Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

It was time to slow down the carousel. I covered the walls with two coats of winter white. The room shone. On sunny afternoons it was like living inside a cloud, wandering lonely with angels and harps. At night, during periods of the month when the swollen moon peered anxiously in, the letters became visible again, rose to the surface like bloated corpses. So when Huey began to practice her calligraphy on the walls I did not object. Another layer of paint might help to up the interference level, scramble communications, generate some white noise in the text. Besides, I loved to watch Huey work. Her brush arm, flowing with an orchestra conductor’s grace, weaved intricacies of calm as it soon filled acres of arctic space with the bold lines and squiggles of a language I could not understand.

“Okay, now you are safe,” she announced, stepping back to study her work. “I’ve painted protection around you. These are Taoist talismans, ancient charms. You’ve got one to ward off demons, one to establish order, one to aid a spirit who has died in a strange place to find his way home, one to pacify your mind and protect you from harm.” She indicated a poster-sized Chinese crossword puzzle. “These are the one hundred forms of happiness.” She pointed to a collection of sausage-shaped ripples radiating from a pond’s pebble splash. “And this is a stylized representation of lovers engaged in acrobatic sex.” Of course it was drawn over the bed.

But now the walls were turning again and this time I wanted to spiral in so deep I’d either hit a vein of light or slip down stones of darkness into the cold vise waiting on the bottom. How could I fail with roaring lions as my guides?

On the glass table in front of me I carefully arranged my instruments: battered lighter engraved with the cartoon dog Snoopy, half a pack of Kools, plastic bag of DOUBLEUOGLOBE.

I went to work. I picked up a cigarette. I emptied out about an inch of tobacco. I poured in the powder. Et cetera, et cetera. Smoke rings drifted across my face. I jumped through a hole. I was gone.

I traveled.

I knew the euphoria of metal, the atavism of the cell, white nights of burning ice, the derangement of flesh, the deliquescence of dreams, the clarity of death.

I returned.

I stood in the window, mirror propped against the glass, rubbing camouflage stick over face and hands. I rode out under urine yellow skies into a stony desert, scrub grass and dust, crumbling brick buttes and rubble canyons. Trouble on the reservation. I crept up among weeds, peered through binoculars. Indians. Teepees and Cadillacs everywhere. Indians blocked the sidewalks. Indians held open powwows on brownstone steps. Indians had overrun the bus stop. A medicine man outside a movie house was dealing three-card monte. Unemployment lines were dressed in leather and warpaint. Buzzards perched on corroded fire escapes. I entered the tribal council, offered my peace pipe to the chief. He puffed. I puffed. An iron horse screeched in overhead, showering grit and sparks. A fan began to open. The chief seemed puzzled. He picked a piece of tobacco off his lower lip, studied it for a moment, then turned completely black and white, the chilly black and white of a film negative. Red dots bloomed in the cracks between objects, swelled into suns that obliterated space until all I could see was a featureless screen of bloody light. Then the screen went black and I was blind. I tried to speak but I couldn’t locate the connections to my mouth. Laughter clattered through me like a bucket down a well. Consciousness was shaken in a bag, dumped into pandemonium, and when all the images disappeared so did I.

I slowly reassembled upon a musty swayback couch, the cushions gone, jagged springs corkscrewing through the thin nap. The couch was set down in the middle of an open lot between abandoned tenements. My head was a vacant honeycomb. The world had a raw after-the-flood look. Even the boarded windows seemed poised to burst into wooden flowers. In front of the couch, fueled by old rugs, rolls of yellow wallpaper, sticks of broken furniture, a huge bonfire sang and danced. Two old men in misshapen hats and torn coats sat together on a warped piano bench roasting sweet potatoes on splintered croquet mallets. I raised myself onto an unsteady elbow. Where am I? I asked, and the words stuck to one another in a wet froglike croak. The old men turned to inspect me with ageless unremitting eyes, the desolate eyes of a turtle. I made what I hoped would be taken for a smile. They said nothing. The fire popped and cracked. When they weren’t looking I leaned over, picked up a chunk of brick, hid it under my leg. A cold wind blew through the lot, lifting shreds of faded newsprint, pieces of roof tile. A few stray flakes of snow brushed across my lips. Winter. Was it winter already? I lay on my back, staring up into gray air, watching the crystals shoot out of nothingness, swirl down into my eyes, explode softly against warm skin. The light drained from the sky. The fire leaped brighter and brighter. I wondered how soon the yams would be done.

The trees stood straight up thick as phalluses and cautiously they picked their way among them like blind explorers. The boy in front of Kraft had a plug in his ear and when he turned his head, ducking a branch, Kraft could hear the faint insect sound of transmitted rock and roll. The boy was a smudge. After he died Kraft would use the butt of his sixteen to smash the radio into plastic confetti. Behind him another smudge, out of shape and wheezing, kept stepping on his heels. “Open it up,” Kraft had warned. “Don’t bunch,” he hissed. It had taken the muzzle of his weapon swung into the kid’s flushed face to get the message across. Last time he’d come along with this group. Smudges. They didn’t care, their next of kin probably wouldn’t either.

The only butterfly in all of Southeast Asia fluttered past, settled on a broad-leafed plant ahead of him, quietly fanning its wings, a pair of flat black eyes highlighted by powder blue shadow all around, then lifted gracefully away one moment before Kraft’s upraised knee brushed impatiently by. Of course the trail was booby-trapped. It was simply a fact he knew as well as the vital statistics about himself stamped into metal tags hanging about his neck and taped together to eliminate jingle, and the fact that this undergrowth too was somewhere, inevitably, booby-trapped. He began to focus.

Captain Brack, tears of sweat clinging to his cheeks, appeared at Kraft’s side. “Five hundred meters,” he whispered. “Two to one nobody’s home.” Another smudge. Kraft ignored him. He continued to focus, projecting his will, bright and clear, through his senses onto the green hostility beyond. In five minutes someone was going to be dead. It wouldn’t be him.

They entered a clear space where the brush diminished in size to short, soft leafy plants like ferns and grasses, and the trees, their size and strength wholly exposed, looked like concrete pillars in an underground parking garage. The roof they supported was dense and green. Under this canopy the light was viscid and alive, something given off by the plants, an organic soup of brightness and pollen you parted with your body, eddies swirling away behind. In back he could hear the slob panting like a horse.

The Bush was a professional secret. You didn’t talk about it. Words were bars. What was important roamed free. Zoos were for smudges. The Bush had a taste and a touch, a scent and a bite. It moved. It made sounds. It was real. Moving through it, conscious of it, you were conscious of yourself. Irrevocably itself, a presence distinct and unyielding, it offered opportunities for definition. Something smudges would never understand.

There was a click.

A plump white spider dropped through the air, whirling on a thread.