Read We Need to Talk About Kevin Online

Authors: Lionel Shriver

Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Teenage Boys, #Epistolary Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Massacres, #School Shootings, #High Schools, #New York (State)

We Need to Talk About Kevin (7 page)

BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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But the biggest surprise of all was that I married an
American
. Not just any American either, a man who happened to be American. No, you were American by choice as well as by birth. You were, in fact, a patriot. I had never met one before. Rubes, yes. Blind, untraveled, ignorant people who thought the United States was the whole world, so to say anything against it was like decrying the universe, or air. Instead, you had been a few places—Mexico, one disastrous trip to Italy with a woman whose cornucopia of allergies included tomatoes—and had decided that you liked your own country. No, that you
loved
your own country, its smoothness and efficiency, its practicality, its broad, unpretentious accents and emphasis on honesty. I would say—I did say—that you were enamored of an archaic version of the U.S., either an America that was long past or that never was; that you were enamored of an idea. And you would say—did say—that part of what America was was an idea, and that was more than most countries could claim, which were mostly scrappy pasts and circumscriptions on a map. It was a fine, it was a beautiful idea, too, you said, and you pointed out—I granted you this—that a nation that aimed to preserve above all the ability of its citizens to do pretty much whatever they wanted was exactly the sort of place that should have captivated the likes of me. But it hasn’t worked out that way, I’d object, and you’d counter, better than anywhere else, and we would be off.
It is true that I grew disenchanted. But I would still like to thank you for introducing me to my own country. Wasn’t that how we met? We’d decided at AWAP to run those advertisements in
Mother Jones
and
Rolling Stone
, and when I was vague about the photos we wanted, Young & Rubicam had you stop in. You showed up at my office in a flannel shirt and dusty jeans, a beguiling impertinence. I tried so hard to be professional, because your shoulders were distracting. France, I supposed. The Rhone Valley. And then I dithered over the expense—sending you over, putting you up. You laughed. Don’t be ridiculous, you dismissed. I can find you the Rhone Valley in Pennsylvania. Which indeed you did.
Hitherto, I had always regarded the United States as a place to leave. After you brazenly asked me out—an executive with whom you had a business relationship—you goaded me to admit that had I been born elsewhere, the U.S. of A. was perhaps the first country I would make a beeline to visit: whatever else I might think of it, the place that called the shots and pulled the strings, that made the movies and sold the Coca-Cola and shipped
Star Trek
all the way to Java; the center of the action, a country that you needed a relationship with even if that relationship was hostile; a country that demanded if not acceptance at least rejection—anything but neglect. The country in every other country’s face, that would visit
you
whether you liked it or not almost anywhere on the planet. Okay, okay, I protested.
Okay
. I would visit.
So I visited. In those early days, remember your recurrent astonishment? That I had never been to a baseball game. Or to Yellowstone. Or the Grand Canyon. I sneered at them, but I had never eaten a McDonald’s hot apple pie. (I confess: I liked it.) Someday, you observed, there would be no McDonald’s. Just because there are lots of them doesn’t mean that the hot apple pies aren’t excellent or that it isn’t a privilege to live in a time when you can buy them for 99 cents. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn’t necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.
And that was your perspective on your country as well: that it was not forever. That of course it was an empire, though that was nothing to be ashamed of. History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had ever dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted. Sure it was imperfect, you would add, with the same hastiness with which I observed before Kevin was born that of course some children “had problems.” But you said that if the U.S. were to fall or founder during your lifetime, collapse economically, be overrun by an aggressor, or corrupt from within into something vicious, you would weep.
I believe you would. But I sometimes considered during those days you were carting me off to the Smithsonian, needling me to recite the presidents in order, grilling me on the causes of the Haymarket Riots, that I wasn’t visiting the country, quite. I was visiting
your
country. The one you had made for yourself, the way a child constructs a log cabin out of Popsicle sticks. It was a lovely reproduction, too. Even now, when I glimpse snippets of the Preamble to the Constitution,
We, the people
. . . , the hair raises on the back of my neck. Because I hear your voice. The Declaration of Independence,
We hold these truths
—your voice.
Irony. I have thought about you and irony. It always got your back up when my friends from Europe would come through and dismiss our countrymen as “having no sense of irony.” Yet (ironically) in the latter twentieth century, irony was huge in the U.S., painfully so. In fact, I was sick of it, though I didn’t realize that until we met. Coming into the eighties, everything was “retro,” and there was an undercurrent of snideness, a distancing in all those fifties diners with chrome stools and oversized root-beer floats. Irony means at once having and not having. Irony involves a prissy dabbling, a disavowal. We had friends whose apartments were completely tricked out in sardonic kitsch—pickaninny dolls, framed advertisements for Kellogg’s cornflakes from the twenties (“Look at the bowlfuls go!”)—who owned nothing that wasn’t a joke.
You wouldn’t live that way. Oh, to have “no sense of irony” was supposedly to not know what it was—to be a moron—to have no sense of humor. And you knew what it was. You laughed, a little, at the lampbearing cast-iron black jockey that Belmont picked up for their hearth, to be polite. You got the joke. You just didn’t think it was that funny, really, and in your own life you wanted objects that were truly beautiful and not just a laugh. Such a bright man, you were sincere by design and not merely by nature,
American
by personal fiat, and you would embrace all that was good in that. Is it called naïveté when you’re naive on purpose? You would go on picnics. You would take conventional vacations to national monuments. You would sing
O’er the la-and of the free!
at the top of your tuneless voice at Mets games, and never with a smirk. The United States, you claimed, was on the existential cutting edge. It was a country whose prosperity was without precedence, where virtually everyone had enough to eat; a country that strove for justice and offered up nearly every entertainment and sport, every religion, ethnicity, occupation, and political affiliation to be had, with a wild wealth of landscapes, of flora and fauna and weather. If it was not possible to have a fine, rich, sumptuous life in this country, with a beautiful wife and a healthy, growing boy, then it was not possible anywhere. And even now, I believe that you may be right. But that it may not be possible anywhere.
 
9 P.M. (BACK HOME)
 
The waitress was tolerant, but the Bagel Café was closing. And printout may be impersonal, but it’s easier on the eye. For that matter, I worry that throughout that handwritten passage you’ve been skimming, reading ahead. I worry that the instant you spotted “Chatham” up top you could think of nothing else, and that you for once couldn’t care less about my feelings for the United States.
Chatham
. I go to
Chatham
?
I do. I go at every opportunity. Fortunately, these journeys every two weeks up to Claverack Juvenile Correctional Facility are aimed at such a restrictive window of visiting hours that I am not free to consider going an hour later or another day. I leave at exactly 11:30 because it is the first Saturday of the month and I must arrive immediately after the second lunch slot at 2:00. I do not indulge myself in reflection over how much I dread going to see him, or, more improbably, look forward to it. I just go.
You’re astonished. You shouldn’t be. He’s my son, too, and a mother should visit her child in prison. I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules. If anything, following the letter of the unwritten parental law was one of my failings. That came out in the trial—the civil suit. I was appalled by how upstanding I looked on paper. Vince Mancini, Mary’s lawyer, accused me in court of visiting my son so dutifully in detention during his own trial only because I anticipated being sued for parental negligence. I was acting a part, he claimed, going through the motions. Of course, the trouble with jurisprudence is that it cannot accommodate subtleties. Mancini was onto something. There may indeed be an element of theater in these visits. But they continue when no one is watching, because if I am trying to prove that I am a good mother, I am proving this, dismally, as it happens, to myself.
Kevin himself has been surprised by my dogged appearances, which is not to say, in the beginning at least, pleased. Back in 1999, at sixteen, he was still at that age when to be seen with your mother was embarrassing; how bittersweetly these truisms about teenagers persist through the most adult of troubles. And in those first few visits he seemed to regard my very presence as an accusation, so before I said a single word he’d get angry. It didn’t seem sensible that
he
should be the one mad at
me
.
But in the same vein, when a car nearly sideswipes me in a crosswalk, I’ve noticed that the driver is frequently furious—shouting, gesticulating, cursing—at me, whom he nearly ran over and who had the undisputed right of way. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad. If I’d had the presence back then to seize on the first part of that proof, I might have glimpsed in Kevin’s instantaneous dudgeon a glimmer of hope. But at the time, his fury simply mystified me. It seemed so unfair. Women tend more toward chagrin, and not only in traffic. So I blamed me, and he blamed me. I felt ganged up on.
Hence, when he was first incarcerated we didn’t have conversations as such. Simply being in front of him made me limp. He sapped me even of the energy to cry, which anyway would not have been very productive. After five minutes, I might ask him, my voice hoarse, about the food. He would gawk at me incredulously, as if under the circumstances the inquiry were as inane as it actually was. Or I’d ask, “Are they treating you all right?” although I wasn’t sure what that meant or even whether I
wanted
his minders to treat him “all right.” He’d slur that
sure they kiss me beddy-bye every night.
It didn’t take long for me to run out of pro forma Mommy questions, for which I think we were both relieved.
If it took little time to get past my posing as the loyal mother who’s only concerned that sonny is eating his vegetables, we are still contending with Kevin’s more impenetrable pose as the sociopath who is beyond reach. The trouble is, while my role as a mother who stands by her son no matter what is ultimately demeaning—it is mindless, irrational, blind, and sappy, hence a part I might gratefully shed—Kevin gets too much sustenance from his own cliché to let it go quietly. He still seems intent on demonstrating to me that he may have been a subjugant in my house who had to clean his plate, but now he’s a celebrity who’s been on the cover of
Newsweek
, whose fricative appellation,
Kevin Khatchadourian
—or “KK” to the tabloids, like Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia—has tsked chidingly off every major network news anchor’s tongue. He’s even had a hand in setting the national agenda, sparking new calls for corporal punishment, juvenile death sentences, and the V-chip. In lockup, he would have me know that he is no tinhorn delinquent, but a notorious fiend of whom his less accomplished fellow juveniles are in awe.
Once in those early days (after he’d grown more talkative), I asked him: “How do they regard you, the other boys? Do they . . . are they critical? Of what you did?” This was as close as I could come to asking, do they trip you in hallways or hawk in your soup. At first, you see, I was hesitant, deferential. He frightened me, physically frightened me, and I was desperate not to set him off. There were prison guards nearby, of course, but there had been security personnel in his high school, police in Gladstone, and what good had they been? I never feel protected any more.
Kevin honked, that hard, joyless laugh forced through his nose. And said something like, “Are you kidding? They fucking worship me,
Mumsey
. There’s not a juve in this joint who hasn’t taken out fifty dickheads in his
peer group
before breakfast—in his head. I’m the only one with the stones to do it in real life.” Whenever Kevin cites “real life,” it is with the excessive firmness with which fundamentalists reference heaven or hell. It’s as if he’s trying to talk himself into something.
I had only his word, of course, that far from being shunned Kevin had achieved a status of mythic proportions among hoods who had merely hijacked cars or knifed rival drug dealers. But I have come to believe he must have once garnered some prestige, since, in his oblique fashion, just this afternoon he allowed that it had begun to ebb.
BOOK: We Need to Talk About Kevin
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