Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Zip, zip, zip.

Griffin sat cross-legged on the bed, a firm erection glowing in his lap, as he poured with a chemist’s methodical care a clear plastic vial of white powder into the emptied tip of a Kool cigarette. He twisted off the end, lit it, inhaled deeply. His lungs were golden honeycombs, his veins the root system supporting Eden.

Zip went the day.

Once the days had gone squeeeak, now they went zip.

He glided over time in swift hydraulic comfort. Faces were like cities, the night was a smoky black mirror, the sound of a single word filled the chamber of the universe. He heard the bells in the great Himalayan temples, he rode on cockroaches to the end of color, he watched the machines dissolve into gray fluid that bubbled away into the ground. The future was here, ladies and gentlemen, now.

Once he had been so backward as to think thoughts such as these: if mind was an engine requiring maintenance and tune-ups for dependable performance down reality road, what happened when you mislaid the tools and your feeler gauge came apart, blades of metal falling into the big oil drum, lost. This, following a ninety-minute monologue on demolition derby from Hagen, a hungover and homesick mechanic. Simmering in the boredom of Sunday morning. Sleep, when it came at all anymore, appeared in snatches, periods of minutes. Marijuana had lost its magic. Trips dropped in with news of a deuce and a half leaving for the beach. Griffin pulled a dirty towel off the floor and wandered out to the truck.

Entertainment on the ride was provided by Trips’s jukebox favorites, today’s tune: how I dropped acid on the rifle range and shot off my drill instructor’s Smoky The Bear hat, mistaking him for a plastic target silhouette. Griffin stared out the back at the road pulling away between parallel clouds of yellow dust. Behind the concertina and the garbage on each side were relocation centers, human kennels constructed from discarded ammunition crates and flattened Coke cans. Packs of stray children ran after the truck, shouting adult obscenities and hurling imaginary hand grenades.

The beach was clean, white, and empty.

Stripped to his shorts, Griffin sat in the soft sand at the water’s edge, warm waves foaming over his legs, and searched the horizon. He wanted to see merchant vessels bound for Hong Kong, cream-colored ocean liners crammed to the rails with happy tourists, Russian fishing trawlers, leaping dolphins. He lay on his back and listened to the sea, a constant echoing roar like something huge hurtling through a pipe. Behind him the thousand windows of a luxury hotel. He heard a woman laughing.

His eyes opened. A helicopter was descending. The approaching blades whipped sand in his face and he turned away, spitting. The helicopter settled onto the dunes, disgorging a mob of officers in swimming trunks and bermuda shorts, their hands filled with metal food canisters, tubs of iced beer, assorted balls and a net. Griffin rolled over onto his stomach.

“Lookee what I got.” Trips was standing beside him, holding a transparent walnut between thumb and forefinger.

“Cocaine,” said Griffin.

“How’d you know?”

“Brother at the PX long time ago offered me some.”

“And you turned him down?”

“There’s no coke in Asia.”

“Who says?”

“Take it from your resident botanist. No coca trees in rice land.”

“So what is it then?”

“Crushed aspirin. Corroded battery acid.”

“Let’s do some up and see.”

“Why not?”

Down the beach was an empty shack that served as a bar and refreshment stand during unit parties. Crouched inside, Trips arranged the powder into four identical lines on his military ID card. The shack smelled of fungus and stale urine. “Okay,” said Trips, “who’s been pissing in the brew?” They giggled nervously and took turns snorting through a rolled-up twenty dollar MPC note. Suddenly it became urgent that Griffin stand up. Struggling to his feet, he lost consciousness and fell, the side of his head banging against the wall. When he awoke Trips was shaking him roughly by the shoulders. “Hey, you okay, huh?” “Yeah,” answered Griffin, frightened by his uncharacteristic concern, “sure,” on his hands and knees, breakfast eggs splattering over the wooden floor. “You okay?” “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay, what’d I just say.” He wiped his mouth on a green army towel. “Let’s go outside and goof,” said Trips.

Griffin staggered into the light. He seemed to be traversing some immense outdoor trampoline, the flutters in his stomach gathering momentum for the next eruption. He stood still for a minute, hoping the dinghy-in-a-high-sea motion would subside. Then, delicately lifting his head, he forced his awareness into as objective a survey of the surroundings as his reduced concentration could achieve. His eyes and the world shattered simultaneously. It was like staring into a cracked kaleidoscope at bright pieces of color that no longer resolved themselves into any unified pattern. One splinter reflected the intense blue of a sky higher and deeper than any he had ever known, another the hypnotic heaving of a mass of sewage that must have been the sea, another the blob of putty that was Trips’s face; scattered shards: the lighted beacon of a beer can, a smiling ball sailing through crystal air, the half-buried treasure of a shod foot (his own), seasick palm trees, amazing movable fingers, the miracle of a knee; there were visibly shoddy seams where things refused to fit properly together, each object stood apart from the others, a sovereign form; a desert of salt undulated upward into heaven, every grain shadowless and distinct, embodied geometry. “C’mon, what the fuck’s wrong with you now?” The cottonwood seed floating impossibly past his nose became a city-sized cloud miles away. The lion in his ears, a remnant of reason informed him, was the ocean breaking against the shore. “I’m okay, okay?” He followed Trips up the fluorescent slope to a slumped shoulder of sticky licorice road. Trucks with white stars on their shells clattered past like giant crustaceans. “How you feeling, good buddy?” “About a hundred and two.” Across the road in the storage lot of a supply depot long rows of new tanks faced each other like elephants preparing to charge. The letters RESTRICTED AREA hung in the air six inches in front of the sign. The barbed wire glowed. The traffic howled and Griffin teetered in the wind, a pit opened and closed, opened and closed. From out of nowhere a scrawny yellow dog ran barking beneath the chortling wheels of a U.S. Army garbage truck. The soft asphalt sprouted a patch of wet fur, the echo of a yelp dangled in the gray monoxide air. Turning simultaneously, Griffin and Trips presented identical expressions to one another. Wow. They looked back to the dog, looked again at each other. Griffin—dog—Trips—Griffin. The moment welded into a triangle. A mystic crown. Griffin, scratching his skin, felt spiders skittering along under his epidermis. An eye burst into flames. Then one said a word to the other—which one who could say?—or one only thought the word to himself and the other instantly knew or no one thought or said and the word was simply there between them, a revelatory sound arcing two minds.

“Meat!”

Mother Nature’s secret ingredient.

“Meat!”

The barbecue on eternity’s grill.

“Meat!”

Make love, squeeze a trigger, pave a road.

They rolled in the tar-speckled gravel, enormous wheels whirring inches from their hilarious heads. Griffin’s side began to ache and he had difficulty getting enough breath. None of that mattered though, he had penetrated a mystery and seen there at the secret center of things a rubbery pair of laughing lips. And it wasn’t until he was back in his hootch, prone on his own bed, that he realized he was back in his bed and that one whole interminable day was actually over, had, in fact, gone zip.