Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

In the end, mastitis put an end to my desperate search for whatever foodstuff was putting Kevin off my milk. Poor nutrition may have made me susceptible. That and fumbling to get Kevin to take the breast, which could have lacerated the nipples enough to transmit infection from his mouth. Inimical to my sustenance, he could still introduce me to corruption, as if already at year zero the more worldly party of our pair.

Since the first sign of mastitis is fatigue, it’s little wonder that the early symptoms went unobserved. He’d worn me out for weeks. I bet you still don’t believe me about his fits of pique, though a rage that lasts for six to eight hours seems less a fit than a natural state, from which the tranquil respites you witnessed were bizarre departures. Our son had fits of peace . And this may sound completely mad, but the consistency with which Kevin shrieked with precocious force of will the whole time he and I were alone, and then with the abruptness of switching off a heavy-metal radio station desisted the moment you came home—well, it seemed deliberate. The silence still ringing for me, you’d bend over our slumbering angel who unbeknownst to you was just beginning to sleep off his Olympian exertions of the day. Though I’d never have wished on you my own pulsing headaches, I couldn’t bear the subtle distrust that was building between us when your experience of our son did not square with mine. I have sometimes entertained the retroactive delusion that even in his crib Kevin was learning to divide and conquer, scheming to present such contrasting temperaments that we were bound to be set at odds. Kevin’s features were unusually sharp for a baby, while my own still displayed that rounded Marlo Thomas credulity, as if he had leeched my very shrewdness in utero.

Childless, I’d perceived baby crying as a pretty undifferentiated affair. It was loud; it was not so loud. But in motherhood I developed an ear. There’s the wail of inarticulate need, what is effectively a child’s first groping after language, for sounds that mean wet or food or pin . There’s the shriek of terror—that no one is here and that there may never be anyone here again. There’s that lassitudinous wah-wah , not unlike the call to mosque in the Middle East or improvisational song; this is creative crying, fun crying, from babies who, while not especially unhappy, have failed to register that we like to constrain weeping to conditions of distress. Perhaps saddest of all is the muted, habitual mewl of a baby who may be perfectly miserable but who, whether through neglect or prescience, no longer anticipates reprieve—who in infancy has already become reconciled to the idea that to live is to suffer.

Oh, I imagine there are as many reasons that newborn babies cry as that grown ones do, but Kevin practiced none of these standard lachrymal modes. Sure, after you got home he’d sometimes fuss a little like a normal baby that he wanted feeding or changing, and you’d take care of it and he’d stop; and then you’d look at me like, see? and I’d want to slug you.

With me, once you left, Kevin was not to be bought off with anything so petty and transitory as milk or dry diapers. If fear of abandonment contributed to a decibel level that rivaled an industrial buzz saw, his loneliness displayed an awesome existential purity; it wasn’t about to be allayed by the hover of that haggard cow with her nauseating waft of white fluid. And I discerned no plaintive cry of appeal, no keen of despair, no gurgle of nameless dread. Rather, he hurled his voice like a weapon, howls smashing the walls of our loft like a baseball bat bashing a bus shelter. In concert, his fists sparred with the mobile over his crib, he kick-boxed his blanket, and there were times I stepped back after patting and stroking and changing and marveled at the sheer athleticism of the performance. It was unmistakable: Driving this remarkable combustion engine was the distilled and infinitely renewable fuel of outrage .

About what ? you might well ask.

He was dry, he was fed, he had slept. I would have tried blanket on, blanket off; he was neither hot nor cold. He’d been burped, and I have a gut instinct that he didn’t have colic; Kevin’s was not a cry of pain but of wrath. He had toys dangling overhead, rubber blocks in his bed. His mother had taken six months off from work to spend every day by his side, and I picked him up so often that my arms ached; you could not say he lacked for attention. As the papers would be so fond of observing sixteen years later, Kevin had everything.

I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive. I think Kevin hated it. I think Kevin was off the scale, he hated being here so much. He may even have retained some trace spiritual memory from before conception, and glorious nullity was far more what he missed than my womb. Kevin seemed incensed that no one had ever consulted him about turning up in a crib with time going on and on, when nothing whatsoever interested him in that crib. He was the least curious little boy I’ve ever encountered, with a few exceptions to that rule that I shudder to contemplate.

One afternoon I started to feel draggier than usual, at times a bit light-headed. For days I’d been unable to keep warm, and it was late May; outside, New Yorkers were in shorts. Kevin had pulled off a virtuosic recital. Huddled on the couch in a blanket, I reflected crankily on the fact that you’d stacked up more work than ever. Fair enough, as a freelancer you didn’t want your long-term clients to find an alternative scout, whereas my own company could be trusted to underlings and wouldn’t just go away. But somehow this meant that I was stuck all day with hell in a handbasket while you tooled merrily off in your baby-blue pickup to window-shop for fields with the right-colored cows. I suspected that if our situation were reversed—you headed a thriving company while I was a lone freelance location scout—Eva would be expected to drop the scouting altogether like a hot brick.

When the elevator clanked and shuddered, I was just noticing that a small patch under my right breast had turned bright red, tender, and strangely stiff, mirroring the much larger such patch on the left. You opened the lattice gate and went straight to the crib. I was glad you were turning into such an attentive father, but of the two other inhabitants of our loft it was only your wife who appreciated the meaning of the word hello .

“ Please don’t wake him up,” I whispered. “He’s only been down twenty minutes and he’s outdone himself today. I doubt he ever goes to sleep. He passes out.”

“Well, has he been fed?” Deaf to my imprecations, you had laid him on your shoulder and were poking at his conked-out face. He looked deceptively content. Dreams of oblivion, perhaps.

“Yes, Franklin,” I said with immoderate control. “After four or five hours of listening to little Kevin bring the house down, I thought of that. —Why are you using the stove?”

“Microwaving kills nutrients.” Over lunch at McDonald’s, you read baby books.

“It isn’t so simple as figuring out what he wants and can’t ask for. Most of the time he has no idea what he wants.” I caught it: Your eyes flicked toward the ceiling like, oh-brother-not-this-again. “ You think I’m exaggerating .”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You think he’s ‘crabby.’ He’s ‘fussy’ sometimes, because he’s hungry—”

“Listen, Eva, I’m sure he gets a little ill-tempered—”

“See? A little ill-tempered .” I waddled to the kitchen in my blanket. “You don’t believe me!” I had broken out in a cold sweat and must either have been flushed or pale. Walking hurt the soles of my feet and sent pains shivering down my left arm.