charge to blow it up. In the Madly field that was part of the rules, they were disappointed if I didn’t find a way pretty quick. That was a game.
But here — here I want none of that, here I am tamed. Here I can only sit and wait, suspending time, spinning time into such a fine, delicate thread that this moment becomes no longer part of time but part of humility. This is a new field.
Each day I say good morning to my charming and handsome boyfriend Ricky Gervais, and he says ‘good morning darling, how lovely that we get to spend another day together here in Malibu’. And then I open the front door and I say ‘darling, didn’t that real estate agent tell us this was beachfront? all I see is dust and I can’t smell the ocean at all’; and he says ‘get that estate agent on the phone love, for thirty thousand quid a month there ought to be a good swimming beach as well as the infinity pool.’ And then I wake up.
This is the first story I ever had published. It won grand prize in a 250-Word Science Fiction Short Story competition in the Village Voice.
When I was in grade school, I couldn’t take a multiple choice test without scribbling long explanations in the margins: “I’ve put ‘a’ for the answer to this one, but I don’t think there’s really enough information in the question to be 100% sure it couldn’t ever be ‘c’, like for instance, if….” etc.
Likewise, the moment I write “This is Fiction,” I’m wondering if that’s truthful or if my novel, anyone’s novel, is just loosely camouflaged history. On the other hand, when I watch the news on TV it seems like mythological archetypes masquerading as fact in topical costumes…..
Okay, all I set out to do this morning was see if I could get a comment to post.
