Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Yeah, I noticed what a rock this joint is. Who’s the wisp in the hall with the mutt?”

“That’s Eugene. He’s afraid to leave the building.”

“I think I’d be afraid not to. What’s that skull hanging in the john?”

“Little knickknack I picked up downtown.”

“Spooky, Grif, mighty spooky. Don’t know what’s happened to you since I’ve been away. What’s that?”

I had curled my hands into claws and exposed my teeth. “Our resident three a.m. bogeyman.”

“Don’t. You’re giving me a peak. Peaks and valleys, I’ve been warned to avoid them.”

“Need to get you one of Arden’s magic flowers.”

“Sheeeeit. That raisin-eyed Green Beret crazie. You still bother with him?”

“Sometimes.”

“There’s a dude they’d like to see down on Nine West.”

“He was talking about you just the other day, wants to make you up a big bouquet.”

Trips held up a finger. “Tell him to meditate on this.”

“Peaks, watch out.”

He glanced around the room. “So where’s Rapunzel?”

“I don’t know. One day she went down to the corner for a can of orange juice and…”

“These squiggles hers?” Oriental ideograms had been painted in black across all four white walls.

“Charms,” I explained, “for the demons that abound.”

“They look like snakes, nests of snakes. Listen, you want me moving in here for a couple days you’re gonna have to tone down the atmosphere. Skulls in the shithouse, gooks on the walls, ghosts in the night, it’s worse than the ward. And get some eats. I notice all you’ve got in the refrigerator is a jar of peanut butter and a bag of leaves.”

“Romaine lettuce.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s wilted. I require minimum daily amounts of the four basic food groups: caffeine, nicotine, sugar, and dope.”

“Watch out,” I said, clutching the arms of my chair, “I think the rug is starting to move.”

Later that night I learned about the hospital—medicated Basic Training—about the daily sessions, chairs drawn in a circle, tall tales around the old campfire: “We had one poor guy raping grandmothers with a bayonet, rolling hand grenades into orphanages, all the time he’s screaming and bawling and tossing the chairs, kicking the Ping-Pong table to pieces, chewing padding off the walls, a jazz solo, man, and he finishes up by wetting his pants and collapsing against the Coke machine. He was back on the street in a week.”

“Fun.”

“Well, you know, we were in competition. I freaked them, though, told everybody I enlisted, I followed orders, I always volunteered, I never complained, I liked it a lot, I believed .”

“Yeah, that was you all right.”

“I was a goddamned maniac.”

“Snoring all day at your desk.”

“Greasing gooks all night.”

“Remember the time Anstin caught you digging up your stash behind the signal shack?”

“That old fucker could really run.”

“You must have done a dozen laps around the compound. His face got so purple I thought he’d have a heart attack.”

“I was the one who was gonna die.”

“Sergeant Mars was shooting that gun into the air. He knew you weren’t really an escaped prisoner.”

“Into the air, hell, he was firing right at me. That guy was from Mars.”

“Remember the grass pizza?”

“One of the great home recipes.”

“It was like chewing on dirt.”

“And you were on guard duty and passed out in your bunk and a rat fell off the rafter into the fan.”

“I thought I’d been hit.”

“Simon turns on the light and there’s your silly face all plastered with blood and rodent fur.”

“A laugh riot.”

“Yeah, I must have laughed hard twenty times a day.”

“You were always laughing.”

“You were so goddamned funny.”

“So were you.”

“We were all funny.”

I fell asleep and dreamed of a pair of oversized cartoon hands trying to lace a tiny cartoon boot and then an old gook clutching a bar of blue soap bent over me, face twisted with laughter, and I woke up in the bathtub. I staggered into the other room. The telephone book had been torn apart, ripped and crumpled pages littering the floor and furniture. The door was wide open. Trips was gone.

From the air the compound of the 1069th Intelligence Group was a triumph of military design. Living quarters for both officers and enlisted men consisted of fifty-five identical hootches arranged in five ranks of eight hootches, then three ranks of five. In the open area at the lower right was a concrete basketball court. An L-shaped mess hall defined the bottom corner. The various other necessary structures—motor pool, EM club, chapel, et cetera—were positioned separately off to the side in no particular order. The working offices, long windowless Quonset huts, could be found in the line of hangars, maintenance shops, and supply sheds bordering the airfield. But the unit’s basic geometric design possessed a pleasing sense of natural logic and finality that seemed somehow magical to the mind. Approaching from the east you thought of the runway as a pole and the perfectly engineered rectangle of buildings to the right of its top as a flag, a three-dimensional facsimile of a flag. In fair weather when basketball games were a daily occurrence, the tiny players moved back and forth across the court like a handful of loose marbles rolling around a board tilted first one way, then the other. Today the court was deserted, the hoop nets hung sodden and empty, unscored on for weeks. Between the hootches the night rain had mixed sand and clay into yellowish-red stripes that bled like cheap dye.

Outside the compound gate sat a scrawny old man with a face so expressively ancient the lines seemed to have been drawn in ink. Day after day he sat patiently upon his small plastic turquoise mat, a dark wooden bowl centered on the ground before him. Sometimes a soldier on his way to the PX or to town would stop, toss in a wrinkled bill, but such generosities were rare. There was only so much a soldier could care about. Trucks loaded with laughing troops rumbled down the road and often a beer or soda can or even a gob of spit came flying toward the old man who did not move or speak. The thick dust clouds would settle back onto his conical straw hat, his hunched shoulders, and into his empty bowl, tinting everything red. During monsoon season when the daily storms came the old man would cover himself with a rubber U.S. Army poncho and continue to sit, without apparent concern or discomfort, as now the big trucks splashed mud and the bowl filled slowly with rain.

In a plot of spiky grass to the right of the orderly room stood a large painted sign:

In the center of the sign was a gaudy portrait of a screaming woman with round crimson mouth, huge yellow eyes, a black nest of snakelike hair: the unit emblem.

The green light was a rusted socket stuffed with sand and bits of broken glass.

Hanging on metal hooks from this large sign was a smaller one that read: 7 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT. Even though the sign had been constructed so that the numerals could be changed the same faded 7 had been dangling there as long as anyone could remember. The wind blew and the sign creaked back and forth, creak, creak, in the damp wind.

“See how this pin…”

“Was sawed through?”