Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

A murmuring surrounded us like drums. Leisure Suit studied his macaroni as though it were a treasure map. Lips pursed, Floral Dress contemplated a vanishing point above the chandelier.

“Ain’t it disgusting,” complained Trips. “The decline in manners everywhere. Corruption of the social contract. Death of civility. These are disappointing times we inhabit, my boy. As a member of the species, I am fucking outraged.”

“Here,” I said, nudging a ketchup-doused plate toward him, “have one of these dehydrated French fries.”

Again he dipped a finger into the salt, licked it clean with one swift audible suck.

“Someday,” he said, “I’m going to turn around, walk right out of this city, keep going until I come to a big empty place with a big hollow sky over it and I’m going to dig a hole and sit in it and rest, just listen to the blood beating in my ears for a long, long time. No horns, no voices, no fucking creeps. Think maybe I’ll walk to Australia.”

He stared dreamily out the window at the usual street turmoil. “I saw the Sarge today,” he said.

“Uh huh.”

A large box of limp greenery served as the cafeteria’s window dressing. Dust had coated the plants with a fuzzy gray fur. A dead fly, resembling a shrivelled berry, dangled from one of the stems. I reached over to touch a leaf. Plastic.

“He was walking a dog.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ve never seen him with a dog before. It’s like he knows.”

“Uh huh.”

I had been wondering when the Sarge sightings would resume. UFOs, macrobiotics, former army sergeants, one learned to tolerate the eccentric interests of friends. Since Sergeant Anstin’s rumored retirement more than half a decade ago, Trips had claimed to have spotted either him or a cleverly disguised double in almost every quarter of the city. The Sarge was a traveling man. He was North, he was South, he was all around. He rode in cars, cabs, buses, and trains. He ate lunch in the East, dinner in the West. He was a doctor, a traffic cop, a guy unloading fruit off a truck. He washed his clothes in an all-night laundromat, he sat in the back of a Mercedes, he chased a dragon kite through the park. Once he jumped from a fifth-story window, rode screaming to a hospital where he died. Once he held up a federal bank and appeared that night on the evening news. In the summer on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he sold flowers in the street to pale people rushing home. But always, every day, he ran around the corner of the signal shack and saw the freshly opened hole, the uncovered can, the vegetable matter. He ran around, he saw the matter. He ran, he saw. The Sarge was here, there, everywhere. He was nowhere.

“Let me get you a salad,” I offered, pushing back my chair. “That salt’s going to need some sociable company.”

“His name is on the mailbox.”

I sat down.

“His name, Anstin, is on the mailbox. I followed him home.”

“Are you positive?”

“You know I could spot that name in agate type from across a room. There’s no mistake. This is the one.”

“It couldn’t be a different…”

He looked at me as if I’d just proposed we reenlist.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s not like I haven’t heard this tale before.”

“You want pictures, I can get them.”

“I believe you. Give me a minute to adjust. Sergeant Millard Anstin, the terror of I Corps, alive and well and you found him. Incredible. After all these years.”

“They call it bad time.”

“Okay, so now what? Rape the little woman, slip acid in the daughter’s malt, choke Daddy black and blue with a gold lamp cord?”

“The dog. I’d like to begin with the dog.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s been almost seven years. Nobody stays mad that long.”

“I’m not mad, I’m cool, I’m Frosty the Snowman. No heat, no sweat. Cool me. Cool Trips. I can’t get a job, my family doesn’t speak to me, the VA wouldn’t give me a Band-Aid if I slit my wrists in their lobby. That’s okay, I’m cool. I learned this in the army.”

“He was just an ignorant E-7 alcoholic.”

“And Thai was one beautiful animal.”

“So what are we supposed to do? Wait around, look for your name in the papers?”

“You’ll never see it. I’ve had an eternity to construct cunning plans of Gothic splendor. Will the execution flawlessly match the design? Believe it.”

“He doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Don’t forget, the link between us is old and private, the chances of any connection being established practically non-existent. No, this will be a modern event without apparent motive, cause, or origin. Should the authorities ever happen to meet our friend at all—and it’s not likely—they will know him only as Millard R. Anstin, U.S. Army retired, victim of random urban crime.”

“You’re joking with me, right?”

“I’ll tell you a joke.” His forefinger glistened with salt crystals. “You’re gonna help me kill the bastard.”

Deliberately now, behind a static of unbroken rain, light began to phase steadily in, a plasm of dead silver dilating on the darkness. Gradations of gray laminated the sky, assumed structure, a subtle pressure, a fluorescence tepid and shadowless, pervasive as blight. Soon the vibrancy of these green latitudes lay stunned beneath a screen of modulated obscurity. Generators purred in contentment; cathodes glowed merrily. There may still be thunder in Rangoon and Mandalay, but here the dawn came up on the hushed click of a rotated dial.

“Goooooooooooooooooood MORRRN-ing, Viet-NAAAM!”

This happy whoop, reveille horn for combat’s latest hybrid, pierced the deep winter of Griffin’s sleep like the howl of a rutting wolf. Shuffling through immaculate, endlessly extended spaces, the Bearded Explorer feels first the air emptying around him, prickling the skin, alerting the hair, and then a pause and before he can even hear the crack as crisp and final as a twig snapping at thirty below, everything is moving all at once very fast. Dry tundra collapses into a schema of bladed clefts; multiple avalanches leap from mountain shelves, range beyond range; caps of ice unlock, settle out on less polar currents. The crust buckles under him, folds itself into sculptured waves, a massive white sea undulating rapidly away, rushing to the safety of a vast silent beach no map has ever located. Equilibrium dislodged, B. E. is flung prone, spreadeagled across the top of the world, devoid of shelter, handhold or rock, a simple × of flesh revolving like a dizzy ornament fixed to the hub of a great wheel until the axis begins to tilt, the blizzard to speak. A brass band swung lustily into the virulent opening bars of “The Colonel Bogey March” and Griffin, semiconscious, rolled onto his side in apparent pain. He clamped the pillow over his exposed ear as though applying a compress to the puckered mouth of a sucking chest wound. Instantly the volume was amplified, melody banged all around, the martial strain ricocheting through his makeshift bandage, note impacting on note, tinseled sharps and flats bouncing like loose ball bearings against his resonating eardrum, and the music parted and obstinate Alec Guinness led a whistling regiment of ruddy tommies down an avenue of chords and across the doomed Kwai bridge. Griffin’s body obligingly contracted with tension. I am a British officer, colonel, a devoted subject of His Majesty and I simply do not break. Eastern eye-slants narrow to Western gunslits. A smile passes across betel-stained lips like wind over grass. I find your bravado amusing, English… Dee-dum dee-dum-dee dum dum da. Griffin whipped the pillow away, sat bolt upright, and slammed his fist into the wall.

“Goddamn!” he cried. “Goddamn.”

“Whatsa matter, troop?” It was Trips calling across a gap of sand and crumbling bunker from his room in the adjacent hootch. “Roach in your shorts?”