Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

“He needs one too, the poor, fat pimp,” I said.

Then just as suddenly I got well. I woke the next morning and the world wasn’t yellow anymore but violet, beautiful, and fresh as if a gale had swept it clean. Belatedly Señor Landlord brought me a couple of small white pills and several big ones packaged in a strip of tin foil. I ate them all at once, and they didn’t come back up, or rush along through.

Inside of seventy-two hours I’d starved down to a saintly, X-ray translucence. When I looked in the mirror I saw the black lips and gums of a smiling dog.

For two days I took no nourishment but Fanta colas. . I drank them and walked all over downstairs, where there were clean wet sheets hanging in the high-ceilinged halls and sweetening the atmosphere pitifully with an odor of soap. The light from above fell through the vents in the eaves and struck these sheets in such a way that they absorbed the unrelieved purple of the hallway and gave it back as benevolence. . Hanging there, curtain after curtain, turning the hallways into a series of wet, lilac rooms — I’d never seen anything so rapt, so holy and so frail, so completely terrifying . . To think that in the center of a boiling sea of sweat, this teardrop cowered in its purity. . Beauty, especially the angelic beauty of bedding being de-stained between fucks, is the most frightening business going in Inferno ’84.

Except for clean sheets, this was a rough time. We still had a couple of days to wait through anxiously for our car. Days in which the press of realities emptied our honeymoon of its occult power.

I myself was in real trouble, that was one of the realities. I occasionally took time to appreciate that the Department of Defense was after me to lift my passport, thanks to my having been struck by altruism like lightning. And the Englishman never mentioned the life he’d placed in limbo by his half-assed benevolence, but sometimes, when I wasn’t supposed to be seeing it, he wore a secret face bottomless with losses.

As the time came to leave, the lurking details snatched at us, the decisions we hadn’t made — in the first place, which border would we cross? North or south?

“Not north,” I insisted, “the roads are bad, and also that’s where the war is. The administration is completely informal up there. I saw how they do justice up there — right by one of the main roads in Matagalpa, about three hundred yards from my cute little house.”

“Matagalpa. .”

“I saw somebody strung up.”

“Strung up, you say.”

“Yeah. They hung him — a Contra. Suspected Contra.”

“You don’t mean to say they hanged him?”

“They hung him or they hanged him, either way he shit his pants and died.”

He was stunned. “Oh, what an ugly thing to say.”

I supposed he was right. “Fuck you,” I said.

WE DECIDED on the southern border, which was closer anyway and made more sense, as far as gasoline was concerned — but we didn’t think about gasoline. We didn’t think about anything practical.

Questions hovered and were never asked. Why head for Costa Rica when one of us was wanted in that country? Why not find a lawyer, or write a letter to the Times, or what about the Brit putting a call through to somebody he could trust at Watts Oil in London, or contacting a relative, even his wife?

These were considerations that turned up in the vicinity of our desperate little chats, but we never considered them.

I don’t know about his, but my mind wouldn’t think, it would only lift up horrible possibilities and shake each one at me like a club. Act! Run! Hide! Later you can be rational! We had problems here we couldn’t cope with. Don’t you get it? We didn’t know where to begin! We had to erase ourselves from this map and pop up in the middle of another one like tunnelling rodents.

Still the car wasn’t ready . .

AND STILL we had those moments. I remember in particular calling out to him the last time we made love in our little room something like, “Cover me, oh, keep me covered . .” One of those moments when it seems like something’s going to work . .

THE CAR was ready.

I’M STANDING out back of the Nicaraguan town of Masaya. A volcano sends up a cloud of steam in the distance. .

Far off there’s a black storm, full of lightning. Overhead it’s clear. Two stars are already visible.

Looking out over the dusk-covered earthquake craters while the storm descends I think of another of William Something Merwin’s lines: The lightning has shown me the scars of the future. .

This was the end of our first day travelling. We’d turned off the highway, and while the Englishman went to Masaya’s open-air mercado looking for God knows what, I wasted time.

Behind some kind of cultural center characterized mainly by stillness and an air of neglect, I leaned on a rock wall overlooking a volcanic lake and talked with a lady from a tour bus. I’d noticed her only last week at the equally deadly cultural center in Managua; she happened to be one of a group of musicians from Madison, Wisconsin, getting a taste of Third World socialism. Getting a bellyful. Like so many of us who’d descended into this region, she was a small bit horrified. . What, no hot water, and I have to wipe my bum with words?. . We looked at Nicaragua stretching out toward wherever it went, the Pacific Ocean was a good bet. Whatever was going on down here, it was none of our business. Only she couldn’t admit it yet. Two minutes after our conversation I forgot what we’d said. . The volcano spoke unmistakably. Everything else was a lie.

Wait a minute, it’s coming back to me, she described herself as a player of the bass viola if I have it right, and we watched the moon go from an amber blob to a strong pearlescent light, along the lines of a smashed egg reassembling itself.

“I don’t know. We’re going to visit Jinotepe next,” she said.

“I’ve been to Jinotepe. I think it has a lot of brick streets. But I can’t remember,” I said. “Where do you stay?”

“We stay at these little kind of like hostels.”

The yellow moon came out from behind the volcano, travelling sideways fast, and surprised us. You had to go forty miles outside of Managua to find anything to see, but the effort paid.

“And what about your bass viola?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “what do you mean, exactly?”

The moon’s face was just like the Englishman’s. That’s what I liked about him — his face was the moon’s, I’d been seeing his face all my life, soft and not yet final.

“Well, do you carry it around with you? Are you guys giving concerts, I mean.”

“No,” she said, “no.”

Her companions were getting on the tour bus — it was one of the modern ones having plenty of room and very small wheels.

“Well. . There they are,” she said.

“I wonder where my friend is? I’ve been waiting an hour.”

“Are you with someone?”

I didn’t like her asking questions. I didn’t like anyone asking questions.

The fat-faced moon. The moon whose bow tie we can never see. The market should have been closed by now.

“Well,” she cried, “I think that’s a terrible remark to make!”

What had I said? Ah, something or other probably.

Then — was it him? He stood at the edge of the parking lot in a suit exactly the color of the dusk. You couldn’t say for certain that he was real. He didn’t come near. I didn’t imagine it then, but probably he was already dead.

THE VOLKSWAGEN’S air-conditioner puffed out a fiery stink. We travelled with the windows down, serenaded by the psycho humming of the tires, which were retreads from some socialist workers’ paradise across the sea. When we got up a little speed the wind thudded around our heads — and the temperature stayed right up there, but it wasn’t as sticky.