The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  Now, shot four times and bleeding out in a storage closet, Finch felt no shame over the crudeness of his own farewell address. He only wished he had taken a better photo. As his eyes began to shut down, he felt a buzzing against his thigh. The elegant fiddle refrain was interrupted by a two-toned chime.

  A text message had arrived.

  Then Siddhartha “Keanu” Finch blacked out.

  SMOKE YOURSELF THIN!

  I looked at my gun. And although I certainly was not qualified to make such assessments, it just didn’t look like a gun that had been fired. Who the fuck had been shooting?

  I looked around. Zengatronic was gone.

  The door flew open. Jim Kim’s dirty little potato head. He looked down at the dying handsome cop.

  Then he shot me.

  FORGET IT, MARGE, IT’S CHINATOWN

  I report the following in good faith, but the years of forgetting have pressed their collective weight on my memory. Many of the truths we thought would ultimately come to light have remained obscured. Jim Kim, good man, did not shoot to kill. I was out of the hospital in a week. Because forensic science had determined I fired no real shots, I was released after thirty or so hours of inconclusive questioning.

  In the months immediately following my release from the hospital, I tried to assemble as much information as possible, envisioning a publishable book. Last year, while cleaning out the storage space where my sister and I have kept all my mother’s belongings, I came across one of my old elementary school yearbooks. In the page for Ms. Hill’s fourth grade class, there is a Tovah Bernstein, but she is listed in the “not pictured” section.

  Needless to say, I cannot remember a thing about her.

  THE POLICE INVESTIGATED BFG LLC, but found no evidence of anything.

  INSPECTOR SIDDHARTHA FINCH survived his wounds, but immediately retired from the force. Last I heard from Kim, who visits from time to time, Finch and his wife, Sarah, had moved to a beach in Indonesia, where she paints and teaches at a local school. He surfs and contributes to the long line of Marxist histories of San Francisco.

  Before he left, Inspector Finch asked me to meet with him for one last set of questions. We met at the Java Beach Café on Sloat Avenue, across the street from the city zoo. He had just finished up a surfing session. A healthy satisfaction radiated out of his red, scruffy cheeks. His teeth were an unnerving shade of white. He kept pitching his head forward to let an endless stream of water pour out of his nostrils. After about three of these dumps, he apologized and explained himself. The surf had been large and in charge. The water gets pounded up into your sinuses.

  His voice carried a noticeable, almost breezy detachment that seemed incongruous with the seriousness, or, at least, the violence of the events he began to describe. Honestly, I found myself getting a bit annoyed because the separation so clearly came from a genuine sense of superiority to the concerns at hand, the way it might sound to listen to Leontyne Price or Maria Callas breeze through the songbook of Sheryl Crow. At first, I wrote this off to the corrosive effects of constant sunlight and ocean water on the brains of the California surfing male, but after a short period of time it became all too obvious that Siddhartha Finch was, perhaps unwittingly, following the path of his namesake.

  I asked him about it. We had been shot together. Part of me was curious to know how he had dealt with the trauma, sure, but more, I was upset to know someone had whipped more out of the experience.

  He said yes, shit bothered him less than it had in the past. I asked some specific questions and dropped some holy Eastern names. He just shook his head, steered the conversation back to some other detail.

  It was clear he didn’t think I’d understand.

  When he was done telling me about the catfish and the kidnapping and what had happened to him at the 12 Galaxies, Finch reached into a plastic shopping bag and pulled out a thick slab of printer paper. He said, “This was on a thumb drive found on the person of James Sanders. Thought you’d be interested.”

  It was You’re My Only Home, the autobiographical novel I had started while in graduate school, but had never finished. Someone or something had gone ahead and added about 140 pages. A bittersweet, aching ending had been tacked on. I tried to protest, but Finch waved me off. He said he already knew. The book was not entirely my work. And then, having already anticipated the question he knew I wouldn’t ask, he said, “Parts of it were good.”

  I exhaled. He asked me to please read over it. He was going to go catch a second surf session. When I get back, he said, we’ll talk more.

  I admit: Whoever had finished the novel had done a pretty decent job. The added scenes were lifted, albeit delicately, from other immigrant novels—recently acculturated children practicing their new American signatures, shared pickles, sports-related humiliations, the distance of aunts, the unbearable weight of a father’s disappointment. The characters made more sense, meaning they acted more like characters should. I also discovered slight edits to my original text—a word missing here and there, a slight rephrasing of bits of dialogue, a moment of levity added here or there to flesh out a feeling.

  When all these credits and erasures were amassed, the effect was, well, pleasant. At least, pleasant enough.

  Finch returned, hair dripping, schmucky smile still expanding. He asked what had changed. (Malthus and Herzog were both right. In this overcrowded world, who can still tolerate those pioneering men who lash themselves to the by-products of natural chaos? Surfers, mountain climbers, those who interpret their dog’s tolerance of their cat as anything more than a thoroughly humiliated animal’s capitulation, why do you so completely deny our misery?)

  I pointed out the phantom edits, offered up some feebly pulsing thoughts on what and why, all of which revolved around the idea that somebody was trying to create a more functional killer, an understandable psychopath who couldn’t just be explained away with a “Whatever happened to crazy?” Finch, for his part, kept interrupting. Not to ask questions or encourage, but to shit out a stream of yessirs, of courses, and that’s what I thoughts.

  I realized he had already figured it all out. But when I asked him what exactly was so fucking obvious, he prattled off something about simple minds, complex minds, a fat man, and the Big Friendly Giant. He said if I was really into all that Eastern shit, I should just enjoy the path of figuring it out for myself.

  He started stacking up the various cups and plates on our table. As he got up to leave, he slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Congratulations, chief. I don’t think they expected you to be you.”

  I didn’t know how to ask him to stay, but there have been times when I have wondered how the course of my life might have changed if I had been privy to what Finch really meant.

  Instead, I have been stuck with my own interpretation. So it goes.

  ABOUT FIVE YEARS ago, a novel called Shards of Madness was published by one Jeff Kim, a twenty-nine-year-old sous chef turned author from Flushing. The novel was a fictional rendering of the life of Cho Seung-Hui, and although the story stopped short of trying to explain whatever happened to crazy, it carried its deliberately unnamed narrator through a lifetime of humiliations. The less specific parts of the narrative, namely, the father, the mother, the disappointments of his childhood, and the way his Koreanness infected, well, everything, were lifted straight out of the phantom edits to my first novel.

  What could I have done with that information?

  I didn’t finish the book. My sister did, though, and wrote me an e-mail. She said she thought I might have liked it.

  ONE LAST DETAIL: Two years ago, the lastest megaconglomerate software company unveiled its newest operating system. At the end of a lineup of awaiting avatars, the BFG sits, kindly, grandfatherly, on his perch, his legs dangling off the edge of the toolbar.

  NOW, WHENEVER ELLEN hoists up one of our three children, each one a beautiful thing that I can love, but do not quite yet understand, my mind returns to the Baby Molester and her daily attacks
on the promenading stroller moms who walked down our block. Somehow, it feels like an unkind memory, but I’ve long since stopped feeling guilty over it. Because whenever that foggy reverie ends, my memory spits me right back into that storage closet behind the stage of the 12 Galaxies—I can feel the flattened slugs in my legs and shoulder, I can hear Ellen’s gasps, as she, shot through the lungs, chases down whatever breath is left.

  But relief, sweet Jesus, floods in quickly, because Ellen will do something, anything, with one of the kids or the mail will come in on time or we will argue over whose turn it is to take out the dog or I will catch her smiling at her computer screen. Whenever one of these moments, seemingly random, stumbles into our lives, I will recall, in full colorful detail, running down the sun-blighted hallway of the hospital on the day they called to tell me she would be released. A shadowy figure emerged out of a doorway with an IV hook hovering over its head. I can remember stumbling over a water cooler and a nurse who told me to slow down. As I apologized, the figure and the IV retreated away down the hall. I recognized the breadth of Ellen’s shoulders, the effort she, and only she, put into maintaining posture, despite having been shot through the gut.

  Whirling dervish Ellen, best of the bears, heading, as always, straight toward the goal.

  I asked the nurse, “Who is that woman?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel would not have been possible without the help of Lindsay Sagnette, Jim Rutman, Rivka Galchen, Francisco Goldman, Kate Steilen, Noelle Daly, Ramesh Pillay, and Casey Koppelson.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JAY CASPIAN KANG was born in Seoul and grew up in Boston and North Carolina. He received his BA from Bowdoin and his MFA from Columbia, and has published work in the New York Times Magazine, where he is a regular contributor; Wired; Deadspin; TheAtlantic.com; and the Morning News. Kang is currently an editor for Grantland, Bill Simmons’s online magazine focusing on sports and pop culture. He lives in Los Angeles.