Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Someone flipped a switch and the darkness exploded into geometry. Spheres of light overhead illuminated the angles and planes of an enormous rectangular room. Two rows of bunks faced one another in mirrored perfection and on the last bunk of the left row, a warp in the symmetry, one body, male, inert, semiconscious.

GRIFFIN, JAMES I. 451 55 0366 SP4 P96D2T

USARV TRANS DET APO SF 96384

“Hey, numbnuts, wake up!” yelled a voice slurred with drink. “There’s a goddamn war out there.”

The lights went rapidly on and off, on and off.

Griffin’s eyes blinked once, twice, then closed in defense against the naked one-hundred-watt bulb he could feel even through shut lids bombarding him from above. Planetary-sized spots bloomed on his retina, slid back and forth, black holes in his vision. He hated being awakened like this. It was too sudden, too brutal, it was like being hit on the head from behind. It made him uneasy, subject to disturbing, revelatory thoughts. This is how you will die, said such an interruption, not in the comfortable tranquillity you have always imagined as a natural right, but violently, in shock and confusion, far from home, without preparation or kindness, rudely extinguished by an unexpected light much bigger than your own.

Then a mortar round fell out of the sky into the roof directly over his head.

In the super slow motion of television sports reports Griffin saw the underside slope of the roof shiver into a pattern of stress lines, bow, change color, and had the time to think even this: the barracks is a beer can and we’re about to be opened before his eyes and everything in them fizzed up and whooshed out into the warm foreign night. He didn’t have time to scream. The smoking rubble of morning yielded one charred finger and a handful of blackened molars

a flap of skin and a torn nail

a left ear, a right hoof

a hambone and the yolk of an eye

He could never decide how to finish. Real death was a phenomenon at once so sober and so silly his imagination tended to go flat attempting comprehension. Like everyone else he was able to picture possibilities. The gathered parts, the body bag, the flagged casket, grief, tears, the world going tritely on, the war too, the sky above an untarnished blue. These were generalities, accurate but lacking the satisfaction of the personal detail. Griffin believed that there existed a proper sequence of final events, which when imagined correctly would give off a click, dim the room, and shut down at last that section of his brain which worked for the other side. Meanwhile, he would learn how to handle these terrible rehearsals that rushed in on him from nowhere. Maybe they were valuable learning experiences. Maybe layers of protective hide were being sewn onto his character. Maybe when the time came he would be brave when bravery was required, calm when there was an excess of panic. He didn’t really know. Nor did he know where or when he might encounter real death, but he was sure he didn’t ever want to die in a place where in the corner two drunks argued in loud whispers over the juiciest way to fuck a gook pussy.

When you go they put you in a shed there until the computer finishes its shuffle, marked cards, shaved deck, jokers all around. Griffin remained in bed. He chose to pass.

“Got no slots for mattress testers,” they said. “We gonna place you in a right tasty location, way up north maybe, where the only lying down is of a permanent nature, heehee.”

“Do I get a pillow?” asked Griffin. Hoho.

In the bunk to his right was a randy adolescent ripe with virginal fantasies of wartime sex. He spent hours leafing through pornographic paperbacks reading the good parts aloud. On Griffin’s left a twenty-six-year-old baker from Buffalo, New York, who had already received his orders directed a feverish monologue to the ceiling while scratching anxiously at his groin: “I won’t go I tell you, no way, I won’t go, they’ll have to drag me out of here, those people are animals, fucking animals, they like to pull triggers, bayonet babies, I’ve seen the pictures, strings of ears on a wire, Christ! can you imagine that, what kind of person walks around wearing an ear necklace for God’s sake, who would have believed it, airborne, me airborne, why me, huh? there must be thousands of guys itching to go airborne, run around like baboons and get blown away, well I’m the winner, I’m the goddamn lucky winner. I don’t need this, I got a wife and two kids, I’ll shoot myself in the foot first, I’m not gonna get killed for a bunch of crazy glory hounds, that’s insane, know what I mean, fucking sick, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?”

Griffin pulled the sheet up over his head. He lay quite still and soon felt himself sinking into an immense bowl of vanilla pudding. It was peaceful and quiet on the bottom, submerged and fetal. From the surface the slow mournful sound of a distant radio filtered down like weary shafts of sun through an unruffled sea:

The song faded to be instantly replaced by the manic voice of a Top Forty disc jockey: “This is AFVN, the American Forces Vietnam Network broadcasting from our Tower of Power in Saigon with studios and transmitters in Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, Pleiku, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, and Quang Tri.”

My God, thought Griffin in astonishment. I really am in Vietnam.

He had been in the country for two weeks.

What can go wrong:

ants

anthracnose

aphids

Botrytis

caterpillars

chlorosis

cockroaches

compacted soil

crickets

crown and stem rot

cutworms

damping-off disease

earthworms

earwigs

fungus

gnats

improper lighting

improper soil pH

improper temperature

improper watering

insufficient humidity

leaf miners

leaf rollers

leaf spots

mealybugs

mildew

millipedes

mold

nematodes

nutrient deficiencies

root rot

salt accumulation

scale

snails

slugs

sowbugs

spider mites

springtails

symphylan

thrips

white fly

and pollution: animal, vegetable, and mineral.

And these are merely the threats to common house and garden plants. Consider the problems of backwoods survival.

The white walls dissolved and through my room moved a parade of silent disconnected objects: a bolt, a door handle, a brass eyehole, the black letter U, a steel grill, a pane of glass, a row of wooden struts, disks of yellow light, spinning tires, parts of a truck, of several trucks, a battalion of trucks, a convoy in a fog. A quick skinny dog ran up barking…

The country opened abruptly into broad coastal plain. Red sand drifted across the road. Mountains huddled in the mist like blue animals. At the bend the wind took off Sergeant Sherbert’s hat. We leaned into the long turn, a rotating curve of rusty barbed wire, stagnant ditch, picnicker’s litter, the bursting eye—don’t look!—swelling from the socket like a fresh egg, one, two, three scarecrows flung across the whistling wire, melted noses, moldy ears, spilled stuffing, sausage fingers aimed in both directions, lip skin peeled back on purple gums, yellow teeth patrolled by shiny beetles. “The laughing gooks,” laughed Sergeant Sherbert, pressing on the accelerator as behind us, inflated with death gas, the bodies floated high above the fleeing jeep down the disintegrating road into Greenlandtown.

It came on like this, scene after colorful scene, rushing in with disorienting abruptness. Memory and desire screaming through my living room at the speed of light, me clinging to the couch. Of course I was in it too, but I was being played by someone else.