The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  Boston, Performance Fleece explained, had become just a photo reel of her years with Mel. In the first frame, she and Mel move her mom’s old furniture into the bottom floor of a run-down duplex in Cambridgeport. Farther along the reel, after having lived all over Boston, they stand smiling next to a SOLD sign. She had just accepted the progression of these images, just as she had accepted Choate, lacrosse camp, Williams, and, ultimately, Mel. Then, one day, for reasons unknown, she simply didn’t. Everything became ugly to her—the hats the cashiers at Dunkin’ Donuts had to wear, the grease on the handgrips on the T, the excess butter served with the bread at Bertucci’s, the endless talk about the Red Sox, the droves of pale, mute Chinese kids, forever shuttling on the Red Line between Kendall/MIT and Harvard Square, the green everywhere on Saint Patrick’s Day and the kids who never took an interest in anything other than Tom Brady suddenly asking one another what part of Ireland their people were from, the constant questions from their married friends about when they were going to “repay the party,” the drabness of the drive on the 2 up to her parents’ house in Beverly, the only stretch of road in America where the trees are bare year-round, the bartender at their neighborhood bar, a guy Mel described as “the salt of the earth,” and his stupid philosophy about what constituted “honest work,” mostly stolen from Good Will Hunting.

  When they left Boston for San Francisco, the scaffolding of their love fell away. She had known this would happen. The move was her idea. She had gotten a job offer at Wells Fargo and found him a position at a start-up. She reasoned that they would never get to live in California ever again, and he couldn’t think of much of a rebuttal. His best friend from college lived in San Francisco, and he was tapped into a network of good dudes. They’d moved into the condo on Natoma Street nine months ago.

  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 Riv
er 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.”

&nbs
p; “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.