Page 65 of Angel of Thursdays

He put the block on the tower. The motion was right, the block balanced. Jaewon said something else and May’s mouth answered it and the exchange was normal, fine, happening on the other side of a window that hadn’t been there before.

He was on the floor with Jaewon, and then he was standing near the kitchen, and the interval was—there had been an interval. He’d stood up. He’d walked. The standing and the walking had happened and May had apparently missed that part, bzzt.

Cassiel’s mother said something to him. She was bright today, haloed in the light. Her mouth was moving, asking a question he knew the answer to but the words were blurry, or maybe that was just her face.

“I’m good! Bathroom—just, one sec.”

His legs took him to the hallway. The hallway had family photos on the wall—Cassiel as a kid, Minju in a graduation gown, the parents younger, pretty, black and white wedding. The photos were in frames which were on the walls and the wall was in the house. The house was in Fremont. May’s body was in the house. This was good information. His brain, which felt like it was on a dimmer, was still making connections.

The bathroom door closed behind him. The lock turned. His hand had done that—the hand that knew locks, the hand that knew doors, the hand that was presently cutting through water like it knew what to do, because it did, because it was a hand.

He checked the bathroom mirror and found the face in the mirror was his. He knew this because he had seen this face before in many mirrors and in the black reflection of his phone when it was locked. The face with the dark circles and the left eye smaller than the right and the mole on one cheek that looked like a dead pixel—that one. May’s face, attached to a head which contained memories of being May.

He raised two fingers. Pressed them to the cheekbone. The bone was there. His fingers felt the bone and the bone felt the fingers and⁠—

Bubble unpopped. The two sensations existed in parallel and did not merge into the single experience of I am touching my own face. He pressed harder. The bone didn’t yield. The pressure just increased. The mirror showed a person pressing two fingers to his own cheekbone. He tried again, harder this time, but nothing else happened.

Then the face in the mirror drew closer, because he was leaning toward it. He pressed again, turned around. He paused, then flushed the toilet and left the bathroom.

It was Chinese New Year, he was May Huang, he was in a hallway.

He found his shoes at the end of the row and they fit on his feet. The front door opened—or possibly closed—in front of or behind him as he walked out onto the porch. The light there was blinding and for a second he stood frozen, staring around for the exit onto the street, seeing everything pulse in the grey-blue light.

His eyes focused on a kumquat plant, its colors washed out. It looked strange there.

The BART platform was nearly empty when he arrived. He watched the numbers on the sign. He was late, but not too late. It would be less than an hour on the train and then he’d be in Chinatown. He shuffled onto the train when it arrived and he was a man sitting there, behind two layers of glass, staring out into the bay.

His phone made a noise, had been making noises for a while. He looked at the screen and it was too bright instantly so he put it away again, felt for the switch on the side to put it on silent for the rest of the ride.

Stockton Street was dark, the neon and the lanterns doing most of the work. He rubbed his eyes with hands that were slightly smaller than they were in the morning. Red lanterns and strings of firecrackers hung somewhere above his head as he walked the familiar route to the restaurant.

When he arrived at Lau Kee, he realized what was wrong, staring up at the sign. 劉記 - CHINESE BBQ. There were no ducks in the window. Of course not, because it was Chinese New Year. Auntie Tsang and Uncle Lau were at home. He was here for the duck but he should have picked up the duck yesterday.

He checked for his notebook, but the person who had arrived here hadn’t brought his backpack. There were no notebooks. He reached for his phone, unlocked it, and his eyes strained, then focused on the words call Mama.

“Gong hei fat choi,” he said, standing in the alley beside the restaurant. That had been written on the red paper banner in the window where the ducks should be.

Zeke’s Crystals next door was still open. He wasn’t here for crystals, so he moved on. He’d just have to find something else, because he wasn’t calling his mother and he wasn’t showing up empty-handed either.

The burst of warmth as he entered the chicken shop condensed across his skin, the bell above the door jingling and echoing in his ears. His number, when he got it, read 73. The girl behind the partition did not look at him but he looked at her, and he smiled as he took the bag and left the shop back out into the cold that was creeping up.

Downtown, now. Easy.

The escalator at Powell was broken, which meant stairs. His legs did stairs. The station smelled like brake dust and something sweet, and he found the outbound platform without checking the signs.

The train arrived. The inside warm, sparse, a woman with grocery bags between her ankles, a man asleep with his chin on his chest. The doors closed and he sat down, the chicken bag sat warm on his lap, grease seeping a dark circle through the paper.

Underground, the windows showed tunnel wall and then his own face in the dark glass and then tunnel wall again. He looked away from the face. The stops came and went—Van Ness, Church, Castro—the disembodied voice announcing each one. He didn’t need the announcements. The route was underneath him.

The train surfaced at West Portal and the city changed. The tunnel ended and fog filled the windows and the light inside the car went from underground amber to grey. Condensation formed where his forehead rested on the glass.

Taraval westbound. The commercial strip. Chinese businesses closed for New Year, the rest still going, every other storefront shuttered with red paper in the windows. Firecrackers crackled close and loud and bright and then gone.

The fog thickened by the block. By the outer avenues the streetlights had halos and the houses were same same but different all the way to his stop. The doors opened and he stepped out. The cold came through the fabric of his shirt, biting. He had left his jacket somewhere, earlier in the evening or months ago.

He didn’t need the jacket. The walk to the house was short and easy. A few blocks, the chicken bag gone from warm to less than warm, paper softening, grease circle reaching the handles. His other hand was in his pocket. His phone was warm, so he held it.

His childhood home was a row house, same as every house on the block. Same grid, same fog, every day, every year. The porch light was on. The front door was red—his dad repainted it every December, and this year’s red was darker than last year’s, which had been darker than the year before’s, as though the door had been soaked in something for too long.