Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Well, sounds like you had quite an adventure in there.”

“I try to be fully conscious of my surroundings at all times, Grif. A word to the wise.”

“Were you on the phone before?”

“You asked me not to do that.”

“Then who were you talking to?”

“Anstin.”

“You just said you didn’t use the phone.”

“Don’t need no wire to talk to him. When de obeah man make de magic he like to croon over de charms.”

“I saw your latest here. Pungent.”

“It’s like an ad campaign. Escalation of effect. All day the itch is working under the skin; at night he sits up in bed listening for the sound of breaking glass.”

“Our Sergeant Anstin? He may be sitting up trembling in bed but it’s not because of your letters.”

“He wonders about bringing in the police. Will they be suitably concerned or merely polite?”

“If it even is him.”

“Don’t start on me again, Grif. You’re just pissed because you’ve finally come to realize that Hardon or whatever the hell he calls himself now is a fucking fraud.”

“But I always knew that.”

“Then why this horticulture crap?”

“I want to get back to my roots. What’s more American than good honest fraud? Your consciousness can’t be that full of the gritty day-to-day without an appreciation of the delights of deceit. It’s a fun head, knowing and pretending not to know or not knowing and pretending to know or not knowing and not pretending. Wheels within wheels, forging cash value. It can get pretty elaborate but once you work your way in, shake off those qualms, there’s all these cozy layers between you and the outer chill. Delusion is a national pastime.”

“I don’t know, Grif, do I know you anymore? You’re out in the boonies. This creepy apartment, your weird friends, hunkering down in the toilet all day. The boonies. Know what I think? I think that war’s got you bent out of shape. You’re all twisted up.” He began to chuckle quietly. “The war turned you around. You ain’t the same since you shipped out. Yeah, you’re all fucked up.”

“I’m in a world of hurt.”

“And it could be worse. You could be all fucked up and getting cut-and-paste threats in your daily mail.”

On the wall above Trips’s right shoulder was a faint dark spot (one of those surfacing scrawls?) I realized I had been staring at for some time when it erupted into blossom, unfolding moist petals of unbelievable color, a liquid-quick stem plunging to the floorboard, extending curly tendrils and acid green leaves, vines whipping right and left, flowers exploding, seed pelting the room, fecundity gone mad. No, I thought, not this, not now. In seconds the entire wall was covered over, a riot of vegetation that seemed to heave and pulse.

“Here’s another one I did this morning,” Trips continued, thrusting into my confusion a sheet of yellow paper on which had been pasted a grainy night photograph of a dented semi, a crumpled Ford, state troopers reaching in through a smashed window, wet pavement, the head of a dog, possibly German shepherd, no carcass in sight, caption: MAN’S BEST FRIEND GOES ON A TRIP.

“Don’t give it to me,” I snapped. “You know I don’t touch any of that stuff without gloves on.”

The floor was bobbing gently up and down like a dock in the wake of a departed speedboat. I dropped onto the couch.

“He paces, gripping his pill bottle. He sits in the window, waiting for the screeching car, the shoulder at the door. The night is no longer his friend.”

“He calls for flares,” I muttered, “but the line is dead.”

My heart was thrashing like a rabbit in a gunny sack. Attend to specifics, fasten on detail. Sergeant Anstin, yes, Sergeant Anstin, the vodka vampire. Slinking through the compound, flashlight at the ready, sniffing for narcotics, listening for the telltale creak of bedsprings.

Do not look at the wall, don’t look.

“That’s the spirit,” Trips declared. “Start with a little sarcastic abuse and work your way on up. I knew you’d get with the program sooner or later.”

“Eugene told me you took a kick at Chandu.”

Dogs. In the hallway. On the street. Roaming foreign lands. The need for submissive companionship. Shit everywhere.

If I do not choose to see foliage, the foliage cannot be seen. Think winter.

“Chandu? Who’s Chandu?”

“The dog. His dog’s name is Chandu.”

Thai. He liked to chase cockroaches. He liked to swallow cigarette butts. He liked to sleep on top of the bunker, howl at the stars when the sirens began.

Take a peek. Is it still there, writhing at the periphery?

“Chandu? What kind of name is that for a dog?”

“He says you were on your way downstairs and deliberately came down the corridor to kick Chandu. You were wearing steel-toed jump boots.”

He liked to get stoned. Crawl inside the big plastic bag we’d, huffing and puffing, inflate with brown smoke. Circle the room on rubbery legs, collapse on his belly like a rundown toy.

The imagery has become self-generating. The mind’s gone organic. There’s no control.

“Why would I do that? I love dogs.”

“That’s what I said.”

Where were they now, those hounds of yesteryear? Fur and flesh sucked down the hopper for processing into the vegetable level, the vegetable level then compressed into the mineral level, the whole cycle pointed toward the perfection of stone, the bottom level. A passage noted in a careless configuration of forgotten bone, a last graffito scribbled into the surface of the planet, Kilroy was here, our mark.

What will I do when I look down and see the frondage sprouting at my feet? Twining about my arms?

“What did he say?”

“He made me feel the bruise.”

The place where I slept, the space where I worked. Who lives there now? Do the buildings remain or have they been razed to make way for the Nguyen Giap Golf Course and Country Club or, more likely, a wire-enclosed Reeducation Center. Bulldozers to uncover the canine skull, the rib cage—now prize exhibits in lectures on the natural depravity of imperialist Americans.

This meditation business is not working, it is not working at all.

“Hey, this Eugene character better watch his mailbox.”

No, I can see them still, those huddled ramshackle structures. They didn’t even bother to dismantle them, torch the planks with souvenir Zippos. The ultimate insult: they ignored them, left all that Western redundance and engineered craziness to time and rain and wind. It is not the water that flows but the bridge, say the masters. The runway buried in sand. Duty rosters bleached white on the bulletin board outside the orderly room. 7 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT. The basketball court sunken and cracked. It is night. It is always night. Cold moonlight gleaming across tin rooftops, row on row. Silence, the total haunted silence only possible in a place once devastated by noise. Rusted screen curls away at the windows. Mosquitoes pass whining in and out, the ceaseless blood quest. A rotting T-shirt on a nail. Empty bunk frames, overturned lockers. A nodding table fan plugged directly into the void. In the corner a dimpled helmet, home to the cockroach. Between the floorboards poke the tender tips of new life, shoots of marijuana, naturally. There is growth everywhere. Plants have taken the compound. Elephant grass in the motor pool. Plantain in the mess hall. Lotus in the latrine. Shapes are losing outline, character. Wooden frames turning spongy. The attrition of squares and rectangles. The loss of geometry. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

Mind is a magpie.

Forward brothers

Forward sisters

Marching the long road to Victory

The suffering of our beautiful land calls out to us