The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  His suspicions got hold of him completely finally. “I wonder why they aren’t talking to me? Why are they only talking to you? Why are they talking to you at all,” he pleaded, “what have you got to tell them?”

  I couldn’t shut him up. “We’ve only been here a day. It’ll be your turn soon. They’ll probably talk to you tomorrow.”

  “But what did you find to talk to them about?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Then why did they keep you all afternoon?”

  “Oh, I see. Do you want logic? That isn’t Scotland Yard out there, it’s practically the middle of the equator. Everybody’s brains are fried. Everybody’s stupid.”

  “Don't evade me. It’s essential you be candid. Please. Don’t leave me in the dark.”

  “Look, I’m not functioning,” I said, “I told them I know they’re demons and I said I wanted to see Satan himself, I’m not functioning!”

  “Are you serious? Do you mean to say you carried your little metaphor into your communications with these people?”

  “I told them I don’t love you!”

  “It’s all right,” he said, "I’m sorry I asked, you’re right. Of course it’s your affair and none of mine.”

  “They told me this is Hell, and I can’t love you.”

  “I apologize,” he said, “I was wrong to pry.”

  “There’s a war on. And war is Hell. That’s not a metaphor. That’s what war is. That’s what Hell is.”

  At this point he took off his shirt and draped it over the windowsill to take the air.

  I’ll never be told whether through all this he was held in check by great discipline, or only paralyzed. Nobody will ever be able to tell me.

  “I signed something.”

  "Oh,” was the best he could do. Then, “You signed something.”

  Then he said: “What was it, exactly, that you signed?”

  "I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Does it matter?”

  “Yes. It does.”

  “Well, not to me.”

  “It’s all right,” he said defiantly. “All of this can be worked out somehow. The important thing is that I’m with you because I love you.”

  If he was playing games it was disgusting—and if he meant it, it was disgusting anyway, that he chose this moment to say it.

  I had to remind him: “Just don’t forget what you were looking for when you found me.”

  “I won’t forget,” he said, “how can I forget?”

  Speechlessly he put his head in his hands.

  Then he started in torturing me with his explanations, which were exactly like my own explanations.

  “I think I began by . . . Well, I suppose I was curious. I started out feeling that I wanted to know you, I had to watch you in action, observe you, you understand.”

  “Oh no, wait . . .”

  “But I ended by feeling that you needed my help . . .”

  “Stop, wait, stop. Are you talking? Or am I?”

  What he’s doing is what I’m doing; what I thought he was—is what I am—

  Just as when we were loving, honeymooning . . . There was only one of us . . .

  But if there is only one of us, then I’m alone.

  TWO MEN from the Costa Rican Guardia picked us up in an aluminum boat after sunset, when the bugs had reached the peak of their feeding-frenzy. “Horrible,” the Englishman said. These insects were like bullets whining in the air. They got in your orifices.

  “Are you the Rural or the Civil Guard?” I asked, getting into the boat.

  “We are the Rural,” one of them said, and identified himself as a captain.

  “Ay! Ay!” the other said, meaning the bugs.

  We passed slowly along across the San Juan, a sleepy river overgrown with the images of stars. The Rio San Juan feeds into Lago de Nicaragua, the only freshwater lake in the world to have sharks. The sharks come up a channel from the Atlantic and find the lake. I didn’t think they would ever get into the San Juan, but it was something to consider before taking a swim . . .

  The motor was small and hummed absentmindedly, almost like an insect itself.

  On the Nicaragua side of the Rio San Juan there was nothing but jungle. Across the river, in Costa Rican territory, a pier began, going back over marsh and mush toward dry land. On this pier a sentry walked. When the engine stopped we could hear him clicking the safety of his rifle on and off nervously.

  And then at the end of the pier, where Costa Rica began, there was the oddest thing, a large deck with a bar, all lit up. On the bar a television sat in a cloud of moths, and the bartender was simply waiting all alone behind it, surrounded by a void.

  There couldn’t possibly have been any customers for him in this wilderness, other than the sentry making a regular series of noises in the darkness at the other end of the pier. And now the four of us.

  The bartender served up a gin and tonic for me, and a Coke for the Englishman. He was watching a Spanish-dubbed version of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

  “Thank you,” I told the two Guardia. “Will you drink with us?”

  “Not now.”

  The enlisted man bit his lip hearing this. But the Captain was in charge of the whole outfit, and he wanted to show us how irritated he was at having been sent out at night.

  “Your loss,” I said.

  “Please,” the Englishman said. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or the Captain.

  "Okay, I’ll practice my English with you,” the Captain said, and the enlisted man smiled happily.

  They had a beer with us and loosened their shirts. The Captain identified his weapon as a .556 millimeter Galil, which he thought might have come from Israel. The previous week he’d been involved in a two-hour gunfight with some Sandinistas, trading bullets across the river. “The Contras saved you from death,” he assured us. “And your man from the CIA.”

  “The American,” the Englishman said. “The one with red hair.”

  “I never met him,” the Captain said, “I don’t know his hair.”

  “But he’s the one, I'm sure of it. CIA . . . Well, it was obvious enough I suppose.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  “Still, isn’t it shocking. You work,” he said to the Captain, “with despicable people.”

  “Hey,” I warned him.

  The Captain didn’t mind. “It’s a business of survival,” he said amicably. “If a guy wants to kill you, before you do something bad to me, then—I want to help him kill you. The Contras are good people. Sandinistas are very bad.”

  “It's that simple, is it.”

  “Yes, it feels very uncomplicated to me.”

  “Well . . . Hadn’t we better find a hotel?” the Englishman said to me.

  “The Señorita will find a hotel herself,” the Captain said. “You have to come with us and be arrested.”

  THE NIGHT was muggy and the wind had stopped. There was an odor from the Rio San Juan. This close to the water the mosquitos were bad, and so I kept walking. The middle of the town of Los Chiles was a vacant city block with a patch across it and a few trees interrupting its level lawn. This space was hemmed around by a concrete sidewalk that the citizens were using, in twos and three and fours, to take a little of the night air. Right across the street was the church, a low modern building more like a warehouse than a place of worship. Something must have been scheduled; its doors were thrown wide and it was bright inside. But either the people hadn’t come yet or they’d already left the place, because the benches stood empty.

  I had a gin and tonic and half a chicken in a dark restaurant. My eyes felt as if they’d been baked and I could hardly hold my head up. I concentrated on these sensations and felt nothing at all to speak of about the Englishman or his trouble.

  I spent the night at the Hotel Rio Frio, down by the water, in a room the size of a closet. Next door was a station of the Guardia Rural. They hung around up there on the balcony, slapping at bugs and talking, keeping an old recoil-less rifle
pointed over the railing toward the river. He was probably in there, the Englishman, unless they’d turned him over to the Guardia Civil or the OIJ.

  The next morning it rained. I sat in a soda eating fried eggs and drinking Coca-Cola. The decor was familiar: on the wall an inexpensive high-gloss print of Jesus Christ surrounded by his pals at the Last Supper, and another print of bulldogs in vests and derby hats, with cigars in their mouths, playing poker on a train. The proprietor was an older man of the Laughing Buddha type. He sat at the rickety table beside mine and played his radio for me. I asked him to leave me alone.

  I was still exhausted. I napped, and dreamed I saw the soldiers coming for him, and the redheaded CIA man and another all too obvious American, who was showing the redhead his camera as they walked along together. Such a simple detail, their heads bent toward that object, but its pointlessness gave so much reality to the dream that when my eyes opened and I saw the rows of bottles and various unmatched worm-eaten tablecloths around me I insisted to myself, “That wasn’t a dream, somewhere that was really happening, and I saw it.”

  The rain was falling harder outside and the damp was blowing in—the place had only two walls, the rest was wide-open.

  About fifteen minutes after I woke from this strange dream, the redheaded American man came in accompanied by the Costa Rican from the OIJ, both of them wearing dripping ponchos of bright yellow. “You look very much a team,” I said to the American.

  He only shrugged, reanimating the flow of water from his poncho, and shut his eyes with a certain weariness. But the Costa Rican, who appeared very happy, said, “We are an unbeatable team.”

  They both shook the water from their ponchos and sat down without taking them off. I saw with some relief that we wouldn’t be long about our business.

  The American held up two fingers to the proprietor as if hexing him. “Two beers. And give me a napkin.”

  “English? North American?” the proprietor said.

  “He wants a cloth to wipe his face,” the Costa Rican said. “I’ll give him a napkin. What else does he want?”

  “Two beers,” the Costa Rican told him.

  “I don’t speak English,” the fat, smiling proprietor said to the American in Spanish as he set down the glass before him. “Nobody will teach me how to speak it.”

  “He doesn’t speak English,” the Costa Rican translated for the American.

  “Terrible beer,” the American said after he’d tried some. He sat back and waited pleasantly, one leg draped over the other and his hands folded in his yellow lap, a bead of foam clinging to his moustache at the corner of his mouth. He was looking at the Costa Rican.

  “I don’t like people like you,” the Costa Rican told me. “I don’t like giving you money.” But no amount of irritation was going to dull his sense of triumph. His face shone as he reached under his poncho and then handed me a manila envelope with that unmistakeable heft to it—inside was cash.

  His contempt made it easier to take the money.

  The American had with him a leather satchel which he put on the table and wiped with the cloth.

  He opened it and took out a sheet of paper.

  “One more thing for you to sign.”

  Unbelievable. I just looked at him.

  “It’s a nuisance, isn’t it?” he said.

  I signed my name to it and asked him for a match, drawing out a cigaret, and he gave me a light. I handed him the paper.

  When I thought of asking him, now that it was all done and ended, what would happen to the Englishman, I had no more strength to do it than if my blood had turned to water. “I’m depressed,” I told him. It was stupid, reaching out to him for comfort. He closed up his satchel.

  The OIJ man had paid for the beers and stood up.

  “Vaya con Dios,” I said bitterly.

  He nodded to me and pulled up his yellow hood. I looked away.

  The American was staring at me with moisture all over his forehead, it was unbearable. I thought he had something to say to me, I was sure he had some piece of news about the Englishman. But then I realized he only wanted to go on watching me suffer. “Maybe they’ll give you a commendation in Washington,” I said: I wanted to offer the thought of some future satisfaction in exchange for whatever he was taking from me now. The sound of words shook loose his gaze. He followed the Costa Rican out into the rain.

  MAYBE I fell asleep in the restaurant, but in any case I dreamed this goodbye: almost verbatim it was the conversation we’d actually had when the Guardia Captain had arrested him the night before:

  I was sneaking off—but the Englishman caught me: “Where are you going . . .”

  “I thought I'd grab a bus south.”

  “You mean we’re over. You've done something to free yourself. You're free.”

  I chattered back at him, but I couldn’t hear anything I said.

  He said: “And I’m caught, I’m caught, I’m still here.”

  I WAS in that town just a day. In the afternoon I got ready to take the bus out of Los Chiles—it was waiting right out in the muddy street before the Guardia station, next door to the hotel—nicer than Nicaraguan buses; nevertheless quite similar to a wooden crate. My hair was still wet from the shower.

  But the most terrible thing happened. When I came out of my little cubicle of a room at the Rio Frio Hotel, he was there, coming down the corridor.

  A pair of Guardia were with him, but not the ones from last night.

  I was so confused I actually turned around and tried, for a brief and most ridiculous couple of seconds, to pretend I hadn’t seen him or hadn’t recognized him or something like that.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “They’re letting me use the telephone. It’s the only one in the entire town, or so I gather.”

  If you’d taken me out in the town square and stripped me, set me on fire . . . No punishment could have been more fitting or awful than to be trapped here with him in this narrow corridor.

  I started backing up toward the bathrooms and desk and phone, because we were going to have to touch brushing past one another if we simply kept going.

  “What are you planning to do now?” he said.

  “Oh, God—I don't know,” I said, “settle down in some nice community someplace and watch the little boys grow up . . .”

  “I’m the one who changes, who experiences insight," he said now.

  Oh, Jesus.

  “There’ll never be an England,” I told him.

  Think of the monster he must have been on Earth, imagine the concentration camps, the oven doors he must have slammed, the screams he must have turned his back on, dusting off his hands, to be sentenced to follow around a quick-change artist like me with his heart cracked and the saliva rolling down off his tongue—that, that right there, that’s the kind of person who always gets humiliated . . .

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You might let us pass,” he said.

  I WENT to the seaside resort—call it a village—of Playas del Coco, and I wouldn’t go on to mention it, except that the Englishman kept figuring so boldly in my life. Nightly he wandered through the shambles of my dreams, dripping with chains, rarely getting a central role but always around, and three or four times I woke to find myself standing upright in the middle of my room at the Playas Hotel, as wet and salty as the ocean seething quietly in its own bed just yards away. I’d sworn off drinking, not for the first or last time—that was the cause of these lurid dreams and night-sweats; in the middle of one such episode, when I turned on the light before washing it all off me in the shower, I found a blue crab the size of a plate crawling up from the drain . . . I ran from the room, collapsed naked on the walk outside, and screamed and screamed until the lights came on in the neighboring bungalows and the desk lady’s husband came and carried the thing away to have it cooked. I felt that the Englishman was calling out to me from the edges of these dreams, “I’m dying to meet you . . .” I’m dying to
meet you . . . What an awful thing to say. But this hallucination seemed to get in the way of my waking hours, and I started looking for him everywhere. Half of me remembered he was only a dream now; but half of me believed he’d come to town . . .

  I dreamed they were boiling him alive. I watched his face develop like a photograph in a swirl of chemicals. In the hospital I heard his wife screaming yes, that’s his face, that’s finally his face . . .

  Playas del Coco is a restful spot, having that purposeless tropical ambience, that sugary irrelevance in which every night is one night. Mainly it’s a stretch of beach between two humps of hill, a cove, I guess. I lay out in the sun to be healed by the motion of coconuts rolled up and back by waves, crabs scuttling around and digging into the dark beach, schools of tiny fish pecking my ankles. The beach was greyish, composed of a volcanic silt that puffed up in a powdery mist around my ankles when I went wading. Not entirely appealing—but oh! the soldiers weren’t going to come down from the mountains and bayonet you. And with these people, the color of my passport wasn't interchangeable with the smell of blood. I stayed out until the sun came over the eastward rock about the same time every morning and pierced every grain of sand and leaf. Then it was a little too hot for the beach.

  The village has a couple of nice restaurants and also its slummier section, with foot-high homemade bridges wobbling above rivulets of sewage, where the bar stays open even in the rainy season. One of those places where the alcoholic expatriates and Costa Ricans pal around together woozily and argue over the antique jukebox—anyway it boasted an all-Latin selection of 45’s.

  Only these losers were around. Real people came here in the winter, the dry season—not in August.

  The day after I fell off the wagon again—was it a week or so I’d been there by then?—I wandered the town convinced I’d seen the Englishman somewhere the night before—where could it have been? Being hung over made me feel as if I were dreaming . . . I heard him calling from the periphery of things, I’m dying to meet you . . .