Denis Johnson: The Stars at Noon

I dreamed they were boiling him alive. I watched his face develop like a photograph in a swirl of chemicals. In the hospital I heard his wife screaming yes, that’s his face, that’s finally his face. .

Playas del Coco is a restful spot, having that purposeless tropical ambience, that sugary irrelevance in which every night is one night. Mainly it’s a stretch of beach between two humps of hill, a cove, I guess. I lay out in the sun to be healed by the motion of coconuts rolled up and back by waves, crabs scuttling around and digging into the dark beach, schools of tiny fish pecking my ankles. The beach was greyish, composed of a volcanic silt that puffed up in a powdery mist around my ankles when I went wading. Not entirely appealing — but oh! the soldiers weren’t going to come down from the mountains and bayonet you. And with these people, the color of my passport wasn't interchangeable with the smell of blood. I stayed out until the sun came over the eastward rock about the same time every morning and pierced every grain of sand and leaf. Then it was a little too hot for the beach.

The village has a couple of nice restaurants and also its slummier section, with foot-high homemade bridges wobbling above rivulets of sewage, where the bar stays open even in the rainy season. One of those places where the alcoholic expatriates and Costa Ricans pal around together woozily and argue over the antique jukebox — anyway it boasted an all-Latin selection of 45’s.

Only these losers were around. Real people came here in the winter, the dry season — not in August.

The day after I fell off the wagon again — was it a week or so I’d been there by then? — I wandered the town convinced I’d seen the Englishman somewhere the night before — where could it have been? Being hung over made me feel as if I were dreaming . . I heard him calling from the periphery of things, I’m dying to meet you . .

It was pouring rain — when I get to San José, I promised myself, it won’t rain like this.

The town was about five blocks long and one block wide. Inside of ten minutes I’d been everywhere. Places weren’t open, there was nothing to see, I was sopping wet and shivering with a chill. I followed a sign to a chapel off the beaten track — in the bush, in fact, down a muddy, depressing, and increasingly unnavigable dirt path. I took off my shoes and went barefoot, the shoes were useless against such deep muck. I needed to get out of the rain, I realized — where was this chapel? — soon enough I’d be in the arms of the Lord, so to speak, out of the unbelievable wet. . But it wasn’t a cozy little chapel at all, it was open to the air, six rows of benches facing a big, rude cross under a thatched roof, and the wilted wreaths and incomprehensible badges, fronds, ribbons, and emblems all over the altar, the insane bric-a-brac of Centro-american jungle homage — dressed in such paraphernalia it looked the scene of a combined virgin sacrifice and Boy Scout meeting — chilly and damp, and the beaded strings of rain coming down loud as a waterfall on all four sides. And there I had a revelation.

Nothing fancy, but now I knew: It’s not enough to observe. It's never enough to observe suffering. With my eyes open I have to let that suffering pay for me. I have to confess, alone in these solitary places, unheard in the roaring rain, that the suffering of the afflicted pays for me. Either I’m Christ or I’m Judas: it’s kill or be killed. .

Are you the Christ? One of us has to be . .

In a sense I was playacting, but in another sense I was trying to communicate something to myself. . My mind turned over random events of the night before. There'd been a dogfight in the dirty cafe at the end of the street, and then a party because one of the barmaids was quitting to get married. And I had a stupid idea that in the course of it someone had delivered a message to me from the Englishman, I couldn’t quite remember what it was. I couldn’t quite remember the messenger.

I went back to Playas proper and started looking for him, half histrionically, half seriously — but the soda was closed, its awning fallen over its face, and the cafe of last night’s wedding party was shut for the rest of the stormy afternoon, and the street outside it was empty . . It was just a pouring-down rain with nobody in it, and the water running down the road in veins and jostling the fallen coconuts in front of the cafe.

Well, I’d been so terrified of crossing the border, but there was nothing on the other side, just me. .

SO; NOW? — it’s none of your business, but the winter finds me pursuing culture in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. I spend my afternoons in the café at the Teatro Nacional, where the waiters do everything to please you but suck your toes; and they don’t turn up with the check in their hands the second your café con leche is gone, either. I couldn't bring myself to go back to New York now, even if I could raise the fare. Besides, where I live I can speak all the Manhattan bastard Spanglish I want to with my building's owner. . I'm staying in reasonable comfort at the United States Hotel. It isn’t by any means the Amstel, which is the nicest one downtown, but it’s kind of homey, the proprietor isn’t at all Centroamericano mellow, he’s from Panama by way of the Lower East Side and has the idea no non-paying humans should appear anywhere near where he’s leading his life. Don't ask me why he thinks any of his neighbors can read English; but he’s put up a little sign over the entrance that says DO NOT STANDING IN FRONT OR JANG AROUND IN DOORSTEP, the same as he did, we can depend on it, above the door of his tenement down on Avenue B.

I spend long evenings at the Key Largo, the infamous supper club where you can’t get supper. . It’s set back from the street, only a few doors down from the Hotel Amstel, in its own small misty jungle, with the loneliest green neon sign on Earth clutching the corner of the building. The grounds are dark and dangerous, but inside there’s too much light — they have to keep an eye on the customers. I stand aside, with the other girls, and I drink when invited; upstairs there are rooms; sometimes I leave with a man, sometimes I come back, often I go home. . And there’s never any trouble, nobody insists on representing me, nobody abuses me; I’ve never been spoken to unkindly.

I’m a favorite of the less widely travelled Americans, the young men who would never pay for love in Kansas, and I’m hated and desired by those more sinister — the man I begin with this evening, for example, a knobby-jointed Alabaman off an Air Force or Navy base in Panama or Puerto Rico with a trembling puppy-dog earnestness I’ve learned not to mistake for innocence . . So much character expressed in a face made of absolutely nothing! — no eyes, no nose, no mouth . . I rib him that if things fall the wrong direction, he’ll have to come back here some fine day in an official capacity and level all the buildings and destroy all these people he’s been dancing with. “God, I am sure as shit ready for a lady who speaks English,” he says, burning like a human flame, “but do you have to blame me about mischief I haven’t gotten into yet?” We dance and kiss. His shirt smells brand-new and tainted with the perspiration of his celibacy. He holds me at arm’s length a minute, reading my face, and then he puts everything to rest with a certain smoothing gesture of the hands: “I do a job. I don’t know anything but my job.”

“Same here.”

He stands back and watches me dance . . I stay away from the guitarist so as to avoid his simpering degenerate requests for money. Does he really think we all came in here to hand the colones away? If I had the price of dinner to begin with I wouldn’t be in here shaking my money-maker for these looped Caribbean refugees.