The Son of Every Man

Chapter 7.2

The train screeched and howled as it rounded a bend in the tunnel. As Gabe scanned the faces of strangers who quickly filled the car, he felt Miguel's brown eyes continually study him. Maybe Miguel thought he was being discrete. Or maybe he was trying to cause a stir yet again. Either way, Gabe didn't mind the attention. Not one bit.

By the time they reached Chinatown North Station, the car was packed. They wormed between riders in order to reach the doors, through which they spilled into the cool and rank underground. They pressed through a steaming summer crowd, passing a string of sparring bubble tea shops, then climbed a worn, clattering tile staircase into the night.

Gabe calmed as he felt the intimacy of the streets, wide enough for just a single lane of one-way traffic. As always, the colors moved him too, especially at night: red neon presided over all the others, but plenty of green, blue, orange, purple melted in.

"Ever been?" asked Miguel, leading him along, pinky tapping the center of Gabe's palm.

"Where?"

"Tom Lo's."

"No."

"Oh. It's for people like us."

Gabe wanted to ask Miguel what this meant. But he already knew, and in asking, he would only have been trying to make a point—that he couldn't be so easily categorized. They pressed on, hanging a left onto Abbott, a street even narrower than the last, leading toward a small square. Gradually, the will to argue faded, leaving only his tired old apprehension, which led him to confess, "I've never been to a place like that before."

"I think you'll like it."

Gabe assembled a list of reasons in his head for why they shouldn't go, but to his dismay, each sounded like more bald-faced excuse than the last. He would never dare stoop so low as to utter any of them. Desperately, he dredged up a vague memory of some news story from five years prior, in which a mass shooter had targeted patrons dancing at that kind of club. He opened his mouth, then stopped himself. What was he so scared of, anyway? Did he not want to be seen? And who, exactly, was he imagining would spot him? He looked over at Miguel. "I'll give it a try."

"Good. About to take an alley. Hope that's okay."

"That one's fine," Gabe said. He'd walked down it many times before. It was bright and occupied, glowing with zig-zagging lights strung from end to end. They were greeted him from the left by a wide window with thick white painted lettering, inset slightly between red brick pillars, framing the familiar shelves of a used bookstore that never closed called Daryl Wong's Cavalcade.

When Miguel turned toward the bookstore, Gabe stopped dead in his tracks. A strange feeling settled in. "Why did you take me here?"

"It's the bar. Tom Lo's."

"What are you talking about? The bookstore—I go here all the time."

"Not the bookstore, you weirdo." Miguel pointed at a gap between the storefront and a neighboring building. "In there."

That was when Gabe remembered. He rarely visited Daryl Wong's Cavalcade at night, but once when he had, he detected a pulsing vibration rising up through the linoleum tiles, humming in the dusty shelves, massaging the tired spines of forgotten romances and mystery novels. It had been unclear to him what the source of the disturbance might be, but the revelry of a basement bar-turned-nightclub had not even crossed his mind at the time. Gabe didn't budge. "Is that the entrance?"

"Well, at the other end of it, yeah. If it's too dark for you...or whatever...then we don't have to go. We can find another place."

"It's okay. It's just that I come here all the time."