Chapter 13 #2
Cassiel’s apartment smelled like nothing. No candles, no plug-ins, even the dish soap was unscented. The only something was Cassiel. Warm skin, woody and sweet from the cologne he wore so subtly that May couldn’t smell it properly unless he was next to him, face pressed into his neck.
The spare key was January new. Given to him without ceremony on a random day with “so you can get inside,” as if he thought the concept of keys opening doors was an explanation.
May let himself in and toed off his shoes next to Cassiel’s, which were aligned with the wall at a distance that implied a ruler had once been involved in the habit’s formation.
The layout was weird. You entered through the hall, then the bedroom was there.
A single queen bed, big enough for two, a nightstand, and an adjustable desk.
Crucially, the desk was also where the CD player sat, with Positions on Amplitude, Vol.
1 still in the disc tray, the jewel case next to it.
May had checked inside. It had been like finding a love letter, except he’d burned the CD himself.
Then there were these French doors which opened into the living room with the bay windows you saw from outside, and three separate lamps at different levels. Seemingly random. But May knew better.
Cassiel’s own turntable, some make and model May could not begin to guess, had its own corner close to the plush couch.
So basically, there was only one optimal route here. To get to the couch you had to walk past the bed. To get to everything else, you had to walk past the couch.
“This is a weird house,” May told Cassiel.
“It’s Edwardian,” Cassiel replied, a touch defensive. “It has character.”
May carried on his prowl.
There were teas in the kitchen cabinet, alphabetized—assam, chamomile, earl grey, genmaicha, sencha. May had never once seen Cassiel drink any of them. He’d taken a photo and sent it to Lauren with no caption. Three skull emojis back.
He reheated Miss Mary’s kimchi jjigae in the microwave and slorped it out of the container like soup, standing at the counter, no rice because he didn’t know how to use Cassiel’s rice cooker, which had too many buttons on it and, anyway, May didn’t want to ask.
The pianist next door practiced most evenings, according to Cassiel.
Classical mostly, a scattering of jazz standards accompanied by muffled singing.
It was Chopin tonight and May was on Cassiel’s bed, watching him do something fiddly at the desk.
The piano came through the wall muffled, and for a few beats the room became pressurized.
Squished, like the month. The light from the bay windows came in from a distance that didn’t match the angles of the room.
May was on the bed. Cassiel was at the desk. The bed was in the room. The desk was—
The May on the bed turned onto his side and inhaled deeply, his chest rising, a vessel filled with the scent of Cassiel’s cologne.
His fingers found his cheekbone. Fingertips pressed hard. The piano shifted into a chord and the room came back—the lamp, the duvet, the line of Cassiel’s shoulder blades through his shirt.
“Nocturne in E-flat,” Cassiel said, without looking up. “She’s been on it since November.”
The glass had come and gone so fast it barely registered. Cloud crossing the sun.
“Rubato is too heavy,” May murmured into the pillow, a voice not his own. Cassiel did not seem to hear. Neither did the pianist next door.
* * *
Cassiel texted around eleven every morning, always after he’d eaten and dressed.
Because he was like that. Sometimes a link to whatever insane video he had watched the night before, assumption implicit that May would never watch it himself.
Sometimes he sent a picture of something he saw from the bus.
Once, he just sent a lowercase hm that May had stared at for far too long before accepting it just meant hm.
On this day, it was a photo of a huge jar of citron tea from H Mart.
May
OK I’ll bite. What’s wrong with it
OPPA
Hmm.
The extra ‘m’ warranted further interrogation, but May had things to do. Podcasts to edit. People to help. Money to earn, crucially. May sent off the volley, quickly, before getting back to his work.
May
This. This is why
LAUREN says
you get off on being withholding!!
The pages in his yellow notebook still had names on them, STDY Melanie, STDY Hector, but not Cassiel’s, not anymore, and that was the way it should be.
His parents’ insurance card was still in his wallet, good until his birthday, and the envelopes on the counter were still sealed, and the mornings kept on coming.
* * *
“Wu! Okay, Episode Three—you’re gonna love this one.”
May opened the link. Kevin Knows A Guy, Episode Three: A guy named Ben Shum in Oakland, a third-gen kid trying to find a song his grandmother recorded in Hong Kong in the early seventies.
Granny’s name was Wong Suet Ying. She’d been a singer for a couple of years before the real boom of Cantopop, then she married and moved to the States.
Somewhere, a 7-inch single existed, pressed for a label that folded in 1974.
Ben had a photo of her—his grandmother at home, young, a record and a turntable on the shelf behind her.
May could make out WONG SUET YING on the sleeve if he squinted; the rest was unreadable.
The trail went through a Cantonese music archive in Vancouver with partial catalogs, a dead end at a warehouse in Kowloon that burned down in ’87, and a collector in Fremont who might have a box of uncataloged 45s from the right era.
May edited. The work ran on the rails now, hands ahead of thoughts, the waveforms a language he didn’t have to parse consciously. What was new was the episode, the story. Kevin was a radio natural, his voice smooth but actually warm. He cared about what he was talking about.
May listened over the voice notes from the grandson.
He’d never heard the disc, Ben said, but his mom used to hum one of them and now his mom was gone too and the song was lost. Wong Suet Ying’s voice wasn’t there yet.
Kevin was still looking. But May felt the shade of where it would have to go: the gap in the audio where that voice would eventually sit, if it existed, if the vinyl survived the fire and the ocean and all the years.
He saved the project file and closed the laptop, laid his arms down on it and dropped his head into the cradle of his arms.
It paid. The amount and consistency wasn’t the point. It was money from a skill instead of a body in a room. The gap between Wuyue Huang and May H.
He played a clip for Cassiel the next week, the part with the Fremont collector describing his catalog system, a guy named Beaver with a voice like a trash compactor for monster trucks.
Cassiel listened with his head tilted. “I can hear the reflection.”
“The what?”
“The hardwood floors. No soft furnishings. The sound bounces.”
“Oh, sure. Because you are a dolphin bat. What do you mean the floors?”
“I can hear the reflection off the floors.”
May stared at him and laughed. “I love your brain.”
The word ‘love’ whooshed past, casual as anything, snagged on nothing. Cassiel’s ring clicked and May wondered if the floorboards heard.
A THURSDAY IN JANUARY
Green Apple Books was across the road from the dim sum takeout spot he liked.
To get there from his place, they walked past a fantastically sketchy-looking massage place with a neon sign shaped like feet that May stopped to snap a picture of every time.
He sent it to Cassiel, who was standing beside him, judging. May didn’t care. He was happy.
Outside the bookstore, two young guys were taking turns posing with the gremlin jester statue, one of them trying to get the angle right while the other draped an arm around the painted shoulders. May watched them for a second, grinning, and passed by.
Once inside, Cassiel disappeared into the narrow passageways between shelves while May drifted.
He found a book with an exciting title and what looked to be a dinosaur with a naked man’s torso on the cover and brought it over—“Cassiel, look. HOT PTERO-DACTYL BOY-FRIEND”—and received a frown and a withering comment about typographical choices.
May took it back to where he found it. Further into the maze, he found a copy of Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto with a previous owner’s annotations in pencil.
Tiny handwriting, exclamation marks drawn with circles. Three dollars. Used. Loved. His.