Meditations in green, p.4
Meditations in Green, page 4
“A tiger?”
“Remember when they bombed the elephants in the valley and Wurlitzer flew over later taking pictures and crying all over his viewfinder.”
“Not people, elephants.”
“People and elephants.”
“I think I’m going to have to leave.”
“Wonder if anyone ever picked up the ivory.”
“Vietnamese ones aren’t the kind with ivory.”
“All elephants have ivory.”
“Well, you can be sure that if there was any ivory someone got it.”
“Maybe there were guns inside.”
“Guns?”
“Sure, the dinks could have hollowed out the tusks, fit machine guns inside.”
“Tear gas canisters in their trunks.”
“Those Indian rajahs used to paste jewels on them. To bully the lower castes.”
“That’s what I’d like to know, where are the jewels. The jewels and the women. What do you think I came over here for? What good is a war without pillage and plunder? Where’s our share? The only women around here are these smelly dog-faced hootch maids and they sure as shit don’t wear any jewels. Where the fuck are my jewels?”
“Look in your pants.”
“There was that elephant in the movies, what’s his name, who knew how to fly.”
“Dumbo.”
“He had to hold a magical cap in his trunk to get off the ground.”
“No, no, it was a feather. His friend, the mouse, sat in the cap on his head and whispered instructions in his ear.”
“Wow, what if they got a gook mouse to fly an elephant around and snap recon pictures of us.”
“They could train hundreds of gook mice to pilot them in, bomb the compound with pachyderm pies. Dusty gray squadrons spread out in V-formation.”
“Ears flapping like giant bat wings.”
“Evil baby eyes inflamed.”
“Trunks thrashing.”
“Triangular mouths spilling drool.”
“Then they all swoop in at once like this mammoth wrinkled hand pressing down and down, closer and closer. The intimacy is frightening. Dirty yellow toenails. Wispy belly hairs infested with black ticks.”
“Dung-clotted tails.”
“Hot peanut breath.”
“The shock of the weight, the consciousness of collapse, the infinite agony of an unendurable mass.”
“Weather for today: continued clear and sunny. Highs in the mid to upper nineties.”
The Kid leaped from his seat, knocking over the water can, and darted to the door. “Let me out of here, please,” he said. His fingers scrabbled ineffectually at the lock, twitching like galvanized worms. The bolt was already retracted. “How do you.” Simon stood and pulled the door open and The Kid tore down the corridor, crashed through the hootch door and out into the rain and the night.
“Bye,” called Trips.
“Oh boy,” said Simon, reaching out for the wall, “have you people got a surprise when you stand up.”
Trips tossed a lighted match through the open doorway, watched its yellow ribbony afterimage hang for an instant in the air. “I wouldn’t want to be in junior’s path the next time the sirens go off. But he’ll be back tomorrow night begging for more. That boy’s a head if I ever saw one.”
“I’ve got to go to bed,” said Simon, “if I can find my bed, if I can go. Goodnight, gentlemen. See you on campus.”
Simon was gone.
“I thought they’d never leave,” said Trips. He unbuttoned his left shirt pocket and produced a metallic film canister. “Home brew,” he explained, pouring some into a rolling paper. “I’m gonna fix you a nightcap you won’t forget.”
“I’m getting better and better at forgetting,” warned Griffin.
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.
Meditation in Green: 3
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.”
“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.
