Read The Dead Do Not Improve Online
Authors: Jay Caspian Kang
The Dead Do Not Improve (10 page)
Last night, she told Mel about her latest affair. She didn’t understand the timing, herself, but it had something to do with her feelings toward me. Or maybe it didn’t. She didn’t really know. Either way, Mel had responded badly to the news. He had assumed that their move to California was, at least in some way, an effort to salvage what was left. He had said some things she had expected him to say and one thing she had not.
She had spent the night at a twenty-four-hour Starbucks in Laurel Village before deciding to text me.
3
. By the time she finished, we were both drunk. I had forgotten about the Advanced Creative Writer. Or, perhaps, I should say, I had misplaced my panic. We talked about baseball. She, like all sturdy girls from Boston, knew just enough about the Red Sox to carry on a conversation, but not enough to raise concern.
But then she asked, “Did you call that detective?” and I remembered that we were in grave danger. She must have seen the alarm on my face because she asked, “What happened?”
I told her. Or at least, I told her most of it. I left out the second hottest girl at the bar. She listened quietly, but as I kept filling in details, her face slowly caved in. When I finished telling her about being attacked, she whispered, “Fuck this.”
“Yeah.”
“So the kid in the van.”
“Yes.”
“He saw me, too.”
“He doesn’t know who you are, though. You’re not friends with his creative writing teacher.”
“Still, he probably knows where I live. Lived.”
“Maybe.”
“Are you safe?”
“Who knows?”
“Well, if they had wanted to kill you, wouldn’t they have just killed you when they attacked you?”
I had not considered this. It was a bit embarrassing to admit, so I just nodded. She continued, “Maybe they’re trying to send you a message or something. Or maybe this is just a fucked-up coincidence.”
“How could it be a coincidence?”
“These things, they usually end up being a coincidence.”
“Okay, but let’s pretend it’s not a coincidence. What is it, then?”
We talked like this for a while. I grew mildly annoyed, not by Performance Fleece, but more with myself for my inability to create a plausible scenario. Everything sounded crazy, paranoid. I blamed my career as a fiction writer, but Performance Fleece noted that if I were actually anything of a fiction writer, I could have thought up some version of things where we both would be safe. Plus, she added, you don’t get to claim that you’re a writer until someone has paid you to publish something.
It sounded about right.
4
. That afternoon, Performance Fleece showed up at the Hotel St. Francis with three plastic tubs. This is what was inside.
Tub one: two sets of fitted sheets (dark brown and crimson, queen, flannel), a down comforter with a crocheted duvet (stuffed full, fruit orchard in fall), a Hudson’s Bay blanket, an Afghan throw, a business calculator, two business suits (gray, black), a tangle of nylons, a rubber bath mat, a Tempur-Pedic pillow, an architecturally advanced desk lamp, a can of Ajax, a bottle of mineral oil, a pack of tarot cards, a Bose Wave radio, a field hockey stick, three pairs of shin guards.
Tub two: a paper bag filled with hair bands, two pairs of jeans (one weathered, one black, both sculpted and rigid), black pumice, a small plastic container, which, upon further investigation, held both a mouth guard
and
a retainer, a camping headlamp, a propane canister, a white bathrobe, two plush white towels, a Brillo pad and one of those yellow and green sponges, a puffy jacket, a peacoat, two cashmere sweaters, all manner of underwear, and her two newest purchases: a thirty-two-inch Louisville Slugger and a four-inch hunting knife.
Resting on top of tub two was a dehumidifier.
I get congested easily, she explained.
I admit it. Some of the happiest memories of my life are of waking up in some girl’s dorm room and inhaling the synthesis of dirty, sweaty clothes, scented candles, burned hair, microwaved popcorn, and Secret. In college, whenever I found myself in this Byzantium of white girliness, I’d always sneak off to take a shower, where a patch of brightly colored hair and body products sprouted on the scummy tile floor. On the shower
head, loofahs hung heavy-headed, like slightly browned iris blossoms. I’d always take my time and lather myself with every gel, every goo, every mall-bought, industrially scented, animal-tested product that would never have been allowed in my childhood home. Once, after drunkenly pawing at a heavy freshman who had been impressed by a story I had written in the school’s literary magazine, I bounded in the morning to her shower to wash off the congealed cheese from the half-eaten pizza I had passed out on, only to find a relic from my childhood spoiling the usual bouquet of loofahs—a red, corrosive, nasty washcloth that I immediately knew belonged to the freshman’s Korean roommate. It was enough to send me home without a shower. Since then, I’ve felt some shame over these sorts of things (we don’t have to talk about it, really), but within the vault of my sense memories, no collection of smells quite perks me up like the smells that live in the shared dormitory bathrooms of the elite colleges of the Northeast.
So when Performance Fleece opened up the third tub and began stacking up her collection of moisturizers, conditioners, and shaving products, I fell halfway in love.
5
. We had sex on top of the crocheted orchard duvet, but the desperation of our earlier go had dissipated. I kept slipping out and apologizing. She demanded we try at a slower pace. I responded to this emasculation by trying to jam my finger up her ass. It worked, sort of, but then it really didn’t work. Given the state in which we had found each other again, I didn’t understand what might be wrong. Maybe it was, let’s say, our modest surroundings, but Performance Fleece, true-blue New
Englander, had kept her silence about the mattress, the ramps of dust left in the corners by the cleaning girl, the black veins spreading across the bathtub, the rust and the scum on the faucet, the smell of retread and hard-burned cooking oil, the ominous thuds against the wall, all of which were too soft to be anything but a body. Her only commentary on the room was to note that the pastoral print that hung over the bed had been painted by someone in the Hudson River School, but she couldn’t quite remember the name of the artist. She didn’t comment on how the print had been tacked to the wall without a frame or that it had been blackened so badly by smoke that it now looked more like a Bosch.
Is there anything more attractive to an unsettled man than a woman who silently endures it all? I rolled over, and we did it again. This time, I think I was better.
She went off to the shower. I lay back and waited for the gusts of steam, carrying the heavy scent of products, to waft into the room. For the first time in what seemed like days, I thought about the Baby Molester and the night she showed up at my door, half naked and drunk, asking for a cigarette. It felt like years ago. All the associated panic—the beating, the cryptic threats, the black masks, the blue Astro van—now felt abstracted from my endless list of concerns, as if it had all been part of a story for which I was no longer being held responsible.
I’m hopeless like that. Find me a girl, and I forget the rest of my life happened.
Content, waiting for Performance Fleece to reemerge, I picked up my phone and went back over my browsing history.
THE DIGNITY PROJECT
WILLIAM THOMAS CURREN
B: DECEMBER 18 1984. GLENVIEW, ILLINOIS
D: MAY 12 2009. SAN FRANCISCO, CA
William Curren, known as Bill to his friends and colleagues, was born at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, on December 18, 1984, the first and only son of Stacy and Michael Curren. He spent much of his childhood in a two-story colonial with black shutters. At least one summer of his youth was spent playing Little League baseball. From a young age, Mr. Curren displayed a high academic aptitude, placing in the 95th percentile and above on all of his yearly statewide assessment tests. He carried this academic aptitude to high school, where he finished in the top 20 percent of his class. His academic strengths and his success as a debater gained him acceptance into Tufts University, where Mr. Curren became heavily involved in the Beelzebubs, the college’s acclaimed a cappella group.
After a successful academic career at Tufts, Mr. Curren graduated with a 3.45 GPA while double-majoring in political science and economics. He spent the summer after graduation at Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina, where, according to our sources, he tended bar and enjoyed the local nightlife. In February 2007, Mr. Curren flew out to San Francisco to interview at getoverit.com, then a start-up company. He moved into a house share on California and Broderick before finding his own apartment at 236 Jackson Street in the city’s Marina District. According to his friends,
Mr. Curren enjoyed the vibrancy of the city and lived every second like it was his last.
I stopped reading there. Performance Fleece walked out of the bathroom, mummified in terry cloth. When she saw my face, she dropped her plastic shower caddy. A pink can of shaving cream went clattering across the floor.
When
Kim dropped Finch off at his car, still parked a block away from the Porn Palace, Finch restrained himself from grabbing at any of the thoughts that floated by in slow, eddying circles. Despite his best push for sanity, a physical reflex that made his sphincter contract, these thoughts appeared to him as catfish swimming slowly at the bottom of a clear blue lagoon. Every once in a while, one of the fish would pop to the surface and say something. One said, “Sarah only loves you because she feels obligated, but she’s also the sort of girl who feels better under obligation.” Another said, “Visit your mother. She was trying her best.” Another said, “Visit your father. He was trying his best.” Another said, “That poor kid was stabbed to death by a ski pole. How
many times in Tahoe were you lucky?” Another sang, “Going to leave this broke-down paaa-lace/on my hands/
and
my knees/I will
roll-roll-roll
/Make myself a bed by the waterrrrr-
side
/in my time/in my time/I will
roll-roll-roll
.”
Finch closed his eyes. Through his eyelids, he could see the outlines of the fish swimming about in a reddish miasma of partial images, muted light, blood, and words. For some reason, it was clear that he could not catch these fish, or throw them out of his mind. And although he knew from experience that the psilocybin had passed the stage where a visual hallucination was anything more than a shadow, he could feel their unusual boniness, their prehistoric architecture.
What to do? He drove home, picked up his board and his wet suit, and drove to the beach.
SID “KEANU” FINCH
had started surfing because of
Point Break
, but he kept surfing because the ritual of suiting up in the parking lot, the daily baptism in freezing water, the panic of being dumped, the rush of the drop, and the preening satisfaction of the ride atomized his daily mind into unrecognizably small, disparate parts. While floating in the lineup, thoughts like, “Where is my career going?” would circulate through his head, but once a wave welled up in front of him and the demands of the sport presented themselves, all those nagging concerns lost their immediacy. His fellow locals were all after similar annihilation. Some were methheads incapable of hacking it down in Santa Cruz. Others were jaded LA kids who had made the pilgrimage up north to this Mecca of oldish, charmish Edwardians, pale girls, and the strict, protective business zoning laws that kept out Applebee’s and their ilk. A
smaller proportion were like Finch—San Francisco natives who surfed OB because its riptides, deadly closeouts, sharks, blooms of fecal coliform bacteria, and general gnarliness made it the only place in the city where one could escape from the totality of yuppie things.
Finch drove down Geary past Land’s End and the Sutro Baths, past the curve at the Cliff House, and around Seal Rock, between whose craggy double humps he had once been stranded, surrounded by five hundred indifferent seagulls, after a rogue wave snapped his leash. The catfish in his brain, perhaps noticing his distraction, chirped up more insistently: “Stabbed to death with a ski pole! Yes, the cradle of love … don’t rock easy, it’s true.… There is no difference between you and Kim anymore, he has taken on your hate, you, his bitterness. There’s a million ways to be, you know that there are. You know that there are.…”
But as he wound down the hill toward Kelly’s Cove, he could see that the winds were straight offshore and that the waves were about head-high, maybe 1.5x on the sets.
No school of catfish, or their words of wisdom, can hold a surfer’s mind hostage when he sees perfect conditions and an empty lineup.
IN THE PARKING
lot at Sloat, a little militia of surfers were standing behind their trucks, each one in some stage of disrobing. Finch recognized Doc Samson, an OB local who had come to surf celebrity when a national magazine published a feature that revealed, in anthropological detail, the oddity of a man who surfed
and
practiced medicine. The good doctor was accompanied, as always, by his surf buddy Chris Isaak, whose “Wicked Game” video occupied a monolithic space in Finch’s history of masturbation.
When Finch got out of his car, he heard raised voices. Two men, stripped to the waist, were shouting at each other. One of them had his phone in his still-wet hand.
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
“Why don’t you get your fucking kook friends down here so you can all have a fucking faggot gang bang on the beach? Where the fuck are you from, anyway? I’ve surfed here for twenty-six years and I’ve never seen your ugly ass before.”
“I’ve lived in the Sunset for eight years, motherfucker.”
“I’m going to break that fucking phone.”
Finch walked over to Chris Isaak and asked what was going on. Isaak had just started struggling out of his wet suit, and as he began peeling the rubber off his chest, Finch felt a vague, nostalgic shame.
It was the oldest running joke at the beach. Isaak gave everyone a hard-on because they couldn’t look at his gorgeous face without imagining Helena Christensen and all those tits and mascara.
How many socks had been irreparably stiffened, how many boxes of Kleenex had been emptied to catch all the semen wasted on account of that video?
“How was it out there?” Finch asked.
“Holy shit.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Hit up that left down past the Cliffs of Despair. Barrels all day.”
“What’s up with those two dudes?”
“Stokereporter.”
“Ah. Fuck him, then.”
Stokereport was an MMS/user-generated website providing surf reports for the breaks from Bolinas down to Capitola’s Wild Hook. The posters on the site referred to themselves as “Stokereporters,” and were mostly kooks—out-of-towners who cluttered lineups with whoops, clumsy takeoffs, bleach-blond hair, noodle arms, lame cutbacks, and brightly colored, criminally overpriced longboards.
Old salty locals, who either lived by the beach or hawked over updated geological survey maps and wind pattern trackers to guess at the conditions, regarded Stokereporters with a gentrifical venom. Stokereporters were blamed for overcrowded conditions, unfavorable winds, broken boards, drop-ins, and beach pollution. When the Coast Guard had to rescue four different surfers in the span of six days during a massive northwest swell, it was discovered that three of the men were Stokereporters who had read about the perfect big-wave conditions and had paddled out. These incidents escalated the conflict between locals and Stokereporters. Both sides found access to the familiar linguistic arsenal of right versus left, life versus death, and the military. It had all come to a head at the Riptide Bar up on Judah, when a Stokereport get-together was crashed by a group of drunk old locals, including the infamous Bad Vibes Bob, who had shown up with a riding crop. No one was arrested, largely thanks to Finch, but the resulting brawl sent one Stokereporter to the hospital.
Down at the end of the parking lot, the local had managed to wrest away the Stokereporter’s phone and was threatening to smash it against the ground.
Finch laughed. Chris Isaak laughed, too.
FINCH SUITED UP
and paddled out to the spot Chris Isaak had mentioned. It took only one steep, barreling left to forget about William “Bill” Curren, Being Abundance, psilocybin, Hofspaur, Dolores Stone, Sarah’s distance, the swinging breasts, Kim’s stupor, and the bony persistence of the prehistoric catfish. As he paddled back out, he saw Bad Vibes Bob’s red board tombstoning out of the break and then, a second later, Bad Vibes Bob’s gray head popping up out of the surf.
A calm, quite different from the mushroom clarity, washed over Finch. The winds were cooperating, the waves were peeling perfectly, and all the bros were out.
On his third thumping, overhead left of the session (Finch had a habit, probably born out of his childhood fascination with baseball stats, of counting his rides and categorizing them by the direction, shape, and length), a shoulder hopper dropped in on him, lost his balance, and tumbled headfirst into the trough. Finch heard the crunch as his fins ran over the offender’s board and was launched into the white water. As the washing machine gathered him up, he could feel the shoulder hopper struggling to get to the surface. In an effort to separate their bodies before the churn sent them both back over the falls, Finch pushed himself away and curled himself up into a ball and began his routine of counting slowly in his head to dispel the panic. He felt the surge of water catch his body, and, in a sledgehammer’s arc, he was slammed, shoulder-first, onto the ocean floor. Sixteen seconds later, his leash went slack.
At the surface, a red-faced, scraggly bottle blond was gasping for air. A few feet down the beach floated the sawed-off remains of a
Coke-bottle-green Harbour Noserider. He recognized the man from a poster someone had put up at the Riptide Bar, which had photos of all the Stokereporters, descriptions of their boards, and a simple declaration:
WANTED: FOR POSEURISM
.
“Bro, look what you did to my fucking board!”
“You dropped in on
me
, asshole. I should be yelling at you for nicking up my fins.”
“That’s a sixteen-hundred-dollar board, asshole. You fucking ran me right over.”
A second wave, hollow and frothy, crashed on their heads. Finch went back over the falls, bounced on the sand, started up the slow count.
“Fucking shit, man. If someone walks out in front your car, do you just run them over? Where is your fucking discretion?”
“Post something about it on your website, bro.”
His contrarian nature and soft voice absolved Finch from the usual charges of cop bullying. There had been a short stretch, right after graduating from the academy, when he had picked up a whiff of menace in his dealings with wealthy women. In particular, there was an instance when, while pacing around the maid’s quarters of a mansion up on Pacific, he had purposely knocked over and shattered a Ming vase—a
good
Ming—owned by a woman whose fifteen-year-old son had just stolen her car. Although his old patrol habit of pulling over cars with NPR bumper stickers might be interpreted as abuse by those who caught the tickets for going 46 in a 35, every cop he knew had to keep at least one good joke going. But aside from those two quirks, which he attributed directly to unresolved mom issues, Sid Finch sought out the losing side of any confrontation. He was always kind to fat women. He felt sentimental over the poor terrorists in Iraq who, holding an AK-47 for the first time in
their lives, were cut down by American bullets. He hadn’t voted in the last election because he couldn’t fight how sorry he felt for soggy old John McCain. After his childhood love of the Giants had been annihilated by Barry Bonds’s arrogance, he had even rejected the idea of rooting for a team, choosing instead to hope only for the humiliation of the Yankees and, in time, the Red Sox.
While the rest of the judging world might choose a side based on silly, affected opinions, Finch’s choice came on a more visceral level. In any conflict, one side was going to get killed. He would forever be fighting for that side. In San Francisco, that meant being police.
Finch agreed that the Stokereporters were surf-ethically wrong, but he had long since determined—despite their use of technology, their superior numbers, and their cloying enthusiasm—these limp-armed poseurs were, in fact, the underdog. Finch could understand why his fellow locals had fashioned the battle as a Thermopylae, with the buff, salty cast of locals fighting valiantly against the hordes of offending kooks, but whenever he saw a Stokereporter flailing, panicked, whenever he read one of their posted narratives, riddled with nuanced self-congratulation about trying to paddle past the break on a 2OH OB day, whenever some pale, concave-chested kid covered in body acne walked up to him in the parking lot and asked for help with his wet suit zipper, Finch knew the Thermopylae comparison was wrong.
When he grabbed a fistful of the Stokereporter’s poseur-blond scraggle, nobody was more surprised than Finch. A wave welled up, the face going from green to gunmetal gray as the water shifted away from the sun. The dredge kicked up, and, as both men were being sucked back, Finch watched with detachment as the man’s eyelids peeled back. As the
lip detonated on their heads, Finch found himself simply appreciating the aesthetic magnitude of the man’s terror.
