Page 6 of Angel of Thursdays

He grabbed his bowl and chopsticks from the station, plucked an acceptable amount of pork into the bowl, then placed one piece into his mouth and chewed until the lady was satisfied.

The pork was outstanding. The pork was always outstanding. He and Uncle Lau, who co-owned the place, disagreed about basically everything—the correct height at which to mount a TV being the most recent one—but they were united on the siu yuk.

May ran the sink. His hands moved through the water, finding the next thing by shape, and for a second his wrist pressed against the steel edge of the basin. The pressure stopped him for no reason he could name. Something weird about hands and greasy water and solidity and pressure. Contact. He imagined being a submarine.

Then someone dropped a pan behind him and the crash brought the room back in full and Ah-Keung swore just as “Red Sun” started playing again. Sam the prep cook laughed, and May laughed too.

“Ah-Keung,” May called, holding up a stock pot with a dent in it the size of a fist. “Were you cooking with your hands or your ass?”

“Let’s not talk about my hands and your ass,” Ah-Keung fired back, and the kitchen erupted. May grinned. He liked this part; the play, being part of the back and forth. Remembering he could turn a room into one that wanted him inside it.

May used to be the guy out front. He was good at it, chatting up the regulars, and he liked the rhythm of the floor. Then there had been the car crash where he’d taken a knock to the head and some internal bleeding and after that, things had gotten shittier.

He’d lost a whole table once—four fully formed human beings he’d served twenty minutes earlier, gone from his head like he’d never seen them. The same thing happened two, three more times.

Auntie Tsang and Uncle Lau had talked about it and moved him to the back, where the only thing he had to count were hours. And woks. May liked to count in fives. It had been his number since birth. Wuyue, May, fifth month—lucky number five, never let him down, except when it did.

After the endless procession of woks and pans and dishes, there was less to do. And that was nice too. May helped with wontons because they were easy the way Auntie liked them done. Spoon the filling, scrunch and pinch, finito. He’d recently graduated to also being allowed to make jiaozi, which was another kindness, or maybe a test of some kind that he hadn’t yet passed or failed.

His phone buzzed from the shelf above the sink. He quickly dried his hands on his apron and checked it between loads. He checked it every half hour or so, because the gig economy ran on notifications and sweaty twenty-somethings. STDY’s home screen was already open. One active booking for Saturday, a birthday party in Daly City, confirmed. One completed, paid, cleared. And now, at the top, a new request.

May thumbed the notification and the preview flew away.

* * *

The back door opened to the alley between Lau Kee and the building next door that had been a bookshop and now sold crystals and salt lamps. Steam followed May out, clinging to his arms, his neck, the parts of his shirt the apron hadn’t covered. The air hit and the temperature difference was immediate.

May leaned against the wall, ankles crossed, phone cradled in both hands. The request screen had the guy’s photo at the top—good-looking, perfect nose, serious face staring straight to camera. It looked like he’d taken it at the DMV.

Hello. I need a companion for a family dinner. Korean holiday, extended family, probably 4-5 hours. I’m not easy company in group settings. I’ll need someone patient and comfortable not being spoken to. Ideally you will be able to improvise without being offensive. Knowledge of the culture would be helpful. I’d like to meet beforehand to see if this works. I’ll be direct about what I need. Thank you.

May read it again.

Then he read it a third time because his brain had been actively rotting from chronic low activity, to use his little brother’s phrasing, and parsing a single paragraph was hard now. It just went through him. The words were there on the screen and he was on Mars and then he was… back in the alley, next to the dumpster, phone warm in his hand, with the fog still crawling up from Broadway.

May stopped on the part about ‘improvising without being offensive’ and smiled. Someone out there in the city had typed those words. Genuinely believed that if you put a stranger in a room and said “go crazy,” the stranger’s first instinct would be to cause offense, but this instinct could be tempered by the words “oh, but not too crazy.” May was attracted to optimism and thus respected this.

The next part that interested him was ‘not easy company in group settings’ and he recognized something there—the desire to play the role better next time.

May had met this person before, a hundred times in a hundred rooms in a hundred mirrors. Someone trying so hard to ask for something they’d already decided wasn’t theirs to want.

His thumb traced the air above the words ‘Thank you.’ He stared at the screen for a moment, picturing himself sitting beside the man.

Then he echoed, “Thank you,” beneath his breath, accepted the request, and went back inside.

* * *

The 38 at this hour was mostly empty. May’s eyes passed over his fellow passengers: a woman with grocery bags that took up two seats, a guy in headphones whose head lolled with every turn, two possibly-teenagers huddled up toward the back, cackling at something on their phones, heads pressed together. Outside, downtown gave way to the avenues, lit signs thinning out block by block until the city was mostly dark houses and fog.

His apartment door stuck twice and then gave in, because the door to doorframe relationship dynamic was entering the ‘will’ era of their will-they-won’t-they. May took that as a good sign.

Inside, the kitchen counter was a magnificent diorama. Notebooks in a stack, a phone charger cord tangled with his neon green earbuds, plus an unopened bill he’d put there with the intention of opening it in a theoretical future that kept not arriving. The stovetop had a pan on it containing oil from a previous cooking attempt whose details were now unclear to May and therefore lost to history.

The living room consisted of a couch, a low table, and a TV. Nothing on the walls except the obligatory red calendar with 福 on it that they gave out every year at Lau Kee. His last visitor, his sister Anna, had come inside and let out an ohhh that lasted for an unreal amount of time while she tried to find something nice to say.

Shoes off in the shoe corner, backpack dumped by the door.

He took his meds at the counter. Two pills from the organizer with days labeled in Sharpie because the pre-printed letters were too small, and if he couldn’t read them it was all for naught. The pills went down with water from a mug he’d accidentally stolen from a break room somewhere years ago, the faded print advertising a towing company that no longer existed.