Denis Johnson: The Stars at Noon

A humanitarian in Hell — worse even than my own observer-punishment! His life must have been marked by more than several bad crimes. This guy, at some point in his earthly existence, must have been truly evil, possibly Hitlerian.

I’d have demanded his autograph, but what was the point? We can’t remember our sins here. We don’t know who we used to be.

“Now that we understand each other,” I said, “what about some supper?”

“Oh, well, isn’t it kind of late?”

“Lunch then.”

“That’s much more reasonable.”

There was something about him I liked. “You make me sick. For a price I’ll sleep with you,” I told him.

MAKING LOVE with him was like passing through a patch of fog. .

He was a pale and faintly freckled person, with that sort of flesh that bruises at a touch . .

WHEN HE was finished he sat up and put his hand on his pants, which were draped over the telephone on the nightstand, as if he wanted to grab them and go, run off, jump out the window. But it was his room.

I told him I wanted to be paid in dollars.

“Everybody wants dollars, don’t they,” he said.

It’s a rule I have never to say anything further on the subject of my wishes after stating them to a jay-naked customer, because they get you talking, and pretty soon you relent.

He turned on the bedside lamp. “Well then,” he said, picking two twenties and a ten out of his wallet in the jarring, interrogator’s glare. “And you're quite right, too. There’s talk they’re going to roll up the currency.”

It was bright as a flashbulb in the room. I felt as naked as I was. “Roll up?”

“Yah.”

“Roll up. .”

“Run down some of the black-market stuff. Call in the foreigners and check their dollar supply, and so on. Us foreigners. Our dollar supplies.”

“Fuck me.”

“And — would I have to pay extra for it?” He put out the lamp, and then cut back the sudden blindness with his lighter while he got a cigaret going.

“Check their dollar supply.”

“Right.”

“I have no dollar supply. I live entirely on black-market cordobas.”

Wordlessly he smoked in the darkness. .

“You don’t have to start thinking how to ditch me,” I told him. “I’m not after your dollars. I’m here for the air-conditioning.”

I stood by the window, where the cooling unit’s breath could find my armpits.

Things weren’t perfect. But this was quite the recipe for soothing financial anxiety — U.S. money, cool room, quiet night, moonlight down through the Venetian blinds, and the blue hair of his cigaret smoke drifting in the slats of light. .

“You’re thinking so hard how to ditch me your head is smoking,” I told him, “what do you think of that?”

“I’m thinking something quite a bit different,” he said . . Faceless voice in a dark bedroom somewhere . . “What I'm thinking is that I could very easily stroll right out of myself. This isn’t the first time I’ve committed adultery. I do it quite often. But I can’t stand it. .” His face bloomed behind the glow of his cigaret . . “I don’t really miss anybody . . I feel I’m in danger of throwing my life, away. .”

“You’re not moving. You’re not in danger.”

“I'm not moving,” he said. “I'm not in danger.”

Now I heard the adrenaline running out of his voice. He’d probably just stepped off a fifteen-hour flight.

“I came here to be generous,” he was saying in a flat tone, “but there’s a chance I’ve overstepped. Perhaps I’ve given away too much.”

“It’s late, darling,” I said, “let’s not start hauling out the snapshots of the family.”

“Of course. I’m being messy.”

He was a mess, all right. It was a wonder I hadn’t spotted it right off. But they’re all a little demented away from home.

He offered me a cigaret — a filter, as I discovered on accepting it, from Costa Rica. Filter brands were rare lately in Managua. “Derby,” I told him, quoting the sharks who manufactured these lung-scrapers, “es el cigarrillo. Thanks.”

Before I knew it I was asleep, and I trust he took that as the highest compliment. . After all, you can’t sleep in the same bed with all that many of them — a few you wouldn't want to shut your eyes, even briefly, in their presence. But I woke up in the night and he was out of bed, standing by the window. I was lost. It was the kind of moment that beats with a sinister heart. The air-conditioner hummed raggedly and the whole building seemed to have erased itself, along with everything else. Leaving him, me, and this black dislocated room . .

And then I heard some drunken reporters upstairs arguing in German or whatever and smashing a bottle, and I felt the world again and saw that this guy was probably not too horrible, just another foreign businessman, the dregs of his company’s executive work force, or he wouldn’t be here, would he — just another confused person with a briefcase and a poor report to bring back.

I don’t know how he guessed I was awake. “Shall we meet again?” he asked me.

“Again and again. Anytime you’ve got fifty U.S.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course . .”

Oh, I felt bad . . I liked his style. I enjoyed his company. But please, actually I’m not in the habit of taking an emotional bed-check in my dark heart each time some libidinally impoverished lackey of pig billionaires gets the wrong idea. Or what if it was the right idea? In any case it was an idea entirely his own, wasn’t it, and let him stagger around his rented bedroom holding his head. At that moment I had to get a little rest. . How fast the tropics sap you. .

I COULD walk through hours like doorways in the middle of the night, if only the middle of the night would last for hours — midnight’s the only time a somber if not exactly a reverent breath blows along the air of Managua — holding in my head a few lines from one of the great poets of the Inferno, William S. Merwin. I can turn onto one of these rackety lanes cobbled with mashed fruit and urchin-dung and hear, honestly hear out loud, William Something Merwin saying I have seen streets where the hands of the beggars / Are left out at night like shoes in a hotel corridor . .

Of course, the streets aren’t literally like that here, they aren’t lined, I mean to say, with whacked-off appendages, but the hotel corridors are, I’ve left the Inter-Continental in the very small hours with someone else’s money in my purse and seen the hands laid out by the doors, and the lost voices hung on wooden pegs behind the doorman’s podium, and the tongue-cut bellboys delivering potions and poisons along the halls. And I’ve stepped out under the awning, and across the small parking lot where the taxis usually stand I’ve seen men in white robes and hoods conspiring together, and the haunted Negro singer Robert Johnson swinging from a rope by his broken neck.

They left him there for days, and eventually the rope lengthened so that his feet, in blue tennis shoes, were flat on the dirt; he seemed to be standing there with his neck in a noose and his chin on his shoulder, thinking.

A guy who’s been strung-up drops down gradually on his rope like a slow-motion spider. The rope stretches. Pretty soon he’s standing around on the ground just like the rest of us, only he's deceased, grey-blue, textured like a sausage, and undergoing his putrefaction at a rapid clip in this sweltering mush of a climate. You can't even see the rope around his neck because it bites in, and the flesh swells up around it, the flesh incorporates the very instrument of its demise. .

Or maybe this is a twisted memory of a hanging I saw in Matagalpa . .

But whatever had happened in Matagalpa was already the discredited past. Impossible to prove. And it explains nothing. Nothing explains why I did what I did. .