The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

“Or, as I say, we could go north to Honduras.”

  “We could do Honduras.”

  “And as one leftist nation to another we might cross more easily into El Salvador.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. We could do El Sal. Only there's no common border with El Sal.”

  He got up, trembling.

  “You are a North American female prostitute-drifter with a press card,” he said, “which has been revoked. You drink like an Apache. You’ll end by killing us both. So much is obvious about you that you really ought to just,” but he ended stammering, “just—shut up.”

  His face had turned white, and I thought the tears would flow.

  But all I needed was some upper-crust lightweight giving me hallelujah about my circumstances. “Don’t forget, honey,” I said, “the night you found me you were looking for a whore.”

  That got him marching around the room aimlessly. He seemed to cast back through the events comprising his life, and then his defeated face agreed that, yes, he had been looking for just that kind of person, and so he sat down and kept quiet for a change.

  “Sorry.” I don’t know why I said it, I wasn’t sorry at all . . .

  “Look here now,” he said, “leave the money behind, will you? And I’ll be certain to redeem it when I can get some dollars, if you can’t afford to lose it—just, please, don't risk our plans.”

  “I can make a decent exchange at the border. I won’t lose my ass.”

  “I’ll give you a better price than he”—he reconsidered his terminology—“a better rate, whatever your arrangement—"

  “What do you mean, whatever my arrangement? You were right there. You know the arrangement.”

  “Oh, God, all this, having my tit caught in a wringer—my ass in a sling.” I couldn’t tell if he was sweating or spilling tears down his cheeks. Pretty soon we were laughing together. There’s nothing like hysteria, and thunder in the clouds, to convince you nothing matters.

  “It’s just that he can’t be trusted. Of course you see that.”

  “He can be trusted to sell us out,” I said.

  “No. Nothing is certain, not even that.”

  “Look, everybody sells everybody out down here. They can’t afford not to, it’s basic, that’s the situation. If you hang on to even one little tiny scruple it’ll be the death of you, I promise. This is Hell, it’s Hell, how many times do you have to be told?”

  “This is apropos of nothing. Are you talking to me or to yourself? You seem to be suggesting that I be the one to throw somebody to the wolves, but I see nobody in the vicinity to be thrown. Do you?”

  I was caught up in a cloud of rage . . . I sensed cool sanity drifting just beneath me but I couldn’t reach it. “All I’m saying is be ready. Be ready to find out that this is Hell.”

  “It isn’t Hell. This is all quite real.”

  “If it wasn’t real, it wouldn’t be Hell.”

  That seemed to get him thinking.

  “You do have a vivid world view,” he said.

  THE ENGLISHMAN didn’t like driving on the right. But he drove us to the border anyway. He needed to dominate something, if only a steering wheel.

  He’d used up all his words for the time being. Even after we’d crept up the dirt streets and gotten past all of the stores and houses we’d seen last night and crossed the bridge out of town—it stood empty of sentries in the daylight—he kept quiet.

  I watched the last of Nicaragua go by. We passed along a stretch of Panamerican Highway quite typical of the south, running a sparse gantlet of crippled vehicles—and here and there a dead dog stretched out beside the road, and wrecked, flip-flopping chickens, and your occasional truck-struck horse, still somewhat alive in the dirt, hindquarters jerking and the all-too-visible ribcage heaving with the desire to get back up and go on protractedly starving . . .

  We came into the tunnel of tall grasses we’d gone through last night. I wondered if the same soldiers would be at the crossing now . . . Whereas I should have felt the terror searching between my ribs for my heart, what I actually remember experiencing was self-consciousness and embarrassment. Instead of a fluttery vertigo I felt a speechless irritation, a paralyzing disgust for every insect that killed itself on the window, a defeated feeling that I was through with sugar fields, a heavy, sleepy hatred for the Englishman that actually made me slur my words when I talked to him . . . And then I wanted to make love with him, I wanted to taste his skin . . . I realized that I hated my hands, and that my clothes wouldn’t stop touching me . . .

  Anger is fear. Lust is fear. Grief, excitement, weariness are fear—just feel down far enough, look hard enough.

  My words came out small and whining: “Oh God, oh God, I hope nothing happens . . .”

  I told him I wanted to see everything destroyed before I had to look at any more of it.

  He didn’t talk at all.

  And the Englishman kept his thoughts to himself even after we were stopped ten miles down the highway with the walls of grass growing on either side of us, in the line of cars waiting to get out of this horrible land.

  Someday the Marines would come down from the sky and strafe this convoy of hopefuls. Would come in a plague of U.S. gunships like big lightbulbs in the nighttime, sowing down on them all a lot of Dow chemicals, drifting and winking leaflets full of unintelligible threats and bribes, and high-caliber Gatling tracer-bullets . . . And giant firebombs . . .

  We spent a good hour moving down the last mile of Nicaraguan roadway full of holes, turning the engine off and letting it rest between our yards-long advances toward that first kiosk.

  Behind us in the line was a group of boys with a huge transistor radio, all four of them wearing the kind of sunglasses I associate with French film stars, in a tall convertible jeep with Panamanian plates. Their jeans were impossibly blue, their tee-shirts white as glaciers . . .

  On the other hand, ahead of us was one of those buses that seem to drift out of history from Buchenwald and turn up in the Third World to take impoverished people home. The passengers had all gotten out and were wandering up and down beside this strange craft looking patient and content.

  We stayed in the car—out of an unspoken mutual tenor of exposing our faces, I’m sure. And still the Englishman hadn’t said one word since San Juan del Sur—two hours ago.

  He kept quiet as we got past the first checkpoint, where last night the cable stretched across the road had stopped us. Our documents were fine; nobody bothered about us at all. Up ahead, it appeared, we would have to get out and complete some forms, and then wait while our car was searched.

  It was phenomenal: a few hundred yards down the road was Costa Rica, and I swear to you that on that side of the verge the palm trees were taller, the fields a more subtle shade of green, and the highway moved up into cool mountains without a bump or a hole in its pavement. And everyone was better dressed, and there weren’t so many bugs.

  The sun came over the easternmost of those mountains all too soon. The windshield grew hot to the touch. Eerie shafts of light, reflecting from the glass parts of jeeps and trucks, flew up through the dust-cloud ahead.

  A shadow passed over us trailing a vague, light rain; and in two minutes the day was bright again.

  “We’ll pass out if we stay in this car,” I said.

  The Englishman didn’t answer me.

  “You haven’t said a word in almost—a long time,” I said. “You’re thinking too hard. Don’t do that, not in this heat, okay?”

  Later I said, “The temperature is fatal.” I was drenched; but there was something narcotic about simply giving in, letting myself be cooked. The line of cars moved slowly, to say the least. The Panamanian boppers behind us had taken to the shade by the road and fallen asleep on the grass. “I didn’t think so many people would be here so early. Look at all the people.”

  I couldn’t help saying such things, the Englishman’s cold treatment was making me nervous.

  But for once he answered me. “Maybe this is better,
all this crowding, as they’ll have less time to . . .” He didn't go so far as to name the possibility.

  THERE’S NO conveying the state we’d reached. Let it be enough to say that as we’d sat in the car and stood by the car, we’d seen most of the people around us walking over to the second kiosk to surrender their Nicaraguan travel papers. We wouldn’t be able to go any farther until we did the same. But we behaved, the both of us, as if we were certain that something else had to happen first, maybe that an official had to approach, look at our papers, and pass us along, or the car in front of us had to disappear—exactly what trick my fear-struck mind was playing I can’t remember . . . The point is that the next move in getting on toward Costa Rica was ours, that was the procedure here, but we did nothing. We did nothing for hours. Such was the obliterating strength of our fate.

  Basically this border station was a little settlement occurring between two roadblocks—stores, residences, a barracks, some offices, everything made of soggy lumber, like a jungle village. Across the highway was a chapel with its doors and windows boarded over.

  In the afternoon I went behind the church to pee—this was the only private place I’d found to do it the day I’d come into this country. Now I watered the same patch of grass again . . . Everything was still happening twice . . . As I was done, I had a picture of myself running away into the field and shrinking out of sight

  When I got back to the car, he wasn’t there. Everything was in motion suddenly. The locks on his heart were shattered, and he was standing in the line at the second kiosk with his papers in his hand. He was just like the rest of them in the line: unhurried, bedraggled, lobotomized.

  He watched me as we gave them our passports and papers.

  “I pray to God you got rid of that money back there,” the Englishman said.

  I couldn’t say anything. I hadn’t.

  The money? . . . I hadn’t even thought about it.

  He couldn’t say anything either. But he was so excruciated that if I’d touched him with a hand, my hand would have hurt, I know it.

  But now I understood what he’d been waiting for—what he’d put off saying. Why he hadn’t gone up to the kiosk until now. He’d asked me once, and he was too civilized to go on demanding that I not endanger us. Now, it seemed to him, I’d had a chance to do the right thing . . .

  I put him straight. “The limit is only for currency you bring in. They don’t care how much you take out—they’re glad to see their stupid currency go.”

  “But you mean to say you didn’t put it away back there? Out back of the church?”

  “No.”

  “But I was sure you had.”

  “I told you, they’re glad to see it carted out of their miserable country. It's worthless. Here,” I said, losing my grip altogether suddenly and going after the money in my purse, “here, do you need some toilet paper?”

  “But you’re over the limit by thousands—tens of thousands. It’s just too irregular, you’ll call attention to us . . .”

  “Oh, big fucking deal,” I said, just to be talking back.

  “It’s fine of you to want to destroy everything between us, but do you have to be so unbearably stupid about it?”

  “Oh—stewpid,” I said. “Stewpid.”

  Okay, okay. But he’d shocked me by laying his finger so deftly on—was it the truth, was I doing something irrevocable and crazy just to break us up? I didn’t know. It was hot, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think.

  But the suggestion drove me to produce nonsense. “Answer me, do you need some toilet paper or not? When do you shit, anyway? I’ve never seen you,” and so on.

  “This is so silly,” the Englishman said, “I’m silly, I’ve been an absolute fool. You’re a sick woman, you’re very ill . . .”

  And he continued, now addressing the young civilian approaching us for the search: “And she would have to be disturbed, you see—a woman peddling herself in the cocktail bars, without any reason for doing it, so much to recommend her—take pity on this woman, she’s ill—loco, loco . . .

  “I’m being sacrificed,” he said to me. “You’re destroying me.” And he announced: “It probably has to do with your father.”

  Oh, you smug patrician lisping asshole shit. . .

  “Don’t think because we rolled around a couple times and got sweaty, now I’m ready to start laying out the life story of my father and how I got to be a whore,” I said, “hey, what are you all of a sudden, a therapist?” He really wanted to talk about my father! “If I feel like a catharsis, I can just step out in the road and take an AK-47 in the ear. Can’t I.”

  Not that he was carefully following all this . . . No, he was watching the customs officer.

  And he didn’t have to watch very long—the man found the money right away. It was there in my purse, an old white envelope wilted around a brick of cordobas.

  “There,” the Englishman said. He resigned; he sank down behind his eyes and shut up.

  I tried to smile at the young man weighing my money in his hand. "I'm going away. I’m crossing the border. It’s nothing,” I insisted. “No problem.”

  “Where did you get this Nicaraguan currency?” his superior, a man also in civil dress, asked when he was brought over.

  “No problem,” I said.

  He laughed, repeating this phrase as he took a pen from behind his ear and filled out a receipt for me. “How much?” he said, beginning to count the money.

  I had to shrug. “Don’t know.”

  “No problem, no problem,” he said to the younger one. He whistled ostentatiously and rolled his eyes at the final count, which he said out loud, but large numbers in Spanish go right by me . . . He took the money back to the office, leaving us with the younger man and also the receipt, on which he’d written a figure close to sixty thousand.

  The assistant, as if he hadn’t already seen the money, sidled around and looked at this number, duplicating his boss's admiring whistle.

  SPEAKING ENGLISH, the customs officer directed the Englishman to a chair outside. “Sit down,” he beamed, “there’s going to be some delay now.” His glee was not masked. “Come in, come in,” he said to me.

  As he questioned me he pursed his lips and tried to look stern, but his eyes shone. I was not a bore, that was it. His job was a bore; this was not.

  I held on to the sides of my wooden chair, before his desk, faking nonchalance and answering his questions truthfully. Why bother lying now? We established that I’d arrived here from Costa Rica four months ago.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to Costa Rica. And then to the U.S.”

  “You have some friends in Costa Rica? Some Nicaraguan friends who sell you money? These people we call them Contras?”

  He clasped his hands in front of him on the desk, and leaned forward over them pleasantly. “How much have you paid for these cordobas?”

  “I don’t remember, exactly,” I began, but he interrupted me by going into a rage and slapping his hand on his desk several times—

  “Fuck yourself you don’t remember! That’s a lot of bullshit!”

  “Wait, please don’t be angry—I mean I don’t remember exactly, but around two hundred ten cordobas to the dollar.”

  “There. It’s much better.”

  “I’m cooperating with you completely,” I said in Spanish.

  “Forgive me for forgetting that I’m a gentleman and you are a lady,” he said, also in Spanish.

  This surprised me almost to the point of tears.

  In English he said brightly, “All right, my dear! I have your passports, and I must make one phone call or two. It’s necessary.”

  “Please,” he said when we’d rejoined the desolate Englishman, “get some drink, enjoy your lunch, here is my associate, he will be your guide, is it okay? There’s going to be a delay, I made it clear already.”

  His associate, the younger man who’d called all this nuisance down on us, smiled sheepishly, I believed, and po
inted out a kiosk that sold food.

  “Are you hungry?” I said, not looking too directly at the Englishman.

  “No,” he told me.

  WITHIN AN hour the car had been officially impounded and our passports confiscated. We were taken to a military encampment several miles east of the Panamerican Highway to await civil arrest.

  The truck we rode in the back of broke down before we reached the end of the jungle path. Under the not-too-watchful custody of our guard of three soldiers we got out and walked, our shoes slipping on a pabulum of melted leaves. Again I was granted an awareness that my sensations—the thirst, irritation, anger, also unexpected attacks of peace and benevolence—were only the forms of fear, the thousand faces of adrenaline . . . It was still afternoon but there would be a Night Person back in here somewhere to receive us, no doubt, a tormentor or henchling, there will always be a Night Person.

  In no time I was ready to vomit, having conjured for myself a vague spider-shadow toward which we floated . . .

  Fear blocked my sight—made irrelevant whatever was immediately around—in effect, drained the normally clotted jungle of visible things, and I was deaf, too, to anything but an inner pleading, What do I do now, how do I cope, this can’t be as bad as it seems, but if it’s as bad as it seems, what do I do now, how do I cope? . . . But then all of a sudden I surfaced momentarily and several yards of scenery produced themselves like a photograph. I was stunned by what I saw. This jungle road, two ruts through a musky vegetable dimness, all of this, branches and bouquets and the shocks of leaves—even sounds, even the chirping of birds—was steeped in humidity like bandages in one of those foreign soporifics such as reserpine . . . Every few heartbeats a bird floated up across the path far ahead of us. The sunlight lay like money on the jungle floor, and here and there, where the roof of trees was ripped, it came down in a torrent, in other places it fell in shafts as thin as a glassblower’s rod . . . We reached the encampment, and there was the Army of Nicaragua—as usual a lot of pestiferous urchins dirty as pigs . . .