The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang pptx

Again!” When I heard the knock, I hurried to the door, anticipating some new girl, the sort of beautiful girl who, when her hair is wet from the rain, looks more like a planet than a gir

fi ctitiously Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Jay Caspian Kang

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the

H colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is

available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-307-95388-9 eISBN 978-0-307-95390-2

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Maria Elias Jacket design and hand lettering by Gray318 Jacket illustration by Christopher Brand Author photograph by Eric Wolfinger

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

1 The Baby Molester and I talked only twice The fi rst time, she

knocked on my door and asked for four eggs I remember being amused

by the anachronism—what sort of person still asks her neighbor for

eggs?—until I realized it had been years since I’d had a single egg in my

refrigerator, much less four

The second time she knocked, it was well past midnight on some blown-out Tuesday I was clicking through Craigslist w4m’s, my head

swimming in a desperate, almost haikulike fog—“oh my loneliness /

it rolls through the foggy bay / here it comes Again!” When I heard

the knock, I hurried to the door, anticipating some new girl, the sort of

beautiful girl who, when her hair is wet from the rain, looks more like a

planet than a girl But it was just the Baby Molester in a peach slip And

one limpening sock The light from an earth-friendly bulb cut through

that electric hair, exposing a fragile, mottled quail egg of a skull A look

somewhere close to smugness hovered over her shiny face She asked for

a cigarette and, after an awkward pause, asked for two She had a guest,

she explained I gave her fi ve and really considered asking her some

ques-tions, but did not

2 It was Kathleen who came up with the name Baby Molester

This was three years ago, at a concert in Golden Gate Park I had just

moved to San Francisco from New York Staring down at the mass of

dank heads, I asked Kathleen, “Who knew an entire city could be fi lled

with ugly white people?” She said, “Calm down This is a bluegrass

fes-tival.” On a dirt patch by the stage, this old hippie was stomping up a

cloud of dust Two young girls danced at her feet, clapping like drunken

seals A woman, hopefully the mother, hovered nearby, forcing the sort

of smile that is forced more in San Francisco than anywhere else in this

country

Later, at a dustier, abandoned stage, we saw her again This time she was dancing with someone else’s little boy His red beret stayed on

his head by some miracle of centrifugal force His chubby, inscrutable

face was contorted into the look of a young child who is

contemplat-ing whether to cry—the wide-open eyes, the twittercontemplat-ing chin designed

to stop even the most militant of spinster armies Kathleen murmured,

“There are so many reasons why a woman that age would feel the need

to molest other people’s babies.” After a pause, she added, “And each one

of them is heartbreaking.” I murmured my agreement, said something

devastating about the failure of the sixties, and spent the rest of the night

feeling superior to the entire state of California

Two weeks later, when I moved into my own apartment, the Baby Molester was sitting on the stoop I called Kathleen and marveled at the

smallness of the city She said, “Yeah, it’s a small city But all cities are

small, you know?”

I tried to not hate her for saying something so stupid But, you know

3 I confess: I slept through the whole thing Through the

gun-shots, the police sirens, the ambulance, the detective who might have

knocked on my door, the hushed discussions of the neighbors And

since there was no real reason to leave the apartment the next day, I did

not witness any of the police tape or the shattered glass or the crime

reporters or the wary gang members walking up and down the street

just to make sure

i learned about the death of the Baby Molester because I was

bored and Googling myself I had found nothing but the same shit I

always fi nd—a fi ve-hundred-word essay I had written for a now- defunct

blog about how Illmatic had helped me grieve for my dead parents

(num-ber 14 in search), a published excerpt of my ultimately unpublished novel

(number 183 in search), a pixelated photo of me, fatter, reading at a bar

in Brooklyn (number 2 in image search) I was once again humiliated

to know that my version of “Philip Kim” could elicit nothing more than

those three fl ags stuck in the landscape of all the other Philip Kims of

the world Desperate (again) to fi nd something else, I added my

ad-dress into the search with a litany of hopefully descriptive keywords:

ASIAN, THIN, ATHLETIC, LONG-HAIRED, BROODING,

CHEEKBONES

My hope was that some girl might have watched me lean up against

a tree or maybe light a cigarette or pet an agreeable dog or frown over a

burnt cup of coffee and maybe she might have caught my eye and maybe

she might have decided to post something cute and short in “Missed

Encounters” or some forum like that, on the decent chance that I might,

in fact, be trolling the Internet for her

When I narrowed the search by Googling my cross-streets, a link

appeared to a story in the Chronicle’s crime blog: woman slain in

mis-sion district The details were spare—the location, the age of the

vic-tim, the adjective “elderly.”

I knew it was her Our block is short and lined with lime trees, and every other old lady I’ve seen walking around is Mexican

After some deliberation, I called Kathleen She sounded weary and practical, and although it had been over a year since we had spoken last,

she politely consoled me over the murder of my neighbor, citing statistics,

the fragility of our lives One day, you take the 31 to Golden Gate Park

to dance with the children of people who see you as nothing but a

testa-ment to the exhausting reality of idealism Sometime later, an illegal

im-migrant fi res a gun on your street, and the bullet, by force of infi nitesimal

chance, or God, shatters your sole window and, defl ected slightly by the

impact, travels exactly to the spot where you have decided to put your

head for the night

She said, “Crazier things happen all the time You know?”

I said, “That’s retarded.”

She said, “What?”

“You’re being retarded.”

“Why do you even care so much? You told me you talked to her twice.”

“Why don’t you care?”

“Because it’s senseless and insane to worry about stray bullets Think

4 Outside, the only remaining evidence was a shattered

window-pane and a sagging, trampled perimeter of police tape Someone had

smeared a pinkish substance on the white slatting that framed the

win-dow Upon closer inspection, the pink stuff appeared to be lipstick

Across the street, a young couple stared woefully at the crime scene

They lived in one of the gentrifi er condos The guy was always making

an effort to talk to the block’s indigenous Mexicans In two years, neither

the guy nor the girl had ever said a word to me because their safety was

not compromised by my presence The girl was the sort of girl who looks

best in jeans and a performance fl eece She had an extraordinary ass The

man owned, but rarely rode, a turquoise Vespa

When he saw me walking down the steps to the sidewalk, the guy shrugged, but with meaning Because I am a bit of a coward, I shook

my head, approximating his meaning My way of saying, “It’s a damn

shame.” To those people

5 I wandered around for a while before admitting there was

no-where to go, so I ducked into BEAN and took a seat near the bathrooms

I hated everything about BEAN—the unfi nished ceilings, the

Eames-wonderful chairs, the sanitary tables, the architectural cappuccinos, the

barrel-aged indie rock Still, I was always fi nding myself there, partly

because it was a half block from my apartment, but also because I,

de-mographic slave, am always fi nding myself in the places I hate the most

I ordered a cappuccino and read the Chronicle’s crime section

Someone got beaten badly on 26th and Treat A pizza shop was held

up in Oakland Under a footbridge in the Tenderloin, police found a

homeless man who had been stabbed to death My mind drifted to

some detective story I had read back in college, and although I could

recall the author’s name and the particulars of the story, I could not

translate what any of it was supposed to mean I did remember that

the corpse in the story was not a corpse until it became a corpse again

And that at the end, through some trick of logic, which might or might

not have been inspired by Schrödinger’s cat, it turned out the corpse

had never been a corpse at all I remembered not really understanding

anything, really, but I did remember a girl in the class who everyone

called Pooch Cooch, and remembered Pooch Box wore white and pearl

earrings, and remembered that I, absurdly, had felt sorry for her And

fi nally, I remembered that my confusion over the story had, in part,

helped convince me to give up my scholarly ambitions

As I was sitting in BEAN, amid the city’s aesthetically unemployed, the memory of my stupidity still embarrassed me Since college, I had read

maybe two hundred, three hundred books and even tried my hand at

writ-ing a diffi cult novel Did it not stand to reason, then, that I might have

somehow, unknowingly, developed the skills to understand the meaning

of the corpse? I really considered walking up the street to the used

book-store to have a crack at redemption, but I had spent two hours in there a

few days back The girl behind the counter had a perfectly symmetrical

haircut and stared impassively at everyone who entered the store Her

recommendation shelf fl oated nicely between the listless ether of Joan

Didion’s female narrators and the histories of hardscrabble things: car

bombs, prison gangs, crystal meth How could I face her twice in a week?

I sat in my seat instead Read the paper, jotted pretend notes to self on a napkin One read: “WILLIE MCGEE.” Another read: “You

my-say, I talk slow all the time.” A couple hours passed like that By the time

Adam walked into BEAN, I had completely forgotten about the Baby

Molester

Columbia’s graduate creative writing program at the age of twenty-three

Neither of us really ever had anything to write about, but we held to the

credo that all young, privileged men in their twenties should never ever

discuss their lives in any meaningful way Our stories were about

bore-dom, porn, child geniuses, talking dogs

We spent three, four years that way, telling the same jokes Adam eventually picked up a variety of drug habits because he thought they

would provide a grittier spin on the traditional American Jewish

experi-ence They did not As for me, all my morose, nameless narrators had

two living parents, and, although people were always dying, nobody ever

succumbed to stomach cancer or a car wreck To all those raceless men,

death was funny or it was strange, but it was never talked about, at least

not directly

When it became clear that the thriftily coiffed girls of the publishing industry were just not that into me, I moved to San Francisco to follow

Kathleen Adam had just started dating a hard-luck porn star in North

Hollywood A year and a half later, he showed up in San Francisco with

his father’s car and a new girlfriend

At some point, it became clear we had to fi nd work Adam started teaching creative writing at a school for the criminally insane I got a job

editing content for a website providing emotional help for men recently

abandoned by loved ones

7 Adam sat down at my table without a word of welcome It could

no longer count as coincidence, us fi nding each other here We talked

about TV, fantasy football, breasts Outside, the fog had condensed

down to a drizzle The baristas started up their chatter One was worried

the rain would drive the crackheads underneath the awnings, meaning

she would have to perfectly time her trip to the bus stop Another said

she liked the rain because it reminded her of her favorite soul song Adam

took a bad novel out of his jacket and began to read I took my laptop

out of my bag and read through my dumb e-mail After a while, Adam

asked, “What’s good?”

“Good?”

“Good.”

“Odd word choice.”

I pointed at the computer screen “What could be good?”

“You on Craigslist?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s your problem On Craigslist, things can be good.”

The mention of Craigslist loosed a current of shame I thought about the grainy, dimly lit women of the previous night—the camera angles

that soften noses, the anonymous, truncated breasts, the loose attempts

at dignity, the unabashed anatomy, the ball-crushing loneliness, the

labyrinthine possibilities of hyperlinks; all of it reminded me that my

neighbor had been murdered the night before

I told Adam about it He arched his eyebrows and asked, “Through the window, just like that, huh?”

“Yeah I don’t think it was a stray bullet, though Somebody had taken the time to smear some pink shit all around the window.”

“Fucking biblical, man.”

“It wasn’t blood.”

“You said it was pink?”

“Like lipsticky pink.”

Adam stuck his pinkie in his coffee and frowned He said, “Easy explanation Gang violence Nortenos That’s their color.”

“She was like a sixty-year-old white woman.”

“Exactly They want los gringos like us out of their neighborhoods.”

“I feel it necessary to remind you that I’m not white.”

“Did you read Mission Dishin’ this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Some dude got beat up A tech nerd.”

“I saw that.”

“Up on Treat.”

“I saw it.”

“That’s like eight dudes getting beat this month And then your neighbor gets shot You don’t think there’s something going on?”

I confess it made me feel a little important

8 Adam went back to reading his book An e-mail from my boss

arrived in my inbox:

FROM: bill <bill@getoverit.com>

TO: phil <phil@getoverit.com>

phil here are today’s gold members get back to me.

A spreadsheet was attached Twenty-six names in all

The company had recently put a signifi cant amount of money into targeted advertising, a departure from the previous strategy of placing

banner ads on any porn sites offering free trailers The old idea was that

men who had recently broken up with their girlfriends would probably

increase their porn intake, but not to the point where they would be

will-ing to hand over a credit card number

It was stupid, but it wasn’t my idea The porn trailer idea resulted

in the worst quarter in the company’s three-year history Meetings were

called Surveys were passed around to the employees In the end, some

genius who wasn’t me fi gured out that if you could somehow probe a

person’s e-mail for certain keyword combinations—broken + heart, never

+ felt + so + lonely, dumped + me/her, ended + things, destined + to +

end, what + happened, fucking + bullshit, slut + bag—you could more

ac-curately narrow down your customer base Contracts were signed with all

the prominent social networking sites and every major e-mail provider

Within the fi rst three months, the site saw a 550 percent jump in hits and

a 300 percent jump in subscriptions We expanded our services

My job was to send out a personalized e-mail to each of the new clients, congratulating them for taking this courageous and worthwhile

step forward

9

FROM: phil <phil@getoverit.com>

TO: Richard McBeef <rmcbeef22@yahoo.com>

Hey Richard,

This is Phil from getoverit.com, your Personal Break-Up Coach

Just wanted to introduce myself and let you know how excited I am

to start working with you My buddy from college works in IT, so I

understand the stress and pressures of the profession Like you,

this buddy of mine had a girlfriend who couldn’t handle his success

and ended up sleeping with some absolute loser Let’s talk about it

Whenever you’re comfortable.

Phil Davis

FROM: phil <phil@getoverit.com>

TO: Tom Nichols <tdnichols@imagineengines.com>

Hey Tom,

This is Phil from getoverit.com, your Personal Break-Up Coach

Just wanted to introduce myself and let you know how excited

I am to start working with you My buddy from college works

in engineering, so I understand the stress and pressures of

the profession Like you, this buddy of mine had a girlfriend

who couldn’t handle his success and ended up sleeping with

some absolute loser Let’s talk about it, bro Whenever you’re

comfortable.

Phil Davis

“How do you do it?” Adam was reading over my shoulder

“Control-C, Control-V.”

“That’s awful, man.”

“You’d get used to it.”

“They make you sign with your slave master’s name?”

“Nobody trusts an Oriental with love advice.”

“Control-C, Control-V, indeed.”

“Hey, did you send this e-mail as a joke?”

“What? No.”

“Check out this name.”

“Richard McBeef ?”

“I assumed it was you.”

“Nope Are you hungry?”

I pointed at the fl aky remains of my croissant

“Pastries don’t count Too much air.”

“I guess.”

“Okay Nachos, then.”

1 0 We walked onto Valencia Street into the grayness of another

foggy morning In places like San Francisco that are choked by fog, even

the bluest, clearest day always carries a tinge of remembered gray So this

housing project, painted canary and cardinal red, surrounded on all

side-walks by plots of pioneer fl owers, still pulses grayly up Valencia to 16th,

where the anonymous buildings are all hotels like the Sunshine Hotel or

the Hotel 16 or the Hotel Mission or the Hotel Ignacio or even the Hotel

St Francis, where the sign in the window reads, “we no longer rent

rooms by the hour,” a hopeful declaration, somehow When I voted

for Obama, I stood in line with a man from the Hotel St Francis who

looked exactly like Cornel West, but insane and with bits of powdered

doughnut stuck in his beard He asked me if this was the polling station

for the Hotel St Francis, and when I shrugged, he said he was being

dis-enfranchised because you can live in the Hotel St Francis for years—the

man at the front desk will know when you’ve gone on your run, the girl

who is too young to live in the Hotel St Francis will fall in love and buy

you a pair of socks—but you certainly cannot have a voter registration

card delivered there During a childhood road trip to the Blue Ridge

Mountains, my father explained the difference between hotels and

mo-tels Hotels, he said, are more expensive Now I know he was wrong

Hotels are just motels, but romanticized somehow These collapsing

buildings are hotels to the people who keep L’Étranger and Howl stashed

under their pillows, who try heroin once before realizing they only like

the literary strain of the drug, who see a bit of crazy wisdom in the

shit-stained, misspelled cardboard signs of the homeless, who stand in front

of the Hotel St Francis and look in through the smoggy picture window

at the backboard, where forty-two actual keys dangle the same way they

might have dangled in a more humane time Beyond the front desk, the

lobby opens up, green as a Barnes & Noble bathroom Twenty or so

plas-tic Adirondacks are clustered in hostile little arrangements, each one

an-gled at a fi ve-hundred-pound television A chandelier, dusty, incomplete,

provides a rebuttal to the fl uorescent stringers overhead, a soft, nearly

sepia rebuttal, which, on more than one occasion, lulled up the

slouch-ing fi gures of Arturo Bandini, Steve Earle, Fuckhead, Jim Stark, Knut

Hamsun, and Ronizm in those Adirondack chairs But then, invariably,

the fl uorescent stringers will fl icker or one of the tenants will stand up or

a dead smell will gather and my old favorite literary losers will turn back

into the crackheads of the Mission who are all defeated in the same way

Still I admit it There were times when I stood in front of the dow of the Hotel St Francis, stared in at the squalor, thick and silent as

win-an oil spill, win-and wished my prospects had shaded a bit blacker

1 1 In the rust-girded doorway to the Taqueria Cancun, fi ve kids

in oversized white T-shirts huddled around two lit cigarettes Last week,

Mission Dishin’, a neighborhood events blog targeted at the seventh wave

of gentrifi ers, had broken the story that these Latino kids in oversized

white T-shirts were, in fact, gangsters