Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Why didn’t he scream at me, why didn’t he accuse me, force out of me a gang of crippled reasons for the fact that I was down here watching what my government was doing to their homeland?

What was the matter? Didn’t he like me?

I began to get the idea that his whole purpose in having me here was to confiscate my passport; and now, having failed, he didn’t know what to do with me without looking like a fool.

“How do you expect to profit from dealing in our currency?”

“I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry. I didn’t expect to profit.”

“Why did you come to Nicaragua?”

Through the window I saw the red-haired American walking past in the dirt street.

I heard a car or jeep start up outside, drive a short way, and stop with its engine off.

I told the Tenente: “I came here to see the Devil with my eyes.”

The Tenente and the other one stood together watching out the window a minute while he talked low. I made out the one word “. . politico . .”

He came back and looked at me with his face cooking.

“Crazy,” he said.

OH I had a lot of bold thoughts, waiting in there for him. I recited the lines of William Something Merwin:

I will not bow in the middle of the room

To the statue of nothing

With the flies turning around it.

But the last line of the verse seemed to belong, when he entered, to the redhead:

On these four walls I am the writing.

“I’m cooperating here,” I said with the confused love of a child for its father when its father is enraged.

But he didn’t answer me.

I said, “I had a feeling about you.”

As far as he was concerned, supposedly, I wasn’t present. He took a minute to look around the room as if he’d come about renting it. Then as soon as he “noticed” me he started right in:

“Look, you’re U.S., I’m U.S., I’d like to treat you with respect. But I’m sure you yourself would have to admit, you’ve been all over the place lately. As far as being a representative of your country, you get very poor marks. You’ve lost your rights, and you’re in more fucking trouble than you can handle. Do you cut him loose or do you eat whatever they’re going to make him eat?”

“Who do you mean? The Sandinistas? He was helping them.”

“We’re in the process of turning that information around.”

I was beaten, completely beaten, or I might have asked him who in the world he was and what he meant. But as it rested I was not well, and what I didn’t understand I ignored.

“Are you a journalist or not?” he said. “This is the story of a lifetime, wandering around with a hunted British oil executive — and this is the leverage where I get you out of this; you’re a dumb señorita, excuse me, but that goes a long way with these folks, you’re a journalist with a respected magazine — you choose the magazine, I’ll get a telex down here for you within twenty-four hours — and you were by no means his accomplice — as of right now you cut him loose, you dump his act—”

“I cut his throat you mean, I stab his back —”

He wasn’t liking his work. He threw me a look like that of someone being burned at the stake. I fancy he didn't guess how naked he was.

I was every bit as naked . . He saw me. There wasn’t anywhere on Earth he wouldn't be looking right at me and seeing my breasts, the veins in my belly, the curling hair over my vagina. I felt intensely embarrassed, I felt like exploding, I felt like crying, and then I was crying at last, I was weeping, weeping—

What a relief, like coming home—

“Oh, hey,” he said when he saw my tears, "I get that all this wasn’t in the plan.” He summoned up some sort of air of professionalism. “This is a rough one. But either you do it and get out of the way, or you let it happen to him right on top of you. You have fucked up. Remember I said before that mistakes can be corrected? Well this is a big mistake. Maybe to put this one behind you you’ll have to reach right down into your guts and tear them out. It’s not possible for you to do anything else. It’s all you can do. You have no choice.”

“No choice.”

“You have no choice.”

“It's 1984.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that’s right, you could say that.”

How good it felt! To be sitting down in the dirt and giving up.

He began bargaining over the blame with me: “Half the trouble here is my fault, I admit that,” he said, “just let me do what I can, okay? Let me make up for it. I’m just looking for some way of getting you across the border.”

“If I sign, you’ll get me out of this place?”

“That’s all it takes, I believe. To be honest, a lot of this is out of my hands. But I feel sure enough to make it a quid pro quo — getting you across that border.”

“Me, you’re saying. Just me.”

“What do you mean? No,” he said, “both of you.”

DID THIS conversation really happen? Or is it just the same conversation I’m always having here in Hell? Does Hell consist merely of that one conversation leading to the date, 1984—the recognition of my absolute imprisonment, the ineluctability of my everything — does my life consist of that single dialog sketched out and framed in an infinite variety of situations?

The act of signing — how is that proved? I don't remember signing my name. To this day I wonder if I actually signed my name.

Wouldn't there be some record of a move like that, luminous singing scars where my fingers touched the pen?

But I know that down here you have to deal. That's the mystery of the reality of down here. That’s why I descended into this place, and now was the fated moment.

“I’m not free.”

“That’s right,” he said, “that’s right, that’s right.”

How good it felt!

THAT AFTERNOON when I got back to the church, the Englishman was still there. It was hot again, really oppressive. I wanted a drink of rum with ice, but I didn’t bother asking for one. Outside the plantain and arbolitos looked bedraggled after the night’s hard rain. The soldiers must have decided it wasn’t going to storm anymore, because they began gathering their equipment together.

They marched us out the door and alongside the church, back the same way we’d come in the dark and the rain last night, and I was shocked — more than shocked; I thought I’d known whatever there was to know of disorientation and miserable wonder by now, but this was beyond all — to see, around the corner of the church, several large shrubs cut into shapes: an elephant, a dog, two swans putting out their long necks toward each other in a green leafy kiss. I’d never seen a topiary garden before, had never expected to see one, couldn’t even have explained why I should know the English term for this collection of organic statues. What a silly world. A brief flagstone path wound among these four shapes in a side yard not half the size of a tennis court.

“Did you see that?” I asked the Englishman after we’d gone into the dale and were heading up the side of it toward the encampment.

“See what?” he said.

“A topiary garden.” He turned to look back at me and down the line of soldiers to the bottom of the dell. The men ahead of him paid no mind and kept right on trudging upward — we might have lit out into the jungle at that moment, if we’d only known which way to run. “A garden, no. I’m sorry to say I missed it altogether,” he said.

Before they put us back in our child-size cinderblock, they took us to bathe ourselves at the well. Honestly, it was just a mud-hole sleeping in a jail of sunbeams at the end of a path. We took turns dipping a wooden bowl down into it, as we balanced on the well’s tiny embankment of muck, and pouring the water over our heads.