Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“A misspelled name on a smudged pamphlet.”

“There, you’re doing it again.”

The desk between us held a dozen Chinese vases bursting with assorted flowers above which Arden’s face hovered plumply, an October moon.

“I’m wilting, swami.”

“I hear you.”

“You think it’s gone at last, slunk off to die in its own dark corner, you forget about it, and the instant you do, it comes popping out at you like a face leering in a fun house.”

“This is interesting. I wonder if the planets are involved. You know I’ve been seeing things lately, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Mum’s the word to the pilgrims.”

“Your cover is safe with me.”

“Flashes, that’s all, like white sheets snapping at the corner of your eye except there’s no sound, nothing there, just flashes.”

“I’ve had that. It went away.”

“What I figured.”

“I’ve got sounds and smells.”

“Appears you might need a good transplant.”

Arden was in the pacification business. He operated a service for those who suffered from rebellious nerves, insurgent thoughts. Wherever the countryside of the mind was being ravaged there was Arden to promise peace. He was a relentless peacemaker. Treatment began with a sustained verbal assault upon the infrastructure of the ego, a tactic designed to extinguish any coherent sense of self. Then followed a period of warm baths, solitary contemplation, quiet sobbing. According to the theory, out of the rubble of personality should then arise, like Brahma from the lotus, a newer, more confident “I,” wet, mewling, and goggle-eyed. This tiny creature was scolded, coaxed, and trained toward happiness in a series of private exhortatory sessions with Arden or one of his aides. Daily meditations continued the process of reeducation at home. Each sufferer was given a personal flower or flow-image to concentrate upon, these images selected to coincide with desired traits. If an individual was unable to love, then a rose was offered as the image of meditation. For innocence, the daisy; for optimism, the chrysanthemum; for a stronger ego, the narcissus. Each image was presumed to inspire a sympathetic efflorescence of the soul. But don’t conclude that the study of smartweed will boost your IQ. Arden’s organic calculus was composed of equations more refined than these examples. For instance, how was the unaided psychic gardener to know that an intensive consideration of phlox would reduce the miserly in the spirit or that an equal time pondering bluebells would tend to elevate one’s pain threshold. The formula by which Arden arrived at such prescriptions was as complex and arcane as that of medieval alchemy or the Coca-Cola Company. The trunk of his thought grew about a core of pilferings from nineteenth-century language of the flower chapbooks, that quaint hobby of genteel American ladies; the branches were imported graftings, gnarled notions of Oriental religion; and the whole was dusted down with generous handfuls of native positive thinking pesticide. The result was Arden’s magnum opus, intellectual fruit of a lifetime, key to harmony, bible of serenity, and guarantor of financial prosperity, an inches-thick loose-leafed compendium of affinities, attributes, idiosyncrasies, character flaws, tics, stutters, and quirks of over ten thousand different species entitled The Psychology of the Plant. The book had to be kept in a vault for it was rumored large sums were available to anyone who could provide a privileged peek into its secret contents. There were desperate pilgrims everywhere. The end was at hand. Arden was the messiah of the advent of vegetable consciousness.

He studied me with the gaze of a museum curator. “Well, right away, I don’t like your skin. Mealybugs have healthier tone. What kind of evil weed killer you been dousing yourself with?”

“Bag of the old DOUBLEUOGLOBE.”

“Jesus Christ, where’d you get that?”

“Huey’s brother.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“Who knows? It’s dropped in the pipe at one end, goes round and round, comes out here. The omniscient communist conspiracy wastes no opportunity to undermine our will. Our minds may no longer be in control.”

“I haven’t tasted any pixie powder since Vientiane ’seventy. Want to brief me?”

“Standard stuff.”

“Sounds and smells.”

“But measured, in assimilable cadences. Up, then down. The years in review on a sine curve. You’re close, then you’re far away. A saraband of shame and folly.”

“Remember Nostalgerin?”

“The memory medicine with active ingredients.”

“Your buffer against the past.”

“Inspired concept.”

“Too bad the ingredients would have had to be so illegally active. I’d be sitting on a ransom by now.”

“You ain’t doing so bad.”

“Ah, you can never be sure. The bottom could drop out of this gig in the next hour. Americans have no staying power for this sort of enterprise. They bitch, they moan. They want palaces in every dewdrop or what’s the point. Then there’s the awareness problem. Problem is they don’t really want it, awareness. To be aware is to, well, suffer, can’t escape the masters. Instead, they want happiness, little fixes of delight. So I spend all my time pulling weeds. Hard work, especially when they’re talking back at you.”

“You seem to be displaying the symptoms Nostalgerin was going to alleviate.”

“Of course I’m displaying symptoms, who doesn’t display them? The great disease of what-if. What if I’d married the neighbor across the street? What if I’d bought Xerox at seventeen and a half? What if Kennedy hadn’t been shot? What if the South had won the Civil War? Well, we can go on like this all day and usually do whether we’re aware of it or not. That’s why I could be sitting in a forty-room estate if we could ever market that product.”

“My problem is I don’t know whether I’m addicted to the O, the war, or that stupid sweet kid who was once me.”

“Your problem is you’re just a general all-purpose addict, addicted to addiction, the nearest drug will do. I don’t think you’re giving my buds a fair chance.”

“I think I’m allergic.”

“Doing your sessions regularly?”

“Dawn, noon, and dusk.”

“In the window?”

“Per your instructions.”

“My mistake. I remember your window. Police Street, 1941, Weegee. A philodendron couldn’t be happy there. Find a spot without a view. Sit in the bathroom. You might try lounging in the tub. The cool cleanliness of the porcelain, the hypnotic drip drip drip of the faucet. I would imagine it could be extremely restful. Ponder the title.”

“My john’s not exactly the Luxembourg Gardens.”

“So paste up some postcards. Make an effort. Busting through the accumulated muck of a lifetime is no simple Boy Scout’s task. You’ve got to be ready to split rocks.”

“Like the mustard seed?”

Arden smiled. “Like the mustard seed.”

“Well, my muck’s as tight as a marble floor. I don’t know, your worship, but there’s something about this process that still eludes me. Somewhere between fleshy pink and chlorophyll green lies a big brown bog of stink and weeds your brochures fail to mention.”

“So what? Take time to study the swamp flora. Don’t be discouraged. Practice. Sincere practice possesses an extraordinary ability to transform the atmosphere of the heart. That’s purity, Grif, and I know that one fine day you’ll sniff it, taste it, blow it out of both nostrils. That’s when the shoots start to clear the soil. You wait, you watch, I know what you think but trust me, for once trust somebody, you might be astonished.” As he spoke, Arden extended his arms in the manner of a priest offering benediction, a self-conscious habit deliberately enhanced by the monk’s robe he wore complete with cowl and deep sleeves. The color of the robe, an electric moss green pitched to the very extremity of ripeness and beyond, gave him the appearance of a penitent at a monastery for unredeemed acidheads. Printed in random profusion across the cloth were hundreds of small white circles, mystic signs, emblem of the uroboros, the serpent devouring its tail, image of renewal, immortality, eternity; but also, of course, the chemical symbol for oxygen, final product of photosynthesis. Whenever I sat in this office, staring at that costume, waiting for a monologue to end, I couldn’t help but think that all those circles scattered like leper’s sores over all that green had the depressed look of craters, mandala of the bomb.