Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Fifteen minutes later Griffin sensed the first subtle movements of that interior process that shifted the structure of his awareness from a solid to a liquid to a gas. In accordance with the laws of evaporation. On the wall opposite, above Trips’s head, a previous occupant of the room had scrawled in crimson Day-Glo the sardonic slogan: KILL A COMMIE FOR CHRIST. Under the soft luminescence of the black light the words seemed to suspend themselves in space, to ripple ethereally like the swollen palps of an anemone beckoning in a torpid current. Letters revolved, faded, reemerged, sluggishly metamorphosing into a progression of variants on the original:

ZAP A ZIP FOR ZEUS

GARROTE A GOOK FOR GOD

NIFE A NIP FOR NEPTUNE

Amazing how facile the mind, thought a facile portion of Griffin’s mind. Something wrong, though, with that last.

Teetering on the rim of complete dissolution, his attention fixed momentarily on that mysterious hieroglyphic which had puzzled him ever since his arrival:

A fraternity letter? An Oriental ideogram? A meaningless military cryptograph? Or only the stylized initials of a long dead or long gone soldier? I.O. Ingmar Olson? No. How many Scandinavians in the American Army? How many Swedes could bear the heat? O.I. Oliver Ingersoll? More likely. Oliver Ingersoll, are you alive, are you well?

Thought winnowed down to a maundering thread. Frontal bone splintered into billowing motes of ivory dust, exposed neural lobes to the cool fall of descending air. Intimate fission flashed with the erratic tempo of summer lightning on a gray horizon. Sheets of electronic rain glided past like heavy theater curtains on oiled tracks. He felt a hand move swiftly inward and seize the flaccid sponge of his mind within the grip of a velvet-gloved fist. Silent static closed over consciousness…

…and the clouds went slowly through the spectrum of visible light and the sun, just as big and round and red as a penny gumball, plopped between the moist lips of the sea and dissolved… into minute grains of sand wedged among the leather cracks of his boot. His focus centered on a large rust-colored cockroach the size of his thumb traversing the uneven wooden floor in a determined diagonal from right to left. He ground his heel down flat against the hard shell, listened for the crunch. There was not a sound. He raised his foot. The undamaged roach scuttled steadily away past the Richard Nixon knothole and disappeared under the bed. Startled, Griffin looked up. The sticks of incense had burned to ash, the candle was guttering in the last quarter inch of its stub. Vegetable and the dog had wandered off; only Trips remained, slouched on the footlocker, head tilted back, eyes shut.

“Trips.”

“Hunh,” he grunted, without moving.

“Maybe I’m seeing bugs.”

“Lucky stiff.”

“Maybe I’m seeing bugs and I’m in serious personal trouble.”

“Sure.”

“Or maybe there are bugs and we’re all in trouble.”

“Sure, Griffin, sure.”

“The quality of my hallucinations is improving. Have you noticed? Do I appear alarmed? Are my eyes red? Am I making any sense?”

“No.”

“It’s so difficult to concentrate when your head is leaking essential ingredients.”

“You’re stoned. Go to sleep.”

“A word of advice, Earthling, before I zoom away: Beware of the atomic cockroaches.”

“Go to sleep.”

Halfway to dawn and the guns continued to boom, each successive concussion fluttering the taut membrane that stretched over the dark sky like a vast circus tent, expanding the canvas toward that mystical moment when the balloon would indeed go up. Oliver Ingersoll, where are you? He glanced at Trips, slack-jawed and dumb, his docile face turned up into the black light, and wondered idly if under that warm violet glow he too looked so much like a corpse, and somewhere beyond thought and illusion and war he fell back across the bed and into real dream: of wet stark trees, of arctic wind, and of snow, of falling snow.

You stand in a field surrounded by family. Light falls from the proper angles, wind blows from the proper direction, shadows are composed of friendly shapes. Home. Simple nourishment, harmonious rhythms. A fertile tomb where the spirits of ancestors brood over the unbroken seeds of the future. Long green waves swell and ebb across time. The rustle of relatives is a melody. The weather is kind. Nothing will ever change.

Dawn. The first light touches you upon the head, morning’s anointment. The dew evaporates, inner chemicals mix and bubble, there is magic brewing. In the pulp, in the frail tissue movement quickens, a push upward, firm, persistent, the imperative of cellular wisdom ancient as the soil which sustains it. The rush expands into leaf after leaf, planes of awareness, alchemist’s shops to sweeten the day. A fountain of energy you rise ecstatic into the blue-petaled sky, the pollen-dusted sun.

Centuries pass.

There is a vibration. Rolling in from the west comes thunder louder than the afternoon shower, a foreign key that silences the drone of insects. It advances swiftly, the tremors spread. Boom pause boom pause boom pause boom pause boom boom boom pause boomboomboomboom faster now, the heavy running feet of an animal new to the forest, boomboomboomboomboomboomboom and a shadow swoops in and the sun swooshes out and a wind and you, you find yourself all at once chewed and torn, thrust head downward in smoking dirt while above in the hot air dangle your shocked roots already begun to blacken and curl at the touch of a light photosynthesis is hopelessly unable to transform.

Framed in the shattered doorway of my apartment Trips lay sprawled across the secondhand couch, combat-booted feet grinding dirt into the faded cushions, a tattered paperback copy of Ubik clutched in one grimy fist. He hadn’t taken off his coat, a grease-stained field jacket decorated with dozens of division patches surrounded by the colors of every notorious motorcycle club in the country. He looked up from his reading with an annoyed master-of-the-house expression.

“You’re melting all over the carpet,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Okay, I’ll buy you a new door.”

“You’re out.”

“Yes, I am out.”

“You okay?”

“My friend, I’m a genuine certified okay. Dr. Caligari threw up his hands. Mirabile! A spontaneous individuation. Nothing like it in the entire literature. Gave me a comb, bottle of Thorazine, showed me the gate. They let a bunch of us go every year on the anniversary of Freud’s birth.”

“How do you feel?”

“About a hundred and two. Got anything special in the house for a weary old soldier?”

“Afraid the cupboard’s bare, Pop.”

“That’s what I feared. Been away a long time.” He reached into his pocket and flung onto the table between us a handful of colored capsules and tablets. “Cocktail nuts,” he exclaimed, popping several into his mouth. “Courtesy the hospital pharmacy. Try the purple shells, they’re great.”

I poked through the pile, trying to find something I recognized. The table was a window I had screwed to a set of wooden legs.

“I like this,” said Trips, leaning forward. “It’s like they’re floating in air like tiny planets.” He moved his head back and forth over the glass. “I can see myself.” He bent closer. “My feet. I can see my feet. That’s good, always keep track of your feet, might need ’em to go somewhere.”

“How’d you find me?”

“It ain’t easy, good buddy, you hop around like a nervous bird.”

“Trees keep falling down.”