If you don’t mind my weighing in on Kevin’s side for once, you and his teachers thought all through primary school that he needed help on his organizational skills, but I’ve decided that his organizational skills were razor sharp. From first grade on, those assignments demonstrate an intuitive appreciation for the arbitrary, for the numbing powers of repetition, and for the absurdist possibilities of the non sequitur. More, his robotic declaratives do not indicate a failure to master the niceties of prose style; they are his prose style, refined with all the fastidiousness that attended H. L. Mencken’s. Uneasy intimations to us at parent-teacher conferences that Kevin “didn’t seem to put his heart into his schoolwork” to the contrary, Kevin did put his heart into his work, his heart and soul. Check out this fourth-grade rendition of the assignment, “Meet My Mother”:My mother goes somewhere else. My mother sleeps in a different bed. My mother eats different food. My mother comes home. My mother sleeps at home. My mother eats at home. My mother tells other people to go somewhere else. Other people sleep in a different bed. Other people eat different food. Other people come home. Other people sleep at home. Other people eat at home. My mother is rich.
I know what you’re thinking, or I know what you thought then. That it was Kevin’s surly, remote pose with me that was fake, while with you he could relax and be his sprightly, chipper self. That the pervasive stiltedness of his written work revealed a commonplace gap between his thoughts and his powers of expression. I’m willing to grant that his closed condescension toward me was an artifice, even if its biding-time quality, tracing back to my appropriation of his squirt gun, felt true. But neither the Beaver Cleaver nor the windup schoolboy straight man was any less bogus. Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
I just glanced over what I’ve written so far and realized that I was being awfully summary about a solid seven years of our lives together; moreover, that the abundance of that summary concerned Celia. I’m ashamed of this, I really am, but while I can remember how we spent every one of Celia’s birthdays during those years, my memories of Kevin from the age of eight to about fourteen tend to blur. Oh, a few bits and pieces stick out, especially my disastrous attempt to impart the enthusiasms of my professional life by taking you and thirteen-year old Kevin (you’ll recall that Celia, too young, stayed with my mother) to Vietnam. I deliberately chose that country because it’s a place that to any American, at least of our generation, inescapably means something, saving it from the dissociated Just Somewhere Else and Who Cares feeling that foreign countries so easily induce when you visit them for the first time, and to which Kevin would naturally fall prey. Too, Vietnam had only recently opened up to tourism, so I couldn’t resist the opportunity on my own account. But I grant that this sense of connectedness, of guilty intimacy with rice paddies and wizened old women in conical straw hats, would pertain mostly to you and me. I’d marched on Washington in my twenties, while you had actually begged the Draft Board, if to no avail, not to reject you because of flat feet; with Saigon already fallen three years before, we had some bracing knockdown drag-outs over the war when we met. Kevin had no such associations, so maybe despite my intentions to the contrary, I had indeed dragged him to Just Somewhere Else and Who Cares. Nonetheless, I’ll never forget my stinging humiliation when our son—if nothing else, ever a quick study—sauntered through the sea of scooters in Hanoi telling the “gooks” to get out of the way. However, one other memory rises eidetically above the blur, and it is not, Franklin, one more mean, slanderous example of how our son was heartless from birth. I refer to that two weeks when he got so sick. He was ten. For a while, Dr. Goldblatt worried that it was meningitis, though an excruciating spinal tap only proved that it wasn’t. Despite his poor appetite, Kevin was generally a healthy boy, and this was my only experience of our son laid so low for so long. When he first started coming down with it, I noticed that the spirit in which he turned up his nose at my meals was no longer sneering; he’d look at his plate and slump, as if in defeat. In fact, since he was accustomed—like his mother—to battling his own impulses as much as outside forces, he struggled to stuff down one of my lamb sarma before giving up. He didn’t lurk in shadows or march martinet-style down the hall but began to wander, sagging against furniture. The rigid set of his face went limp and lost that smirking sideways skew. Eventually I found him curled helplessly on my study’s ink-stained Armenian carpet, and I was astonished that when I helped him up and lifted him to bed that he offered no resistance. Franklin, he put his arms around my neck. In his bedroom, he let me undress him, and when I solicited which pajamas he wanted to wear, rather than roll his eyes and say I don’t care, he thought for a moment and then whispered in a small voice, “The spaceman ones. I like the monkey in the rocket.” This was the first I’d heard that he liked a single garment in his possession, and when I discovered this was the one pair in the laundry hamper, I was distraught, shaking them out and hurrying back to promise that the next day I would wash them to be nice and fresh. I expected, “Don’t bother,” but instead got—another first—“Thanks.” When I tucked him in, he huddled gladly with the blanket to his chin, and when I slipped the thermometer between his flushed lips—his face had a bright febrile blotch—he suckled the glass with gentle rhythmic contractions, as if finally, at the age of ten, having learned to nurse. His fever was high for a child—over 101°—and when I stroked his forehead with a moist washcloth, he hummed. I cannot say whether we are less ourselves when we are sick, or more. But I did find that remarkable two-week period a revelation. When I sat on the edge of his bed, Kevin would nestle his crown against my thigh; once I became convinced that it wouldn’t be pushing my luck, I pulled his head onto my lap and he clutched my sweater. A couple of times when he threw up he didn’t make it to the toilet; yet when I cleaned up the mess and told him not to worry, he exhibited none of the self-satisfied complacency of his diaperchanging phase but whimpered that he was sorry and seemed, despite my reassurances, ashamed. I know that we all transform one way or another when we’re ill, but Kevin wasn’t just cranky or tired, he was a completely different person. And that’s how I achieved an appreciation for how much energy and commitment it must have taken him the rest of the time to generate this other boy (or boys). Even you had conceded that Kevin was “a little antagonistic” toward his sister, but when our two-year-old tiptoed into his bedroom, he let her pet his head with damp little pats. When she offered him her get-well drawings, he didn’t dismiss them as dumb or take advantage of feeling bad to tell her, as was well within his rights, to leave him alone, instead exerting himself to say weakly, “That’s a nice picture, Celie. Why don’t you draw me another one?” I had thought that dominant emotional tone of his, so extravagant from birth, was immutable. Call it rage or resentment, it was only a matter of degree. But underneath the levels of fury, I was astonished to discover, lay a carpet of despair. He wasn’t mad. He was sad. The other thing that amazed me was his curious aversion to your company. You may not remember, since after he’d rebuffed you once or twice—imploring when you popped in that he’d like to go to sleep or laying your present of rare collectible comics silently, wearily on the floor—you were injured enough to withdraw. Maybe he felt unable to muster the Gee, Dad boisterousness of your Saturday afternoon Frisbee tosses, but in that instance he clearly regarded this rah-rah boy mode as compulsory with his father. I comforted you that children always prefer their mothers when they’re sick, but you were still a little jealous. Kevin was breaking the rules, ruining the balance. Celia was mine, and Kevin was yours. You and Kevin were close, he would confide in you, and lean on you in times of trouble. But I think that was the very reason he recoiled: your insistence, your crowding, your wanting, your cajoling, chummy Daddishness. It was too much. He didn’t have the energy—not to give you the intimacy you demanded, but to resist it. Kevin made himself up for you, and there must have been, in the very lavishness of his fabrication, a deep and aching desire to please. But do you ever consider how disappointed he must have been when you accepted the decoy as the real thing? The second industry he could no longer afford was the manufacture of apathy—though you’d think that apathy would come naturally in a state of malaise. Instead, little islands of shy desire began to emerge like bumps of sun-warmed dry land in a cold receding sea. Once he was holding down food, I asked what he’d like to eat, and he confessed that he liked my clam chowder, going so far as to assert that he preferred the milk-based to the tomato. He even requested a toasted slice of katah, whereas he had previously gone out of his way to disdain anything Armenian. He confessed to a fancy for one of Celia’s ragged stuffed animals (the gorilla), which she donated solemnly to his pillow as if her humble primate had been selected for a rare honor—as indeed it had been. When I asked him what I should read to him on the long afternoons—I had taken time off from AWAP, of course—he was a bit at a loss, but I think that was only because when either of us had read stories before, he had refused to listen. So just on a hunch—it seemed an appealing tale for a boy—I picked Robin Hood and His Merry Men. He loved it. He implored me to read Robin Hood over and over, until he must have committed whole passages to heart. To this day I will never know whether this particular tale took so because I read it at some perfect chemical point—where he was strong enough to pay attention but still too weak to generate a force field of indifference—or whether there was something about the nature of this one story that captured his imagination. Like many children foisted into the headlong march of civilization when it was already well down the road, he may have found comfort in the trappings of a world whose workings he could understand; horse-drawn carts and bows and arrows are pleasantly fathomable to the ten-year-old. Perhaps he liked stealing from the rich and giving to the poor because he had an instinctive appreciation for the anti-hero. (Or, as you quipped at the time, maybe he was just a budding tax-and-spend Democrat.) If I will never forget those two weeks, as indelible was the morning that he felt well enough to get out of bed, informing me that he would dress himself and would I please leave the room. I obliged, trying to hide my disappointment, and when I returned later to ask what he’d like for lunch, maybe clam chowder again, he jerked his head in annoyance. “Whatever,” he said, his generation’s watchword. A grilled cheese sandwich? —“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” he said—a phrase that, whatever they say about kids growing up fast these days, still took me aback from a child of ten. I withdrew, though not before noticing that the set of his mouth was once more askew. I told myself I should be pleased; he was better. Better? Well, not to me. Yet his fever had never burned quite high enough to sear the seeds of a tiny, nascent interest to ash. I caught him the following week, reading Robin Hood to himself. Later, I helped you two buy his first bow-and-arrow set at the sporting goods store at the mall and construct the archery range at the crest of our sloping backyard, praying all the while that this little bloom of rapture in our firstborn would endure the length of the project. I was all for it.
Eva
FEBRUARY 24, 2001
Dear Franklin,
When I saw Kevin today his left cheek was bruised, his lower lip swollen; his knuckles were scabbed. I asked if he was all right and he said he cut himself shaving. Maybe the lamest remarks pass for drollery when you’re locked up. It gave him palpable pleasure to deny me access to his travails inside, and who am I to interfere with his few enjoyments; I didn’t press the matter. Afterward, I might have complained to the prison authorities about their failure to protect our son, but considering what Kevin has himself inflicted on his peers, objection to a few scrapes in return seemed worse than petulant. 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. “If it makes you feel better,” I added sourly, “Soweto’s basketball career is no longer a slam-dunk. ” “Yeah, well as a matter of fact that does make me feel better. Last thing the world needs is one more darkie who wants to play hoops in the NBA. Talk about stale.” “Talk about stale! Another high school rampage?” Kevin cleaned his nails. “I prefer to think of it as tradition. ” “The media assumed you picked on Soweto because he was black.” “That makes sense,” Kevin snorted. “Nine kids locked in that gym. Only one of them’s of the Negro persuasion, and bingo, it’s a ‘hate crime.’” “Oh, it was a hate crime, all right,” I said quietly. Kevin half smiled. “Totally.” “They said the same thing about Miguel Espinoza. That you went for him because he was Latino.” “Superspic? I leave out communities of color, they’d say I discriminated.” “But the real reason was he was such an academic bright spark, isn’t it? Skipped a grade. All those dizzyingly high scores on state achievement tests and the PSAT.” “Whenever he talk to you, turn out he just trying to use ‘echelon’ in a sentence.” “But you know what ‘echelon’ means. You know all kinds of big words. That’s why you thought it was such a hoot to write whole essays with words three letters long.” “Fine. So it’s not like I was jealous. Which, if I’m getting the drift of this bor-ing third degree, is what you’re getting at.” I took a moment; you know, Kevin did look bored. Documentary makers like Jack Marlin, criminologists dashing off best-sellers, the principals and teachers and reverends interviewed on the news; your parents, Thelma Corbitt, Loretta Greenleaf—all these people obsessing over why KK did it, with the notable exception of our son. It was one more subject in which Kevin was simply not interested: himself. “The cafeteria worker,” I raised. “He doesn’t fit the pattern.” (I always feel sheepish that I can’t remember his name.) “He wasn’t on the list, was he?” “Collateral damage,” said Kevin sleepily. “ And,” I said, determined to say something to get him to look alive, “I know your secret about Laura Woolford. She was pretty, wasn’t she?” “Saved her trouble,” Kevin slurred. “First sign of a wrinkle and she’d a killed herself anyway.” “Very, very pretty.” “Yep. Bet that girl’s mirror was all wore out.” “ And you were sweet on her. ” If I’d any remaining doubt, Kevin’s theatrical guffaw cleared it right up. He doesn’t often, but he rent me then, just a little. Adolescents are so obvious. “Give me credit,” he sneered, “for better taste. That Barbie doll was all accessories.” “It embarrassed you, didn’t it?” I prodded. “The eyeliner, the Calvin Klein, the designer haircuts. The nylons and opalescent pumps. Not icy, misanthropic KK’s style.” “She wasn’t all that hot-looking when I was finished.” “It’s the oldest story in the book,” I goaded. “ After confiding darkly to friends that, ‘If I can’t have her, then no one else is going to...,’ Charlie Schmoe opened fire....’ Is that what this whole sorry mess was meant to cover? Another pimply teen smitten with the unattainable prom queen goes berserk?” “In your dreams,” said Kevin. “You wanna turn this into a Harlequin romance, that’s your midget imagination, not mine.” “Luke Woodham was lovesick, wasn’t he? In Pearl? You know, ‘The Whiner.’” “He only went out with Christy Menefee three times, and they’d been busted up for a year!” “Laura rebuffed you, didn’t she?” “I never came within a mile of that cunt. And as for that fat Woodham fuck, you know his mother came with him on every date? No wonder he reamed her with a butcher knife.” “What happened? Did you finally work yourself up into cornering her against a locker during lunch? Did she slap you? Laugh in your face?” “That the story you wanna tell yourself,” he said, scratching his exposed midriff, “I can’t stop you.” “Tell other people, too. I was approached by a documentary filmmaker not long ago. Terribly anxious to hear ‘my side.’ Maybe I should call him back. I could explain to him how it was unrequited love all along. My son was head-over-heels for this smashing little number who wouldn’t give him the time of day. After all, how did Laura go down? Kevin may have made a hash of the rest of that crowd, but he shot her straight through the heart, our own cupid of Gladstone High. All those other poor wretches were just camouflage, just—what did he call it? Collateral damage. ” Kevin leaned forward and lowered his voice confidentially. “How much did you care what girls I did and didn’t like before I whacked a couple? How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?” I’m afraid that at that point I lost it a bit. “ You want me to feel sorry for you? ” I said in a voice that carried; the mole guard looked over. “Well, first I’ll feel sorry for Thelma Corbitt, and Mary Woolford. For the Fergusons and the Randolphs, for the Ulanovs and the Espinozas. I’ll let my heart break over a teacher who bent over backward to get inside your precious head, over a basketball player who can barely walk, and even a cafeteria worker I’ve never met, and then we’ll see if there’s any pity left over for you. There just might be, but it’s the scraps of my table you’re due, and for scraps you should count yourself lucky.” “Nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh -nyeh!” Then he laughed. Oh, Franklin. Whenever I let fly he seems so satisfied.
I admit, I tried to make him mad today. I was determined to make him feel small, not the deep dark impenetrable conundrum of Our Contemporary Society, but the butt of a joke, hoisted on his own retard. Because every time Kevin takes another bow as Evil Incarnate, he swells a little larger. Each slander slewed in his direction— nihilistic, morally destitute, depraved, degenerate, or debased —bulks his scrawny frame better than my cheese sandwiches ever did. No wonder he’s broadening out. He eats the world’s hearty denunciations for breakfast. Well, I don’t want him to feel unfathomable, a big beefed-up allegory of generational disaffection; I don’t want to allow him to cloak the sordid particulars of his tacky, crappy, gimcrack, derivative stunt with the grand mantle of Rudderless Youth Today. I want him to feel like one more miserable, all-too-understandable snippet of a plain dumb kid. I want him to feel witless and sniveling and inconsequential, and the last thing in the world I want to betray is how much of my day, every day, I spend trying to figure out what makes that boy tick. My needling about his being stuck on Laura was merely an educated guess. Although any suggestion that his grandiose atrocity derived from a tawdry little broken heart was certain to offend, I’m not honestly sure how much Kevin’s crush on Laura Woolford had anything to do with Thursday. For all I know, he was trying to impress her. But I have made a study of those victims, whether or not he cares to examine the list himself. At first glance, it was a disparate group, so motley that their names might have been drawn from a hat: a basketball player, a studious Hispanic, a film buff, a classical guitarist, an emotive thespian, a computer hacker, a gay ballet student, a homely political activist, a vain teen beauty, a part-time cafeteria worker, and a devoted English teacher. Slice of life; an arbitrary assemblage of eleven characters scooped willy-nilly from the fifty or so whom our son didn’t happen to like. But Kevin’s displeasure is not the only thing that his victims had in common. Okay, throw out the cafeteria worker, clearly there by mistake; Kevin has a neat mind, and he’d prefer a tidy group of ten. Otherwise, every one of them enjoyed something. Never mind whether this passion was pursued with any flash; whatever his parents claim, I gather Soweto Washington hadn’t a chance at going pro; Denny was (forgive me, Thelma) an atrocious actor, and Greer Ulanov’s petitioning New York congressmen who were going to vote with Clinton anyway was a waste of time. No one is willing to admit as much now, but Joshua Lukronsky’s obsession with movies was apparently annoying to many more students than just our son; he was forever quoting whole sequences of dialogue from Quentin Tarantino scripts and staging tiresome contests at lunch, when the rest of the table preferred to negotiate trades of roast beef sandwiches for slices of pound cake, over who could name ten Robert DeNiro films in chronological order. Be that as it may, Joshua did love movies, and even his outright irksomeness didn’t keep Kevin from coveting the infatuation itself. It didn’t seem to matter infatuation with what. Soweto Washington loved sport and at least the illusion of a future with the Knicks; Miguel Espinoza, learning (at any rate, Harvard); Jeff Reeves, Telemann; Denny Corbitt, Tennessee Williams; Mouse Ferguson, the Pentium III processor; Ziggy Randolph, West Side Story, not to mention other men; Laura Woolford loved herself; and Dana Rocco—the ultimate unforgivable—loved Kevin. I realize that Kevin doesn’t experience his aversions as envy. To Kevin, all ten of his victims were supremely ridiculous. They each got excited over trifles, and their enthusiasms were comical. But like my wallpaper of maps, impenetrable passions have never made Kevin laugh. From early childhood, they have enraged him. Sure, most children have a taste for spoliation. Tearing things apart is easier than making them; however exacting his preparations for Thursday, they couldn’t have been nearly as demanding as it would have been to befriend those people instead. So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am. Besides, for most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon. And there’s an ownership to destruction, an intimacy; an appropriation. In this way, Kevin has clutched Denny Corbitt and Laura Woolford to his breast, inhaled their hearts and hobbies whole. Destruction may be motivated by nothing more complicated than acquisitiveness, a kind of ham-handed, misguided greed. I watched Kevin despoil other people’s pleasures for most of his life. I can’t count the number of times I picked up the word favorite during some hot-under-the-collar maternal diatribe—the red galoshes stuffed with snack cake in kindergarten were Jason’s favorite footwear. Kevin could easily have overheard that the white caftan he squirted with concord grape juice was my favorite floor-length dress. For that matter, each walking adolescent bull’s-eye in that gym was some teacher’s favorite student. He seems to especially revile enjoyments I can only call innocent. For example, he habitually beelined for anyone who was poised to snap a photograph and walked deliberately in front of the lens. I began to dread our trips to national monuments, if only on behalf of the Japanese and all their wasted film. Why, across the globe are scattered dozens of collectible snaps, blurred head shots of the notorious KK in profile. Further illustrations are countless; I’ll cite only one in detail.
When Kevin had just turned fourteen, I was approached at his middle school’s PTA meeting to chaperone the eighth-grade spring dance. I remember being a little surprised that Kevin intended to go, since he boycotted most organized school activities. (In retrospect, maybe the draw was Laura Woolford, whose shimmering crotch-high frock for the occasion must have set Mary back hundreds.) This end-of-the-year bash was the highlight of the school’s social calendar, and most of his classmates would have been anticipating admission to this exclusively senior rite of passage since the sixth grade. The idea was to give these kids practice at being Real Teenagers and to let them swagger around as kings of the hill before entering the adjoining high school as hacked-on peon freshmen at the bottom of the pecking order. Anyway, I said I’d do it, not especially looking forward to confiscating pints of Southern Comfort; I treasured the memory of my own hot, surreptitious hits from hip flasks behind the stage curtains of William Horlick High School in Racine. I was never keen on getting stuck with the role of Big Killjoy Meanie and wondered if I might not look quietly the other way so long as the kids were discreet and didn’t get sloppy drunk. Of course I was naive, and Southern Comfort was the least of the administration’s worries. At our preparatory meeting the week before, the first thing they taught chaperones was how to recognize a crack vial. Graver still, the faculty was still anguished over a couple of national incidents at the start of the calendar year. Kids graduating from eighth grade may be only fourteen, but Tronneal Mangum had been only thirteen when that January in West Palm Beach, he shot and killed another classmate in front of his middle school because the boy owed him $40. Only three weeks later in Bethel, Alaska (it’s embarrassing, Franklin, but I remember all this stuff because when conversation flags at Claverack, Kevin often reverts to reciting his favorite bedtime stories), Evan Ramsey had got hold of his family’s.12-gauge shotgun, murdered a popular school athlete at his desk, shot up the school, and then systematically stalked and blew away his high school principal—in my day, a word whose spelling we were taught to distinguish from principle by the mnemonic, “The principal is your PAL.” Statistically, of course, in a country with 50 million schoolkids, the killings were insignificant, and I remember going home after that meeting and complaining to you about the faculty’s overreaction. They’d moaned about the fact that there wasn’t enough left in the budget to purchase metal detectors, while training a whole cadre of chaperones on how to frisk every kid on the way in. And I indulged myself in a bit of liberal indignation (that always revulsed you). “Of course, for ages black kids and Hispanic kids have been shooting each other in shithole junior high schools in Detroit,” I opined over a late dinner that night, “and that’s all very by-the-by. A few white kids, middle-class kids, protected, private-telephone-line, own-their-own-TV suburban kids go ballistic, and suddenly it’s a national emergency. Besides, Franklin, you should have seen those parents and teachers eat it up.” My stuffed chicken breast was getting cold. “You’ve never seen so much self-importance, and when I made a joke once they all turned to me with this it’s not funny expression, like airport security when you make a crack about a bomb. They all love the idea of being on the front line, doing something ooh-ooh dangerous instead of chaperoning a sock hop, for God’s sake, being in the national spotlight so they can participate in the usual politics of hysteria. I swear on some level they’re all jealous, because Moses Lake and Palm Beach and Bethel have had one, what’s wrong with Gladstone, why can’t we have one, too. Like they’re all secretly hoping that as long as Junior or Baby Jane sneaks off without a scratch wouldn’t it be keen if the eighth-grade dance turned into a melee and we could all get on TV before the whole tacky number becomes passé....” I’m making myself a little sick here, but I’m afraid I did spout this sort of thing, and yes, Kevin was probably listening. But I doubt there was a household in the United States that didn’t talk about those shootings one way or another. Decry the “politics of hysteria” as I might, they hit a nerve. I’m sure that this dance has emerged in such high relief in my mind because of where it took place. After all, it’s a small memory; whether to the disappointment of those parents or not, the event passed without a hitch, and as for the one student who probably remembers the evening as a calamity, I never even knew her name. The gym. It was in that gym. Because the middle school and high school had been built on the same campus, they often shared facilities. Fine facilities they were, too, for it was partly this good school that had drawn you to buy us a house nearby. Since, to your despair, Kevin shunned school sports, we’d never attended his middle school’s basketball games, so this glorified baby-sitting job remains my sole experience of that structure from the inside. Freestanding, it was cavernous, more than two stories high, slick and expensive—I think it even converted to an ice hockey rink. (How wasteful that the Nyack School Board has, last I read, decided to tear the whole thing down; students are apparently dodging PE courses by claiming that the gym is haunted.) That night, the arena made quite a booming echo chamber for the DJ. Any sports equipment had been cleared off, and though my expectation of balloons and bunting was clearly a hangover from my own dance debut doing the twist in 1961, they had hung a mirror ball. I may have been a rotten mother—just shut up, it’s true—but I wasn’t so deplorable as to hang around my fourteen-year-old son at his school dance. So I positioned myself on the opposite side of the gym, enjoying a good view of his sideways slump against the cinder-block wall. I was curious; I’d rarely seen him in the context of his larger social milieu. The only student beside him was the unshakable Leonard Pugh, with his weaselly hee-hee face, and even at 100 yards exuding that greasy toadying quality, a sniggering obsequiousness that always seemed of a piece with his faint odor of day-old fish. Lenny had recently pierced his nose, and the area around the stud had got infected—one nostril was bright red and half again as large as the other; its smear of antibiotic cream caught the light. Something about that kid always put me in mind of brown smudges in underpants. Kevin had recently conceived his tiny-clothes fashion, which (typically) Lenny had aped. Kevin’s black jeans might have fit him when he was eleven. The legs reached mid-calf, exposing dark hairs sprouting on his shins; the crotch, whose zipper would not quite close, well sponsored his equipment. Lenny’s ocherous cotton slacks would have looked nearly as hideous had they fit. They were both wearing stretched Fruit of the Loom white T-shirts, leaving the usual three inches of bare midriff. Perhaps it was my imagination, but whenever schoolmates passed by, they seemed to give those two wide berth. I might have been alarmed that our son appeared to be the object of avoidance—and I was, rather, though his classmates didn’t snicker at Kevin as if he were a social reject. If anything, had the other students been laughing, they stopped. In fact, when crossing in front of that pair, other students ceased to talk altogether and only resumed their chatter once well out of the duo’s earshot. The girls held themselves unnaturally erect, as if holding their breath. Instead of squinting at the tiny-clothes brigade askance, even football types trained their eyes straight ahead, only darting an edgy backward glance at Kevin and his pet hamster once a safe stone’s throw away. Meanwhile, as eighthgraders hung back from the dance floor and flowered the walls of the gym, the space on either side of our son and his sidekick remained deserted for a good ten feet. Not one of his classmates nodded, smiled, or ventured so much as an innocuous how’s tricks, as if hesitant to risk—what? I’d anticipated that the music would make me feel old—by groups I’d never heard of, whose pounding appeal would elude the decrepit. But when the sound system cranked up, I was startled to recognize, between selections of timeless bubblegum, some of the same “artists,” as we pretentiously called them then, to which you and I would have flopped about in our twenties: The Stones, Credence, The Who; Hendrix, Joplin, and The Band; Franklin, Pink Floyd! With little to do with myself and repelled by the sweet red punch (which cried out for a slug of vodka), I wondered if the fact that Kevin’s peers were still nodding along with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, The Grateful Dead, and even The Beatles made our own era especially distinguished, or his especially destitute. When “Stairway to Heaven” came on—that old warhorse!—I had to stifle a laugh. I never expected that Kevin would dance; that would be dumb, and in some respects that boy hadn’t changed since he was four. The rest of the group’s reluctance to break in the dance floor was pro forma; we were the same way, no one wanting to be first, to draw excessive and inevitably less than kind attention to themselves. In my day, we’d all dare one another interminably, nip at Dutch courage behind the curtains, and finally shuffle from the walls in concert once our safety-in-numbers quorum had reached at least ten. So I was impressed when, the midcourt populated by no more than whirling polka dots from the mirror ball, one lone soul took the floor. She didn’t assume a shadowy corner, either, but the center. With pale, translucent skin, the girl not only had blond hair but blond lashes and eyebrows, whose tentative definition made her features look washed-out. There was also a weakness in her chin—small and skisloped—and it was mostly due to this one less than classical feature that she’d never be considered pretty (by how little we’re undone). The other problem was her clothes. Most girls at the dance had played it safe with jeans, and the few dresses I’d spotted were either black leather or sleek, spangled, and smashing, like Laura Woolford’s. But this fourteen-yearold—for shorthand, let’s call her Alice—was wearing a dress that came almost to her knees and tied in the back with a bow. It was a tan plaid. It had puffed sleeves. She had a ribbon in her hair and patent leather on her feet. She’d clearly been clad by a mother afflicted with some woefully generic notion of what a young girl wore to “a party,” never mind the year. Even I recognized at once that Alice was uncool— a word whose improbable currency from our generation to the next testifies to the timelessness of the concept. What is cool changes; that there is such a thing as cool is immutable. And in our heyday, anyway, the average nerd got a little credit for acting mortified and apologetic, staring at his shoes. But I’m afraid this poor chinless waif didn’t have enough social intelligence to rue her puffed-sleeve, tan-plaid, tie-bowed party dress. When her mother brought it home, she doubtless threw her arms around the woman in moronic gratitude. It was “Stairway to Heaven” that had enticed her to strut her stuff. Yet however we may all keep a warm place in our hearts for that old Led Zeppelin standard, it’s terribly slow and I personally remembered the tune as undanceable. Not that this stopped Alice. She extended her arms and lunged in ever-widening circles with her eyes closed. She was clearly transported, oblivious to the fact that enthusiastic turns exposed her panties. As she got caught up in the thrall of bass guitar, her moves lost any semblance of rock-and-roll boogie and wobbled between unschooled ballet and Sufi dancing. In case I’ve sounded mean, I was really rather enchanted. Our little Isadora Duncan understudy was so uninhibited, so exuberant! I may even have envied her a little. Wistfully I remembered jigging around our Tribeca loft to Talking Heads when pregnant with Kevin, and it saddened me that I no longer did that. And though she was a good eight years older than Celia, something about this girl as she flounced and pirouetted from one end of the gym to the other reminded me of our daughter. An unlikely exhibitionist, she seemed to have taken to the floor simply because this was one of her favorite songs—that word again—and because the empty space made it easier to rush around the floor in a swoon. She probably emoted about her own living room to the same song and saw no reason not to dance in exactly the same flamboyant manner merely because 200 malicious adolescents were leering on the sidelines. It always seems interminable, but “Stairway to Heaven” was almost over; he might have held off two more minutes. But no. I felt a peculiar stab of fear as Kevin peeled languidly off the cinder block and sauntered in an unerring straight line toward Alice, tracking her like a Patriot missile homing in on a Scud. Then he stopped, right under the mirror ball, having correctly calculated that Alice’s next pirouette would land her left ear exactly in line with his mouth. There. Contact. He leaned, just a little, and whispered. I would never pretend to know what he said. But the image has informed all my subsequent mental reconstructions of Thursday. Alice froze. Her face infused with all the self-consciousness of which it had a moment before been so conspicuously absent. Her eyes darted left and right, unable to find a single resting place that afforded respite. Suddenly all too well aware of her audience, she seemed to register the obligations of the folly she’d begun; the song wasn’t quite finished, and she was compelled to keep up appearances by bobbing to a few more bars. For the next forty seconds or so, she floundered back and forth in a macabre slow-motion death dance, like Faye Dunaway at the end of Bonnie and Clyde. The DJ having aptly segued to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” she clutched her tan-plaid skirt and bunched it between her legs. Hobbling toward a dark corner, Alice pressed her elbows tightly to her waist, as each hand fought for cover under the other. I sensed that, in some sickening fashion, over the course of the previous minute she had just grown up. Now she knew that her dress was geeky, that her chin was weak. That her mother had betrayed her. That she was uncool; that she would never be pretty. And most of all, she had learned to never, ever take to an empty dance floor—possibly any dance floor—for the rest of her life. I wasn’t there, on Thursday. But two years before, I was witness to its harbinger in that same gym, when a lone graduate of Gladstone Middle School was assassinated.
Eva
