The Stars at Noon

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THE AIR was getting thick — if you like calling a garotte of diesel and greasy dirt “air”—and so before the burning rain began I stepped into the McDonald’s. But right away I caught sight of the grotesque troublemaker, the pitiful little fat person whose name was forever escaping me, Sub-tenente Whoever from Interpren, getting out of his black Czechoslovakian Skoda and standing there on the dark street with my fate in his hands . . If I didn’t go to bed with him again soon, he was going to lift my card.

I hoped it wasn’t me he was waving at, but I was the only customer in the place. I’ve always been the only patron in the McDonald’s here in this hated city, because with the meat shortage you wouldn't ever know absolutely, would you, what sort of a thing they were handing you in the guise of beef. But I don’t care, actually, what I eat. I just want to lean on that characteristic McDonald’s counter while they fail to take my order and read the eleven certifying documents on the wall above the broken ice-cream box, nine of them with the double-arch McDonald’s symbol and the two most recent stamped with the encircled triangle and offering the pointless endorsement of the Junta Local de Asistancia Social de Nicaragua. . It’s the only Communist-run McDonald’s ever. It's the only McDonald's where you have to give back your plastic cup so it can be washed out and used again, the only McDonald’s staffed by people wearing military fatigues and carrying submachine guns.

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