Page 57 of Angel of Thursdays

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.

Cassiel found him by the USED COOKING section, appearing at his shoulder with a book about octopuses. Octopi.

“An octopus has three hearts,” he said.

“That’s just showing off,” May replied.

“Two pump blood to the gills. One pumps it to the body. When they swim, the third heart stops.”

May thought about that, tried to imagine it. Did he know how cephalopods swam? Was it head-first? It was wriggly. He’d watched a documentary, probably, but forgotten most of it.

“So they have to choose between moving and feeling?”

Cassiel looked at the book, turning it to inspect the blurb on the back.

“I don’t know if it’s a choice,” he said.

They walked back out onto the street and got bánh mì from the Vietnamese place around the corner, eating on the sidewalk because the fog was sitting on the Richmond and there was nowhere to sit anyway. A rainbow flag in a window two doors down was bright despite the overcast. Cassiel had a piece of cilantro on his lip and May removed it with his thumb and kept it there longer than necessary, because he was allowed.

The record store was four blocks from May’s apartment, on Balboa. He’d been coming here since before the accident, back when he was Wuyue and bought vinyl without a turntable to display in his room as art. Now he was May and he had a turntable his boyfriend had given him, and those other vinyls were in his childhood home and he had no budget to feed the machine. But browsing was free.

The clerk nodded at them as they came in. Cassiel moved past a man clad in full denim to begin a methodical flip-through of one of the bins. The speakers were playing something jangly from further down near the end of the store. May slotted himself between the denim guy and Cassiel, glancing up at the nearest speaker. Cassiel didn’t seem to care, so May made himself busy pretending that he, too, was interested in the New Arrivals.

Cassiel pulled a record and held it at arm’s length, scrutinizing the liner notes. May kept on flipping, eventually arriving at the World section, imagining for a moment—what if he just stumbled upon the missing grandmother record, right here? He looked for a young Chinese woman whose face he knew as a picture of a picture, still somehow clear in his memory despite its tendency to drop things.

He didn’t find her. Instead he found an Anita Mui record with a cover he liked and imagined owning it. Imagined playing it in his living room and swaying to whatever was on it. Imagined saying, “Oh, yeah, I’m a huge fan,” and acting like he hadn’t just been drawn to it for the red dress and the fierce eyebrows. He checked the sticker. Twelve dollars. May put it back.

Walking the four blocks home, they passed the Little Free Library box on the corner of Balboa. Small, purple, paint chipping.

“Purple,” May said, and pointed at it like Cassiel needed to know, and when Cassiel did not react like this was world-shattering information, May leaned in and pecked him on the cheek.

He had a book in his bag now. He was going to read this one. For real.

The wind came in off the ocean and May inhaled the smell of salt, adjusted his scarf, rubbing the cashmere between his thumb and forefinger. He wore the scarf two weeks a year when January got serious, stashed it in a ziplock bag the rest of the time. It was Anna’s gift to him from two Christmases ago. Red for fortune.

“So,” May said. “I’m not going home for New Year’s. Uh, Chinese New Year.”