The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  It was pouring rain—when I get to San José, I promised myself, it won’t rain like this.

  The town was about five blocks long and one block wide. Inside of ten minutes I’d been everywhere. Places weren’t open, there was nothing to see, I was sopping wet and shivering with a chill. I followed a sign to a chapel off the beaten track—in the bush, in fact, down a muddy, depressing, and increasingly unnavigable dirt path. I took off my shoes and went barefoot, the shoes were useless against such deep muck. I needed to get out of the rain, I realized—where was this chapel?—soon enough I’d be in the arms of the Lord, so to speak, out of the unbelievable wet . . . But it wasn’t a cozy little chapel at all, it was open to the air, six rows of benches facing a big, rude cross under a thatched roof, and the wilted wreaths and incomprehensible badges, fronds, ribbons, and emblems all over the altar, the insane bric-a-brac of Centro-american jungle homage—dressed in such paraphernalia it looked the scene of a combined virgin sacrifice and Boy Scout meeting—chilly and damp, and the beaded strings of rain coming down loud as a waterfall on all four sides. And there I had a revelation.

  Nothing fancy, but now I knew: It’s not enough to observe. It's never enough to observe suffering. With my eyes open I have to let that suffering pay for me. I have to confess, alone in these solitary places, unheard in the roaring rain, that the suffering of the afflicted pays for me. Either I’m Christ or I’m Judas: it’s kill or be killed . . .

  Are you the Christ? One of us has to be . . .

  In a sense I was playacting, but in another sense I was trying to communicate something to myself . . . My mind turned over random events of the night before. There'd been a dogfight in the dirty cafe at the end of the street, and then a party because one of the barmaids was quitting to get married. And I had a stupid idea that in the course of it someone had delivered a message to me from the Englishman, I couldn’t quite remember what it was. I couldn’t quite remember the messenger.

  I went back to Playas proper and started looking for him, half histrionically, half seriously—but the soda was closed, its awning fallen over its face, and the cafe of last night’s wedding party was shut for the rest of the stormy afternoon, and the street outside it was empty . . . It was just a pouring-down rain with nobody in it, and the water running down the road in veins and jostling the fallen coconuts in front of the cafe.

  Well, I’d been so terrified of crossing the border, but there was nothing on the other side, just me . . .

  SO; NOW?—it’s none of your business, but the winter finds me pursuing culture in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. I spend my afternoons in the café at the Teatro Nacional, where the waiters do everything to please you but suck your toes; and they don’t turn up with the check in their hands the second your café con leche is gone, either. I couldn't bring myself to go back to New York now, even if I could raise the fare. Besides, where I live I can speak all the Manhattan bastard Spanglish I want to with my building's owner . . . I'm staying in reasonable comfort at the United States Hotel. It isn’t by any means the Amstel, which is the nicest one downtown, but it’s kind of homey, the proprietor isn’t at all Centroamericano mellow, he’s from Panama by way of the Lower East Side and has the idea no non-paying humans should appear anywhere near where he’s leading his life. Don't ask me why he thinks any of his neighbors can read English; but he’s put up a little sign over the entrance that says DO NOT STANDING IN FRONT OR JANG AROUND IN DOORSTEP, the same as he did, we can depend on it, above the door of his tenement down on Avenue B.

  I spend long evenings at the Key Largo, the infamous supper club where you can’t get supper . . . It’s set back from the street, only a few doors down from the Hotel Amstel, in its own small misty jungle, with the loneliest green neon sign on Earth clutching the corner of the building. The grounds are dark and dangerous, but inside there’s too much light—they have to keep an eye on the customers. I stand aside, with the other girls, and I drink when invited; upstairs there are rooms; sometimes I leave with a man, sometimes I come back, often I go home . . . And there’s never any trouble, nobody insists on representing me, nobody abuses me; I’ve never been spoken to unkindly.

  I’m a favorite of the less widely travelled Americans, the young men who would never pay for love in Kansas, and I’m hated and desired by those more sinister—the man I begin with this evening, for example, a knobby-jointed Alabaman off an Air Force or Navy base in Panama or Puerto Rico with a trembling puppy-dog earnestness I’ve learned not to mistake for innocence . . . So much character expressed in a face made of absolutely nothing!—no eyes, no nose, no mouth . . . I rib him that if things fall the wrong direction, he’ll have to come back here some fine day in an official capacity and level all the buildings and destroy all these people he’s been dancing with. “God, I am sure as shit ready for a lady who speaks English,” he says, burning like a human flame, “but do you have to blame me about mischief I haven’t gotten into yet?” We dance and kiss. His shirt smells brand-new and tainted with the perspiration of his celibacy. He holds me at arm’s length a minute, reading my face, and then he puts everything to rest with a certain smoothing gesture of the hands: “I do a job. I don’t know anything but my job.”

  “Same here.”

  He stands back and watches me dance . . . I stay away from the guitarist so as to avoid his simpering degenerate requests for money. Does he really think we all came in here to hand the colones away? If I had the price of dinner to begin with I wouldn’t be in here shaking my money-maker for these looped Caribbean refugees.

  He takes me to the bar, and we lean against it. The señoritas in their lively dresses line the walls, somewhat like umbrellas at a funeral . . .

  “You got a name?”

  “What on earth would I do with something like that?”

  The tall black bartender, wearing a white shirt of arctic crispness, delivers me a drink with those gentle hands of his.

  “It’s the beautiful New York señorita,” he says—he’s supposedly from Limón, but he’s got no accent. “Did you know you got out of here last night with a tab still hanging, bunny?”

  Behind him is a window fixed with black wrought iron. The building floats in a cypress swamp, a mossy branch and waxy ivy visible in the green effulgence of the little neon sign outside . . .

  “A hundred and fifty?” he says. “Gin tonic and two beers? Does it register?”

  “Oh.” Last night I’d been angry at him, can’t remember why, but justice had cried out that I stiff his suave black ass . . .

  “A hundred and fifty. Are you on it?”

  “Right, sure, sorry, honey, sorry.” I pay him out of my purse.

  “Hey, it’s not a dilemma.” Now that he has his money, it’s not a dilemma. “Are you fixed all right? Do you need a little help this week?”

  “She’s with me, dude,” the G.I. says.

  “Then I’m happy. She’s in very good hands.”

  The G.I. ignores him, wooing me. “Do you know what’s the biggest cause of divorce? Marriage,” he fucking opines.

  After a while he loses interest in me and drifts away . . .

  And then I see another one come in. I’ve been waiting for him. You know who.

  Here he is.

  And I say here he is, he’s on a roll, he’s wired for a win, he’s tuned to every known vibration.

  Oh, those familiar eyeglasses giving him the faceless face of Clark Kent! . . . But take them off and he is by no means Superman. The way he holds himself there’s no mistaking him. Does he have a bit of a tan?

  Isn’t it him? Or maybe it is. It is. It isn’t. But it’s him . . .

  No, I’m wrong. The accent is all wrong. But he does converse in English. Unbelievable striking fucking similarity, knock you right out, it’s the glasses . . .

  Those are actually the glasses, not a similar pair, but actually the Englishman’s glasses on this stranger’s face.

  He’s stolen them off the corpse or out of a prison laundry o
r bought them from a torturer . . .

  “Por favor? Si?” He lets me look through them—but they aren’t the same glasses at all. It isn’t at all the kind of view you get through the real glasses, these don’t make things more distant and crisp but fat, grotesque and not exactly substantial . . . Through these eyes every object is a cloud.

  Just to tease him, I pretend I can’t speak English. He's forced to make ridiculous signatures in the air with his hands. He has to be a regular monkey, getting his dirty ideas across.

  He offers to take me to dinner, but he’s a cheap bastard . . .

  In no time he and I are eating tacos chinos, that’s what they call egg rolls down here, with my friend Esmeralda in a Chinese restaurant and talking to a beggar-boy who’s just handed us a well-written letter from his mom. “Estimados Señores,” this letter begins, and goes on to say she’s raising a large number of children, well whose fault is that, and delivers a little lecture on the subject of her income versus her obligations. Honey, don’t you know you’ve got one of the world's most negotiable instruments right there between your legs?

  If you’d made them pay you wouldn’t be home arthritically copying out these tearful communications for your bastard children to read to people a great deal more fortunate and quite a bit smarter than you . . . Just the same, we slip him a twenty and I figure, Let the miniaturized sociopath eat my egg roll, even in my line of work I’ve never been so desperate as to take anything quite like this in my mouth. None of the Chinks in this establishment has ever been to China, I’m prepared to insist this is true.

  Before this little monkey eats, he counts his money and turns in his change for bills. The egg rolls just sit there in front of him, getting cold. Now we see he’s got a wad of cash in those little shorts of his bigger than my purse would hold—this kid has thousands. Don’t ask me how he fits it in his pockets, it's a miracle his pants don’t plummet to his ankles when he walks. “Ho, Malo,” I say, “bueno!”

  But I’m being too familiar. “Don’t call me Malo,” he says.

  “Is this crippled duck still here?” I ask Esmeralda, putting my hand on the customer’s thigh.

  The customer wants to do it with two women. He doesn't have much money. He’s a cheap bastard.

  It’s uncanny how this mind-blown welder—for that’s what he is, a welder from Miami with an overseas contract, gone nuts—brings to mind the Englishman, and I wonder what became of my friend from London, and how bad it hurt. . . But you know who this lint-collector really reminds me of? Humphrey Bogart. There’s something sideways and not altogether repellent about his glance, and something Bogart-like in the pain of his wince.

  A clear reminiscence of Humphrey Bogart seems to inform the modes and styles and even the gestures tonight . . . Whatsisname, the long black bartender without a trace of an accent, shaking drinks . . .

  And Esmeralda, the red-dressed high-class prostitute—she might have stepped out from behind a potted palm in a Hollywood lounge, 1953 . . . Who knows where they get it; after all, the movie houses are showing, Spanish-dubbed, whatever’s current Stateside. Maybe they watch a lot of Humphrey Bogart on TV.

  Maybe the air of this place just seizes and holds as long as it can that pre-Castro Havanan tang, or possibly it drifted down here years ago and got lost not unlike so many of us, hey . . .

  He’s been spilling his pay out behind him for days, all he’s got is about 1,800—I’d want two grand for me alone. He keeps saying, “Let’s do it three ways, c’mon, tres—tu, yo, una otra, Señorita comprende, si?”

  Esmeralda, or whatever her name is, isn’t interested.

  He wants me to find another, offering me 1,500 colones. I cost a lot more than that, I’m a rarity, without a drop of Indian blood . . . I’m white as dice . . .

  We go down to one of the sleazier spots, next door to a massage parlor, looking for a second girl. In the dark he looks just like the Englishman. I start weeping, I’m the sentimental sort . . . So we dicker, and like every North American, he’s heartbroken to talk of money and love together.

  The only one I can foozle into it cheaply enough to make it worth my while is Mona Lisa, who has a little difficulty with opiates and also alcohol, anything, for that matter, that will chemically alter her outlook and produce fog inside her head . . .

  I always think of her as Mona Lisa because she has a secretive, beautiful smile that says, “It’s over—why are we still here?” She keeps scratching her nose and falling asleep.

  Next door they have rooms. The three of us go out together. In the kitchen a chubby fellow cleans a pistol while he talks to the radio. No . . . There’s a woman sitting against the wall by the radio.

  “Hello, people,” the North American tells them.

  He has to pay three hundred for the bed.

  He doesn’t mind, he’s got plenty, he’s been holding out on us. And he pays the two of us, like an absolute dildo, in advance. We all undress. Good old Mona Lisa, scratching her nose, falls back beside me on the bed. “Tonight I’m lopsided,” she tells me.

  And the naked welder kneels above us. Maybe he’ll kill us. Maybe this is the maniac we’ve all been waiting for.

  In this near-dark he’s quite handsome. “Muy lindo,” I say to Mona Lisa, and she agrees . . . But he’s a miserable sissy, as limp and useless between his legs as a long wet hair. The night is cool, yet the sweat breaks out on him. Mona Lisa doesn't go in for a lot of English, and I keep on pretending I don’t speak it, either . . . He’s reduced to a savage state, naked, signalling with his hands. By all kinds of ridiculous gestures and in great embarrassment he tries to get one of us to fellate him. We don’t know what he’s talking about. Hon, you shouldn't have paid up front . . . He tries to ignore his failure, he tries to fake it, he tries to laugh it off, he tries to explain himself. He’s getting humiliated just like the other one, I can smell him boiling in a swirl of the same emotions that vaporized the Britisher . . .

  “I think I’ll stay here tonight,” Mona Lisa says to me. “I’m feeling sleepy.”

  “He paid enough. They’ll let you stay.”

  “He paid three hundred,” she recalls fondly.

  And will you just observe how this character is being tortured? He looks more and more like the Englishman. He doesn’t see the dark world’s innumerable eyes observing. Two young women submitted before his wishes—and he’s useless above them, on his knees on the bed, useless!

  The speechless poet, the blind painter—a tingling in the sculptor's amputated hands . . .

  Holy Jesus, what this guy must have done in his time on Earth . . . To be put here with his dreams, but not himself, made substance . . .