The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  Down at the end of the parking lot, the local had managed to wrest away the Stokereporter’s phone and was threatening to smash it against the ground.

  Finch laughed. Chris Isaak laughed, too.

  FINCH SUITED UP and paddled out to the spot Chris Isaak had mentioned. It took only one steep, barreling left to forget about William “Bill” Curren, Being Abundance, psilocybin, Hofspaur, Dolores Stone, Sarah’s distance, the swinging breasts, Kim’s stupor, and the bony persistence of the prehistoric catfish. As he paddled back out, he saw Bad Vibes Bob’s red board tombstoning out of the break and then, a second later, Bad Vibes Bob’s gray head popping up out of the surf.

  A calm, quite different from the mushroom clarity, washed over Finch. The winds were cooperating, the waves were peeling perfectly, and all the bros were out.

  On his third thumping, overhead left of the session (Finch had a habit, probably born out of his childhood fascination with baseball stats, of counting his rides and categorizing them by the direction, shape, and length), a shoulder hopper dropped in on him, lost his balance, and tumbled headfirst into the trough. Finch heard the crunch as his fins ran over the offender’s board and was launched into the white water. As the washing machine gathered him up, he could feel the shoulder hopper struggling to get to the surface. In an effort to separate their bodies before the churn sent them both back over the falls, Finch pushed himself away and curled himself up into a ball and began his routine of counting slowly in his head to dispel the panic. He felt the surge of water catch his body, and, in a sledgehammer’s arc, he was slammed, shoulder-first, onto the ocean floor. Sixteen seconds later, his leash went slack.

  At the surface, a red-faced, scraggly bottle blond was gasping for air. A few feet down the beach floated the sawed-off remains of a Coke-bottle-green Harbour Noserider. He recognized the man from a poster someone had put up at the Riptide Bar, which had photos of all the Stokereporters, descriptions of their boards, and a simple declaration: WANTED: FOR POSEURISM.

  “Bro, look what you did to my fucking board!”

  “You dropped in on me, asshole. I should be yelling at you for nicking up my fins.”

  “That’s a sixteen-hundred-dollar board, asshole. You fucking ran me right over.”

  A second wave, hollow and frothy, crashed on their heads. Finch went back over the falls, bounced on the sand, started up the slow count.

  “Fucking shit, man. If someone walks out in front your car, do you just run them over? Where is your fucking discretion?”

  “Post something about it on your website, bro.”

  His contrarian nature and soft voice absolved Finch from the usual charges of cop bullying. There had been a short stretch, right after graduating from the academy, when he had picked up a whiff of menace in his dealings with wealthy women. In particular, there was an instance when, while pacing around the maid’s quarters of a mansion up on Pacific, he had purposely knocked over and shattered a Ming vase—a good Ming—owned by a woman whose fifteen-year-old son had just stolen her car. Although his old patrol habit of pulling over cars with NPR bumper stickers might be interpreted as abuse by those who caught the tickets for going 46 in a 35, every cop he knew had to keep at least one good joke going. But aside from those two quirks, which he attributed directly to unresolved mom issues, Sid Finch sought out the losing side of any confrontation. He was always kind to fat women. He felt sentimental over the poor terrorists in Iraq who, holding an AK-47 for the first time in their lives, were cut down by American bullets. He hadn’t voted in the last election because he couldn’t fight how sorry he felt for soggy old John McCain. After his childhood love of the Giants had been annihilated by Barry Bonds’s arrogance, he had even rejected the idea of rooting for a team, choosing instead to hope only for the humiliation of the Yankees and, in time, the Red Sox.

  While the rest of the judging world might choose a side based on silly, affected opinions, Finch’s choice came on a more visceral level. In any conflict, one side was going to get killed. He would forever be fighting for that side. In San Francisco, that meant being police.

  Finch agreed that the Stokereporters were surf-ethically wrong, but he had long since determined—despite their use of technology, their superior numbers, and their cloying enthusiasm—these limp-armed poseurs were, in fact, the underdog. Finch could understand why his fellow locals had fashioned the battle as a Thermopylae, with the buff, salty cast of locals fighting valiantly against the hordes of offending kooks, but whenever he saw a Stokereporter flailing, panicked, whenever he read one of their posted narratives, riddled with nuanced self-congratulation about trying to paddle past the break on a 2OH OB day, whenever some pale, concave-chested kid covered in body acne walked up to him in the parking lot and asked for help with his wet suit zipper, Finch knew the Thermopylae comparison was wrong.

  When he grabbed a fistful of the Stokereporter’s poseur-blond scraggle, nobody was more surprised than Finch. A wave welled up, the face going from green to gunmetal gray as the water shifted away from the sun. The dredge kicked up, and, as both men were being sucked back, Finch watched with detachment as the man’s eyelids peeled back. As the lip detonated on their heads, Finch found himself simply appreciating the aesthetic magnitude of the man’s terror.

  He kept his grip through the tumble and through the fourteen-second washing machine. When the wave let up, he saw the man’s squarish, capped teeth inside his gaping mouth, the equine flare of his nostrils. Nausea crept up from the pit of Finch’s stomach. He let go.

  The Stokereporter had a few things to say, but it was just theater, the chronically insecure man’s version of a spank bank.

  THE STOKEREPORTER TOOK the next wave in. Finch paddled back out past the break. Floating three hundred yards from the beach, he tried to summon up some reasoning behind the attack.

  The ocean went slack. The wind picked up from the south. Down the beach, he could see about a dozen guys floating around on the gray water. He could hear them yammering on about the credibility of some shark encounter down in Montara. The nausea subsided. Bad Vibes Bob paddled over and asked him what had happened. Finch shook his head. Bad Vibes Bob said, “Fuck them, right?”

  Finch nodded, stared down south, where the parking lot gave way to the cliffs of Fort Funston. When the Porn Palace had closed, they had moved the munitions down here, and when Fort Funston closed, they hauled the guns up to the Marina. He thought it might mean something, but again, he couldn’t quite figure out what.

  Fuck it, he thought, and paddled back to the beach.

  AS HE TROD up the hill that led from the edge of the water to the parking lot, Finch saw the Stokereporter and four other men standing behind his car. Both pieces of the man’s broken board were laid out on Finch’s hood. The nausea returned. Finch closed his eyes and saw the white flash of one of the catfish’s protruding bones.

  Finch made a mental note: Get to the hospital.

  The Stokereporters advanced uneasily across the parking lot. Finch quickly checked around, but everyone else was in the water or had gone home.

  “Looking around for your buddies?”

  One of the catfish whispered, “Feel the color of his voice. Insubstantial. He’s still broken. Think of the odds you’re at now.”

  Finch gave in. The fish were right. The Stokereporter, flanked by his friends, stalked right up to Finch and said, “You’re lucky I don’t call the fucking cops on you, man.”

  Finch punched him straight in the forehead. The Stokereporter’s eyes rolled back in his head. He staggered into the arms of one of his buddies. Clearly, all of them had been expecting the usual routine: screaming, occasional shoving, homophobic epithets, and empty threats.

  He laughed. The catfish all surfaced. They laughed, too.

  What else to do? Finch pushed past, tossed the broken board over the cliff.

  After yelling a bit, the Stokereporters scattered. Two hopped on down the cliff to retrieve the remains of the board. Another helped his concusse
d friend find a seat on the bumper of his truck. The last one pulled out his phone, and, from the way his fingers were moving on the screen, looked to be looking something up. No one looked at Finch.

  No matter, thought Finch.

  FINCH DIDN’T QUITE know what to make of anything yet and had already forgotten his mental note to go to the hospital, so he peeled out of the parking lot at Sloat and headed south. He had always loved driving down the 1 past Pacifica through Devil’s Slide, especially in the fall, when the furrowed fields around Half Moon Bay sagged with their heavy, orange fruit. The uselessness of everything that grew down the 1 had appealed to him as a kid: the pumpkins, the kiwi farms, the trust fund projects with their silly, reassuring crops: pie fillings, star fruit, Brussels sprouts. His junior year in high school, he had lain down with Loretta Neill in a pumpkin patch down near the Princeton Jetty. Staring up at the array of stars, Finch gave what amounted to a spoken word performance of Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta,” a song he had picked almost entirely out of the great coincidence that there was a song with the same name as his girlfriend. He could still remember each word, just as he could still remember the startling pungent smell on his fingers, the bumping of teeth, the chirp of his own brain celebrating the start of something new. Hundreds of pumpkins, swollen, moonlit, stood sentry as Finch and Loretta squirmed and pushed and then wallowed a bit in the cocoons of their guilt. Afterward, they lay on their backs and he explained why Townes Van Zandt was a real singer and Johnny Cash, whom she loved, was just a charming impostor. He was always ruining these moments with his awkwardly timed vitriol. He honestly thought Loretta’s life would be improved if she upgraded from Johnny Cash to Townes, just as he honestly believed that his teachers would be better off dead, or that his parents would be better off if they took acid at least once a month and smoked weed every day. Loretta, he remembered, had said that Townes was ugly, and a misogynist, to boot. All his women were kindly whores or wives with impossibly warm hearts. Everyone was always leaving. Even Loretta, she explained, is a carousing bartender whom Townes only likes because he can have her any time. Finch had nothing to say. She huddled deeper into his houndstooth coat and sighed. He squeezed her fingers and felt happy anticipating the rest of the night: the planned stop-in at the Denny’s in Pacifica, her flushed cheeks, unraveling hair, the wordless car ride back home, both of them listening to Guy Clark, the median between Townes and Johnny Cash, on the tinny speakers of his mother’s beat-up Mercedes. Back then, at the height of their young love, Finch, who had never bent in anything, imagined the hundreds of compromises he could make for Loretta.

  Through the pastel sameness of Daly City’s row houses, old Finch’s mind stayed on Loretta, who had died at nineteen of meningitis. Loretta! Her chicken legs, her tuft of dry, pale yellow hair, her asymmetrical eyebrows, the persistence of her wool, earflapped ski caps, the way she kept both hands on her forty when she drank.

  For the first time in years, Finch began to cry. Softly, and to himself.

  Hurtling down the hill now toward Pacifica on the 1, where you can see the ocean fan out from Fort Funston all the way down to Pillar Point, he rooted one of his Townes Van Zandt CDs out of the glove box and sang, chokingly, along.

  He realized how long it had been since he had sung along to anything. Something has gone wrong, he thought, and felt embarrassed at the clumsiness of the declaration. Something has been wrong for years. He closed his eyes, searching for the fish, expecting to see their tails flailing as they burrowed their bony heads further into his brain, but he only found the dry, vacuous space of his mind.

  Litost. The torment that arises when we unexpectedly encounter our own expansive misery. It had been Loretta’s favorite word, borrowed from her favorite book written by her favorite author. Finch had taken her to task on Kundera—if she shunned Townes for his misogyny, why accept a lecherous old Czech? All of Kundera’s women, he pointed out, were whores, glorified courtesans, or, even worse, philosophical and political symbols. At least Townes cared about his whores. She had answered, simply, that she chose Kundera because he, above all other writers, understood what it meant to be in love.

  It was too much. Johnny Cash, ski hats, and Kundera. He began to be mean to her.

  His memories of that period in his life were so foreign to him now that they seemed almost to belong to someone else, someone whom he might now despise. How had he, who no longer read or listened to music, been the sort of person who could muster the arrogance, and the care, to categorically dismiss Johnny Cash, or, for God’s sake, Milan Kundera? And while the rationalist in him, the trained detective who could trace back circumstance into motive, could posit an explanation of how the fire of his young love had been extinguished at Loretta’s death—none of us really ever fall out of love with the first woman who agrees to return us the favor—he could not recognize the totality of that younger self who had sat entranced by all that had provided kindling for that little blaze.

  He understood how he had gotten so old. But how had he ever been so young?

  THE BUZZING OF his phone interrupted his reverie. It was Kim. He sent him to voice mail.

  THERE WERE STILL things that could shift him around—Opening Day, walking past the tunnel at Pac Bell Park to take in the Giants in their papal whites, tossing around warm-ups; the letter and family photos he received every September from his childhood pen pal, Mishka, who had emigrated from Russia and was now a computer programmer in Atlanta; the perfectly conical dunes of spices his mother piled up, for God knew what reason, on the kitchen counter every Thanksgiving; the uncontrollable, childish grins that broke out across the faces of his scowling, salty friends whenever they pulled out a barrel and knew that someone else had witnessed it; how the lotion-obsessed Chinese women of Clement Street hawkishly guarded their trays of dumplings; the busted gait of the dogs that trailed around after the ratty, homeless kids on Haight Street; and here, eating a heavy, glazed scone in his car, outside of a bakery in Pescadero, thinking, for the first time in years, about Johnny Cash, Townes, pumpkins, litost, ski hats, Olde English, and a dead girl.

  Something buried in Finch’s heart picked up its birdy head, shook off a generation of dust, and floated around aimlessly. He felt the sort of joy only Tolstoy could ever describe, the sort of joy that the younger Finch, sharp, modern fellow that he was, had always hated Tolstoy for acknowledging. For a second, probably more, he was ecstatically happy. And then, when he could take it no more, he took his phone out of his pocket and checked his messages.

  THERE WERE FOUR. The first three were from Kim. Dolores Stone’s neighbor had disappeared. Goldwyn and Kim were going for drinks at Irene’s at seven, if he wanted to come. The Chronicle had already left eighteen phone calls at the office about the Stone murder. The last message had been sent from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said, “Hello, Officer. I know this will upset you, but when you were resting at the restaurant, I took the liberty of calling my phone from your phone, you know, so I would know your number. I imagine it has been a bit of a strange day for you. If you would like an explanation, please call me at this number.”

  What did Lionface want? He called the number and got a nonpersonalized voice mail. Seconds later, he received a text:

  218A 39th Avenue. x-street: Fulton. Will be here till 9 PM. Plz call when your nearby.

  P IS FOR PSYCHO

  1. The detective who picked up the phone identified himself as Jim Kim. I tried to not be bowled over by this. Every Korean is named Kim, and no Kim has ever done me a favor. This Kim told us to meet him at the Starbucks on 20th and Mission. He would be wearing a Wisconsin sweatshirt.

  We called a cab.

  My panic internalized. My cheeks and hips ached. Ellen, hunched over and huddled in her performance fleece, deflated, slowly.

  We, Ellen and I, said some things about how the cops would help.

  The cab company called and said the driver was downstairs. We told him to meet us in an alley behind the Hotel St. Francis, and
, with the promise of a decent tip for the trip of five blocks, told him to drive us, circuitously, to Starbucks.

  He laughed.

  The shame was a welcome intrusion from the terror. I whispered, not quite into Ellen’s ear, but more into her neck: Everything is going to be all right.

  WE FOUND JIM Kim near the back at a round table, one of those pieces of furniture birthed completely out of corporate research, in which you can see the honed edge of market math, but cannot figure out how to put two separate cups of coffee on it. The Wisconsin sweatshirt was tied around his shoulders. Kim, anticipating our arrival, I guess, had taken the liberty of pulling up two empty chairs. I tried to smile at him. He scowled.

  I consoled myself with his remarkable ugliness. His head, as my mother might have said, looked like a filthy little potato.

  He asked, “Any problem finding the place?”

  “What?”

  “I was kidding. It’s Starbucks.”

  I already hated him, but I apologized for myself.

  He asked, “Do you know what this place used to be like before you people started moving into this neighborhood? It wasn’t a Starbucks, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “How can you be sorry? You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

  Ellen, finally, sat down. I resisted the urge to sit in her lap.

  She asked, “Can you please tell us what’s going on?”

  Again, the eyebrows rose up. He grimaced. “That’s what I ask you, darling.”

  “Well, we have no idea.”

  “Is this your boyfriend?” Without bothering to look at me, he pointed a stubby, yellow finger in my face.

  “Yes.”