The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  Out of nervousness, the couple of dozen soldiers in the clearing pretended not to see us. They posed for us in their sea-green utilities, the highlights on their rifles quivering like shards of porcelain, as if they always gripped their weapons like this and sat around all day without moving or uttering words. Before the blizzard of fear-blindness swallowed me again I formed an impression of squalor from just a few things, from the smashed watermelons, the lukewarm bottles of strawberry pop, the rain of bugs off Lago de Nicaragua.

  They put us in their headquarters, a cinderblock building about half a story high—the corrugated roof had been laid over it prematurely, it appeared, to provide a minimal shelter while more cinderblock found its way here from the North Pole . . . Waiting to be completed, that’s the motif . . . Elaborations of it will fill every page of the history of this revolution . . .

  We couldn’t quite stand upright inside it. I might have complained, but some of the soldiers had sacrificed this, their living space, for the two of us.

  And all complaints and all conversations were forestalled by the endless shrieking of what I at first took to be heavy machinery in the dale out back—screaming girders pulverized by giant grindstones. . .

  It was the locals slaughtering hogs or whatever—hacking them with axes or beating them to death with sledges, I didn’t know, our open doorway and half-sized windows faced the other direction—anyway they were providing themselves with meat.

  And all afternoon I was thinking, with shame and embarrassment, about what would happen to me when I had to go to the bathroom. The question was as large in my mind as all the rest of it, all this being arrested and taken out into the jungle and possibly, for all I knew, being shot and buried.

  The slaughtering must have been a seasonal endeavor, because every pig in the land seemed to be getting it . . . They kept up squealing all afternoon and didn't stop until suppertime. You just wouldn't think any living thing would have that much breath in its body.

  Right through the doorway we could see the soldiers’ kiosk, country women combing through a wicker tray of rice for pebbles or sticks, and monster pots brewing up something steamy. But I wasn’t feeling hungry just yet.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake of everything,” the Englishman said.

  I’d been thinking the same thing about myself.

  He said, “There are spiritual principles at work here.”

  “My. Aren’t you swift to grasp?”

  “Your attitudinizing really doesn’t protect you, you know, not from anything important.”

  “Does it protect me from dinner? What about dinner?”

  “That’s up to them, I would presume.”

  “Maybe we have to make a noise about it before they decide to feed us.”

  But we didn’t say anything. He sat beside me, in my corner there.

  He wanted to take me in his arms. “No, it’s too hot.” I let him hold me for a while nevertheless.

  I felt sweaty, sticky—I felt slimy. This is one of those things it’s difficult to put into words: yet letting him hold me I felt more like a whore than I did being lowered down upon by a naked stranger and thinking only about the money.

  “I’m sorry I was such a bear,” he said.

  That was funny to me—“I do like the way you talk,” I said.

  “I know we’ve been under equal stress. We'll have to give each other the benefit of the doubt, does that sound reasonable? Listen, can you talk to these people? You know the language, you were with soldiers up in Matagalpa, wasn’t it, you—helped them. I’m in your hands, I’m afraid.”

  Oh, poor man, in my hands . . .

  I said, “I was only up north a couple months. Actually it was one month. I was late with my first report, I kept putting it off . . . When the second one was already due and I still hadn’t done the first one—I don’t know. I left! Actually I’d made up my mind before that. I was gone from the first day.”

  “My God, we’re so much alike . . .”

  It made me uncomfortable to hear somebody say this. Anybody at all.

  “One attempt, one gesture,” he said. “Something to bring you back . . . It comes up empty . . . You go on as always. As always . . . And then that one thing, that one attempt becomes a sort of ugly lump, doesn’t it. Almost a cancer. That act that was supposed to be good. The thing that was going to bring you back, it becomes an obscenity.”

  I knew what he was talking about. I knew exactly. “That’s a boring theory,” I told him.

  He was strong. He just asked the guard, who was some distance away paying more attention to the women than to us, for some food and water. The guard mocked his gestures, laughing, and said he’d find out if it was permitted.

  THAT NIGHT, an explosion of thunder and water drew me slowly out of sleep. Flashlights herded us out into the middle of the night, through the rain, into a church on the other side of the dale. Not that we prisoners were in any hazard of a soaking until they got us wet—not under our corrugated roof. But the soldiers had all been sleeping in hammocks, and the bits of plastic sheet they depended on probably didn’t work against such a downpour.

  The church’s floors felt cool when we lay down on them—they were stone, or tile, I couldn’t tell by the small glow of votive candles in the corners. The candles were far off, it was a sizeable church, the town must have been populous—certainly there’d been a fair number of barnyard animals going under the knife that afternoon—exactly as up north, you thought you’d lost contact forever, but it turned out a small civilization thrived just over the next shrub.

  It was true. The next morning we found that the church square opened into a tiny town of a few buildings whose purposes remained unexplained. Nobody was out on the streets except soldiers.

  The air was cool and wet. After our breakfast of rice and beans they let the Englishman relax in the doorway, in a patch of sun next to the tub of holy water.

  But me they took into town to see a full-Tenente at a Sandinista campaign office, which also apparently served as the area’s military headquarters.

  I was looked after first, silently, by a frightening person who came from the back and took charge of me with the slowness of somebody just awakened from a coma, an older enlisted man in a clean white undershirt and mud-encrusted combat boots.

  In Managua almost every soldier I’d met had seemed just another citizen of the general stupefaction; but these people, hardened by this rural life and very often by actual combat, were of quite another order. “Good day,” I said to him as he searched me. “Are you ordered to search me, or do you like to touch me?” He had no right to be feeling my ass. . .

  He didn’t answer, but he looked hard at me. Actually, I saw nothing of his face except for two eyes brilliant with fatigue and irritation, but I created for him one of those interrogator-faces from films and television, a cruel, deceptive face, at first bland and dreamy, suggesting interstellar distances, and turning suddenly into a cage for his inward, rabid self.

  This man took me into the rear office and stood by the window while I talked with the Tenente.

  The Tenente sat behind his desk, comfortably, with one leg crossed over the other, examining papers prefatory to our interview. I knew these papers had nothing to do with his thoughts. What made him think it was necessary to pretend like that?

  On the wall behind the desk was a poster invoking Efficiency & Discipline, a sentiment I found too ridiculous, considering the nation around us, even to be a joke—riveting, in fact, for its psychopathic denial of all experience . . . Beside it was a poster presenting the photograph of an old woman in the embrace of someone who looked a lot like Daniel Ortega. And the caption read in Spanish:

  Mother,

  where they speak your name

  it says victory . . .

  They don’t ask much of life, these revolutionaries. To sit at the desk there with the telephone in the flickering light and know that the grown-ups are never coming back: this is the peace of man . . .

/>   I sat before the Tenente quietly, but inside I was covering up my head with my hands . . . Reasons, images, memories came at me, the advance weapons of fear. I drove myself out into the street and whipped her, pleaded forgiveness from the dust as I was whipped . . . Just because I’d wanted to help the Englishman . . . While forgetting to stay objective I’d leaned my elbow inadvertently on the Fate lever. I’d brought it all down on my own head.

  The Tenente’s lollygagging had its desired effect. I weakened myself considerably while nothing happened at all.

  In his own language he said, “Why do you come to this country and make yourself to be such a nuisance?”

  Get to the point! Will I live?

  But I could only shake my head and say: “I’m sorry.”

  He was different. It was the way he looked at me. It had something to do with the chemistry he generated, or rather didn’t generate . . . For him there was no more of the swooping between grandiosity and resignation that usually characterized the demeanor, from moment to moment, of the Latin men I knew. Whatever powered those flights had been leached out of him.

  “Your passport.”

  “Certainly, I carry my name and my face right here, I keep them hidden between my tits . . .”

  “Please speak Spanish. It’s true you speak it?”

  “The other man took my passport and the Englishman's passport also.”

  “Who took them?”

  “The customs officer.”

  “Ah. It’s clear,” he said.

  “Good.”

  I might have been applying for a job I didn’t really want, a job they didn’t really have available . . . We might have been stewing in a void of casual and absurd lies like that . . .

  Why didn’t he scream at me, why didn’t he accuse me, force out of me a gang of crippled reasons for the fact that I was down here watching what my government was doing to their homeland?

  What was the matter? Didn’t he like me?

  I began to get the idea that his whole purpose in having me here was to confiscate my passport; and now, having failed, he didn’t know what to do with me without looking like a fool.

  “How do you expect to profit from dealing in our currency?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry. I didn’t expect to profit.”

  “Why did you come to Nicaragua?”

  Through the window I saw the red-haired American walking past in the dirt street.

  I heard a car or jeep start up outside, drive a short way, and stop with its engine off.

  I told the Tenente: “I came here to see the Devil with my eyes.”

  The Tenente and the other one stood together watching out the window a minute while he talked low. I made out the one word “. . . politico . . .”

  He came back and looked at me with his face cooking.

  “Crazy,” he said.

  OH I had a lot of bold thoughts, waiting in there for him. I recited the lines of William Something Merwin:

  I will not bow in the middle of the room

  To the statue of nothing

  With the flies turning around it.

  But the last line of the verse seemed to belong, when he entered, to the redhead:

  On these four walls I am the writing.

  “I’m cooperating here,” I said with the confused love of a child for its father when its father is enraged.

  But he didn’t answer me.

  I said, “I had a feeling about you.”

  As far as he was concerned, supposedly, I wasn’t present. He took a minute to look around the room as if he’d come about renting it. Then as soon as he “noticed” me he started right in:

  “Look, you’re U.S., I’m U.S., I’d like to treat you with respect. But I’m sure you yourself would have to admit, you’ve been all over the place lately. As far as being a representative of your country, you get very poor marks. You’ve lost your rights, and you’re in more fucking trouble than you can handle. Do you cut him loose or do you eat whatever they’re going to make him eat?”

  “Who do you mean? The Sandinistas? He was helping them.”

  “We’re in the process of turning that information around.”

  I was beaten, completely beaten, or I might have asked him who in the world he was and what he meant. But as it rested I was not well, and what I didn’t understand I ignored.

  “Are you a journalist or not?” he said. “This is the story of a lifetime, wandering around with a hunted British oil executive—and this is the leverage where I get you out of this; you’re a dumb señorita, excuse me, but that goes a long way with these folks, you’re a journalist with a respected magazine—you choose the magazine, I’ll get a telex down here for you within twenty-four hours—and you were by no means his accomplice—as of right now you cut him loose, you dump his act—”

  “I cut his throat you mean, I stab his back—”

  He wasn’t liking his work. He threw me a look like that of someone being burned at the stake. I fancy he didn't guess how naked he was.

  I was every bit as naked . . . He saw me. There wasn’t anywhere on Earth he wouldn't be looking right at me and seeing my breasts, the veins in my belly, the curling hair over my vagina. I felt intensely embarrassed, I felt like exploding, I felt like crying, and then I was crying at last, I was weeping, weeping—

  What a relief, like coming home—

  “Oh, hey,” he said when he saw my tears, "I get that all this wasn’t in the plan.” He summoned up some sort of air of professionalism. “This is a rough one. But either you do it and get out of the way, or you let it happen to him right on top of you. You have fucked up. Remember I said before that mistakes can be corrected? Well this is a big mistake. Maybe to put this one behind you you’ll have to reach right down into your guts and tear them out. It’s not possible for you to do anything else. It’s all you can do. You have no choice.”

  “No choice.”

  “You have no choice.”

  “It's 1984.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s right, you could say that.”

  How good it felt! To be sitting down in the dirt and giving up.

  He began bargaining over the blame with me: “Half the trouble here is my fault, I admit that,” he said, “just let me do what I can, okay? Let me make up for it. I’m just looking for some way of getting you across the border.”

  “If I sign, you’ll get me out of this place?”

  “That’s all it takes, I believe. To be honest, a lot of this is out of my hands. But I feel sure enough to make it a quid pro quo—getting you across that border.”

  “Me, you’re saying. Just me.”

  “What do you mean? No,” he said, “both of you.”

  DID THIS conversation really happen? Or is it just the same conversation I’m always having here in Hell? Does Hell consist merely of that one conversation leading to the date, 1984—the recognition of my absolute imprisonment, the ineluctability of my everything—does my life consist of that single dialog sketched out and framed in an infinite variety of situations?

  The act of signing—how is that proved? I don't remember signing my name. To this day I wonder if I actually signed my name.

  Wouldn't there be some record of a move like that, luminous singing scars where my fingers touched the pen?

  But I know that down here you have to deal. That's the mystery of the reality of down here. That’s why I descended into this place, and now was the fated moment.

  “I’m not free.”

  “That’s right,” he said, “that’s right, that’s right.”

  How good it felt!

  THAT AFTERNOON when I got back to the church, the Englishman was still there. It was hot again, really oppressive. I wanted a drink of rum with ice, but I didn’t bother asking for one. Outside the plantain and arbolitos looked bedraggled after the night’s hard rain. The soldiers must have decided it wasn’t going to storm anymore, because they began gathering their equipment together.

  The
y marched us out the door and alongside the church, back the same way we’d come in the dark and the rain last night, and I was shocked—more than shocked; I thought I’d known whatever there was to know of disorientation and miserable wonder by now, but this was beyond all—to see, around the corner of the church, several large shrubs cut into shapes: an elephant, a dog, two swans putting out their long necks toward each other in a green leafy kiss. I’d never seen a topiary garden before, had never expected to see one, couldn’t even have explained why I should know the English term for this collection of organic statues. What a silly world. A brief flagstone path wound among these four shapes in a side yard not half the size of a tennis court.

  “Did you see that?” I asked the Englishman after we’d gone into the dale and were heading up the side of it toward the encampment.

  “See what?” he said.

  “A topiary garden.” He turned to look back at me and down the line of soldiers to the bottom of the dell. The men ahead of him paid no mind and kept right on trudging upward—we might have lit out into the jungle at that moment, if we’d only known which way to run. “A garden, no. I’m sorry to say I missed it altogether,” he said.

  Before they put us back in our child-size cinderblock, they took us to bathe ourselves at the well. Honestly, it was just a mud-hole sleeping in a jail of sunbeams at the end of a path. We took turns dipping a wooden bowl down into it, as we balanced on the well’s tiny embankment of muck, and pouring the water over our heads.

  In no time at all the well was muddy-looking. I prayed about snakes, and worried I might slip down into the hole and wondered just how deep it went. But the cool water was like heroin.

  “Oh!” the Englishman cried, “that's good, that’s wonderful.” He didn’t say anything else.

  BY THAT night he couldn’t hide his feelings. He was in a frenzy to ask me what was going on. I couldn't see his face because they wouldn’t give us a light, yet I felt his tension in the way he sat against the wall, with his neck stiff and his head held up. Still he was silent for a while in that restraint of his, in that simple unfounded and useless decency that would kill him soon.