Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

In a month he was bored. The colonel, his face, his mannerisms, the way he sipped his wine, had begun to depress. Wendell’s camera began to stray. Quite often the colonel, midway through a pulse-quickening address to the troops, would look up expecting to see the familiar eye of the lens staring blankly back and instead, with dismay, discover it inspecting some rotting telephone pole, meaningless puddles in the road, the undistinguished profile of some private’s face. “Backgrounding,” Wendell explained. “Objective correlatives, you know.” The colonel didn’t know but his young man seemed so capable, so assuring. By the time the Old Man died his unexpected end barely affected the course of what was now The Movie. His story had become only one strand in a coil that would embrace the complete complexity of the American experience in Southeast Asia. Wendell photographed indiscriminately, confident that form, like invisible writing exposed to a flame, would reveal itself beneath the heat of his talent. For a couple days he even followed Thai around on his hands and knees for a short section entitled The War In Vietnam: A Dog’s Point Of View.

Company clown was a role that had already taken shape between himself and the rest of the unit before Wendell, gauging its possibilities, simply stepped forward into it, adding flesh to shadow, thereby multiplying his intensity in accordance with that peculiar arithmetic of human behavior, which often yields the largest sums to the smallest fractions of personality. As a caricature he was granted a personal freedom “normal people” were not. No one else in the unit was permitted to spend so much public time on private matters doing exactly as he pleased. The price for such exemption, however, was a frequent lapse of sympathy and a loosing of laughter. Several of his peers, Griffin and Trips included, suspected that his eccentricity was only a mask, a white boy’s military version of the antebellum black’s Uncle Tom. They had a phrase for it: “You know Wendell,” chuckling good-naturedly over his latest antics. Payne himself used the phrase, had invented it in fact, to deal specifically with the impossible demands of his immediate superior in the signal shop, Sergeant Anstin. “Okay, I give up, just where have you been for the last day and a half?” Smile. Shrug. “You know Wendell.”

Up on the guard tower Wendell pleaded through the loudspeaker for one last take. “C’mon team, before it’s too dark.” Out in the field his “actors,” booing and jeering, began to disperse. “Thank you,” shouted Wendell. “Thank you for your patience and wholehearted cooperation.” A hand disappearing around a hootch corner showed him a single greasy finger.

He sent Vegetable to drop off today’s film with Speed Graphic, his man in the photo lab, and then, portable loudspeaker in one hand, empty Beaulieu camera in the other, Wendell trudged through the sand to the silence of his room. There he stretched out on his bunk, a beaded can of cold pop pressed to his forehead. A vague flylike thought buzzed through his preoccupations. Had Sergeant Anstin told him to do something today, some specific what? Check the wiring in the mess hall? Sort through the parts box in the radar trailer? Test the VHF circuits on one-seven? Hadn’t he done those jobs? The thought flew away. Military trivia. Impedimenta, up to our asshole in impedimenta. The army nagged without interruption like someone you borrowed money from once and paid back long ago but neither had had enough sense to retain a proper receipt. Nagged until artistic breakthroughs collapsed into fuck-ups, the most carefully planned scene fell apart in hopeless tatters, streaks of boredom staining the celluloid like plastic fingers scratching at a closed window. And it got inside all the moving parts like the sand in his camera always working to stop the advance, to freeze the action. Boredom. From the thigh pocket of his fatigues he extracted a well-worn paperback copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, front and back covers both gone, the book itself only two-thirds its original size. When Wendell read he tore off each page as he finished, dropping it wherever he happened to be. The densest concentrations, modest piles on the floor beside his chair, his bunk, were swept up daily by the hootch maid, but page after page had been found throughout the unit, I Corps, all of South Vietnam: in the latrine, the mess hall, the EM club, the chapel, the hangar, the detention cells, the supply room, in the bunkers, on the floors of cockpits, in air terminals up and down the coast, on helicopters, C-130S, Cobras, Beavers, Birddogs, the whole zoo of military aircraft, page one hundred and eighty-seven was even rolled up and smoked one desperate night. Once a couple loose pages got sucked up into the right engine of one-nine and Sergeant Anstin had to be restrained, his swollen face contorted into obscenity and a threatened legal reprimand which never did materialize framed in the viewfinder backing steadily away. Taken slowly, a few pages a day, the book, thick as a flak vest still, could last weeks, months, perhaps the whole tour, a further antidote against the boredom real as the enemy out there in the weeds. His bed began to shudder as the local artillery commenced its regular early evening barrage. The book jiggled between his hands but he read on, wholly absorbed in the text, thinking, yes, reason is happiness, selfishness is virtue, A is A.

At night Griffin burned classified trash. An unusually popular detail. He never lacked help, even at two in the morning. Every night, a stapled bag of secrets tucked under each arm, he’d lead a modest procession out behind the intelligence hut to the Restricted Area incinerator, a converted fifty-gallon drum with a hole cut in its side and mounted on waist-high metal legs. There a half dozen or so security-cleared “assistants” crowded around the drum, watching Griffin unroll reels of aerial film into the flames. The acetate bubbled and sizzled. Oily smoke moved in clouds over the sleeping company, sprinkling rooftops with black snow, the acrid scent also masking the classified odor of burning dope. The pleasures of combustion. Once Griffin burned so much trash he lost his balance on the wooden sidewalk, fell off a board laughing into the sand, too giddy to stand up; once he tossed in a handful of money to see what that felt like; once he saw trees shrieking in the fire. Sometimes they’d take turns spitting against the drum, the saliva hissing like snakes as it went to steam. Personal habits were going up in smoke too, rules Griffin had formulated to ease him through his tour. For instance, he wasn’t supposed to incinerate until his desk work was done; but one exceptionally tedious night it had suddenly seemed perfectly reasonable, the height of clarity, to go outside rather than to stay in plotting targets and reading out infrared missions. Afterward, his self seemed to sit easier inside his body, his body to fit more comfortably inside the uniform as though certain restraints had been lifted, certain straps loosened. Sometimes now he even forgot there was a uniform, although those rare occasions still managed to frighten him; he preferred a more orderly madness, a middle class ecstasy you could stroll in and out of at your leisure; deep sofas, pile carpeting, the lounge chair in front of the TV while the wallpaper crawled with unpatented colors, the mirrors screamed, demons danced in circles past the windows. Tonight there was no hysteria. He simply felt good. Cross had brought a ring of sausage and a box of Ritz crackers. Wurlitzer was retelling the famous story of Captain Ferris and the SAM missile. Vegetable had a canteen full of cockroaches he had trapped in his room and was dropping them, one by one, into the singing incinerator. His friends. The Thai sticks tasted of burnt roses. The stars strobed in unison across the heavens. Mere breathing was a sensual event. The flames crackled. He felt himself blacken around the edges, begin to melt. For one whole hour he was in love with Vietnam. Until all the secrets turned to ash.