Free The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang

through the front door, Hofspaur and Finch had been greeted by one of three brunettes, all of whom had short-cropped, bowly hair. Like all the other girls, she had that reddish sheen. Her eyes, Finch noticed, were set a bit wider apart than one would usually expect in a human being. In a voice bearing the full benefit of healthy lungs and good posture, she said, “Welcome to the Being Abundance Cafeteria. Would you like to hear the question of the day?”
    Hofspaur, sniggering, said, “Please.”
    “What future are you living toward?”
    “White power, brother.”
    “Excuse me?” Her eyes darted over to a small, bedazzled icon of President Barack Obama that had been pasted up on the cash register.
    “White powder,” Hofspaur said. “Trying to kick a habit. Hoping the future is free of white powder.”
    Relief flooded over her face. She touched her finger to her clavicleand said, “Well, I wish you all the best of luck with that. Everything you put into your body goes into your body.”
    “This is true. Can you bring us two bee pollen smoothies, please?”
    “You Are Vivacious. Amanda will be right over to take your food order. While you wait, enjoy the artwork and please, feel free to play the Abounding River Game.”
    A series of paintings had been hung up on the walls. Scanned from left to right, a narrative line revealed itself. A young blond girl with pigtails stands behind a brick wall. It is raining. On the other side of the wall, which appears to have been constructed at a forty-five-degree angle, the grass is green, rabbits stare impassively at pink flowers. A row of trees gamely hold on to their gigantic fruit. In the second painting, the girl, digging in the hard, ugly dirt on her side of the brick wall, comes across a small white box. The next few paintings show the girl opening the box, which contains a red apple and a glowing scroll.
    In the last five paintings, the girl eats the apple, reads the scroll. The wall dissolves, and the girl enters the bountiful paradise.
    On each table in Being Abundance, there was a basket filled with crayons, dice, and greeting-card-size reproductions of each of the paintings. On the backs of the cards were instructions on things to say to the people at your table, and, if you had procured prior consent, the people at the next.
    Hofspaur flipped through the cards and grunted. “These idiots couldn’t even make the game complicated.”
    “What would be the point of that?”
    The hostess came by with the drinks, which were a radioactive shade of green.
    “Well, it would at least have some allure to it.”
    Finch felt a tingly lift at the base of his scalp. To mask whatever his face was giving away, he scowled at his green drink and announced, “This thing tastes pretty toxic.”
    “That means it’s working. As I was saying, the game is so simple, as are these ugly communist paintings, because these idiots want to sell a linear path to happy. But the trick only works on people who are already happy. No miserable fuck wants to wake up one morning and realize that salvation is just an easy twelve-step jaunt down a path that’s been obvious the entire time. The straight line demeans their intelligence, their families, and all the fucked-up psychological trauma that brought them to their particular misery.”
    “And yet this place is crowded at eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday.”
    “People who refuse to respect traditional mealtimes are all happy. Or something like that.”
    “I don’t think that works.”
    “Sure it does. If you don’t really feel your misery or if it doesn’t exist, you can walk right out of it. That’s the accidental genius of this place. They make a bunch of nine-dollar drinks, sell a bunch of fucking horse food for twenty-five dollars, tacitly remind rich people of the possibility of misery, and then advertise a way out of it. It’s essentially allowing the happy to be temporarily confused about being happy and then showing them that all they