Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

The computer opened with a jaunty singsong rendition of “Chopsticks.” On the screen clumps of bush began moving from left to right. I gripped the plastic handles of my weapons system. A tiny figure darted out into the sights. I swiveled and squeezed. The tiny figure somersaulted into flying fragments. The computer played “Charge!” Now there were trees and figures in the trees. I zapped three, just, like, that. I jumped the punji pit, forded the parasite stream, skirted the booby trap. In the village tiny figures appeared at the windows. Swivel and squeeze. Burning huts crackled realistically. A head popped out of a tunnel opening, and another, and another. I utilized my laser bomb. Everything blew up. “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” sang the computer. A reporter pointed a microphone. How do you feel? he asked. I don’t know, I replied. Above us at the top of the screen the number 1,313,000 flashed away in digital delirium.

Panic dwindled into jitters into detached fascination. It was just a show. The longer I watched the less I felt. Events coupled, cavorted, and vanished, emotion hanging in midair before my lemur eyes like a thin shred of homeless ectoplasm. It was cool. It was like drowning in syrup. It was like TV.

Everyone on the helicopter was dead except us. One hung head down out the door, another was draped over the left skid. I was strapped into the pilot’s seat. The General was munching on a handful of pistachio nuts. I had never flown a helicopter before. Hard ground zoomed in and out of focus. The General opened his briefcase and dumped a pile of medals into my lap. I touched a button. Rockets leaped out ahead of us, streaming away into bursts of black and white and orange. We landed inside a gray crater. Scattered about were arms and legs and heads and other miscellaneous parts. We hopped around in our pressurized suits. The General drove up in a huge bulldozer. It’s okay, he said, scooping cinders, cover ’em up, water daily, and next year you’ve got a fresh crop good as new.

Gradually I became aware of the heavy paw pressing insistently down on my cheek, sandpaper pads and retracted claws pinning me to the floor. I attempted to think clearly. It was while pondering the possibilities of the situation—a fascinating process that seemed to occupy uncountable hours—that I noticed the dancing lions on the plastic bag inches from my nose, the brown musty rug squashed against my face. The show was over.

I pulled myself up onto the couch and assessed the damage. I could hear trucks rattling down the narrow street, the strange mechanical flap of pigeons’ wings at the window. Under the skin the landslide continued to settle, jagged pieces of glass spilling across a xylophone of dry nerves. I had to get away from these ballooning walls.

Outside the air fell in soft glittering flakes over the crystal city. Buildings were lattices of light that shifted pattern as I passed. I couldn’t even feel the pavement. The leg went up and down smooth as a piston. Remote-controlled locals with waxed faces too large for their bodies clustered around me. I decided to return to the colony. Arrows pointed the way: Botanical Gardens. I traversed an alien world, I hopped a turnstile. Huddled beneath the poisonous atmosphere were five geodesic domes. I found the sign marked Tropical Rain Forest and went inside. A million leaves erupted into applause. Staghorn fern. Acacia. Betel nut palm. Screw pine. So how you been? Okay, and you? Up and down. Hey, you’re glowing. Yeah, so are you. A black asphalt path curved away into waiting green darkness. I went around three times searching for an inviting way in. Finally I just grabbed a railing and leaped over. The ground was warm and spongy. It was like treading on flesh. I moved through curtains of long smooth leathery things to slump against the buttress roots of a strangler fig. The scent of bad teeth drifted up, a cool mist sprinkled down. When I sat still the drug folded in around me like huge silken wings. My spine began transmitting coded messages into the mud, the mud relaying secret signals back. The leaves sighed. I could feel myself slowly emptying, the rushes, the bubbles, the shakes, until I was as blank as a stone Buddha, weather-stained, liana-lassoed, sinking into the jungle depths of some forgotten temple. The void at the heart of fertility. I looked up to see in the spaces between the foliage a skinny white man in hornrim glasses and a maroon turtleneck squinting through a camera in my direction. Study the finished print with a magnifying glass, good buddy, you don’t always see what you get. There were dozens of people out there, passing innocently unaware within yards of my position. Over their heads beyond this curious eternally peaking summer stretched a lawn of brown glass, shriveled hedge, skeletal trees. The sky was lowering, the light bleeding away. “Fifteen minutes,” called a voice, “fifteen minutes to closing.” Lightning flashed across the top of the dome. I crawled out of the cozy forest into bitter wind and the start of a stinging rain. My body was exhausted. It felt as though inner walls had been worked at with a cold chisel. I splashed through the empty streets, water trickling down my neck, wondering if this trough of fatigue was deep enough to connect with that elusive treasure: a good night’s sleep. The interludes in my consciousness were uncharitably brief. I’d often wake in the dank hollows of early morning, passing as instantaneously as the revivified monster in a horror film from inert oblivion to raving hysteria. The sheets wrapped so tightly about my legs were made of plastic. Hands, under my arms, were dragging me over rough ground. My heart pounded as though some stranger were trapped inside, lost, suffocating. I would force myself to concentrate on surrounding objects. Gradually the bunker would melt back into a desk, the chair would lower its weapon. When dawn came at last, filling the room with fluid light, I would drift off into an uneasy imitation of sleep, holding between nervous eyelids a child’s wish that every vessel, no matter how unsound, might one day ride to the shores of a place where everything was filled with light, even rocks and bones and dreams.

By the time I got home I was The Beast From 50,000 Fathoms, thudding slowly up the stairs, on each step a damp footprint, a clump of seaweed.

In the hallway on the floor below mine Eugene was taking his dog, Chandu, for a walk. Up and down the dim stale corridor. Eugene was dressed in a red bikini, Chandu in a studded leather collar.

“How’s it going, lieutenant?” he asked.

“We’re getting the medicine through to the Eskimos,” I replied.

Eugene smiled, giving me a thumbs up. Chandu lapped noisily at the puddles beneath my dripping clothes.

I climbed the last flight, turned the corner, and stopped. My apartment door was hanging open, the wooden jamb in splinters.

Trips had returned.

“Looking Glass two-zero, this is Looking Glass Control, over.”

“Two-zero, what the hell do you want?”

“Yessir. You forgot to fill in the log. What should I put down for this mission?”

“Jesus Christ. Do you ever listen to a damn thing anyone says? I distinctly remember standing right in front of you not five minutes ago and saying I was only going once or twice around the field. This is a check-out flight for Captain (garbled).”

“Excuse me, sir. Captain who?”

“Hold on a damn second, I’m about to take off.”

“Looking Glass two-zero, this is Looking Glass Control, over.”

(Static.)

“Looking Glass two-zero, this is Looking Glass Control, come in, over.”

(Static.)

“Aw, fuck it.”

The rain was still falling the night the Old Man went down. The weather had settled into an ugly bloated monotony; forecasts promised no relief. The rain fell in hard straight lines and the shells flew out, the planes moved up and down, the helicopters went round and round. Outside, in the dark, metal and machinery were busy churning plants and animals into garbage. It was the season of the monsoon, the Year of the Monkey.