Chapter 22 #2
Under 1985, there was a cluster of three photos from the same event.
A banquet or gala, possibly Chinese New Year.
The center photo showed a microphone stand and a tiny stage.
Someone or most likely many someones had stood there and sung, and the audience had kept eating.
If the story May wanted was true, then perhaps a voice had crossed the room and reverberated against everything within it and a part of it had remained, kept within the memory of a woman now reading a newspaper in a folding chair.
His hand went to his ring finger, and then to the strap of his bag. He turned back to where May and the woman were talking.
“Her English name,” he said. “What was it.”
May actually looked at him. Mrs. Au Yeung turned as well.
“The record says Wong Suet Ying,” Cassiel said, speaking to May because May would translate. “But she came to Oakland having married a Shum. Even if she didn’t change her last name—”
He stopped.
May turned back to Mrs. Au Yeung. His Mandarin was slower now. He looked down at his phone, picked it back up, looking through what Ben had sent him. “Elizabeth,” he said, like he wasn’t sure. Then, more sure, “Elizabeth.”
“Ah!” the woman exclaimed. She gestured at the phone and said something. Then in English: “Show me again.”
May swiped again. The woman peered with her magnifying glass with more scrutiny.
“Betty,” she declared, and stood up, walking over to Cassiel, to the photographs. She found the same photo of the banquet. Her finger landed on a woman at a table near the stage—dark hair straight and long, different from the ’72 photo, older, sitting beside a man wearing a pair of thick glasses.
“Betty and Mark.” Mrs. Au Yeung craned her neck up and nodded at Cassiel, tapping the photograph. “She sing, he always listen.”
May came over to look.
“Betty and Mark, Mark and Betty. Shum?” He took photos of the photos, then remembered to ask if it was okay to do so. The woman laughed.
They returned to the table and the conversation carried on. Cassiel stood, having offered precisely what he could, and started counting. The minutes (ten), the times Mrs. Au Yeung laughed (three), the times May remembered there was someone else there and looked at him (two).
Most of it, Cassiel had to assume, was fluff. May translated one sentence out of every four. The woman drank her tea at her own pace and talked at her own pace while the phone recorded. May listened, betrayed only by the shaking of his knee.
Betty Wong sang from time to time. She had taught piano on Saturdays out of a church that was no longer a church. Cassiel caught the word ‘vape.’ Mrs. Au Yeung’s own daughter had taken lessons for three years until it was clear that her daughter had no patience or talent. Then something else.
“Strict with the fingers,” May said, though it sounded more like he was talking to himself. He went quiet after that, his head swiveling back to the photographs on the wall.
One man had brought a portable recorder to the banquet from the pictures. The woman was sure of that. She was less sure that he had recorded Betty.
Cassiel considered the technology. Cassette.
Mono, almost certainly—a handheld unit with a built-in condenser mic that picked up everything within arm’s reach.
With forty years of oxide degradation on the tape, the high frequencies would be the first to go.
What may still survive on a cassette that old would likely be hisses and melody and the clinking of cutlery. A voice if they were lucky.
The man the recorder belonged to had died fifteen, twenty years ago. Mrs. Au Yeung knew his daughter lived in Sacramento, or used to. She didn’t have the number but had a friend in her dance class who might.
They had two names and possibly a city. Not today.
May hadn’t brought his notebooks. He tapped the information into his phone instead. Cassiel would ask for a copy of the voice memo recording and transfer the relevant details to the Midori later, he decided. Properly.
On the way out, May shook Mrs. Au Yeung’s hand with both of his. She patted his forearm and said something that made him laugh and Cassiel looked at his mouth, his teeth. Cassiel nodded at the woman from the doorway and turned, already halfway down the steps before May left the room.
They walked back toward the station through Chinatown the way they had come. The produce stands were still out, narrowing the sidewalk, and Cassiel watched a woman sorting lychees into plastic bags as May walked ahead, and Cassiel maintained their distance.
May was quiet for half a block. Then—
“She taught piano,” he said.
“Hm?”
“Betty. My mom taught piano too, for like—twenty years. I’d come home from school and there’d just be some kid in the living room banging out scales while I was trying to watch SpongeBob.”
That had been the most information May had ever given to Cassiel about his mother.
They made it back to the platform, saying nothing else. Once there, the sign above counted down from eight minutes. The tunnel air made Cassiel clear his throat and wish he’d packed a mask. May sat on the bench as they waited, staring out onto the tracks.
“I was thinking about the—” May began, then sighed, running one hand through his hair.
It just about obscured the choppiness—the uneven patch where he’d attacked it with scissors because Cassiel had told him two too many times that it was too long.
“—The doctor thing. I should go see someone before May.”
May, named for the month he was born in. Twenty-six in less than three months. Cassiel held what he wanted to say in his throat—you could make an appointment now—and swallowed it down.
“Good idea.”
May opened his mouth as if to say something back and then didn’t. There had been a lot of that today, between the two of them.
Cassiel glanced up. Four minutes to go. The wind rushed through the tunnel first—air displaced, ahead of the train—and May closed his eyes until the train arrived. Cassiel stayed standing.
Once on the train, they found two seats facing forward.
May took the window seat this time, opening his phone.
Cassiel saw a familiar teal icon and UI from the corner of his eye.
STDY. He was aware that May still took gigs—not doing so would be ridiculous, and May often talked about what he called ‘side quests’—but this was the first time in months that Cassiel had seen the app itself.
Then the phone was locked, put away. Back to silence.
Cassiel retrieved his notebook from his bag, unscrewed the cap on the pen, and wrote.
Elizabeth “Betty” Wong Suet Ying. Cassette, ~1985, mono. Possible Sacramento source.
May glanced over. His eyes moved past the notes to the opposite column where Positions on Amplitude, Vol. 2 sat with three song titles beneath it and more crossed out. He’d made no progress on it.
“Is that a playlist?”
“It’s not done,” Cassiel told him, but he didn’t move the page away. He had shown him already on the ride in and received ‘Nice.’
“Yeah,” May hummed. “Three tracks would be a pretty short mix.”
“I may not finish it.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s too late.” May leaned in, breaching the gap, and circled the air around “No Ordinary Love” with one finger. “I already found you out. You like me.”
The words didn’t match but Cassiel wasn’t going to say it. He closed the notebook and set it between them while out of the corner of his eye he saw May’s mouth twitch into a self-satisfied smirk.
Through the tunnel, the train car rocking over the underwater stretch, Cassiel felt the pressure change in his jaw.
Then the bay opened up through the glass beyond May’s head—an expanse of familiar grey, San Francisco a low shape in the distance that didn’t look like home from this angle.
May leaned his shoulder against the window, breath fogging on the glass.
He dragged that same finger through the condensation.
Cassiel leaned half an inch forward to see.
A love heart, or a blob that resembled one.
“I need to take my dad’s jacket back to him,” May said, finger sliding down the glass. “My mom’s—ugh, concerned. It’s gonna turn into something. Probably dinner. Would you…”
Go with him to his parents’ house. Cassiel’s thumbnail dug into his index finger.
“Are you hiring me to be your date?” he asked.
May exhaled a laugh. “Depends on the rate.”
“No rate,” he said.
“Then… yeah. You wanna come to my parents’ house for dinner next week?”
A house he couldn’t find when it mattered. The parents at the table. The brother who had no love for Cassiel and wanted answers to questions May only wanted to avoid. None of it sounded good. But May was not hiding now. May was in the seat next to him and warm, tangible, exhausted.
“I don’t.” This was at least honest. “But I will.”
May turned from the window, his eyes soft from exhaustion, the all-nighter showing on his face.
“Cool,” he said. “Should be awful.”