Jacob Agatucci

THE GREEN CIRCLE

San Diego is pristine, spreading out in all directions, a maze of buildings and stretches of freeway running along an expanse of blue ocean. The sun is how I remember it, bright and dense, bearing down with a subtlety only the coast can coax from it, bright and transparent.

"You just visiting?" Bill asks me. He's an older man who has sat next to me the entire flight. I like him; he let me read most of the way. The only questions he asked were those mandatory for such a situation. What's your name? Where you from? What do you do? All easy answers when aimed at a stranger. Mark (I lie). San Diego originally. Nothing.

"I'm not sure," I say to him without looking away from the window. The plane is arcing, descending, and I can see Balboa Park below me cascading away in a flash of green trees and Spanish facades. "I've been gone the better part of five years. I'm just going to see what happens."

"It's a beautiful city."

"Yeah, I almost forgot," I say, caught up in a wave of nostalgia and homesickness.

"What were you doing in Europe?" Bill asks. This is the only time he has pried and I feel a pang of annoyance-clad disappointment.

Oscillating, I want to say, feeling suddenly pretensious. "Traveling, working."

Then the plane is descending, the high rises of downtown whipping by, residences cringing as we drop rapidly, screeching over a traffic jam on I-5 and onto the runway with a soft bounce.

Bill is quiet, leaving me to the excited rattle that is homecoming. I silently thank him. The plane taxis and I'm home, back where things start.

She had called me unexpectedly, before I left for the airport. Despite everything, this was a surprise.

"I wanted to say goodbye, again," she had said.

I couldn't say anything. I could only listen to her breathing and imagine the heart beyond the connection; it had been pressed against me only hours before, my tentative hand running along the outline of her smooth hip.

I had wondered if I should say it (if I dared say it; if I dared even feel it). Two perfectly unexpected sequences that had slipped by so quickly they almost seemed like some preposterously idyllic fantasy.

"I love you," she had said.

"I love you," I had replied. There had been no hesitation. It was the realization of a fantasy.

"I'll call you," I told her and I remember to this day how pathetic that promise sounded. I hadn't meant to call, despite everything. We had said, "Goodbye." Parted as if to say, "It's been nice, wonderful -- perfect -- but our lives are heading in separate directions so ..."

"When?" her voice, I remember this fondly, adoringly, was tinged with faint desperation, reciprocating my feelings in a way that is selfishly and insecurely satisfying.

"Soon," I promised her before I reluctantly left the place where things start.

Time was pressing down on me. Six thousand miles, two continents and an ocean's worth of time.

"You realize we're twenty-five?" I say to Steve as he hurtles his little blue Chevy down a side street, ignoring dips and potholes as if his rickety car is indestructible.

He doesn't say anything, he only nods, his face accepting but not happy. He pulls his pipe from the side panel in the door and makes a sharp left across traffic before handing it to me. Then he retrieves his baggy and begins rolling a small bowl, steering with his knees.

I hold the pipe out when he's ready and he shoves the tiny circular wad of green into the resin-stained orifice.

"Fucking twenty-five," he says and holds the lighter my way. I light up and the scent of marijuana thankfully smothers the thick odor of the pizza coming from the back seat. The pot-smell mingles with cheese and tomato sauce, creating a sickeningly familiar combination that immediately begins to tug at my appetite.

"Damn, you've already been married, been to Europe," Steve says. I hand him the pipe and he lights up, finishes the bowl and makes another left, skidding down a sidestreet he has probably seen a million different times.

"What do you suppose that means?"

"I don't know," he says and stops in front of an apartment complex. He hurries out of the car, grabs the pizza from the backseat and disappears into the building. He's back in a few minutes, stuffing his tip money in his back pocket.

"We've been out of high school seven years now," he says, pulling away. "In three years someone is going to start sending us letters about the ten year reunion. Probably one of the cheerleaders or the high priest of the social butterfly association."

"Terrifying."

We both crack up, something about actually attending a reunion and being stoned; a bad combination.

As we pull up in front of LaBella's Steve hastily throws back some Visene and offers it to me. I wave it off.

"You want to stick around and go on a couple more deliveries?" He asks me.

It's sinking in. This isn't just a visit. I'm really back. I really have to make some decisions. This is not a vacation.

"Sure," I say. Steve slips into the building to get more orders. I adjust the seat into a semi-horizontal position and lean back to wait.

Steve's face smirks. Over a coffee cup, over a beer bottle, over a bong, across a plate of food.

"How does it feel to be home?" He asks me for the first time, though I've been in San Diego a week. He moves slowly across the kitchen, bare feet slapping coldly on cheap tiles.

He squints at the microwave over the oven and turns around to look at me with pinched brows. "Shit, it's only nine!"

"Great actually," I say. I'm surprised I'm able to answer so honestly.

"Just like old times," he says. There's sarcasm in his voice. "Waking me up early."

"It's a beautiful day already." I'm looking out the kitchen window at a crisp yellow Sunday morning. "Let's go to Crest."

"Crest?" Steve says and his eyes widen, the first evidence that he might be waking up. "Crest sounds damn good. You know I only go to Crest with you. It just never comes up when I'm not with you."

He dresses quickly, piecing through the carpet of clothes covering most of his small studio's floor. He sniffs at a pair of jeans and quickly puts them on. Then he grabs a gray T-shirt and tests it as well. His face crinkles and he tosses the shirt over his shoulder and goes on searching.

I can see the walls melting away, replaced by the walls of his adolescent bedroom. Posters of archaic British bands cover the wall, a shelf sags under the weight of a record collection. Beyond his door comes the drone of a large Mormon family going about its daily rituals. How many of my mornings have begun with Steve sniffing out clean clothes so we could go out and get away?

"Ready," Steve announces.

The freeway is nearly empty, abandoned to church and hangovers, and we zip downtown where the streets are equally subdued. I can't stop staring. I can't stop smelling the air, sucking down that familiar atmosphere.

The Crest Cafe waits for us on the corner of 5th Ave. As we pull into the lot we're smiling, listening to a dusty demo tape of Steve's band he pulled from under his seat.

We walk in and get a table in the corner. Just above our heads, shafts of sunlight, heavy with silvery motes, cascade over us like a transparent roof. We eat and talk happily and Steve asks me about Europe and what it was like. I tell him about Amsterdam and Frankfurt and Zurich and Rome and Paris. I talk mechanically, having told the stories before, mouth and brain working in separate directions.

"I didn't even have a phone then," I say. "I'd go out every night to these phone booths, these fucking yellow German phone booths, and call her. It was winter, too. I froze my ass off."

"That's it!" Steve says. "A few phone calls and she's hopping the Atlantic. Sounds like a bad movie."

"It wasn't for a while," I say. "It was nice in the beginning. Honeymoon in Paris, trips to Amsterdam. By the time my work contract ran out and we were ready to leave ... our marriage contract sort of ran out too."

"Was it time?"

"Definitely time," I say. "What's fucked up is that now it's sort of hazy. It started here, it climaxed there, and then ended here. Now it's like I never left. Like it never happened."

The ceiling of sunlight had descended as the morning wore on. Our plates shoved to the center of the table, Steve and I lean back and stare at one another. I know it's as hard for him to believe I'm back as it is for me to believe it. Both of us swore if we ever left we would not return, that there had to be something out there that would keep us away if we were actually willing to go to it in the first place. Home is always home, though.

Steve is facing the window and he has to squint through the golden shaft's new angle.I ask him if he's been reading or going to school. Time for a new subject.

"I don't have time," he says. It sounds like a confession. "I haven't actually read a book in ... shit, I can't remember the last book I read."

"You work that much?"

"Five days a week; two 12 hour shifts," he says. "Good money. It's all under the table and tips are great. I pull in about $450 a week tax free."

I'm not convinced, even though it sounds good. I frown at him, halfway conscious of the gesture.

"On my days off I get together with the band and practice; that and try to catch up on sleep." He can't seem to stop now that he's started and I can't help but keep frowning. I notice how tired he looks for the first time since I've come home. Steve's features have always been invariably younger than his years. Now, however, there are faint lines under his eyes and his ever-smiling mouth is etched on either side with traces of strain. I see myself in my friend's face and I look away.

"What keeps you sane?" I ask him. The question I was never able to answer for myself.

Steve sits still, silent. His eyes close and I pretend it's because of the sun.

"I have no idea," he says finally.

We're both quiet then. The clatter of plates echoes form the kitchen and the dull buzz of early morning breakfast conversation washes over us. This is comforting somehow.

Normal. Healthy. Familiar.

"You ready to go?"

Steve drops me off at his place and goes to work. I contemplate a nap, how nice it would be to drift off into a dreamy sleep, belly full, head empty. I lay on the couch, belly full, head overflowing.

I have all the time in the world for the first time in several years. I'm helpless. I can't fathom it. Sometimes it seems like excess, sometimes it seems like repression. There's this guilt, as if I should be doing something, when for the past five years I simply wanted to find a moment when I could do nothing. I keep seeing the lines on Steve's face that were never there before. I see her. So familiar. A reminder of both emotional comfort and domestic squalor.

In the isolation of self, in having only me to think about, I feel strangely vacant. I don't want her back, but there's that essence of what she represented that is missing. I want to reach out with my tentative hand again and be able to stroke the line of a curving hip.

When I trace the road we took, the bright moments are pleasant speed bumps scattered along the endless line of an autobahn. All I see is Steve's face as I have just now seen it. Familiar and altered and worn.

I shudder.

The well-known input is there, as if it followed me back, would always follow me. I can still sense it and am helpless to ward it off. It smells deep, it feels black, it looks like suffocation, it sounds like pursuit, it tastes like bright blinding light. It is what commitment becomes when it is no longer wanted.

"Going to the show tonight?" Steve asks.

"Yeah, I'll be your roadie."

"You know we're going to suck, don't you?"

He always says that. Every since I've known him, a history that drags itself from the depths of high school, he says that before a show. I sense the drive in him; I see the passion he funnels through a razor-edge wit and a cynical, borderline nihilistic, view of life.

"We haven't practiced in three weeks," he says calmly. "We're gonna be chasing each other all over the place. But hey, it's Jo and Andy's so who gives a shit."

The complaints go on a bit longer, but since I know what they all are I don't really listen. Lack of communication between band members, lack of money to produce a decent demo that will get them shows at places other than Jo & Andy's, managing time so they can get together and practice. All the basic concerns (communication, money, time), just different syntax. I'm convinced none of this matters to him, really. He loves to create and play music despite it all. He would do it by himself, could do it all by himself, if he wanted to. He'll never stop, he'll always be writing and playing and improving until someday, maybe, something will happen, something good, something that will break through the wall of cynicism he has erected just in case it doesn't ever happen.

It's been so long since I've seen him play. I missed it while I was away. I remember waiting for the letters about disastrous shows, knowing it was never as bad as he portrayed it. Watching Steve play was like sharing something with him, something beyond words and memory and bonds of friendships. It had always been something that grounded me.

Despite the worn features and the tired eyes, Steve possesses a control which is embedded deep within, a compass that always guides him back to his focus. Sometimes this is why I think I enjoy being near him. Somehow, as we bitch and complain and fuel our cynicism his drive remains intact and I hope that some of it will rub off on me, slip into my head through osmosis.

"So what are you going to do?" He asks me suddenly, looking up at me with a wide smile spreading across his face.

I've been floating for a month now, riding the easy-going wave of a San Diego summer. Money is dwindling. I haven't worked since I left Europe. I figured I had saved up enough suffering to take two or three months off. Steve is all I have left here really.

I don't know what I'm going to do and I say so.

"Still thinking about going north to go to school?"

"Yeah, this fall," I say, confident for some reason. It's actually the one thing that it seems I should do. "School seems like a good idea."

"You could stay here and work," Steve says. "I can get you a job delivering pizzas. You'd be a very important member of the community, like me."

I laugh, not that it's that funny. I almost would stay, just to be around my one true friend. We speak the same language, conjure the same memories, and this fact is like a comfortable insurance policy on my sanity. Yet, the little voice in the back of my mind tells me that would be irresponsible.

"When the hell did we become adults for Christ sakes?"

Steve sits back, a bong between his legs. He's rubbing a bowl between his fingers like a booger looks at me as he slips it into the bong's aperture. Then he stares into the red circular tube as if contemplating my question, his head shaking gently from side to side.

"I don't know," he says and lights the bong. Slowly, gracefully, hypnotically, the bong fills with coils of smoke. Soon after, the entire room is a cloud of gray and thoughts drift out and around and back, transformed for a while, their density broken and rearranged.

There's a scream. Just as we walk outside. It floats above the noise of crowded sidewalks and dissipates under the strain of traffic. Steve doesn't even notice, but my skin must have became thin while I was away and I look around nervously.

"Come on," Steve says. He'd forgot his extra strings in his car. The band was set to play in ten minutes.

I hurry after him. We shoulder our way in and out of crowds of people. Mobile clubs have popped up for the weekend in various downtown bars and restaurants and there seems to be a line of people on every corner. Music stretches out and around itself from different sources, combining into a dense esoteric fog of sound. Vehicles cruise by, tinted windows flash, and there is a feeling of unavoidable tension in the air.

We had to park several blocks from the club Steve's band was booked in and as we walk we bump into a bum on every corner. They mix in with the crowds, waiting for eye contact, their hands snapping out so that you run into upturned palms and find yourself suddenly staring down into desperate rheumy eyes. They cleaned both of us out of our spare change on the way to the club and our lack of anything to offer quickens our pace, keeps our eyes directed into the distance. It's like being inside a pinball machine, bouncing from bumper to bumper, every fourth of fifth one lighting up with a cracked and rotten smile: bonus!

We shed the main thoroughfare and foot traffic lightens up. The Chevy is parked on a side street and we hurry up to it as if it's an island in the midst of swirling waters. Steve unlocks the back door and begins rummaging around the devastation of tapes, boxes, trash, clothes and unread books that litter the inside of his car. He begins to cuss.

I lean on the side of the Chevy and wait, staring into the shadows of some warehouse lots across the street. The car shakes a bit under Steve's efforts and he continues cussing to himself. There's a clank or a rattle every now and then.

I look up at the sky. The stars are dull. When I look back at the warehouses there's a silhouette standing directly across from us. His is a deeper darkness, a silhouette on black. A cold prickle makes its ways slowly down my back, along the length of my arms. I can see the slouch, a line of ratty hair. There's something waded in his left hand and in his right he holds an object I can't make out, though it's long and widens at the base. I feel myself tense and walk around to the driver's side of the car where Steve's ass hangs out the door.

The guy begins crossing the street. He has a slight limp and as he gets closer I see the bottle he has in his right hand. I nudge Steve and he steps back and looks up at me, then turns his head towards the scrape of the man's gait. We both stand in front of the car, waiting.

"Need a cleaning?" The guy says. He's emerged from his darkness and is a bundle of ratty jackets cast in the alien green of a street light. He holds up the bottle of Windex and I can see the question play itself out in his eyes, which are surprisingly lucid. After a moment of our silence he holds up the crumpled newspaper in his left hand to reemphasize. "Your windows, man. Do they need cleaning?"

"Ah ... ," Steve says. "Sure. Go for it."

The guy begins in the front and Steve goes back to his search.

"So what are you guys up to tonight?" Window-washer asks me.

I'm surprised. I've never actually had a bum make small talk with me.

"My friend's band's playing in a club down here tonight."

"Sounds cool," he says. He's rubbing vigorously at a blotch on the glass, his breath coming rapidly. He's young. Maybe thirty. Maybe less. The dirt makes him look older.

"Newspaper's not so hot. I need to get a hold of some paper towels, you know."

I don't. I have no idea and I don't say anything.

Steve emerges from the car again, the packet of strings held triumphantly in his hand. He smiles at me and then looks at Window-washer as if he's just seen him.

"I used to play down here too," Window-washer says. He's putting the finishing touches on the front window, rubbing a corner with a flannel elbow. "You ever play the Green Circle?"

"You played the Green Circle?" Steve asks. He's impressed.

"Few years ago," Window-washer says. He's stopped cleaning and is leaning against the car next to me, his breath short and strained. "Little three piece band. Not too bad."

"Not if you played the Green Circle," Steve agrees. He's been trying to get booked there for two years.

Silence descends, sudden and dense. Window-washer pushes off from the car and begins to head back to the warehouses.

"Fucking bad luck," he mutters but we both catch it. I see the waves of memory that must be going through his head as if we shared some form of telepathy. Ruminating on the past, of things that have been and things that are.

"Hey," Steve calls after him. He jogs across the street and hands Window-washer a buck.

We begin walking back, preparing to enter the pinball machine again, arcing our elbows defensively, aligning our eyes straight ahead towards some mysterious purpose.

"Think he really played the Green Circle?" I ask before we resubmerge ourselves.

"I hope so. That was my last buck."

Summer is coming to a close and I have continued to float, trying hard to avoid contemplation. I simply settled on the fact that I told myself I was going to go to school and did my best to avoid thinking about it, to avoid rationalizing it out of the picture in favor of something less worthy.

On Friday nights, the Salmon House transforms from restaurant to jammed social watering hole. This is where we are tonight. I help the band set their equipment up, qualifying me for free beer. When everything's ready I drift, find an empty table, hoping to be able to watch and relax. It's not to be tonight. The inevitable past rears up.

"Oh -- my -- God!"

There's a sudden vision. A static display that has resisted time and remained intact. A tiny clique that struggles on like persistent urban nomads maintaining a cyclical wandering. Faces flash in and out. Hugs and the smiles and exclamations are passed from person to person. There's quite a few Oh-my-gods, a Holy-shit-it's-been-a-long-time.

Just as quickly as they emerged they're gone. All except one. She stays, sitting down at my table. Her smile is one I've actually missed. Actually remembered. It's an old memory, separated by the five years I've been away. There's enough of something, though, to draw us together. We talk about chemistry in eleventh grade and Mr. Jones's class in twelfth grade and ditching fourth period and hey-I-heard-you-got-married. We spend the entire evening like this, talking and laughing under the comfort of nostalgia, not really probing how we're actually doing Now, beyond the briefest and most polite inquiries.

The conversation hangs with us, we hang with each other, beyond the Salmon House, back to her house. It moves from the living room to the bed, where pictures from all those years are spread out and laughed at and peered at in amazement.

It goes beyond even this. It moves into darkness and night light and lying next to one another, still talking, still laughing, until suddenly there is a long drawn out silence.

"Will you answer me honestly if I ask you something?" She says to me. We're both lying on our backs, staring up into the darkness where the ceiling should be.

"Yes."

"Do you want to touch me?"

"Yes."

Then there is only the tentative hand and the curving hip.

Later, without noticing the clock, we wonder if we've damaged our friendship somehow. I don't know, but I don't say this, I just listen to her wondering, pondering. I realize I don't know what's going on in her life, whether she has a relationship already, what she might think now of things I may have been able to predict five years ago. All she knows of me is that I may have been married and I may have spent some time in Europe. All she really knows of me is what she knew before I left and I'm not sure how strongly this applies now.

I left. Now I'm back. For her, is it as if I've never really been away? Time becomes a blink, so inevitable and savagely consistent its passing becomes intangible. This toys with the reality of those years. I did something, began a career, ended a career, got married, got divorced. Now I'm back. That's all I can think about. Now I'm back. So did it really happen?

Sleep comes thankfully, taking me away, a momentary rescue.

When I wake the next morning, the feeling is there. I know this, but I still sniff it, stare at it, lightly touch it, listen to it, tentatively dip my tongue to test its flavor. I discover it waits patiently for me, as if wondering if I really want it to emerge, maybe wondering, itself, how real it is.

I lay there, on my side, my head propped on my elbow, peering at her brown shoulder and brown back. I see the beginning of a bikini strap tan line, so white that in the early morning light I almost think she has put on a bra while I slept. I remember last night, when the bikini bottom tan line was pressed against me, how bright it was then also.

The feeling flutters impatiently and I just let it rest there, on the edge, waiting.

I stand and I stare. Into the back of my little truck, packed neatly for the journey north. Summer is over, as much as that can be realized in San Diego. I haven't thought about this day, purposefully not thought about it, shoved it to the back of my mind. I'm just going to do it and I want to tell myself it's because I've learned discipline and responsibility and some other user-friendly adjectives that shed a warm fuzzy light on men and women and how they function.

It's ten o'clock in the morning and the sun is bright, the sky clear. A flawless light has descended over my grandmother's neighborhood of green manicured lawns and pastel-colored houses. Three months I have taken shelter here, calling it a vacation. I shake away old images, hoping Steve will show up before I crack.

I stopped by LaBella's last night and just missed him before he went on the road. I waited in the bar, nursing a beer, but he must have had a ton of deliveries. I left him a note telling him I was taking off the next morning and to stop by if he got a chance. I know he won't, though. This has always been the way it worked when I would come back for visits. No goodbyes.

So, I stand in the hot morning sun, now flashing blindingly off the perfection of the block. I stand there, waiting, as a gesture to I know not what. It's slipping away, that feeling of security, the assurance of the known and the valued. Who will I share my language with now?

The phone rings and I hurry into the house to catch it. I pick up the receiver and say, "Hello."

"Hi, it's me," a familiar voice says. "I just wanted to say goodbye."

The feeling is there, so strong, so solid, so seemingly right. It bids me to say, "Come with me, let's be together," and I fight it off, reluctant to relinquish my grip on the line, unwilling to find out which way I will drift. She wasn't supposed to call.

"I'll call you," I promise.

"When?"

"When I get there."