The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  Having scored this luggage, I wondered should I steal it. Certainly it would have been the reasonable and prudent thing to do . . .

  Halfway home the taxi's radio suddenly burst into song. False alarm, it died just as quickly.

  “What’s happening,” the driver mumbled to himself, “am I going crazy?”

  When I got back to the Englishman he was in a state of depression; it stood to reason: he was doomed.

  “I got one suitcase and one little carry-on thing,” I said. He was just as gloomy after hearing this. “May I have a cigaret?”

  “Yes.” I gave him one.

  “Cheers.”

  “Let’s go, squire.”

  It was then that we left La Whatsis, where I’d lived for four months, and reenacted our ruses of the day before in order one more time to lose the accompaniment of the OIJ, and I introduced the Englishman to another of the sort of motel where a Watts Oil representative would never have stayed unless his life had gone absolutely to pieces. He didn’t even ask where we were going.

  I'VE ALWAYS been curious about the meaning of what followed. In its chief aspects the rest of the day was a price-slashed rerun of the day before. Maybe these things had to be done all over again on a reduced, murkier level. Every day I was taken to a more terrible region and made to reproduce my error.

  Are there crimes I can commit that add to my indefinite sentence? Oh, blubbery invisible torturer, was it just that I hosted some short-lived idea of being of assistance? I didn’t mean it. Please, I take it all back . . .

  When I’d offered to help the Britisher lose this OIJ man with whom we’d since been reunited, I’d only been up for some entertainment, I hadn’t really wanted to help. This I swear.

  I swear that that uncompleted phone call, the one I’d tried to put through to warn the Englishman at his hotel the previous day, was my only action motivated by a sincere desire to help another. But for even such a tiny act of generosity as that, forgiveness is out of the question. I can only do it again, I think—repeating, in a series of rearrangements, that one mistake. And in scene after scene the Englishman, for his part, can only accept my assistance, which, as any fool but him can see, is his big mistake.

  Yesterday we’d lost the OIJ man in the Mercado and hidden ourselves in a cheap motel; today we did the same . . . Like mechanical dolls in a clock, We pop out regularly and stage the same dumbshow.

  There are two mercados, one is the Mercado Central, which we’d already experienced, and the other is the corrupt, awful mercado, an airless labyrinth of hawking and jewing, something out of the Middle Ages, worthy of the wildest, most herpetic Arab, composed of scraps and stench, shaded from the grinding weather by burlap and old plastic sheets. This is the Black Market, the thieves’ market. The human stink, the heat, the suck and press of poverty, it erodes the senses, I've been trapped in there myself a couple of times, and each time within seconds the buzz of commerce started to reverberate like the cries of multitudes being strangled . . . To get there we had to follow a spiral route into the heart of Managua, avoiding various one-way streets and taking the long way around such buildings as TELCOR and the military hospital.

  Just as we’d done the day before, we rode in our cab with the Daihatsu following along behind, but today our conversation was one-sided. The Englishman watched out the taxi’s window but never said a word, steeped in such a funk I really thought I ought to just go through his pockets and depart. Today he took no interest in our policeman, whose unexplained presence and scary vagueness and all that were the whole reason for this move.

  I told the Englishman he was going to repeat our mercado trick, only this time he'd do it by himself. He didn’t object. Or indicate awareness particularly.

  “There you go. hon,” I said, shooing him out of the cab next to the small community of burlap and contraband. From without it had an element of the circus—wind-influenced roofing covering a grotesque throng, mysterious delights, abandon.

  He went into an opening and, as soon as he passed into the shade, winked out like an apparition.

  The Costa Rican got out of his jeep and walked right past me. He went in behind the Englishman by the same way.

  I let the cab go and stood in the streetside swirl of pedestrians. They came at me smelling of peach pomade and sweat.

  The temperature was monstrous, you could reach out and grasp handfuls of it, the top of my head cooked while my throat, in the shadow of my chin, felt cool by comparison.

  Whether we actually eluded the Costa Rican wasn’t the issue. The important thing was not to let the OIJ know where I was off to now; because unlike the rest of these citizens, most of whom appeared to be trying to ram through buildings with their heads or claw their way up into the sky, I was actually going places, I'd been visited with a plan of escape . . .

  Across from the mercado, on a street I thought was called Embarcadero (I had to guess at that, because for no good reason the street names had been ripped off the poles in Managua), was a garage dealing in used cars. Nobody ever bought the cars, they only traded them back and forth with each other, trying to convince themselves they must be getting ahead.

  Two cars were for sale today. One was impossibly expensive, but I made a down payment on the other one, a Volkswagen, in cordobas, promising dollars in traveller’s checks when the machine was ready to travel—the man hadn't quite finished preparing it.

  He was using the air-compressor hose to spray a poison-smelling mist all over the engine compartment, dribbling it from a bottle through the explosive stream of air.

  I was fascinated. “What’s happening?” I asked. “What’s in your bottle?”

  “Diesel,” he said. “It makes the engine brilliant.”

  And what did it do for your lungs? It was impossible to breathe. FUUUUUZZZHHH, he gave it another dose.

  “Does this car work? Is it a good car?”

  “Yes, very good, the best.”

  “Is there anything wrong with it?”

  “No, not at all,” he said, “although many times it won't start.”

  “Isn’t that bad?”

  “It’s not a problem. The car needs one sparking element.”

  “How long will that take? I require a car today.”

  That took him back a few paces, but he recovered quickly. “Don’t be in a hurry,” he advised me. “Maybe I can find the part this week.”

  “When you install the sparking element, will the car go?”

  He hit me with a shot of English: “Yes. From regular gasoline.” Full of regret, he shook his head. “Diesel, no.”

  “Is that bad?” We were back to Spanish now.

  “It’s very expensive.”

  Any kind of fuel would be expensive for us—we had no ration coupons and would probably have to resort to bribery. “Will you fill the tank before I take it?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Will a full tank get me to the border?”

  “Which border?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll get there and return with one tank of gas,” he said.

  “I'm not returning," I said.

  “That’s good for you,” he said.

  “Can I have it tomorrow?”

  “I told you once before, don’t be in a hurry. The documents, by themselves, will take several days.”

  “Screw the documents,” I said in English.

  “You’ll have to get documents of ownership, and more documents to take it across the border."

  I didn't think so. If it came to it, we'd eat the car and walk across.

  “It’s a very good car,” he felt obliged to remind me.

  “Have you driven it?”

  “No, because it doesn’t start,” he said.

  I GAVE the mechanic five thousand cordobas, one-tenth the car’s price at the black-market rate of exchange, and now I owed him nine hundred U.S. dollars. For the nine hundred I was relying on the Englishman.

  I hailed another c
ab. Bending over slightly to grab the door-handle of a taxi was my chief form of exercise, opening those doors and smelling that combination of spilt gas and dirty socks . . . “Go to the border of the mercado, there. Let's wait there for my friend.”

  While our vehicle cooked at the edge of the mercado's byzantine chaos, I sat sideways with the door open and my heels off, my feet on what passed for a running board, wiggling my toes.

  The last time I’d been in there foul hands had touched me secretly and voices raked my ears until I thought they'd draw blood, harsh rock-n-roll prodded me along aisles mostly dirt, across patches of concrete speckled with the fluids and essences of hanging meat, past pairs of gentlemen squatting face-to-face, introducing their colorful bantam killer-roosters to one another, beneath the eyes of cartoon characters nailed to crosses and alongside members of my family starving in cages . . . Yes, I'm lying, but you get the idea . . . Yet when I picture the Englishman crossing it to find me on the other side, I imagine that it’s like outer space in there . . . Around him everything is stock-still, deep-frozen, cold as dry ice to the touch, but he doesn't touch any of it. Gravity doesn’t hold him. He travels feather-like through a brittle silence. The phony gasoline ration tickets flare into ash as he passes, the gutless counterfeit radios start to play—nothing stinks, everything's black-and-white . . .

  All the same he emerged, after twenty more minutes, with his hair shellacked by sweat, big wet stains under his arms, breathing hard and squinting against the daylight, looking over his shoulder like a thief. Human after all. He’d impressed me mightily by turning into an international fugitive, but he was just like the rest of us, I suppose.

  I shouted to him and he found me. He’d come to life, he could talk. “I’m desperate for a bath.”

  “What went on in there?”

  “I think I lost him. We lost each other, more accurately. I nearly bought a fighting cock.”

  “That surprises me.”

  “I would have let the little fellow go,” he said. “He appeared rabid. He wasn’t all that friendly.”

  “They’re not supposed to be nice.”

  “Still, he probably deserves a chance.”

  I was glad to see him a little happier. He’d need every bit of a sense of humor to laugh off our new residence . . .

  We had reservations at a motel near Managua’s southern edge, a rooms-by-the-hour joint painted, every last inch of it, very purple. El Purpureo, I’d always called it. It was the shade of certain rhododendrons, not all that ugly if they’d only given it a wash. “They” were the potbellied owner with the humiliated teeth of a sugarcane addict, and his youthful assistant, who assisted him diligently in watching the TV. Not to suggest that I’d spent a lot of time at El Purpureo, but I knew that the television was just inside the front entrance, that it was made out of white plastic, and that the better part of their waking hours passed while they sat on wooden folding chairs beside a stack of half a dozen Fanta soft-drink crates, watching programs.

  This is where they’re always found. This is where the Englishman and I find them.

  We’re both tired, drained by constant fear, the unrelieved jimjams at a honking horn, at brakes squealing, at sounds imagined or anticipated—a footstep, a knock on the door. I just want to be forgotten by governments. The Englishman just wants a bath. The owner just wants to rent rooms by the hour.

  Naturally the owner doesn’t remember me, doesn’t remember our phone conversation, asks himself if I’m really here in front of him . . . He scratches his head and ponders our intentions while I go through the whole plan again, as if nobody's ever thought of staying here all night before. “We want to stay a few days. But we’ll pay by the hour,” I suggest.

  I hand him four hundred cordobas.

  Right away the clouds part in his mind. “Your rooms aren’t ready yet,” he says. “Wait.”

  The Brit is now permitted to take a shower, and I to sit by the front entrance (clients mainly use the rear), between him and the boy—who turns out be his nephew—watching the tube. Managua’s TV station appears to be devoted, at this hour, to live music, people strumming guitars and singing songs in which the words “Sandinista" and “Frente'' crop up frequently. As its refrain, one song called “Libertados” uses the Frente slogan “No pasaran” . . . Our pimp landlord joins in on the final line, and he and his nephew burst into laughter. I point at him—“Sandinista?” “Si,” he says, “somos Sandinistas!” I point at myself—“No pasaró?” Whatever he says, using a lot of slang I can't unwrinkle, indicates that as long as I let drop a few cordobas around his establishment, I can pass anywhere, anytime.

  He begins to cough raggedly.

  Leading members of the Frente are standing before the television audience now, answering questions. But the nephew only snorts, and the landlord laughs and coughs.

  Down here the elder folk really know how to produce a cough, they bring it up from the hips with a roaring like that of a Caterpillar tractor. I place a hand on my sternum, hoping he doesn't think I'm offering him my tits, and ask the old character if he’s been to the clinic yet.

  He indicates as best he can to the senseless gringa, pointing at Señor Ortega of El Frente Sandinista de la Liberation de Nicaragua who is speaking into the cameras, that if you get your fingers cut off at work in this country, you’ll get no doctor, no compensation, no nada. I guess he’s making some comparison to his lung trouble, but maybe he’s misunderstood my question.

  Shyly a boy and girl come through the front entrance, holding hands, and the old man escorts them to a room.

  He’s still coughing when he returns.

  I have lived in a succession of stair-steps downward I believe. I have lived in St. Patrick’s Day, a land of free green beer and screaming trains, and I have lived in Mardi Gras: Caucasian real-estate men in black-face and hula skirts dancing on restaurant tables . . . Down is the direction. But the scene never changes: there’s a man, and I’m walking into a a motel with him, and the Night Person is there to accommodate us.

  “Why can’t we have a room?” I ask. “You had a room for them, didn’t you?”

  He watches the TV screen a minute. “Your rooms are still being used,” he says.

  THE ENGLISHMAN came downstairs, done with his soapless cold-water shower, looking pink as a cat’s tongue. He hadn’t been in this zone long enough to catch a tan on his face.

  In a while the landlord took us up to our rooms.

  We took a look at my room first, a purple region with a toilet, shower, sink, and bed all in the same twelve square feet. Overhead a long white malfunctioning neon tube waxed and waned and shimmered stroboscopically so that things happened to your mind.

  We didn’t get around to seeing the Englishman’s room that day. As we stood in my doorway speechless, he put his hand on the back of my neck, and a most curious inner transition was accomplished . . . Almost on the order of a car wreck . . .

  FROM THAT instant, whatever we did, all of it, counted as lovemaking, which seemed to have burst in upon two humans for the first time without wearing any of its disguises.

  MINUTE TO minute we couldn’t remember what we said to each other. Words didn’t count. We sat naked together under the cold-water shower for decades drinking from a pint of rum, while out in the streets the foreign sobs and laughter intimated symphonies, and we kissed to this accompaniment . . . The chorus had no words but “mm” and “oh” . . . One did the vowels, one did the consonants. . .

  Sometimes I got tired of it. I'd trudge downstairs and watch television and let it build again, return to him and feel us, as we made love in that strobe-lit place, descending through room after room.

  I’m telling you I was in deep, we both were, it was a honeymoon, that whirligig of crashing nuances and dismal reconciliations, vistas of hope redeemed, endless milliseconds free of natural law. We spent a night away from each other in separate rooms—I had nightmares of losing him and I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed at four a.m. Did you
think I was going to say anything but a.m.? Do you want to talk about darkness? I loved him! Everything about him was candy. The vulnerability of his skin seized up my throat; sometimes I felt I couldn’t live anymore. And so on . . .

  “You're handsome.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I'm lying . . .”

  He was faceless. But he had a beautiful ass. His bottom was like an upside-down heart filled with the blood of martyrs. Would you think that about anyone you didn't truly love? I loved him! In my heart, my belly, in my bones, my teeth, I loved him!

  He was in love with me too. In the morning I'd kiss him in bed while the light came under the vented eaves. I’d feel his mouth around my tongue and the light slicing through my back, turning my lungs to gold; he liked to have me breathe into his mouth and out of his mouth. At a time like that there was only one of us.