Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

I GAVE the mechanic five thousand cordobas, one-tenth the car’s price at the black-market rate of exchange, and now I owed him nine hundred U.S. dollars. For the nine hundred I was relying on the Englishman.

I hailed another cab. Bending over slightly to grab the door-handle of a taxi was my chief form of exercise, opening those doors and smelling that combination of spilt gas and dirty socks. . “Go to the border of the mercado, there. Let's wait there for my friend.”

While our vehicle cooked at the edge of the mercado's byzantine chaos, I sat sideways with the door open and my heels off, my feet on what passed for a running board, wiggling my toes.

The last time I’d been in there foul hands had touched me secretly and voices raked my ears until I thought they'd draw blood, harsh rock-n-roll prodded me along aisles mostly dirt, across patches of concrete speckled with the fluids and essences of hanging meat, past pairs of gentlemen squatting face-to-face, introducing their colorful bantam killer-roosters to one another, beneath the eyes of cartoon characters nailed to crosses and alongside members of my family starving in cages. . Yes, I'm lying, but you get the idea. . Yet when I picture the Englishman crossing it to find me on the other side, I imagine that it’s like outer space in there. . Around him everything is stock-still, deep-frozen, cold as dry ice to the touch, but he doesn't touch any of it. Gravity doesn’t hold him. He travels feather-like through a brittle silence. The phony gasoline ration tickets flare into ash as he passes, the gutless counterfeit radios start to play — nothing stinks, everything's black-and-white. .

All the same he emerged, after twenty more minutes, with his hair shellacked by sweat, big wet stains under his arms, breathing hard and squinting against the daylight, looking over his shoulder like a thief. Human after all. He’d impressed me mightily by turning into an international fugitive, but he was just like the rest of us, I suppose.

I shouted to him and he found me. He’d come to life, he could talk. “I’m desperate for a bath.”

“What went on in there?”

“I think I lost him. We lost each other, more accurately. I nearly bought a fighting cock.”

“That surprises me.”

“I would have let the little fellow go,” he said. “He appeared rabid. He wasn’t all that friendly.”

“They’re not supposed to be nice.”

“Still, he probably deserves a chance.”

I was glad to see him a little happier. He’d need every bit of a sense of humor to laugh off our new residence . .

We had reservations at a motel near Managua’s southern edge, a rooms-by-the-hour joint painted, every last inch of it, very purple. El Purpureo, I’d always called it. It was the shade of certain rhododendrons, not all that ugly if they’d only given it a wash. “They” were the potbellied owner with the humiliated teeth of a sugarcane addict, and his youthful assistant, who assisted him diligently in watching the TV. Not to suggest that I’d spent a lot of time at El Purpureo, but I knew that the television was just inside the front entrance, that it was made out of white plastic, and that the better part of their waking hours passed while they sat on wooden folding chairs beside a stack of half a dozen Fanta soft-drink crates, watching programs.

This is where they’re always found. This is where the Englishman and I find them.

We’re both tired, drained by constant fear, the unrelieved jimjams at a honking horn, at brakes squealing, at sounds imagined or anticipated — a footstep, a knock on the door. I just want to be forgotten by governments. The Englishman just wants a bath. The owner just wants to rent rooms by the hour.

Naturally the owner doesn’t remember me, doesn’t remember our phone conversation, asks himself if I’m really here in front of him . . He scratches his head and ponders our intentions while I go through the whole plan again, as if nobody's ever thought of staying here all night before. “We want to stay a few days. But we’ll pay by the hour,” I suggest.

I hand him four hundred cordobas.

Right away the clouds part in his mind. “Your rooms aren’t ready yet,” he says. “Wait.”

The Brit is now permitted to take a shower, and I to sit by the front entrance (clients mainly use the rear), between him and the boy — who turns out be his nephew — watching the tube. Managua’s TV station appears to be devoted, at this hour, to live music, people strumming guitars and singing songs in which the words “Sandinista" and “Frente'' crop up frequently. As its refrain, one song called “Libertados” uses the Frente slogan “No pasaran” . . Our pimp landlord joins in on the final line, and he and his nephew burst into laughter. I point at him—“Sandinista?” “Si,” he says, “somos Sandinistas!” I point at myself—“No pasaró?” Whatever he says, using a lot of slang I can't unwrinkle, indicates that as long as I let drop a few cordobas around his establishment, I can pass anywhere, anytime.

He begins to cough raggedly.

Leading members of the Frente are standing before the television audience now, answering questions. But the nephew only snorts, and the landlord laughs and coughs.

Down here the elder folk really know how to produce a cough, they bring it up from the hips with a roaring like that of a Caterpillar tractor. I place a hand on my sternum, hoping he doesn't think I'm offering him my tits, and ask the old character if he’s been to the clinic yet.

He indicates as best he can to the senseless gringa, pointing at Señor Ortega of El Frente Sandinista de la Liberation de Nicaragua who is speaking into the cameras, that if you get your fingers cut off at work in this country, you’ll get no doctor, no compensation, no nada. I guess he’s making some comparison to his lung trouble, but maybe he’s misunderstood my question.

Shyly a boy and girl come through the front entrance, holding hands, and the old man escorts them to a room.

He’s still coughing when he returns.

I have lived in a succession of stair-steps downward I believe. I have lived in St. Patrick’s Day, a land of free green beer and screaming trains, and I have lived in Mardi Gras: Caucasian real-estate men in black-face and hula skirts dancing on restaurant tables. . Down is the direction. But the scene never changes: there’s a man, and I’m walking into a a motel with him, and the Night Person is there to accommodate us.

“Why can’t we have a room?” I ask. “You had a room for them, didn’t you?”

He watches the TV screen a minute. “Your rooms are still being used,” he says.

THE ENGLISHMAN came downstairs, done with his soapless cold-water shower, looking pink as a cat’s tongue. He hadn’t been in this zone long enough to catch a tan on his face.

In a while the landlord took us up to our rooms.

We took a look at my room first, a purple region with a toilet, shower, sink, and bed all in the same twelve square feet. Overhead a long white malfunctioning neon tube waxed and waned and shimmered stroboscopically so that things happened to your mind.

We didn’t get around to seeing the Englishman’s room that day. As we stood in my doorway speechless, he put his hand on the back of my neck, and a most curious inner transition was accomplished. . Almost on the order of a car wreck. .

FROM THAT instant, whatever we did, all of it, counted as lovemaking, which seemed to have burst in upon two humans for the first time without wearing any of its disguises.

MINUTE TO minute we couldn’t remember what we said to each other. Words didn’t count. We sat naked together under the cold-water shower for decades drinking from a pint of rum, while out in the streets the foreign sobs and laughter intimated symphonies, and we kissed to this accompaniment. . The chorus had no words but “mm” and “oh” . . One did the vowels, one did the consonants. .