We Need to Talk About Kevin

  "Few of the girls did, after a while," he said airily. " N o b o d y could take a leak, see. Fact," Kevin achieved a wheezy little laugh,

  "that donkey-face Ulanov wet herself."

  " D i d anything make the administration especially alarmed?

  Or was it just, oh it's Wednesday, why don't we play with sniffer-dogs?"

  "Probably an anonymous tip. T h e y r u n a telephone hodine now, so you can rat out your friends. For a quarter, I could get out of Environmental Science any day of the week."

  "An anonymous tip from w h o m ? " I asked.

  "Hello-o. If I told you w h o it was, then it wouldn't be anonymous, would it?"

  "Well after all that bother, did they even find anything?"

  "Sure they did," Kevin purled. "Shitload of overdue library books. Some old French fries that were starting to stink. O n e really juicy, evil p o e m had t h e m going for while, till it turned out to be Big Black lyrics: This is Jordan, we do what we like... —Oh, and one more thing. A list."

  " W h a t kind of list?"

  "A hit list. N o t ' M y Favorite Songs,' but the other kind.You know, w i t h T H E Y ALL DESERVE TO D I E scrawled at the top, big as life."

  "Jesus!" You sat up. "These days, that's not funny."

  " N o o o o , they didn't think it was funny."

  "I h o p e they're planning to give this kid a good talking-to,"

  you said.

  " O o o h , I think they'll do better than a talking-to."

  "Well, w h o was it?" I asked. " W h e r e did they find it?"

  "In his locker. Funniest thing, too. Last guy you'd expect.

  Superspic."

  "Kev," you said sharply. "I've warned you about that kind of language."

  "'Scuse me. I mean Senor Espinoza. Guess he's just bustin'

  with ethnic hostility and pent-up resentment on behalf of the Latino people."

  " H o l d on," I said. "Didn't he win some big academic prize last year?"

  "Can't say as I recall," said Kevin blithely."But that three-week suspension is going to nasty up his record something terrible.

  Ain't that a shame? Geez, and you think you k n o w people."

  "If everyone k n e w this search was coming," I said, " w h y wouldn't this Espinoza boy clear such an incriminating list from his locker beforehand?"

  "Dunno," said Kevin. "Guess he's an amateur."

  — 376 —

  I d r u m m e d my fingers on the coffee table. "These lockers.

  T h e kind I grew up with had slits in the top. Aeration vents. Do yours?"

  "Sure," he said, heading from the room. "So the French fries keep better."

  T h e y suspended the valedictorian-in-waiting; they made Greer Ulanov pee her pants. They punished the poets, the hotheaded sportsmen, the morbidly dressed. Anyone with a jazzy nickname, an extravagant imagination, or the less than lavish social portfolio that might mark a student as an "outcast" became suspect. As far as I could tell, it was War on Weirdos.

  But I identified with weirdos. In my o w n adolescence, I had strong, stormy Armenian features and so wasn't considered pretty. I had a funny name. My brother was a quiet, dour n o b o d y w h o ' d scored me no social points as a predecessor. I had a shut-in mother w h o would never drive me anywhere or attend school functions, if her insistence on continuing to manufacture excuses was rather sweet; and I was a dreamer w h o fantasized endlessly about escape, not only from Racine but the entire United States.

  Dreamers don't watch their backs. Were I a student at Gladstone High in 1998, I'd surely have written some shocking fantasy in sophomore English about putting my forlorn famdy out of its misery by blowing the sarcophagus of 137 Enderby Avenue to kingdom come, or in a civics project on "diversity" the gruesome detad in which I recounted the Armenian genocide would betray an unhealthy fascination with violence. Alternatively, I'd express an inadvisable sympathy with poor Jacob Davis sitting beside his gun with his head in his hands, or I'd tactlessly decry a Latin test as murderous—one way or another, I'd be out on my ear.

  Kevin, though. Kevin wasn't weird. N o t so's you notice. He did brandish the tiny-clothes thing, but he didn't wear all black, and he didn't skulk in a trench coat; "tiny clothes" were not on the official photocopied list of "warning signs." His grades were straight Bs, and no one seemed to find this astonishing but me.

  I thought, this is a bright kid, grade inflation is rife, you'd think

  — 377 —

  he'd make an A by accident. But no, Kevin applied his intelligence to keeping his head below the parapet. I think he overdid it, too.

  T h a t is, his essays were so boring, so lifeless, and so m o n o t o n o u s as to border on deranged. You'd think someone would have noticed that those choppy, stultifying sentences ("Paul Revere rode a horse. He said that the British were coming. He said, ' T h e British are c o m i n g . T h e British are coming.'") were sticking two fingers up his teacher's butt. But it was only w h e n he wrote a paper contrived to repeatedly use the words snigger, niggardly, and Nigeria for his Black History teacher that he pushed his luck.

  Socially, Kevin camouflaged himself with just enough

  "friends" so as not to appear, alarmingly, a loner. They were all mediocrities—exceptional mediocrities, if there is such a thing—or outright cretins like Lenny Pugh. They all pursued this minimalist approach to education, and they didn't get into trouble. T h e y may well have led a whole secret life behind this gray scrim of bovine obedience, but the one thing that didn't raise a red flag at his high school was being suspiciously drab. T h e mask was perfect.

  D i d Kevin take drugs? I've never been sure. You agonized enough about h o w to approach the subject, whether to pursue the rectitudinous course and denounce all pharmaceuticals as the sure route to insanity and the gutter or to play the reformed hellraiser and vaunt a long list of substances that you once devoured like candy until you learned the hard way that they could rot your teeth. (The truth—that we hadn't cleaned out the medicine cabinet, but we'd both tried a variety of recreational drugs, and not only in the sixties but up to a year before he was born; that better living through chemistry had driven neither of us to an asylum or even to an emergency room; and that these gleeful carnival rides on the mental midway were far more the source of nostalgia than remorse—was unacceptable.) Each path had pitfalls.

  T h e former doomed you as a fuddy-duddy who'd no notion what he was talking about; the latter reeked of hypocrisy. I recall you finally charted some middle way and admitted to smoking dope, told him for the sake of consistency that it was okay if he wanted to "try it," but to not get caught, and to please, please not tell anyone that you'd been anything but condemnatory about narcotics of any kind. Me, I bit my hp. Privately I beheved that downing a few capsules of ecstasy could be the best thing that ever happened to that boy.

  As for sex, the accuracy of that " h u m p 'em and dump ' e m "

  boast is up for grabs. If I've claimed, of us two, to " k n o w " Kevin the better, that is only to say that I know him for being opaque.

  I k n o w that I don't know him. It's possible he's still a virgin; I'm only sure of one thing. That is, if he has had sex, it's been grim—short, pumping; shirt on. (For that matter, he could have been sodomizing Lenny Pugh. It's uncannily easy to picture.) Hence Kevin may even have heeded your stern caution that if he ever felt ready for sex he should always use a condom, if only because a slimy rubber sheath bulging with milky come would have made his vacuous encounters that much more delectably sordid. I reason that nothing about a blindness to beauty necessitates a blindness to ugliness, for which Kevin long ago developed a taste. Presumably there are as many fine shades of the gross as the gorgeous, so that a mind full of blight wouldn't preclude a certain refinement.

  There was one more matter at the end of Kevin's ninth-grade school year that I never bothered you about, but I'll mention it in passing for the sake of being thorough.

  I'm sure you would remember that in early June, AWAP's c
omputers were contaminated with a computer virus. Our technical staff traced it to an e-mail tided, cleverly, "WAPJSfING: Deadly new virus in circulation." No one seemed to trouble with hard-copy dumps or those chintzy little floppies anymore, so that since the virus also infected our backup drive, the results were disastrous.

  With fde after file, access was denied, it didn't exist, or it came up on screen all squares, squiggles, and tildes. Four different editions were put back for at least six months, encouraging scores of our most devoted bookstores, including the chains, to put in bountiful orders for The Rough Guide and The Lonely Planet w h e n A Wing and a Prayer couldn't satisfy the brisk summer market with u p - t o -

  date hstings. (We didn't make any friends, either, w h e n the virus sent itself to every e-mail address on our marketing list.) We never fully recouped the trade we lost that season, so the fact that I was forced to sell the company in 2000 for less than half its valuation two years earlier traces in some measure to this contagion. For me, it substantially contributed to 1998's Zeitgeist of siege.

  I did not tell you about its source out of shame. I should never have been snooping, you'd say. I should have minded every parenting manual's edict to respect the inviolability of a child's bedroom. If I suffered dire consequences, I had made my o w n bed. It's the oldest switcheroo in the book, and a favorite of the faithless the world over: W h e n folks discover something incriminating by poking around where they're not supposed to, you immediately flip the issue to the snooping itself, to distract from what they found.

  I'm n o t sure what led me to go in there. I'd stayed h o m e from AWAP to take Ceha in for another oculist appointment, to check on her adaptation to the prosthesis. There was little enough in Kevin's r o o m to attract curiosity, though it may have been this very quality—its mysterious blankness—that I found so magnetic. W h e n I creaked open the door I felt powerfully that I wasn't meant to be there. Kevin was in school, you were scouting, Celia was poring over h o m e w o r k that should have taken her ten minutes and would therefore take her a good two hours, so the chances of my being discovered were slim. Still, my heart raced and my breath was bated. This is silly, I told myself. I ' m in my own house, and if improbably interrupted I can claim to be checking for dirty dishes.

  Fat chance, in that room. It was immaculate; you teased Kevin about being a "granny," he was such a neatnik. T h e bed was made with boot-camp precision. We'd offered him a bedspread of racing cars or Dungeons and Dragons; he'd been quite firm on

  — 3 8 0 —

  preferring plain beige. T h e walls were unadorned; no posters of Oasis or the Spice Girls, no leering Marilyn M a n s o n . T h e shelves lay largely bare: a few textbooks, a single copy of Robin Hood; the many books we gave him for Christmas and birthdays simply disappeared. He had his o w n TV and stereo system, but about the only "music" I'd heard him play was some kind of Philip Glass-like CD that sequenced computer-generated phrases according to a set mathematical equation; it had no form, no peaks or valleys, and approximated the white noise that he would also tune in on the television w h e n he was not watching the Weather Channel. Again, the C D s we'd given him w h e n trying to sort out what he "liked" were nowhere in evidence. T h o u g h you could get delightful screen savers of leaping dolphins or zooming space-ships, the one on his Gateway merely pointillated random dots.

  Was this what it looked hke inside his head? Or was the room, too, a kind of screen saver? Just add a seascape above the bed, and it looked like an unoccupied unit at a Quality Inn. N o t a photograph at his bedside, nor keepsake on his bureau—the surfaces were slick and absent. H o w m u c h I'd have preferred to walk into a hellhole jangling with heavy-metal, lurid with Playboy centerfolds, fetid from muddy sweats, and crusty with year-old tuna sandwiches. That was the kind of n o - g o teen lair that I understood, where I might discover safe, accessible secrets hke a w o r n Durex packet under the socks or a baggie of cannabis stuffed in the toe of a smelly sneaker. By contrast, the secrets of this r o o m were all about what I would not find, like some trace of my son. Looking around, I thought uneasily, He could be anyone.

  But as for its conceit that there was nothing to hide, I wasn't buying. So w h e n I spotted a stack of floppies on the shelf above the computer, I shuttled through them. Inscribed with characterless perfect printing, their titles were obscure:"Nostradamus,""I Love You,""D4-X." Feeling wicked, I picked one of t h e m out, p u t the rest back the way I found them, and shpped out the door.

  In my study, I inserted the floppy in my computer. I didn't recognize the suffixes on the A drive, but they weren't regular word-processing files, which disappointed me. In hoping to find a private journal or diary, I may have been less eager to discover the precise content of his inmost thoughts than to confirm that at least he had inmost thoughts. N o t about to give up easily, I went into the Explorer program and loaded one of the files; perplexingly, Microsoft Outlook Express came up on screen, at which point Celia called from the dining table that she needed help. I was gone for about fifteen minutes.

  W h e n I returned, the computer was blank. It had shut itself off, which it had never done without being told. Disconcerted, I turned it on again but got nothing but error messages, even when I took the disk from the drive.

  You're way ahead of me. I carted the thing into work the next day so that my technical people might sort it out, only to discover the entire office milling about. It wasn't exacdy pandemonium, more hke the atmosphere of a party that had run out of drink.

  Editors were chatting aimlessly in one another's cubicles. No one was working. They couldn't. There wasn't a terminal functioning.

  Later I was almost relieved when George informed me that my PC's hard drive was so corrupted that I might as well buy a new one. Perhaps with the infectious object destroyed, no one would ever know that the virus had been forwarded by AWAP's own executive director.

  Furious at Kevin for keeping the modern equivalent of a pet scorpion, I held onto the disk as evidence for several days rather than discreedy sliding it back on his shelf. But once I simmered down, I had to admit that Kevin hadn't personally wiped out my company's files, and the debacle was my fault. So one evening I knocked on his door, was granted admission, and closed it behind me. He was sitting at the desk.The screen saver was bhpping in its desultory fashion, dot here, dot there.

  "I wanted to ask you," I said, tapping his floppy. "What's this?"

  "A virus," he said brightly. "You didn't load it in, did you?"

  " O f course not," I said hastily, discovering that lying to a child feels much the same as lying to a parent; my cheeks prickled as

  — 382 —

  they had w h e n I assured my mother after losing my cherry at seventeen that I'd spent the night with a girlfriend she'd never heard of. M o t h e r k n e w better; Kevin did, too. "I mean," I revised mournfully, "only once."

  " O n l y takes once."

  We b o t h k n e w that it would have been ridiculous for me to have sneaked into his r o o m and stolen a disk, with which I subsequently ruined my computer and paralyzed my office, only to come storming in to accuse him of industrial sabotage. So the interchange proceeded with an evenness.

  " W h y do you have it?" I asked respectfully.

  "I keep a collection."

  "Isn't that a peculiar thing to collect?"

  "I don't hke stamps."

  Just then I had a presentiment of w h a t he might have said had you burst in determined to find out why the heck he had a stack of c o m p u t e r viruses above his desk: Well, after we watched Silence of the Lambs, I decided I wanted to be an FBI agent! And you know how they have this whole task-force that, like, tracks down hackers who spread those terrible computer viruses? So I'm studying them and everything, 'cause I've read it's a really big problem for the new economy and globalization and even for our country's defense...! T h a t Kevin skipped such a p e r f o r m a n c e — h e collected c o m p u t e r viruses, end of story, so what?—left me feeling strangely flattere
d.

  So I asked bashfully. " H o w many do you have?"

  "Twenty-three."

  "Are they—difficult to find?"

  He looked at me gamely, with that old sense of indecision, but on some w h i m he decided to experiment with talking to his mother. "They're hard to capture alive," he said. " T h e y get away, and they bite.You have to k n o w h o w to handle them.You know—like a doctor. W h o studies diseases in a lab but doesn't want to get sick himself."

  "You mean, you have to keep them from infecting your o w n machine."

  — 383 —

  "Yeah. Mouse Ferguson's been teaching me the ropes."

  "Since you collect them. Maybe you can explain to m e — w h y do people make them? I don't get it.They don't achieve anything.

  What's the appeal?"

  "I don't get," he said, "what you don't get."

  "I understand hacking into A T & T to get free p h o n e calls or stealing encrypted credit card numbers to run up a bill at T h e Gap. But this sort of computer c r i m e — n o b o d y benefits. What's the point?"

  " T h a t is the point."

  " I ' m still lost," I said.

  "Viruses—they're kind of elegant, you know? Almost—pure.

  Kind of like—charity work, you know? It's selfless."

  "But it's not that different from creating AIDS."

  "Maybe somebody did," he said affably. "'Cause otherwise?

  You type on your computer and go h o m e and the refrigerator comes on and another computer spits out your paycheck and you sleep and you enter more shit on your computer.. .Might as well be dead."

  "So it's this-—. Almost to, what, k n o w you're alive. To show other people they don't control you. To prove you can do something, even if it could get you arrested."

  "Yeah, pretty much," he said appreciatively. In his eyes, I had exceeded myself.

  "Ah," I said, and handed him his disk back. "Well, thanks for explaining."

  As I turned to go, he said, "Your computer's fucked, isn't it."