Circles
by Erick Castrillon
Evian. There’s a name for you. In the morning she tells me she’s figured it all out—what I’ve been telling her about demographic trends and individual responsibility. I ask her what of it hoping she’s changed her mind, but she doesn’t answer. Instead, she takes almost an hour to get out of the shower, then another hour before she’s off to work. “Here we fucking go again,” she says, slamming the door. Ten minutes later I’m still thinking that she’s around, but it’s only her perfume that lingers.
At night she slides into bed next to me wearing her awful TAG uniform. Her breath reeks like cigarettes and weed on my face. Then she starts crying and complaining about how horrid her life is. I get out of bed, look out the window, and there’s not a star in the night sky. This is when I get serious and realize there’s nothing keeping my feet to the floor, except those clouds. Luna once said that my fate is to hold a fistful of sand in the rain, whatever that means. That my dad’s dreams—and subsequently my dreams—got caught up in the barbed wire of some fence out in the Mexican desert, somehow. And I disagreed with her when she said it.
I turn around, and for a second there she really had me believe she had it figured out about the individual responsibility bit. I get the urge to laugh at her tears, and I do. She says, “What the hell, Danielo,” hitting the bed with both her fists. Then she screams something I already know I will forget because I don’t think it even matters enough to her. Another stupid, stupid déjà vu.
In the middle of the night she’s standing right over me, shaking my body. Her blond dreadlocks are all in her face, and I jump out of bed startled like an idiot. I squint at the alarm clock and sit on the edge of the bed with my face in my hands. I rub the sides of my head and remember I was having a dream that my dad was crying. 3:52 A.M., the digital screen flashes. I feel a bad headache coming. Evian pulls the sheets from my body and they fall on the floor. She says that I’m an asshole and that she doesn’t want to be with me anymore. I tell her I thought she had it figured out, Evey, and she says she does, Baby, that she finally does.
“Please, let’s talk about this later,” I say.
She says, “Just get out of my bed, you fuck.” And so I put on yesterday’s clothes without really saying anything. At the door of the room I turn around and see that she’s crying again. I press my head to the frame and tell her that if she goes through with this baby, I swear she won’t see me again. Ever.
She wipes the tears off her face with the neck of her shirt and laughs at me. Then she falls back on the bed with her arms on her belly and says, “Please Danielo, Danielo. I wouldn’t want to see you if it were you I was giving birth to.”
“Only, you wouldn’t have me . . .” I say under my breath, careful she doesn’t hear me. I put my accordion inside its case, gather my drawings, my tools, the cat, and turn around. “I’m serious, Evian, if I leave now, I’m not coming—”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
“Get. Out!” She curls into a ball on the bed, and then she really starts sobbing. I feel guilty as shit and want to go to her and say that I’m so sorry, my Evey, my love. I’m thinking I didn’t mean it. Any of it. It’s just that sometimes you’re too much for me—but honest to god—too much in a good kind of way. I want to make her see we’re still practically only kids, and that having this baby’s pretty irresponsible. Even for us. But instead I take the accordion case by its handle, the cat and my drawings under the other arm, and storm the hell out before she can say wait. As I’m standing by for the elevator door to open, the cat works its way out of my hold and goes running back to the apartment. Oh, fuck you too, Mr. Moustache, I say, as I press the first-floor button. The door slides shut, and I recline against the back wall of the elevator, shaking my head.
Nights like these always remind me of Luna. When I was sixteen, she was seventeen, almost eighteen. Her black skin was smooth and soft, and mine . . . I was pimpled and angry. Lonely as hell, but angry nevertheless that most everybody seemed to fall into place, but not me. I felt so fucking inadequate all the fucking time like a booger on a white empty wall. In my darkest hours, my self-esteem pressed to the floor, I felt like crashing on purpose. Just closing my eyes and letting go of the wheel. Luna saw that in me, I think.
On my sixteenth birthday I did like she told me to. So I spent all the money my dad had given me on a sketch of my face at forty. She had done the same when she had turned seventeen. When the sketch finally came in the mail, I framed the canvas and placed it next to hers on the written walls of her room. I had my father’s sad face in the drawing. Not the eyes of a navigator like I always thought I had, but with an abstract gaze. Always so fucking bleak. And she was bony in the cheeks like her mom, almost sickly, but still beautiful. What was surprising, though, is that she looked happy.
That year Hurricane Andrew hit us. The week that followed, there was a mandatory curfew at night. There were no lights because the power was out for miles. You could actually see the stars cutting through the dome for a fucking change. One of those breezy nights around midnight (it seems like forever ago now) we walked to our school, climbed over the fence, and made love right under the palm trees where the freaks used to hang out. A few doors from my Blueprint For Success class. We didn’t kiss. Rather, she didn’t let me. She said, “I love you, but I don’t.”
I said, “What an awful thing to say.”
She said, “Shut up.”
Months later she disappeared. I went back to her house, and her mom told me she had taken a greyhound to LA after having aborted. She was a sweet lady, her mom. She said Luna said she was sorry, but that things weren’t like they seemed. That she had issues and that she was without. And her mom agreed with that, I bet just to make me feel better or something.
All this time I’ve been waiting in front of a pawn shop along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard since I left Evian’s. At ten somebody finally flips over the “closed” sign, and I go inside. I take out the accordion and put it on the counter. The clerk looks at it and says he’ll give me $75 for it. “Come on, man,” I say. “it’s a Mexican vintage piece, and it plays great. My dad actually dragged the thing through the dessert across the border in ‘84. It’s got history, brother.”
“Fifty,” the fuck-face clerk says, and I end up walking along MLK with $75 in my pocket, a bag full of art tools, and a folder full of drawings. A bus passes by, honking, and I get the crazy idea. California. I can make it, by God, I can make it. I walk right back to the pawn shop and ask Fuckface how much he’ll give me for all these tools. “Most of ‘em are practically in mint condition,” I say. He opens the bag and takes a look. He fingers a few brushes and pins, and says, “Twenty dollars.”
“No way, brother,” I say. “These are professional brushes. Each one is around twenty dollars. And you see they are all practically new.” He scratches his beard and exhales. I can smell his breath all the way from here, and it smells like ass. He empties out the bag and counts.
“Twenty-eight items,” he says. A cloud moves before the sun and the store goes blue. “Fifty dollars.”
How generous, I say, and he smiles like he’s doing me a goddamn favor. I take the money and ask him if I could use his computer. He says, Yeah, turning the monitor around and handing me the mouse. I look up the bus fare to California. $213, non-refundable, and it leaves at 5:00 P.M. today. That means I still got around six hours to get the rest of the money, and one hour to get to the station. I get out of the place, counting my money. I put half of what I got in one pocket, the other half between my sock and my foot. I walk along, and as I pass the bend of the corner, I’m still thinking about Luna. She had a car back then. We used to skip class and drive around random neighborhoods. And we would stop in front of the houses we liked. What we’d do, is we’d lie right on these house’s lawns with a boom box she always carried around. And she would play these old tunes from mix-tapes she had gotten at thrift stores. Then she’d tell me about her dreams. Especially her “runaway bus.”
She would drive this bus all the way up into Canada, and back into Mexico, and down, down all the way into South America. The crew, she said, would be the people that she picked up on her way around. “We’d tell stories,” she said. “And that’s all we would do. Just run away from all these fucking monsters everywhere. Like a pirate ship, sort of.”
I told her it sounded unlikely, and that’s when she said it—that my dad’s and my dreams got caught up in the barbed wire of a fence. I said, “No, they didn’t. Come on, Luna. No, they didn’t.”
As I’m about to cross the street someone taps my back. I turn around, and it’s a black fucker with a knife and a golden grill. “Whussup, rocker?” is all he says.
“Negro, please,” I say. “I have nothing.”
“Bitch,” he says, “I seen yo ass countin’ the fuckin’ money back there . . . . What’s that?”
“I need it,” I say shouting, almost. That’s when he swings his stupid gorilla arm and slaps the side of my face. I put my hand over my ear, and hear a loud ringing.
“Give it here, punk!” he gets in my face and pokes my stomach with the knife. It hurts like hell, so I reach into my pocket and take out the sixty dollars I have there. He snatches the money right from my fingers and runs away. I lift my shirt and see that I’m bleeding, and I’m thinking, Damn it, Evian. We had this shit figured out already.
Sixty-five dollars to two-hundred . . . $135. I need at least $170. Fuck! I got only one more thing to do, and it sucks to think about it. But it’s all I have left and it’s worth the cause. I’ll sell my work of seven long years since I started sketching people’s faces. I figure my best bet to do that is going to Bayside. I plan ahead and count the time I got left before departure.
Almost an hour later the bus drops me off at Bayside, and I start placing rocks on the corners of my drawings. I lay them on the sidewalk next to the freedom torch that’s at the entrance of the market. It would help if it weren’t so goddamn windy today. But I can’t complain. Just as I’m putting down the fifth drawing, a couple of tourists approach me and buy one of my favorites; a piece titled “Hideaway,” for $20.
Three and a half hours later I have nine drawings spread on the floor. I’ve sold five since, with a profit of $130. It’s after three already, and I’m getting impatient. I got to take a piss, so I leave my work and my folder with the rest of my sketches on the floor because I won’t be long at all. As I’m walking into the mall, a thunder sounds in the distance. Minutes later I come back outside and the whole fucking sky pours down on Miami. I run back to gather my drawings, but it’s too late. “No, no . . .” I say, as I walk back to the outside part of the mall. I sit on the ledge of a fountain. Damn it! I stomp on the floor. Fuck it! I pull my hair and close my eyes so tight it hurts. When I open them again, there it is. Suddenly I see it, and it relaxes me, and it enthralls me. I see it rain.
For some reason whenever I think of parenting, I remember the day my aunt was in labor. She was in the back seat of the car with her head out the window, next to all of my dad’s greasy mechanic clutter. She kept saying she felt like throwing up. That was way back when I was a kid and my mom was still alive. I remember tracing the rain drops on the windshield with my index finger. The rain would slide down on it at the red lights. But when we were moving, the wind would push the drops up past where I couldn’t see them anymore. My mom said she was glad it was raining because that meant the baby would have plenty of everything in life. Dad was at the wheel, nodding, and I kept tracing those drops sliding up, up.
My aunt’s baby was born a girl, and she liked the name Angelica. But my uncle arrived at the hospital pissed drunk some hours later and said his son’s name would be Pedro, a proper name for a strong macho. Yes, my dad said. Pedro is a fine name for a boy but not for a girl, hombre. My uncle pulled his hair and said that the name wasn’t fine, but that it was what it was, and that he should mind his own stupid business.
I never knew, God, I never knew about Luna. Sometimes I wish she hadn’t done what she did, but other times I give her credit for doing the right thing. I mean I was only sixteen, and we were not normal kids. She had to plan rigorously for her trip, and she knew she couldn’t have afforded that kind of company. But I would have followed her to Argentina and beyond like her shadow, unburdening, and like those old songs she used to say were so “trite and true.” That wasn’t all just silly child talk.
Ten after four already. I check the pile of wet drawings, and they are pretty bad. I open my folder to see how the remaining drawings are, and most of them are wet at the edges. I flip through the pages desperately, and almost at the end there’s a drawing that I had put inside a plastic protector. I look around because I can’t believe the irony of it. The piece is called, “Circles.” There’s Luna’s bus tracing the inside design of a marble. I laugh, feeling anxious as hell. I get up and start walking around, offering the drawing to every single person that passes by. Thirty dollars, I say, all I need is that. Please buy it. Please.
“No, thanks,” people say, avoiding me.
Four-thirty. I got to get the hell out of here. Start heading to the Greyhound station. I have no clue where it is, but I know there is a tourist guide booth somewhere in this mall. I turn to the map at the entrance, and once I locate the information booth, I run there and ask the lady.
“You have a car?” she says.
“No.”
“Well dear, in that case you have to take the metromover, get off at the metrorail junction, take the metrorail going north, you hear me? Going north. Get off at the Miami Arena station, and walk north on Arena Boulevard till you get to NW 10th street. You’ll see the buses on your left-hand side.”
I linger for a second, trying to absorb the information. Then I thank her very much and start running to the metromover. Once I get there, I’m out of breath and I have to wait for the cart. I look around and spot a payphone right in the corner by the stairs. I walk over and dial Evian’s number. The phone rings four times before she answers.
“Evian, please don’t hang up,” I say. All of a sudden I feel so shitty and so depressed.
“What do you want, Danielo. I’m at work.”
“Hear me out, Evey. Don’t hang up.” I have to catch my breath.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m leaving, babe. I’ll call you. It’s gonna be good, yeah.”
“You’re not making sense, slow down. Are you okay?”
“No. Yeah, I’m . . . listen I’ll call you. I’ll be a good dad, Evey. I can do this.” I’m fucking crying now. The cart stops with a squeal on the rail, and I say to Evian that I got to go, that I’m leaving, but that she should come with me. “I love you. Both of you.”
“Wait.” She says. I can tell she’s also crying. “Where are you?”
“Listen, I got to go, Evey. It won’t happen if I don’t go now. Please. Listen, I can do—we can do this.” The cart shuts its doors and leaves without me.
“Okay,” is all she says.
I hang up, and look at my watch. 4:50. I lumber to the stairs and feel like kicking through the fucking walls and jumping from the metromover bridge. But instead I scream, “Fuck!” at the top of my lung, tossing my drawings against the stairs. I fall back on the wall and slide down onto the floor with my hands on my head.
Maybe there were untied shoelaces in our lives, and guitars missing strings, and dislocated umbilical chords. Maybe so. I think of Luna and our dead baby as ghosts, interrupted. Vibrant and beautiful, and terrible things all at once. She embodies who I was—the boy in my mind that I’ve lost sight of while I’ve been busy instead wrapping myself in a bubble with duct tape and a vein on my forehead. All this anger . . . . Things are separate, independent, and unique, and I don’t know how I missed out on that. Evian is for water like I am for shapes. I think that’s good. I think that might be all we need, for now. There’s always tomorrow to run away if we feel like it. It’s not neglect that it couldn’t happen today, and besides we are not painted or mounted on a fucking wall to stay still for long anyway. We are what we are, and I think we are something good. There’s a porcelain axis somewhere in this rain that’s keeping our lives from derailing, and I have a fistful of sand with me. She’s rumbling underneath a rock with so much potential, working a job and living a life she hates. But I see a new life coming out of us, out of me and out of her, and I could already tell this falling rain will keep us.
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