The Dead Do Not Improve Read online

  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.

  LET’S ALL SAVE TONY ORLANDO’S HOUSE

  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.

  3. On the ninth morning of my stay, I went with James to the library. He needed someone with good standing to log him into the computer terminals. Nobody else qualified, he explained. I found this a bit hard to believe, but I had nothing else to do.

  I’ve worked in libraries and therefore know that deranged homeless men have only two uses for the Internet: the lottery and porn. Thankfully, James chose the former, although I will admit, when I first looked over at his screen lit up with numbers and charts, a little hope flared up, however briefly and nostalgically, that perhaps James was some discarded savant, and that his way, whatever that might be, would be the one for me. But then he ferreted greedily into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of Lotto tickets.

  I went back to checking my e-mail.

  There was nothing from work. I read through a couple of blogs, aimlessly typing in the URLs of sites I had visited before—the same mean-spirited celebrity gossip sites, the same baseball stat nerd blogs, the same photo blogs manned by gay men who shared my love for pale, big-eyed brunettes, the same true crime reports.

  As James thwacked away at his forehead, stunned at every loss, I found myself stalking the Baby Molester. The Dignity Project profile had not been updated. There was a lengthy Chronicle article, but it just rearranged the available information into tighter sentences and shorter paragraphs. Combining her name with several different keywords yielded not much else, although I did learn that there was a Dolores Stone who sang and played tambourine in a psychedelic band called the Terror of the Smallpox Blankets.

  There was no choice left. I read her blog.

  MARCH 20 2008

  The future president, Presidential, addresses the waiting nation on the squawk box tonight, regarding the charges brought up by one Jeremiah Wright. We shall pause in bestowing on Mr. Wright what he believes to be his God-Given title of Reverend until he shows us some Reverential (hell, we’d even settle for Christian) actions. The we, here, refers to those of us who, through blood, sweat and tears, have withstood the earth, wind and fire of injustice, those of us who earned our judgment. Not the sheltered do-gooder poseurs, hiding in their hooded sweatshirts, grandstrutting about the streets of San Francisco, handing out pamphlets to the already-initiated, both sides sunning themselves in the freedom we worked so hard to provide, using words like change, liberation, break the order, the same words we used back when those words mattered. Now they just sound like they were bought at the mall. I would stop and blow up their preconceptions, but I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain the truth to someone who rises and shines under the sun of freedom we provid
ed for them.…

  Next.

  MARCH 18 2008

  Winston R. Pummelstein, as he’s known to those in the know, came by today with a stack of our old records. I put our first recording on the old Victrola and with that first twang of Gusto’s guitar, ringing out the revolution, the walls fell away from my living room, modest, simple, furnished by Salvation Army, and we were back in ’72, in similar digs. I could see it all: me, stomping around, trying to not be Janis, but with Janis always on my mind; Gusto: his handbands and his rituals; Winston: fat, gold and shiny.

  Pummelstein is in a bad way. His mind is just hanging on, I can tell. The music must have transported him back, just like it did me. He must not be seeing what I see whenever I look in the mirror or whenever Miles forces me to watch some cut of one of my movies. I see the awesome power of gravity. His mind is so fucked with acid that he must be seeing these tits when they defied Newton and this ass back when even the Panthers would call it sweet.

  I began to cry. For the first time in years, I thought about a friend of mine named Hal who had worked with me in the library at Bowdoin. My freshman year, I’d invite Hal up to my room to smoke pot and stream underground hip-hop over the Internet. At some point that spring, the resident adviser put an end to it. Apparently, one of the girls in the hall thought it was sketchy to have a “townie who doesn’t even go here” hanging out in the dorms.

  I wrote the girl a letter whose contents don’t need to be mentioned ever again. The resident adviser’s punishment? In the cafeteria, I held a reading of the poetry he had published in the school’s literary journal. It sufficed.

  As for Hal, I began hanging out with him at his apartment across the bridge in Topsham. One of his friends lived in a hallway closet, the other slept on the couch. They were, I admit, ravers. But nobody at Bowdoin would do the drugs I wanted to do, and so I, too, for a period of about six months, became a raver. Hal’s parents were hard-burned Deadheads who owned a pasta shop up near campus. From them, he inherited a heavy hand with garlic and a belief in roving, ecstatic tribalism. Before my first rave, outside of a tool and die factory in Athol, Massachusetts, Hal handed me a doggie bag containing four hits of acid, four H-bombs, a gram of ketamine, two grams of marijuana, and a tiny bottle of water. I’d never felt so loved, at least not in such an organized sort of way. I emptied the entire bag into my mouth, minus the ketamine, which I split six hours later with a girl who had just lifted up her shirt to reveal a third nipple. Pierced.

  Although I always laughed whenever Hal would talk about how we were the last generation of hippies, and therefore were the only people left in the country who still believed in real freedom, I still got in his Taurus every Friday. I never refused his thoughtfully packaged drugs or his friendship, really. At a rave in Hartford, I had the best sex of my life in a bathroom stall with a freshman from RISD. In Bar Harbor, while walking a loop around a bowling alley, my feet and I lost our connection. And yet, whenever I could muster the focus to look around at the half-naked fourteen-year-old girls grinding their teeth, the fat kids wearing neon ski goggles, the older men on the floor, minding their pubescent girl traps, the baby bibs, the pacifiers, the candy-stamped pills, I never saw anything more than a bunch of kids who, like me, were trying to kill themselves by stomping around in some depraved, childish dance.

  AND YET, NONE of this explains why I started crying in the middle of that library. Or why my hunger, which I had been successfully ignoring since eating half of Lunch Combo 21, began mewing horribly like a run-over cat. Maybe it was the piling on of stress, maybe it was a short circuit in my nostalgic mind, or maybe it was just one of those moments that happen to me about once a year, usually while driving, when I will sob hysterically because some song comes on the radio that reminds me of my mother.

  I could smell James staring over my shoulder at the screen. It was too much. I got up and jogged out the door.

  As I was walking back down toward the hotel, I got a text from a 617 number. In all caps, it read:

  PLEASE MEET ME AT TAXIDERMY AT 3. THIS IS ELLEN. A BIT URGENT, BUT ALSO NO BIG DEAL.

  It was Performance Fleece.

  When he came to, Sid Finch was in what looked to be a utility closet. A bucket of sudsy water sat between his feet, which, he noticed, were bare and, somehow, scaly. On a nail above the rickety, shabbily painted white door hung his pants.

  He allowed himself to look around and realized that he must have been drugged because the light from the bare bulb that hung over his head was refracting out all across the walls. Upon closer inspection, though, Finch saw that the shelves of the closet were littered with tiny mirrors, which, had Finch been a bit older or, perhaps, a bit younger, he might have recognized as pried-off bits of a disco ball. The rest of the space was completely bare save for a white Maneki Neko, who raised and lowered his paw in greeting.

  FINCH HAD NO idea if he passed out again or if some part of his memory was blacked out, but when he snapped back into function, two sizable breasts swung an inch from his nose. Something warm and wet was being mushed against his forehead. Even in his scrambled state, Finch could appreciate both the lift and the heft of her breasts and the grimaceworthy perfection of the two tiny pert nipples.

  He sat up, bonking his nose straight into the left breast.

  The breasts swung out of sight and were replaced by a broad face and a leonine smile.

  “There you are.” A tinge of digital echo trailed behind each word.

  Finch grunted. The girl reached down between his legs into the bucket and pulled out a sponge. She applied it to Finch’s forehead. Once again, he was eye to eye with the breasts.

  “You were out for a minute there. There is a reason why You Are Vivacious comes with that warning.”

  Finch could actually feel his brain fire the command to speak, but some greater, suffocating force kept his mouth shut. It became very obvious very quickly that he was not going to be able to say anything.

  The breasts swung back up again, and he felt the sponge move to the back of his neck.

  “Mona is new here. She should have asked if you had seen the allergy warning.”

  “Allergy?” He felt each syllable ricochet, painfully, off the broken pieces of his brain.

  “Bee pollen. It’s rare, but it seems you are allergic to it. Never seen anyone who was quite as allergic, though. In the past, when people have reacted badly, their eyes swell up a little and their skin goes itchy. You, well, you had a much more, let’s say, intense reaction.”

  Finch heard the sponge plop back into the bucket, and the breasts once again were replaced by the irrefutable symmetry of her face. She peered in at his eyes and cupped his forehead with a cold, wet palm. “You have the gift to share of the most compelling eyes. Although I can’t really tell what color they are. Some parts are hazel, others look green.” She stood back up, dripping sponge in hand. “You are unique.”

  “Where?” It was all Finch could manage.

  “There’s nothing to worry about. When you lost consciousness, we knew what had happened, gave you the appropriate treatment, and closely monitored you. Since everything looked like it was going as we expected it to go, we didn’t feel the need to get any sort of professional medical personnel involved, especially given the long history of malpractice and misdiagnosis over at San Francisco General.”

  The digital echo receded. Replacing it was a honeyed condescension, the sort you hear on late-night infomercials—a beautiful teenage pop star lecturing young girls on how they don’t need to endure the burden of acne.

  The sponge plopped back down into the bucket. He could sense Lionface stiffening a bit and regretted the violence of his thoughts. When his mother had gotten into her very own bombed-out derivative of Buddhism—a simplified, woodsier life version for white people who loved the idea of disassociation but couldn’t quite get over the ugliness of the associated plastic trinkets and the Chineseness of it all—not much about her changed, but he did notice that the hour of requir
ed daily meditation honed both her senses and her intuition. She could better smell the booze on his breath, the marijuana smoke on his sweatshirts. She knew when he was high or if he had really gone to basketball practice. From then on, he had always felt a bit naked around anyone who might, in whatever circuitous way, subscribe to the Four Noble Truths.

  Did violent thoughts emanate out farther than mundane or pleasant thoughts? Was there a different, more easily discernible tone to them? With his brain still struggling to recollect itself, Finch felt the cold bite of paranoia along the base of his spine. The water pooled at his crotch felt icy, heavy. He began to shiver.

  The breasts swung down out of view again, and the face reappeared. In the same tone, which indicated that the answer to the question was an ethical matter, she asked, “Are you cold?”

  “Yes.” The word crept like a slug in his mouth. He shivered again.

  She dipped her finger in the bucket and, coquettishly, winced. “This has gotten cold. I apologize.”

  “It’s. Okay.” Finch said. And then, “My. Pants?”

  She produced a red towel and began a tousling assault on Finch’s body. He felt her trained, professional touch, an efficiency to the twists and a detachment to the contact. Eyeing her breasts, which were still swinging about, he wondered if she had been a stripper.

  Lionface explained, “I was a hairstylist. Before I started working here. Towel drying was always my favorite part.”

  Convinced now that Lionface could read his thoughts, Finch tried to blank out his brain. He tried an old technique, picturing a blue, rotating ball, but even that familiar trick, which he used in everything from sex to golf, could not quite close out the mental image of Lionface on the stripper pole. His fear dissipated into a begrudging respect—after all, who could really begrudge a beautiful woman who reads your thoughts while drying your hair?