Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Oh, you smug patrician lisping asshole shit. .

“Don’t think because we rolled around a couple times and got sweaty, now I’m ready to start laying out the life story of my father and how I got to be a whore,” I said, “hey, what are you all of a sudden, a therapist?” He really wanted to talk about my father! “If I feel like a catharsis, I can just step out in the road and take an AK-47 in the ear. Can’t I.”

Not that he was carefully following all this. . No, he was watching the customs officer.

And he didn’t have to watch very long — the man found the money right away. It was there in my purse, an old white envelope wilted around a brick of cordobas.

“There,” the Englishman said. He resigned; he sank down behind his eyes and shut up.

I tried to smile at the young man weighing my money in his hand. "I'm going away. I’m crossing the border. It’s nothing,” I insisted. “No problem.”

“Where did you get this Nicaraguan currency?” his superior, a man also in civil dress, asked when he was brought over.

“No problem,” I said.

He laughed, repeating this phrase as he took a pen from behind his ear and filled out a receipt for me. “How much?” he said, beginning to count the money.

I had to shrug. “Don’t know.”

“No problem, no problem,” he said to the younger one. He whistled ostentatiously and rolled his eyes at the final count, which he said out loud, but large numbers in Spanish go right by me. . He took the money back to the office, leaving us with the younger man and also the receipt, on which he’d written a figure close to sixty thousand.

The assistant, as if he hadn’t already seen the money, sidled around and looked at this number, duplicating his boss's admiring whistle.

SPEAKING ENGLISH, the customs officer directed the Englishman to a chair outside. “Sit down,” he beamed, “there’s going to be some delay now.” His glee was not masked. “Come in, come in,” he said to me.

As he questioned me he pursed his lips and tried to look stern, but his eyes shone. I was not a bore, that was it. His job was a bore; this was not.

I held on to the sides of my wooden chair, before his desk, faking nonchalance and answering his questions truthfully. Why bother lying now? We established that I’d arrived here from Costa Rica four months ago.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to Costa Rica. And then to the U.S.”

“You have some friends in Costa Rica? Some Nicaraguan friends who sell you money? These people we call them Contras?”

He clasped his hands in front of him on the desk, and leaned forward over them pleasantly. “How much have you paid for these cordobas?”

“I don’t remember, exactly,” I began, but he interrupted me by going into a rage and slapping his hand on his desk several times—

“Fuck yourself you don’t remember! That’s a lot of bullshit!”

“Wait, please don’t be angry — I mean I don’t remember exactly, but around two hundred ten cordobas to the dollar.”

“There. It’s much better.”

“I’m cooperating with you completely,” I said in Spanish.

“Forgive me for forgetting that I’m a gentleman and you are a lady,” he said, also in Spanish.

This surprised me almost to the point of tears.

In English he said brightly, “All right, my dear! I have your passports, and I must make one phone call or two. It’s necessary.”

“Please,” he said when we’d rejoined the desolate Englishman, “get some drink, enjoy your lunch, here is my associate, he will be your guide, is it okay? There’s going to be a delay, I made it clear already.”

His associate, the younger man who’d called all this nuisance down on us, smiled sheepishly, I believed, and pointed out a kiosk that sold food.

“Are you hungry?” I said, not looking too directly at the Englishman.

“No,” he told me.

WITHIN AN hour the car had been officially impounded and our passports confiscated. We were taken to a military encampment several miles east of the Panamerican Highway to await civil arrest.

The truck we rode in the back of broke down before we reached the end of the jungle path. Under the not-too-watchful custody of our guard of three soldiers we got out and walked, our shoes slipping on a pabulum of melted leaves. Again I was granted an awareness that my sensations — the thirst, irritation, anger, also unexpected attacks of peace and benevolence — were only the forms of fear, the thousand faces of adrenaline . . It was still afternoon but there would be a Night Person back in here somewhere to receive us, no doubt, a tormentor or henchling, there will always be a Night Person.

In no time I was ready to vomit, having conjured for myself a vague spider-shadow toward which we floated. .

Fear blocked my sight — made irrelevant whatever was immediately around — in effect, drained the normally clotted jungle of visible things, and I was deaf, too, to anything but an inner pleading, What do I do now, how do I cope, this can’t be as bad as it seems, but if it’s as bad as it seems, what do I do now, how do I cope?. . But then all of a sudden I surfaced momentarily and several yards of scenery produced themselves like a photograph. I was stunned by what I saw. This jungle road, two ruts through a musky vegetable dimness, all of this, branches and bouquets and the shocks of leaves — even sounds, even the chirping of birds — was steeped in humidity like bandages in one of those foreign soporifics such as reserpine . . Every few heartbeats a bird floated up across the path far ahead of us. The sunlight lay like money on the jungle floor, and here and there, where the roof of trees was ripped, it came down in a torrent, in other places it fell in shafts as thin as a glassblower’s rod. . We reached the encampment, and there was the Army of Nicaragua — as usual a lot of pestiferous urchins dirty as pigs . .

Out of nervousness, the couple of dozen soldiers in the clearing pretended not to see us. They posed for us in their sea-green utilities, the highlights on their rifles quivering like shards of porcelain, as if they always gripped their weapons like this and sat around all day without moving or uttering words. Before the blizzard of fear-blindness swallowed me again I formed an impression of squalor from just a few things, from the smashed watermelons, the lukewarm bottles of strawberry pop, the rain of bugs off Lago de Nicaragua.

They put us in their headquarters, a cinderblock building about half a story high — the corrugated roof had been laid over it prematurely, it appeared, to provide a minimal shelter while more cinderblock found its way here from the North Pole. . Waiting to be completed, that’s the motif. . Elaborations of it will fill every page of the history of this revolution. .

We couldn’t quite stand upright inside it. I might have complained, but some of the soldiers had sacrificed this, their living space, for the two of us.

And all complaints and all conversations were forestalled by the endless shrieking of what I at first took to be heavy machinery in the dale out back — screaming girders pulverized by giant grindstones. .

It was the locals slaughtering hogs or whatever — hacking them with axes or beating them to death with sledges, I didn’t know, our open doorway and half-sized windows faced the other direction — anyway they were providing themselves with meat.

And all afternoon I was thinking, with shame and embarrassment, about what would happen to me when I had to go to the bathroom. The question was as large in my mind as all the rest of it, all this being arrested and taken out into the jungle and possibly, for all I knew, being shot and buried.

The slaughtering must have been a seasonal endeavor, because every pig in the land seemed to be getting it. . They kept up squealing all afternoon and didn't stop until suppertime. You just wouldn't think any living thing would have that much breath in its body.