Page 62 of Angel of Thursdays

May

Interesting you didn’t address the eunuch part

Cassiel shook his head and set the phone on the counter. The apartment was quiet. He walked into the bedroom and hit play on the Marantz.

THE THURSDAY BEFORE SEOLLAL

May’s shift ended at four, and he’d said he’d come to the apartment after, and the word after in May’s vocabulary meant anywhere from forty minutes to two hours depending on whether he got distracted by a storefront or a stray cat.

Cassiel used the time. He sat on the bedroom floor with the headphone case open and checked the battery. Eighty-three percent. He’d charge them overnight. The case went on the nightstand beside his glasses case and phone charger, positioned where his hand could reach it without sitting up.

The forecast was clear, low fifties, no rain. BART to Fremont, forty-nine minutes platform to platform, then the six blocks from the station. Arrive by 10:15. Sebae at 10:30. The children in hanbok—Hayoung’s first, Jaewon’s with the shoes that his uncle had helped negotiate. Tteokguk came next, then the long afternoon of food and family and Jaewon’s volume and Hayoung’s unpredictable nap window.

He knew where the noise would peak: after lunch, when the adults shifted from the table to the living room where the TV would be on and the conversation would layer over it. He knew where he’d go: back bedroom, the one that used to be his, door closed, headphones on, thirty minutes. He knew how to signal it. He would stand up, touch Minju’s shoulder, leave. No announcement. She’d cover.

He’d done this math for every family gathering since he’d figured it out at seventeen. The variables changed—Hayoung was new, Jaewon less new, David about as new as Jaewon was, give or take a year. The house had been rearranged, rooms repurposed, but the pattern held. He knew how long he had. Two hours before the noise started to wear on him, three before it became actively antagonistic. He’d never been wrong by more than fifteen minutes.

May would be there, and May was fine. May was the person who’d walked into Chuseok and made his mother laugh in the first twenty minutes. Who’d stood in front of the TV with his father and understood it was more about not saying anything than the watching, and it was more about the standing than being quiet. Who’d let Jaewon claim his lap, show him his tooth, who wrote Hayoung’s name in hangul in a notebook when Cassiel was still thinking of her as ‘the baby.’ May, who’d built rapport with David, and handled Minju watching him without flinching.

May was the part that didn’t need managing.

The front door opened. The sound came down the hall. Hinges, then the scrape of shoes being removed and placed against the wall, then socks on hardwood, then May’s voice, already mid-sentence, something about a seagull that had stolen a man’s sandwich on Judah Street and the man had chased it, Cassiel, he chased the bird across two lanes of traffic and didn’t die⁠—

Cassiel stood from the bedroom floor. His knees clicked, his ring didn’t. The headphone case was on the nightstand, charging, positioned for retrieval.

He walked through the French doors toward the voice.

15

MAY

SEOLLAL

May woke up at something to eight with the light through the blinds grey-bright. He rolled over, feeling for the edge of the mattress. Didn’t find it, rolled back. He squirmed upright. The purple notebook on the nightstand had today’s plan written out: Seollal @ Lim house! 10:30 am SEBAE!, underlined, next to a handsome doodle of a snake.

He sent Cassiel a text to announce that he was awake, and then fired off a few obligatory Happy New Years! to various and sundry, then put his phone down on the nightstand and felt around for Kitchen instead. The book he’d bought at Green Apple, someone else’s pencil marks in the margins, a warm stranger who underlined things and wrote yes next to a passage about worms and defeat and dying and having to live anyway.

He found his page and read, the blanket up to his chin, still having to backtrack to re-read things he hadn’t absorbed but reading, until his phone sang with Cassiel’s ringtone.

* * *

The 9:07 Fremont-bound was half-empty. May had miscounted the seats twice already and still couldn’t tell Cassiel which car had the fewest people in it because he’d gotten distracted by a woman eating a breakfast burrito like she was the God Empress of Burritos.

January 29th. Year of the Snake. His phone had reminded him again three times, in the time it took for him to roll out of bed and meet Cassiel at the station. Notifications he’d set some time in November when he’d still been imagining he might go to two New Year’s dinners, an impossibility he’d solved by inviting himself to one and being exiled from the other. CNY!!! and Seol @ Lim house 10:30 AM SEBAE and call Mama, the last of which he hadn’t done and wouldn’t do. He left them all lingering on the lock screen.

May pressed his shoulder into Cassiel’s arm because he felt like it, because the blue oxford Lauren had given him now smelled like the detergent at Cassiel’s apartment. He sniffed his own hair, which smelled… herbal. They’d almost had their second fight—or first official?—when Cassiel saw the Suave Men 3-in-1 in his bathroom and he hadn’t called May a broke bitch, but he’d said it with his eyes, and May had yelled something about it being “TEN TIMES MORE MOISTURIZING THAN BEFORE!” and Cassiel had just walked out.

Then, like Mark Darcy, he came back thirty minutes later with two bottles of RYO shampoo and conditioner and May asked what he was supposed to wash his body with now, and Cassiel looked like his head might explode, so May kissed him and decided the fight was over.

Outside the BART window, the East Bay hills came in low and brown. The train rocked through the tube and came out the other side into Fremont sun.

“Nervous?” Cassiel asked, not looking up from his phone.

“About what? I’ve been to your mom’s house like four times. I’m practically household furniture. A Pottery Barn ottoman, maybe.”

“You’re not an ottoman.”

“Footrest. Decorative yet functional. People put their feet on me.”