The Stars at Noon Read online

  THE STARS AT NOON

  DENIS JOHNSON

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: ATHENEUM PUBLISHERS, Inc.: Excerpts from the poems "The Present,” “Route With No Number,” “To My Brother Hanson,” “The Nails” and “Bread and Butter” from The Moving Target by W S. Merwin. © 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963. Reprinted with permission of Atheneum Publishers, Inc. and David Higham Associates Limited. Graywolf Press: Excerpt from "Sunday Snow” from The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White. © 1982. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.

  This book was originally published in 1986 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  THE STARS AT NOON. Copyright © 1986 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, NY 10022.

  . . . what we are looking for

  In each other

  Is each other,

  The stars at noon,

  While the light worships its blind god.

  W. S. MERWIN

  ONE

  THE AIR was getting thick—if you like calling a garotte of diesel and greasy dirt “air”—and so before the burning rain began I stepped into the McDonald’s. But right away I caught sight of the grotesque troublemaker, the pitiful little fat person whose name was forever escaping me, Sub-tenente Whoever from Interpren, getting out of his black Czechoslovakian Skoda and standing there on the dark street with my fate in his hands . . . If I didn’t go to bed with him again soon, he was going to lift my card.

  I hoped it wasn’t me he was waving at, but I was the only customer in the place. I’ve always been the only patron in the McDonald’s here in this hated city, because with the meat shortage you wouldn't ever know absolutely, would you, what sort of a thing they were handing you in the guise of beef. But I don’t care, actually, what I eat. I just want to lean on that characteristic McDonald’s counter while they fail to take my order and read the eleven certifying documents on the wall above the broken ice-cream box, nine of them with the double-arch McDonald’s symbol and the two most recent stamped with the encircled triangle and offering the pointless endorsement of the Junta Local de Asistancia Social de Nicaragua . . . It’s the only Communist-run McDonald’s ever. It's the only McDonald's where you have to give back your plastic cup so it can be washed out and used again, the only McDonald’s staffed by people wearing military fatigues and carrying submachine guns.

  I let go of my supper plans and headed for the ladies' room in the hallway leading to the kitchen.

  The two soldiers leaning against the drinking fountain looked between me and the approaching Sub-tenente with slow eyes that said they understood what was happening and were completely bored by it.

  I thought I’d wait him out in the ladies' room, doing nothing, only sweating—needless to say, I wouldn’t go so far in such an environment as actually to raise my skirts and pee; and the walls were too damp to hold graffiti . . . I was sure the Sub-tenente hadn’t got a good enough look to say it was me—

  He came around anyway and stood outside the door and coughed.

  “Señorita.”

  I turned on the faucet, but it didn’t work.

  “Señorita,” Sub-tenente Whoever said.

  I tried the toilet, which flushed but didn’t refill . . . Just the same, the sight of a more or less genuine commode, with a handle and a cover-and-seat, functioning or not . . . Nothing fancy, but a lot of the lavatories down here don’t have toilets, that is, the room itself is designed to be one monstrous toilet, with water running down the walls and gradually, over the course of days, influencing substances toward tiny plugged-up drains in the corners.

  The Sub-tenente knocked on my door now. This seemed, all by itself, a slimy presumption. He cleared his throat. . . Costa Rica was just across the border. But they would never let me out of this country.

  “Señorita,’’ he said through the door, “may you tell to me if you are intending to remain very long?”

  I looked for toilet paper, but there wasn't any toilet paper and there never would be toilet paper—south of here they were having a party with streamers of the stuff, miles and miles of toilet paper, but here in the hyper-new, all-leftist future coming at us at the rate of rock-n-roll there was just a lot of nothing, no more wiping your bum, no more Coca-Cola, no beans or rice: except for me they got no more shiny pants, no more spiked heels. No unslakeable thirst! No kissing while dancing! No whores! No meat! No milk! South of here was Paradise, average daily temperature 71° Fahrenheit, the light sad and harmless, virgins eating ice-cream cones walking up and down—

  “Señorita, if possible I will wait for you . . .”

  Still I thought I could hold out a few seconds longer, hugging the wall—drugged, like a little kid, by the taste of my own tears on my lips . . .

  “Señorita. Señorita. Señorita,” said the Sub-tenente.

  He said something to the soldiers outside and everybody laughed.

  “Si. Si. Si,” I said. I opened the door. “Sub-tenente Verga!”—which wasn’t his name, but “verga” means prick—“It’s so good to see you again!”

  I DIDN’T think this would take long . . . And it didn’t. . .

  We were doing it on the couch tonight: it was either that or the rug . . . His clothes, civilian clothes, lay in a heap beside mine—I’d never seen Sub-tenente Whoever in uniform. He was a spy, or something like that. I believe anybody who thought about it would have said he affected the goat-like Lenin look, but in truth his features were unshaped, they seemed to be materializing out of a bright fog, nothing more than a shining blank with shadows floating on it. . . Even as he coasted back and forth above me with the lamp behind him, the oval of his face gave out a mysterious light, like the exit from a tunnel . . . “Are you looking at me,” I asked him softly, but he was sighing and hiccuping too loudly to hear. I hoped he wouldn’t go on long enough to make me sore. I started to worry that maybe I was too thin for him, it’s a fact that I’m always either too fat or too skinny, I can’t seem to locate the mid-point. Not that the pleasure and comfort of an incompetent small-time official in a floundering greasy banana regime surmounts my every concern, but all men tend to grow innocent, wouldn't you agree, at the breast. . . You can’t help feeling a little something, if only a small sharp pity, as if you’d just stepped on a baby bird. The bird was going to die anyway, you only shortened its brainless misery . . . “Are you coming? Are you coming?” I was speaking English. He probably didn’t know what I was talking about. . .

  Through it all I wept and sniffled, I did it all the time, it was becoming a kind of trademark.

  The Sub-tenente spoke softly, he stroked me, he was thankful, what a laugh, if only they knew how obvious they all are!

  And here we languished perspiring in his bureaucratic tristoire with its slatted shutters, and also, even, a rug . . . Cozy . . . But in this climate generally you didn’t want cozy. Anything but.

  “Do you have any talcum powder?” I asked him.

  Already he was engaging the routine—acting like he’d skipped some critical errand and couldn’t remember what. “Qué?” Getting on his shirt like he was late for an appointment, and so on.

  “Polvos de talco, baby?”

  “Oh. Si. Si,” and he started toward the bathroom, changed his mind. “No. No.” He spoke in Spanish now: "Listen to me. I want to tell you something.”

  “Yes—”

  “The moment has come when I must take your press
card and your letter of authority.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You are not a journalist.”

  “But I am. Yes.”

  “No.” He held my purse in one hand and searched through it with the other.

  “Yes.” I snatched the purse from him and he shuffled quickly through some papers his hand had come away clutching. He picked out the letter he’d written authorizing me to visit various locations in the capacity of a journalist.

  I was naked, but I suppose that was my armor. He tossed my other papers on the bed and held out his hand, but didn't come at me.

  “And your press card. It’s necessary for me to ask for your press card also. Also.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Yes. You have it.”

  “It’s in my room at the motel.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “You can’t have it.”

  “Your press card is invalidated.”

  “Who invalidated it?”

  “I am forced to do it.”

  “I don’t understand.” I was crying again as usual.

  Hadn’t we just made love? His brown eyes were small and hard. The guilt I saw in them was like a child’s. It wasn’t aware of itself.

  “One of these days the army will arrest you,” he said.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “This letter carries my name. Everyone who reads it sees my name.”

  He swaggered a little, hefting the letter in his hand. As if taking it away had made him significant. Honestly, they’re all pimps.

  And so we stood out front, quite soon, as usual, waiting for my cab, my armpits feeling prickly and sweat that would never dry slipping down between my breasts. The wind shook the leaves around us on the dark street.

  “I left many messages for you but you didn't responded. Why that is?" he said. “I am force, I am force to wonder."

  While he tried for irony in his torn phrasebook English, he was busy unlocking the gate in the iron fence to get his car out. The fence ran the length of the block before the row of flats.

  Oh, their suspicions, the self-degrading fantasies, the panic in their hearts. Whatever his innuendos covered was bottomless. It went down from his mother’s womb, I knew that by now. It had to do with the Devil, the Madonna, the Christ

  “I tried to call you,” I said, “but the phones weren't working.”

  The office-cum-boudoir he had the use of was in a viny residential neighborhood I was already unfortunately acquainted with, even quite bored with; in fact all by itself the familiar groaning of its sap-fat branches readjusted by a breeze sickened me . . .

  “I’ll be needing some shampoo tomorrow at the Mercado,” I said.

  “I'll buy for you this shampoo. With much pleasure.”

  “You’re very generous.”

  Now the Sub-tenente was embarrassed, and seemed to be suffering.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “If it is quite okay,” he said, and hopped into his defunct Czech juntamobile and disappeared—all in as many seconds, I swear to you, as it takes to say it—leaving behind that ragged small-car sound echoing in the carport

  He had nothing! nothing! nothing about him that was manly . . .

  Oh, well. In his own way, he was nice to me.

  Before too long an old Impala stopped for me, and the driver identified this vehicle as my cab. What a mutilated heap! In this place everything—the cars, the colors, all our disguises—soon washed away in the daily boiling ten-ton rain.

  As I opened the cab’s door, it croaked like a mating elephant.

  “Señorita,” the driver said in the way they all said it.

  I leaned forward from the back seat and told him in English, “The Marines are going to love your sister.”

  The little light on the meter showed how he’d decorated the dash before him with silver A’s and B’s and C's, the paste-on type, arranged illiterately in crosses, swastikas, circles, and so on. “Where do you wish to go?” he answered in English.

  “Honey-bunny, where do they all end up? The periodistas?” Although I was no longer officially a journalist.

  “You wish the Inter-Continental.”

  THE TAXI smelled of locker rooms. The radio functioned, how unprecedented, and Radio Tempo was playing U.S. music, mostly: a non-stop mix of last season’s Top 40 and last century's R&B hits . . . It was 1984, the real 1984, just before the elections would be postponed again; yet Radio Tempo concerned itself, in a city whose nightlife dribbled away to nothing by nine p.m., exclusively with bopping and dancing . . .

  We travelled through the empty center of the capital, an earthquake-leveled region where the enormous faces of several dead revolutionary leaders stared, looking iron-hard and Orwellian, out of their big billboard and across the bare fields toward the Mercado Central. The Mercado, a kind of shopping center, was closed and dark.

  I tried to direct the driver the shortest way. But as usual I found it hard to talk, because I had no easy time of it even breathing, the diesel smoke was that thick, and the night’s mugginess completed the impression that something with a head even more sizeable than these martyred Sandinistas’, as to whose names I drew a blank, had taken Managua into its mouth . . .

  And just let me say, while I'm on the subject, that trying to draw a decent breath of air in that place, especially downtown, fostered some appreciation of what it might be like to inhale a shirtsleeve soaked in horse-piss . . .

  We dropped down toward the biggest hole in the city, actually a volcanic lake that had more or less surprised everybody with its presence one day, blessedly extinguishing the fiery torment of many hundreds. Now they had it set up as a kind of vast municipal swimming pool, offering refreshment to anybody sufficiently berserk to hike down into it; at the bottom there was a small bathhouse made out of hay, or something equally depressing, but in the dark the lake was a great gaping absence; and going up the hill away from it we passed on our left the Hospital Militar, and across the avenue from that the Sub-tenente’s press office, Interpren, where they gave out the cards that said I was a journalist and not a whore.

  We arrived.

  The Inter-Continental Hotel in Managua goes up like a pyramid, somehow more white and pure with every floor, narrowing toward nothing, fewer rooms on each ascending storey . . .

  And in the top penthouse, I suppose, is the Devil himself, inhaling the groans of the damned . . .

  BECAUSE OF my unusual financial circumstances, I gave the cabdriver more money than he’d dreamed possible, and then pointedly, because I had to get strict with them, I cold-shouldered the boys and men out front of the hotel who washed cars and watched cars. Their chieftain sported as always his ridiculously shrunken Harley-Davidson tee-shirt. He spoke; I raised my middle finger in hatred. I wished I were dead, or at least more sensibly apparelled, if not swaddled in a death-shroud then at least dressed in flats and slacks—my ankles were tired and the backs of my knees itched with bug-bites . . .

  By now they had me perfectly encoded at the Inter-Continental: as I approached the carpeted entrance, the doorman moved away from it . . . He actually stepped back, when he saw it was only me, and stood aside leaning on his little podium and looking right through my head as I pulled the door open for myself.

  On the hotel’s ground floor a concourse ran along a row of windows past shops and a buffet room toward the restaurant and the lounge. I made for the lounge.

  Perhaps the doorman sensed my slipping descent in status, but the bartender was my kind of person, his features draped with the flag of bartending country, the veil of boredom.

  “Your face escapes me,” I told him, and asked for a martini.

  He shook my drink to the tempo of our evening’s entertainment, an overweight musical duo—that the only two fatsos in the whole zone had managed to find each other is one of those poignant miracles we were supplied with so abundantly here . . . One played the guitar, and the other didn’t
seem to do anything at all.

  As the cabdriver had understood they would be, several journalists were drinking here tonight, the usual bunch, every one the sort of person who really ought to be shot dead right away.

  The press gang had seized a couple of tables and were going at it now about how dull this election was.

  I sat down with them a minute. They knew all about me, but what did they care? They’d come to this country to see the bullets fly. Tonight those of any account agreed Beirut was a much more interesting place than Managua, while the others who’d signed on forever down here passed no judgment.

  A woman watching the elections for CBS, who’d run up north to the war a couple of times and only gotten rained on, was disappointed. “When I get back I’ll see more action out front of La Guardia while I’m looking for a cab.”

  “You have to hustle,” a man who obviously didn’t like her said. “It’s around. It’s up there. But it’s elusive—last week in Eslita they called an air strike down on some Contras a quarter mile from where I was standing. I got there in ten minutes with leaves in my fucking teeth, literally, from smashing along through the miserable brambles, and all I shot were holes in the ground. Meantime the bastards I’d been with had Contras up the ass—they’d got themselves ambushed exactly where I’d been standing.”

  I knew him, he’d lived down here for years, he really did work. He turned up here in front of a whiskey glass every third week, the rest of the time he slept in the jungle with the BLI, the elite—I doubted that—crack Brigada de Simon Bolivar, up in Matagalpa.

  “There’s no war. There are no Contras, there’s no Matagalpa.”

  “No Honduras.”

  “I’d been so close, I almost expected to find I had some shots of the shit. . .”

  Each one who did not have a vagina had a beard. All had cans of film bulging in their snap-flap pockets. They all drank as if they were just getting up to leave, but they never—I didn’t blame them, believe me—got up and left unless forced.