The Dead Do Not Improve (21 page)

THE BACKSTAGE AREA
at the 12 Galaxies was just a well-stocked utility closet with a few beat-up couches pushed up against the wall, and a coffee table, dorm-issue, stacked up high with alternative weeklies and pizza boxes. James was plopped down on one of the couches. He motioned for us to do the same. Zengatronic closed the door and leaned up against a rusty cylindrical boiler.

Through the wall, we could hear the crowd cheer, and then a raspy, muted voice on the PA. James, for his part, looked confused.

What a horrible place to die, I thought.

I heard a bang, a thud, the clang of metal.

I looked over.

There, by the boiler, alone, my unstoppable girlfriend lay with her hands clutched over her stomach. She looked confused as blood spurted between her fingers and onto the cement.

Zengatronic pointed the gun at my chest. She said, “It’s your turn now, Mr. Brownstone.”

Who was she talking to?

On cue, James stood up, reached under the couch, pulled out two Uzis, and ran through the door.

Frank
Chu trudged back down the steps, where he was greeted by a crowd of autograph seekers who had printed out facsimiles of his signs. Finch felt the nudge of the heavy’s gun against his ribs. Leaning over, he hissed in Finch’s violated ear, “Stay cool. Stay real cool. What’s about to happen is part of a show, got it?”

The spotlight, Finch saw, had come to rest on the velvety black curtain behind the stage. As the music kicked back up, the curtain ruffled and then split. Mr. Brownstone ran out onto the stage with an Uzi in each hand, screaming something in Chinese or some Asian language.

Then, guns pointed straight in the air, Mr. Brownstone began to fire away.

EVERYTHING MOVED IN
such slow motion that Finch even had the time to think, Wow, the reports are right, things
do
move in slow motion. The chunks of plaster shot out of the ceiling looked as if they were falling through water, the screams of the crowd registered in a palm-dragged baritone. When the heavy grabbed Finch by the collar of his shirt, he could feel each muscle in the heavy’s fingers, could sense the tightening of his forearm, the surge of power gathering in his haunches. The crowd did what crowds are supposed to do in these scenes—they ran.

Finch knew, albeit abstractly, that he was also screaming and cowering, but he could also feel, at least somewhere in his body, an unctuous disbelief over what was going on. As the heavy dragged him by his collar toward an unmarked door behind the stage, he could still assess the lack of any real danger. Sure, there was an insane man on stage firing off two Uzis, but Mr. Brownstone kept the barrels raised high, and although the chaos made it impossible to be sure, after the first few rounds, which had brought down the ceiling, Finch was sure, 51 percent sure, that Mr. Brownstone had switched over to blanks.

But before he could confirm any of this, the heavy dragged him up to a metal door and started knocking.

Do
you remember when Chris Rock was talking about Columbine and asked, “Whatever happened to crazy?” He was right, of course. The attempts to psychologically or sociologically or spiritually explain the massacre arose—with a grim, zombie hunger—out of the graves of our Protestant work ethic. Because we knew we were somehow to blame, we felt the need to work toward some absolution, to find the cure. (The use of the collective pronoun here could be read however you’d like, but I’d prefer you be generous.) When the usual viruses were rounded up, the public (again, be generous) let loose an exhausted sigh. Chris Rock’s question was our panacea, the mantra we could all chant to convince ourselves of what was true—sometimes people, even kids, go crazy and kill a bunch of other people, even kids.

I mention it because I am thinking again about Cho Seung-Hui and why I have never been able to cast him off with a nice, measured “Whatever happened to crazy?” The reasons are obvious, but just as we can no longer think about Columbine without routing it through Chris
Rock’s question, I, specifically, can no longer process anger without routing it through Cho Seung-Hui.

Hyung-Jae said something about it once. We were back in that soggy bar around Columbia, and we were making jokes about Cho Seung-Hui again. It was late. The Yankees were playing in Seattle. We watched a few innings, made more bad jokes. At some point, Ichiro Suzuki came up to the plate and slapped his eight billionth single of the year. Hyung Jae said, “If that Jap has inspired gooky kids in America to think, ‘Hey, I can drag this tiny dick onto a baseball field and slap singles around the infield,’ then Cho is like Super Ichiro because he allowed every angry Asian kid in this country whose dad sucks or who is taking shit at school or who is getting no pussy to just go ahead and think, ‘Hey, I actually can shoot all these motherfuckers.’ ”

We both laughed because it was true. Then he asked, “Isn’t some part of you a little bit proud over Cho?”

IF I TOLD
you my answer, would you believe that as I stood over Ellen’s quaking body, gun in hands, I, hipster dinosaur, was ready to shoot Zengatronic down?

There was a knocking at the door. Zengatronic reached down for the doorknob.

The door flew open. I shut my eyes and fired. Six or seven times.

The
first bullet hit Finch in the left shoulder. The second split his clavicle ridge and exited a half inch from his spine. The third hit him in the right thigh, shattering his femur. The fourth missed. The fifth missed. The sixth hit the heel of his left loafer. The seventh missed. The eighth missed.

Of course, Finch thought, of course. But other than the bullets, he couldn’t quite figure out what was so goddamn obvious.

Who
knew that shooting blindly was so easy?

Until
it happens, every cop spends an unhealthy amount of time wondering what it feels like to get shot. Cynic Finch had always assumed that it wouldn’t hurt as much as it should, at least not at first. Nothing was numb, nothing was in shock. Instead, he could feel the bullet lodged in his shoulder, the one now floating in the back of his shattered thigh. If he had been able to close his eyes, he was sure he would have been able to see the slugs, the rifling on their sides, their heads, split open like mouths, calling out, feebly, their caliber.

He drifted off. As his brain drained itself of thought, the fish wriggled free and swam off. Had he had his faculties intact, Finch would have noticed, with pride, hopefully, that the only words remaining—the raised
Atlantis, dead, perhaps, but still urn burial—came from one Sullivan Ballou, a Union Army major who had died at Bull Run. On the night before the battle, Ballou had written a letter to his wife about his duty to serve his country and how it might conflict with, truncate his love for his wife and family. Finch, like everyone else, had come across the letter in Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary.

Eyelids flitting, vision narrowed, Finch could hear the unmistakable, lilting fiddle refrain that had accompanied the reading of Ballou’s letter. For the first time in years, he recalled standing with Sarah on the edge of the cliffs at Montara State Beach. He had just accepted his position within the homicide division. Sarah was wary of the long hours, the stress it might put on their young marriage. By way of rebuttal, Finch had memorized the entirety of Ballou’s letter. At Montara, backed by ten thousand yellow wildflowers, the unruly Pacific crashing below, he had recited the letter to her.

Now, shot four times and bleeding out in a storage closet, Finch felt no shame over the crudeness of his own farewell address. He only wished he had taken a better photo. As his eyes began to shut down, he felt a buzzing against his thigh. The elegant fiddle refrain was interrupted by a two-toned chime.

A text message had arrived.

Then Siddhartha “Keanu” Finch blacked out.

I
looked at my gun. And although I certainly was not qualified to make such assessments, it just didn’t
look
like a gun that had been fired. Who the fuck had been shooting?

I looked around. Zengatronic was gone.

The door flew open. Jim Kim’s dirty little potato head. He looked down at the dying handsome cop.

Then he shot me.

I
report the following in good faith, but the years of forgetting have pressed their collective weight on my memory. Many of the truths we thought would ultimately come to light have remained obscured. Jim Kim, good man, did not shoot to kill. I was out of the hospital in a week. Because forensic science had determined I fired no real shots, I was released after thirty or so hours of inconclusive questioning.

In the months immediately following my release from the hospital, I tried to assemble as much information as possible, envisioning a publishable book. Last year, while cleaning out the storage space where my sister and I have kept all my mother’s belongings, I came across one of my old elementary school yearbooks. In the page for Ms. Hill’s fourth grade class, there is a Tovah Bernstein, but she is listed in the “not pictured” section.

Needless to say, I cannot remember a thing about her.