Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

We emerged from the Eastern Sales Division of Motorola to glimpse the Sarge crossing at the next light and ducking into a corner drugstore. We set up an observation post in the recessed doorway of a closed shoestore across the street. I flopped down on the icy pavement, bent over my outstretched leg, trying to work out the ache. Trips lit a joint. “Bad?” he asked, crouching beside me.

“I don’t know. It’s like a used car, you never know when it’s going to go out on you. It needs exercise every day. I’ve been inside too long with my plants.”

“Your what?”

“My plants. You’ve got to come visit.”

Some kids danced past, swordfighting with broken car antennas. Two drunks were trying to hit each other with clumsy snowballs.

“Plants.” Trips stood up, studying the figures in black silhouette crossing to and fro the lighted windows of the drugstore. “What the hell is he doing in there?”

“Listen,” I said, my fingers clenching around the stubborn meat of a thigh that no longer seemed mine. “The cables are all twisted up. When he comes out go on without me or you’ll lose him.”

The hard prominences of Trips’s skull glowed orange as he sucked on the joint. “No,” he said finally, smoke exploding about his head. “Never left nobody behind, ain’t gonna start here.”

A patrol car slid silently by, cop faces like dolls behind shatterproof glass.

“You could always leave me with an extra bullet.”

“Don’t try telling me you don’t want a piece of this. I heard you back there huffing and puffing, ‘I’ll kill that motherfucker, goddamnit, goddamnit.’ Don’t try telling me.”

“How do you know who I was talking about?”

“Shit.” The saltshaker was in his hand again, long restless fingers unscrewing the shiny cap.

“What I need is one of those wooden platforms with the little metal wheels to drag myself around town on.”

Trips licked his thumb, eyed me sideways like a crazy dog. “It is him, you know.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”

A man exited the drugstore, slipped around the corner.

“C’mon, there he goes.” Trips yanked me to my feet. I tested the leg. Pins and needles. “Let’s go,” Trips shouted, dashing out into honking traffic, flash and metal, sphincter aflutter. When I reached the opposite curb the leg was in flames. “Go,” I said, leaning against the winking DON’T WALK light. “You go on. Knock him down and I’ll come along to get in a few good kicks.”

“I’ll carry you,” said Trips.

I tried a couple quick steps. It wanted to collapse. “God damn this thing!” I cried. I was turning in circles, beating a fist against it, the wires crackling up and down. “God damn!”

“Put your arms around me.”

“I’m fucking sick of this!” I kicked the light pole as hard as I could. A shower of hot white sparks flamed across my eyes. It had been a long time so when it came up it moved suddenly with the enormous lift of a black wave spinning up storms of sand, tattered ropes of brown weed, broken shells, barnacled sections of unrecoverable wrecks, bloated sea horses with eaten-out eyes, and always breaking and always about to break, frozen in that charged moment between as in woodcuts or watercolors or ebony sculpture of an Oriental style. I turned away, my cheeks wet.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, I’m all right, I’m always all right, now will you go on, he’s getting away.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Okay, watch, I’m moving, see this, I’m right behind you, see, I’ll scuttle along like a crab. Look ma, no crutch.”

A block of concrete darkness opened into a hollow of vibrating light. We covered the distance as best as I could, slipping and sliding in the slush, Trips glancing back repeatedly, me shouting, “Yes, I’m still here.” Then there was Sergeant Anstin’s head bathed in flashing color. DANCE DANCE DISCO DANCE shrieked the neon. A crowd of people moved in and out of a silver door. “Sarge!” Trips called in a huge friendly voice. “Sarge, hey, wait up!” There was something in Trips’s hand. I could barely see ten feet in front of me. The storm was approaching total whiteout. It was like being trapped in static. The silver door rippled with blurry bars of light. Faces flowed toward me out of the fuzz on currents of laughter and perfume. “Hi Sarge, remember me?” There was something in Trips’s hand. Sarge turned, his profile clear in a corona of neon emerald. “Trips!” I cried. The hand was coming up. I grabbed a city trash can and lunged forward, feet slipping out from under me, and swung as hard as I could into Trips’s back. I saw a flash as we went down and heard someone scream, gun and can skittering away on a sheet of iced cement that opened my pant leg and the skin over my knee. Trips was squirming around under me. I hugged him tightly about the waist. He beat on my head and shoulders with his fists. “Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop! It’s not him, you hear me, it’s not even him!” He looked up at me, eyes like milky ice cubes. “Understand? That’s not Sergeant Anstin.” He stopped moving for a moment, then nodded his head. “You fucking fool,” I said, lifting myself off him. “I think I busted my knee. The good knee.” And even though I really saw nothing, my body reacted instinctively to the click, jerking backward, so when I did feel something solid moving through jacket and shirt it didn’t get in deep enough to matter. I howled like an animal and leaped for the knife. It flicked at me quick as a snake, drawing blood across both hands. “You goddamn motherfucker!” I drove my other knee with all the force I had right into his groin. He gasped as the wind left his lungs and I seized the wrist of his knife hand with both of mine. Yes, I wanted the knife, I wanted the cutting to stop, but at that moment even simple tempered steel seemed too inadequate, too technological, for the lusts that were on me, I wanted to feel flesh—skin, muscle, the airhose of his throat—swimming between my bloody fingers, I wanted to feel it recoil, I wanted to feel it crack, desire never so fierce, and all the time the blade, in the grip of our combined touch, was weaving between us with a sovereign will like a planchette anxious to spell a message from the other side and then abruptly the spirits were fled and I was sitting up examining the mess of my knee, my mangled hands, the amazing pearl handle projecting from Trips’s field jacket like a switch you could turn on or off. He was folded up on his side, the falling snow already busy building a pretty white layer down one motionless arm, along the length of one bent leg. I pulled out the knife and opened up his jacket. His LIVE TO RIDE, RIDE TO LIVE T-shirt was soaked through. I wadded up a glove, pressed it in against the wound. “You stupid shit,” I murmured. Beside me stood a pair of quaking legs. “Who is this guy?” asked “Sergeant Anstin.” “I never saw him before in my life.”

“Sorry,” I said.

There were veins and arteries, places to be squeezed, pressure points, I couldn’t remember all that stuff, half a day of training inside a stifling garage somewhere in the middle of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. That familiar helplessness. Why hadn’t I been sent to medics school, brought back something useful from those lost years? My hand was getting wet. A red amoeba swelled slowly across the pavement, coloring the snow pink. My heart was pounding in sync with the beat of the music spilling from the open silver door where a crowd stood, quietly watching. I looked around. I was at the center of an arena of shocked eyes. The stained knife occupied its own clear space on the sidewalk like something fallen miraculous and glowing out of the night sky. I didn’t know where the gun had gone. Trips’s pulse was weak and irregular. The chills started then, it was so cold and unprotected out here on the concrete, brushing the snow off Trips, trying to keep it from covering him completely, the fine crystals falling like salt all around us. The black wave began rising, pushing out of unglimpsed vaults, higher and higher, there was no stopping it this time, so it rose and it peaked and it broke and I didn’t care, all control gone, slumped on the sidewalk, warm blood washing over my hand, and under the flashing lights, the gaze of the crowd, I cried and I couldn’t stop. The snow tumbled out of the darkness, draping a mantle over angles and edges, shrouding the world at last in softness and silence.