Chapter 15 #2
The afternoon was golden. Literally. The sun came through the west-facing windows and the living room went golden, the color of fried batter, and May sat on the floor with Jaewon building a block tower that Jaewon kept destroying because destruction was fun.
Someone’s phone was playing trot music from the kitchen, and the house was full of people who wanted to be there, and May wanted to be there, and he was, and when the blocks fell again, Jaewon shrieked with delight.
May laughed with him and began the reconstruction.
* * *
When the room flattened, the tower was six blocks tall.
The light through the west windows was the same, and Jaewon was explaining something about the blue block’s name being Balulu or Pazuzu, and May’s hands were still on the carpet, and all of it was still there—the jeon, the trot, Miss Mary’s voice from the kitchen—and all of it was frozen.
He’d been here a second ago. He’d been inside it.
The block in his right hand was wooden and had a letter on it—J or T or something, the paint was chipped—and he could see his fingers around it but the fingers were the impression of fingers.
Someone had painted a picture of a hand holding a block and May was looking at the picture.
Jaewon’s voice came from far away, the signal thin. The source was somewhere else.
“May-hyung? Hyung, I said Balulu wants to be on TOP.”
“Yeah,” May said. “Yeah, Balulu goes on top.”
He put the block on the tower. The motion was right, the block balanced. Jaewon said something else and May’s mouth answered it and the exchange was normal, fine, happening on the other side of a window that hadn’t been there before.
He was on the floor with Jaewon, and then he was standing near the kitchen, and the interval was—there had been an interval. He’d stood up. He’d walked. The standing and the walking had happened and May had apparently missed that part, bzzt.
Cassiel’s mother said something to him. She was bright today, haloed in the light. Her mouth was moving, asking a question he knew the answer to but the words were blurry, or maybe that was just her face.
“I’m good! Bathroom—just, one sec.”
His legs took him to the hallway. The hallway had family photos on the wall—Cassiel as a kid, Minju in a graduation gown, the parents younger, pretty, black and white wedding.
The photos were in frames which were on the walls and the wall was in the house.
The house was in Fremont. May’s body was in the house.
This was good information. His brain, which felt like it was on a dimmer, was still making connections.
The bathroom door closed behind him. The lock turned. His hand had done that—the hand that knew locks, the hand that knew doors, the hand that was presently cutting through water like it knew what to do, because it did, because it was a hand.
He checked the bathroom mirror and found the face in the mirror was his.
He knew this because he had seen this face before in many mirrors and in the black reflection of his phone when it was locked.
The face with the dark circles and the left eye smaller than the right and the mole on one cheek that looked like a dead pixel—that one.
May’s face, attached to a head which contained memories of being May.
He raised two fingers. Pressed them to the cheekbone. The bone was there. His fingers felt the bone and the bone felt the fingers and—
Bubble unpopped. The two sensations existed in parallel and did not merge into the single experience of I am touching my own face.
He pressed harder. The bone didn’t yield.
The pressure just increased. The mirror showed a person pressing two fingers to his own cheekbone.
He tried again, harder this time, but nothing else happened.
Then the face in the mirror drew closer, because he was leaning toward it. He pressed again, turned around. He paused, then flushed the toilet and left the bathroom.
It was Chinese New Year, he was May Huang, he was in a hallway.
He found his shoes at the end of the row and they fit on his feet.
The front door opened—or possibly closed—in front of or behind him as he walked out onto the porch.
The light there was blinding and for a second he stood frozen, staring around for the exit onto the street, seeing everything pulse in the grey-blue light.
His eyes focused on a kumquat plant, its colors washed out. It looked strange there.
The BART platform was nearly empty when he arrived.
He watched the numbers on the sign. He was late, but not too late.
It would be less than an hour on the train and then he’d be in Chinatown.
He shuffled onto the train when it arrived and he was a man sitting there, behind two layers of glass, staring out into the bay.
His phone made a noise, had been making noises for a while. He looked at the screen and it was too bright instantly so he put it away again, felt for the switch on the side to put it on silent for the rest of the ride.
Stockton Street was dark, the neon and the lanterns doing most of the work. He rubbed his eyes with hands that were slightly smaller than they were in the morning. Red lanterns and strings of firecrackers hung somewhere above his head as he walked the familiar route to the restaurant.
When he arrived at Lau Kee, he realized what was wrong, staring up at the sign. 劉記 - CHINESE BBQ. There were no ducks in the window. Of course not, because it was Chinese New Year. Auntie Tsang and Uncle Lau were at home. He was here for the duck but he should have picked up the duck yesterday.
He checked for his notebook, but the person who had arrived here hadn’t brought his backpack. There were no notebooks. He reached for his phone, unlocked it, and his eyes strained, then focused on the words call Mama.
“Gong hei fat choi,” he said, standing in the alley beside the restaurant. That had been written on the red paper banner in the window where the ducks should be.
Zeke’s Crystals next door was still open. He wasn’t here for crystals, so he moved on. He’d just have to find something else, because he wasn’t calling his mother and he wasn’t showing up empty-handed either.
The burst of warmth as he entered the chicken shop condensed across his skin, the bell above the door jingling and echoing in his ears.
His number, when he got it, read 73. The girl behind the partition did not look at him but he looked at her, and he smiled as he took the bag and left the shop back out into the cold that was creeping up.
Downtown, now. Easy.