Read The Dead Do Not Improve Online
Authors: Jay Caspian Kang
The Dead Do Not Improve (8 page)
3
. On the ninth morning of my stay, I went with James to the library. He needed someone with good standing to log him into the computer terminals. Nobody else qualified, he explained. I found this a bit hard to believe, but I had nothing else to do.
I’ve worked in libraries and therefore know that deranged homeless men have only two uses for the Internet: the lottery and porn. Thankfully, James chose the former, although I will admit, when I first looked over at his screen lit up with numbers and charts, a little hope flared up, however briefly and nostalgically, that perhaps James was some discarded savant, and that his way, whatever that might be, would be the one for me. But then he ferreted greedily into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of Lotto tickets.
I went back to checking my e-mail.
There was nothing from work. I read through a couple of blogs, aimlessly typing in the URLs of sites I had visited before—the same mean-spirited celebrity gossip sites, the same baseball stat nerd blogs, the same photo blogs manned by gay men who shared my love for pale, big-eyed brunettes, the same true crime reports.
As James thwacked away at his forehead, stunned at every loss, I found myself stalking the Baby Molester. The Dignity Project profile
had not been updated. There was a lengthy
Chronicle
article, but it just rearranged the available information into tighter sentences and shorter paragraphs. Combining her name with several different keywords yielded not much else, although I did learn that there was a Dolores Stone who sang and played tambourine in a psychedelic band called the Terror of the Smallpox Blankets.
There was no choice left. I read her blog.
MARCH 20 2008
The future president, Presidential, addresses the waiting nation on the squawk box tonight, regarding the charges brought up by one Jeremiah Wright. We shall pause in bestowing on Mr. Wright what he believes to be his God-Given title of Reverend until he shows us some Reverential (hell, we’d even settle for Christian) actions. The we, here, refers to those of us who, through blood, sweat and tears, have withstood the earth, wind and fire of injustice, those of us who earned our judgment. Not the sheltered do-gooder poseurs, hiding in their hooded sweatshirts, grandstrutting about the streets of San Francisco, handing out pamphlets to the already-initiated, both sides sunning themselves in the freedom we worked so hard to provide, using words like change, liberation, break the order, the same words we used back when those words mattered. Now they just sound like they were bought at the mall. I would stop and blow up their preconceptions, but I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain the truth to someone who rises and shines under the sun of freedom we provided for them.…
Next.
MARCH 18 2008
Winston R. Pummelstein, as he’s known to those in the know, came by today with a stack of our old records. I put our first recording on the old Victrola and with that first twang of Gusto’s guitar, ringing out the revolution, the walls fell away from my living room, modest, simple, furnished by Salvation Army, and we were back in ’72, in similar digs. I could see it all: me, stomping around, trying to not be Janis, but with Janis always on my mind; Gusto: his handbands and his rituals; Winston: fat, gold and shiny.
Pummelstein is in a bad way. His mind is just hanging on, I can tell. The music must have transported him back, just like it did me. He must not be seeing what I see whenever I look in the mirror or whenever Miles forces me to watch some cut of one of my movies. I see the awesome power of gravity. His mind is so fucked with acid that he must be seeing these tits when they defied Newton and this ass back when even the Panthers would call it sweet.
I began to cry. For the first time in years, I thought about a friend of mine named Hal who had worked with me in the library at Bowdoin. My freshman year, I’d invite Hal up to my room to smoke pot and stream underground hip-hop over the Internet. At some point that spring, the resident adviser put an end to it. Apparently, one of the girls in the hall thought it was sketchy to have a “townie who doesn’t even go here” hanging out in the dorms.
I wrote the girl a letter whose contents don’t need to be mentioned
ever again. The resident adviser’s punishment? In the cafeteria, I held a reading of the poetry he had published in the school’s literary journal. It sufficed.
As for Hal, I began hanging out with him at his apartment across the bridge in Topsham. One of his friends lived in a hallway closet, the other slept on the couch. They were, I admit, ravers. But nobody at Bowdoin would do the drugs I wanted to do, and so I, too, for a period of about six months, became a raver. Hal’s parents were hard-burned Deadheads who owned a pasta shop up near campus. From them, he inherited a heavy hand with garlic and a belief in roving, ecstatic tribalism. Before my first rave, outside of a tool and die factory in Athol, Massachusetts, Hal handed me a doggie bag containing four hits of acid, four H-bombs, a gram of ketamine, two grams of marijuana, and a tiny bottle of water. I’d never felt so loved, at least not in such an organized sort of way. I emptied the entire bag into my mouth, minus the ketamine, which I split six hours later with a girl who had just lifted up her shirt to reveal a third nipple. Pierced.
Although I always laughed whenever Hal would talk about how we were the last generation of hippies, and therefore were the only people left in the country who still believed in real freedom, I still got in his Taurus every Friday. I never refused his thoughtfully packaged drugs or his friendship, really. At a rave in Hartford, I had the best sex of my life in a bathroom stall with a freshman from RISD. In Bar Harbor, while walking a loop around a bowling alley, my feet and I lost our connection. And yet, whenever I could muster the focus to look around at the half-naked fourteen-year-old girls grinding their teeth, the fat kids wearing neon ski goggles, the older men on the floor, minding their pubescent
girl traps, the baby bibs, the pacifiers, the candy-stamped pills, I never saw anything more than a bunch of kids who, like me, were trying to kill themselves by stomping around in some depraved, childish dance.
AND YET, NONE
of this explains why I started crying in the middle of that library. Or why my hunger, which I had been successfully ignoring since eating half of Lunch Combo 21, began mewing horribly like a run-over cat. Maybe it was the piling on of stress, maybe it was a short circuit in my nostalgic mind, or maybe it was just one of those moments that happen to me about once a year, usually while driving, when I will sob hysterically because some song comes on the radio that reminds me of my mother.
I could smell James staring over my shoulder at the screen. It was too much. I got up and jogged out the door.
As I was walking back down toward the hotel, I got a text from a 617 number. In all caps, it read:
PLEASE MEET ME AT TAXIDERMY AT 3. THIS IS ELLEN. A BIT URGENT, BUT
ALSO NO BIG DEAL
.
It was Performance Fleece.
When
he came to, Sid Finch was in what looked to be a utility closet. A bucket of sudsy water sat between his feet, which, he noticed, were bare and, somehow, scaly. On a nail above the rickety, shabbily painted white door hung his pants.
He allowed himself to look around and realized that he must have been drugged because the light from the bare bulb that hung over his head was refracting out all across the walls. Upon closer inspection, though, Finch saw that the shelves of the closet were littered with tiny mirrors, which, had Finch been a bit older or, perhaps, a bit younger, he might have recognized as pried-off bits of a disco ball. The rest of the
space was completely bare save for a white Maneki Neko, who raised and lowered his paw in greeting.
FINCH HAD NO
idea if he passed out again or if some part of his memory was blacked out, but when he snapped back into function, two sizable breasts swung an inch from his nose. Something warm and wet was being mushed against his forehead. Even in his scrambled state, Finch could appreciate both the lift and the heft of her breasts and the grimaceworthy perfection of the two tiny pert nipples.
He sat up, bonking his nose straight into the left breast.
The breasts swung out of sight and were replaced by a broad face and a leonine smile.
“There you are.” A tinge of digital echo trailed behind each word.
Finch grunted. The girl reached down between his legs into the bucket and pulled out a sponge. She applied it to Finch’s forehead. Once again, he was eye to eye with the breasts.
“You were out for a minute there. There is a reason why You Are Vivacious comes with that warning.”
Finch could actually feel his brain fire the command to speak, but some greater, suffocating force kept his mouth shut. It became very obvious very quickly that he was not going to be able to say anything.
The breasts swung back up again, and he felt the sponge move to the back of his neck.
“Mona is new here. She should have asked if you had seen the allergy warning.”
“Allergy?” He felt each syllable ricochet, painfully, off the broken pieces of his brain.
“Bee pollen. It’s rare, but it seems you are allergic to it. Never seen
anyone who was quite as allergic, though. In the past, when people have reacted badly, their eyes swell up a little and their skin goes itchy. You, well, you had a much more, let’s say, intense reaction.”
Finch heard the sponge plop back into the bucket, and the breasts once again were replaced by the irrefutable symmetry of her face. She peered in at his eyes and cupped his forehead with a cold, wet palm. “You have the gift to share of the most compelling eyes. Although I can’t really tell what color they are. Some parts are hazel, others look green.” She stood back up, dripping sponge in hand. “You are unique.”
“Where?” It was all Finch could manage.
“There’s nothing to worry about. When you lost consciousness, we knew what had happened, gave you the appropriate treatment, and closely monitored you. Since everything looked like it was going as we expected it to go, we didn’t feel the need to get any sort of professional medical personnel involved, especially given the long history of malpractice and misdiagnosis over at San Francisco General.”
The digital echo receded. Replacing it was a honeyed condescension, the sort you hear on late-night infomercials—a beautiful teenage pop star lecturing young girls on how they don’t need to endure the burden of acne.
The sponge plopped back down into the bucket. He could sense Lionface stiffening a bit and regretted the violence of his thoughts. When his mother had gotten into her very own bombed-out derivative of Buddhism—a simplified, woodsier life version for white people who loved the idea of disassociation but couldn’t quite get over the ugliness of the associated plastic trinkets and the
Chineseness
of it all—not much about her changed, but he did notice that the hour of required daily meditation honed both her senses and her intuition. She could better smell
the booze on his breath, the marijuana smoke on his sweatshirts. She knew when he was high or if he had really gone to basketball practice. From then on, he had always felt a bit naked around anyone who might, in whatever circuitous way, subscribe to the Four Noble Truths.
Did violent thoughts emanate out farther than mundane or pleasant thoughts? Was there a different, more easily discernible tone to them? With his brain still struggling to recollect itself, Finch felt the cold bite of paranoia along the base of his spine. The water pooled at his crotch felt icy, heavy. He began to shiver.
The breasts swung down out of view again, and the face reappeared. In the same tone, which indicated that the answer to the question was an ethical matter, she asked, “Are you cold?”
“Yes.” The word crept like a slug in his mouth. He shivered again.
She dipped her finger in the bucket and, coquettishly, winced. “This has gotten cold. I apologize.”
“It’s. Okay.” Finch said. And then, “My. Pants?”
She produced a red towel and began a tousling assault on Finch’s body. He felt her trained, professional touch, an efficiency to the twists and a detachment to the contact. Eyeing her breasts, which were still swinging about, he wondered if she had been a stripper.
Lionface explained, “I was a hairstylist. Before I started working here. Towel drying was always my favorite part.”
Convinced now that Lionface could read his thoughts, Finch tried to blank out his brain. He tried an old technique, picturing a blue, rotating ball, but even that familiar trick, which he used in everything from sex to golf, could not quite close out the mental image of Lionface on the stripper pole. His fear dissipated into a begrudging respect—after all,
who could really begrudge a beautiful woman who reads your thoughts while drying your hair?
He said, “Oh, yeah?”
“It’s the only part that’s not”—for the first time since she had materialized, she hesitated—“uh, that’s not sharp, you know? Like, every part of styling hair is so precise, so angled. You need a protractor these days to cut bangs, and every woman wants her hair straightened first, which makes things even harder because if you screw up once, it looks like someone took a hatchet to their head. It’s so nerve-racking, what with those metal scissors and the smell of burning hair and all the precision.”
She lifted the towel from his hair and peered in, professionally, at his face. “I sense that I’m boring you. Here are your pants.”
Looking down, he was confronted with his bulging erection. Lionface smirked, following his eyes, and said, “You have a truly abundant gift there. Your wife must be very happy.”
In an attempt to force his will down to his cock, Finch frowned.
She said, “Have you ever held anything in your hands and just known it was real and that the sensation you felt from the thing wasn’t just the ephemeral rush provided by words and images? Like it was a real thing?”
Finch grunted.
“I once had a pair of hiking boots like that. All-leather, none of this crappy synthetic crap, Vibram soles, and double-cushioned insides. Whenever I’d hike around the Headlands in those boots, I could feel that they were real things and not just the fluff from the assault of advertisers. Do you know what I’m talking about, Detective? The difference between the abundance of things and the false charm of words?”
Once again, he grunted.
“I can tell by the tan line on your neck that you are probably a surfer, no?”
No surfer can ever resist the opportunity to identify himself. Finch managed a nod.
“I am from San Clemente, and as a result, my brothers all surfed, and so I know a bit about it. I’m certain there are boards where you just can tell that someone put their love into shaping it and glassing it, but that there are also boards that are made entirely of fancy words and computer designs.”
Finch nodded. He tried to say something, but his jaw was no longer cooperating.
“Being abundance, Detective, simply means choosing to be those real things, those real boards, those real boots, and not buying into the absurdum of adjectives and computer designs. That’s all it is. It’s the feeling of surfing the real board and knowing you and it are one and that those sorts of things and feelings are not rare, but are simply hidden from us by those who wish to dominate through words.”
Lionface touched his shoulder. His erection jumped. Finch sat up a bit straighter. Lionface smiled and revealed a mouthful of straight, white teeth.
BY THE TIME
Jim Kim pulled up in his new white Lexus, Finch’s faculties had mostly returned. His legs ached and his throat felt scraped out, but he knew where he was, at least. He had no idea what had happened. All he could think was that the cyberpunks had spiked the drinks in an effort to get back at Hofspaur, but then why cause a scene? And why had Hofspaur taken him to Being Abundance? As he creakily got into Kim’s
car, Finch was sort of hoping that Kim would open his fat mouth and explain all.
“What the fuck happened to you, Keanu?”
“I can barely talk.”
“You need to go to the hospital?”
“Probably.”
“Fuck me.”
“I think I’ll be okay.”
“The hot girl on the phone said you were allergic to pollen or something.”
“How do you know?”
“That she was hot? I don’t know, man, she sounded hot. You know how certain bitches just sound hot? I don’t know why I have to explain these things to you when you know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Finch shook his head. For a few blocks, they drove in silence. Kim turned up Franklin and started hauling up the hill toward Pacific Heights. Finch was too exhausted to ask where they were headed, so he just hung his head and stared at the floor mat.
“This bitch is acting all holy here,” Kim said. It was his habit, when angry at Finch, to describe the situation to an invisible third party.
“Let’s not talk about it right now.”
“Okay.”
“Where are we going?”
“Cleanup.”
The Lexus crested California Street and barreled down toward the Marina. Although he had grown up just a few blocks from here, in a house with its own moneyed view, the sight of the hazy bay, with its
clutter of sailboats and Alcatraz sitting small but significant in the center of it all, always made Finch pause and bask in an unabashed civic pride. Whenever he saw the bay or the Golden Gate Bridge swallowed up in fog, the grim-faced surfers crossing Great Highway on their way out to the shore pound at Ocean Beach, even the valley nerds wobbling along the 1 on their ridiculously efficient bicycles, he felt his hatreds soften, at least a little. It had always made sense to him that the silliest people would congregate in beautiful, inefficient spaces where they would be entertained by their surroundings but always have the built-in excuse to barely function.
THEY PULLED UP
to an unremarkable two-story in the Marina. Squad cars were parked at aggressive angles out front. A female officer was spooling yellow caution tape around a chewed-up, droopy madrone.
Kim explained, “We got called here. Everyone else is out at some stupid function at the Giants game. We just have to clean up, then assign it to whoever’s next up.” He made eye contact with the female officer and gave her his usual salute—two hands on his belt buckle and a slight yet firm thrust of the hips. She rolled her eyes and motioned toward the front door.
THE BODY WAS
in the upstairs flat—a sunny railroad-style with a kitchen whose appliances all had European names, but not quite the right European names. The floor, at least the parts not covered in blood, was an off-cordovan. The greats of American outdoor photography hung on the wall. Given those details and the location, Finch did not even really have to see the body: white, mid-twenties to early thirties, gym-built torso, probably moved to the city after college, either in the Midwest or New
England, divorced parents, house share up near Squaw Valley for the winters. Somewhere, clunking around in one of the closets, they would find a pair of skis. In the medicine cabinet, a vial of bad cocaine and a medicine bottle stuffed full of some annoyingly high-grade marijuana.
Two young, twittery officers hovered above the body. Both wore white plastic gloves. Finch and Kim exchanged a not-so-private look of disgust. Without prompting, the officers began a tandem explanation of what they thought had happened.
“We responded to the call. Landlord noticed the door was open, called up for some service issue. Toilet, I think.”
“We get here, hysterical woman on the front lawn screaming in Chinese. She’s pointing at the door, so we head upstairs and find the body.”
“He had his ID on him?”
“Yeah, wallet with one hundred thirty-eight dollars in cash, credit cards, ID, everything. Found some marijuana paraphernalia in his pockets as well.”
“What’s his name?”
“William Curren. As far as we can tell, that ski pole’s the murder weapon. Blood on the end of it. The size of the, uh, puncture wounds on his neck matches up with a, uh, forced entry, you know, into his throat.”