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.”
LEPER IN THE BACKFIELD
1. And so we found ourselves at the 12 Galaxies. Field Agent Tovah Bernstein, née Officer Bar Davis, had given each of us a pager. When trouble comes, she said, press the red button. She promised her team would provide a swift response.
Who was this team? The bar was overrun with its usual crowd of dudes in their mid-thirties, each one aging catastrophically—spare tires tucked into tight V-neck shirts, horn-rimmed glasses, lenses greased up by the usual straggle of thin, long hair, a feigned earnestness, referential fucking humor—a cabal of high school girls forever updating and reupdating the parlor scenes from Little Women.
Also, I admit it: Carrying a gun is nice. Each time the holster banged against my chest, it felt like a bionic heartbeat. Ellen had stowed her gun in her handbag, reasoning that if there was a need to shoot, I should be the one to pull the trigger. How grateful I was to hear that! Till then, I had simply assumed that she, athlete supreme, feminist by bodily example, and recipient of better alumni magazines, would have taken the lead.
2. The lights dimmed. The crowd shuffled up toward the stage. I looked over at Ellen. She just shook her head.
A thin man trudged onto the stage. From our spot back at the bar, all I could make out was the flash of a large pink birthmark on his cheek. I can’t remember if it was the left or right cheek. When his somber march to the microphone stand came to its end, he about-faced and said, “Thank you guys for coming out to the party. We have two wonderful performers tonight, including the man, the legend, Frank Chu. Afterward, myself and Alan, my co-owner over the years, will be saying some words for the closing of the club. But before all that tearful sadness, let’s celebrate what made the 12 Galaxies a Mission staple since 2002. Our great performers. So, first let’s welcome Mr. Brownstone to the stage.”
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