The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  “And yet there they are,” he said. “Helping, I could very easily add. Meanwhile, the representatives of your government are somewhere far off, assisting the Contras.”

  “Am I supposed to defend the stupid CIA now?” I said, driving on. “Okay, I’m Hitler’s daughter just by virtue of my passport. And you can feel just as smug as you want to, because you’ve struggled so hard to get yourself born a fucking Englishman.”

  “Thankfully,” he said, “we’ve come to the waterfront and we can change the subject.”

  “If the CIA hadn’t intervened in World War Two, you probably never would have been born.”

  “A little imprecise on dates and things,” he said, “but I understand your point.”

  The hotel we were looking for was right on the bay, which was full of commerce and smelled like machinery. Because of the sight of Russians, maybe, I felt that everything on the blurry waters was secret and military—a big ship moving like a mystery across the view, and down to the south a huge docking area where it appeared a lot of construction was going on, lit with a fuzzy orange glow in the fog.

  I felt how wonderful it would be to get out of here.

  Although its sign had fallen down and been carted away somewhere, the hotel still showed the world a presentable face. The entrance gave onto a large barroom with an immensely high ceiling and bottles, many of them empty and plainly just for looks, behind the bar on shelves going up to the roof.

  But the rest of the building, the part we were expected to sleep in, was like someone’s basement; the floors were dirt, there were cobwebs . . . The walls were rough and armed with splinters, and actually these walls were nothing more than six-foot-high dividers serving to break up what was obviously, I realized, a barn into irregularly shaped stalls for humans. There was one electric light in a central spot way up in the rafters.

  The owner wouldn’t look at us. He was a youngish man—he’d travelled, probably, and knew he was bedding us down in a filthy swamp.

  “Ah me. Oh boy,” the Englishman said.

  I felt sorrier for him than for myself.

  “We’ll be in Playas del Coco this time tomorrow. At a real resort,” I promised.

  In our stall were two cots covered by straw-filled mattresses. The owner lay clean sheets across the foot of the bed and disappeared.

  Naturally we were the only patrons. Those with any sense slept in the street at a considerable savings and found equal comfort. But I exaggerate—the place had a freshwater shower in the smallest of the stalls surrounding us. I undressed while the Englishman went to stand under it, and then I stood under it with my eyes closed so as not to know about the bugs.

  “Things are looking much, much brighter,” he said when I got back to our part of the barn. “I have a pot of tea.” He was just finishing a cup—actually it was not a cup, it was a glass. “I’ve got but the one cup,” he said, and finishing it, he poured me some.

  “And something else almost as wonderful,” he said. He struck a ridiculous fencer’s attitude: “I’ve bought an umbrella.”

  While I drank my tea, he commenced to reorganize his luggage.

  In his own way he’s a beautiful human, perhaps he’s a hallucination, he’s no easier to credit, in this obscene heat and dust, than a frail white snowflake. We’re trying to outrun the Devil and everybody else, but for him it’s that cozy minute before a journey when the tea tastes fine and the traveller isn’t perturbed by the certain knowledge that all attempts at organization will fail. He’s got his shirts right here, over there his trousers, got his little underthings all arranged, a pocket for the documents; he congratulates himself, silently but perceptibly, for his foresight—two notebooks, an umbrella—and you can see he feels no trepidation whatever at a moment when all others would, as I happen to, be carrying a cold weight in their hearts.

  THERE WEREN’T any windows so it was hard to tell, exactly; but I judged it to be only a little past dawn when something woke me. Something, a certainty, a conviction . . .

  “It’s time for us to get out of here,” I said, poking the Englishman over and over in his throat.

  He rolled away, then turned over on his back and looked up at the ceiling without understanding it. “I was sleeping,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but we’d better get out of here, I just know it.”

  “Why did you wake me?” he said as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “It’s daylight. We’ve got to get a move on.”

  He turned toward me, lying on his arm, and saw me finally. “Where would we go? The border won’t be open till—eight, did they say?”

  “No, seven. We could sit in the car till they open it up.”

  “I can’t think of anything more nerve-wracking. Do you forget I’m a hunted man?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Isn’t this just how you felt the night before last?”

  “This time I’m not kidding.”

  I started putting things in my purse. I was upset to say the least, grabbing useless things, a soiled Kleenex, an empty matchbox. “I’m leaving. And I’m taking the car.”

  “Don’t be like this,” he said.

  “The best I can do for you is meet you later, at the bridge, where we let those soldiers off.”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll meet you on the other side of the bridge.”

  “I’m staying with you,” he said in absolute fear.

  It was awful. He thought I'd abandon him. He didn’t trust me, he had to guess, and second-guess, and guess again . . .

  “Okay. Okay.” I lay down on my cot, facing him.

  In a few minutes I saw he was asleep again and I left. But I didn’t get very far—he had the car keys in his pocket.

  It was windy and grey outside. The owner was sweeping the wooden walk out front. There were several ships out on the harbor but none of them was taking me anywhere.

  I asked the owner about breakfast.

  They actually had my favorite, sopa negra. A poached egg floating in it justified my calling it breakfast. I ate at the bar.

  It wasn’t really a bar, it was a counter faced by wooden chairs.

  There was no minor back of it—just the shelves of bottles—or I’d have seen our redheaded American from Rivas come in behind me. As it was, he just turned up in the chair next to mine.

  “You queer,” I said by way of a greeting. To see him there absolutely ruined me. Now it was clear we were in a lot of trouble.

  “I thought you’d be out of the country by now,” he said.

  “I’m not turning anybody in.”

  “I thought we’d made some sort of connection. I thought you understood . . . Okay, I was overly subtle. Let me be a little more direct. I’m asking you to help me with my report. Your British friend interests me, I’d like to include some background on him.”

  “Your report is all about him.”

  “More or less, yeah, you could say that. He gets a lot of ink, your friend does, because he’s done a minor something that upsets the balance more knowledgeable people are trying to maintain from day to day down here, moment to moment, even—people who know more, people who care more than he does.”

  “I believe I’ll sit by myself at the window.” I moved my bowl and spoon to a table across the room.

  I didn't eat much. The air held that tar-and-brine combo that made you feel already out at sea, and sick of it . . . Maybe this had been a resort once, but no more. Across the street was a very brief stretch of sand interrupted by blacktop boat-slips. Only two palm trees remained of the sunny era I'd anticipated entering here when the soldiers had said “resort,” two trees sort of on the order of pachyderm feet, mashed into the sand . . .

  I didn’t leave, and neither did he. In another twenty minutes the fog had gone and the sunlight was burning up the dirt street. There’d been no rain for two days, I could feel it coming over the horizon though no sign of it was visible . . . The moment was suddenly narcotic, and although we were separated b
y half a room and the gulf of our pretenses, I think that fellow-feeling overcame each of us. Two Americans, two stupid Americans. Nobody will ever understand what that’s like.

  He rested his arm on the bar, the other hand in his pocket, his legs stretched out comfortably. And, finally, said something, talking across the room: “You know what I think? College never ends . . .”

  I hated him for that, for starting in with his lies . . .

  “Look at it this way,” he said, getting up and coming over and joining me, “your travelling companion and I work for rival outfits. It’s all this college-boy stuff, if you want to know the truth,” he said. “Well, we’d like to fuck up their action. Basically, and it’s really this simple, I need a signature on a report. And it has to be your signature.”

  “What are you sitting at my table for? Are you going to chase me all around the block? If you only knew how sick everybody gets looking at you, even knowing you exist. Don’t you know what an asshole you are?”

  “Don’t you know what an asshole he is?” Now he leaned forward and took over the whole table . . . “He didn’t just move things from one part of his desk to another part—he changed the future of two countries, do you see that? He turned over charts and documents and a whole economic future to an outlaw state.”

  I couldn’t come back at him with anything but an empty, open mouth. The effect of this big talk was irresistible. The dream-like trouble chasing us took on force and a shape—charts, documents, the power of money.

  “Whose side is your British friend on? In whose interest is he operating, or can you tell me in whose interest does he think he’s operating?”

  The infinite hopelessness of it left me floating: “I believe he said in the interest of fairness.”

  The pain that screwed up his face was genuine, I was convinced of that. “But the balances here, and the contests, are going according to loyalties to people and groups.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair.

  I said, “What if the oil’s not there? Doesn’t that blur the edges a little?”

  “I’m a reporter. Aren’t you a reporter? We make reports, don’t we? What they do back at the main desk is beyond us. What goes on under the earth, as far as oil deposits and whatnot, that’s all out of my hands.”

  He leaned forward again. His expression was alert. A gust of wind blew a little dust and sea dampness through the doorway into the room; everything seemed to be waking up.

  “But I’ll tell you this,” he said, “because I think the masks have fallen away, and you wouldn’t be talking to me at this moment if you didn’t think it was completely in your interest to be talking: Whatever the situation as regards oil, at some point things are going to come down very hard on this man. If you insist on staying connected with him right up to that point, then at the very least it’s going to hurt to feel that connection broken. Doesn’t that make sense? And that’s looking at it in the most positive light I possibly can. I'd be prepared for a bigger job coping on that day, frankly.”

  “You’re so full of bullshit.” I was embarrassed to sound like a child.

  “Look, we’re both in the business of reporting. Yesterday you were interested in me. Maybe you and I should pack in together after all.”

  “Pack in. Pack in? Pack in?”

  “Okay. Okay,” he said.

  “You mean go with you? Are you threatening me with arrest?”

  “You’re so far off the mark,” he said.

  “Well what are you threatening me with, then?”

  He rubbed his face. He looked at his watch. Perhaps he was wondering how much longer he had to go on being polite.

  “Who would I be pulling for in this situation?” he asked. “Will you look around and tell me if you see any possible allies around here for me? Based on what I’ve been saying? I’m not threatening you. Everybody around here is threatening us. And especially you, because of your friend.”

  “What’s wrong with my friend, really? What crime did he commit, really and truly?”

  “I think somebody’s going to have to take him out.”

  “What?”

  “He’s so completely off the map. Nobody knows what to do with him.”

  I was so stunned I couldn’t think. “You lied. That’s a threat,” I said. “You said you weren’t threatening,” I cried out stupidly.

  “Remember where we are,” he said. “The connections down here are so sexy because down here this stuff really does happen. Isn’t that why we all came down here?”

  “Oh Down Here. Down Here . . . You said mistakes could be corrected.”

  I was weeping.

  His attitude seemed to change completely. I didn’t know what it was. It was as if he’d finished his drink, but actually he didn’t have a drink. It was as if he were no longer thirsty.

  “There,” he said. “That’s what I was talking about when I came up to you right here a few minutes ago.”

  He watched me a minute. “Are you listening to me?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You cross the border this afternoon. You go to Liberia, and you get a bus to Los Chiles.”

  “Los Chiles? Where on earth is that?”

  “It’s a few dozen miles northeast of Liberia, right on the San Juan river. Border town.”

  “What do we want to do there?”

  “Assuming everything’s gone off okay, that’s where you get paid.”

  He didn’t understand anything—life! words! faces! moments!

  He’d made me cry, he’d scared me, he’d beaten me at the game of conversation. But he hadn’t won . . .

  “There’s nothing to get paid for. I’m not signing anything.”

  “You’ll sign when you get a halfway grown-up understanding of the goddamn situation. Which is going to be soon.”

  “Go to hell.”

  He got up from the table, and my first thought was that I’d driven him off with curses.

  But actually he was rising, with a bright smile, to greet the Englishman: “I just got into town.”

  “How remarkable to see you again. Especially here,” he said.

  “I know, it’s weird, it’s great,” the American agreed, “I’m really glad. What are you guys doing? Should we pal around a little this afternoon? See the sights?”

  The Englishman ignored all that. “The manager fellow is brewing me some tea,” he told me. “I'll be in the room, is that all right? We should be thinking about an early start.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Maybe he saw that I’d been crying, because he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

  “We’ll talk again, okay?” the American said.

  The Englishman looked at him, and then at me. By straining to cover up his anger, he made his face seem young and weak. “I don’t have anything to say to you,” he told the consultant.

  “I wasn't suggesting you did,” the American said as I stood up. “But maybe others do.”

  I looked around for someone to bring me the check, but the three of us were alone in the place. The Englishman was already leaving, and I followed him feeling defensive and ashamed.

  We went back to the room, where I. poured the tea into our single glass as the Englishman stood beside his suitcase opening and closing his umbrella with a succession of breezy whooshes.

  “It rains quite a bit in Costa Rica, doesn’t it?”

  “It rains a hell of a lot in Nicaragua, too, didn’t you notice?”

  “I’m very glad,” he said, “to have an umbrella.”

  But I could tell he wanted to know what we’d talked about. He was just too afraid, or too polite, to ask. I could tell he’d reached a point of tightly bound panic because he couldn’t trust anyone, least of all me.

  But in a minute he started in: “Onward and upward,” he said. “I hope we have enough petrol to re
ach the border. I thought you said we had a half a tank, was it half a tank,” he said, “do we have enough gasoline? I’m afraid I really don’t care whether we have enough, by God I’ll walk as far as necessary to get out of here. I think we should try for the northern border,” he said suddenly, “I’m not sure about Costa Rica at all . . . I don’t think we should fool around with the Costa Rican border, we’ve drawn too much notice. It may be we’ve—telegraphed our intentions . . . What are you looking at? Isn’t it obvious?—we never should have come here. We’ve done everything wrong. But it’s not too late to change our plans . . .

  “What would you say,” he pestered me, “is there anything you can add to this? Anything at all you can add?”

  He looked at me like a beggar, waiting for me to confess whatever I might have done.

  But I didn’t know what I’d done. I honestly didn’t know. I thought I’d held out, given nothing away . . . “Will you relax? We just talked about exchanging cordobas over the border.”

  He wasn’t satisfied with that. But again good breeding checked him from interrogating me.

  He sat down on his cot and seemed to be testing the tensile strength of his new umbrella, resting his hands on it like a cane.

  “Maybe we should sneak around the checkpoints somehow,” I said.

  “Sneak.”

  “Is there something wrong with your hearing? I mean smuggle ourselves across the border.”

  “No,” he said without a second’s reflection, “I wouldn't want to try anything like that.”

  He of the weightless, invisible cojones!

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, “it can’t be that hard to cross illegally. The Contras are all the time wandering in and out of here, you know.” I was getting a little testy, granted; however, his blatantly spineless attitude was taxing my civility.

  And apparently something was taxing his: “Will you please shut up? And let’s simply turn our minds to the legal options?”

  “Oh do let’s.”

  “We can—turn around, give ourselves up to the American Embassy or the British Consul.”

  “Yes. Right. We can do the Embassy.”