The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  THE HOUSE WAS just as nice as the other houses on the block—three of its five stories rose up above the roofs across the street, affording it a view of the hazy bay and Alcatraz and probably, if the owner of the house had invested correctly, the nameable beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Heather, he noticed, wasn’t even looking up at the address. She seemed to know where she was. In a new, throaty, Mae West voice, she said, “I have something to tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you go into that house right now, you’ll find Karlos and the monk and you’ll have solved something that probably needs to be solved, but they’ll think I helped you find them, and even if you agree to put me in witness protection, they’ll find me because there’s nowhere for me to go, really. So, if you choose to walk into that house, I won’t be here when you get out and you’ll never find me again, which means you’ll have no one who can corroborate your version of things. I know the stuff Karlos says on the Internet is awful, but it’s not a crime and so if you do want to pin them for beating people up and kidnapping Mister Hofspaur, you’ll need me. Otherwise, all you saw was a pot farm owned by five people who have prescriptions who are just trying to grow a private stash, and a bald man tied up on a couch.”

  Finch didn’t really know what to say to that. He pulled his phone out of his pocket.

  It was a picture message from Sarah.

  AS YET ANOTHER stipulation in their surrender to a pragmatic vision of love, Finch and Sarah had labeled text messaging as “strongly discouraged,” especially during work hours. It had been Finch’s idea. He couldn’t stomach the anxiety of figuring out how to answer her texts (most were about grocery lists)—how to measure the appropriate response time, the humiliation of realizing that Sid Finch, city detective, handsome man, rider of waves, was almost always available to text back.

  But here was not just a text message, but a picture message. His heart jumped.

  Heather was saying something else about probable causes and fated outcomes, but Finch’s attention was fixed on his phone’s screen. The caption loaded first: WHILE YOU WERE GONE. And then, centimeter by blockish centimeter, an image unscrolled. The first bar was indecipherable—flesh tones against what appeared to be a green, almost oxidized backdrop. The second bar provided context—the curve of a waist, the pixelated suggestion of a belly button. A thin trail, grayish, tickled down from the belly button, almost as if an artist, exhausted after detailing the folds of the belly button, had simply let his pencil slip. Finch puzzled over the gray, wrote it off to bad cell phone camera technology, bad screen. The next two bars loaded in quick succession. The trail fanned out into a tangle of chestnut brown. The suggestion was enough—Finch, half seeing the matchbook-size picture, half seeing with memory, ran his eyes over the outer whorls, the paleness of the skin underneath, the furrows in the thick, curly hair near the lips. Those lips were dense, dark, permaswole—a bona fide furburger framed by two pony thighs. With the mild scent of her vagina filling his nostrils (he had always lamented this mildness because the smell never stayed for very long on his fingers), Finch recalled lying in bed with Sarah on their first night together. Once she had fallen asleep, Finch had turned on the lights, gently peeled back the top comforter, and stuck his head underneath the sheet. In that dank tent, the light filtering in through pale blue cotton, he had propped up his head with his elbow and stared for a real good minute at the whole thing. The vitality of Sarah’s pussy—its fullness, its shocking wetness—convinced Finch of the health of all things Sarah.

  That night, and for the next three years, there had only been a billy goat’s beard, a comma punctuating the tip of her pelvis. The evidence, pixelated or not, of this new, unexplored thicket shamed Finch and confirmed the distance he had felt for years, really. Had Sarah’s bush suddenly appeared in front of him, he would have reached both of his arms and embraced the fuck out of it.

  FINCH SOUNDED A Bronx cheer and left her in the car. Fuck this. Who cared what Heather did? He walked up the steps and knocked on the front door of 172 Pacific.

  CHRISTMAS APE GOES TO SUMMER CAMP

  1. One last thing about Cho Seung-Hui before I tell you what happened after Kim stormed into the bar. I wonder if anyone will ever really understand him in the way they tried to understand Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. When the country saw two relatable kids walking through that cafeteria armed with Uzis, when they watched the videotapes of Dylan and Eric yelling about things their own kids probably yelled about, an explanation was demanded. With Cho Seung-Hui, his Koreanness/insanity was enough of an explanation, and so the talk eddied off. Nobody made an attempt to figure out what had possessed a twenty-three-year-old creative writing major, born in Korea, raised in the American suburbs, to suddenly open fire on his classmates.

  I, at least, was never consulted.

  What I am trying to say is this: If a kid like me makes monster tapes, sends them to NBC, and then walks into the engineering building to kill thirty-two people in the worst school massacre in American history and even he can’t shoot his way out of the heavy blanket of cultural explanation, what hope do I, sad literary pussy that I am, have for an autonomous redemption?

  So, when Kim stormed into the bar, yelling about Mr. Brownstone and some society of people who, I assumed, were part of the inspired generations for whom Cho Seung-Hui had died, I confess that my thoughts were not on Bill or the poor Baby Molester. My thoughts were on Cho Seung-Hui and how maybe someone was trying to understand him better.

  For my sake, I hoped.

  2. This is what Kim explained: Shortly after we left the station, he had received a call from a pay phone. The caller told him a letter would be arriving shortly via FedEx. Kim was to follow its instructions carefully. Sure enough, at that moment, one of the mail guys walked by and handed Kim a FedEx letter package. Inside, there was a blank envelope, and inside the envelope was a torn-out sheet of yellow legal paper with the following handwritten note.

  We the Brownstone Knights claim responsibility for the murders of Dolores Stone and William Curren. We will bury anyone else who facilitates the degradation of our world. These two targets were chosen very specifically to send a message. Take heed, all others associated with the systematic degradation will also be taken out. Tell the world about us on the local news or someone else will die.

  Signed,

  The Brownstone Knights

  He had done all the cursory checks, but could find no evidence of an organization calling itself the Brownstone Knights. The call was traced back to the Montgomery BART station, which meant nothing. As for our ruined hotel room, Kim said he couldn’t even begin to speculate why the Brownstone Knights would harass me.

  But he said he would drive us to the Fairmont Hotel and assign a patrol.

  3. At the Fairmont, we ordered scallops, champagne, and porn because Ellen said the only thing more sinful than waste was wasting luxury. For our patrol—a square-shouldered lesbian with a harelip—we ordered a Kobe burger and a sensible bottle of sparkling water, but she wouldn’t even look at us, choosing instead to stare straight ahead at a corniced lamp that sat on a table by the elevator doors. We left her in the hallway and quickly forgot she was there. Ellen ate the burger, again citing waste, but I had noticed a bit of a teeter in her and desperately needed to know if it was just the stress that accompanies fearing for your life, or if she was actually in love with me.

  When SportsCenter began to repeat itself, we flipped over to CNN. It was three in the morning. I made a halfhearted attempt to kind of fall into Ellen’s arms and brush my lips up against hers, but she said she had eaten too much for all that. There were rainstorms in Los Angeles. A small plane carrying a nature photographer and his three sons had gone down in Colorado. No confirmed word of any survivors. After the break we were going to see some shocking footage of a scene from downtown San Francisco.

  I looked over at Ellen. She was gnawing on the corner of her napkin. A kitty litter commercial came on, a cat holding i
ts nose with its paw. Napkin still hanging from her teeth, she turned to me and smiled.

  The anchor returned and reminded us that before the break, she had promised us footage from a truly bizarre and “only in San Francisco” scene that had happened earlier today. James Sanders, a forty-six-year-old native of San Francisco, had put on an impromptu fashion show that was caught by several cell phone cameras. In a shaky frame in muted cell phone camera colors, which, if we dare to be so unsentimental, are the same colors as Monet’s colors, was James. He was strutting down Market Street in a full-length fur coat and a pair of teal stilettos. Marching next to him, grimly holding his sign, his eyes blocked out by a pair of oversized sunglasses, was Frank Chu. I heard Ellen gasp. The next shot showed the duo farther down Market toward the gay Safeway, at the spot where the Burger King marks the border between the mall district and the crack district. James had changed into skintight leather pants and a T-shirt that had the words I’M TOO SEXY written in rhinestones across his chest. Frank Chu, still grim-faced and protesting, now wore a cabbie hat and a pair of white dinner gloves that disappeared into the cuffs of a voluminous, dazzlingly white tuxedo shirt. The banner at the bottom of the screen read:

  VIRAL HOBO MARKETING? HOMELESS MAN PUTS

  ON FASHION SHOW IN DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO.

  In the last video, shot from behind, James and Frank Chu, both dressed in somewhat tasteful bondage leather, disappear over the crest of the hill on Octavia. The Safeway sign hovers on the horizon, but you can still read the words printed on the back of Frank Chu’s sign, the side he has always rented out to advertisers:

  BEING ABUNDANCE CAFETERIA

  I heard Ellen shift around in the bed. A pillow thudded against the TV. In a voice quivering with joy, she said, “That motherfucker was wearing my shoes.”

  4. At four in the morning, seated amid a litter of room service plates, wine bottles, and coffee platters, we finally came up with our plausible scenario. James had tossed our room at the Hotel St. Francis because he needed a pair of women’s shoes for his fashion show. The reason he did this, we deduced, was that he was insane. The attack outside the Uptown had been the spillover from the Baby Molester’s murder. Because the party responsible was a terrorist group, which, we assumed, was primarily concerned with promoting its agenda, there was no reason why they would take the time and energy to track me down again. Someone probably had to pay, sure, but we couldn’t find any reason it had to be us. As for Bill, we chalked it up to coincidence, and I marveled again, with my new girl, at the smallness of San Francisco and said some nice, smart things about how this Internet media social networking fuckanalia had done some crap and made some things that seemed impossible more possible, simulacra, planets spinning in their own orbits, and so on. We poured out a drink for the Baby Molester and Bill and said some nasty things about the vermin who would kill a destitute old lady and a decent dude, after which we screwed quickly and quietly, so as to not disturb our bull dyke patrol. Then, blessedly, entombed in Egyptian cotton, scallop juice, finer plates, and wine, we fell asleep.

  We were wrong, of course, but a most-plausible scenario is still a most-plausible scenario, and when you’re in love and fearing for your life, you accept any scaffolding upon which you can hang your fragile, contingent future.

  5. Writers are always complaining about how Tolstoy ruined love. What they mean isn’t that he gutted our expectations for romance, or cast an unrelenting eye on our vanities. It’s more that after reading Anna Karenina, you realize the futility and clumsiness of any attempt you might make at projecting love, or even the concept of love, onto the printed page. He’s just too good at it, and anything you try is doomed to sound silly, glib, or, even worse, baroque. In fact, the space Tolstoy takes up in the literature of love is so monstrous that if one were to draft up a list of the five best-written love stories, it would read something like this:

  1. Vronsky and Anna (Anna Karenina)

  2. Levin and Kitty (Anna Karenina)

  3. Romeo and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet)

  4. Isaac and Rebecca (Genesis)

  5. Swann and Odette (Swann’s Way)

  I’m sure there are those who will protest the fact that three of the four authors are dead white men (I won’t get into jokes or debates over the fourth), but dead white men invented romantic love, and so it seems reasonable that they would be best equipped to write about it. If someone were to draft a list of the greatest relationships between a man and, say, the reflection of the moon in a cup of wine, or anything involving mountains or farewells, the top fifty would all be Chinese. This doesn’t mean that we can’t find value in Thoreau, or even Pound, with his ornate imitations, but if you’re looking for a pure distillation of something, especially something poetic, I say go straight to the source.

  I’m stalling and deflecting, sure, but I am also trying, despite this weighty, ornate hesitation, to commit, at least to the written page, exactly what happened when I woke up in the morning and saw Ellen sleeping next to me—her arm flung dramatically across her forehead, her fingertips dipped in a puddle of mustard. I, who had always prided myself on my ability to accept the fallacy of love, with all my commas, parentheses, and qualified statements, felt love grab me violently by the back of the neck and fling me straight into her arms. This blooming helplessness, which flooded me to my teeth, made me feel a lot of different things, but mostly, it made me feel like a girl.

  She was the eighteenth or nineteenth girl who had shared a bed with me. At least, in some way that counts. Early riser, always, I have watched each of these girls sleeping, and although I could usually muster up a flare of sentiment over the beauty of vulnerability, or whatever, I could also feel the slight but utterly evident discomfort of a forced appreciation, something similar to the tyranny that made me put Romeo and Juliet up on that list, when my real choice at number three would have been the off-page romance between Holden Caulfield and Old Jane.

  But with Ellen, I only felt the need to gently lift those fingers out of the mustard puddle and wipe them off with a napkin dipped in water. She screwed one eye open. With a giant shit-eating grin on my face, I held up the yellowed napkin and chuckled.

  How else could I explain love? I am compromised, in so many ways.

  6. Kim came by the room shortly after Ellen woke up. The hard edge from the Starbucks had been dulled down to something close to mere rudeness. More than anything, he seemed worried. I wondered if this show of vulnerability was some cop trick, or if, as I suspected, it was the sort of sign one immigrant flashes to another when he admits that the country cannot be conquered alone. Before his debriefing, which consisted of no new information and could have been easily done over the phone, he handed me a folder of e-mails printed from Bill’s account. There were about fifteen in all, each one authored by someone calling himself Richard McBeef or Mr. Brownstone. He wanted me to see if I could detect some unfamiliarity with the language, some syntax that might provide us with a clue about the author.

  As Kim fiddled with his keys and explained something to Ellen, I read over the letters, but they were all senseless, synthetic. Whatever awkwardness Kim had read in the sentences probably came from the pressure of having to cram so much of Mr. Brownstone and Richard McBeef into such a small epistolary space.

  It was nice to feel useful, to say the least.

  We explained our plausible scenario. Using Ellen’s phone, we showed him the videos of James strutting down Market Street. Kim shook his head, glowering at the floor, but said we might as well stay at the hotel for a couple more days. The danger, he agreed, had passed. He would get in touch with us once he figured anything out and urged me to keep thinking about the letters, Cho Seung-Hui, the Baby Molester, and any possible connections between them all. If I came up with anything or remembered anything, I should give him a call.

  Then, hangdogged, he left.

  As Kim left, our guard cop entered the room and introduced herself as Officer Bar Davis. She apologized for being brusque the n
ight before—Kim had explained the new scenario, and now that the threat seemed less imminent, she could ease up a bit. She said to ask if we needed anything.

  We ordered breakfast up to the room: Eggs Benedict, something called morning steak, pancakes, and mimosas. Staring at the bubbles in the champagne flute, it dawned on me that I had been drunk for two or three straight days now. The thought made me giggle. Ellen, sawing through morning steak, looked up and smiled. She said, “The bubbles tickle my throat, too.”

  After breakfast, we had lazy, careless sex and watched The View. I checked my e-mail on my phone, but it was just the same silliness from Adam about who had published what where and how we were both fucked for life. The noon news started up. The anchor said something about a rash of murders with a possible link to an activist group within the city, but my plausible scenario was working its magic and I had no concern anymore. But then someone said something about funeral arrangements, and I looked up and saw a blue screen with these words.

  FUNERAL OF DOLORES STONE

  FOREVER HOME CEMETERY

  TODAY AT 2:30 PM

  COLMA, CA

  Please send all donations, remembrances and thoughts to

  MILES HOFSPAUR

  433 Mission Street

  San Franicsco, CA 94103

  It seemed like a good way to put a close on all of this. Ellen must have been thinking something similar because she raised her questioning eyebrow.

  But what to wear?

  7. Officer Davis dropped us off at Fight Against the Dying of the Light, a vintage shop on 16th and Mission, just up the street from the Hotel St. Francis. I’ve always loved shopping with girls, probably because the girls who end up with me are never the type to drag their men anywhere, especially somewhere with forgiving lighting and clean floors. Sitting on some couch, waiting for a girl to emerge from behind a curtain, is the edifying sort of torture that helps us understand generic stand-up comedy and the norms of American domesticity. For someone like me, who has lived so far outside of the narrative of paying taxes or the annoying guy who sits by the water cooler at work, these pauses of normalcy are my glimpse at what it might be like to be a bro. And so, slouching in a velvet love seat, I tried to look disinterested, and, more important, oppressed, every time Ellen came flouncing out from behind the curtain, but in my heart, I was happier than I’ve been in years.