Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

I want to grow big as a house, strong as the wind.

I want roots that are deep and complex and secure.

I want birds in my hair, squirrels on my arms, children climbing over my skin.

I want to cool, to comfort, to inspire.

I want to expand the day with oxygen.

I want to cast shade on lovers.

I want to catch lightning bolts in my fists.

I want to pose nude against a flaming sun.

I want to die in a shower of color and return from the dead with annual regularity.

I want to live a long long time.

And when at last my body withers I want the bones converted into pencils and baseball bats.

If Daphne’s pleas were answered, why not mine?

I found Arden in his office closet, stacking shelves with plastic flower pots. In his green cowled robe and high-top sneakers he resembled an eccentric elf with glandular problems. Perhaps it was the location. The Green Bean occupied the entire second floor above a magic and costume shop. On the way up you passed plastic vomit and rubbery body parts, lifelike masks of flesh-eating ghouls and modern presidents.

“One free to the first hundred people signing up for our introductory course,” he explained. “You’ll see them, big letters everywhere, newspapers, wall posters, mimeographed handouts: FREE POT. Thought of it myself, Grif, what do you think?”

“Don’t call me Grif.”

“Oh? What do I call you?”

“G.”

“G?”

“Just the initial. I’m down to the initial.”

“You’re not sleeping well, I can see that.”

“Everything’s fuzzy. Everything looks like there’s mold growing on it.”

“What about the bathroom, what happened there?”

“I went tile blind.”

“Do me a favor, Grif—excuse me, G.—don’t tell anyone you’re a student of mine. Years of painstaking analysis and perfected technique roll off your back like water. Thank God you never appeared in any of the advertising.”

“What can I say?”

“Let’s hear the gory details.”

“Insomnia. Migraine. Vertigo. General phantasmagoria.”

“I’ve had visions. I told you about those, didn’t I. They went away.”

“Teeming walls. Fornicating furniture. Cockatoos in the curtains. I crawl into bed with a machete and a canteen.”

“You familiar with the term ‘China syndrome’?”

“What, I’m having a meltdown?”

“I think you concentrate extraordinarily well.”

“My karma’s radioactive for the next ninety-nine years?”

“However, I also think that all your considerable attentive abilities are beamed at present onto too flimsy a screen. Temperature mounts, collisions abound, and soon you’ve got yourself a critical breeder.”

“I don’t think I can handle the lead suit.”

“I like this resistance, you know that. What’s a rose without thorns? Listen, I’m sorry about the shouting when you were here last. Sometimes the robes get unduly heavy. It ain’t easy being serene day and night. The paradox of tense tranquillity. I believe there are references in the ancient masters. It’s something I’m still working on myself. But to return to your problem, have you ever considered gardening?”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing these many months?”

“Let’s speak nonfiguratively for a moment. Blistered palms, damp knees, gummy soil under the nails gardening.”

“No, I have to admit I’ve never engaged in nonfigurative gardening.”

“Yes, I think we need to go 3-D with this.”

“Wonderful. I love those little cardboard glasses.”

“I remain serene. You see me, a fountainhead of equanimity. The pure abstraction is, of course, the meditative object of choice among true devotees, but someone with your psychic reserves requires more than mental images and two-dimensional photographs for their energy to effloresce properly. You need the concrete. The objectification of interiority. So we turn the glove inside out before reinserting the hand. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Sowing, tending, watering, whatever one does to produce a healthy plant. Target on the actual green thing. Prune, mulch, hover.”

“Should I wear an apron and sing to them, too?”

“Cooperation, please, a little patience and cooperation. Give it a chance. Choose a plant you can relate to, something you feel good about. Here, to begin.” He handed me a plastic pot. “Free.”

“This doesn’t mean I have to sit through the course again?”

“Be nice, G. Say it with flowers.”

The CID was sympathetic but they simply had no legal grounds for holding Private Franklin. There were no witnesses, no evidence, no telltale stains, no fingerprints of any kind on a knife no one could prove was his. “Favorable odds do not a case make,” said Captain Rossiter who was thoroughly sick of Franklin’s antics but tired of running a hotel for misfits and delinquents. Their detention facility was already crowded with certain convictions and the notorious LBJ had exceeded its official capacity years ago. There simply was no more room to house a man who was a perpetual suspect.

So that was how Private Franklin came to occupy a special chair in the orderly room of the 1069th where he could be found from morning formation to evening chow under the custodial eye of the First Sergeant. And if Major Holly expected Franklin to break down and confess, thought Simon who worked at a desk across from the detainee, everyone within range of Franklin’s mouth was in for a long siege. No quiet on this front.

“Hey, Top! How long I got to sit here?”

“All day.”

“How long for all day?”

“Till the CO says otherwise.”

“Shee-it. This the use the army makes of a man’s talents? I got multiple talents. What kind of contribution can I make here?”

“You can shut up and let the rest of us get on with the business of winning this war.”

“Winning? Winning? You people are even crazier than me. I ain’t never figured you folks out yet.”

“So sit and watch, learn something.”

“Can I smoke?”

“No.”

“Can I read? Give me that paper there.”

“No.”

“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

“Think about being a good soldier.”

“How can I think in here with all this chatter? And my chair’s too hard. Hey, Top, give me one of them like yours with a cushion on it.”

The clerks looked at one another. The First Sergeant fired a sharpened pencil at Franklin’s head. Simon put on his headphones and typed to the music. A betting pool formed with the pot going to the one who came nearest to correctly guessing the date upon which the First Sergeant reverted and dealt with his tormentor on a more primal level. The afternoons were usually less tense since Franklin dozed in his chair. Major Holly came out of his office to glare. Franklin snored away in the corner. As word spread, officers and NCOs from other units dropped by to check out the sassy black in the orderly room and Franklin, who was already a celebrity among members of his own unit and the nearby military police companies, was soon famous throughout I Corps as the voice and symbol of the exotically secret 1069th Military Intelligence Group. Inspired by the attention, Franklin’s personality quick-shifted into a variety of gears.

“I’m a hairy eyeball,” he proclaimed, swaying in his chair. “I see galloping moons, I see green fire, I see little bitty yellow men running through the woods, I see you, I see me, I see bad shit, whoooeeee.”

The mania in his laughter evidence enough for most onlookers to convict him of all charges.

“I’m hungry,” Franklin declared. “How about a slice of watermelon?”