Page 75 of Angel of Thursdays

Hey!!

No. Absolutely not.

Hey. How’s it going? I know things are weird. Are we okay?

Well, that was nothing. Months of Thursdays and a turntable and a Christmas and a fight and a mug of tea he’d left on a nightstand, and the best he could do was things are weird. He tapped his foot under the table a few times and tried again.

Hey. Are we okay? No pressure

Backspace, backspace. He stared at his mug for a minute, then tried again. Typed Are we and stopped because finishing that sentence required knowing what came after and the options were still together or done or okay and each one of those was a potential explosion his already-exploding brain couldn’t handle.

May locked the phone and shoved it in his pocket, then packed his things and stood up. He exited Sparrow, stepping out onto Irving Street. Walking distance from Cassiel’s apartment. May looked in the direction of the building and couldn’t see anything through the fog. Cassiel wasn’t home anyway.

May turned and went to catch the bus.

18

CASSIEL

No new texts, no calls, no pictures of street cats or odd signs or questions about whether an appliance should or should not be doing something. The last message between them remained Cassiel’s. It was fine. Peter says howdy. May reacted with a thumbs up, didn’t reply, and had said nothing since. He’d matched the exact energy. Cassiel couldn’t blame him.

It had been eleven days since Seollal. His mother had called twice, both times asking if May needed anything. Cassiel told her that May was fine and his mother had said of course in the voice she used when she didn’t believe him. And he couldn’t blame her, either, because he didn’t know that May was fine. He knew that he’d said “Stay,” and May had said “No,” and that he’d let him leave the apartment in a too-big jacket and red in his eyes.

The apartment was quiet. The CD player still had the mixtape in the tray, May’s purple Sharpie liner notes folded and wedged underneath it. In the kitchen, May’s mug sat upside-down on the drying rack where Cassiel had washed it the night of January 29th and had not yet put it away.

He flicked the beads on his ring and unclenched his jaw, conscious that he was doing it again. He let out a breath and looked back down at his desk. The notebook sat open and he sat looking at all that he’d written in the seven weeks since Christmas—which, like the texts, amounted to very little.

He fiddled with the finial of his fountain pen, twisted it just enough to agitate the piston mechanism, keep the feed from drying out. Still he wrote nothing.

* * *

Cassiel walked through the Panhandle and down Masonic with his headphones around his neck. By Haight Street, the foot traffic and the noise were past tolerance, so he put the headphones on and walked faster.

Amoeba Records was four blocks down. He’d been twice before, both times with a purchase in mind, both times in and out within twenty minutes. Today was different. He meant to browse.

The building went deep—rows of bins stretching back under warm lights, concrete floor absorbing the bass from whatever the store system was playing. Genre signs in block lettering hung from the ceiling on chains, hundreds of posters and album art papering the upper walls in an unbroken band, not quite straight. He cast his gaze down.

The World Music section was near the back wall. He walked purposefully toward them, flicking through the bins from left to right, Chinese and Japanese and Korean pressings shuffled together. Faye Wong, a compilation called ASIA GOLD, a Teresa Teng reissue with a water-stained sleeve, Faye Wong again. Whatever he was looking for was not in this bin. He didn’t know what he was looking for.

He moved to the singer-songwriter section, and his hands slowed. He was searching for a feeling, he knew. Feelings were vague. The task was vague. The whole exercise was nebulous.

He pulled a Joni Mitchell record from the bin. Blue, original pressing, the sleeve worn soft at the spine. It was the sort of album May probably liked; an album almost anyone who had opinions on female singer-songwriters probably liked. Which made it wrong. Cassiel put it back.

A woman reached past him for the adjacent bin and her elbow grazed his forearm. The store was busier now—more people in the aisles, the gaps between bins narrowing. He gritted his jaw and carried on.

He managed five more minutes and then gave up, knowing the exercise was for nothing and already feeling the numbness creeping up the back of his skull that preceded overwhelm. His tolerance today was bordering on pathetic. Cassiel made his way back to the door, past the register queue, past the security sensor, and onto the street.

The fog had closed in during the few minutes he’d been inside, leaving the Haight grey and flat, the Victorians around him muted. He looked at his phone. He’d accomplished nothing, really, but he’d checked the bins. No correct and vague emotion to be found, no song he could put down on the page when he returned to the notebook.

Cassiel kept moving, walking north on Masonic toward Fulton, through the park, and knocked three times.

After a full minute, Lauren opened the door, clad in a leopard print pajama set with a Peter Pan collar, a pink bow detail, and bed socks. Cassiel knew it was fashionable. He knew Lauren owned a matching sleep mask with her own initials embroidered on it. It was an affront to every value he held dear and he was beyond commenting.

“Hey,” she said. “Did you text?”

“No.”

“Come in.” She stepped back.