Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

I had a gin and tonic and half a chicken in a dark restaurant. My eyes felt as if they’d been baked and I could hardly hold my head up. I concentrated on these sensations and felt nothing at all to speak of about the Englishman or his trouble.

I spent the night at the Hotel Rio Frio, down by the water, in a room the size of a closet. Next door was a station of the Guardia Rural. They hung around up there on the balcony, slapping at bugs and talking, keeping an old recoil-less rifle pointed over the railing toward the river. He was probably in there, the Englishman, unless they’d turned him over to the Guardia Civil or the OIJ.

The next morning it rained. I sat in a soda eating fried eggs and drinking Coca-Cola. The decor was familiar: on the wall an inexpensive high-gloss print of Jesus Christ surrounded by his pals at the Last Supper, and another print of bulldogs in vests and derby hats, with cigars in their mouths, playing poker on a train. The proprietor was an older man of the Laughing Buddha type. He sat at the rickety table beside mine and played his radio for me. I asked him to leave me alone.

I was still exhausted. I napped, and dreamed I saw the soldiers coming for him, and the redheaded CIA man and another all too obvious American, who was showing the redhead his camera as they walked along together. Such a simple detail, their heads bent toward that object, but its pointlessness gave so much reality to the dream that when my eyes opened and I saw the rows of bottles and various unmatched worm-eaten tablecloths around me I insisted to myself, “That wasn’t a dream, somewhere that was really happening, and I saw it.”

The rain was falling harder outside and the damp was blowing in — the place had only two walls, the rest was wide-open.

About fifteen minutes after I woke from this strange dream, the redheaded American man came in accompanied by the Costa Rican from the OIJ, both of them wearing dripping ponchos of bright yellow. “You look very much a team,” I said to the American.

He only shrugged, reanimating the flow of water from his poncho, and shut his eyes with a certain weariness. But the Costa Rican, who appeared very happy, said, “We are an unbeatable team.”

They both shook the water from their ponchos and sat down without taking them off. I saw with some relief that we wouldn’t be long about our business.

The American held up two fingers to the proprietor as if hexing him. “Two beers. And give me a napkin.”

“English? North American?” the proprietor said.

“He wants a cloth to wipe his face,” the Costa Rican said. “I’ll give him a napkin. What else does he want?”

“Two beers,” the Costa Rican told him.

“I don’t speak English,” the fat, smiling proprietor said to the American in Spanish as he set down the glass before him. “Nobody will teach me how to speak it.”

“He doesn’t speak English,” the Costa Rican translated for the American.

“Terrible beer,” the American said after he’d tried some. He sat back and waited pleasantly, one leg draped over the other and his hands folded in his yellow lap, a bead of foam clinging to his moustache at the corner of his mouth. He was looking at the Costa Rican.

“I don’t like people like you,” the Costa Rican told me. “I don’t like giving you money.” But no amount of irritation was going to dull his sense of triumph. His face shone as he reached under his poncho and then handed me a manila envelope with that unmistakeable heft to it — inside was cash.

His contempt made it easier to take the money.

The American had with him a leather satchel which he put on the table and wiped with the cloth.

He opened it and took out a sheet of paper.

“One more thing for you to sign.”

Unbelievable. I just looked at him.

“It’s a nuisance, isn’t it?” he said.

I signed my name to it and asked him for a match, drawing out a cigaret, and he gave me a light. I handed him the paper.

When I thought of asking him, now that it was all done and ended, what would happen to the Englishman, I had no more strength to do it than if my blood had turned to water. “I’m depressed,” I told him. It was stupid, reaching out to him for comfort. He closed up his satchel.

The OIJ man had paid for the beers and stood up.

“Vaya con Dios,” I said bitterly.

He nodded to me and pulled up his yellow hood. I looked away.

The American was staring at me with moisture all over his forehead, it was unbearable. I thought he had something to say to me, I was sure he had some piece of news about the Englishman. But then I realized he only wanted to go on watching me suffer. “Maybe they’ll give you a commendation in Washington,” I said: I wanted to offer the thought of some future satisfaction in exchange for whatever he was taking from me now. The sound of words shook loose his gaze. He followed the Costa Rican out into the rain.

MAYBE I fell asleep in the restaurant, but in any case I dreamed this goodbye: almost verbatim it was the conversation we’d actually had when the Guardia Captain had arrested him the night before:

I was sneaking off — but the Englishman caught me: “Where are you going. .”

“I thought I'd grab a bus south.”

“You mean we’re over. You've done something to free yourself. You're free.”

I chattered back at him, but I couldn’t hear anything I said.

He said: “And I’m caught, I’m caught, I’m still here.”

I WAS in that town just a day. In the afternoon I got ready to take the bus out of Los Chiles — it was waiting right out in the muddy street before the Guardia station, next door to the hotel — nicer than Nicaraguan buses; nevertheless quite similar to a wooden crate. My hair was still wet from the shower.

But the most terrible thing happened. When I came out of my little cubicle of a room at the Rio Frio Hotel, he was there, coming down the corridor.

A pair of Guardia were with him, but not the ones from last night.

I was so confused I actually turned around and tried, for a brief and most ridiculous couple of seconds, to pretend I hadn’t seen him or hadn’t recognized him or something like that.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“They’re letting me use the telephone. It’s the only one in the entire town, or so I gather.”

If you’d taken me out in the town square and stripped me, set me on fire. . No punishment could have been more fitting or awful than to be trapped here with him in this narrow corridor.

I started backing up toward the bathrooms and desk and phone, because we were going to have to touch brushing past one another if we simply kept going.

“What are you planning to do now?” he said.

“Oh, God — I don't know,” I said, “settle down in some nice community someplace and watch the little boys grow up. .”

“I’m the one who changes, who experiences insight," he said now.

Oh, Jesus.

“There’ll never be an England,” I told him.

Think of the monster he must have been on Earth, imagine the concentration camps, the oven doors he must have slammed, the screams he must have turned his back on, dusting off his hands, to be sentenced to follow around a quick-change artist like me with his heart cracked and the saliva rolling down off his tongue — that, that right there, that’s the kind of person who always gets humiliated. .

“What do you want me to do?”

“You might let us pass,” he said.

I WENT to the seaside resort — call it a village — of Playas del Coco, and I wouldn’t go on to mention it, except that the Englishman kept figuring so boldly in my life. Nightly he wandered through the shambles of my dreams, dripping with chains, rarely getting a central role but always around, and three or four times I woke to find myself standing upright in the middle of my room at the Playas Hotel, as wet and salty as the ocean seething quietly in its own bed just yards away. I’d sworn off drinking, not for the first or last time — that was the cause of these lurid dreams and night-sweats; in the middle of one such episode, when I turned on the light before washing it all off me in the shower, I found a blue crab the size of a plate crawling up from the drain . . I ran from the room, collapsed naked on the walk outside, and screamed and screamed until the lights came on in the neighboring bungalows and the desk lady’s husband came and carried the thing away to have it cooked. I felt that the Englishman was calling out to me from the edges of these dreams, “I’m dying to meet you. .” I’m dying to meet you. . What an awful thing to say. But this hallucination seemed to get in the way of my waking hours, and I started looking for him everywhere. Half of me remembered he was only a dream now; but half of me believed he’d come to town. .