The Dead Do Not Improve (7 page)
Read The Dead Do Not Improve Online
Authors: Jay Caspian Kang
Upon walking through the front door, Hofspaur and Finch had been greeted by one of three brunettes, all of whom had short-cropped, bowly hair. Like all the other girls, she had that reddish sheen. Her eyes, Finch noticed, were set a bit wider apart than one would usually expect in a human being. In a voice bearing the full benefit of healthy lungs and good posture, she said, “Welcome to the Being Abundance Cafeteria. Would you like to hear the question of the day?”
Hofspaur, sniggering, said, “Please.”
“What future are you living toward?”
“White power, brother.”
“Excuse me?” Her eyes darted over to a small, bedazzled icon of President Barack Obama that had been pasted up on the cash register.
“White powder,” Hofspaur said. “Trying to kick a habit. Hoping the future is free of white powder.”
Relief flooded over her face. She touched her finger to her clavicle
and said, “Well, I wish you all the best of luck with that. Everything you put into your body goes into your body.”
“This is true. Can you bring us two bee pollen smoothies, please?”
“You Are Vivacious. Amanda will be right over to take your food order. While you wait, enjoy the artwork and please, feel free to play the Abounding River Game.”
A series of paintings had been hung up on the walls. Scanned from left to right, a narrative line revealed itself. A young blond girl with pigtails stands behind a brick wall. It is raining. On the other side of the wall, which appears to have been constructed at a forty-five-degree angle, the grass is green, rabbits stare impassively at pink flowers. A row of trees gamely hold on to their gigantic fruit. In the second painting, the girl, digging in the hard, ugly dirt on her side of the brick wall, comes across a small white box. The next few paintings show the girl opening the box, which contains a red apple and a glowing scroll.
In the last five paintings, the girl eats the apple, reads the scroll. The wall dissolves, and the girl enters the bountiful paradise.
On each table in Being Abundance, there was a basket filled with crayons, dice, and greeting-card-size reproductions of each of the paintings. On the backs of the cards were instructions on things to say to the people at your table, and, if you had procured prior consent, the people at the next.
Hofspaur flipped through the cards and grunted. “These idiots couldn’t even make the game complicated.”
“What would be the point of that?”
The hostess came by with the drinks, which were a radioactive shade of green.
“Well, it would at least have some allure to it.”
Finch felt a tingly lift at the base of his scalp. To mask whatever his face was giving away, he scowled at his green drink and announced, “This thing tastes pretty toxic.”
“That means it’s working. As I was saying, the game is so simple, as are these ugly communist paintings, because these idiots want to sell a linear path to happy. But the trick only works on people who are already happy. No miserable fuck wants to wake up one morning and realize that salvation is just an easy twelve-step jaunt down a path that’s been obvious the entire time. The straight line demeans their intelligence, their families, and all the fucked-up psychological trauma that brought them to their particular misery.”
“And yet this place is crowded at eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday.”
“People who refuse to respect traditional mealtimes are all happy. Or something like that.”
“I don’t think that works.”
“Sure it does. If you don’t really feel your misery or if it doesn’t exist, you can walk right out of it. That’s the accidental genius of this place. They make a bunch of nine-dollar drinks, sell a bunch of fucking horse food for twenty-five dollars, tacitly remind rich people of the possibility of misery, and then advertise a way out of it. It’s essentially allowing the happy to be temporarily confused about being happy and then showing them that all they have to do is be happy and think that the world is exactly what it is to the rich and happy.”
“What’s that?”
“A bountiful place. A place where the ears of corn are huge and the fucking blacks and Mexicans and Chinese and retarded don’t venture, even though they are welcome. There’s no net effect, except that someone
paid nine dollars for a drink and twenty-five dollars for a plate of seaweed and someone pocketed that money. But no matter, there’s plenty more for nine-dollar drinks and twenty-five-dollar plates of seaweed. Keep it simple. Remind rich people that all they have to do to remind themselves that they aren’t miserable is to look in the mirror.”
“You don’t think they do this on purpose?”
“What does on purpose even mean? Everyone here, they’re all fundamentally happy people who need this”—he turned his palms up to the ceiling and gestured, disgustedly, at the paintings—“to temporarily displace their happiness, so they can discover it again. Anything rich people like: hiking in the outdoors, crossword puzzles, fucking opera, art galleries, volunteer work, domestic literary fiction, surfing, John Updike—it’s all the same: bullshit engineered to make people bored and kinda miserable until they finish, at which point they can allow themselves to feel satisfied for walking the straight line.”
Finch couldn’t help himself. He was beginning to really like Hofspaur. He announced, “I surf.”
“That’s a bit surprising.”
“Why?”
“Because you, more than any other cop I’ve ever met, are an ulcerous, miserable fuck.”
“That’s a bit presumptuous, no?”
“An old woman gets murdered in an area of the Mission rife with gang violence during one of the worst gang wars in the city’s history. You, the detective assigned to the case, are sitting at a cultish restaurant with the city’s nastiest pornographer, investigating inefficient cyberpunks.”
A red-faced brunette came around to Finch and Hofspaur’s table and
asked if they were ready to order. Finch, quickly studying the menu, said he’d have the sampler plate. A beatific glow glazed over the girl’s eyes. Bowing her head, she said, “You are diverse.”
“The sampler plate.”
“You are diverse.”
Hofspaur pointed at the menu: Next to the description of the sampler plate were the words “I AM DIVERSE.” Every item on the menu had a different, loosely relevant affirmation.
“I am diverse.”
“You are diverse.”
Hofspaur chuckled and announced, “I am fertile.”
The waitress bowed again and said, “You are fertile,” before smiling and shuffling away.
Just then, the five men at the bar jerked up to their feet. The one with the most interesting facial hair stood front and center, while the other four fanned out behind him. In an effete, squeaky voice, he asked, “Are you Miles Hofspaur?”
Hofspaur raised an eyebrow and smirked at Finch.
The man jabbed Hofspaur’s shoulder with an insistent finger. “I am talking to you. Please pay me the respect of an answer. Are you Miles Hofspaur?”
Hofspaur said, “Doctor Hofspaur, please.”
“You are not welcome here, Doctor Hofspaur. Please leave.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are not welcome here. Please leave.”
“This is America. I can sit here and eat your food and pay you money.”
The man who was doing the jabbing paused to solemnly close his eyes. Then, recomposed, he jabbed Hofspaur in the shoulder again.
Hofspaur said, “What is illegal, by the way, is assault.”
Finch kind of grunted. Again, the light tingle started at the base of his skull, but this time it felt more insistent. He thought of the scene in the movie
Akira
where Tetsuo balloons out into a breathing, blinking globe of blood vessels and eyes.
“I will stop when you leave.”
“I already ordered, fuckhead. I’ll leave when you stop sending your lame letters to my business.”
“I don’t know what you’re referring to, but if you do not leave, I will be forced to call the police.”
Hofspaur laughed derisively and pointed at Finch, who was trying to hide his face behind what remained of his green drink. “That,” he said, pointing at Finch, “is the police.”
“Well, then the officer should be well versed that this is a private establishment and that we reserve the right to serve who we want to serve, and that in this case, we refuse to serve people who relocate men and women from the bounty of the earth into the wasteland of depravity and virtual death found on websites like smut.com and its affiliated websites.”
Everyone turned to look at Finch, who, in turn, stared into the bottom of his glass. He became acutely aware of the empty space underneath his armpit where his holster usually would be.
The man closest to Finch, who, had this been a boy band, might have been the forgettable baritone, asked, “Officer, what’s the verdict?”
The tingling intensified. It almost felt as if the back of his head was slowly being sheared off. It occurred to him that he might have been drugged. But when he looked over at Hofspaur, he didn’t notice any discomfort on his new friend’s face.
“Do you own this place?” Finch heard himself ask.
“This is a collective. It is owned by the workers.”
A digitized whomping flooded Finch’s ears—a loud, vibrating noise, which, had he been able to access his memory, he might have recognized as the sound you hear after huffing down a canister of nitrous oxide. His vision blurred. He was vaguely aware of some danger. At some point, he began to laugh. His cheeks felt enormous. A wet sensation splashed across his thighs.
Then, as easy as that, he blacked out.
1
. And so I began my stay at the Hotel St. Francis under the name Charlie Dushu. For an extra $20 a week, I was given my own bathroom and daily maid service, which meant at ten every morning, my neighbor would knock politely on our shared door. On the first morning, she waddled in, knock-kneed, approximated a service smile, and proceeded to punch the pillows and toss the shabby brown comforter over the unspeakable mattress. The next day, she took out the trash. She was about nineteen, maybe eighteen, and didn’t really say much to me.
What would be the point of describing her build, the color of her hair, the shape of her eyes? Just know, I tipped her well.
Most of the social activity at the Hotel St. Francis occurred inside the shared bathrooms, so it was kind of like high school in that way. Tenants did congregate in the lobby, but only to succumb, collectively, to their catatonia. The TV didn’t get VH1. Or
SportsCenter
. I could sense everyone’s hatred. On the first day, I sat in my room and read
Hunger
, which I hoped would put things in the proper perspective. It didn’t work.
After an hour of deliberation, I called my favorite Chinese delivery place and demanded they bring the food directly to my room.
When the delivery guy got to the lobby, he called my cell phone and pretended to not speak English until I agreed to come downstairs. He must have recognized me from earlier deliveries because he frowned, not in sympathy or anger, but rather in concentration, as he did the math we all do when we are confronted with the irrefutable proof of debits and hard times.
I tipped him well, too.
I don’t know if it was the smell of Lunch Combo 21 or the sound of cash exchanging hands, but the bodies in the green lawn chairs all sat up and turned their heads in our direction. The delivery guy frowned again. I knew what he was thinking: Whatever you’ve done, you deserve what’s coming.
One of the bodies lifted itself out of its chair and staggered on over.
It was my disenfranchised friend from Election Day, the one who looked like Cornel West, but with bits of doughnut in his beard. He asked if I remembered him.
It never occurred to me that the insane might be able to recognize actual people.
He asked again, “Hey, do you remember me?”
“The election.”
“That’s right. You stood beside me as we made history together!”
He grabbed my wrists. His palms felt like the palms of a scholar, clammy and smooth. I worried about my food, the possibility of contamination.
When it became clear that I had nothing to say, he said, “If we don’t have the ability to separate ourselves from ourselves and use that one
good part of ourselves to make a statement via the political process, no matter the results, then we really are slaves. You know that, right?”
I managed to slip my wrists away from his hands. He frowned and, with the care of a surgeon, plucked Lunch Combo 21 out of my hands, placed it on a nearby table, and regrabbed my wrists.
He asked, “Do you support the revolution?”
“Sure.”
2
. I admit: Being surrounded by desperation eased my panic, or, at least, it displaced it for a while. In retrospect, it’s clear that in an effort to place itself in familiar surroundings, my mind had simply transposed the sympathetic desperation of the characters in my favorite books, songs, and movies onto the depleted bodies that shuffled by in the lobby. Cornel West with food in his beard became a synthesis of the dying Ronizm, three, maybe four characters from
A Confederacy of Dunces
, with Laurence Fishburne’s character in
Searching for Bobby Fischer
mixed in for good measure. The girl who cleaned my room every morning was not a tragically young heroin addict, but rather, Camilla, Arturo Bandini’s Mexican lover from
Ask the Dust
. As such, whenever she came by, I mourned for her as if she were dying somewhere in the desert, her life mortgaged out to some worthless mope.
It’s been brought to my attention by several people, who, if I am being kind to myself, have a genuine concern for my well-being, that this state of affairs does not deviate much from my usual approach to life. I suppose it might be true. Maybe all my Colleens and Kathleens and Lauras were just variations of Old Jane from
The Catcher in the Rye
or
whatever character Zooey Deschanel happened to be playing in a movie, every street corner I drive past will forever be Queensbridge ’85, but even if this is true and I live in a shadow, contingent world, I’ve never been able to summon up, as we used to say in high school debate, an impact to this scenario.