The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  Our man stayed with us all the way, neither obtrusive nor hidden. I couldn’t help thinking of a spirit wandering in the Bardo between its death and the next birth, trailing behind its future parents, as we came out the Mercado's other side and found the roadway in the big absence cleared by the seventies’ earthquake.

  “I see there are two cabs.”

  “Take ours,” I said, “I’ll race you,”

  “Ours is the slower one, I’m sure of it.”

  “Just to the other side of the field,” I said, “right there where the road curves.” The OIJ man, who’d caught on, was bearing down fast. “Go! Go!”

  The whole idea nearly fell through because the OIJ spoke quickly and volubly, confusing my driver with frightening promises, as he closed the distance between us. “Fuck him! Fuck him!” I told the cabbie tearfully.

  The car we’d come in was already away, carrying the Englishman.

  “Fuck him!” the cabbie cried, much amused. “Let’s rock!” He squealed the tires leaving.

  “You just made a thousand cordobas.”

  We pulled abreast of the other cab, and the drivers played games while I signalled to the other and talked to mine, until I’d convinced them both, with some difficulty, that we should stop after only a few hundred yards.

  I paid off my driver extravagantly and fell, with a creaking of brittle upholstery, into the seat next to the Britisher. “Brilliant! Brilliant!” he said as our cab crept away.

  The field floated in the dusk.

  “Nothing matters, does it?” he said as he watched me sip from the bottle.

  “Not for you anymore,” I said, “and it never did for me.”

  “I have to disagree on both counts,” he said.

  “Look at him out there. He really would shoot you, I bet."

  The Costa Rican was standing across the field watching us.

  “Right.” He took my hand and laughed. “I can feel it.”

  IN FRONT of my place, as I was paying off the cab, the Englishman asked me, “Where did you get so much money?” It really wasn’t his kind of question. He was so tense he didn’t know what he was saying.

  “In Costa Rica.” It had been foregone that he’d come back to the Whatsis Motel with me. “Watch out for the dog-do,” I warned him, “watch out for the kiddy-plop.” Back at the Inter-Continental, the representatives of his fate would be hanging around.

  “I’m sure it’s all been driven down into the mud. My God, what a rain. What muck. Oh, here’s a clear puddle.” Under the awning there was a slab of concrete in which a basin had been eroded. He soaked the bottoms of his shoes and I washed my feet in the puddle there. “You were marvelous,” he said. “You’re a treasure. You, the rain, the escape—”

  Such gush embarrassed me. “By Jove,” I told him, “I thought you English were supposed to be steely and reserved.”

  Now he was the one embarrassed. “No, those are the chaps with pith helmets and years of training.” As we went in he said again, “My God, what a rain.”

  The Señora greeted us, coming from the back, rubbing the sleep from her face, a tiny woman, somewhat humpbacked, her hair tied up in a scarf . . . I hadn’t yet determined if she was actually this outfit’s owner or just an impassioned hireling.

  “Any calls?” I said in English.

  “Good evening,” she said in Spanish.

  She turned on the hi-fi and set about doing her books at the desk. Actually, I knew, she meant to serve as chaperone should the situation require one—in her friendly presence and drunk out of my mind I could adhere to the couch with my state-of-shock boyfriend and listen to music, hey.

  She was just as happy that we went on through the lobby and into my room.

  “NOTHING FANCY,” I tell him.

  “The bulbs are very dim . . .”

  “Bulb. There's only one bulb.”

  I relieve my purse of its bulge in the bathroom and discover that the administration of this motel, meaning some sneaky relation of the Señora’s, has also been looting the Inter-Continental: instead of the usual stack of carefully torn squares of newsprint, a folded yard of bluish toilet paper rests on the tank of the commode. It’s 1984, the real 1984, the revolution’s over and things are looking up.

  He’s standing by the window but you can’t see a thing out there through the screen with the light behind you, what does he think he’s looking at?

  “I see you have a back door,” he says.

  “These rooms were originally hired by the hour. This used to be a triste-motel. You come in the back door, you pay through this window.” I show him the small window, like a ticket-seller’s, next to the door that opens onto the hall. “You pay as you go, from hour to hour. Nobody gets your name, nobody sees your face.”

  “Oh, for a life like that.”

  The rain starts again. But not too hard. He looks up through the ceiling toward the weather.

  “No more,” he says. “This is too much.” His blue jacket hits the floor.

  He lies down on the bed.

  I fall on the bed next to him, and inside me it all comes loose. I put one foot on the floor to keep the room from spinning . . .

  The Señora goes by outside in the hallway, humming a love song along with Radio Tempo. I’ve never brought a man here before now, but the Señora understands, time is a river ever moving, chastity’s a joke this year, it’s 1984, there’s a war on, and the radios are crying, just as they’re probably crying in New York, “You take my self, you take my self-control.”

  Beside me he falls asleep, still wearing one of his shoes.

  HOW MANY mornings am I going to wake and find him there, this one, that one, or another one, one who last night seemed so sad and forgivable, last night in a moment when I myself was framed with a blessed light, borne down on soft wings, how many mornings, having forgotten his name, am I going to wake up and find him there in my bed like a slab of meat?

  I didn’t have to open my eyes. I only had to listen for his breathing to know that the troubled Englishman was still with me.

  At some point he’d got up and undressed himself. He lay uncovered, turned away from me, a big thing with a hidden face—for all I knew, he’d left in the night and been replaced by some other incompetent—wearing boxer undershorts of the kind any fool might have prophesied.

  By this time, morning at the Whatsis had been happening for hours, and the moans and rattles from the other parts of the building had settled into the day’s monotony. “I smell coffee in Dogpatch,” I said.

  He was too unconscious to be roused. He’d be sorry if he slept very late—this wasn’t the air-conditioned InterContinental. In bed past ten-thirty, he’d be broiled alive. Already perspiration dripped out of his hair and down his neck as he slept.

  What point was there trying to sleep? I’d only at some point wake up again. I had to go out anyway, I had errands, I had to go out. I had to go out of the country, it suddenly occurred to me as it seemed to do quite often, or go out of my mind.

  By now it was light enough to see that there weren’t any bugs around the drain: I took a brief shower—only cold water here—and washed my hair with Prell, newly bought but so old the label’s print had faded white. I put on clean clothes.

  Pilar, or whatever her name was—the washer-woman and Five-Star General of Maids—was resting on the couch.

  “Coffee?” I asked her. “With milk?”

  “Black coffee,” she corrected me, and went to get it.

  I STAYED at La Whatsis cheaply, that is, at the recommended official rate as opposed to the actual, usual one, thanks to an impotent (our little secret) Vice-minister at Interturismo.

  This man at Interturismo had told me many times he had a contact, a cousin, an uncle, who knows what, but someone willing, anyway, to turn cordobas into dollars.

  I’d never tried him out, because I’d never been so desperate as to want to believe this obvious lie, never so greedy as to traffic with Contras right here in the capital of their
extermination, never wanted to owe favors to the future dead—until now. And what for? Did I think I’d be “rolled up” in some kind of currency investigation? Over the course of weeks I’d gone back to Interpren time after time after time, just to get a couple of documents . . . If it took years to fill the blanks in a press card, think what centuries must drip past before the machinery of prosecution for some picayune commercial misdemeanor started up. Certainly it wasn’t a consideration to run me out of here any faster than anything else.

  Hung over and fueled by a general irritation, I was at last moving, that’s all . . .

  Oh once again trying to make clear what can’t be understood or forgiven . . .

  I CALLED the Vice-minister from one. of the shell-shaped pay phones on the corner near the motel where the taxis waited empty on the dirt shoulder and the houses were silent. He was an old man, one of the few grown-ups still functioning in an official capacity, I liked him, he treated me like an errant daughter, et cetera, and this morning he seemed to convey assurances from a far planet as his voice drifted, competing with a giant hum, down the wires. I gathered he was glad to hear from me.

  “Please speak very loudly and slowly,” I said.

  “Yes, okay.”

  I said, “Do you remember that you said you had a friend?”

  “Yes, I remember,” he said.

  “A friend to help me with my cordobas.”

  “Yes. I remember our conversation.”

  “I’d like to contact him.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you tell me how to contact him?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Can you tell me now, on the telephone?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “When can you give me the information?”

  “Come to my office,” he said.

  “Soon?”

  “Before noon.”

  “I’ll come right now.”

  “Certainly, but don’t hurry . . .”

  I’d never been able, actually I’d never tried, to find out what the taxis thought they were doing parked here, driver-less, on this dirt shoulder, and it never failed to rankle me that I had to walk a block and a half to the nearest substantial intersection and stand, still within sight of them and usually for quite a while, until I got a live one and was carried off—in this case across the city to the corner where the Interturismo offices were.

  From before this bureau’s gates I could see one of the town’s better restaurants, and a corner of the parking lot of the patio café I called Los Paraquitos, and beyond that the Inter-Continental Hotel looming like a mountain, tall enough to have afforded the journalists a view of Nicaragua’s government changing hands, one hand dropping bombs on the other, five years earlier.

  My Vice-minister friend was busy and sent me over to the restaurant. There was nothing to do there. I looked at La Barricada. It was a day of wreckage in the papers: Something had crashed just after take-off from Timbuktu . . . And on Monday a C-47 piloted out of Honduras had been shot down in the north.

  The waiter brought me a menu.

  “Do you have a Coke?”

  “No Coke.”

  I got some livid violet fruit juice in which floated a shard of ice.

  I liked the Vice-minister not only because he liked me, but because he found me beautiful.

  I’ve never been beautiful. Currently I was too thin, but whenever I gain weight it goes on in uncoordinated bulges.

  My face is appealing although I have bad teeth . . . I’m not beautiful but I keep my back straight and my hands still.

  “I’m leaving Managua,” I told the Vice-minister as soon as he got there.

  He beheld me with weariness and amusement. “When?”

  “Very soon. In a few days, I think.”

  “Going back to the United States?”

  “I want to go to San José. Maybe after that, I’ll visit Playas del Coco.”

  “It’s not the season for Playas. If you want to go back to Costa Rica, Limón would be more interesting.”

  “Too crowded there,” I said in English. “Crowded?”

  “No crowded. But a person can be losted there.”

  “I like Playas. It’s quiet.”

  “Then go to Playas,” he said, getting back to Spanish. “And I suppose you need some Costa Rican money?”

  “I need U.S. in order to buy a plane ticket.”

  “Very bad.”

  “Can’t your friend get U.S.?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

  Bright promises turning vague . . . Such was the plot of every transaction, human or financial, in this bed of dung!

  “Are you still living at the motel whose management I spoke to?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s okay for you there, I believe?”

  “Yes. I’m used to it.”

  “Maybe you should stay there a little longer.”

  “Can you buy a ticket for me with cordobas? A ticket to San José?”

  He smiled. “I don’t believe I’ll be permitted to buy a plane ticket to Costa Rica.”

  I SEEMED to be getting into the very Latin habit of going over and going over my options without committing myself to, or even coming up with, an actual plan . . .

  In the taxi to Plaza España where this money marketeer kept his offices, I tried to lock my attention onto the problems ahead of me and mislaid all sense of the goal. The fumes and smells and roaring temperature of Managua’s roadways savaged all mental effort, in my brain was only a kind of tape-hiss. As I got out of the cab before the white, two-tiered Plaza, the kind of moneyed-Texas architecture Nicaragua had once esteemed, I found I’d lost my mind and could only wonder, What errand has driven me here? Young boys who would soon be killers approached me, demanding money. “Right.” It was money I’d come for. “Thank you,” I said, making headway through them toward the offices, “fuck you,” I added, “you’re wasting your time.”

  And then I wasted a good deal of my own time trying to find the place, a travel agency, ironically.

  But of course much more time would be wasted before anything was accomplished—that is the style. Whatever happened, nothing would happen today, I’d have to go back again—you have to appear at least twice, anywhere, in order to prove your existence.

  I found him at the appointed place, behind the desk of his travel agency, which, by the look of it, hadn’t been open for business in quite a while.

  Like his friend the Vice-minister, who’d begged off accompanying me here because it was risky for a person in his position, this one was an older man.

  The Venetian blinds were drawn. The fixture for the overhead fluorescent was empty. And a study-lamp bending low over his desk gave the only light. “Good day. Good day,” he said. He only needed sunglasses on his face to make it all just too nauseatingly sinister to bear.

  I said, “Your office is closed permanently?”

  “Why? You wish to go somewhere today?” This was said by another man who now leaned into the light, wearing sunglasses. A boy, really, with smooth skin and the frailest beginnings of a moustache.

  The older man smiled and offered me a seat. “We can probably arrange travel for you. But I don't think you want it.”

  I offered them cigarets, and they assured me that the Vice-minister had been in touch.

  We all three smoked, fouling the room, and I declined their offer of coffee.

  “It's strange that you have an office, but no commerce.”

  “No, it’s not strange . . .” He made a speech that I couldn’t keep up with, but I understood he saw no point in running a travel agency when hardly anyone could be expected to travel anywhere.

  I said, “This is a time of poverty. The shortages, no replacements . . .” Most of my Spanish came off the wall-posters and out of the pages of La Barricada . . . “I have a problem about money, too.”

  “It's no problem,” he said. “For someone who knows the methods, it's not a problem, the lack o
f replacements . . .” I lost him, and then regained the meaning a couple of sentences later . . . “I live at a height above those things.”

  He closed his eyes on all of it. “Another floor,” he said in English, “another room.”

  “Then you can help me, I believe.”

  “Are you fond of eggs? I have chickens at my house.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I can get milk at my comrade’s house. And the man who gives gas coupons right here in the Plaza España is my cousin. I can buy extra coupons from him at a good price.”

  “I have no car. I don’t need coupons.”

  “I’m not trying to sell you coupons. I’m saying something. I live at a height above this war, this shit. My children aren’t going to fight for the Sandinistas.”

  “Good. War is bad.”

  “Sandinistas are bad.”

  “Can you get drugs?”

  “What do you want.”

  I shrugged. “Cocaine?”

  “You’re crazy. Go to Panama.”

  “I don’t really want cocaine.”

  “Then why do you ask? Why do you drink when you’re not thirsty?”

  I shrugged again. I felt stupid. It had only been a notion.

  “Watch out for the woman who drinks when she's not thirsty.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll watch out.”

  “No. It’s a saying of the Miskitos. It tells me to watch out, not you.”

  “All right then goddamn it,” I burst out in English, “keep your fucking eye on me then, okay?”

  He paused, shocked. “I know very little English,” he said, “but I know ‘goddamn’ and I know ‘fuck.’ ‘Fuck’ is the property of the whole world.”

  “I need to exchange cordobas for dollars,” I said.

  “Everybody wants that. Even the members of the Junta would like dollars.”

  “Can you do that for me?”

  “I have a problem too,” he now revealed.

  “Yes. How can I help?”

  “You are a journalist.”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand about this country. The Sandinistas are bad. If they decide I’m a Contra, then it doesn’t matter, they’ll arrest me. If they can’t arrest me, they’ll arrest my family. Maybe I’m a Contra. Maybe I’m not Contra.”