Chapter 12
CASSIEL
THE THURSDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Cassiel had ordered it without deliberating.
May’s drink on the table, his own chocolate mint in a tumbler, both ready for them to walk out.
Cassiel wanted the park, the air. The morning was clear enough, and clear December mornings in the avenues had a half-life measured in hours before the marine layer reasserted itself.
May’s brown corduroy jacket was unzipped, revealing a green flannel beneath. His hair curled past his ears and the cold had put color in his cheeks, giving him a Hallmark movie effect against Sparrow’s half-hearted holiday decorations.
He’d been sitting on the same side of the booth since Cassiel’s birthday as though the table was a formality they’d outgrown, and Cassiel had not objected, so by now the arrangement had solidified into just what they did.
May’s knee bumped against Cassiel’s thigh.
Two months ago, the same contact area at his mother’s dinner table had been an event.
“I’m early,” May said.
“You are.”
“Three minutes early. Do I get something?”
“You get a gingerbread man.”
May blinked, only now noticing the cookie on the to-go cup’s plastic lid. He picked it up in one hand, then turned the cup to read the handwriting on the side. “You ordered for me?”
The specials sign read: GINGERbrEAD LATTE: IT’S ALWAYS SEASONAL.
“You were going to order the seasonal thing,” Cassiel said.
He remembered an image of May wearing an atrocious attempt at a Betelgeuse costume at Halloween, quietly drinking his pumpkin chai while Cassiel stewed.
“Oh, yeah? How many seasons have we Thursday-ed through? What if I was in a cortado phase?”
“Are you?”
May bit the gingerbread man’s head off, and whatever retort he had prepared dissipated as he took his first sip of the drink. He let out a happy sigh and Cassiel was vindicated.
“—Okay,” May said gravely. “So, I’ve met someone.”
Cassiel’s cup stopped halfway to his mouth.
“A crow,” May continued. “His name is Uriel.”
The cup completed its arc.
“He was on the same bench three days in a row in the park,” May said. “Same time. He watches me. Just me.”
Corvids did, in fact, recognize individual human faces.
They held preferences. They had been documented holding grudges across generations and bringing gifts to people who fed them.
The claim was scientifically defensible, which was the worst kind of May claim, because it left no clean angle of correction.
“It could have been a common raven,” Cassiel said. “They’re difficult to distinguish at a distance.”
“It was a crow.”
“The size difference is the main indicator, but without a direct comparison—”
“Cassiel. I know my own crow.”
Uriel, the angel of light. “Lily” was track four on the mixtape and so Kate Bush’s voice invoked the name in his head, accompanied by the angel wings doodled in the margin of the liner notes next to May’s handwriting—we gotta watch the red shoes sometime.
Cassiel had listened to the album version and then the live version and then the album version again.
He’d found The Line, the Cross and the Curve—the short film’s proper title—and hadn’t watched it, because May had written ‘we’ and Cassiel was holding him to it in a version of the world where he said things like this out loud.
May sat on his left.
“He’s a sophisticate,” May said. “Worldly but sneaky. I think he’s ex-CIA. Bond meets Bourne.”
Cassiel drank his chocolate mint and let it go. He didn’t need to be right about corvids, he didn’t need May to remember his own words. The morning was right. The knee against his thigh was right.
“We’re going to the park,” Cassiel said.
“I figured.” May nodded, raising his gingerbread latte. “Paper means park.”
* * *
They crossed Irving and entered through the path near Ninth Avenue, where the trees closed overhead and the traffic sound dropped.
Golden Gate Park in December was a muted affair.
The cypresses retained their dark green, but the ground cover had turned brown and the light filtered through the trees in pale lances.
The air smelled of eucalyptus. Cassiel’s eyes relaxed.
No contrast to manage, no squinting against directional glare.
May walked close. The gap between their shoulders had been something Cassiel measured once—six inches sticking in his mind like a mental stim—and now it was less than that. He had no need to measure anymore.
The path curved through a stand of eucalyptus, the bark peeling in long strips. May’s hand swung and brushed his sleeve.
“So!” May said. He’d eaten half of the gingerbread man. “Christmas.”
“What about it.”
“You got me something.”
“As the capitalist gift-giving tradition dictates.”
“You’re not going to tell me what it is.”
“Correct.”
Cassiel turned his ring. He watched May’s face—the brightness in it, the endless need to know that made his eyebrows shoot up and his whole body angle forward. The urge to hand May a piece of it, just enough to watch his face change, was tempting. But controllable.
“It’s something I’d need to set up,” Cassiel said. “At your place.”
He hadn’t planned to say it here. He’d planned to say it later—after the walk, maybe, or over text, where he could draft and revise. Instead it came out here, because May had been performing an interrogation with a paper cup and Cassiel’s mouth had opted for indiscretion.
May’s stride broke. He gave a watery smile that was possibly a grimace, scratching at the back of his neck somehow, with the fingers not holding a cookie.
“My place?” he echoed.
“If that’s—”
“No, yeah. Yeah, that’s—” His hand came down and the grin came up. The recovery was faster than the flinch. “That’s cool. Crazy you’ve never been, the shop’s so close and all. Uh, but I’ll need, like, twenty-four hours’ notice so I can—” He waved his hand. “…you know.”
Cassiel didn’t know. He’d never been. He knew it from what small snippets May gave away—a game console belonging to his brother mentioned once, the couch visible in the background of a late night photo, the kitchen counter in a blurred shot of a mug.
It was all partial information, like what he had seen just now.
The hand at the neck, the faltering, the grin reappearing.
“My apartment is great,” May said, falling into step beside him. “It’s a palace. You’re going to walk in and you’re going to say, ‘Oh May, this is beyond my wildest dreams.’”
“I’m not going to say that.”
“You’re going to think it.”
The path opened into a meadow—brown grass, a stand of trees at the far edge, the sky wide and grey above them. May’s voice was speeding up, papering over a crack. The performance was good, but Cassiel was getting better at hearing the seam. Still, he let it go.
May’s hand, evidence of cookie brushed away on his jeans, found Cassiel’s sleeve and held it.
CHRISTMAS DAY
Cassiel locked the door behind him and stood in Linden fourteen minutes at the bench with a jeweler’s screwdriver and the alignment template.
The counterweight came pre-set from the factory at 2.
0 grams. The anti-skate matched. He’d packed his bag with the rest: the replacement RCA cables, a digital stylus gauge, an anti-static brush, and the record.
He was aware this was unhinged, but as usual this didn’t mean it was the wrong course of action.
Cassiel carried the box out the front door. Clement Street was empty—shuttered bakeries and a cat watching imperiously from a second-floor window. He glanced up and their eyes briefly met.
The train car held only six people, none near him, so the turntable box sat on the seat beside him, too large for his lap and too expensive for the floor. He kept one hand on it through the curves.
May made this trip. Not BART from the avenues to Fremont with a turntable—but the transit equivalent.
The 29 to Sparrow, the bus-to-BART combination for Chuseok, for the other dinner, for every Thursday that required crossing the city on a schedule built around a dishwashing shift and a bus that came when it came.
May made this trip carrying containers, egg tarts, whatever the morning demanded, and arrived smelling like soap and rush and five-to-eight minutes late with a gap-toothed grin that made the room whole.
Cassiel had never calculated the route before. It hadn’t occurred to him. May always showed up.
The East Bay opened up beyond the window. Brown hills, freeway, the light widening. Fremont in twenty minutes.
* * *
At the house, the bulkhead light was on despite the hour, daylight in daylight. There was a wreath on the door now—artificial pine, red ribbon, a single pinecone wired to the bottom that had been spray-painted gold. His mother’s handiwork. She painted pinecones gold every year. He’d forgotten that.
He slipped off his shoes at the entryway. His mother’s slippers, his father’s house shoes, Minju’s ankle boots, David’s oxfords, Jaewon’s sneakers. And at the end of the row, blue canvas shoes, recently scrubbed clean. Cassiel arranged his loafers beside them.
His mother opened the door in her peony apron and a garishly floral hot water bottle was tucked against her lower back. This had May all over it. She peered at the box.
“What is that?”