The Dead Do Not Improve (19 page)

She turned around and winced.

Hofspaur said, “You two have already met Field Agent Bernstein.”

Ellen coughed. Me, I was too drunk. Field Agent Bernstein, née Officer Bar Davis, jerked the wheel, swerving the limo through two lanes of traffic, onto the exit ramp for the 1 South. “We have to be careful that we’re not followed.” Hofspaur explained, “You two are in some danger, and it’s paramount we reach a safe space. From here on out, please maintain radio silence. Cell phones off.”

We drove down the hill toward Pacifica through a bank head of thick,
gray fog. In the parking lot of a McDonald’s, Field Agent Bernstein herded us out of the limo and into a green Toyota Corolla. We drove around on the surface streets, passing by squat, efficient houses whose bright colors and well-tended lawns couldn’t quite ward off the fog’s cold grip. At the corner of some street and another, a cavalry of teenage kids rode by on BMX bikes that had been rigged up with surfboard racks. Their wet suits were draped, like black flags, over their handlebars. We pulled up in front of a nondescript pink house and watched as the fog slowly erased their retreating forms.

Field Agent Bernstein got out of the car and started walking up toward the pink house. Hofspaur said, “Come along.”

We did, although now that I think about it, I have no idea why.

FOR THE ENTIRETY
of our silent drive down the 1, the same two scenes kept running through my head. In the first, I was dying somewhere squalid with a bullet in my gut. As I gasped for air and muttered some meaningful stuff, Ellen’s face would hover over me like some radiant, teary planet. She would press her finger to my lips and say, “I have to say something,” and then confess, earnestly, that she was a double agent working for someone or the other. “But,” she would say as I was gathering up my last breath, “somewhere along the way, I fell in love and I’m sorry.”

In the second scenario, Ellen lies dying on some squalid floor and I am the one hovering like some radiant, teary planet, but this time, when she makes her gasping, tortured confession, she reveals her pregnancy.

I know it was ridiculous, but try to understand, it had just dawned on
me that I barely knew this girl. If Bar Davis was not Bar Davis and our danger was not danger, wasn’t it also possible that Ellen was not Ellen? But there was nothing to do. I took her wrist and led her into the pink house.

2
. Inside, the furniture was old. The television was huge. The photos stared out from thick bronze frames. An antique foggy mirror hung from its mount—all the evidence of an old woman who, from time to time, receives gifts from her offspring. Bar Davis was seated on a couch next to Hofspaur, still grimacing, but it was more of a grimace of soft concern, the way a dog lover will grimace as he clips the toenails of his beloved golden. She waved toward a yellow cretonne settee and said, “Please. Sit down and listen.

“As Miles alluded to before, I have not been completely forthright about my identity, so allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Tovah Bernstein of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Recently, I have come across some information that should be concerning to both of you, but especially Mister Kim. Without going into unnecessary detail, Mr. Kim, we have reason to believe that members of the San Francisco Police Department, acting under the command of an executive at a large Internet security company, have enacted a plot to frame you for the murders of your former neighbor, Miss Dolores Stone, and your former colleague, Mister William Curren.

“Last night, however, as you might have heard on the news, a letter was received from a group calling themselves the Brownstone Knights.
The letter was mostly incomprehensible, but thanks to the efforts of Inspector James Kim, the origin of the Brownstone Knights was quickly traced back to the writings of Cho Seung-Hui.

“The confluence of the fact that you were the only person connected to both victims and your own peculiar background, which includes both Korean heritage and a laundry list of published short stories, all of which, I might add, exhibit a fascination with guns, gang culture, physical abuse, and violence—”

I interrupted her. “What?”

“What to what?”

“Published short stories? Gang culture? Physical abuse?”

“Are you denying this?”

“I’ve published one story. It was about a retard and his brother. And it didn’t even count because they didn’t pay me.”

I squeezed Ellen’s hand.

“I see.” Reaching into the slash pocket of her blazer, she produced a folded sheet of paper. “You are not the author of ‘Rapey Time Militia,’ ‘Tonz of Gunz,’ ‘Mrs. Brownstone,’ and ‘Cunty Kinte and the Last Molester,’ all published in
Ammo
and
Pussy Quarterly Review
?”

“Wikipedia?”

“What?”

“Those stories, you found them on my Wikipedia page, right?”

Ellen broke her silence. She asked, “You have a Wikipedia page?”

“My friend Adam made a Wikipedia page for me when we were in graduate school. It was a joke. None of those stories are real. I’ve just never bothered to take it down because what’s the point?”

“Could you please explain this, then?”

She reached back into the same pocket and pulled out a thick, folded square of paper. Printed across the top, in big bold letters, was the title “Cunty Kinte and the Last Molester.” The first sentence read, “When Cunty Kinte was born, his father took him to the soothsayer, who placed the young boy in a bed of tea leaves and molested him.”

“I didn’t write this. I never write in the third person.”

“It’s possible it was planted online.”

“Why?”

“Because with this evidence, Mister Kim, and your general antisocial tendencies, a convincing story will be told to the general public that pits you as a menace against the greater society.”

“What?”

“Yes. The organization behind these actions is BFG, a Silicon Valley Internet security company. Now that people’s bank accounts and children are relatively safe, this company has decided to branch out into a different sort of security, namely, protecting people’s online identities from predators such as yourself. Every time a white person gets killed now, this company, through a network of hyperlocal blogs and news organizations, tries to link the victim and the killer through a form of social media. By taking the randomness out of every murder, they create monsters and put them right under your bed.”

“But I didn’t kill anyone.”

“We understand that now.”

“So, uh, what’s going on?”

“What we do know, Mister Kim, is that you, I’m sorry to say, make a pretty scary monster.”

In the haze brought on by this erratic panic and eight Cape Codders,
I thought she was calling me pretty. But then I looked into the gilt, smoky mirror and saw the truth. At least, I thought, Ellen looked nice in that fucked-up hat.

“You, with your tony educational background, your ethnic background, which links you to the Virginia Tech killings, and your prolific presence on the Internet, are the new breed of monster.”

“Really.” Despite everything, I was still somehow flattered.

“I do not know what they will do from here on out, but I would not be surprised if more of these sorts of stories, authored by you, began appearing in far-off stretches of the Internet. The story will be the same. You are a frustrated young writer living in the serial killer capital of America, who, on several occasions, has posted ironical things about Cho Seung-Hui. They will find what I found quite easily—the rap lyrics posted on Internet forums, the disturbingly violent short stories, the history of fights in college, the rampant drug use. There will be interviews with kids from your high school who will say you were bullied and made to feel inferior. They will interview your ex-girlfriends, who, no matter what they say, will be white. Are you understanding me?”

“Yes. I mean except the white girlfriend part.”

“Well, that’s less important.”

“Okay, then.”

She paused, mercifully, and smoothed out the front of her skirt. Ellen, I noticed, was crying again. Hofspaur, elbows on knees, emanated a Buddha-like calm, as if all of this was just another example of whatever this was an example of. I couldn’t help but think he was right.

Tovah Bernstein asked, “Do you want to know why I’m telling you this?”

“Sure. I don’t care.”

“Because your last victim, Philip, is you.”

3
. Like all moody, hell-bent children, I grew up knowing I was not long for this earth. I remember lying in bed at night, trying to imagine a saggier, wiser me. When I succeeded in projecting a bowlarama gut, my face would still be my face. If I scrolled up to edit the face, the gut would shrivel back into my fifteen-year-old stomach. My cock hung down lower in these imaginings (gravity’s inevitable favor), but my legs would lose their manly hair. A totality of vision was always out of reach. This incompleteness sieved out my faith for a future like the futures of others.

It’s fair to point out: I wasn’t really trying.

This condition, I’ll call it, has never been addressed, but over the years, the demands of staying alive have wrested away the edges of incompleteness and roughly stitched them together. I have stopped worrying about my inability to imagine myself as an older man, but in doing so, I warped what I had counted on as being good, my quick-flamed glory. The need to find girls to share my bed, the need to see myself as a social being, the need to avoid adverbs, the need to win at chess, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, the need to not be moody and the need to be moody provided a wearable shield against the darkness, but they never could quite convince me that I should still be existing anymore.

When Field Agent Tovah Bernstein announced my imminent death, the stitches hemming in my imagined life split. The lumpy tapestry
spread out, revealing its blackening gaps. As I looked up at the march of truncated and half-formed bodies, my stowed-away celluloid places and their associated place names, I was inundated with something much better than relief. There I was, headless, save a floating mop of graying hair, walking down some street. The buildings on either side made no sense—there was the communist ice cream shop on the corner of 18th and Guerrero, the red awning of a pizza slice counter on 110th and Broadway, my high school’s vocational building, spare, squat, and brick, the used book store in Chapel Hill where I had spent my allowance, dutifully building up a library that might match my towering intellectual vanity. And there was Ellen, accompanying me through this maze of associations, her face blurry, her legs thick and sturdy. I could see a Christmas card of our children in Santa hats—the only one who looked at all like me was grimacing. There we were in some overgrown marshland, surrounded by cattails, staring up at the white plume of the
Challenger
traced out across the murky blue sky. There we were, standing by the leaded windows of our classic six on Riverside Drive, a few blocks too far up to truly still be called Riverside Drive, watching as a mob of zombies thunked their rotting fists against the front door of our building. There, surrounded by blue-green landscapes and whorls of qi lines, we sat in a noodle shop in Seoul, my mother’s apparition hovering nearby. Through the paper walls, we heard her tell us about how, before she ever met my father, he used to come down to this noodle shop to study, and how she will always return to sit in this booth with a view of the street, to pick at the cheap chajangmyun, because even when you fall out of love with someone, you are still in love with who they were before they met you.

Relief flooded out of my fingertips. I hiccuped.

You please believe. I did not want this to become a love story. Were the circumstances different, I would have been embarrassed to know that so much was contingent on this girl I barely knew. But Field Agent Tovah Bernstein had laid out a potential escape, a way to dive right into the darkness, and although the iterations of self on the cloth were all headless, monstrous, moaning, all the Ellens were clearer, somehow.

I felt something familiar spark up, tinder, and ignite.

I asked, “Where the fuck are these people?”

The
shot hit the fat man in the shoulder. He grunted, blinked a dozen times, keeled over. Finch dived behind the island, landing squarely on the back of the fat, striped yellow thing. From under the island, he could see Bad Vibes Bob’s scuffed Doc Martens planted firmly on the tile. Somebody was saying something to somebody, and the fat yellow thing was squealing and squirming under his chest. The nitrous whonging returned. Finch’s vision grayed at the edges.

A weight pressed down on the back of his neck. A cell phone clattered on the tile near Finch’s head.

“Please don’t struggle, Sidney. This has very little to do with you. Now please, call an ambulance for our fat friend.”

GUN IN RIBS
,
Finch drove the Subaru down toward the Mission. Bad Vibes Bob was laid out in the backseat, his wrists zip tied behind his back. He was cursing, but without much conviction. At the intersection of 20th and Mission, Lionface instructed Finch to park in front of the old Victoria Theatre sign. Rusted out and long since gutted of its lights, the Victoria sign stuck up over the storefronts, a bit of Coney Island shipped out to San Francisco. Two men jogged over and positioned themselves on either side of the Subaru. The one on Finch’s side pulled up his shirt, revealing a gun butt stuck in the waist of his pants.

Lionface said, “We are going into this club to watch this show. Don’t ask why. Just know that there are at least thirty men in there just like these men. Their only job is to watch over you. If you do not want bullets to fly in a club, I would suggest you remain calm and listen to all of my instructions. Again, there is no need for all of this to get ugly. At the end, I promise to explain. Now please, get out and these men will escort you quietly to your reserved seats.”

The man on Finch’s side tapped on the window.

NERDS SWARMED THE
12 Galaxies. Standing at the threshold, Finch stared out at all the milling children. Once again, he hated them. He wished Sarah could be the one with the gun up in his back, so that she might say something damning about the postcollegiate population of San Francisco: how poorly they dress, how behind Brooklyn, how earnest their art, how boring and consuming their jobs down in Silicon Valley, how organic scam, their organic chard.

As for the gun in his back, Finch had no opinion, but as he edged and apologized his way through the crowd, he felt the bump of the joy he had felt outside of the bakery in Pescadero. He couldn’t quite draw the exact line back to some earlier happy memory and haul himself back toward it, but he knew, just by the totality of the joy, that this time it had something to do with his memory of Sarah.

Where was she? And just how beautifully would she have hated what was here?

At the back of the club, near the stage, were five rows of folding chairs, each one occupied, save the two at the stage-left end of the front row. Finch, who, like all surfers, made a habit of examining the bodies of other built men to ferret out whether the muscles were produced by labor and nature, or by the unnatural efficiency of machines and gyms, noticed that the heavy’s smooth skin and evenly proportioned arms screamed of gym strength, which meant he, Finch, who had built his strength both in academy training and in the stormy waters of Ocean Beach, had little to fear. He exhaled, cracked a baffling smile at his captor, and, with the joy still knocking about his ribs, Inspector Sid “Keanu” Finch sat down.

ON STAGE, FIVE
production assistants hopped about like ravens at a picnic, adjusting this, rolling that over there, and generally looking pleased with the impossibility of how busy they were. The floodlights above the stage had not been turned on yet, but on the black backdrop, Finch could see the flickering, probably on purpose, projected image of an Asian man in a beat suit trudging through Willie Mays Plaza, placard on shoulder. He, native San Franciscan, or, as the OB locals liked to say, Real Live Salty Fuck, of course recognized Frank Chu. Spinning around the video feed were uncommon fonts in Frank Chu’s preferred
colors—magenta, baby blue, lavender, and fire engine red—spelling out all the words that only made sense to Chu and the ever-expanding eighteen thousand galaxy illuminati, led by President Bill Clinton, who controlled the rights to his reality TV show.

ULTIMATE: ZEGNATROCICED:

ANALYSISED: COMPLIMENTARY FREE BUDWEISERS: MENARD:

TECNITRONICED: ROSSINIALIZED: SEXTROLOGICALLED:

INTERRED-GALATIALLED: OMEGATRONICED: RETORICALLED:

TUTRALOGICALLED: ESCALAED: BETATRONICED: RELEVANT:

CIRCUM-QUADROLOGICALLED:

DEPOSITIONS: ALTRALOGICALLED: INSTANTANEOUSED:

DECKED-TRONICED: IMPEACH CLINTON: IMPEACH CLINTON:

IMPEACH CLINTON: CAMERON: KOTSRDODENIKEL EMANATIONS:

TOSS: GUTSPROSENICAL COVERAGE: PHIXGRSTRENIKUL:

APOLOGETICS: EMBELLISHMENTS COSOLATIONS: ERGOFRENICUL

EMBRYONIC: PBS: NOLTSGROGRENICOL

COVERAGE: UTRDRENIKAL: ANTITHESIS

INCENTIVIEZEZ: CHROMOGENIC:

CLEVERLY: STATUTORY SYNCHING: ARGITHENICAL:

475,000 GALAXIES

Like anyone who works downtown, Finch had had his share of run-ins with Frank Chu, usually at the ballpark, but had never thought much of him. Once, while driving around aimlessly with Kim, he had almost run Frank Chu over at a crosswalk. When he rolled down the window to apologize, expecting a salvo of angry insanity, Frank Chu had simply
said, “Hello, Officer,” before shuffling over to the other side of the road. Kim had said, “I’m glad that guy’s Chinese.”

When the video feed of Frank Chu by the ballpark ended, another, much grainier, washed-out scene kicked up, this one showing a wiry black man standing on the steps of a squat, modern, thoroughly concrete building. Despite having never seen the building in person, Finch could tell, somehow, that this was Berkeley, and, from the evocation of imprecise, blurry colors, thinly cut slacks, and big hair, he deduced that whatever was about to happen probably happened back in the seventies. For a minute or so, the man simply stood at the top of the steps, watching disinterestedly as a steady parade of young faces filed on by. Then, with a whoop, unheard, but signaled by his gaping mouth, he hopped onto a bronze guide rail and slid down, arms outstretched, hopping off at the last possible moment and disappearing off the bottom of the frame. As with the video of Frank Chu, a constellation of words surrounded this video, but they had been clustered into short slogans, which, if properly situated, might have passed off as poetic.

We are THE ONE. Struggles are struggles. Beware the limping men. Wisdom is just we’s dumb to me. Am I here for the cause, or just because? We shall overcum. Cork the pork cause I digs the pigs. Somebody Blew up America. The God of Love is Dead but the God of War, he lives on. Respect kills the talk. Be celestial in the body, celestial in the mind.

Each video had been about a minute in length, but to Finch, time had stalled. He had already dismissed the notion that he was in much danger.
All of it—the heavy, who, at regular intervals, was still jabbing the barrel of his gun into Finch’s ribs, the kids scurrying up on stage, the merch stand selling black T-shirts with Frank Chu words printed across the front, the gangly kids, their Western shirts, their cheap domestic beers, their cuffed jeans, all of it some coy reference back to an irretrievable past when America would not have tolerated their gluttony—seemed very funny to Finch.

The heavy, distressed, flashed a hand sign that Finch recognized as the calling card of the Mara Salvatrucha 13. Finch laughed, again.

Lionface’s breasts, covered by a Zengatronic T-shirt, but still unmistakably hers, appeared in front of him. She sat down in his lap and pressed her mouth to his ear. He felt her sculpted flanks shift menacingly up against his crotch. In a hissing, slow voice, she said, “Listen. There are twenty-five men in this place who are carrying weapons. Each one has been instructed to shoot to kill. You have no fucking clue what is going on, but if you want to stay alive, you had better shut the fuck up, sit quietly, and do everything I tell you to do. This is not a joke.”

“Eh.”

“Eh? Take a look back at the bar. See how ‘eh’ this is about to get.”

Finch complied. Sitting by the bar, swarmed by kids in black shirts, he spotted a tiny, mottled potato head. His heart leapt.