Chapter 18
CASSIEL
No new texts, no calls, no pictures of street cats or odd signs or questions about whether an appliance should or should not be doing something.
The last message between them remained Cassiel’s.
It was fine. Peter says howdy. May reacted with a thumbs up, didn’t reply, and had said nothing since.
He’d matched the exact energy. Cassiel couldn’t blame him.
It had been eleven days since Seollal. His mother had called twice, both times asking if May needed anything.
Cassiel told her that May was fine and his mother had said of course in the voice she used when she didn’t believe him.
And he couldn’t blame her, either, because he didn’t know that May was fine.
He knew that he’d said “Stay,” and May had said “No,” and that he’d let him leave the apartment in a too-big jacket and red in his eyes.
He flicked the beads on his ring and unclenched his jaw, conscious that he was doing it again. He let out a breath and looked back down at his desk. The notebook sat open and he sat looking at all that he’d written in the seven weeks since Christmas—which, like the texts, amounted to very little.
He fiddled with the finial of his fountain pen, twisted it just enough to agitate the piston mechanism, keep the feed from drying out. Still he wrote nothing.
* * *
Cassiel walked through the Panhandle and down Masonic with his headphones around his neck. By Haight Street, the foot traffic and the noise were past tolerance, so he put the headphones on and walked faster.
Amoeba Records was four blocks down. He’d been twice before, both times with a purchase in mind, both times in and out within twenty minutes. Today was different. He meant to browse.
The building went deep—rows of bins stretching back under warm lights, concrete floor absorbing the bass from whatever the store system was playing.
Genre signs in block lettering hung from the ceiling on chains, hundreds of posters and album art papering the upper walls in an unbroken band, not quite straight. He cast his gaze down.
The World Music section was near the back wall.
He walked purposefully toward them, flicking through the bins from left to right, Chinese and Japanese and Korean pressings shuffled together.
Faye Wong, a compilation called ASIA GOLD, a Teresa Teng reissue with a water-stained sleeve, Faye Wong again.
Whatever he was looking for was not in this bin. He didn’t know what he was looking for.
He moved to the singer-songwriter section, and his hands slowed. He was searching for a feeling, he knew. Feelings were vague. The task was vague. The whole exercise was nebulous.
He pulled a Joni Mitchell record from the bin. Blue, original pressing, the sleeve worn soft at the spine. It was the sort of album May probably liked; an album almost anyone who had opinions on female singer-songwriters probably liked. Which made it wrong. Cassiel put it back.
A woman reached past him for the adjacent bin and her elbow grazed his forearm. The store was busier now—more people in the aisles, the gaps between bins narrowing. He gritted his jaw and carried on.
He managed five more minutes and then gave up, knowing the exercise was for nothing and already feeling the numbness creeping up the back of his skull that preceded overwhelm.
His tolerance today was bordering on pathetic.
Cassiel made his way back to the door, past the register queue, past the security sensor, and onto the street.
The fog had closed in during the few minutes he’d been inside, leaving the Haight grey and flat, the Victorians around him muted.
He looked at his phone. He’d accomplished nothing, really, but he’d checked the bins.
No correct and vague emotion to be found, no song he could put down on the page when he returned to the notebook.
Cassiel kept moving, walking north on Masonic toward Fulton, through the park, and knocked three times.
After a full minute, Lauren opened the door, clad in a leopard print pajama set with a Peter Pan collar, a pink bow detail, and bed socks.
Cassiel knew it was fashionable. He knew Lauren owned a matching sleep mask with her own initials embroidered on it.
It was an affront to every value he held dear and he was beyond commenting.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you text?”
“No.”
“Come in.” She stepped back.
The common area was Lauren’s on Sundays.
The couch was wide, deep, upholstered in an emerald green velveteen that had hardened in spots, which Lauren had once optimistically attributed to cigarettes.
The skylight above them cast yellow and blue and teal in wedges on the wall, shifting with the clouds.
Cassiel sat on the couch and watched the wall. The headphones came off. Lauren’s place was quiet—no music, no TV, the street noise muffled by the bay window’s double pane, only the occasional noise from old plumbing and the house settling as distractions.
“You sleeping?” Lauren called, fixing two mugs of hot something in the kitchen. She knew the rough shape of what had happened, though he had left out the parts that scared him. She was good at filling in gaps.
“Yes,” he said.
“Liar. Eating?”
Cassiel did not answer. This was the type of thing his mother asked and he was tired of answering. He took the Midori MD out of his bag and opened it to the page he’d been working on.
Lauren came in and handed him a mug, then sat down on the other end of the couch with her own. She watched him for a minute before she said anything.
“What’s that?” She leaned forward and tapped the cardboard cover. Her manicure this week was highlighter yellow, dotted with purple mod flowers.
He looked at the page. Crossed-out song titles and three remaining entries.
The first a city pop track he’d found by a singer named CINDY—the cover showed a woman in a red dress and he’d listened to “Must Be Lucky” four times before writing it down.
The second was a Sade song that Peter played in the shop occasionally.
Cassiel had never paid attention until the week after Christmas when his ring finger had twitched to the lyrics.
And the last was a Sharon Van Etten track from the same record he had given May with the turntable. That one felt like cheating.
“I’m making a mixtape,” he said. “A response to one he gave me.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “What’s on it? Show me.”
“No.”
“Show meee—” She moved closer, scooting her ass along the couch like a dog.
“The tracklist is private.”
May had burned his CD in a public library, chosen the tracks in whatever manic method he used, written the liner notes in the insert in purple Sharpie, all before either of them had admitted what was between them was anything, and all of it was for Cassiel.
The response would belong to May. It would be better than a text or a call or an apology.
So Lauren could see the outside of the notebook.
She rolled her eyes. “Okay! Secret fucking mixtape. I knew you liked him but you’re down bad.”
Anything he said would confirm he knew what ‘down bad’ meant and that it applied. Whether it still applied was a question Cassiel could not answer today. He kept his eyes on the notebook.
Lauren sipped from her mug and clacked her nails along the stoneware.
“So what’s the problem? You look constipated.”
He knew the feeling. Not constipation—the amorphous feeling that had been following him. He could not turn it into a track listing or a single declarative sentence that would translate into something defensible in a liner note.
“I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” he admitted.
Lauren turned her head in the direction of the hallway and hollered: “CORDY. Cass can’t figure out how to make a ‘I’M SORRY’ MIXTAPE for his BOYFRIEND. Do you want to HELP.”
He didn’t correct her on ‘boyfriend,’ didn’t know if he needed to, if May wanted to take the word back. An ambiguity that grated on his nerves.
A door opened down the hall. The voice of Cordy—Lauren’s roommate with what Cassiel suspected was an affected British accent—came back: “Is he crying?”
“Not yet!”
“Then I’ll pass.”
The door closed again and a few moments later a large orange cat appeared from the hallway and jumped onto the couch between them.
This was Alexander, who belonged to Cordy on paper, to himself in actuality.
Cassiel liked Alexander. He reached out and touched his ear for a scritch, which the cat allowed.
Soft. Alexander purred, and Cassiel let his hand stay a few seconds longer than he otherwise would have.
Lauren turned on the television.
“Right, so like—if you don’t know what you’re trying to say, why are you making it? What’s it for?”
Cassiel knew he was frowning. He stared at her, poised for an answer.
It was for May. It was for the sake of writing something worthwhile in a notebook that was gifted to him.
It was for saying—I listen to you, I have been listening to you.
It was for doing something instead of the nothing that May wanted.
His thumb went to his ring and only felt flesh. It wasn’t there. Cassiel reached into his pockets. Not there either.
“I thought it might help. I thought he’d like it,” he said, knowing it didn’t sound like the truth.
“Uh, sure.” She looked back at him while hovering between the same two sitcoms she always defaulted to for background noise. “He’d also like… a novelty pen? Oh, or like, one of those moss ball things. He sent me a pic of that.”
Cassiel had received the same picture. The term was marimo—algae in a jar.
And May would like it. He looked down at the notebook, at the laptop, at the television and then at Alexander, now biting the upholstery of an ottoman.
He felt around the couch cushion, teeth gritted at the sensation of the faux-velvet against his skin. No ring.
“I want to do something.” He wanted not to be empty-handed when he showed up at May’s door. He wanted a reason to text him and the reason could not be lunch or the word howdy and it couldn’t be sorry either.
“Do it then.” Lauren shrugged. “Make a fucking mixtape or get him a moss ball.”
There was another ‘or.’
“What are you looking for?” Lauren asked.
“My ring.”
She helped him check the cushions, the floor around the couch, the hallway.
It wasn’t in the apartment. He tried to retrace—when had he last touched it?
On the walk down Masonic, he’d had his headphones on, his hands shoved in his pockets.
Amoeba, his hands had been in the bins. Had he felt it catching on the divider cards?
He couldn’t place it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been aware of it on his finger, which was more aggravating than having lost it.
But Cassiel was not going to have a meltdown over a children’s toy that cost less than a dollar to replace. It was most likely in a bin at the store, knocked loose while he was flipping through pressings. He would go back and look tomorrow.
The modern family or whoever it was on the screen bantered on, and the skylight above had changed.
Or rather, the position of the sun had changed.
The colored wedges were gone and the light was flat through the room.
Lauren reached out one long skinny leg to hit the pedal of a standing lamp with her heel, casting low light through the dimming room. The cat had wandered away.
The notebook was still open on his lap. Lauren hummed and looked back at the television while Cassiel picked up his pen and toyed with the cap.
CINDY — Must Be Lucky
Sade — No Ordinary Love
Sharon Van Etten — Every Time the Sun Comes Up
Lyrics about broken glasses and trying. He couldn’t tell if leaving it on the mixtape would be romantic or a confession of inadequacy.
And that was it—inadequacy, too close to helplessness for comfort.
Cassiel let the pen roll into the center of the open notebook, which stayed open on his lap for the rest of the evening.