He decides to wait to say hello so as not to get recruited into unloading gear. Stretching out on the hill, he relaxes and watches clouds, letting the air of anticipation linger. It is his favorite time, the next—the time before the Thing—whatever it is—that’s going to happen. It is the moment before walking out on stage. It is the moment before he strums. It is the moment before the kiss. It is the threat to time—the infinite present. He is never nervous when he senses something afoot, the reversal of the equilibrium, the change in the tide—he’s ecstatic—the next is everything—because once the change comes, it will be over.

[similetimeline]

Facing downtown, buildings that sigh by leaning on each other—you know, old age—on the right side of College Square, Blue Sky coffeehouse sits, its rustic awning leaning over the sidewalk, oxidized iron dripping when it rains. At almost all times, when Travis can’t find Ian by cell phone, it can be assumed that he is hard at work on something in the basement at Blue Sky. Travis can see in his mind’s eye, entering the shop, turning left and walking down the loud iron-rimmed stairs, turning right and leaning down on the landing to peer out at all the tables spread out across the concrete basement floor. On the left side of a fountain in the center of the room, Ian would be at “his” table (though only Travis referred to it as that) scribbling away at letters or papers, or looking at slides, or sifting through stacks of photographs.

Today, though he just steps into the main room where a large corkboard sits to the right, every inch covered in stapled announcements. It is equivalent of geographic strata—dig deep enough through the hundred tattered flyers, thumb tacks and staples and maybe you’ll unearth an R.E.M. or Widespread Panic poster—and one of the first one’s he spots is unfortunately a show he can not attend. It reads:

“See Travis drink. See Travis play. Travis likes to drink and play. Friday August 4th, The Washington Street Tavern.”

Ian and Travis had written it up and typeset it on Ian’s computer a while back, with blank space to fill in the date and place with a Sharpie, and Nick had suggested a favorite painting of his by Picasso, a guitarist. Travis smiles at the bill. The face of the guitarist is long and distorted and seems possessed by the instrument he holds upright in thin bony hands, eyes closed. Though the guitar player in the painting looks nothing like him, Travis can see he own face in cubist pieces. Looking over the other bills and posters, Travis recognizes a few—doesn’t recognize most of them. A lot of shows had already passed. But after looking over the bulletin board for several minutes, Travis can’t find anything that interests him. He hits the street.

The lightposts prove to be more helpful. More recent flyers show up there, including two more copies of Travis’s poster. One other poster stands out, and Travis decides this is the band to see. Not because of the funny name, Elf Power, but because they’re playing the Georgia Theater, an old cinema house on the corner of Clayton and Lumpkin, which meant they must be halfway decent. Their press photo is goofy, too. They’re all smiling and laughing at something off-camera. Travis much prefers it to the oh-so-typical, pensive staring in different directions to the horizon.

The show doesn’t start until ten, though, so Travis figures he has an hour or two to kill. He realizes the possibilities are horribly endless. He can get a cup of coffee and watch people. He can get a drink and watch people. Or, if he wants to, he can just sit right there on the sidewalk outside in the summer evening and watch people.

He opts to wander aimlessly while a memory of Daphne drifts into the vacancy in his mind. The two of them had sat at the table by the window of the Athen’s coffeehouse watching the world going by. It was their freshman year.

“What do you want, Travis?”

Travis was surprised by the question. In those days, Travis and Dizzy had been content with sitting in coffeehouses discussing the inane, the political, the metaphysical even, but it was never too personal, never too serious. The question was evidence of changes. The future, as distant as it still was, life beyond the boundaries of their then-new little town, was slowly coming into focus.

“What do I want?” Travis had repeated. “I want what I’ve got, really.”

Daphne disapproved, so he added a postscript, “and a motorcycle.”

“What do you want?” he asked Dizzy.

She wrapped her strawberry blonde hair around her finger and gazed out the window, too. “I don’t think I know just yet.” Then she turned to him and scrunched her face, dissatisfied with her answer. Glamorously, she posed, “I wanna’ be famous.” Spreading her arms out widely, like a Scarlet, she said, “I just want them to love me.”

Back in the past, the pair had moved away from the conversation like gazelle shifting lightly away from an unseen predator, joking about it, too. A predator, Travis thinks, sipping his beer in August, 1995, that is still out there somewhere—and now he knows it’s a man in a gray suit, with obsidian eyes. He was the man who took your ticket for the ride. Somewhere amongst screaming and kicking purple, orange, and green horses there is the hint of fear that something terrible is coming for them. Maybe it has already come, arrived on the day of their birth. It is not just that they cannot move freely that terrifies them, though that much is hard to bare; it is that they cannot run away from him, and they know he’s coming for them once they’re tired and worn out. Travis knows, because he feels it too, even though he isn’t on the ride. Just then, an old lyric comes back to him— “Life’s a carousel / we’re all chained to the movement.” And it dawns on him that he’s kidding himself. He looks around, not so much at the bar, as around at the world, the people and things in it. He gets up and walks over to the window and looks out at the street. There it was, the ride. The whole thing was a ride.

He walks back to the bar where he finds Phil standing, unoccupied. Phil says, “Hurry up and order another so I can have something to do.”

“That’s all it is, isn’t it?” Travis asks, wistful. “We all just want something to do.”

“Jesus,” Phil says. “I didn’t think you’d get all deep on me.”

“Sorry.”

“Naw. I keed! I keed! I expect Travis Fleeting to be a philosophical guy.”

Travis is confused now. He knows Phil, but not outside of Mean Mike’s. “How’d you know my last name?”

“You think all I do is work here? I’ve seen you play at DT’s.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you’ll have to excuse me, man. I thought all you ever did was work here.”

Phil smiles. “How’re you doin’?”

“You wanna’ know the truth?”

“Yeah, actually. I got time.”

“I feel great. Really great.” Travis pauses. “But… I don’t know if I’m just bored, or if I should stop being bored, or… I don’t know.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to get over that.”

“It’s just that nobody seems to want to be happy, and I guess I am, and I guess it ticks me off. It’s kind of hard to be happy when it seems like so few other people are.”

“You know what?” And Phil leans on the bar, eyeing Travis’s half-full beer, “Another beer will solve that problem.”

“Here’s to that,” Travis raises his glass and Phil toasts it with his meaty fist.

“I don’t know,” Phil sighs. “It’s cliché man, but I say don’t sweat it.”

Travis nods, but really, sweat what? Fame? Money? He had neither. The future? The music? How could he ever worry about that unless he just stopped playing? How would that ever happen? It was as unthinkable as amputating a limb. I want what I’ve got. He still doesn’t feel assured. Phil has wandered off again, so Travis goes back to the table by the window.

Something new, something new. Travis travels a loop to the very thought that had sent him out into the damp evening. He sips his beer, his Paps Blue Ribbon, then looks at it and laughs. Apparently, his curiosity only went so far. But then, beer was beer and yet there were a thousand kinds. And surely the first didn’t taste like the last. After years of playing his guitar, he’d learned to create sounds that before, he could not have even distinguished, let alone generate. This is what he wants: the comfort of finding elegance in the minutia, in the absolute infinity found between every inch, every second. Let someone else find the next big thing. He sits quietly and finishes his beer, finally free of nuisance thoughts.

And then, he orders another.

“What?” Travis asks and looks. There was a particularly unattractive girl at the booth window.

“Yours,” Nick said casually out of the side of his mouth.

“Sonuvabitch!” Travis curses under his breath. “I’ll get you for that.”

As they pass out of the crowd into the intersection of Lumpkin and Clayton, Travis and Nick raise their voices again. “Oh my God! She was awful.” Nick hits Travis in the shoulder. “Did you see the hair bagel on that one.”

Travis doesn’t reply. Retaliation would have to wait. When someone called “yours” everyone was alert, paying attention to the game. You couldn’t get someone then—unless you were good. You had to wait until no one was paying attention again.

The basic premise of the game was simple, and had evolved out of a game that Nick and Travis had originally developed their freshman year. The original game had been invented for the purpose of commenting on the attractiveness of a woman while in close proximity. The player would spot a target, turn to the other and inquire, “What time is it?” The second player would ask, “Where?” and the first player would proceed to name a city that was North, South, East or West of the players’ location. Once the “target” was spotted by the second player a time between one and ten o’ clock was giving as a rating.

By the time they’d gotten adept at the game, Travis and Nick had also invented twenty or so sayings to follow the time as coded comments, like “I think you’re shoelaces are untied,” which was meant to be interpreted as “She’s too young/illegal for you.” One summer afternoon at an amusement park, Nick and Travis had been debating over a certain young woman’s attractiveness when Travis said, “She’s your girlfriend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Nick, thinking he had forgotten one of their secret phrases.

“She’s ugly and you can have her,” Travis replied.

It stuck. “Yours” developed some obscure rules of its own over the years. A player could never lie to get another player to look at the target—could never claim that the target was pretty/handsome if they weren’t. And the peculiar rule-of-three came into being, meaning that if you were given the same boyfriend/girlfriend three times in a row in three different locales, they were yours for life.

It was all terribly shallow and childish. Nick and Travis knew it. But really, they prided themselves on being shallow. There was more time for fun if they didn’t have to worry about trivial matters like manners or politeness.

“I saw her last weekend. She was out with that Vic guy,” Travis replies.

“There’s something about him I don’t like.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“What is it?” Nick asks seriously.

“I don’t know. He’s a little flashy, don’t ya’ think.”

“I guess.”

“Like, whenever Dizzy’s around, he acts real friendly. But then, a couple of weeks ago I ran into him at a barbeque a friend of mine was having, and he just blew me off. Didn’t talk to me for two minutes.” Travis takes a drag off his cigarette and thinks about it.

“You know, Daphne hasn’t been real receptive to my presence lately,” Nick says.

“Well, you guys weren’t even talkin’ there for a while,” Travis offers.

“Yeah but we worked all that out back in January.”

Coming to a short wall along the parking lot’s edge, Travis jumps up on it and starts balancing his way alongside Nick. “Maybe if you lost a little weight, she would like you.”

“Shut up, Fatty.”

“You’re so fat, you’re blood type is Ragu.”

Nick starts laughing, and Ian and John stop to turn around. “What?” asks John curiously.

“He said, ‘You’re so fat you’re blood type is Ragu’,” Nick explains.

John and Ian both laugh before moving on up the street.

“Mmm…” Nick says, pulling the corners of his lips down like an angry samurai. “Me must get money from a-tee-em. Much money for good drink.”

“Hai,” Travis replies with a bow and jumps down off the wall.

The group make their way through the crowd in front of the Georgia Theater, looking at all the people waiting on show tickets as they go. Nick leans over conspiritorially to Travis as they made their way. “Over at the ticket booth. She’s buying one.”

“What?” Travis asks and looks. There was a particularly unattractive girl at the booth window.

“Yours,” Nick said casually out of the side of his mouth.

“Sonuvabitch,” Travis curses under his breath. “I’ll get you for that.”