Read The Dead Do Not Improve Online
Authors: Jay Caspian Kang
The Dead Do Not Improve (14 page)
3
. Our first stop was at the breezy, yuppie wine bar up on 18th Street. Ellen took out her phone and placed it faceup on the bar. “I can’t feel the vibrations anymore,” she explained. “Especially when I get as drunk as I’m planning on getting.” She ordered two bottles of wine and a cheese plate. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was lactose-intolerant, but had just the shred of hope left to not risk a night of farting in front of my new girlfriend. She didn’t notice, ate the whole cheese plate herself. Again, I was in love. We didn’t talk about what was happening. Instead, she told me about her parents’ vacation house in Mexico and the boys she met during her childhood summers. A bottle and a half in, she giggled and said that there had been times when she had
wondered if her relationship with Mel was just her way of finding a white replacement for all those beautiful Mexican boys. Who has the heart to judge a girl who talks about sex while devouring cheese? Especially in my state? I just drank more and told her about the time I drove down with my friend Chad to a rope swing out in Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was a half-mile hike through poison ivy and all the greenish undergrowth that pops up in the South, the sort of generic, choking vegetation that never seems worth naming. As we walked up the river’s bank, we could see little islands of pig shit floating on the surface of the brown water. Somehow, the cocooning greenness of the leaves, the redness of the clay, and the humidity in the air made even pig shit seem healthy. About a year later, while I was trying to show the first girl who had ever told me that she loved me the rope swing, a vacationing couple from Fort Lauderdale would rear-end my minivan and blow out the back windows. The girl gathered a handful of shattered glass and put it in an Empress typewriter ribbon tin because she had just watched
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.
Anyway, on that day I was just telling you about, Chad and I drove to the rope swing listening to Bill Withers’s
Greatest Hits
. There was a thrift store on the way, and next to it, a soda fountain that served egg creams. We stopped in and looked for tuxedos for some school dance that was coming up. When we got to the turnoff for the rope swing, we parked and walked in, towels draped around our shoulders. But when we got to the spot, we saw a bunch of Mexican kids taking turns on the swing. Neither of us knew what to do. Were they black, we would’ve skulked back to the car. If they were white, we would’ve asked for a turn. Even then, I think both of us had been to too much school to realize that we had not, at the age of sixteen, ever dealt with a Mexican without the ease and padding of some service position, so neither of us could acknowledge
the weirdness, and so we took refuge under a willow and silently watched them take turns climbing the boards nailed into the side of the tree—the sort of tree steps that could have appeared in
Pogo
or even
Br’er Rabbit—
as the Mexican kids, one by one, bombed themselves right, and I mean
right
, into the islands of pig shit. In the spring, every year, the white people would have a festival on that river, to save it from pig shit, and so when Kathleen finally asked me to the bluegrass festival where I first saw the Baby Molester, how could I have explained what, exactly, was churning in my heart? Just the jangly, kind crowd, the sight of old men and mandolins on the stage brought me back to the muddy spot where Chad and I stood on the bank of the river beneath the heavy droop of a hundred-year-old willow whose greenness is impossible to describe—if you cut Hermes open, his heart would be that green. After some hand-wringing, we decided to try again later and turned to walk back to the car. As we came out from under the willow, I saw one of the kids, his face glowing like a lucky moon, gesture us toward the tree. The other kids were all bobbing in the water, and they just grinned as I grimly climbed up the steps. The kid who had motioned us over handed me the rope, and before my cowardice could betray me, I jumped off. I don’t know, it was like maybe fifteen, twenty feet off the ground, I didn’t look down. My arms back then were just barely strong enough to support my weight, so instead of swinging out into the deep middle, I tumbled headfirst down into the shallow bank. You know those videos people send around of rednecks catching catfish with their arms? That’s where I landed. No, I wasn’t hurt, but when I came up to surface, those brown heads were bobbing nearby and each one was laughing at me.
My mother told me once to soften up my laugh. She could hear no forgiveness in it, no concession to the fact that we are all trying. I can
think of the reasons why it ended up that way, but I’ve never been able to change.
That dickhead detective was right. When I laugh, it’s because the world is suffering.
When I came up to the surface and saw the kids laughing, my mind locked into an ugly, eugenic calculus. Chad went hurtling over my head and splashed straight into one of those pig shit blooms. The laughter, once again, rang up the river. I remember pretending to be hurt, clutching at my knee to avoid looking back out at the river, or up at the branch, where the moon-faced kid still sat. Had I known what to look for, I would have seen the generosity my mother had always missed in her only son, the kindness you can only hope happens to your children, because while you can teach a person to act kindly, you can’t really teach warmth.
From the willow tree, I watched Chad get along better with those Mexican kids. I couldn’t come up with a comfortable, or even angry, reason why, so I just watched, excerpting myself so that the heat and the humidity and the greenness were no longer oppressive or sticky or even beautiful. Then, Smiley-Face Moon, who had since jumped down from the branch, ran over to a plastic cooler they had set on a stump. After rummaging around a bit, he pulled something out and trotted over toward my willow fortress. I stood up, vaguely scared, and screwed on a smile. He did a better job at it. You know when you meet someone who doesn’t speak English and they give you this huge, silly grin, like they’re saying, “Hey, I’m sorry we can’t talk, but we’re okay”? There’s a lady who works in one of those doughnut shops–slash–Chinese buffets on Clement Street who smiles like that. It’s always kind of breaking my heart—did I just use that phrase?—because she’s always touching dirty things and not washing her hands. Anyway, this kid ducks under the
willow branches, and guess what he hands me? A quesadilla in a Ziploc bag. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Me, standing there, humiliated, worried vaguely about how the unflattering fabric of my bathing suit was clinging to my shrinking, stereotyped penis, Chad making friends, and this kid brings me a fucking quesadilla in a plastic bag. I looked down at the tops of my bare feet and the little currents of pig shit river water dripping off my shorts, and, for that moment, I could press my hands up against the furthest edge of love. And it felt massive.
Even back then, I knew this sort of moment would have been better set in the fifties or sixties or even the 1890s, but in 1996 we all knew better than to say something silly and impolite, like, when I was seventeen, I met some Mexican kids on the banks of the Haw River and one of them handed me a quesadilla in a plastic bag. I’ll never get the image of that quesadilla out of my mind, but I can’t tell anyone that story and I certainly can’t write about it because our modern tolerance assumes all cross-cultural exchanges are either zero-sum or simply amazing. You’re supposed to write, at best, about foods, dances, weird clothes, and mothers who catch you with your cock in your guilty, yellow hands, but you’re not supposed to write about the time when you became a bit less of a bigot. Because you already were supposed to have gotten through that.
We, you and me, were raised to assume our humanity.
She laughed. She said, “Maybe you were.”
We got a bit drunker.
At some point, Ellen picked up her phone to see if Kim had called. A grizzled man smiled on the screen. He had on some sort of floppy sun hat. I would not have described him as looking happy, but I suppose, if fair is fair, I have never described anyone as looking happy. Ellen stared in at the man’s face, not quite comprehending.
“That’s mine. Your phone is over there.” It was the bartender. Maybe it was all the wine and the soft light, but she looked, almost exactly, like Diane Lane.
Ellen placed the phone, screen up, in her open palm and offered it to her. She asked, “Is that your boyfriend?”
“Husband.”
“Husband?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lucky. He’s really hot.”
The bartender plucked the phone out of Ellen’s hand and stared in at the screen. She pursed her lips. Attractively. And sighed. Also attractively. Looking up at Ellen with those Diane Lane doe eyes, she said, “Thank you.” And then, “I’m going to step away for a minute. You two good?”
Kim called Ellen’s phone at around eleven. Her side of the conversation involved a lot of yeses and noes. After hanging up, she asked the bartender if she could turn the TV to the local news, and, perhaps, turn up the volume. Something important had just happened. The bartender asked if there had been an earthquake, but Ellen shook her head and just repeated the request. The bartender said she could turn on the news, but couldn’t turn up the sound. Her manager, she explained. Ellen asked if she could at least turn on the captions.
.
THE VICTIMS, FIFTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD DOLORES STONE AND TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD WILLIAM CURREN, WERE BOTH FOUND DEAD IN THEIR APARTMENTS EARLIER THIS WEEK. THE POLICE RELEASED A STATEMENT TONIGHT REVEALING THE EXISTENCE OF THE LETTER, AND, INDEED CONFIRMING THAT IT HAD BEEN SENT BY AN ORGANIZATION CLAIMING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MURDERS. HOWEVER, NO DETERMINATIONS HAVE YET BEEN MADE AS TO WHETHER THIS CONSTITUTES TERRORIST ACTIVITY.
.
The image on the screen had frozen. Street reporter Sam, bathed in halogen, was standing on the steps of what I assumed was the downtown police station. His eyes had been frozen half closed, and his lip was curled just enough to reveal a blurry but dazzlingly white set of teeth.
Behind his left shoulder, with, again, a blurry, malicious look on his dirty potato face, was Jim Kim.
I was too drunk to make much sense of it, but I do recall, for whatever reason, feeling relieved. I looked over at Ellen, but those fine, sturdy New England features weren’t giving anything away. I considered telling her I loved her. The bartender, back from her break, said, “Holy shit. Jim Kim.”
The bar’s front door swung open.
It was Jim Kim.
The bartender said, “Jimmy. How weird. Look, you’re up on the TV!”
He said, “Sarah. Where is your husband? I can’t reach him on his phone.”
Before she could answer, he looked me dead in the eyes and asked, “Did you recognize that name? Did you catch that name?”
I stared at the floor.
Mr. Brownstone. The name of Cho Seung-Hui’s other play.
Heather
stared at the vacated parking spaces, the open door, her face clouded in ruin. She whispered, “Whoever left here left in a hurry.” Finch didn’t ask who whoever was, but he had done the math. Two men, especially if one of the men lies unconscious and hog-tied, cannot drive away three cars, even if two of the cars are identical.
He asked, “Is there anyone else left in that house?”
She shook her head.
“Do you have any clothes in there?”
“I have some things.”
“Well, why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go down to the station.”
There was nowhere to sit in the Subaru, so Finch strapped his surfboards to the rack and tried his best to dust the sand off the passenger’s seat. Heather’s hair was now piled up like a conch atop her head, and she now wore a groovy yellow dress she had somehow found the time to accessorize: dull silver Mexican rings, a cloudy jade bracelet. To the unknowing observer, she could have been his young secretary.
He asked, “Where to?”
“Can we please go down to the station?”
“There are many stations.”
“The downtown one.”
As he pulled out onto Fulton, he asked her to explain everything she could explain. She said, “As I told you back in the restaurant, I was born in San Clemente, basically just in the last cluster of houses before you hit San Onofre. My father was a famous local shaper named Terry LeBlanc, and my brothers were—”
“I don’t need your life story. Just an explanation of where we’re going so that I can call in backup.”
She looked hurt. Picking at some invisible thing on her bared knee, she said, “I was providing context.”
They pulled up to the red light at Divisadero. He tried calling Kim, but went straight to voice mail. As he was about to call into dispatch, he heard Heather gasp. She was pointing at the intersection. The light had just turned green. The rusted-out Dodge Ram, flanked by the S-Class sedans, rolled into view. And then, much to Finch’s dismay, one of the sedans went right, the other left. The Ram went straight.
Heather’s gaping face gave nothing away.
Finch chose the Ram.
Through the Ram’s rear windshield, Finch spotted a lone head
bobbing up and down. Worried about being made, he instructed Heather to feel around the backseat for a magazine. When she came up with a copy of
Surfer’s Journal
, he told her to hold it up in front of her face. There was still the problem of the beacon of her red hair, so he asked her to let it down. She heeded all these instructions without question or protest, and, as they followed the Ram down into the Western Addition, she appeared to be reading. On Fillmore, the Ram turned left. Finch, following three cars behind, called into dispatch and gave the girl the description of the three cars and the direction they were headed, but when Heather asked him what he was planning on having done, he realized he had no real idea.
On Geary, the Ram turned right and accelerated up the hill toward Gough. A white produce truck pulled out in front of the Subaru, blocking both the turnoff and Finch’s line of sight. He cursed and felt around for his gun, which still was tucked into the waist of his pants. An old Asian man climbed down from the driver’s seat and motioned for him to drive around. The traffic headed the other way was unrelenting, so Finch pulled onto the sidewalk, clipping one of his rearview mirrors up against a parking meter, and hurtled out onto Gough.
The Ram was gone.
FINCH LACKED THE
confidence, and, perhaps, the aesthetic callousness, to start a high-speed chase in a Subaru Outback wagon, especially one with two surfboards strapped to the top, so he backed over the curb, parked, and got out. The passenger’s side mirror dangled by its wires. It’s like Van Gogh’s ear, he thought to himself. Or something. Whatever. He was tired of thinking in metaphors and once again closed his eyes to feel around for the fish. But they were gone. He remembered a meal
he had once had with his mother at some hole in the wall deep in the Chinese part of Daly City. His mother’s acupuncturist and part-time lover had given the place his personal stamp of authenticity. When they got there, a curious Chinese woman with a perfectly round boil on her nose, a singularly immigrant blemish that conjured up the same mixture of disgust and wonderment he had found in
National Geographic
’s running gallery of tribal breasts, sat them down at a table by the window. Some malnourished-looking men were playing cards in the corner. The dank, suffocating smell of Nag Champa hung in the air. Upon being instructed by Finch’s mother to “make it up as she goes along,” the woman disappeared behind a curtain and returned with a Bunsen burner, a block of tofu, and a clay pot inside which a school of tiny fish darted around in a few inches of oily water. The woman lit the burner and placed the pot on it and watched, with a wicked smile, as the heat began to churn the water. Then, just as the water began to boil, she dropped the block of tofu into the pot. All the fish, sensing the coolness of the tofu, began burrowing their heads into the tofu. Within a few seconds, all the fish, save one, had entombed themselves in that white soy mausoleum. The woman must have seen the horror and the restraint on Finch’s mother’s face because she cackled, and then, with a magician’s flourish, extracted the tofu and sliced it in half, revealing all the corpses inside. Had the catfish, with their spiny heads, chosen a similar grave? Had his brain become fish loaf?
THERE WAS NOTHING
left to do. He called in the Ram and gave dispatch strict directions to call him the second any of the three cars were pulled over. He motioned Heather out of the car. They walked to a
nearby Panda Express. He ordered a bag of egg rolls and a soda and let Heather finish her explanation.
“AS I WAS
saying, I was born in San Clemente. You’ve seen
The Naked Gun
, right? You know those boob buildings? Like five miles from those. My brothers grew up on the beach, and by the time our father went away, their sponsors had moved the oldest one to the North Shore, the middle one to the Gold Coast. I was left alone with my mother. She never quite got over what my dad used to be. I kind of understand, though. Even during the worst of it, when the years of dust from the shaping room had cut his lungs in half, when the meth had taken his teeth and his strength, she’d always ask him if he was going to go surfing.
“What was I doing during that time? Oh, I don’t know. I was eating a lot of Metabolife and trying to think of a way to get out of there that didn’t involve doing better at school. I fell in love with one of my brother’s old friends, but he got pissed at me because he said I was looking at another boy’s pecs. That’s what he said, ‘You were looking at his pecs.’ When I laughed, he threw me in his car and wouldn’t let me out until the cops came. Then I dropped out of school and moved down to San Diego with one of my girlfriends. One of my father’s old shaping buddies had offered us his extra room. He lived right on Mission Boulevard, in this run-down duplex. From the bathroom window, you could kinda see the ocean. We both stayed there a couple weeks. I got too drunk one night and went for a walk down the boardwalk to the roller coaster at the end of Mission Beach. There was a taco stand there, and I remember ordering five rolled tacos and a Diet Coke and sitting down on the seawall with my back facing the waves. I knew if I stood straight up and walked
in a straight line through the marsh, I’d end up falling into Shamu’s tank at Sea World.
“When I got back to the apartment, the front door was open and someone was crying inside. I saw my friend in the corner. My dad’s old shaping buddy was laid out in the kitchen, bleeding from the head. I’ve never seen skin just hacked up like that.
“I didn’t need to know anything. I went to the kitchen, took out a knife, and stabbed him right in the back. It’s tough to stab someone with a kitchen knife. I’m sure you know that. By the time the police showed up, I had just made it through his shirt. The cops asked what had happened and we told them and when they looked up my dad’s friend’s record they saw he had been arrested three times for sexual assault and so we were let go after just a couple hours in jail. No charges were ever brought up, but we knew we couldn’t be friends again.
“I moved up to San Francisco and started working as a hairdresser and then a dancer down on O’Farrell, and then there was one night when I was walking out of work after some fratty guy had puked on me during a lap dance. There was this quiet-looking man standing outside of a corner store who asked me where I was going and if I wanted to get a drink. He said his name was Karlos with a ‘k,’ and he spent the whole night talking about surfing and being abundance. Just the way he said the word was beautiful and hypnotic, the way the names of tropical places can convince you that nothing ever goes wrong there. What could go wrong in San Tropez? In Bali? Who doesn’t want abundance? He told me he owned a restaurant and said he’d pay me to be a hostess there, but I’d have to stop stripping. This was three, three and a half years ago. I’ve worked there ever since.
“About a year and a half ago, this monk who said he had spent ten
years on a mountaintop in Japan came and visited the restaurant. He insisted on washing dishes, but it was clear from the start that he had a hold on Karlos’s mind. The monk kept talking about this concept he called Electronic Separation, where the constant interaction of mind with an energized source, in most people’s cases a computer or television screen, was responsible for a worldwide evacuation of body energy. As evidence, he pointed out the city of San Francisco, which, he argued, was in ruins.
“It all made sense to Karlos. Of course it did. He began recruiting people who had been laid off in the tech industry. He’d log into tech job hunter websites, pretending to be a start-up called Brownstone Industries. When anyone replied with any pertinent information, he’d send one of us girls to go find these guys at bars or wherever, and we’d be asked to do whatever it took to get the talent on board. You’d be shocked how easy it was. It took five months, and Karlos had a crack team of programmers and hackers who were tasked with taking down a long list of soul criminals. Mister Hofspaur was near the top of that list.
“There’s only a little left to go. The hackers started attacking employees of the companies. Karlos began devising plans to intimidate and terrify the executives. The list of targeted companies just kept getting bigger. We even started a campaign against a group of surfers who started some stupid website community to post surf reports, because Karlos thought they were monetizing and digitizing the ocean. The kidnapping of Mister Hofspaur was just the next step. It’s going to get worse.”
“This Karlos.”
“Yes.”
“Does Karlos have a last name?”
“His real name isn’t Karlos. It’s Robert.”
“Robert.”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe Robert?”
“He’s big. Brown hair. Broken nose.”
“And he surfs?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe his board?”
“He has so many, but they’re all red.”
Finch heard a rumbling in his skull. Closing his eyes, he saw the catfish wriggling their way out of his brain. He let them all swim away. The joy that had been knocking around threw up its hands and dissipated. He heard his phone buzz, but he knew that what they had found no longer mattered.
He had his man.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are we going?”
“To somewhere with Internet.”
THE REASON FINCH
didn’t call in for help, or even Kim, was that he had determined, with what he reasoned was 90 percent certainty, that Heather was lying to him. His suspicions had started when she had handed over her driver’s license. It was a well-worn phrase down at the station, and not just in homicide, that if any witness gives you something, you might as well arrest the fucker. Maybe he didn’t actually commit the crime, but at some point, that witness will turn on you.
Not only had Heather brought him to the scene of the crime, she had insisted on being taken down to the station. In all of Finch’s years of work, no witness had ever volunteered to “go down to the station.” It was
a phrase born completely out of television’s fantasy, and although many of Finch’s dealings with witnesses were tinged with the influence of what they had watched on cop shows, TV’s heavy hand had never quite pushed anyone to willingly entrap himself, or herself, within the stone walls of the downtown police station.
Then there was the issue of her life’s story—why fill it in with so much humanizing detail? Why tell a cop so willingly about the time you stabbed an unconscious man in the back? Why say anything at all about your childhood? Sure, there was a surfboard strapped to the top of his car and he was wearing flip-flops, but Finch was not just a cop, but a cop she had drugged earlier that day. She had made herself a bit too relatable, a bit too easy to pity, and while he could attribute some of this to what must have been years of learning how to distill her angst through highly structured, intricately codified verbal diarrhea, he couldn’t help but notice that her story was too structured, too shot through with loss, injury, and vague artiness, to be believable. The person she had described was what his wife, Sarah, would call a Noelle—a girl, best played by a melanin-deficient girl with bangs and big blue eyes, who whips up injury and a heavily affected quirkiness into a symphonic siren’s song for all the lonely, doddering literary men to hear. My father did x and my response was not a response, but who can respond against all the y in the world, and so here I am with my beloved z, still addled by x, but trying my best to convince myself that z > x + y. Will you, my sad, literary w, will you add to my z, so I can be assured of the calculus of happiness?
