Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

In no time at all the well was muddy-looking. I prayed about snakes, and worried I might slip down into the hole and wondered just how deep it went. But the cool water was like heroin.

“Oh!” the Englishman cried, “that's good, that’s wonderful.” He didn’t say anything else.

BY THAT night he couldn’t hide his feelings. He was in a frenzy to ask me what was going on. I couldn't see his face because they wouldn’t give us a light, yet I felt his tension in the way he sat against the wall, with his neck stiff and his head held up. Still he was silent for a while in that restraint of his, in that simple unfounded and useless decency that would kill him soon.

His suspicions got hold of him completely finally. “I wonder why they aren’t talking to me? Why are they only talking to you? Why are they talking to you at all,” he pleaded, “what have you got to tell them?”

I couldn’t shut him up. “We’ve only been here a day. It’ll be your turn soon. They’ll probably talk to you tomorrow.”

“But what did you find to talk to them about?”

“Nothing!”

“Then why did they keep you all afternoon?”

“Oh, I see. Do you want logic? That isn’t Scotland Yard out there, it’s practically the middle of the equator. Everybody’s brains are fried. Everybody’s stupid.”

“Don't evade me. It’s essential you be candid. Please. Don’t leave me in the dark.”

“Look, I’m not functioning,” I said, “I told them I know they’re demons and I said I wanted to see Satan himself, I’m not functioning!”

“Are you serious? Do you mean to say you carried your little metaphor into your communications with these people?”

“I told them I don’t love you!”

“It’s all right,” he said, "I’m sorry I asked, you’re right. Of course it’s your affair and none of mine.”

“They told me this is Hell, and I can’t love you.”

“I apologize,” he said, “I was wrong to pry.”

“There’s a war on. And war is Hell. That’s not a metaphor. That’s what war is. That’s what Hell is.”

At this point he took off his shirt and draped it over the windowsill to take the air.

I’ll never be told whether through all this he was held in check by great discipline, or only paralyzed. Nobody will ever be able to tell me.

“I signed something.”

"Oh,” was the best he could do. Then, “You signed something.”

Then he said: “What was it, exactly, that you signed?”

"I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Does it matter?”

“Yes. It does.”

“Well, not to me.”

“It’s all right,” he said defiantly. “All of this can be worked out somehow. The important thing is that I’m with you because I love you.”

If he was playing games it was disgusting — and if he meant it, it was disgusting anyway, that he chose this moment to say it.

I had to remind him: “Just don’t forget what you were looking for when you found me.”

“I won’t forget,” he said, “how can I forget?”

Speechlessly he put his head in his hands.

Then he started in torturing me with his explanations, which were exactly like my own explanations.

“I think I began by. . Well, I suppose I was curious. I started out feeling that I wanted to know you, I had to watch you in action, observe you, you understand.”

“Oh no, wait. .”

“But I ended by feeling that you needed my help . .”

“Stop, wait, stop. Are you talking? Or am I?”

What he’s doing is what I’m doing; what I thought he was — is what I am—

Just as when we were loving, honeymooning. . There was only one of us. .

But if there is only one of us, then I’m alone.

TWO MEN from the Costa Rican Guardia picked us up in an aluminum boat after sunset, when the bugs had reached the peak of their feeding-frenzy. “Horrible,” the Englishman said. These insects were like bullets whining in the air. They got in your orifices.

“Are you the Rural or the Civil Guard?” I asked, getting into the boat.

“We are the Rural,” one of them said, and identified himself as a captain.

“Ay! Ay!” the other said, meaning the bugs.

We passed slowly along across the San Juan, a sleepy river overgrown with the images of stars. The Rio San Juan feeds into Lago de Nicaragua, the only freshwater lake in the world to have sharks. The sharks come up a channel from the Atlantic and find the lake. I didn’t think they would ever get into the San Juan, but it was something to consider before taking a swim . .

The motor was small and hummed absentmindedly, almost like an insect itself.

On the Nicaragua side of the Rio San Juan there was nothing but jungle. Across the river, in Costa Rican territory, a pier began, going back over marsh and mush toward dry land. On this pier a sentry walked. When the engine stopped we could hear him clicking the safety of his rifle on and off nervously.

And then at the end of the pier, where Costa Rica began, there was the oddest thing, a large deck with a bar, all lit up. On the bar a television sat in a cloud of moths, and the bartender was simply waiting all alone behind it, surrounded by a void.

There couldn’t possibly have been any customers for him in this wilderness, other than the sentry making a regular series of noises in the darkness at the other end of the pier. And now the four of us.

The bartender served up a gin and tonic for me, and a Coke for the Englishman. He was watching a Spanish-dubbed version of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

“Thank you,” I told the two Guardia. “Will you drink with us?”

“Not now.”

The enlisted man bit his lip hearing this. But the Captain was in charge of the whole outfit, and he wanted to show us how irritated he was at having been sent out at night.

“Your loss,” I said.

“Please,” the Englishman said. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or the Captain.

"Okay, I’ll practice my English with you,” the Captain said, and the enlisted man smiled happily.

They had a beer with us and loosened their shirts. The Captain identified his weapon as a.556 millimeter Galil, which he thought might have come from Israel. The previous week he’d been involved in a two-hour gunfight with some Sandinistas, trading bullets across the river. “The Contras saved you from death,” he assured us. “And your man from the CIA.”

“The American,” the Englishman said. “The one with red hair.”

“I never met him,” the Captain said, “I don’t know his hair.”

“But he’s the one, I'm sure of it. CIA. . Well, it was obvious enough I suppose.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Still, isn’t it shocking. You work,” he said to the Captain, “with despicable people.”

“Hey,” I warned him.

The Captain didn’t mind. “It’s a business of survival,” he said amicably. “If a guy wants to kill you, before you do something bad to me, then — I want to help him kill you. The Contras are good people. Sandinistas are very bad.”

“It's that simple, is it.”

“Yes, it feels very uncomplicated to me.”

“Well. . Hadn’t we better find a hotel?” the Englishman said to me.

“The Señorita will find a hotel herself,” the Captain said. “You have to come with us and be arrested.”

THE NIGHT was muggy and the wind had stopped. There was an odor from the Rio San Juan. This close to the water the mosquitos were bad, and so I kept walking. The middle of the town of Los Chiles was a vacant city block with a patch across it and a few trees interrupting its level lawn. This space was hemmed around by a concrete sidewalk that the citizens were using, in twos and three and fours, to take a little of the night air. Right across the street was the church, a low modern building more like a warehouse than a place of worship. Something must have been scheduled; its doors were thrown wide and it was bright inside. But either the people hadn’t come yet or they’d already left the place, because the benches stood empty.