Slide the Window Down a Bit, Please, Young Traveler

            Michael rode the train on the last leg to Media Falls, seated across from Mrs. Tichnor. He was glad to be of assistance to her, glad to be of use after a period in his life where he felt so confused and rudderless. They both went with the train through the green, and he adjusted the window on request, reached for another Reader’s Digest for her (‘no, the March edition, please’), and was enlisted to inform the conductor that the coupling between the cars close by had an irritating squeak.

            Along with the train, and Mrs. Tichnor, Michael was going away. He was going away from that ‘B’ in Latin, and, more recently, away from the matter of the key to the school washroom, of which Clarissa, a normal school instructor, would simply laugh. He was also going toward. He was going toward Media Falls, and home. He was going toward Mother, for whom radium was a panacea, and his Father, who believed the same about electromagnetic fields, and his sister, Prudence, who always, readily, sided with both.

            Michael went through the green. The green of growth, the green of decay, the overwhelming fecundity that refused to be tamed. It could only be utilized. No dam could control that green. No electrical device invented in the city could overcome it. Michael went through the iridescent, multi-dimentional crystalloid green of life. As if to affirm that, the green was warmly spotted with dew which nearly hovered through surface tension above the leaves, giving them an ethereal quality.

            His eyes followed the tone progression in the foliage racing past as Mrs. Tichnor hummed to herself and worked the crossword. His eyes went upward from the algae on a pond to the moss as green as Christmas bunting, to the firm, assertive light green of the lilies, then, the harmonic green of the upstart ash, the darker green of the established oak, all the way up to the lighter lime on the sawtooth high horizon. It all was a green that seemed to produce its own light, separate from that of the sun.

            How, he wondered, could one soak in all this green without lapsing into groans, grunts and shrieks. Michael feared that he would cry out from all that green, and he clutched the locks beside his head with both hands, then gave a small cough for the benefit of his booth partner, holding a claim of catarrh in reserve in case she noticed the gesture and questioned his capacity to reason.

            Can one go mad from so much green? He wondered. Certainly through exposure to the reds, he thought, and perhaps with the more saturated tones of blue. Yellow, though, was cousined and culpable with green. It was partnered with green, and it was all there as he looked through the train window.

            All life. This green was both the answer and the question. Why didn’t Clarissa ever seem to notice him? They were in the same circle and he served in the same groups as she. From the Assembly for Reform, (which became too large) to the Coalition for Progress (too many federal agents, but a great place to cage tobacco), to the Association for Societal Salubrity (too sibilant). Finally, after attending a month of meetings at the Progressive Conglomeration, (which did have a nice variety of cakes), Clarissa formed her own group.

            That was in February, around the time of The Sorghum Avalanche, and Michael’s father telephoned the rooming house to check on his son’s well-being and application. But he needn’t have worried, the sorghum docks were well on the edge of the city, and Michael was in its center. He was born in the country, but his heart was in the city, far from things sorghum, far from green.

            Michael gazed through the window at all that green and wondered how he earned a degree while his mind was somewhere else. He spied a small, square, brown owl sitting on the branch of a locust tree, there for all to see. And somehow he had to get back to the city. Perhaps he could as a mechanical engineer, especially because, at the moment, his head was full of that. Along with the color green and Clarissa.

            Clarissa’s group, The Committee for the Betterment, soon had many members. The meeting hall was nearly full, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, mostly with people who had come to figure out of what. And Michael wondered, could that have been intentional? He longed to understand her more. After meetings, at Etta’s Beanery, the well-born Clarissa was content with spaghetti. Or with the more sophisticated and small-portioned Macaroni Di Napoli, if time was an issue. She ate healthily, taking care not to get sauce on her crepe bow. 

            Was he just a hick to her? The city had claimed him as one of its own as much as any native there. It was more solid, yet more fragile with electric, water and gas lines, sewers, trams, squalor and cholera. The green was there in the city, but, mostly, as pressed, processed and enslabbed material. The city held the finished wood, the steel, the glass, the masonry and poured rock which the entire world was destined to become. And then it would be reclaimed by all the green after the fall of Man. Michael knew that. But Clarissa didn’t acknowledge his innate urban intuition.

            He was sure that it wasn’t because of Roman, his brother in streetcorner pamphleteering. And rival, of sorts. Michael’s parents would be appalled. But Roman’s exact political affiliation was not much of a cause for curiosity among The Committee for the Betterment. The more pressing question was why he put ketchup on everything. The curiosity his colleagues had toward that small matter was something that Michael’s father just couldn’t understand.

            The train took him, cradled, through the green. The green of his father’s Granger Facilitator ribbon, the green of his sister’s hymnal, the green of his mother’s favorite velvet-upholstered settee. He wondered if the same green could be found in Dijon or along the Irawaddy. Michael would never find out, because he didn’t like ships. But perhaps Lindbergh could take him. The green could be seen in the clover and in the switch grass, a light green that seemed to aspire to something else. Being nibbled by sheep, perhaps. Even the bare soil he saw held a hint of green. It had been there and had returned and now it called to him: “Back to me. Back to me.” But Michael was of the city and he felt it. To return to work the soil would be to regress to a destiny more primitive, and he had so much else to do. It was a pity that he wasn’t sure exactly what that was. It had to have something to do with gear ratio or vector forces, though, of that he was certain.

            Michael gazed drowsily out the window at all the greenness. This world was unequalled in all its verdancy, defying description. Chartreuse? Then he pondered the fact that it was all really red. The train slowed as it climbed and it rocked slightly with the effort. But at the same time, Michael thought, it was all irrefutably green. You could point to it and say: “Yes. That is green.” Or, perhaps, sometime in the near future, he would softly say, “Yes, Clarissa, it’s just some green, now go back to sleep,” in a solid, confident, manly tone. He thought that would be wonderful. Then he shook himself out of his slumber, realizing that colors don’t wake people up in the middle of the night. And, even if that were the case, Clarissa would probably be one who would sleep soundly in the presence of the brightest reds or blues, if sleep was what was called for.

            Such strange, obsessive thoughts. Michael knew that such bizarre notions came to him when he had been studying too much. But it balanced out in the mind, he believed, like an equation. Man was an animal, but also a machine of sorts. Did Clarissa’s mind work that way also, he wondered. And, if that were so, how would she fare?

            The train completed a rise through a cut in the hill, beneath an immense archway of branches. And then the view changed.