Chapter 11
MAY
The kiss kept invading in confetti shrapnel.
As a rule, his brain didn’t really do whole things anymore, hadn’t since the accident, maybe not before.
What it did was fragments, surfacing without warning, often out of order—cold knuckles on a cold face.
The near-silent thud of a CD case against a chest. Cassiel’s calluses on the back of May’s neck.
They were fragments but they were burned in.
Clear, kept. Hot glue globs that had cooled and solidified.
Some mornings the fragments were bright and he’d lie in bed with the alarm going off and grinning at the ceiling like a lady in a movie who’d never been kissed and then had finally been kissed. Except May had been kissed before, just not by an angel on a back deck in the cold and dark.
Both kinds of mornings, May got up. He made the bus. December kept wintering and holidaying on around him, just shinier than it would have been otherwise.
May couldn’t stop singing, was the thing.
On the way to the stop, then on the bus, and in the alley behind Lau Kee.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas,” except May only really knew the first day, mumbled through two through four, and was only trying to get to fiiiiiive golden riiiings.
Ah-Keung told him through the door to shut the hell up, which made May sing louder, and Ah-Keung laughed, which was rare.
December was doing something to everyone.
The texts had changed, too. May still fat-fingered his way into typos the phone’s autocorrect couldn’t parse, still sent them anyway, but there was a rhythm shift in the replies.
Cassiel sent a photo of a chubby tabby with concerned eyes on a parked car. May sent back Is that your cat, knowing it wasn’t, and Cassiel sent back No. which allowed May to ask Do you want a cat? and Cassiel answered I want this cat. and May took a screenshot.
Cassiel called him on a Wednesday. May scrambled outside, having heard his phone go off in the brief blessed interval between the end of “Red Sun” and the beginning of “The Days We Spent Together.” His thumb hovered.
He held a breath for five. He picked up in the alley with pruned hands and his heart buzzing in his teeth, because Cassiel didn’t call.
Cassiel texted in complete sentences with periods and sometimes semicolons, which May considered both diabolical and attractive, but Cassiel did not call.
“Track ten,” Cassiel said. No hello. There never was a hello.
May’s hand tightened on the phone. Track ten was Vienna Teng. “Stray Italian Greyhound.” He’d written something about fireworks on the liner notes and then worried it said more than he meant it to, and then left it because the Sharpie was permanent and he wasn’t starting again.
“The section after the instrumental,” Cassiel continued. “The pleading turns into a whisper.”
“Right,” May replied, finding his voice, his heart still going bzz in his mouth while his brain tried to find something clever to say. “It’s like, I can’t do this right now, and then… okay, but what the hell do I do?”
“Yes,” Cassiel said. “The modulation makes it… effective.”
May grabbed his right cheek with his moist, gross hand and squeezed.
His face was warm and the man on the other end had listened to a song about being ambushed by hope and called to tell him about modulation.
He laughed, slightly high, a little hysterical, and said, “Yeah. That’s—Sure. Did you know it’s actually about—”
When they finished talking he went back inside and washed nine more woks. The water was too hot and his hands were red and he didn’t care about any of it.
* * *
The package arrived on a Wednesday. This was noteworthy because May’s mail was an eldritch horror he couldn’t look at directly for that way lay madness.
Sealed envelopes from UCSF Medical Center, an out-of-network hospital (classic), and a radiology group.
All introduced to May by a sporty little silver coupe.
American excellence, top to bottom. Sealed envelopes were potential energy and opening them was just shuffling the energy around.
It didn’t go anywhere, so it may as well stay in there.
A package, though. Packages didn’t come from radiology groups.
The return address was in Hayes Valley, and the handwriting was round and bubbly in orange ink, which narrowed the suspect pool. May sat on the kitchen floor and opened the package with a butter knife.
Tissue paper. Fancy. May hurriedly pushed it aside and it revealed a shirt.
Light blue oxford, button-down collar, definitely cotton.
It was nicer than anything he’d buy for himself.
The fabric was thick, the stitching looked tidy to his eye, and the label showed it came from somewhere local. Fancy.
There was a note in the same orange pen:
Happy early Christmas! Don’t be weird about this. XOXO L. B. Heineken
May, determined not to make it weird, ran and held it up in the bathroom mirror.
The light blue did something to his skin tone that his navy had never managed.
Lauren had seen his single dress shirt at the birthday party, probably smelled the sales rack on him, and staged a fashion intervention for a guy she’d met in person twice.
This was something a nosy, weird person did, and May appreciated it.
He didn’t bother questioning how she knew where he lived.
He folded the shirt back into the box as neatly as he could manage. Christmas, he decided. The dinner would be the debut.
He wandered back into his living room and lay on the couch for a while, humming to himself.
* * *
The next day, Kevin Chao called him.
“Wu! Dude!”
The name was a punch in the stomach. No one called him that anymore.
The only person who even called him Wuyue anymore was his mother, and right now she wasn’t calling him much at all.
Teresa Ma had chosen that name for herself when she came to the States, then given her children Chinese ones and expected them to answer to them.
The raw files arrived in a Dropbox link and May opened them on the kitchen counter with the same laptop from college, the fan whirring like a small animal in distress.
His hands found the shortcuts before his brain supplied them: compression, EQ, noise gate.
Muscle memory, as he’d hoped, and that worked for everything but his attention span.
So he compensated. He had the System now.
He worked in chunks, stitched together, checked against the green notebook where he’d written the timestamps.
It was slow. It was Wuyue’s, and it was May’s.
He’d had another booking on Friday, a company holiday party, rooftop bar in SoMa.
The guy’s name was Dimitri and he had a fun accent and he laughed at all May’s jokes.
May had danced the dance, followed him around, chatted to everyone he saw with a festive-looking hat.
He’d also had two cocktails on the company’s dime because he wanted to know what ‘butterfly pee flower’ was.
It was purple, and it tasted like purple.
He was slightly let down to find out, after texting Louis in the very clean bathroom, that ‘pea flower’ had an ‘a’ in it.
Afterward, he’d taken the bus home, skipped his meds because of the alcohol, slept magnificently, and STDY would be paying him for that, too.
The STDY notification came that evening.
Payment received—$160.00. Client: Cassiel L.
Session: Dec 5. It sat on his lock screen, still Cassiel’s face, the same picture May had snapped at Sparrow.
The notification banner landed right across Cassiel’s forehead like a price tag in reverse.
It wasn’t for the birthday party. It wasn’t for the kiss.
Those facts didn’t stop the gross feeling. May swiped the banner away hastily.
Now it was something like dinner time. May put Mariah on, ’tis the season and all that, set his phone inside a mug, and decided he was going to cook.
He pulled out the cutting board and the bell peppers he’d bought optimistically on Sunday, and he fulfilled the promise by cooking them. He ate at the counter with the pan still hot, peppers slightly charred how he liked them, and the kitchen smelled oily and garlicky, and May felt like a real boy.
A THURSDAY IN DECEMBER
The place Cassiel worked was on Clement, just eleven blocks from May’s place.
He’d walked the whole fifteen minutes. The fact of it: that Cassiel’s other life existed fifteen minutes from May’s actual life, that every Thursday he’d been riding forty minutes across the city to sit in a café with someone who worked fifteen minutes from his front door—would have been funny if it weren’t also making his chest tight in a way he associated with things mattering too much. Or acid reflux.
Linden & Pratt occupied the ground floor of an old building with iron bars in the windows.
It had a dark green awning, gold lettering, a window display featuring watches on velvet stands and a tiny card that read HOROLOGY & REPAIR in a font that doubled as an eye test. The door was heavy as May pushed it open, the bell above it brass and quiet.
He stepped inside and the scent rose. Metal polish, old wood, something dry and papery underneath, like a library for little steampunk critters.
Lamaria was at the front desk and waved.
A bald Black man in an army green vest emerged from an office with a sandwich in one hand, stepping into the low light from the gooseneck lamps. He looked to be maybe in his forties or fifties or possibly sixties. It was hard to tell.
“You’re May,” the man said, chewing. “I’m Peter.”
“Hi Peter! He talks about you,” May said, shaking his hand.
“No he doesn’t,” said Peter, leisurely dragging out the ‘o’ in ‘no.’
“No, he doesn’t,” May confirmed.
Peter snorted and gestured toward the back bench with his sandwich. “Casio, your guy’s here.”