The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang Read Free Book Online

old typewriter font. There was no mention of an author or illustrator. The back cover was blank as well, as was the spine. The rest of the book, however, conformed to the usual bookish standards: a page with the Library of Congress information, an inside cover page with the title again, this time with the mark—Blacksburg Publishing—a dedication page: “To CSH.” Finch recognized the title but couldn’t quite place it.
    Book in hand, Finch walked back to the stoop and wrote down a series of notes. A silent cheer went up in his heart as he, for the first time in many months, felt his brain unclunk. As he was drawing a mostlyneedless sketch of the entryway, complete with an arrow pointing out Dolores Stone’s mailbox, a young woman in a black fleece exited the condo, stepped over him with an apology, smiled, and walked down to the end of the block. Finch noticed her stellar ass, of course, but then her stiff posture, the way her hands swung mechanically at her sides. He recalled one of Sarah’s paintings, part of the stockades of juvenilia she kept locked up in her studio space. On an expansive spray-painted canvas, five blond girls sit in a circle around a dark wood table. Each of the girls possesses some of the traditional markings of beauty: cleavage, pearls, curls, white teeth, sloped shoulders. The girl to the extreme right has one arm laid out on the table. The girl to her left, the one with the magnificent hanging breasts, is cutting open her neighbor’s wrist with a scalpel. A thick stream of blood runs down the center of the table, running in the ugly static way that things move in Frida Kahlo paintings. The expressions on the faces of all the girls, including the one being mutilated, are directly stolen off the faces of the boaters in Renoir’s
The Boating Party
.
    When the girl in the black fleece marched back down the block, this time with a black plastic bag from the corner store swinging arrhythmically at her side, Finch thought again of the painting and of all the girls his wife must have hated and how all their shared hatreds had hewed out an easy compatibility during those first years of marriage, and how now, as his mother had predicted, the coloration of hatred had started to fade in Sarah, leaving them with little to discuss. His work had ceased to be interesting to him. There was, and remains, no interesting way to discuss surfing with those who do not participate in the sport. She had endured ten years of similar artistic embarrassments and now relegated herself to very pretty, very well-composed paintings of buildings. Neither hadany interest in music or politics, outside of what was expected of Sarah as a youngish, artsy girl in the Mission, and, as Finch had begun to realize, what was expected out of him, a trustafarian turned against his own kind.
    And with that thought, he picked himself up off the stoop and started walking the two blocks over to the Porn Palace.

TODAY WE KILL, TOMORROW WE DIE
    1 . I awoke at an ungodly hour, stuck in the early morning fog that loiters somewhere between consciousness and the vault of my anxieties. Whenever I find myself there, some absurd worry pokes its head out of the vagueness. This time, I worried all my friends had died in their sleep. But then Geronimo Rex dug his claws into my foot, and the panic dispersed, leaving me alone with my senses. Through the apartment’s only window, I listened to two guys talk about their jobs. Some coworker wasn’t showing up on time. I felt implicated, so I picked up Adam’s laptop and tried to find a wireless network. But everything—belkinauto, beanmafia, loves2spooj, dukesucks, Eric’s network, cafed’tazzo, thoroughbread, davis, even trusty old Linksys—was locked.
    One day, when we feel a bit less embarrassed about it all, the next generation’s great poet will write an elegy for the despair you feel when you, without even the hint of a password, look over a list of wireless networks and see nothing but