The Dead Do Not Improve (12 page)

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.”

2
. I would like to try to explain my happiness.

First, let me concede the very real distance between the fear of my impending death and the discovery of love. That is quite the pendulum. And, if we accept, for reason’s sake, a spatial map of our happiness, where the far left side represents a game-winning hit in a Little League game or the birth of a child, and the far right side represents the death of a parent, or parents, or, say, the realization that, despite being decent-looking and interesting enough, less good-looking and less interesting white guys will have a better crack at all the pretty blond girls of the world, or, when at wit’s end, you realize that you cannot really pick up and move to Prague, the Yukon, or Des Moines, Iowa, even, without amplifying your awareness of your otherness; if we evaluate happiness the same way we evaluate, say, baseball statistics (I’m not arguing this is a bad method, by the way), where the best we ever hit is .300 (Sabermetrics, if you only knew how badly you have ruined our failure-based metaphors! Should I say, instead, the best we ever OBP is .440?), I can also concede that when you, in a matter of minutes, go from fearing your grisly end to hearing that you are someone’s boyfriend, even if you don’t really
know
the girl, even if she’s agreeing just to speed along a conversation or misdirect an asshole detective, well, then, I concede, under duress, that all I felt was the breeze of the swing.

But the only evidence I’ve ever found of a compassionate God is how he allows us to excerpt our happiest memories up out of their contexts and hold them with the same care Saint Francis of Assisi holds up his little animals. I can remember passing around a joint in an orange Volvo with my three best friends, listening, in reverential silence, to
Enter the Wu-Tang
. After “Protect Ya Neck,” we plodded through a stoned debate over who was the better leadoff hitter: Rickey Henderson or Inspectah Deck. My friends were all Jews, who were working through their own psychodrama of strangeness. There’s no doubt that we were “cultural tourists,” and while we might have occasionally
felt
the song, our devotion came more from the spike of confidence that comes with rapping bluntedly along: “I’m more rugged than slave man boots. New recruits, I’m fucking MC troops. I break loops, and trample shit when I stomp!” And even though it’s hard to fault three Jews and an Asian in North Carolina for using hip-hop to hack out four little black doppelgangsters, it’s now quite passé to write, at least this earnestly, about how those sessions in the car were among the happiest moments of my life.

So. Even though I didn’t know what would eventually happen between us, when I heard Ellen confirm that I was, indeed, her boyfriend, my head glowed with the heat of a thing being alchemized.

I wonder if there has ever been a more equivocal explanation of happiness. But, it’s the best you’ll get out of this man who has always hit well below the Mendoza Line.

3
. “So you saw William Curren last Thursday.”

“Yes.”

“You went to the Uptown with three girls, after which you were attacked.”

“Yes.”

“Was Ms. Ellen one of these girls?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“I only talked to one of the girls.”

“Can you describe her?”

“I would describe her as unattractive. Unathletic body.”

“I know that you and Mr. Curren liked to smoke weed together at work. Was Mr. Curren involved in any drug trafficking activity?”

“What? How do you know that?”

“Please just answer the questions.”

“Hold on.… Let me check something on my phone.”

“I am a detective. This is serious.”

“Holy shit, you guys use Facebook?”

“Philip, try to focus. Do you have an explanation as to what happened here?”

“These things are usually coincidence?”

“Look at him. What could he kill?”

“Please let him answer the questions.”

“Uh, can we talk about the message?”

“Ma’am, would you mind stepping outside, or at least going up to the counter for a second? I have a Korean thing to discuss with your boyfriend.”

“I have a right to be present for an interrogation.”

“That is not a right.”

“We want a lawyer.”

“This is not an interrogation or even a questioning. Neither of you is a suspect. You have no need for a lawyer.”

“I’m staying.”

“Whatever.”

“Okay.”

“Can you please take a look at this, Philip? Do you recognize who might have written it?”

“You recognize that name, don’t you?”

“Fuck.”

“Why is someone with this name sending e-mails to you at work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you write this? As some fucked-up joke? I read some of your shit on the Internet. You have
Richard McBeef
and
Mr. Brownstone
down as two of your favorite books. That’s some fucked-up shit, man.”

“I have this friend Adam. He thinks these sorts of things are funny.”

“Okay, man, I’m going to have to ask you to come down and answer some questions.”

“All right.”

4
. In Kim’s car, I explained my guilt.

Richard McBeef
was a one-act play written by Cho Seung-Hui, the twenty-three-year-old English major who would go on to murder thirty-two people at Virginia Tech. Just ten pages long and printed in a comically large font,
Richard McBeef
tells the story of a young boy named John, who, one morning over a cereal bar breakfast, confronts his abusive stepfather, Richard McBeef. There is no semblance of reason in the play,
no buildup of tension, none of the narrative logic that allows us to reflect back on ourselves as linear, sensitive creatures. Instead, there are fits of spontaneous anger, wild claims of violation and molestation, a mother’s schizophrenic confusion, a revelation that is not a revelation, and, in the end, the murder of a young child. It is, as Adam put it, the greatest, most horrific episode of
Jerry Springer
, ever. The mechanics are the same: We are told the problem in advance, we anticipate the buildup. When the man comes charging through the curtain, we understand that there is no time for explanations or nuance. Unlike
Springer
, though, where the spontaneity and the degradation of the violence usually make us laugh. There is no barrier between the reader and Richard McBeef. The violence is simply violence. There is no large bald security guard to whisk it away.

Kim drove silently and badly down Guerrero. He muttered something to himself before telling us about being in his mother’s restaurant the morning of the shootings. It was five-thirty and his mother needed help unloading a vegetable delivery truck, so she called him and his little brother, who works downtown. The truck was late, so Kim and his little brother sat in the back office and turned on the TV, and there was a report on CNN about how a confirmed four students had been murdered at Virginia Tech, but that nobody knew anything at that moment. People have a misconception about detectives, Kim explained. They think because we deal with bodies and murderers on the daily that we are somehow desensitized to death. Really, the opposite is true. Nothing is more energized than a fresh corpse. When you’re always around that energy, you can’t help but get drunk off death. His mom kept yelling on the phone and his brother and he just sort of watched as the body count got higher and higher and then he saw that kid, the one with glasses, who
had escaped say it was some Asian kid, and he already knew our people were fucked. The Chinese aren’t creative enough, the Nips don’t have the balls or the specific brand of Korean crazy, which is really just the same crazy as the Irish crazy, because both peoples come from small countries oppressed for hundreds of years by the assholes across the way. Both peoples grew up under the eye of the crown or the emperor and learned to suppress everything, especially anger, until they no longer could distinguish what was what, and could walk around angry without recognizing anger as anger. And the prescription for whatever else was drinking.

That’s what we are, Kim said. We’re the hybrid of Jews and the Irish. That fucking nutjob only confirmed what we all knew about our people, didn’t he?

I didn’t want to answer his question, at least not directly, and certainly not in front of Ellen, so I told him that I had gotten on a Long Beach–bound flight at JFK at 7:30
A.M
. and for six captive hours watched the body count rise on the headset television. When I saw the kid who had escaped describe the shooter as “Asian,” I looked up the aisle and saw the rows of glowing little TVs, all of them tuned to CNN. Of course, I knew he was going to be Korean. I’ve never talked to any Korean who didn’t know.

Kim snorted and asked, You know other Koreans? I ignored him.

When the plane landed, I walked down the steps and onto the runway. I’ve always loved the Long Beach airport because you could shoot a film set in the fifties there and wouldn’t have to change a detail. I remember, though, wishing that I had flown into LAX, so that I could sit entombed inside the guts of an airport for just a bit longer. Kathleen, my girlfriend at the time, was waiting for me and as we drove back up the 405 to her apartment in Westwood, she kept saying how awful it all
was. Nobody was saying anything at the time about the shooter, except the few leaks that came out that said he was Asian. How could Kathleen have known what I knew, what you knew? And if I had tried to explain it to her, what could she have said? It all sounds so insane to me now. The next morning, when they posted his photo and his name, I refused to think about it. But I was glad, for the first time, that my parents were both dead.

When I got back to New York, I met my friend Hyung-Jae in a bar around Columbia. He asked if I had read
Richard McBeef
and
Mr. Brownstone
, and we talked about it without all the scorn with which we discussed all works of literature. I remember Hyung-Jae admitting that he had once thought about shooting one of his teachers, not in an abstract sense, but to the point where he went to Walmart to buy a gun.

We shouldn’t be allowed, he said, to see ourselves like that.

On Wednesdays, the owner of that soggy bar would project the Yankees game up onto the back wall. We watched a few innings in silence. I think we both knew that we would never be this close again. A few days later, he forwarded me some post on a humor blog. It was a Lacanian critique of
Richard McBeef
. You will never convince me that someone other than Hyung-Jae wrote that. For the next few months, whenever I saw him, we would just make jokes about Virginia Tech and Cho Seung-Hui. The baseball season had just started up. We were both big fans. But we never talked about anything but Virginia Tech, and we never allowed ourselves to say anything about it that wasn’t ironic or awful.