Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

My own review of Kevin’s upbringing was assisted by trained legal minds. “Ms. Khatchadourian,” Harvey grilled me on the stand, “did you have a rule in your household that children were not allowed to play with toy guns?”

“For what it’s worth, yes.”

“And you monitored television and video viewing?”

“We tried to keep Kevin away from anything too violent or sexually explicit, especially when he was little. Unfortunately, that meant my husband couldn’t watch most of his own favorite programs. And we did have to allow one exception.”

“What was that?” Annoyance again; this wasn’t planned.

“The History Channel.” A titter; I was playing to the peanut gallery.

“The point is,” Harvey continued through his teeth, “you made every effort to ensure that your son was not surrounded by coarsening influences, did you not?”

“In my home,” I said. “That is six acres out of a planet. And even there, I was unprotected from Kevin’s coarsening influence on me.”

Harvey stopped to breathe. I sensed an alternative-medicine professional had taught him some technique. “In other words, you couldn’t control what Kevin played with or watched when he went to other children’s homes?”

“Frankly, other children rarely asked Kevin over more than once.”

The judge intervened, “Ms. Khatchadourian, please just answer the question.”

“Oh, I suppose,” I complied lackadaisically; I was getting bored.

“What about the Internet?” Harvey proceeded. “Was your son given free rein to access whatever web sites he liked, including, say, violent or pornographic ones?”

“Oh, we did the whole parental-controls schmear, but Kevin cracked it in a day.” I flicked the air dismissively. Harvey had warned me against giving the slightest indication that I didn’t take the proceedings seriously, and this case did bring out my perverse streak. But my larger trouble was paying attention. Back at the defense table, my lids would droop, my head list. If only to wake myself up, I added the kind of gratuitous commentary that the judge—a prudish, sharp woman who reminded me of Dr. Rhinestein—had cautioned against.

“You see,” I proceeded, “by the time he was eleven or twelve, this was all too late. The no-gun rules, the computer codes… Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn’t just naive, it’s a vanity. We want to be able to tell ourselves what good parents we are, that we’re doing our best . If I had it all to do over again, I’d have let Kevin play with whatever he wanted; he liked little enough. And I’d have ditched the TV rules, the G-rated videos. They only made us look foolish. They underscored our powerlessness, and they provoked his contempt.”

Although allowed a soliloquy in judicial terms, in my head I’d cut it short. I no longer suffer the constraints of jurisprudential impatience, so allow me to elaborate.

What drew Kevin’s contempt was not, as I had seemed to imply, our patent incapacity to protect him from the Big Bad World. No, to Kevin it was the substance and not the ineffectuality of our taboos that was a joke. Sex? Oh, he used it, when he discovered that I was afraid of it, or afraid of it in him, but otherwise? It was a bore. Don’t take offense, for you and I did find great pleasure in one another, but sex is a bore. Like the Tool Box toys that Kevin spurned as a toddler, the round peg goes in the round hole. The secret is that there is no secret. In fact, plain fucking at his high school was so prevalent, and so quotidian, that I doubt it excited him much. Alternative round holes furnish a transient novelty whose illusoriness he would have seen right through.

As for violence, the secret is more of a cheap trick.

You remember, once we gave up on the rating system to see a few decent films, watching a video of Braveheart as, dare I say it, a family ? In the final torture scene, Mel Gibson is stretched on a rack, all four limbs tied to the corners of the compass. Each time his English captors pulled the ropes tauter, the sisal groaned, and so did I. When the executioner thrust his barbed knife into Mel’s bowel and ripped upward, I squeezed my palms to my temples and whinnied. But when I peeked through the crook of my arm at Kevin, his glance at the screen was blasé. The sour half cock of his mouth was his customary expression at rest. He wasn’t precisely doing the Times crossword, but he was absently blacking in all the white squares with a felt-tip.

Cinematic carve-ups are only hard to handle if on some level you believe that these tortures are being done to you. In fact, it’s ironic that these spectacles have such a wicked reputation among Bible thumpers, since gruesome special effects rely for their impact on their audience’s positively Christian compulsion to walk in their neighbors’ shoes. But Kevin had discovered the secret: not merely that it wasn’t real, but that it wasn’t him . Over the years I observed Kevin watching decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, flayings, impalements, deoculations, and crucifixions, and I never saw him flinch. Because he’d mastered the trick. If you decline to identify, slice-and-dice is no more discomfiting than watching your mother prepare beef stroganoff. So what had we tried to protect him from, exactly? The practicalities of violence are rudimentary geometry, its laws those of grammar; like the grade-school definition of a preposition, violence is anything an airplane can do to a cloud. Our son had a better than average mastery of geometry and grammar both. There was little in Braveheart —or Reservoir Dogs , or Chucky II —that Kevin could not have invented for himself.

In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent that we led him down the garden path—that we enticed him with the prospect of the exotic. (Hadn’t I myself nourished the fantasy that I would eventually land in a country that was somewhere else ?) When we shrouded our grown-up mysteries for which Kevin was too young, we implicitly promised him that when the time came, the curtain would pull back to reveal—what? Like the ambiguous emotional universe that I imagined awaited me on the other side of childbirth, it’s doubtful that Kevin had formed a vivid picture of whatever we had withheld from him. But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing . That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules, nothing .

The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look-at-us-we’re-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates. By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good. By pandering to this myth of the naïf, we service our own legend. Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves. Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss. The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days. No, they have sex, too. In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.