The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  “You have to hustle.”

  “Beirut.”

  “Right.”

  “You want bang-bang in Beirut, pull the film out of your pocket, wave it around . . .”

  “Makes you thirsty just breathing the air.”

  “Gutters running with blood . . .”

  “Lovely stuff.”

  “No such luck down here.”

  “The last man to get shot down here shot himself.”

  “We’ll have to buy guns. We’re going to have to shoot somebody ourselves.”

  “Arf-arf!”

  “Moo! Moo!”

  We began to snort and laugh. Smoke curled out of our ears. Our claws whined against the glass tabletop . . .

  Word was the beer workers had gone on strike. We argued about whether a trip to the breweries would be worth anything at all.

  Beer, along with meat, and toiletries, and cigarets, would soon be scarce. Beans were also in short supply. For months there’d been no milk. There were no replacements for burned-out bulbs or broken car parts.

  When, in only minutes, I’d grown tired of us, I changed tables and sat down across from a possible European, a slack-witted Swede, I would have guessed, who was trying to negate this impression by wearing glasses.

  By the time we'd introduced ourselves, his accent fairly placed him. I said, “And you’re English?”

  “Right you are. London, currently. And where are you from?”

  “Here and there and yonder. What about yourself?”

  “I—” He was a game sort. “Didn’t we just do that one?"

  I didn’t answer.

  Things got slow. I slipped off my heels and concentrated on cooling off, feet first.

  Did he think I didn’t see the glance pass between him and the barkeep?

  I raised my glass to the martini expert. “Miguel. Alfonso. She’s a little wet.”

  He didn’t hear me.

  “Smell the bamboo in here?” I asked the four-eyed Londoner.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Not quite a refreshing odor, is it?”

  I said, “You have the kind of good manners that eventually get you killed.”

  Smiling neutrally, as if the music had perhaps mangled my words, he said, “Oh, my.”

  While Tweedledee and partner started a version of “Yesterday” in phonetically memorized English, I calculated that if I had the time right, this smelly lounge would be open another forty-five minutes. Long enough to get at least fractionally swacked before drifting into a taxi. Such was the scope of my thinking as I signalled for more and more booze. “Drier, hombre. Gin, si, vermouth, no,” I told the waiter.

  My companion made himself cozy, folding his hands around his drink. “What brought you here?”

  “I came on a plane.”

  He was embarrassed by my attitude and stared down into his glass.

  “Yes. But I was wondering as to your motives,” he began again.

  He was what they call a pleasant enough man, meaning a giant nonentity . . . His features were pudding-like and ghostly, and in the center of this not-quite visage rested a pair of spectacles of the variety sported by Clark Kent and other such eunuchs . . . Except for the glasses, you couldn’t remember his face even while staring straight into it.

  “I can tell you my motives exactly. Have you ever had breakfast at the Sixty-third Street Y just off Broadway? New York?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well then, have you ever trapped something under a box? Brought a shoebox down over some little animal?”

  He really wasn’t listening.

  “I wanted to know,” I told him, “the exact dimensions of Hell.”

  He stirred his drink and wouldn’t look anywhere but at his ice. “Are you for sale?”

  So he’d heard all about me.

  “I’m Press,” I said.

  “We’re all Press,” he said.

  This was the only part that ever turned me on. “Then we’re all for sale.” I started to get warm between my legs.

  He was smiling down at the table and appeared to be on the brink of vomiting. I felt sorry for him. He had to beg, he had to pay. Why do they always get you feeling sorry?

  Because in truth there was nothing about him more lasting or substantial than your own glance reflected briefly in a window. You knew if he took those silly glasses off he’d disappear entirely from sight and mind, it would be as if he’d never existed, the waiter would clean his place without any comment and his hotel room would be rented out to some other stranger with a blank space in his passport where there was supposed to be a photo . . .

  Merely to confuse him I told him the truth: “I came here to be a contact person for Eyes for Peace up north in Matagalpa. In the town of Aswalil.”

  “Oh, really,” he said, “Aswalil, that’s one of the rougher spots, I understand.”

  “In a sense,” I said.

  “Well, is it? I mean what made you decide to leave, for instance?”

  “What made me think I’d last in the Girl Scouts any longer than I lasted—two and a half days?” One more drink and I was out of here. The guy was deeply homosexual, in all likelihood a castrato of some sort. “It’s not the Contras, honey, it’s the garbage. Breakfast-lunch-and-dinner, eating fruit that drips all over you with your feet in the dirt.”

  “Oh. I see,” he said without assurance.

  “Not that Manhattan was any better,” I admitted, “I mean, riding through life with a parking ticket clamped between my teeth . . .”

  “Ah,” he said, “I, uh—” et cetera.

  Finally, after having held off all day, the rain started outside.

  Nowhere on Earth is there an automatic carwash quite as zany as one of these storms. We could hear it through the closed windows, moving sideways against every structure like an assault of razors.

  “And you are here for what,” I asked in order to appear polite.

  "With the Watts people,” he said. “I say with, but of course I mean alone.”

  “The Watts people. The oil company.”

  “Right. In a charitable cause, I suppose you might say.”

  “Please don’t go into detail, babe.”

  “Well, how many companies, at this moment, would consider investing here?”

  “Not many, I’d imagine.” Not enough to form a bowling league, or hadn’t Watts Petroleum heard?

  “Right you are again.” He was happy with himself. “All right, of course it’s all in the name of profit, but it has, let’s say, humanitarian overtones, the mere idea of throwing business their way.”

  A humanitarian in Hell—worse even than my own observer-punishment! His life must have been marked by more than several bad crimes. This guy, at some point in his earthly existence, must have been truly evil, possibly Hitlerian.

  I’d have demanded his autograph, but what was the point? We can’t remember our sins here. We don’t know who we used to be.

  “Now that we understand each other,” I said, “what about some supper?”

  “Oh, well, isn’t it kind of late?”

  “Lunch then.”

  “That’s much more reasonable.”

  There was something about him I liked. “You make me sick. For a price I’ll sleep with you,” I told him.

  MAKING LOVE with him was like passing through a patch of fog . . .

  He was a pale and faintly freckled person, with that sort of flesh that bruises at a touch . . .

  WHEN HE was finished he sat up and put his hand on his pants, which were draped over the telephone on the nightstand, as if he wanted to grab them and go, run off, jump out the window. But it was his room.

  I told him I wanted to be paid in dollars.

  “Everybody wants dollars, don’t they,” he said.

  It’s a rule I have never to say anything further on the subject of my wishes after stating them to a jay-naked customer, because they get you talking, and pretty soon you relent.

  He turned on the bedside lamp. �
�Well then,” he said, picking two twenties and a ten out of his wallet in the jarring, interrogator’s glare. “And you're quite right, too. There’s talk they’re going to roll up the currency.”

  It was bright as a flashbulb in the room. I felt as naked as I was. “Roll up?”

  “Yah.”

  “Roll up . . .”

  “Run down some of the black-market stuff. Call in the foreigners and check their dollar supply, and so on. Us foreigners. Our dollar supplies.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “And—would I have to pay extra for it?” He put out the lamp, and then cut back the sudden blindness with his lighter while he got a cigaret going.

  “Check their dollar supply.”

  “Right.”

  “I have no dollar supply. I live entirely on black-market cordobas.”

  Wordlessly he smoked in the darkness. . .

  “You don’t have to start thinking how to ditch me,” I told him. “I’m not after your dollars. I’m here for the air-conditioning.”

  I stood by the window, where the cooling unit’s breath could find my armpits.

  Things weren’t perfect. But this was quite the recipe for soothing financial anxiety—U.S. money, cool room, quiet night, moonlight down through the Venetian blinds, and the blue hair of his cigaret smoke drifting in the slats of light . . .

  “You’re thinking so hard how to ditch me your head is smoking,” I told him, “what do you think of that?”

  “I’m thinking something quite a bit different,” he said . . . Faceless voice in a dark bedroom somewhere . . . “What I'm thinking is that I could very easily stroll right out of myself. This isn’t the first time I’ve committed adultery. I do it quite often. But I can’t stand it. . .” His face bloomed behind the glow of his cigaret . . . “I don’t really miss anybody . . . I feel I’m in danger of throwing my life, away . . .”

  “You’re not moving. You’re not in danger.”

  “I'm not moving,” he said. “I'm not in danger.”

  Now I heard the adrenaline running out of his voice. He’d probably just stepped off a fifteen-hour flight.

  “I came here to be generous,” he was saying in a flat tone, “but there’s a chance I’ve overstepped. Perhaps I’ve given away too much.”

  “It’s late, darling,” I said, “let’s not start hauling out the snapshots of the family.”

  “Of course. I’m being messy.”

  He was a mess, all right. It was a wonder I hadn’t spotted it right off. But they’re all a little demented away from home.

  He offered me a cigaret—a filter, as I discovered on accepting it, from Costa Rica. Filter brands were rare lately in Managua. “Derby,” I told him, quoting the sharks who manufactured these lung-scrapers, “es el cigarrillo. Thanks.”

  Before I knew it I was asleep, and I trust he took that as the highest compliment. . . After all, you can’t sleep in the same bed with all that many of them—a few you wouldn't want to shut your eyes, even briefly, in their presence. But I woke up in the night and he was out of bed, standing by the window. I was lost. It was the kind of moment that beats with a sinister heart. The air-conditioner hummed raggedly and the whole building seemed to have erased itself, along with everything else. Leaving him, me, and this black dislocated room . . .

  And then I heard some drunken reporters upstairs arguing in German or whatever and smashing a bottle, and I felt the world again and saw that this guy was probably not too horrible, just another foreign businessman, the dregs of his company’s executive work force, or he wouldn’t be here, would he—just another confused person with a briefcase and a poor report to bring back.

  I don’t know how he guessed I was awake. “Shall we meet again?” he asked me.

  “Again and again. Anytime you’ve got fifty U.S.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course . . .”

  Oh, I felt bad . . . I liked his style. I enjoyed his company. But please, actually I’m not in the habit of taking an emotional bed-check in my dark heart each time some libidinally impoverished lackey of pig billionaires gets the wrong idea. Or what if it was the right idea? In any case it was an idea entirely his own, wasn’t it, and let him stagger around his rented bedroom holding his head. At that moment I had to get a little rest. . . How fast the tropics sap you . . .

  I COULD walk through hours like doorways in the middle of the night, if only the middle of the night would last for hours—midnight’s the only time a somber if not exactly a reverent breath blows along the air of Managua—holding in my head a few lines from one of the great poets of the Inferno, William S. Merwin. I can turn onto one of these rackety lanes cobbled with mashed fruit and urchin-dung and hear, honestly hear out loud, William Something Merwin saying I have seen streets where the hands of the beggars / Are left out at night like shoes in a hotel corridor . . .

  Of course, the streets aren’t literally like that here, they aren’t lined, I mean to say, with whacked-off appendages, but the hotel corridors are, I’ve left the Inter-Continental in the very small hours with someone else’s money in my purse and seen the hands laid out by the doors, and the lost voices hung on wooden pegs behind the doorman’s podium, and the tongue-cut bellboys delivering potions and poisons along the halls. And I’ve stepped out under the awning, and across the small parking lot where the taxis usually stand I’ve seen men in white robes and hoods conspiring together, and the haunted Negro singer Robert Johnson swinging from a rope by his broken neck.

  They left him there for days, and eventually the rope lengthened so that his feet, in blue tennis shoes, were flat on the dirt; he seemed to be standing there with his neck in a noose and his chin on his shoulder, thinking.

  A guy who’s been strung-up drops down gradually on his rope like a slow-motion spider. The rope stretches. Pretty soon he’s standing around on the ground just like the rest of us, only he's deceased, grey-blue, textured like a sausage, and undergoing his putrefaction at a rapid clip in this sweltering mush of a climate. You can't even see the rope around his neck because it bites in, and the flesh swells up around it, the flesh incorporates the very instrument of its demise . . .

  Or maybe this is a twisted memory of a hanging I saw in Matagalpa . . .

  But whatever had happened in Matagalpa was already the discredited past. Impossible to prove. And it explains nothing. Nothing explains why I did what I did . . .

  But I’m saying that I was in the habit of walking the midnights after work, barefoot, dangling a high-heeled shoe from either hand, in the only hour when the temperature was bearable. Morning’s an oven; noon is a star; dusk is a furnace; but the middle of the night, at its worst, is only a hot bath . . . I always took a meandering route between the front door of the Inter-Continental, or the Tico, another place I trolled nearer the capital’s outskirts, and the dead-end dirt lane where I lived. I usually got in about four a.m. and sat listening to Radio Tempo in the sort of lobby of La Whatsis, the sort of motel I stayed in. I forget the name of this wonderful motel. I only know it wasn’t the Inter-Continental. In the lobby there was a desk, a padlocked telephone, a ratty couch oftentimes draped with somebody’s wildly snoring cousin or uncle, and a hi-fi of which the radio, at least, worked. Six rooms, all in a row; and at the end of the hall, a door beyond which lay a vast roofed area where half of Managua, it seemed, resided in casual squalor. They washed the towels and sheets back there, brewed up for themselves simmering meals of slop, raised their degenerate offspring, chased away dogs the whites of whose eyes were forever showing. It was going on all over this section of Managua, in a series of dirt yards pocked by lives.

  And me? I was much better off than most, living in a room with a concave double bed, a desk that aspired to become an orange crate, a broken air-conditioner, a cloying damp that seemed to originate in the shower stall . . . There was a toilet, too, and a single faucet overlooking a big white bowl.

  On one wall was an unframed inspirational poster, a close-up view of one of the wounded, bleeding
hands of Jesus, actually, with clouds and saints and mourners drifting in colorful dolor all around it. And I was supplied with one other picture also, next to that one, of bulldogs in human dress smoking cigars and shooting pool.

  As soon as the first drop of dawn dilutes the blackness, the neighbors begin their unbelievable racket, first the roosters, then the radios, then the live accompaniment to the radios—and then it's time to wind up the little children and start their screams and tears—and finally with the pots and pans . . . The yard’s enclosed by a rusty corrugated fence, but the fence has, in addition to countless bullet-holes, many long ragged gashes in it, and anytime after daylight you’ll find crazed dogs, dust-covered urchins, old crones draped in black, or people who’ve slipped their chains—this morning it’s an auburnhaired little girl in a dress, also auburn; and her tiny nude brother—maneuvering among the puddles that soak the grass under the only tree, hoping for something they can try their teeth on, perhaps clots of dirt. Their perseverance is astonishing. Naturally, as an observer-tormentee, I have to watch. It’s one of the refinements of my punishment here that I’m forced to appreciate the little boy’s pinched buttocks, and the rivulets of dust where the pee is drying down the left thigh beneath his uncircumcised carroty little penis, and the nature of his older sister’s ankles, which seemed designed expressly for flat-footed squatting in unconscious misery on the earth.

  I keep the good word close to hand like a ticket. / I feed the wounded lights in their cages, says William Something Merwin somewhere. It’s a miracle, another miracle, that the wounded maintain their appetites at all living in an odor of rotten grass and a smell I’ve always associated with things canine, yet one more miracle in the supurating glue of miracles hereabouts, oh and the monkey-man who chums the vat of it appreciates, I’m sure, that the voltage of slight hunger in my own stomach turns maximum because I know that unlike these dirty, awful children, I’ll get breakfast.

  Understandably I hated this neighborhood . . . But I would never get into a place like the Inter-Continental or the Tico on my own steam—and I couldn’t hop a plane and disappear, either. Because I didn’t have dollars.