Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Griffin sat on top of the roof, rifle cradled in his lap. Up in the sky those three red antenna lights were still winking calmly back at him. Further down lines of tracer fire squiggled comically toward one another. Legend had it that whoever controlled the mountain controlled the base below. A flurry of blips and blurs indicated the questioning of control. Flares were suspended over the perimeter like lights above a used car lot. One of the helicopters patrolling the sky suddenly erupted in flames and plummeted to earth, a giant meteorite. There was intense weapons fire around the EM club, in back of the mess hall, in front of the orderly room. Griffin had seen a pair of big boots curled at the toes protruding from a collapsed wall of the Officer’s Mess. Yesterday Uncle Sam had been laying down duckboard for The General’s visit. Tonight he had picked the wrong place to hide. There were still occasional explosions along the road to the 131st FAC. A jeep careened past Officer’s Row and crashed into the guard shack at the gate. A grenade went off inside the mechanics hootch. A signal shop trailer blew up, scattering wires and circuit boards. Griffin pulled out Mueller’s old lighter and had a last smoke. In the darkness between the supply building and the II section he could see parts of Ingersoll still glowing a fungus green as though contaminated with radioactivity. He hardly recognized the compound anymore. Half the structures were gone, there were craters everywhere, the people had vanished. The battle for the airfield moved on to the runway where weapons barked and flashed. More helicopters arrived to hover anxiously overhead with lights and loud ordance. The sky rained fire. Scores of flares descended in stately procession like a fleet of UFOs. Inside a monstrous transparent egg of flame the last hangar, its shape reduced to a spiderlike frame, appeared to take one tiny step forward and collapse on brittle broken legs. Everywhere light was punching holes through the darkness, revealing at last the tarpaper flimsiness of protection from the awful brightness beyond. The crystal of his mind trembled in its clarity. An enormous fan opened then on a landscape of rock and crevice he had never known, and then another, and another, quickly, like a tearing of skin, arrangements of form and texture disturbing in their alienated familiarity, and these wedges drove into him with splitting force, and he lifted on a peak of vertigo, and then the last fan unfolded, and he looked upon a weaving of lines as distinct as the tracer fire on the mountain, and the tension in those lines was connected to the revelation that his body was certainly a machine, deafening in the roar of its parts, and he saw into the hidden work of a moment, the innumerable strands wiggling in the wind of possibility, and the other lines, those threaded few that were being drawn through him by every separate movement of muscle (thought had never mattered much), and winding out into that spiral of rope dropping away into the infinite past. He saw how the gestures of each instant since his induction and probably from further back than he wished to know had conspired to lead him gently as a domesticated animal to the violence of this moment, binding him to this roof, atop this horror. And it was frightening and it was right and it was beautiful because it was right. He began to swoon into the sensation that must occur when one is at last in the possession of meaning. Then the fan snapped shut and the side of the mountain started to burn. Somebody was using big bombs now. He sucked steadily on the OJ. By the time this world and its visions came tumbling down he expected to be entering another. Particle by particle, the smoke of a plant grown in this violated land would rearrange his elements, render him finally invisible, ready for reconstitution in a more permanent spacetime. The others drew near him now, Claypool, Mueller, Major Quimby, Wurlitzer, Wendell, and all those like the helicopter door gunner whose names he never knew. They sat beside him along the peak of the roof, shared this final smoke. He could hear Mueller’s voice, insistent and excitable as ever, We missed it all, you know, too late for WW II, pulling in rhythm under occasionally inspired coaching against a team in un-variegated black toward an indisputable goal and the sweetness of that victory and the crusader’s conviction in the cause before war got bureaucratized by uniformed business majors who ruined the fun for everyone. And Vietnam? Well, boys and girls, the dope had been incredibly fine. Someone ran by, shouting up at him. He couldn’t tell if the words were English or Vietnamese. Suddenly, as furious as he had ever been, he seized his rifle and fired away at the shadow. The weapon jammed in mid-burst and he tossed it as hard as he could out into the dark. Maybe he had gotten him, maybe he hadn’t. Now he seemed to remember a curious scene. Something had happened between Wendell and the roof. He had tried to return to his room, to see if it was still standing, to retrieve what? Letters from home. The money under the bunk. His personal stash. Something important. Rounding a corner. The half-naked man. The gook. Hands slipping on the greased body, jungle sweat in his nostrils. The bayonet in his fist plunging, driving out the life before it. Fingers filling with doggie goo. Once, twice, three times. The details were out of focus. In fact, he couldn’t be sure whether this incident was an actual occurrence or simply hallucinated desire. The mind apparently was not so clear as he had imagined. Over to the left there was still a radiance visible inside the chapel and he wondered how the movie had come out, unaware the spectatorless film had concluded long ago, the ghouls shot in their heads, the bodies dragged to crematory fires on glistening meathooks, and now the reel spun round and round, the last foot of celluloid slapping repeatedly against the projector. The screen was blank, a rectangle of burning light. There were bugs crawling up his legs, cockroaches heading for higher ground. He jumped up, brushing frantically at his pants. Then he left the roof and he flew, it was amazingly easy, on and on through the night, carrying medicine to the Eskimos. He hit the ground like a dropped sandbag. The sky exploded, the earth screamed. A hot wind whipped over him. Darkness fell in sharp pieces across his back. He closed his eyes. He waited. He had been ready for this for a long time. He opened his eyes. On the flat platter of dirt in front of his nose a small stone jiggled up and down like a kernel of popcorn in hot oil. He didn’t know it yet, but he was outside of sound, existing in a moment of pure silence that rushed out from him in long widening concentric circles. Then the sky knifed down and up through his legs and hearing returned and he was sick, face bathed instantaneously in greasy sweat, body burning, falling away from him in long trickles. He heard a wolf howling. Nothing hurt. He knew he was dead. The ground rumbled beneath him, heaved several times in quick succession as though trying to toss this aggravation off its back. The command bunker. They were blowing up the command bunker. Who was in charge tonight? Not Major Holly. He had left yesterday morning for The General’s Annual Vung Tau Invitational, golf clubs strapped to the helicopter skids. The ground shuddered. Griffin dug into the dirt and held on. The stone rolled against his hand. His fingers closed over the hard rough surface, squeezed. His legs, wax sticks set too near the fire, melted, sent roots into the sandy soil. Lifting onto his elbows, he looked back at himself. His legs stretched to the dark horizon where they burst into foliage, leafy tree toes. His body’s increasing familiarity with the ground was beginning to terrify him. Consciousness, like seeds on the white head of a dandelion, seemed ready to scatter at the slightest breath. He refused to pass out. He clutched the stone tightly. Through the pads of his fingers he concentrated himself onto it, explored contour and texture until the stone was as large as the moon, all craters and mountains and swift smooth seas of sand to glide across in a pleasant rush toward the final room of lights and eyes and giant masked figures bending ominously near, metallic hands flashing like polished claws.