The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  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?

  The thing about Noelles, Sarah maintained, was that they were all fictions. Take a normal girl, deprive her of sunlight, dress her like a hobo, stretch out her eyes, cripple her in some way, teach her about the life of Kaspar Hauser, the catalog of Laura Nyro, and you have yourself a Noelle. The only problem is that real life doesn’t make golems out of all the silly, melancholy threads of our overeducated and oversaturated lives. Real girls, she said, want men to act like men. Anyone who pretends to like something different is just selling her soul to become another Noelle.

  He looked over at Heather, her very red hair, and knew that she had no interest in becoming a Noelle. Rather, in Finch’s detectivey opinion, it seemed as if she thought that he thought that she should be a Noelle.

  That, Sarah would have argued, is the entire fucking point.

  Where had she gone?

  No matter. He pulled the Subaru in front of the Blue Danube Café on Clement. This time, he asked Heather to follow him inside.

  IT WASN’T HARD to find Bad Vibes Bob.

  BVB

  Kelly Slater status

  5832 posts

  re: Save Sloat!

  Broheims! Breaking rocks is tough work—I realize it would take away from your surf time but try and make the sacrifice. Back when I was kid at Malibu (1972), Don Redondo de Vaca came up from Sepulveda and stayed with us at Topanga for a week. He made us carry sand from the canyon to the beach—as it had turned out the waves that winter battered the coast and left nothing BUT exposed rock on the beach. The sand, I guess, had drifted towards Punta Conejo, Mexico … We thought he was nuts making us wear heavy army boots and heavy coats. And yes, we chanted and we chanted. I quit the name listing thing @ John Peck. Never got to Allen Sarlo. It was weird. Soon our parents got involved and they ran Don out of town. But you know what? We saved the beach! And that summer was the best porn surfing EVER! It is where I honed my front side style and attack. Chant: BVB BVB BVB

  BVB

  Kelly Slater status

  6315 posts

  At the Point earlier this summer a couple a guys were on the outside chumping the shoulder so Billy and I watched and then COULD NOT TAKE IT ANYMORE! I had one guy out the back; cursing and trying to mount the fucker but he held me at a distance with his oar! There I am taunting him and he’s being a fucking newly re-seeded hairline prick and I am desperately trying to pirate his SUP and he manages to stay on top of his board. I’m grabbing the rail, diving underneath a murky
ocean and darned if I can’t fucking dunk the guy. Meanwhile I’m missing all the good sets. He finally says, “You are being filmed …” I keep at him. Then he and his buddy (who in the meanwhile is busy with Billy) quickly paddle into the bay towards whatever drain and are gone. One hour later a policeman walks past our Peanut Gallery and then doubles back and stops in front of me and says, “Uh … were you surfing … a Paddle Boarder said that you told him that You were going to fucking eat his eye balls for dinner.” To which I say, “I never said anything of the sort.” Runs my license. Clean.

  Each of the thousands of comments, littered across dozens of surf blogs, told the story of a pathologically insecure man who ground out his esteem in the unwritten rules of surf localism. And while the virulence and bad grammar of BVB’s posts would make his mother weep with concern over her son’s mental health and all those wasted tuition dollars, there was nothing explicitly criminal about his scrawled opus, nothing to indicate that this fight would be taken anywhere outside of the anonymous and guttering arena of a comments section.

  But a codified confession wasn’t what Finch was after.

  He called the URLs into Goldwyn back at the station. About ten minutes later, he received the following text message:

  172 PACIFIC. OLD NEIGHBORHOOD?

  172 Pacific was just beyond the hill of Divisadero and Sacramento, where the mansions of San Francisco stand guard over the city with the same stony, timeless solemnity with which the menhirs of Stonehenge watch over the plains. Finch had grown up just three blocks down the hill, but still always held his breath whenever he drove through this boulevard of storied wealth. While his love of the underdog precluded him from thinking that the people who lived inside these houses were anything but monstrous (he had gone to school with almost all of their kids or grandkids, and they never shared their drugs or gave you rides in their mother’s fancy car), he still appreciated the erratic circuitry of the city’s old money, how there still seemed to be a spirit of eccentricity and silly patronage. Only in San Francisco did people still donate large parts of their estate to the opera. When the whole world is committed to saving the world, who will save the world?