Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

“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.

Our man stayed with us all the way, neither obtrusive nor hidden. I couldn’t help thinking of a spirit wandering in the Bardo between its death and the next birth, trailing behind its future parents, as we came out the Mercado's other side and found the roadway in the big absence cleared by the seventies’ earthquake.

“I see there are two cabs.”

“Take ours,” I said, “I’ll race you,”

“Ours is the slower one, I’m sure of it.”

“Just to the other side of the field,” I said, “right there where the road curves.” The OIJ man, who’d caught on, was bearing down fast. “Go! Go!”

The whole idea nearly fell through because the OIJ spoke quickly and volubly, confusing my driver with frightening promises, as he closed the distance between us. “Fuck him! Fuck him!” I told the cabbie tearfully.

The car we’d come in was already away, carrying the Englishman.

“Fuck him!” the cabbie cried, much amused. “Let’s rock!” He squealed the tires leaving.

“You just made a thousand cordobas.”

We pulled abreast of the other cab, and the drivers played games while I signalled to the other and talked to mine, until I’d convinced them both, with some difficulty, that we should stop after only a few hundred yards.

I paid off my driver extravagantly and fell, with a creaking of brittle upholstery, into the seat next to the Britisher. “Brilliant! Brilliant!” he said as our cab crept away.

The field floated in the dusk.

“Nothing matters, does it?” he said as he watched me sip from the bottle.

“Not for you anymore,” I said, “and it never did for me.”

“I have to disagree on both counts,” he said.

“Look at him out there. He really would shoot you, I bet."

The Costa Rican was standing across the field watching us.

“Right.” He took my hand and laughed. “I can feel it.”

IN FRONT of my place, as I was paying off the cab, the Englishman asked me, “Where did you get so much money?” It really wasn’t his kind of question. He was so tense he didn’t know what he was saying.

“In Costa Rica.” It had been foregone that he’d come back to the Whatsis Motel with me. “Watch out for the dog-do,” I warned him, “watch out for the kiddy-plop.” Back at the Inter-Continental, the representatives of his fate would be hanging around.

“I’m sure it’s all been driven down into the mud. My God, what a rain. What muck. Oh, here’s a clear puddle.” Under the awning there was a slab of concrete in which a basin had been eroded. He soaked the bottoms of his shoes and I washed my feet in the puddle there. “You were marvelous,” he said. “You’re a treasure. You, the rain, the escape—”

Such gush embarrassed me. “By Jove,” I told him, “I thought you English were supposed to be steely and reserved.”

Now he was the one embarrassed. “No, those are the chaps with pith helmets and years of training.” As we went in he said again, “My God, what a rain.”

The Señora greeted us, coming from the back, rubbing the sleep from her face, a tiny woman, somewhat humpbacked, her hair tied up in a scarf. . I hadn’t yet determined if she was actually this outfit’s owner or just an impassioned hireling.

“Any calls?” I said in English.

“Good evening,” she said in Spanish.

She turned on the hi-fi and set about doing her books at the desk. Actually, I knew, she meant to serve as chaperone should the situation require one — in her friendly presence and drunk out of my mind I could adhere to the couch with my state-of-shock boyfriend and listen to music, hey.

She was just as happy that we went on through the lobby and into my room.

“NOTHING FANCY,” I tell him.

“The bulbs are very dim. .”

“Bulb. There's only one bulb.”

I relieve my purse of its bulge in the bathroom and discover that the administration of this motel, meaning some sneaky relation of the Señora’s, has also been looting the Inter-Continental: instead of the usual stack of carefully torn squares of newsprint, a folded yard of bluish toilet paper rests on the tank of the commode. It’s 1984, the real 1984, the revolution’s over and things are looking up.

He’s standing by the window but you can’t see a thing out there through the screen with the light behind you, what does he think he’s looking at?

“I see you have a back door,” he says.

“These rooms were originally hired by the hour. This used to be a triste-motel. You come in the back door, you pay through this window.” I show him the small window, like a ticket-seller’s, next to the door that opens onto the hall. “You pay as you go, from hour to hour. Nobody gets your name, nobody sees your face.”

“Oh, for a life like that.”

The rain starts again. But not too hard. He looks up through the ceiling toward the weather.

“No more,” he says. “This is too much.” His blue jacket hits the floor.

He lies down on the bed.

I fall on the bed next to him, and inside me it all comes loose. I put one foot on the floor to keep the room from spinning. .

The Señora goes by outside in the hallway, humming a love song along with Radio Tempo. I’ve never brought a man here before now, but the Señora understands, time is a river ever moving, chastity’s a joke this year, it’s 1984, there’s a war on, and the radios are crying, just as they’re probably crying in New York, “You take my self, you take my self-control.”

Beside me he falls asleep, still wearing one of his shoes.

HOW MANY mornings am I going to wake and find him there, this one, that one, or another one, one who last night seemed so sad and forgivable, last night in a moment when I myself was framed with a blessed light, borne down on soft wings, how many mornings, having forgotten his name, am I going to wake up and find him there in my bed like a slab of meat?

I didn’t have to open my eyes. I only had to listen for his breathing to know that the troubled Englishman was still with me.

At some point he’d got up and undressed himself. He lay uncovered, turned away from me, a big thing with a hidden face — for all I knew, he’d left in the night and been replaced by some other incompetent — wearing boxer undershorts of the kind any fool might have prophesied.

By this time, morning at the Whatsis had been happening for hours, and the moans and rattles from the other parts of the building had settled into the day’s monotony. “I smell coffee in Dogpatch,” I said.

He was too unconscious to be roused. He’d be sorry if he slept very late — this wasn’t the air-conditioned InterContinental. In bed past ten-thirty, he’d be broiled alive. Already perspiration dripped out of his hair and down his neck as he slept.

What point was there trying to sleep? I’d only at some point wake up again. I had to go out anyway, I had errands, I had to go out. I had to go out of the country, it suddenly occurred to me as it seemed to do quite often, or go out of my mind.

By now it was light enough to see that there weren’t any bugs around the drain: I took a brief shower — only cold water here — and washed my hair with Prell, newly bought but so old the label’s print had faded white. I put on clean clothes.