Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“But it’s against the law in this state for criminals to profit from—”

Again, Kevin swung to the camera. “My story is about all I got to my name right now, and that’s why I feel robbed. But a story’s a whole lot more than most people got. All you people watching out there, you’re listening to what I say because I have something you don’t: I got plot . Bought and paid for. That’s what all you people want, and why you’re sucking off me. You want my plot. I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way. TV and video games and movies and computer screens… On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watch ee . Ever since, I’ve known what my life is about. I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it. You ate it up . Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll. Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, ’cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president’s dog.”

I turned off the set. I couldn’t take any more. I could feel another interview with Thelma Corbitt coming up, bound to include an appeal for the “Love for Kids with Determination” scholarship fund she’d set up in Denny’s honor, to which I’d already contributed more than I could afford.

Obviously, this flashy thesis about the passive spectating of modern life was but a twinkle in Kevin’s eye two years ago. He has time on his hands at Claverack, and he’d knocked together that fancy motive in much the way older convicts manufacture vanity license plates. Still, I reluctantly have to admit that his post hoc exegesis contained a nugget of truth. Were NBC to broadcast an unabating string of documentaries on the mating habits of sea otters, viewership would dwindle. Listening to Kevin’s diatribe, I was struck despite myself by what a sizable proportion of our species feeds off the depravity of a handful of reprobates, if not to earn a living then to pass the time. It isn’t only journalists, either. Think tanks generating mountains of paper over the sovereign disposition of fractious little East Timor. University Conflict Studies departments issuing countless Ph.D.s on ETA terrorists who number no more than 100. Filmmakers generating millions by dramatizing the predations of lone serial killers. And think of it: the courts, police, National Guard—how much of government is the management of the wayward 1 percent? With prison building and warding one of the biggest growth industries in the United States, a sudden popular conversion to civilization across the board could trigger a recession. Since I myself had craved a turn of the page , is it really such a stretch to say of KK that we need him? Beneath his bathetic disguise, Jack Marlin had sounded grateful. He wasn’t interested in the mating habits of sea otters, and he was grateful .

Otherwise, Franklin, my reaction to that interview is very confusing. A customary horror mixes with something like—pride. He was lucid, selfassured, engaging. I was touched by that photograph over his bed, and no little chagrined that he hadn’t destroyed it after all (I guess I’ve always assumed the worst). Recognizing snippets of his soliloquy from my own tirades at table, I’m not only mortified, but flattered. And I’m thunderstruck that he has ever ventured into a Barnes and Noble to gaze at my handiwork, for which his “Meet My Mother” essay didn’t betray great respect.

But I’m dismayed by his unkind remarks about you, which I hope you don’t take to heart. You tried so hard to be an attentive, affectionate father. Yet I did warn you that children are unusually alert to artifice, so it makes sense that it’s your very effort that he derides. And you can understand why in relation to you of all people he feels compelled to portray himself as the victim.

I was grilled at length by Mary’s lawyers about the “warning signs” that I should have picked up sufficiently in advance to have headed off calamity, but I think most mothers would have found the tangible signals difficult to detect. I did ask about the purpose of the five chain-and-padlock Kryptonites when they were delivered to our door by FedEx, since Kevin had a bike lock, along with a bike he never rode. Yet his explanation seemed credible: He’d come across a terrific deal on the Internet, and he planned to sell these Kryptonites, which went for about $100 apiece retail, at school for a profit. If he’d never before displayed such entrepreneurial spunk, the aberration only seems glaring now that we know what the locks were for. How he got hold of school stationery I’ve no idea, and I never ran across it. And while he laid in a generous supply of arrows for his crossbow over a period of months, he never ordered more than half a dozen at a time. He was always ordering arrows, and the stockpile, which he kept outside in the shed, didn’t attract my attention.

The one thing that I did notice through the rest of December and the early months of 1999 was that Kevin’s Gee, Dad routine now extended to Gee, Mumsey . I don’t know how you put up with it. Gosh, are we having some of that great Armenian food tonight? Terriff! I sure want to learn more about my ethnic heritage! Lots of guys at school are plain old white-bread, and they’re superjealous that I’m a member of a real-live persecuted minority! Insofar as he had any tastes in food at all, he hated Armenian cuisine, and this disingenuous boppiness hurt my feelings. With me, Kevin’s behavior had been hitherto as unadorned as his bedroom—stark, lifeless, sometimes hard and abrasive, but (or so I imagined) uncamouflaged. I preferred that. It was a surprise to discover that my son could come to seem even farther away.

I interpreted his transformation as induced by that conversation in the kitchen that he’d overheard—to which neither you nor I had alluded again, even in private. Our prospective separation loomed as a great smelly elephant in the living room, trumpeting occasionally or leaving behind massive piles of manure for us to trip over.

Yet astonishingly, our marriage blossomed into a second honeymoon, remember? We pulled off that Christmas with unequaled warmth. You secured me a signed copy of Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate, as well as Michael J. Arlen’s Passage to Ararat, Armenian classics. In turn, I gave you a copy of Alistair Cooke’s America and a biography of Ronald Reagan. If we were poking fun at one another, the teasing was tender. We indulged Kevin with some sports clothes that were grotesquely too small, while Celia, typically, was every bit as entranced with the bubble wrap it came in as with her glass-eyed antique doll. We made love more often than we had in years under the implicit guise of for-old-time’s-sake.

I was unsure whether you were reconsidering a summer split or were merely impelled by guilt and grief to make the most of what was irrevocably terminal. In any event, there is something relaxing about hitting bottom. If we were about to get a divorce, nothing worse could possibly happen.

Or so we thought.

Dear Franklin,

I know it’s bound to be a touchy subject for you. But I promise, if you hadn’t given him that crossbow for Christmas, it would have been the longbow or poison darts. For that matter, Kevin was sufficiently resourceful to have capitalized on the Second Amendment and would have laid hands on the more conventional arsenal of pistols and deer rifles that his more modern-minded colleagues prefer. Frankly, traditional School Shooting instruments would not only have improved his margin of error but would have heightened the likelihood that he could best the competition in fatalities—clearly one of his driving ambitions, since before those Columbine upstarts came along twelve days later, he topped the charts. And you can be sure that he considered this issue at great length. He said himself at fourteen, “Choice of weapons is half the fight.” So on the face of it, the archaic selection is peculiar. It handicapped him, or so it would seem.