2. I would like to try to explain my happiness.
First, let me concede the very real distance between the fear of my impending death and the discovery of love. That is quite the pendulum. And, if we accept, for reason’s sake, a spatial map of our happiness, where the far left side represents a game-winning hit in a Little League game or the birth of a child, and the far right side represents the death of a parent, or parents, or, say, the realization that, despite being decent-looking and interesting enough, less good-looking and less interesting white guys will have a better crack at all the pretty blond girls of the world, or, when at wit’s end, you realize that you cannot really pick up and move to Prague, the Yukon, or Des Moines, Iowa, even, without amplifying your awareness of your otherness; if we evaluate happiness the same way we evaluate, say, baseball statistics (I’m not arguing this is a bad method, by the way), where the best we ever hit is .300 (Sabermetrics, if you only knew how badly you have ruined our failure-based metaphors! Should I say, instead, the best we ever OBP is .440?), I can also concede that when you, in a matter of minutes, go from fearing your grisly end to hearing that you are someone’s boyfriend, even if you don’t really know the girl, even if she’s agreeing just to speed along a conversation or misdirect an asshole detective, well, then, I concede, under duress, that all I felt was the breeze of the swing.
But the only evidence I’ve ever found of a compassionate God is how he allows us to excerpt our happiest memories up out of their contexts and hold them with the same care Saint Francis of Assisi holds up his little animals. I can remember passing around a joint in an orange Volvo with my three best friends, listening, in reverential silence, to Enter the Wu-Tang. After “Protect Ya Neck,” we plodded through a stoned debate over who was the better leadoff hitter: Rickey Henderson or Inspectah Deck. My friends were all Jews, who were working through their own psychodrama of strangeness. There’s no doubt that we were “cultural tourists,” and while we might have occasionally felt the song, our devotion came more from the spike of confidence that comes with rapping bluntedly along: “I’m more rugged than slave man boots. New recruits, I’m fucking MC troops. I break loops, and trample shit when I stomp!” And even though it’s hard to fault three Jews and an Asian in North Carolina for using hip-hop to hack out four little black doppelgangsters, it’s now quite passé to write, at least this earnestly, about how those sessions in the car were among the happiest moments of my life.
So. Even though I didn’t know what would eventually happen between us, when I heard Ellen confirm that I was, indeed, her boyfriend, my head glowed with the heat of a thing being alchemized.
I wonder if there has ever been a more equivocal explanation of happiness. But, it’s the best you’ll get out of this man who has always hit well below the Mendoza Line.
3. “So you saw William Curren last Thursday.”
“Yes.”
“You went to the Uptown with three girls, after which you were attacked.”
“Yes.”
“Was Ms. Ellen one of these girls?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“I only talked to one of the girls.”
“Can you describe her?”
“I would describe her as unattractive. Unathletic body.”
“I know that you and Mr. Curren liked to smoke weed together at work. Was Mr. Curren involved in any drug trafficking activity?”
“What? How do you know that?”
“Please just answer the questions.”
“Hold on.… Let me check something on my phone.”
“I am a detective. This is serious.”
“Holy shit, you guys use Facebook?”
“Philip, try to focus. Do you have an explanation as to what happened here?”
“These things are usually coincidence?”
“Look at him. What could he kill?”
“Please let him answer the questions.”
“Uh, can we talk about the message?”
“Ma’am, would you mind stepping outside, or at least going up to the counter for a second? I have a Korean thing to discuss with your boyfriend.”
“I have a right to be present for an interrogation.”
“That is not a right.”
“We want a lawyer.”
“This is not an interrogation or even a questioning. Neither of you is a suspect. You have no need for a lawyer.”
“I’m staying.”
“Whatever.”
“Okay.”
“Can you please take a look at this, Philip? Do you recognize who might have written it?”
Dear Philip,
It’s been four days since Sue perished in that tragic accident. John, my son, has gotten deteriorated. His anger is stultifying. Yesterday, he tells me he is going to shove a remote control up my ass. I am afraid that my wife’s death pushed him over into dark, desecrated anger. Before, I thought he was just a rambunctious pubescent boy. But since his mother’s death, he has been lashing out and throwing things at me and his sister. This morning, I saw him in the shed and he was eyeing my chainsaw. I asked him if he wanted to play catch with the football. Do you remember I told you I played football for the Forty-Niners for three weeks before breaking my arm? I see him eyeing the chainsaw while chewing a cereal bar slowly. I know he blames me for his mother’s death, but it wasn’t my fault the boat kept going. Your last e-mail was so helpful. It’s great that you know other chefs like me because then you can really understand my problems.
Sincerely,
Richard McBeef
“You recognize that name, don’t you?”
“Fuck.”
“Why is someone with this name sending e-mails to you at work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you write this? As some fucked-up joke? I read some of your shit on the Internet. You have Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone down as two of your favorite books. That’s some fucked-up shit, man.”
“I have this friend Adam. He thinks these sorts of things are funny.”
“Okay, man, I’m going to have to ask you to come down and answer some questions.”
“All right.”
4. In Kim’s car, I explained my guilt.
Richard McBeef was a one-act play written by Cho Seung-Hui, the twenty-three-year-old English major who would go on to murder thirty-two people at Virginia Tech. Just ten pages long and printed in a comically large font, Richard McBeef tells the story of a young boy named John, who, one morning over a cereal bar breakfast, confronts his abusive stepfather, Richard McBeef. There is no semblance of reason in the play, no buildup of tension, none of the narrative logic that allows us to reflect back on ourselves as linear, sensitive creatures. Instead, there are fits of spontaneous anger, wild claims of violation and molestation, a mother’s schizophrenic confusion, a revelation that is not a revelation, and, in the end, the murder of a young child. It is, as Adam put it, the greatest, most horrific episode of Jerry Springer, ever. The mechanics are the same: We are told the problem in advance, we anticipate the buildup. When the man comes charging through the curtain, we understand that there is no time for explanations or nuance. Unlike Springer, though, where the spontaneity and the degradation of the violence usually make us laugh. There is no barrier between the reader and Richard McBeef. The violence is simply violence. There is no large bald security guard to whisk it away.
Kim drove silently and badly down Guerrero. He muttered something to himself before telling us about being in his mother’s restaurant the morning of the shootings. It was five-thirty and his mother needed help unloading a vegetable delivery truck, so she called him and his little brother, who works downtown. The truck was late, so Kim and his little brother sat in the back office and turned on the TV, and there was a report on CNN about how a confirmed four students had been murdered at Virginia Tech, but that nobody knew anything at that moment. People have a misconception about detectives, Kim explained. They think because we deal with bodies and murderers on the daily that
we are somehow desensitized to death. Really, the opposite is true. Nothing is more energized than a fresh corpse. When you’re always around that energy, you can’t help but get drunk off death. His mom kept yelling on the phone and his brother and he just sort of watched as the body count got higher and higher and then he saw that kid, the one with glasses, who had escaped say it was some Asian kid, and he already knew our people were fucked. The Chinese aren’t creative enough, the Nips don’t have the balls or the specific brand of Korean crazy, which is really just the same crazy as the Irish crazy, because both peoples come from small countries oppressed for hundreds of years by the assholes across the way. Both peoples grew up under the eye of the crown or the emperor and learned to suppress everything, especially anger, until they no longer could distinguish what was what, and could walk around angry without recognizing anger as anger. And the prescription for whatever else was drinking.
That’s what we are, Kim said. We’re the hybrid of Jews and the Irish. That fucking nutjob only confirmed what we all knew about our people, didn’t he?
I didn’t want to answer his question, at least not directly, and certainly not in front of Ellen, so I told him that I had gotten on a Long Beach–bound flight at JFK at 7:30 A.M. and for six captive hours watched the body count rise on the headset television. When I saw the kid who had escaped describe the shooter as “Asian,” I looked up the aisle and saw the rows of glowing little TVs, all of them tuned to CNN. Of course, I knew he was going to be Korean. I’ve never talked to any Korean who didn’t know.
Kim snorted and asked, You know other Koreans? I ignored him.
When the plane landed, I walked down the steps and onto the runway. I’ve always loved the Long Beach airport because you could shoot a film set in the fifties there and wouldn’t have to change a detail. I remember, though, wishing that I had flown into LAX, so that I could sit entombed inside the guts of an airport for just a bit longer. Kathleen, my girlfriend at the time, was waiting for me and as we drove back up the 405 to her apartment in Westwood, she kept saying how awful it all was. Nobody was saying anything at the time about the shooter, except the few leaks that came out that said he was Asian. How could Kathleen have known what I knew, what you knew? And if I had tried to explain it to her, what could she have said? It all sounds so insane to me now. The next morning, when they posted his photo and his name, I refused to think about it. But I was glad, for the first time, that my parents were both dead.
When I got back to New York, I met my friend Hyung-Jae in a bar around Columbia. He asked if I had read Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone, and we talked about it without all the scorn with which we discussed all works of literature. I remember Hyung-Jae admitting that he had once thought about shooting one of his teachers, not in an abstract sense, but to the point where he went to Walmart to buy a gun.
We shouldn’t be allowed, he said, to see ourselves like that.
On Wednesdays, the owner of that soggy bar would project the Yankees game up onto the back wall. We watched a few innings in silence. I think we both knew that we would never be this close again. A few days later, he forwarded me some post on a humor blog. It was a Lacanian critique of Richard McBeef. You will never convince me that someone other than Hyung-Jae wrote that. For the next few months, whenever I saw him, we would just make jokes about Virginia Tech and Cho Seung-Hui. The baseball season had just started up. We were both big fans. But we never talked about anything but Virginia Tech, and we never allowed ourselves to say anything about it that wasn’t ironic or awful.
It was the worst day in our history, Kim said, and you fuckers made jokes about it.
What did you do?
I cried like a fucking baby. I talked my mother out of fleeing the country. I stood outside her restaurant at night for a week because she was afraid it was going to be Rodney King all over again. I gave money to the church around here even though I hate the Korean fucking church. You new kids, man. You grow up thinking you’re white. But then when something happens that reminds you that you aren’t, you got no way to respond. You just stand there stuttering and holding your cock as the white world evacuates all of its well-meaning bullshit.
Please, stop. I don’t disagree with you.
Yeah, well, fuck you.
218A 39th Avenue was a flat-topped two-story stucco building whose color could best be described as moldy orange. A rusted-out Dodge Ram was parked diagonally across the driveway, blocking in two identical black Mercedes S-Class sedans. A modest scooter, the sort that looks natural only with twelve plastic bags of Chinese delivery saddled out to the sides, stood abandoned on the sidewalk.
Finch parked his car a few blocks away on Fulton. The dislodged, happy bird was still bumping around. He kept catching himself grinning. With one of these random grins on his face, he called the number the girl had provided.
She picked up before the phone had a chance to ring. “You’re here?” She was whispering. In the background, Finch heard a TV.
“A few blocks away, as promised.”
“Is your car easily accessible?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’ll be out in front of the house.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have your gun?”
“I can bring one, but you have to explain why.”
“Can’t now. Just bring one, please. It’s not a big deal.”
From the trunk of his car, stashed below the tub that held his wet suit, Finch pulled out his double-action 96D Beretta and its blond leather holster. He hadn’t brought a jacket, so he unlatched the weapon and shoved it down the front of his pants. The sight of the butt of the gun sticking up out of the waist of his jeans struck him as incredibly funny, as if he had woken up from a deep slumber and found himself on the other side of the law. It occurred to him, vaguely, that he should call for backup, but in his state of spasmodic joy, he couldn’t bring himself to pick up his radio.
He strutted up to the moldy orange house. With each step, the gun slid farther down his pants leg. He wondered how the black kids did it. Then, thinking of what Kim’s explanation would be, he laughed out loud.
Lionface was standing on the stoop, huddled in a midnight blue kimono. She looked cold. Her hair, which Finch could have sworn had been brown and straight, was actually deep red, curly, and tied up in a bun atop her head.
Finch tried to summon up his memory of any part of her other than her two swinging breasts, but all he could muster up was a mole, although he couldn’t possibly tell you which body part it had punctuated, and an abstracted face, which, had he been a bit more lucid, he would have recognized as that of the actress who played Juliet in the sixties film version of Romeo and Juliet they used to show in schools, despite the quick flash of nipples and an arty, anatomically impossible sex scene.
And had the circumstances not made it nearly impossible that the redhead waving on the stoop was, in fact, an incidental half-naked woman, Finch would have kept walking down the street. But when he nodded, she nodded back. He recognized the reassuring breadth of her cheekbones. She waved him inside.
Even from the sidewalk, Finch had picked up the heavy smell of skunk. By the time he walked into the house, the smell was so thick that he was forced to breathe through his mouth. Lionface was standing in the corner of a bare foyer, huddled forward with her hands gripped tightly on the sash of her kimono, as if anticipating some gusty, denuding wind.
Finch whispered, “I brought the gun. But you’re going to have to tell me why.”
Lionface put her finger to her lips and motioned her head at a flight of carpeted stairs.
Hand on gun, Finch followed her up to an unlit hallway. He counted three doors on either side, each one framed in a fluorescent glow. He could now feel the skunk down in his lungs. Lionface once again put a finger to her lips. Then, with those two hands trained in tenderness, she opened the first door on the right.
Finch’s suspicions were confirmed. Inside, in what had presumably once been a bedroom, forty m
arijuana plants reached greedily up to their parent grow lights. Finch heard the opening bars to the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” In the back corner of the room he saw a couch wrapped in black plastic where two men sat, both propped up and unconscious.
The first was a thin, bearded man, who, at first glance, appeared to have vomited all over the front of his black hoodie. All he could see of the other man was a round bald head. The rest of his face was obscured by an airplane sleep mask and a gag, loosely tied.
Finch started to move toward the men, but Lionface stepped in front of him. Her eyes bulged. Finch arched his eyebrows and stuck his thumb out in the general direction of the street. She nodded and led him outside.
She kept walking once she hit fresh air, across the yard, down the block, across Fulton, and into Golden Gate Park. In a foggy clearing in the trees, she stopped, spun around, dug into one of the pockets of her kimono, and handed him a California driver’s license.
She said, “Heather.”
Finch looked at the driver’s license: Heather Alejandra LeBlanc from San Clemente, CA. Born 10/2/1984.
“Okay, Heather, can you explain what that was back there?”
“Is it not obvious?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“I thought … Well, I thought showing you would be enough.”
The grinding condescension of the pop star acne medication hack had been replaced with a breathy, anachronistic tremolo. Finch didn’t know what to make of this change, but it occurred to him that he should suspect something was up.
“Is anyone dead?”
“No.”
“Who were those men?”
“You didn’t recognize him?”
“Recognize who?”
“Mister Hofspaur.”
“That was Hofspaur?”
“Bald head?”
“I’m going to have to go back there and look more closely.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re going to come soon. I’m sure they’ve already noticed that the video cameras are down. Please, you have to help me.”
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