Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Fucking pig,” muttered Trips.

“Fucking…” Mutant Man’s voice trailed off, unable to locate a sufficiently damning noun.

The curtain sparkled like red cellophane.

“Running around like that,” said Griffin. “He’s supposed to be on duty for Christ’s sake.”

“What’d you expect,” Trips asked. “Keen eyes? A steady hand?”

“Somebody ought to…” said Mutant Man.

“Nice time we’d have tonight,” said Griffin, staring off at the fireworks, “if something did happen and him to lead us.”

The curtain fell like blood from a wound in the skin of the night.

“I bet he used to be a drill sergeant,” Griffin added.

“Look,” said Trips and the curtain snapped out as if a cord had been pulled. As they watched, the last flare slid down and out leaving only the darkness to consider and the afterimages hanging like movie ghosts or the moldy shroudlike webs various species of insects and disease leave behind to mark their passing among dying trees. Except that even these ghosts possessed more form, solidity, and permanence than the rapidly vanishing real objects and beings of Griffin’s prewar existence. And each time he witnessed another raw incident like tonight’s (the bodies by the road, the ragged line of blindfolded wounded prisoners shuffling from truck to cell) his past took on more and more of the insubstantial characteristics of fantasy. The war was real; he was not. It was like memory, and therefore his most profound sense of self was a tub of tepid water into which chunks of rock (the war) fell almost daily now in wide splashes, spilling his past and his life onto a cold black-and-white linoleum floor. Griffin couldn’t help but wonder what the displacement would be equal to finally.

“That’s all folks,” announced Mutant Man.

Griffin looked over into Wurlitzer’s room. The triangle was gone, the blue light extinguished.

“There’s a couple cans of that Scandinavian smoked salmon still left in my room,” Trips said.

“We ain’t there yet,” said Griffin.

“No,” said Mutant Man.

“No?”

“No. I’m not moving, not for that lifer. That juicehead. Let him write me up. I ain’t doing nothing.”

“Mutant Man takes a stand,” declared Trips. “Okay, here’s what I paid my money to see.”

“I’m going to bed,” said Griffin.

“No one’s going anywhere.”

“I’m tired.”

“You heard The Man. A line’s got to be drawn.”

“Yes, and every line you ever drew they stepped across with an Article Fifteen. Excuse me, my dreams of snow are waiting.”

“Look at Claypool. He’s staying.”

“Claypool obviously would sit out here through a mortar attack.”

“Wait, take Mutant Man’s hand and Mutant Man’ll take mine and me Claypool. Now everyone close their eyes and squeeze. Think about the other guy’s hands, think ’em into your own until they feel like your own, until they are your own, like your hand is squeezing your hand. Now quiet, quiet… Do you feel that?”

“Yes,” said Mutant Man.

“What?” said Griffin.

“We used to do this on patrol sometimes,” Trips explained. “Afterwards, when I reached for my rifle, sparks would jump. If Sergeant Anstin was to come by now he’d take one look and keep on going.”

“Isn’t this what the Dallas Cowboys do before a big game?” Griffin asked.

“I saw a bullet pass through a man’s chest once without touching him.”

“I guess things get a little spooky out there.”

“Things are spooky everywhere, good buddy.”

“Wheeeeeeee!” exclaimed Mutant Man.

“Okay,” said Griffin.

“Don’t worry. You heard him, he hates paperwork. You ain’t gonna lose your precious status as captain’s pet.”

“Don’t forget my trip to Saigon.”

“Or your ficky boom-boom.”

So they all four sat there waiting. There was nothing to look at now but the scattered lights of the base stretching off like a suburban housing tract toward the mountains of the night.

“What do you suppose was here before we came?” Griffin mused.

“Rice,” said Trips. “Rice and buffalo shit, same thing that’ll be here when we go.”

The airfield was at their backs. Occasionally a C-130 rumbled in with the sound of huge vague objects breaking apart and the dark air would fill with the dead scent of expended fuel. After a while Griffin seemed to hang suspended there, the roof rocking gently above it all like the top seat of a Ferris wheel that had stalled. They talked, letting the silence grow naturally in the pauses between those stories anyone who ever wore a uniform anywhere could exhale easily as breath until finally they were simply sitting together in silence, comfortable, content, unalone in each other’s presence.

“Probably he passed out by now,” said Trips.

“I can see him,” said Griffin, “snoring across Top’s desk.”

The sound came in two directions at once, out of the sky falling, up through his insides like something slippery and hard he couldn’t stop, the answer to the soundless repetition what is that? what is that? already begun in his body’s downward roll over the bruising corrugated roof into sand still moist from the late afternoon shower. The explosion was like the sudden collapse of an immense tin can. Crump. Plunged in sand, his fingers felt the trembling of the ground. Darkness fell in pieces around him. Crump. The sky was punched bright with flares. He heard screaming. INCOMING! screamed the screams. INCOMING! The siren on top of the mess hall began its mechanical shriek. Griffin scrambled into the bunker on his hands and knees. “Move over!” he shouted. “Let me in here!” “Sorry,” someone muttered. Inside it was too dark to recognize anyone. There was a faint odor of stale urine. Crump. Arms around his legs, head against his knees, back pressed against the steel ribs of the pipe, Griffin smiled. An image had just come to him of someone—it looked like Alexander—bursting naked through a door, helmet clutched firmly over his penis. First the sound like a knife slicing the darkness in half. Then crump. Metal buzzed past outside.

“Oh my God.” It sounded like Simon.

“Simon?” Griffin asked, surprised that his voice worked so well.

“Is that you?”

“Yes… unfortunately.”

“Nice alarm clock, huh?”

Crump.

“Shit.” Other voices started up.

“What?”

“What do you mean what? I’m scared.”

“Think happy thoughts.”

“Anybody got a flak vest?… a rifle?”

Crump. Griffin heard an echo, an iron twang.

“What do they want with us, anyway? We’re peaceful, I am, anyway.”

“My mother told me I’d regret coming over here. She said I’d get my ass in a crack like this and praying wouldn’t help because any God that permitted this war wasn’t gonna be much interested in the fate of my skinny little prick.”

“Your mother always talk so dirty?”

“She’s a pinko leftist. I almost lost my clearance because of her.”

Crump. Crump, crump. Griffin couldn’t tell if they were closer or further away. A direct hit would resolve this huddle of sandbags and bodies into bits of glass and bone buttons.

“Okay, who’s been pissing in the bunker?”

“It wasn’t Calloway. He does it in bed.”

“Griffin?” Trips’s voice.

“Yeah.”

“Griffin?”

“I said yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Claypool?” called Griffin.

“Don’t touch me,” said another voice, pitched with tension. “Don’t.”

“We didn’t leave him outside, did we?”

“He’s here,” Trips said. “He’s fine.”

Crump. Like a giant sitting down hard on his butt.

“Oh God.”