Read The Dead Do Not Improve Online
Authors: Jay Caspian Kang
The Dead Do Not Improve (15 page)
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?
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.
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 t
he
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 its 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: