Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

His literary activity had begun as a search into the structure of a moment. The moment occurred near the end of a routine photo mission when, glimpsing movement at the edge of an empty village, Mueller dropped the Mohawk for a quick peek and a scrawny old woman, all arms and legs, darted out spiderlike from beneath a bush, stopped, planted a pair of splayed feet into the ground and lifted to her bony cheek the long wide heavy barrel of an immense rifle, fixing forever an instant in which horizon rim, banana tree and palm, thatch roof and angular shadow, flowing grass and squinting face, spun about a huge dark oily metal hole. He hung there at the end of a wire, a set of startled blue eyes staring down. Then the plane banked violently away, landscape and cloud resumed linear motion, engines ground unsteadily home where the part of him labeled Lieutenant Mueller made his report, drank his beer, ate his dinner, impersonated bland normality with professional skill as his watch ticked on, sun followed moon, the first wrinkles appeared in the mirror while the moment persisted, refused to change, a note struck and held, through all his succeeding days and nights, a hole that would never close. He read, he jotted down notes, he began keeping track. The Old Man agreed he could start compiling material, in a semiofficial capacity, on a life of the 1069th. Knee-high piles of books and magazines stood about the room like tree stumps. Sheets of loose paper littered the floor. The moment swelled and deepened. Facts, events, objects, and people, himself included scribbling away, descended daily, whirling about the hole, debris down the drain of history.

There was the tale of the first commanding officer, an unrestrained oddball nicknamed Captain Natural who appeared to have undergone a bizarre version of the famous imperialist breakdown celebrated in film and print and who was last seen parachuting bucknaked into the jungle, falling out of the virginal blue like a hysterical nun’s wet dream. There was the aged intelligence veteran with impressive credentials dating back to the dirk-and-dark-alley days of the OSS, the very mastermind who had attempted to bribe Hitler’s gardener to sprinkle a hefty dose of estrogen on top of Der Fuehrer’s cabbage, thereby rendering the symbol of Aryan virility into a bald, moustacheless, wheezing old woman—an agent of flair and imagination whose mind, approaching its twilight years, was unfortunately lit by the sinking sun from strange angles and took to studying esoteric religious tracts printed on recycled grocery bags by one-man publishing houses with names like The Armed Armageddonist and Hot Cross Press. There was the interrogation chief who called his section The Dental Clinic and conducted sessions in information extraction dressed in a barbecue apron depicting a hapless suburban chef behind a backyard grill on which steaks were smoking like a steel mill in Gary over the amusing caption BURNED OR CHARRED? and who, when he wasn’t devising such clever innovations as the placement of heated map pins in a decorative pattern on the surface of the eyeball, practiced the Oriental Water Pik, an operation consisting of blocking open the mouth with wooden wedges and flooding the upraised throat, nostrils, and eyes with gallons of unpotable water until the ensuing nausea and suffocation resulted in an uncontrollable expulsion of undigested food, water, mucous, and the precise geographic coordinates of the patient’s battalion; an overzealous patriot who was finally escorted, handcuffed and delirious, still chattering about jeep batteries and skin resistance, out to a waiting plane and away. There was the CO found slumped in a latrine stall one gray morning, a large bayonet skewering several important organs in his chest, a roll of damp toilet paper clutched in his right hand. There was the spook who walked the streets of Hanoi in a baggy Bulgarian suit and steel glasses and who died in the bombing the information he radioed out made possible. It was all there in the heap of white leaves collecting on Mueller’s floor. The Crevecoeur Hotel murders, the mad boy of Duc Lop, the explosion of Bunker 13, the EM club manager with Mafia connections, the month-long interrogation of the beautiful Xuan Hoa, the gay First Sergeant who staffed the orderly room with his lovers, the black Counter Intelligence deserter who led a squad of VC sappers, the sexual banquets at the CIA estate outside Hue.

Today Mueller was busy working on a complete creation myth. He puffed on his pipe. Smoke billowed upward into the shadows. The light reflected orange suns off the walls. How did it begin? How did it all begin?

He pulled a pad onto his lap and across the top line wrote, “In the beginning was boredom and air-conditioning.”

The war might have been a universe away.

His pencil, composing, danced gracefully over the page to the scratch, scratch of its own harmonic accompaniment. Yet in the intervals between phrases, the silences separating thought, he could still feel the hole spiraling through graphite, paper, the pulp of his chest.

“What I find definitively weird is this: a guy, thirty years a pilot, military and commercial experience, last five with the Mohawk exclusively, suddenly dumps his laundry at the end of the runway on a routine takeoff in clean weather that a blindfolded student could pull off without a problem. How come? That’s Fort Rucker washout stuff.”

“Unless he had a reason.”

“For sticking his head in a meat grinder?”

“He didn’t know the plane was going to come apart. Hell, they bellyflopped off a diving board. He thought he’d be able to get out okay.”

“Emergency ditching lessons for the new man?”

“Flashy stunts for Hollywood. That movie of his needed a finish. He’s going home, he wants a grand finale for his war flick. He stations Wendell and camera across the highway, smiles and waves, and takes it down under the nose of the lens. Boom.”

“Only he don’t get up again.”

“There is the movie.”

“An amateur job with no sound and scratches all over the negative.”

“Our own CO immortalized.”

“Long as the freak don’t lose the film.”

Out on the sloping edge of the runway, squarely centered over a large white numeral 9, a single aircraft stood poised, awaiting final clearance from the tower, an unreliable looking structure of pocked terra cotta and fissured plaster defaced by the graffiti of three continents, the acne of war, and a perennially pubescent climate. The building had been hurriedly constructed and even more quickly abandoned in the early ’fifties by a disgraced army of fleeing French. (According to Mueller’s History, on receiving news of the debacle in progress, the base commandant, Jean-Paul Roipecheur, immediately ordered a bath drawn and, after soaking the filth of Asia from his pores, donned a royal blue dress uniform and sauntered out to greet the advancing enemy. There, in a superb exhibition of Gallic hauteur, he nibbled leisurely from a tin of pâté de foi gras as lead buzzed like vineyard bees about his head and mortar explosions rearranged the topography of his command until the heathen Viet Minh were less than a hundred yards away when he tossed silver fork and uneaten goose liver aside and threw himself dramatically on his sword shouting. “Et voici comment la France a riposté à tous les despotes!” Unfortunately, the blade, deflected by a gaudy armorlike row of chest decorations and medals, missed the vital organs and he required five hours to die, during which agony Roipecheur unwittingly divulged every military secret he was privy to. “Très déclassé,” muttered the Parisian press.)

Unaware of his proximity to this historical epicenter, the American pilot, Captain Alvin P. Fry, studied his instrument panel with a gruff professional air. The various appliances attached to his head, the huge olive green wraparound helmet, the radio microphone jutting out between his lips, the wide-lensed aviator’s sunglasses shielding his eyes, all served to broaden the zone of cool impenetrability that normally surrounded him. His hands, sensitive to the feel of the machine, moved skillfully among the knobs, buttons, and levers of the cramped cockpit. He leaned forward, tapped on a gauge with a gloved finger, the white needle swung loose, settled back into its proper position. When he glanced up at the sky his sunglasses reflected distorted ovals of soft washed light. The man looked good, he didn’t at all appear to be suffering from one of the most godawful hangovers of his drinking career. He might have been looking for a place to stick his gum instead of manfully debating whether it was more appropriate for a former Green Beret staff sergeant, ex–Operation Phoenix trigger-man, and recently promoted captain to vomit directly on the floor between his legs where that obnoxious jug-eared crew chief who couldn’t operate a screwdriver without diagrammed instructions would be sure to discover it caked and rancid on his return or whether to pop the hatch and boldly let fly into the prop wash, risking a faceful of boomeranging breakfast. Neither alternative was particularly acceptable no matter how sick he felt. Actually he would suffocate on his own repressed vomit before playing the fool for anyone. At the age of seventeen he had had tattooed on his right forearm a blue eagle clutching in its talons the banner DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. An army psychiatrist who examined Fry after members of his Alpha team caught him eating C-rations out of a freshly evacuated VC skull was heard to remark afterward, “This wacko has a real mother of a self-image.” So dishonor somehow seemed more of a possibility today in this plane than it ever had on the battlefield. The big Rolls-Royce engines rumbled on in idle, shivering his hams and driving a series of vibrations worse than malarial fever up his spine, and every polluted throb of his heart set off a burst of Claymores behind each eyeball. He wanted to die. For a moment he seriously considered whether prayer might not help, an option he had not taken since boyhood when he had watched a haloed face materialize one dreary summer morning on the creamy wall of his Sunday school classroom, misting gray and ancient against a cloud-shaped water stain, a juvenile’s composite of authority: stern and sympathetic, gentlemanly and cherubic, wise and innocent, the features unconsciously gleaned from a sunlit memory of his grandfather and an imposing portrait of enthroned Deity looming above the 26-inch color television set in the parlor of his piously dotty Aunt Victoria, a face which amazed years later when he saw it in Time magazine peering owlishly over the canted shoulder of President John Kennedy, the story described the previous week’s Bay of Pigs disaster and a caption identified those familiar lineaments as belonging to one Allen Dulles. Prayer, he concluded, would be about as effective as that invasion. There were more efficient methods of dealing with bodily insubordination. There was that moldy agent’s dodge: In the presence of ungovernable stress, create a diversionary pain you can control. Fry placed his tongue between his back molars and bit down. He thought he would faint. If he could stay cool until airborne there would be too much to do to waste energy on internal discomforts. He had to make it, he had to. He didn’t want to be sick, not in his plane, not on his pants, especially not in front of an enlisted man.