Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

The flecks of lather on the mirror gave his face a diseased look as if he were suffering from some rare, particularly ugly species of boil. Holly ran his fingers across his cheeks. Smooth as The General’s contoured chair.

“Anh,” he called.

“Yes, Major Marty,” she answered, appearing with the suddenness of a genie.

“My pad.”

She returned in a moment with a black leather notebook and a pen. Across the top of the first blank sheet Holly scribbled the word ROCKS. Another idea about improving the general appearance of the unit area. Make a border for the walks. Keep it neat. He put the pad down and splashed green aftershave into his palms, slapped them across his face. A satisfying sting. Friends in CID had dusted down the grenade without finding a single print. Big surprise. This was an intelligence unit after all. He would have been disappointed had the culprit left any clues. Let them play their games. He wasn’t going to bother ordering a headstone yet. Holly scribbled in his pad again. SAND. All the ramps, both aircraft and motor pool, should be swept daily. Better appearance. Cleaner machinery. He checked his face again. With a pair of tweezers he easily removed a short black hair that had apparently erupted overnight in that blemish on his cheek.

“Major Marty, look.” Anh stood in the doorway, holding up his large freshly washed and ironed shirt. For a moment in the mirror he had mistaken her for his daughter, home from school, dressed in one of his old fatigue shirts.

“Yes,” he said. “The General will be most impressed.”

“Not enough starch?” she asked with concern. She was still learning how to handle the cans of spray starch Holly’s wife sent from California.

“Just right,” said Holly, hanging the shirt on a nail behind the door. “Stiff as a board, the way we soldiers like ’em.”

“You like this stiff, too, huh?” She yanked the towel from around his waist. In her other hand she held a spray can. “Here I make this hard.” She pressed on the nozzle. “Why you…” Holly exclaimed and naked chased her squealing into the other room. Behind him the round shaving mirror slid off the top of the sink and slipped soundlessly into the white foamy water, disappearing without a trace.

Christmas came and went. In the mess hall the enlisted men were served a traditional dinner of creamed chicken on toast, instant potatoes, soggy green beans, and chocolate cake with fire engine red frosting. (Where’s our goddamn turkey, demanded the men. You eat what you got, replied Sergeant Ramirez.) Upon leaving a party at the 92nd Evac a red-cheeked Santa Claus fell out of a helicopter and broke his wrist. In Research and Analysis lights were strung between the map pins representing confirmed sightings of the 5th NVA Regiment, a pin in every province of I Corps. Out on the perimeter each bunker was permitted to shoot off one festive flare, make its own star of Bethlehem. In the morning nobody got what they wanted and only four people showed up at 0530 in complete combat gear for the truck ride over to the Bob Hope Show eight hours later. The Vietnamese carpenters had done their job well. The stage was broad and firm and did not collapse. Good work, Uncle Sam.

These transparent elevators are sucked rapidly upward into blue and red light. Machinery gurgles like old plumbing.

“Do not fear The Conversion,” murmur the speakers. “Be proud you have been chosen.”

We are packed naked together for movement to the outer levels. Apprehension surfaces in our solemnity as nervous laughter, the stupidity everyone takes as a joke.

When the elevator stops we crowd into a narrow corridor. A yellow line painted on the floor indicates with arrows the proper direction.

“The Conversion is a privilege, The Conversion is an honor, The Conversion is a duty.”

We are herded into a large chamber. The light is more intense. The air is rich. The chamber is filled from floor to ceiling with stacks of gigantic green coins. Too late for protests and exits. Silently we move toward the doors opening into the coins.

“Let go, people, simply let go now, there is no pain, let go of your O.”

Just before the doors close it is possible to glimpse the conveyor belt moving away, bearing upon its sliding back coffin-shaped tins of sweet food descending one after another into the darkness.

“Do not fear The Conversion. It’s as easy as getting your picture taken.”

Up ahead flashes, pounding, the whirr of machinery.

I was in the john, hunched on the seat, clutching several pages torn from National Geographic. Hawaiians in native dress (Sears muumuus, polymerized leis) looked up at me with Kodachrome smiles. I was supposed to be concentrating on the orchids in their hair. The flower of testicles and death. Is that why high school kids wore them to proms? The mind is a magpie, say the masters.

Trips was in the other room, making obscene calls on my phone. The moment I shut the bathroom door he was on the line. I could hear him out there, dialing, whispering.

Sun. Sand. Pineapple. Little grass shack. Orchids dangling from every ear like splayed skin, pretty nut brown heads beginning to rupture. I tried another picture. A gleaming aluminum trailer. Ohio plates. Foot-high picket fence. Behind the fence and around the trailer a dense cordon of stiff gladioli. Spears of red, of yellow. Flaming stalks. Nature itself spontaneously combusting. In a minute the whole trailer will go up like a storage tank in a refinery fire.

“Hey,” called Trips, “turned into a dandelion yet?”

“The trick is not to turn into,” I said, opening the door, “but to discover you already are, a dandelion.”

“What do I know,” he said, moving past me, unzipping his fly, “I slept through zoology.”

“Botany.”

“I told you I slept through it.”

On the glass table were the scattered remains of a couple issues of Time, a pair of scissors, a jar of white paste, and an open tablet of children’s construction paper. Various sized and colored letters had been cut from advertisements and pasted onto a red sheet to spell BUCKLE UP FOR SAFETY. The photograph underneath showed a type usually described as “a prominent East Coast mobster” seated behind the wheel of a recent model Lincoln Continental. Head pitched back, mouth yawning blackly. In the center of the forehead a modest round hole. This was the fourth, or was it the fifth? such message Trips had composed to Sergeant Anstin. Simple murder, it had been decided, was too quick, too clean for that worm. His varied crimes, his very presence in life, demanded that he twist on a hook. Uncertainty, dread, and impotence—particularly able demons of the NCO mind—set cavorting among the slick hills and dales of an alcohol-softened brain. There should be pain, a lot of pain. I was being encouraged to assist in this campaign, lick envelopes, breathe into the phone. I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no. I was distracted. Big green trucks plowed through my walls every night, chewing up my pansies.

Trips came out of the bathroom, rubbing his hands. “You ever watch a toilet flush? I mean really watch, positioned directly over the bowl. There’s this still pond, then there’s this roaring vortex spiraling away. Know why the water whirls around like that? Cause the planet is spinning like mad and you’re not even aware of it till you flush your commode. Makes me dizzy to contemplate. Below the equator all the toilets spin the other way.”

“Thank you, Mr. Science.”

“Point number two. The tarnished mirror above the sink. It’s not me looking back. I don’t know who you got stuck inside but it ain’t me.”