Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Having scored this luggage, I wondered should I steal it. Certainly it would have been the reasonable and prudent thing to do. .

Halfway home the taxi's radio suddenly burst into song. False alarm, it died just as quickly.

“What’s happening,” the driver mumbled to himself, “am I going crazy?”

When I got back to the Englishman he was in a state of depression; it stood to reason: he was doomed.

“I got one suitcase and one little carry-on thing,” I said. He was just as gloomy after hearing this. “May I have a cigaret?”

“Yes.” I gave him one.

“Cheers.”

“Let’s go, squire.”

It was then that we left La Whatsis, where I’d lived for four months, and reenacted our ruses of the day before in order one more time to lose the accompaniment of the OIJ, and I introduced the Englishman to another of the sort of motel where a Watts Oil representative would never have stayed unless his life had gone absolutely to pieces. He didn’t even ask where we were going.

I'VE ALWAYS been curious about the meaning of what followed. In its chief aspects the rest of the day was a price-slashed rerun of the day before. Maybe these things had to be done all over again on a reduced, murkier level. Every day I was taken to a more terrible region and made to reproduce my error.

Are there crimes I can commit that add to my indefinite sentence? Oh, blubbery invisible torturer, was it just that I hosted some short-lived idea of being of assistance? I didn’t mean it. Please, I take it all back. .

When I’d offered to help the Britisher lose this OIJ man with whom we’d since been reunited, I’d only been up for some entertainment, I hadn’t really wanted to help. This I swear.

I swear that that uncompleted phone call, the one I’d tried to put through to warn the Englishman at his hotel the previous day, was my only action motivated by a sincere desire to help another. But for even such a tiny act of generosity as that, forgiveness is out of the question. I can only do it again, I think — repeating, in a series of rearrangements, that one mistake. And in scene after scene the Englishman, for his part, can only accept my assistance, which, as any fool but him can see, is his big mistake.

Yesterday we’d lost the OIJ man in the Mercado and hidden ourselves in a cheap motel; today we did the same. . Like mechanical dolls in a clock, We pop out regularly and stage the same dumbshow.

There are two mercados, one is the Mercado Central, which we’d already experienced, and the other is the corrupt, awful mercado, an airless labyrinth of hawking and jewing, something out of the Middle Ages, worthy of the wildest, most herpetic Arab, composed of scraps and stench, shaded from the grinding weather by burlap and old plastic sheets. This is the Black Market, the thieves’ market. The human stink, the heat, the suck and press of poverty, it erodes the senses, I've been trapped in there myself a couple of times, and each time within seconds the buzz of commerce started to reverberate like the cries of multitudes being strangled. . To get there we had to follow a spiral route into the heart of Managua, avoiding various one-way streets and taking the long way around such buildings as TELCOR and the military hospital.

Just as we’d done the day before, we rode in our cab with the Daihatsu following along behind, but today our conversation was one-sided. The Englishman watched out the taxi’s window but never said a word, steeped in such a funk I really thought I ought to just go through his pockets and depart. Today he took no interest in our policeman, whose unexplained presence and scary vagueness and all that were the whole reason for this move.

I told the Englishman he was going to repeat our mercado trick, only this time he'd do it by himself. He didn’t object. Or indicate awareness particularly.

“There you go. hon,” I said, shooing him out of the cab next to the small community of burlap and contraband. From without it had an element of the circus — wind-influenced roofing covering a grotesque throng, mysterious delights, abandon.

He went into an opening and, as soon as he passed into the shade, winked out like an apparition.

The Costa Rican got out of his jeep and walked right past me. He went in behind the Englishman by the same way.

I let the cab go and stood in the streetside swirl of pedestrians. They came at me smelling of peach pomade and sweat.

The temperature was monstrous, you could reach out and grasp handfuls of it, the top of my head cooked while my throat, in the shadow of my chin, felt cool by comparison.

Whether we actually eluded the Costa Rican wasn’t the issue. The important thing was not to let the OIJ know where I was off to now; because unlike the rest of these citizens, most of whom appeared to be trying to ram through buildings with their heads or claw their way up into the sky, I was actually going places, I'd been visited with a plan of escape . .

Across from the mercado, on a street I thought was called Embarcadero (I had to guess at that, because for no good reason the street names had been ripped off the poles in Managua), was a garage dealing in used cars. Nobody ever bought the cars, they only traded them back and forth with each other, trying to convince themselves they must be getting ahead.

Two cars were for sale today. One was impossibly expensive, but I made a down payment on the other one, a Volkswagen, in cordobas, promising dollars in traveller’s checks when the machine was ready to travel — the man hadn't quite finished preparing it.

He was using the air-compressor hose to spray a poison-smelling mist all over the engine compartment, dribbling it from a bottle through the explosive stream of air.

I was fascinated. “What’s happening?” I asked. “What’s in your bottle?”

“Diesel,” he said. “It makes the engine brilliant.”

And what did it do for your lungs? It was impossible to breathe. FUUUUUZZZHHH, he gave it another dose.

“Does this car work? Is it a good car?”

“Yes, very good, the best.”

“Is there anything wrong with it?”

“No, not at all,” he said, “although many times it won't start.”

“Isn’t that bad?”

“It’s not a problem. The car needs one sparking element.”

“How long will that take? I require a car today.”

That took him back a few paces, but he recovered quickly. “Don’t be in a hurry,” he advised me. “Maybe I can find the part this week.”

“When you install the sparking element, will the car go?”

He hit me with a shot of English: “Yes. From regular gasoline.” Full of regret, he shook his head. “Diesel, no.”

“Is that bad?” We were back to Spanish now.

“It’s very expensive.”

Any kind of fuel would be expensive for us — we had no ration coupons and would probably have to resort to bribery. “Will you fill the tank before I take it?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“Will a full tank get me to the border?”

“Which border?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll get there and return with one tank of gas,” he said.

“I'm not returning," I said.

“That’s good for you,” he said.

“Can I have it tomorrow?”

“I told you once before, don’t be in a hurry. The documents, by themselves, will take several days.”

“Screw the documents,” I said in English.

“You’ll have to get documents of ownership, and more documents to take it across the border."

I didn't think so. If it came to it, we'd eat the car and walk across.

“It’s a very good car,” he felt obliged to remind me.

“Have you driven it?”

“No, because it doesn’t start,” he said.