The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  It was a yogurt cup.

  I looked up. Performance Fleece jerked her head in the direction of the van.

  I wasn’t getting it. I worried my gigantic head would look even bigger from three stories up. Does distance, with its inexhaustible cache of favors, extend the same grace to us bobbleheads that it extends to the tanned, snaggle-faced gym addicts of San Diego?

  Something behind me buzzed. It occurred to me that professional basketball players, when viewed from the upper deck of an arena, always look like normal-size people. So, given that my head was approximately the size of a basketball, a woman’s basketball, it stood to reason …

  A second yogurt cup hit the sidewalk, this time accompanied by a plastic spoon. Performance Fleece’s head reappeared in the window. She looked disappointed in me. Not knowing what to do, I pointed at the yogurt cup and smiled. She shook her head in disbelief and mouthed something. From where I was standing, it looked like, “The gay, the gay,” but, after a flurry of angry pointing, it became clear that what she meant was, “The gate, the gate.”

  I nodded. She ducked away. The buzzing started up again. It was, indeed, the condo’s front gate. I pushed my way inside.

  The lobby was clean. That’s all I can really say about it. I did note a Paisley settee, but only because I had just learned the week before what a settee was. A loud thudding came from the staircase, and when it finally stopped, Performance Fleece sprang into view. It hurt, at least little a bit, to hear her clunk around in such a plebeian way.

  With a withering, who-farted look on her face, she motioned me up the stairs. I followed her great ass up two flights and through a heavy door and into a condo that also doesn’t really need to be described.

  Then (Hallelujah!), with all of Deerfield Academy behind her voice, she asked, “Are you retarded?”

  “What’s up?”

  She pointed out the window and said, “That van hasn’t moved for two hours now.”

  I failed to see the problem. There were always cars double-parked on our block. I shrugged. Performance Fleece pointed a long, thin finger at my nose. I caught a whiff of cocoa butter. My mounting erection was confused by this. She asked, “Are you high? Mel says you always look high.”

  “Mel?”

  “My fucking boyfriend. You met him this morning.”

  Women of America! Take note: Learn to say “fuck” and “boyfriend” with the same even mix of contempt and protectiveness and you will never be lonely again.

  “Oh, he didn’t tell me his name.”

  “That van hasn’t moved in two hours. About an hour ago, a kid got out and kind of kicked around in the dirt in front of your building.”

  “Maybe he lost something?”

  “Of course he lost something. He lost his bullets in that poor old lady’s face.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, why would he come back to the scene of the crime? Wouldn’t he be in El Salvador by now?”

  “Did you see the red paint smeared around the window? That’s a gang sign.”

  My reason was returning to me. I asked, “Okay, okay. Can we think this through? Together?”

  “You have to go down there.”

  “What?”

  “To establish a strong neighborhood presence.”

  “Strong neighborhood presence?”

  “Yes. Strong neighborhood presence.”

  “Well, where’s Mel? Isn’t that his scooter parked on the sidewalk?”

  “He takes the shuttle to work.”

  “So, that’s like a weekend scooter?”

  “Why are you talking about his fucking scooter?”

  “Sorry, I guess I’m trying to say.”

  “Yes?”

  “Shouldn’t we both go down there?”

  She turned around and bent over to open a drawer. My God, her ass! When my eyes found their way back up to her face, she was holding a fancy kitchen knife. I worried that she might have caught me staring, but then why would she have gone for the knife before the staring had even happened? Had she been looking for something else in the drawer and, during her search, felt my eyes on her ass, and, after the moment of violation passed, chosen the knife?

  I asked, “What’s the knife for?”

  She said, “I’m going down there with you.”

  15. This was Performance Fleece’s plan. We would walk up and down the street, shoving our strong neighborhood presence down the throat of these gangsters.

  It wasn’t the most complicated plan, but what grit from Performance Fleece! What determination! What poor freshman, on which field, at which New England factory of private education and goodwill, had dared to face down this dervish? Unstoppable force, Performance Fleece, running straight toward the goal.

  We took our first lap of the street. My erection felt like it was going to tear through my pants leg. But how to adjust? The waistband tuck would be too obvious. And my pants, as the advanced creative writer had pointed out, were cockblasters. By way of nervous reflex, I asked, “Where did you go to college?”

  She said, “This is not the time.”

  “Sorry.”

  She grabbed my hand but did not turn to look at me. Then, with flourishing modesty, she said, “Williams.”

  “I went to Bowdoin.”

  “That’s a great school.”

  And then we were past the van.

  We walked up and down the block three more times. At each pass of the van, I made sure to ask some stupid question. Perfomance Fleece’s hand was cold and well lotioned, but her palms were covered with calluses. She talked about Williams, her opinions of California, most of which had to do with political things that were foreign to me.

  I talked mostly about small restaurants and small magazines. In response, she just kind of pursed her lips, asked me unrelated questions about who I knew at Bowdoin. It turned out we knew two people in common, but I only knew their names and not their faces. I took a risk and talked some shit about those two faceless people, and Performance Fleece laughed and agreed. Quickly, I forgot why we were walking or what we were doing out on the street. Girls just have that effect on me, I guess. On the fourth pass, without thinking much about it, I stared into the van.

  It was the Advanced Creative Writer. He was crying into his hands. An older man with a Pancho Villa mustache was sitting in the driver’s seat. He was talking to the Advanced Creative Writer, but when he caught me staring, he shut up. The Advanced Creative Writer looked up.

  Then, to my horror, his eyes narrowed in recognition.

  16. Both men stepped out of the car, screaming about something. I caught a couple curse words—puta, pinche—but everything the Advanced Creative Writer said in English was lost on me. Performance Fleece blanched and stepped away. The Advanced Creative Writer took a giant step up onto the sidewalk and pressed his scowling face up to my own.

  Try to understand. I spent most of my childhood split between a foreign model of grace and my father’s personal brand of macho. (I apologize for talking about him so much, but we must try to understand one another, and since we’ve all moved past the era when understanding was only a collection of Buddhas, zenny poems, fucking Tigers, weird pickles, and creative spins on rice, we are only left with fathers. Anyway.) After one of my fights in the middle school cafeteria with Daunte Degraffenreid, my father was called to take me home. When he walked into the office and saw me sitting on a bench next to Daunte, who, even back then, would have been described by even the most well intentioned of my friends as a “big black dude,” an unrecognizable look spread across my father’s face. Again, as with all of his looks, I cannot define this face as one thing or another, but with the benefit of the years (dead parents are easier to understand) and some photos of him at my sister’s high school graduation, I can say that the look on his face was something akin to pride. A few years later, when I listened to Ronizm rap about how some people have to scrap to maintain dignity that is not their birthright, my thoughts on th
e matter were confirmed and committed to instinct. Yes, there is something about the deference of white guilt and I have certainly had my flings with it, but in the end, I’ve always come back to this unspoken lesson from my father: Indulge in all the liberal politics you need, son, but when it comes time to fight, you don’t have the luxury to not fight.

  Which is all a way of saying I slapped the shit out of the Advanced Creative Writer. It felt good. Of course it did. The man with the Pancho Villa mustache got out of the car, cursed at me, and collected the Advanced Creative Writer up off the sidewalk. As they staggered back to the van, the Advanced Creative Writer yelled, “You’re fucking dead. You and your fucking girlfriend.”

  I looked over at Performance Fleece. Was she impressed? Had she heard the Advanced Creative Writer refer to her as my girlfriend? Ah, yes! She was chewing her lip, staring off at Mel’s faggy scooter, calculating a new possibility.

  17. Performance Fleece called the police, but the dispatcher couldn’t figure out how the confrontation had been the Advanced Creative Writer’s fault. She suggested we try apologizing. I called Adam, but he didn’t pick up. While we waited for some idea to present itself, Performance Fleece and I passed around a bottle of Macallan and watched Access Hollywood. Performance Fleece told me that she never liked Jennifer Aniston. Through the drinks and the Access Hollywood, we put together the following plausible scenario: The Advanced Creative Writer, who clearly was involved in a gang, must have accidentally shot the Baby Molester during a turf war. Racked with remorse, the Advanced Creative Writer, who, despite his gang affiliation, was a sensitive soul (hence his enrollment in advanced creative writing), confessed the crime to his father, who promptly packed his son in the family van and drove to the scene of the crime to snatch up any evidence that might criminally implicate his son. After sweeping through the dirt for bullet casings, footprints, the father had forced his son to stare in at the destroyed window, the slackening police tape that still hung across the front of the building. At this point, the Advanced Creative Writer, sensitive soul, broke down in tears.

  At each commercial break, one of us would sneak up to the window to see if the van had moved. It did not move until after Jeopardy. By then, Performance Fleece and I had already fucked twice. Her ass, I remember, was a bit of a disappointment, a trick of restrictive panties and $250 jeans, but she fucked like a real athlete with enthusiasm, impressive force, and limited grace.

  I LEFT AT the end of a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos because Mel had called to say he was finally heading back. Performance Fleece suggested that I sleep at Adam’s house and copied down two phone numbers on the back of a receipt. The first was her number. The second was the number of the detective who had come by the day after the shooting. She said, “His last name is Kim, just like you, not that it means anything.”

  If I got in trouble, she said, call both numbers.

  Nobody who worked in the downtown station could quite remember if Siddhartha “Sid” Finch had picked up the nickname Keanu because he had always been a surfing detective or if the nickname had been the impetus for Sid’s surfing habit. Those who argued for the latter pointed to Sid’s narrow face, his ethnically ambiguous eyes, which seemed half-Asian, but, in fact, were of Welsh origins, his flat, bored manner of speech. Even if Finch had never picked up a surfboard, they argued, even if Keanu Reeves’s filmography had gone from the short-lived television version of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure straight to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, skipping over his only really good role as FBI agent Johnny Utah, Sid Finch would still make for a good Keanu.

  Finch, as a rule, maintained that he could barely remember which version was true, and when recruits or witnesses or reporters or women asked him about the origins of his nickname, he would say, “Keanu is my middle name.”

  But if the inquirer was someone he instinctively liked (Finch, like all cops, only really liked people out of instinct), he would tell him the truth. Back when Finch was in the academy, a red-faced, liverous tub of guts, whose oddly tapered haircut and saggy man-tits had earned him the nickname Sergeant Bulldyke, had found Finch’s slow talking so infuriating that he took to calling him Bill and Ted. The nickname led to great confusion in the classroom, especially to fellow recruits Bill Day and Ted Terpstra, who could never figure out why they were being berated in tandem. Eventually, Sergeant Bulldyke came up with Keanu as a replacement, and the name stuck.

  When Point Break was released, Sid Finch had been Keanu for six months. It came as a great relief to Finch, who now had a better, more graceful model to pin his nickname upon. He began surfing shortly after that. As for his unusual first name, Finch’s explanation was more direct. “My mother,” he would say, “is a fucking hippie.”

  SURFING WAS WHAT was on Finch’s mind as he stared down at the last known living photograph of Dolores Stone. Taken by a Chronicle photographer at last year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park, it showed an old woman swinging around an unidentified child. The caption read, “Dolores Stone of San Francisco braves the chilly weather and fog at this year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.”

  A half hour before, Finch had written the word “barefoot” in his notebook. He had not moved since. When Jim Kim, his phlegmatic, pockmarked partner, came barging into their shared office asking if he could borrow fifty cents, Finch managed to nod toward the dish on his desk where he kept his change. Kim grunted, stubbed his fat fingers around until he came up with two quarters, and stalked off in the general direction of the vending machines. A mild distaste settled over Finch. Kim had picked through dozens of nickels and dimes, all of which would have worked perfectly well in the station’s vending machine. When Kim came back, Diet Coke in hand, Finch said something about it.

  “Why would you skip over all these nickels and dimes and take two quarters?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Now I have to count out five dimes the next time I go to the vending machine.”

  “Jesus fuck, man.”

  “That’s how I feel.”

  “You take a look at those photos yet?”

  Finch handed the stack of photos over to Kim, who shuffled through them quickly.

  “Is that lipstick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice choice of color, especially for that neighborhood. I can’t imagine the neighbors were too happy to see red on the block.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Have you looked into the seedy life of our victim yet?”

  “You don’t want to see those photos.”

  “I don’t know, man. I’ve gotten into some weird shit in my day. Give me a hint.”

  “Apparently, there isn’t a part of the female anatomy that doesn’t wrinkle.”

  Kim tossed the crime scene photos back onto Finch’s desk and sat down on the office’s beat-up leather couch. He said, “We should be getting free sodas, anyway. My cousin works at some stupid Internet start-up a few blocks from here. They have Ping-Pong tables, TVs, and free sodas. The kid’s fucking twenty-four and he’s playing Ping-Pong and drinking free sodas, and here I am risking my life to pay half a dollar.”

  “Fifty cents is a discount.”

  “You should see what my mom charges at her restaurant.”

  “How much?”

  “Two twenty-five. Can you believe that shit? The woman is an animal.”

  “Koreans truly are the Jews of the Orient.”

  “That’s right. Although I should point out that you just got all fucked up ’cause I improperly borrowed your pocket change.”

  “That’s different. It’s a hygiene issue.”

  “Hygiene, Keanu? Do you have any idea what gets washed out onto the beaches here?”

  “What were we talking about?”

  “We were talking about Jews, man. Koreans as the new Jews. When white people have to stop feeling guilty about you and start planning around you, it means you’ve arrived. It’s like that thing I was telling
you about with the landlords.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, what? I was telling you about it like a couple weeks ago.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It hurts me when you do this.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You really don’t remember?”

  “I was probably pretending to listen.”

  “Last year, I go to New York to visit my cousin there and I pick up a paper on the subway and there’s this list of the ten worst landlords in New York City and I go down the list and it’s Shlomo Rubenstein and Jew Jewbergstein and then I get to number seven, which is some Korean guy who I can’t remember, like Kim Chee fucking Guevara and it’s not only him, number nine is another Korean guy. I’m sitting there on the subway reading those names over and over and I feel like crying ’cause it’s so beautiful. Eight Jew names and two Koreans.”

  “I do remember you talking about this now. But it was like six months ago.”

  “I’m getting choked up now just thinking about it. The media in New York needs to put Koreans on the same lists as Jews. The media doesn’t give a shit about blacks and Mexicans except when they’re running for president or illegally mowing some senator’s lawn. But when it comes to posting some terrifying shit—like landlords who let their tenants die over fifty bucks in repairs—and it comes to naming names, then they’re all over Koreans and the Jews. It’s a sign of fucking respect, like those kids carrying Ray Liotta’s groceries in Goodfellas.”

  “His mother’s groceries.”

  “When some Norteno gets popped up in the Mission, what’s the news coverage? Three sentences. Juan Valdez and his donkey were shot by Juan Marichal. The Taco Bell Chihuahua has been detained as a possible accomplice. Police are investigating. Or when Kunta Kinte shoots a wayward Theo Huxtable over in the Western Addition, there might be four sentences ’cause the media doesn’t care.”