Page 41 of Angel of Thursdays

“Yes.”

She squeezed his arm once and released him and went to collect glasses from the parlor.

* * *

He made it back to his own apartment at midnight. Shoes at the door. Messenger bag on the hook, presents in an expansive tote bag Lauren had acquired somewhere. He placed it on his desk chair and stood in his space for a while in a stupor.

Then Cassiel retrieved Positions on Amplitude and put the disc in the Marantz. The CDM-12.1 transport hummed, the swing-arm laser finding the first track, the mechanism he’d been describing when his mouth was repurposed.

The first track opened with a flute, then strings—first bowed, then plucked—before a woman’s voice came in. Mandarin, clear and high and warm, closer to the microphone than the instruments were. He didn’t understand the words, could only guess at the feeling.

Cassiel sat on the couch with his coat still on and the liner notes open on his knee. May’s handwriting in Sharpie, the ink slightly raised where the pen had pressed hard. The downstrokes thicker, the letters crowding each other at the margins. May had written this at a table somewhere, probably his kitchen counter, probably late, probably with the purple notebook open beside him, or the yellow one. Probably smiling.

The disc turned.

Track one ended and track two began with an alarm ticking. Cassiel read the liner notes again from the top.

11

MAY

The kiss kept invading in confetti shrapnel. As a rule, his brain didn’t really do whole things anymore, hadn’t since the accident, maybe not before. What it did was fragments, surfacing without warning, often out of order—cold knuckles on a cold face. The near-silent thud of a CD case against a chest. Cassiel’s calluses on the back of May’s neck. They were fragments but they were burned in. Clear, kept. Hot glue globs that had cooled and solidified.

Some mornings the fragments were bright and he’d lie in bed with the alarm going off and grinning at the ceiling like a lady in a movie who’d never been kissed and then had finally been kissed. Except May had been kissed before, just not by an angel on a back deck in the cold and dark.

Some mornings the fragments were more polaroids of fragments—basically accurate but the details small and blurry, faces washed out by the flash. It happened on December 7th, on Cassiel Lim’s twenty-eighth birthday, confirmed by two sources, or three if you counted his brain and mouth separately. May believed in the events the way he believed Michigan existed. It was probably there. People had drawn maps of it. It was thoroughly documented yet inaccessible to any of his senses.

Both kinds of mornings, May got up. He made the bus. December kept wintering and holidaying on around him, just shinier than it would have been otherwise.

May couldn’t stop singing, was the thing. On the way to the stop, then on the bus, and in the alley behind Lau Kee. “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” except May only really knew the first day, mumbled through two through four, and was only trying to get to fiiiiiive golden riiiings. Ah-Keung told him through the door to shut the hell up, which made May sing louder, and Ah-Keung laughed, which was rare. December was doing something to everyone.

The texts had changed, too. May still fat-fingered his way into typos the phone’s autocorrect couldn’t parse, still sent them anyway, but there was a rhythm shift in the replies.

Cassiel sent a photo of a chubby tabby with concerned eyes on a parked car. May sent back Is that your cat, knowing it wasn’t, and Cassiel sent back No. which allowed May to ask Do you want a cat? and Cassiel answered I want this cat. and May took a screenshot.

Cassiel called him on a Wednesday. May scrambled outside, having heard his phone go off in the brief blessed interval between the end of “Red Sun” and the beginning of “The Days We Spent Together.” His thumb hovered. He held a breath for five. He picked up in the alley with pruned hands and his heart buzzing in his teeth, because Cassiel didn’t call. Cassiel texted in complete sentences with periods and sometimes semicolons, which May considered both diabolical and attractive, but Cassiel did not call.

“Track ten,” Cassiel said. No hello. There never was a hello.

May’s hand tightened on the phone. Track ten was Vienna Teng. “Stray Italian Greyhound.” He’d written something about fireworks on the liner notes and then worried it said more than he meant it to, and then left it because the Sharpie was permanent and he wasn’t starting again.

“The section after the instrumental,” Cassiel continued. “The pleading turns into a whisper.”

“Right,” May replied, finding his voice, his heart still going bzz in his mouth while his brain tried to find something clever to say. “It’s like, I can’t do this right now, and then… okay, but what the hell do I do?”

“Yes,” Cassiel said. “The modulation makes it… effective.”

May grabbed his right cheek with his moist, gross hand and squeezed. His face was warm and the man on the other end had listened to a song about being ambushed by hope and called to tell him about modulation. He laughed, slightly high, a little hysterical, and said, “Yeah. That’s—Sure. Did you know it’s actually about⁠—”

When they finished talking he went back inside and washed nine more woks. The water was too hot and his hands were red and he didn’t care about any of it.

* * *

The package arrived on a Wednesday. This was noteworthy because May’s mail was an eldritch horror he couldn’t look at directly for that way lay madness. Sealed envelopes from UCSF Medical Center, an out-of-network hospital (classic), and a radiology group. All introduced to May by a sporty little silver coupe. American excellence, top to bottom. Sealed envelopes were potential energy and opening them was just shuffling the energy around. It didn’t go anywhere, so it may as well stay in there.

A package, though. Packages didn’t come from radiology groups.

The return address was in Hayes Valley, and the handwriting was round and bubbly in orange ink, which narrowed the suspect pool. May sat on the kitchen floor and opened the package with a butter knife.