Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

I dropped any further preliminaries. I’m increasingly indifferent to setting him at ease on my visits when his own efforts are aimed solely at my discomfiture.

“It’s been preying on me,” I said right off. “I can almost understand going on some indiscriminate frenzy, venting your frustrations on whomever happens to be in the way. Like that quiet, unassuming Hawaiian a year or two ago, who just flipped—”

“Bryan Uyesugi,” Kevin provided. “He kept fish.”

“Seven coworkers?”

Kevin patted his hands in mock applause. “Two thousand fish. And it was Xerox. He was a copy-machine repairman. Nine-millimeter Glock.”

“I’m so pleased,” I said, “that this experience has afforded you an expertise.”

“He lived on ‘Easy Street,’” Kevin noted. “It was a dead-end.”

“My point is, Uyooghi—”

“Yoo-SOO-ghee,” Kevin corrected.

“It clearly didn’t matter who those employees were—”

“Guy was a member of the Hawaiian Carp Association. Maybe he thought that meant he was supposed to complain.”

Kevin was showing off; I waited to make sure the little recital was over.

“But your get-together in the gym,” I resumed, “was By Invitation Only.”

“All my colleagues aren’t indiscriminate. Take Michael McDermott, last December. Wakefield, Mass., Edgewater Tech—AK, .12-gauge shotgun. Specific targets. Accountants. Anybody had to do with docking his paycheck 2,000 bucks—”

“I don’t want to talk about Michael McDermott, Kevin—”

“He was fat.”

“— Or about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—”

“Morons. Give mass murderers a bad name.”

I told you, Franklin, he’s obsessed with those Columbine kids, who upstaged him only twelve days later with six more fatalities; I’m sure I brought them up just to rile him.

“At least Harris and Klebold had the courtesy to save the taxpayer a bundle and make a quick exit,” I observed coolly.

“Weenies just trying to inflate their casualty figures.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He didn’t seem to take offense. “Why make it easy for everybody.”

“Everybody like me.”

“You included,” he said smoothly. “Sure.”

“But why Dana Rocco and not another teacher, why those particular kids? What made them so special?”

“Uh , duh ,” said Kevin. “I didn’t like them.”

“You don’t like anybody,” I pointed out. “What, did they beat you at kickball? Or do you just not like Thursdays?”

In the context of Kevin’s new specialty, my oblique reference to Brenda Spencer qualified as a classical allusion. Brenda killed two adults and wounded nine students in her San Carlos, California, high school only because, as the Boomtown Rats’ hit single subsequently attested, “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The fact that this seminal atrocity dates back to 1979 distinguishes the sixteen-year-old as ahead of her time. My nod to his puerile pantheon earned me what in other children would have been a smile.

“It must have been quite a project,” I said, “trimming the list.”

“Massive,” he agreed affably. “Started out like, fifty, sixty serious contenders. Ambitious,” he said, then shook his head. “But impractical.”

“All right, we have forty-five more minutes,” I said. “Why Denny Corbitt?”

“—The ham!” he said, as if checking his grocery list before checkout.

“You remember the name of a copy-machine repairman in Hawaii, but you’re not too sure about the names of the people you murdered.”

“Uyesugi actually did something. Corbitt, if I remember right, just sat all google-eyed against the wall as if waiting for his director to block the scene.”

“My point is, so Denny was a ham. So what?”

“See that dork do Stanley in Streetcar ? I could do a better Southern accent underwater .”

“What part are you playing? The surliness, the swagger. Where’d it come from? Brad Pitt? You know, you’ve picked up a bit of a Southern accent yourself. It isn’t very good, either.”

His fellow inmates are abundantly black, and his locution has begun to warp accordingly. He’s always spoken with a peculiar slowness, that effortfulness, as if he had to hoist the words from his mouth with a shovel, so the slack-jawed urban-ghetto economy of dropped consonants and verbs is naturally infectious. Still, I was pleased with myself; I seemed to have annoyed him.

“I’m not playing a part. I am the part,” he said hotly. “Brad Pitt should play me .”

(So he’d heard; a movie was already in development at Miramax.)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Brad Pitt’s way too old to play some pipsqueak high school sophomore. Even if he were the right age, no audience would buy that a guy who looks that street-smart would do anything so moronic. I’ve read they’re having trouble casting, you know. Nobody in Hollywood will touch your filthy little part with a barge pole.”

“Just as long as it isn’t DiCaprio,” Kevin grumbled. “He’s a twit.”

“Back to business.” I sat back. “What was your problem with Ziggy Randolph? You could hardly accuse him of failing your exalted artistic standards, like Denny. Word was that he had a professional future in ballet.”

“What had a professional future ,” said Kevin, “was his butthole.”

“He got an overwhelming reception when he gave that speech, explaining he was gay and proud of it at assembly. You couldn’t bear that, could you? The whole student body cooing how courageous he was.”

“And how do you like that,” Kevin marveled. “Standing ovation for taking it up the ass.”

“But I really haven’t been able to figure why Greer Ulanov,” I said. “The fuzzy-headed girl, short, with prominent teeth.”

“Buck teeth,” he corrected. “Like a horse.”

“You generally had it in for the lookers.”

“Anything to get her to shut up about her ‘vast right-wing conspiracy.’”

“Ah, she was the one,” I clued. “The petition.” (I don’t know if you remember, but an indignant petition to New York congressmen circulated Gladstone High School when Clinton was impeached.)

“Admit it, Mumsey , having a crush on the president is totally low-rent.”

“ I think,” I hazarded, “you don’t like people who have crushes of any sort.”

“More theories? ’Cause I think,” he returned, “you need to get a life.”

“I had one. You took it.”

We faced off. “Now you’re my life,” I added. “All that’s left.”

“That,” he said, “is pathetic.”

“But wasn’t that the plan? Just you and me, getting to know one another at last.”

“More theories ! Aren’t I fascinating.”

“Soweto Washington.” I had a long list to get through, and I had to keep the program moving. “He’s going to walk again, I’ve read. Are you disappointed?”

“Why should I care?”

“Why did you ever care? Enough to try to kill him?”

“Didn’t try to kill him,” Kevin maintained staunchly.

“Oh, I see. You left him with holes in both thighs and that’s all on purpose. Heaven forbid that Mr. Perfect Psychopath should miss.”

Kevin raised his hands. “Hey, hey! I made mistakes! Letting that little movie nerd off scot-free was the last thing I had in mind.”

“Joshua Lukronsky,” I remembered, though we were getting ahead of ourselves. “Did you hear that your friend Joshua’s been brought on board the Miramax film, as a script consultant? They want to be historically accurate. For a “movie nerd,” it’s a dream come true.”

Kevin’s eyes screwed up. He doesn’t like it when tangential characters collect on his cachet. He was equally resentful when Leonard Pugh posted his web page, KK’s_best_friend.com, which has garnered thousands of hits and purports to expose our son’s darkest secrets for the price of a double-click. Best friend my ass! Kevin snarled when the site went up. Lenny was closer to a pet hamster.