Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

They laughed, remembering, but this was not the same. Kraft was not a reporter and though he had only been among them for a few hours he did not seem to be a comical person. The look on his mud-caked face was one they recognized. They had sometimes seen it on each other and it had nothing to do with comedy.

In the afternoon a helicopter deposited the new CO at the main air terminal. The colonel’s driver picked him up, Val-Pak and briefcase, and drove him back down the spongy red road past the old man and into the unit area. The new CO ordered everyone to get a haircut and then went inside to inspect his new office. His first quotable remark: “What a dump.”

And McFarland had crotch rot and Ellis malaria again and Cross worried about his feet and Samuels wet his bed and Trips sat all day in Ops reading The Mind Parasites where the flame-proof-suited pilots bearing stained mugs of bad coffee came and went, the metal buckles of their seat harnesses jingling like tiny bells and Sergeant Anstin ran through the hootches at night with a flashlight searching for bags of dope and Lieutenant Hand hadn’t spoken to anyone for three days and Noll was out in the hangar trying to tattoo FTA on his arm with a bottle of ink and a hypodermic needle and the bomb craters on the film reminded Chief Warrant Officer Winkly of little pussies and someone cried himself to sleep and everyone hoped that Captain Fry would crash and burn and Hogan claimed he had never had this much fun in civilian life and hoped his home town was blown up so he wouldn’t have to go back to it anymore and Feeny counted his money each morning and evening and the woman in Cage 1 wished the Americans would kill her today and Boswell, who was leaving, asked Griffin how many days he had left and when he heard the answer said, “Do trees live that long?” and out on the perimeter girls from the nearby village bared their breasts across the wire, tiptoed in among the Claymores, giggled on the bunker floors, and Wurlitzer dreamed of bald monks in maroon robes descending stone passageways in the far-off temples of Katmandu, and a pack of stray dogs roamed up and down the compound searching for someone to play with.

In the late afternoon the rain began again, gently at first, then with gradually increasing insistence until the tire ruts in front of the orderly room were filled with nickel-colored pools and the earth started to move again. The rain pattered down like particles flaking from some high corrosion overhead.

Griffin turned the crank.

Creak, went the sign in the wind. Creak, creak.

2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid

2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid

2,4,6-start the engines, pull the sticks

2,4,6,8-everyone evacuate

Days after Trips left I was still finding tiny dust-coated Easter eggs under the furniture and between the floorboards. His exit hadn’t bothered me, I was used to abrupt departures. When his burn flamed out he’d be back, depleted, depressed, unwinding some bizarre skein of improbabilities down to the invariable cops and docs—he couldn’t warm all his fuses except in relation to uniformed authority—then dropping into an eighteen-hour coma that seemed to be all he required of sleep for a week or more. I was glad to be alone. Those coy Oriental fans inside spreading and folding, spreading and folding. Exteriors were getting remote. I tried going out on patrol. Eugene was in the corridor, strips of electrical tape crisscrossed over his mouth, this week’s love slave. He threw me a Nazi salute. Outside the street was impossible. It wasn’t overfed shoppers and wired account executives I needed to stare at. In fifteen minutes I was back. I replaced the lock on the door, unplugged the phone, covered the windows with plastic garbage bags. When reconnoitering Yesterday you should begin in a haunted chamber, in a place where there are already holes in the scenery. I was lucky. The first time I saw this room I knew at once I had stumbled upon an opening, one of those ruptures the city is secretly riddled with, a way in under the barbed wire. The decor: Modern Aftereffects. This was the site of an explosion.

In the center of the floor stood a cairn of cascading rubbish monumental in size and odor. Phantom vultures shuffled papery wings, pecked for scraps. From a torn mattress flung across the top of the mound spilled curds of fluffy yellowy stuffing. Beneath this clown’s toupee were visible the following: two chair bottoms stamped PROPERTY OF HOLIDAY INN; a bent car antenna; a slide of glossy magazines devoted to the twin subjects of perverse sports and team sex; a scattering of paperbacks (political delusions, paranoid sex); a pair of white oil-stained pants; one cracked combat boot; a jogging shoe without a lace; a powder blue sweatshirt advertising ASPEN SKI MADNESS; four concrete blocks; a transistor radio missing its back; 33 ⅓ record shards; twisted clothes hangers; a coil of climbing rope; a section of rubber hose; a busted television set whose shattered eye framed a large maroon ashtray in which reposed a cluster of shiny prune pits; and everywhere split sacks of garbage leaking empty bean and soup cans, balled-up fast-food bags, crumpled chicken boxes, crushed Styrofoam cups, dry bones, bread crusts, wine bottles, beer cans, chocolate milk cartons. From the base of the pile across the linoleum floor extended a long wide tongue of dark brown fluid that the flies—a busy congregation of them—seemed to find especially tasty. Overhead a mobile made of pipe cleaners twisted into grotesque little men, each man hanging by a different limb, turned slowly in the dusty stillness, frightened astronauts falling.

It was the walls, however, that demanded attention. Every wall from top to bottom had been covered by a jungle of black spray-painted graffiti. The messages were grim. Caught in the center of a demonic merry-go-round your gaze leaped from word to word frantic for security. There was none. The work might have achieved transfiguration as some sort of verbal Guernica of the soul had not every scrawled phrase, without exception, been so worn by age and excessive handling they slipped through the mind with irritating ease. OFF THE PIGS, END THE WAR, UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKERS, BLACK POWER, STOP THE KILLING, POWER TO THE PEOPLE, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK YOU. Slogans, a collision of clichés. But there was nothing counterfeit about the author’s agony. Some of the letters were as tall as a man.

“It needs a little work,” commented the landlord.

I thought of temples and caves and three a.m. subway stations. You didn’t want to linger, in vestments or trenchcoat, unless intent upon disturbing various principalities of unpleasantness above and below. I moved in the next day.

With the patience of an archaeologist I spent hours examining those furious hieroglyphics, trying to imagine the ancient peoples who made them. Tie-dyed hippies who passed around a family-sized bong of mellow yellow, crashed in a tangle of nakedness and beads on a stained flea-infested mattress. Emaciated freaks on methedrine, and knives who performed ritualistic murder on neighborhood cats in the kitchen sink. Righteous Panthers in cocked berets and crossed bandoliers who strutted boldly down bad streets. An unemployed vet, black, broke, and bad-papered, who one night in this room unraveled himself like a mummy peeling away its own wrapping and took a gun and headed for the roof. I composed limericks I never showed anyone: