The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  He said, “It seems I’ve ventured beyond the bounds of reasonable conduct.”

  “I like the way you talk,” I told him. “You’re so hopelessly fucking out of it.”

  “Out of it,” he said, stirring the milk into his tea. “I’m beginning to think that’s precisely the case.”

  “Are you familiar with the American expression ‘You’ve got your ass in a sling’?”

  “I’m familiar with most of your expressions.” He placed his hands before him on the tablecloth. “I’m familiar with a lot of things. I’m familiar with many of the capitals of the world. And if you don’t mind, I’m familiar with whores. I’m familiar with the way whores try desperately to act as if they feel superior to those of us who pay them. When actually you feel quite inferior. When actually you feel ashamed. Why didn’t you look at our waiter when he talked to you? Why don’t you look at me when I’m saying something?”

  “Because there’s nothing to see.”

  “Then why do you avoid my gaze, if I’m nobody at all to you?”

  “Can we back this up a little? Because, actually, I’m not the one the OIJ is scaring shitless down at the InterContinental. Am I.”

  That relaxed him some, at least with respect to his inventory of my failings. “No,” he said. “I’m the one.”

  “Your ass is in a sling. You’ve got your tit caught in a wringer.”

  “I’m all in a muddle,” he agreed.

  “Well, you’ve still got your sense of humor.”

  “You’re very kind. I owe you an apology, a whole group of them, rather. I only said those things because I’m so nervous. ‘Frightened’ is a better word.”

  “Not at all,” I assured him.

  But I would never forgive him for talking to me that way.

  “You’re very kind,” he said. “And I’m very nervous.”

  “Whatever it is, can it really be all that bad?”

  “I don’t see how it could be worse,” he said.

  “Why? What on earth did you do?”

  “Somewhat in the nature of—I’d say it was a mix between—I passed along the secrets of a company to the secret-gatherers of a government. That’s mixing industrial and international espionage, I’d say.”

  “And you’re caught.”

  He grappled in his shirt pocket for his Derbys—not just the fingers, but the whole arm trembled so you worried, would he behave all right—really, it was terrible to watch. “We've already agreed my ass is in a sling.”

  “Can I have one of those Derbys, please?” I said.

  He had a nice lighter.

  I used this lighter and held it in my hand and said, "So why didn’t the Oh-Ee-Hota roll you up just now?”

  “He is not—the OIJ have nothing to do with this. It's complicated. The question of jurisdiction is a little involved.”

  “Well, yes, really. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s a long way from Costa Rica. Why don’t we find a soldier and get him arrested?”

  “Because I’m so very out of my depth,” he said, “so out of it, I admit it . . . I have no idea yet whose side the OIJ are on. Or even whose side I’m on. That man may be the only friend I’ve got.”

  “Does he say he's your friend?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “Then never talk to him again. Did he say his name?”

  “He showed me his identity cards and a badge.”

  “Don’t talk to him anymore. Forget him. Do you have a gun? Shoot him.”

  “I don’t have a gun.” He was panicking again. “I’m honestly just a—stupid Senior Analyst, research and development, Watts Petroleum Corporation, and that is all. That is all.”

  “Let’s lose this man.”

  “I’ve only been Senior for one month.”

  “Heartrending. Let’s ditch him down at the Mercado Central. I’ll pick you up in a cab, see, in a spot where he can’t get one. We’ll leave him standing there.”

  “He happens to drive a car. What about his car?”

  “He parks his car, follows you to the other end of the Mercado, and there I am, waiting for you in a cab—are you following this idea? By the time he gets back to his car, we’re long gone.”

  “Then what?”

  “I can’t line all that up for you. The Mercado idea sounds like a hit, is all.”

  “I believe you’re drunk.”

  All too true. “Would I be sitting here if I was the littlest bit sober? No,” I said. “No.”

  “I don’t have any objection to leaving,” he said. “But the business of getting away from this man is just silly.”

  “You can’t trust anybody down here. I was going to steal this,” I confessed. I handed him back his cigaret lighter.

  “Were you really,” he said as if he hadn’t heard me at all.

  ON THE way out we passed right by the OIJ man. He'd rolled up his copy of La Prensa, and he tapped it against his knee as he sat in his chair on the promenade, his sunglasses cocked on his head, watching us approach and watching us recede.

  The Britisher seemed compelled to offer him something beyond dumb acknowledgment. “I, oh, uh,” he began.

  I pulled him along. “You don’t have to explain anything to that person,” I said.

  By the time we were off and running in a taxi, an old wrinkled Ford driven very slowly by an old wrinkled man, the Costa Rican was pulling out behind us in a four-wheel-drive Daihatsu, one of those Asian makes you never hear of outside the Third World . . .

  “That’s him back there,” I told the Englishman.

  “I wouldn’t know. Don't look. My God, it's a tank. He told me he had a car.”

  “That’s him. He’s got Costa Rican plates, too. They look like the new California plates, you know?”

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Will you go very much faster, please?” I asked the driver.

  “No.”

  “One of the few on Earth,” I noted.

  “We can’t expect to lose him driving as slow as this,” the Englishman said.

  “We're going to get rid of him down at the Mercado,” I reminded him.

  “What’s the point? He’ll only wait back at my hotel.”

  The rain started: they might have been letting down a truckload of marbles on the roof. . .

  We rolled up the windows and commenced suffocating. “This is impressive,” my friend said. “The wipers are useless. Can he see?”

  “Can you see?” I asked the driver.

  “No.”

  “Is he still back there?”

  “I can’t see a thing,” I said.

  We were crawling. Soon the rain lessened by half, and things were visible again, but now our driver was held up by one muddy pond after another that had laid itself down across the road.

  We were driving past the FSLN campaign headquarters. For the benefit of the new arrival I pointed it out, a circular building set by itself at the border of the huge wiped-out central area, rippling behind sheets of rain.

  “It’s big, isn’t it,” he said.

  “Well, I guess the Frente has all the money.”

  “The campaign offices for the other parties aren’t quite as impressive, you’re saying.”

  “No way. I don’t even know where the others are—no, wait, I’ve seen the MPL or whatever, the Communists. They’ve got a big chain-link fence, and a lot of rifles waving around out front. But that’s their whole general center of operations—not just a campaign outfit.”

  "‘So the Sandinistas are going to win.”

  “Win what?

  “Well . . .” He was confused. “The election.”

  “If there’s an election in this country, babe, don’t blink—or you’ll miss the whole show.”

  “But the elections are scheduled,” he said. “The elections are going to take place.”

  “They’re not going to let anybody vote. They’ll postpone it again. And they’ll blame the U.S.”

  “I don’t believe you.�
�

  “Why would they risk losing? Why would they let go of all the power once they had it?”

  “Because they believe in principles. Because those principles would grow stronger if they chanced losing that power in the name—if they played fair in the name,” he said, “of certain principles.”

  “Like what principles? Let’s hear these names.”

  “Equality, democracy.”

  “Liberty, fraternity, right, yeah, right.”

  “Why am I talking to you?” he said bitterly.

  “Yerbabuena,” I told the cabdriver.

  “El Mercado,” the driver corrected me.

  “No, let’s go to the Yerbabuena now instead,” I said. “I'll show you some liberty and some of that other bullshit,” I told the British customer.

  THE CAB driver wanted fifty. I gave him a hundred. “Wait for us,” I said. He nodded, turned off the engine, and sank into his seat to outlast the rain in a stupor, as we intended to do in the Yerbabuena, Managua’s rip-off socialist bookstore.

  However slimy its impostures, the Yerbabuena had the most air-conditioned air in town and was more like home than any other place I’d seen since stepping off the plane a year ago in the capital of Costa Rica. The Yerbabuena had the sweetened rusticity—shelves of clean yellow wood with a satin finish, lots of light, coffee and cakes for sale, and solid manly wooden tables to sit at—of Big Sur, California. But unlike Big Sur this place had pretentious waiters in cheap wine-red jackets. Only disenfranchised intellectuals and left-tourists came here. With that tentativeness of foreigners, people stood in front of the shelves reading the spines of the books.

  Aside from pastry and coffee there were propagandistic tee-shirts for sale at 1,500—at the official rate, that was over fifty bucks—and soft-cover books printed on weightless paper: tracts, rationalizations, biographies, whitewashes, smears, like La Muerte de Sandino, the sad testimonial account of Somoza’s murder of the rebel.

  We found a table by the window, looking out at the beautiful taxicab we’d arrived in and, two car-lengths down the curb, our cop’s hulking jeep.

  The proprietress of the Yerbabuena, draped all over with jewelry, sat near the cake selection going over the ledger, it appeared—a hard-case capitalist ritzily coping through a whole deck of regimes. I hated her fat, red lips . . . When I complained about her in a low voice, the Watts Corporation’s Senior and soon to be ex-Analyst said, “And what do you believe in?”

  “I’m just keeping my head above the flood. At least I’m not in it entirely for profit.”

  “You believe in survival.”

  “Are you going to help me sort out my beliefs now? I just wanted you to see this place.”

  “It’s pleasant.”

  “It’s a little piece of Palo Alto. A little piece of Cambridge.”

  “England?”

  “Boston.”

  “And Palo Alto?”

  “California. If we wanted Disneyland, they’d serve up some of that. They’re just patiently taking our cash and trying to keep the Marines away.”

  He made no comment. The waiter came, and we ordered coffee. “Why are you looking at us like that?” I asked the waiter. That put a stop to his act. “Snotty,” I told him in English.

  “And what about you?” I asked the Londoner. “Are you a believer? Is there a reason for everything that happens?”

  Exhausted and despairing, he didn't answer.

  But in such dry, cool air you can't help but feel, before long, the hope returning. We had coffee. The rain stopped, and the last drops blew out of the air. The sun came back, mist rose from the pavements. We didn’t wonder how we'd started for the Mercado and ended here. It made sense to sit in the air-conditioned Harvard-style bookstore and watch the rain dry first off the concrete lampposts and then, starting from the tops, off the hides of the streetside palm trees. Each tree and post had got wet along one side only.

  The waiter was, unfortunately, a debilitated gelding. He wouldn’t come around when I wanted more coffee. I struggled in Spanish with some of the more insulting idioms. This brought over the proprietress. I must have been soggy with rum and taxi rides, because although there was only one of her, she appeared to triangulate and converge.

  “It’s bad the way you talk to my waiter,” she said, then more, but I couldn’t follow her Spanish.

  “He’s rude. He’s the son of his daddy,” I said, meaning he was spoiled.

  “You've done it two times,” she went on. "Once before, and now today.”

  “I’ve never visited your shop before.” I wished it were true.

  She said no more but went over to the waiter and said softly, “Lying.” The waiter was released from his delicacies. He delivered the check at once and, preliminary to screwing me for dollars, asked what country I was from: “Tu pais?” The fop, the choirboy.

  I pointed at the Englishman. “Maybe he wears a toupee. I don't.”

  This broke the Englishman up. His mirthful outburst was a shock, a regular string of firecrackers. It continued in fits. In his eyes there was nothing funny, but he couldn’t stop. He looked around, confused and nearly purple in the face, trying to stifle himself.

  I yanked out a few dozen cordobas for the waiter . . . The patrons around us looked on blankly . . . Bad money, the police, rancid motel, stupid taxi . . . Now this moment . . . It was all too much . . . We left in defeat, the Englishman belatedly disguising his hysteria as a bad coughing episode. On the post-revolutionary street, on a street that had seen gun battles, the sight of one person helping another bent-over raised a peculiar alertness in some boys leaning against a stack of tires in a garage . . . Our cabbie looked away . . . The OIJ man, behind the wheel of his Daihatsu, was suddenly sitting straight up and peering at us . . .

  “Now the Mercado,” I told our driver. The old man made a blind, macho-hombre U-turn. Meanwhile, having wiped his nose and eyes, the Englishman looked for a virgin corner of his hankie with which to clean his glasses.

  We passed the Ministry of Culture, and the museum: the speechless poets—blind painters—a tingling in the sculptor’s amputated hands . . .

  “AND NOW we’re going to lose this person,” the Britisher said, “pretty much as they do in a film. Do I gather as much?”

  “It isn’t stupid,” I insisted. “It’s a workable idea.”

  We both got out of the cab at one of the entrances to the Mercado Central. “Anyway I’m out of shampoo.”

  In this post-cataclysmic vastness, where once there’d been some kind of downtown, the Mercado lay like a small island. “If he leaves his car here, and we lose him on the other side, he’ll have a hard time getting transportation.”

  “Right, I see it now,” the Brit said. “Certainly give it a try if you like.”

  “I don't speak Spanish very well,” I told the cabbie. “If you don't understand, please tell me that you don't understand.”

  “I understand,” he said. “We’ll meet on the other side of the Mercado.”

  “And I’ll give you the second part of this.” I tore a hundred-cordoba note in two and gave him half.

  He looked at his half, and then at me, in utter horror. “I understand,” he said.

  We left him. “Do you think he’ll be there?”

  “Oh, there must be cabs on the other side,” I said. “I just don’t remember for sure.”

  “Are you certain you can walk all right?”

  “You insist I’m plastered. I’m doing fine. I have the use of my legs.”

  “Very good.”

  The Englishman kept looking back, embarrassed and self-conscious and pretending otherwise. “Are we still . . .”

  “We’re still being monitored.”

  The OIJ man was walking about twenty feet behind. He wasn’t looking at merchandise. He was looking at us.

  “It occurs to me—what do you suppose he’ll—what action,” the Brit finally managed to say, “is he going to take when he sees we’re trying to lose him?”


  “Oh I guess he’ll shoot you in the back once or twice.”

  He was taken with a shudder.

  “Just kidding,” I assured him.

  “Indeed.”

  "I need some shampoo.”

  “Shampoo. Oh, well, as long as we’re here then,” he said, “surrounded by shampoo.”

  We were a long time travelling down the weird thoroughfares at the Mercado, a maze of shops on the order of a Stateside shopping mall, but laid out more haphazardly and quite a bit more various in its pretensions, the decor of sad fifties bowling alleys and modest living rooms, country sheds, Alabama shoeshine parlors, phone booths, and so on pressed out in a series of shops devoted to the sale of any item, absolutely any item, but mostly, as elsewhere, the most useless items: U.S. junk, cheap digital watches, imitation designer jeans, tee-shirts stamped with the spectral-sexual symbols of Heavy Metal rock groups, cuddly posters and records and jogging shoes, something like home but slightly, horribly askew because so much of it was secondhand, dented, bent, stained, or just inexplicable . . . We passed a closed government office whose interior was dominated by an old round-shouldered Coke machine . . .

  “I got to have some rum,” I said.

  “Must be some of that in the vicinity too, I should think.”

  Next to a store that sold both used furniture and costume jewelry we found a store that sold both rum and shampoo.

  The OIJ man waited outside like an angry friend. Leaving the shop, we were walking right toward him.

  “It does get you standing up straight, doesn’t it?”

  “Adrenaline. It’s a beautiful hit,” I said.

  I meant to say hello as we passed, but nervousness pinched shut my throat. And there was an intimacy in being so near to him that depressed me . . .

  “I should get my hair washed by a real professional,” I was suddenly moved to say.

  But the only hairdresser’s we passed was empty and dark. Most of the stores were closed. The others were closing.