Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Lieutenant Phan sat outside in the shade of the interrogation hut, straddling a gray office chair, his hairless arms dangling over the back, in the casual style he had learned at the movies: American Cowboy. The smoke from the Salem cigarette in his right hand flowed upward along brown bony fingers like machine-made fog. When he took a drag, his head tilted to one side, an eye squinted. From where he sat he could see far across the runway and beyond the perimeter to distant water buffalo roaming over a flooded paddy. Claypool slouched in the sand at his feet, chipping away with his thumbnail at the black paint on the eyelets of his boots.

“Every day I see you coming and going,” Lieutenant Phan said, “doing good work and everything is very fine but there is no smile, no talk. Such a serious face. Isn’t this so?”

The thumb flicked away paint.

“I worry about you, Claypool.” Lieutenant Phan’s mouth opened to emit at precise intervals a series of progressively smaller smoke rings that fit inside each other like a set of Chinese boxes. In the air, circles wheeled, scattering. Lieutenant Phan looked up at the clouds and smiled. “You make me wish for a son of my own.”

Chip, chip.

“See how you never talk, my American friend, but if I were to say, PFC Claypool, on the double, get me that report from yesterday, you would say, Yes, sir, Lieutenant Phan, I shall return immediately. Isn’t that so, PFC Claypool?”

“I suppose.” Claypool hunched over his boot like an ancient cobbler.

“There, you see, you can talk and isn’t that much more friendly. You know, sometimes I think you do not make enough of an effort winning my heart and mind.” His laugh was long and high, the screech of a prehistoric bird. “A day of many jokes.” He smiled at Claypool. He was always smiling at Claypool. “This morning when you wouldn’t even say hello I thought of our friends inside and I say, yes, I know many ways to help PFC Claypool talk.” He screeched, he clapped his hands together in delight. “How did you like that one, good buddy?”

Claypool’s thumbnail had turned black with trapped paint.

“Maybe when war is over I go to your Hollywood and tell jokes.” Lieutenant Phan licked his thumb and forefinger and squeezed them hissing about the tip of his cigarette. Then carefully shredding the butt and filter, he tossed the pieces into the air. He reached in his shirt pocket for another.

“I think you are troubled, my young friend, and I think you are troubled because of a confusion. I think that you do not understand. Sometimes, I admit, I myself do not understand and this is my own country so I see how confusing it must be to someone like yourself.” He stared up at the billowing clouds. “Which of the states did you say you come from?”

Claypool looked up at him for the first time. “Indiana,” he said.

“Ah, yes, I forget, Indiana where the Indians live and the cowboys. You are a real cowboy, huh?”

“No,” said Claypool. “There aren’t any Indians.”

“No? Then why is such a place called Indiana?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah there, you see, sometimes you do not know about your country, either. How amusing. I think we are all funny people, don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” said Claypool.

“Sometimes I start to laugh and I cannot stop myself. Very bad manners but sometimes I cannot help it. Have you ever felt such a way?”

Chip, chip.

Smoke rings slipped skyward. “So,” said Lieutenant Phan, “I will try to make you understand. Then you will not be troubled anymore.”

Claypool started work on the other boot.

“My country is old, you understand, very very old. Many many wars. Many enemies, many deaths. Death all the time, a terrible business. So many ghosts sometimes you not always sure you are talking to a real person. Sometimes it does not matter. The ghosts talk back and they are very wise. Sometimes they are stupid. The killing goes on a long, long time. Chinese kill many ancestors of mine. Japanese kill great grandparents. French kill grandfather. VC kill aunts and uncles. Two sisters are prostitutes. Older brother leave for Paris many years ago. Younger brother drive cab in Saigon. VC cousins try to kill me all the time.” He smiled, puffed on his Salem. “Now, do you understand?”

“No… I… What?”

Lieutenant Phan was watching the clouds drift across the sky. “Live fire number ten,” he said.

Claypool nodded gravely.

“VC very, very bad but VC understand.” He slammed a fist into an open palm. “Captain Raleigh, Sergeant Mars, they understand also. Very good men. So now, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“My family is very, very poor. Have nothing for long, long time. Now Lieutenant Phan has stereo—” he shot out his arm “—fine watch, and Playboy book. Maybe someday I go to Indiana. Look for Indians.” His laugh broke into a hacking cough. “America number one, okay Stars and Stripes.” He held out the green-and-white pack of Salems. “You want a cigarette, young Claypool?”

Claypool shook his head.

“No? You don’t smoke. But this is a very bad mistake. Look here. You see how one time I blow smoke out mouth, next time out nose? You see? Do you know why? I will tell you. Everywhere all around there are angry ghosts too, who have no homes and they will try to come into your body, build hootches in the holes in your head. I no bullshit you American GI.” He screeched merrily. “This very bad trouble, so you should, my friend, smoke, smoke all the time your wonderful American cigarettes or number ten trouble will get you.” Lieutenant Phan stared down at Claypool, smoke pouring like steam from nostrils and lips.

“I think you’re insane,” said Claypool.

This was Claypool’s last conversation with another human being. In the following week he was occasionally seen in the company of Trips, silent, expressionless, unresponsive. He took to his bed. Once, hearing a noise in his room, Griffin peered in to find him huddled under a yellowing sheet, eyes huge and bright. “You okay?” Griffin asked. The eyes shone like fog lamps.

Then Claypool abruptly disappeared. Two days went by before he was even missed. One afternoon, Sergeant Mars, requiring a pair of arms to wax and buff the office floor asked about The Kid. The General was coming, all hands were needed to apply cosmetics. Claypool couldn’t be found, his room had been left unlocked and empty. No one knew where he had gone. Sergeant Mars put Mulhavey to work on the floor and in the confusion Claypool was forgotten again. Charts and slides were being hastily prepared, walls painted, speaking parts memorized. Captain Raleigh had spent a week writing and rehearsing to bored officers the briefing he was to present. Records were updated, reports harmonized, whole filing cabinets of disagreeable information locked and whisked out of sight. The cages were hosed down, the wire and bars polished. Certain unkempt prisoners were transferred to a hut behind the Spook House. One of Lieutenant Phan’s men, outfitted in black pajamas, was placed in a cell and handcuffed to the wall, befitting his status as an uncooperative and unruly NVA intelligence officer. (The General would be so impressed by his chat with “Major Quang” that the next day a mountain in western I Corps would be flattened by B-52s on the assumption it contained the top secret headquarters of communist intelligence for all South Vietnam.) Who could concern themselves with Claypool? The General was coming, The General was coming.

Claypool couldn’t have told anyone where he was either. He seemed to have awakened from a nightmare and found himself trapped in completely unrecognizable surroundings. Alone and frightened, he sat in the dark, looking out into the light. He took off his shirt to study the letters stenciled above the right pocket: CLAYPOOL. Whose clothes were these? They couldn’t be his anymore. He had abandoned that name and the life clinging to it like dead meat, he had thrown it away and gone on as easily as one removes a pebble from a shoe. Now, if he was anything at all, he was simply a spy, squatting in the dark to peer between slats through a screen, watching. He watched and wrote in dirt upon the wall notes for his superiors of what he saw. Through wire mesh that sparkled like a theater screen he could see outside bands of the green people walking to and fro with buckets of liquid. When they applied this liquid buildings would vanish. Of course he knew the liquid was white paint but it wasn’t. He couldn’t be fooled again. The paint was a chemical like typewriter correcting fluid and soon all the mistakes would be erased. As they worked, the crews of green people drank the liquid from smaller cans. He knew this was beer but of course it wasn’t. Like the walls and the hootches these people would disappear too, as surely and completely as mistyped letters in an interrogation report. Day after day, as he watched, the crews of green people continued their work and the light got brighter and brighter. It wouldn’t be long until the screen was as clean and white as a page upon which nothing had ever been written. In the sky green machines flew back and forth carrying drums of the liquid everywhere. When they came to do his wall would he disappear too? He thought so. He knew he was a mistake.