Denis Johnson: The Stars at Noon

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.