We Need to Talk About Kevin

MARCH 25, 2001

Dear Franklin,

I have a confession to make. For all my ragging on you in these days, I’ve become shamefully dependent on television. In fact, as long as I’m baring all: One evening last month in the middle of Frasier, the tube winked out cold, and I’m afraid that I rather fell apart—banging the set, plugging and unplugging, wiggling knobs. I’m long past weeping over Thursday on a daily basis, but I go into a frenzy when I can’t find out how Niles takes the news that Daphne’s going to marry Donnie.

Anyway, tonight after the usual chicken breast (a bit overcooked), I was flicking through the channels when the screen suddenly filled with our son’s face. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’m not. And this wasn’t the ninth-grade school photo all the papers ran—out of date, black-and-white, with its acid grin—but Kevin’s more robust visage at seventeen. I recognized the interviewer’s voice. It was Jack Marlin’s documentary.

Marlin had ditched the dry thriller title “Extracurricular Activities” for the punchier “Bad Boy,” reminding me of you; I’ll finish off that bad boy in a couple of hours, you’d say, about an easy scouting job. You applied the expression to just about everything save our son.

To whom Jack Marlin applied it readily enough. Kevin, you see, was the star. Marlin must have gotten Claverack’s consent, for interspersed with shots of the tearful aftermath—the piles of flowers outside the gym, the memorial service, Never Again town meetings—was an exclusive interview with KK himself. Rattled, I almost switched it off. But after a minute or two, I was riveted. In fact, Kevin’s manner was so arresting that at first I could barely attend to what he said. He was interviewed in his dormitory cubicle—like his room, kept in rigid order and unadorned with posters or knickknacks. Tipping his chair on two legs, hooking an elbow around its back, he looked thoroughly in his element. If anything, he seemed larger, full of himself, bursting from his tiny sweats, and I had never seen him so animated and at his ease. He basked under the camera’s eye as if under a sunlamp.

Marlin was off-screen, and his questions were deferential, almost tender, as if he didn’t want to scare Kevin away. When I tuned in, Marlin was asking delicately whether Kevin still maintained that he was one of the tiny percentage of Prozac patients who had a radical and antipathetic reaction to the drug.

Kevin had learned the importance of sticking by your story by the time he was six. “Well, I definitely started feeling a little weird.”

“But according to both the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, a causal linkage between Prozac and homicidal psychosis is purely speculative. Do you think more research—?”

“Hey,” Kevin raised a palm, “I’m no doctor. That defense was my lawyer’s idea, and he was doing his job. I said I felt a little weird. But I’m not looking for an excuse here. I don’t blame some satanic cult or pissy girlfriend or big bad bully who called me a fag. One of the things I can’t stand about this country is lack of accountability. Everything Americans do that doesn’t work out too great has to be somebody else’s fault. Me, I stand by what I done. It wasn’t anybody’s idea but mine.”

“What about that sexual abuse case? Might that have left you feeling bruised?”

“Sure I was interfered with. But hell,” Kevin added with a confidential leer, “that was nothing compared to what happens here.” (They cut to an interview with Vicki Pagorski, whose denials were apoplectic with methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much excess. Of course, too feeble an indignation would have seemed equally incriminating, so she couldn’t win. And she really ought to do something about that hair.)

“Can we talk a little about your parents, Kevin?” Marlin resumed.

Hands behind head. “Shoot.”

“Your father—did you get along, or did you fight?”

“Mister Plastic?” Kevin snorted. “I should be so lucky we’d have a fight. No, it was all cheery chirpy, hot dogs and Cheez Whiz. A total fraud, you know? All like, Let’s go to the Natural History Museum, Kev, they have some really neat-o rocks! He was into some Little League fantasy, stuck in the 1950s. I’d get this, I luuuuuuv you, buddy! stuff, and I’d just look at him like, Who are you talking to, guy? What does that mean, your dad ‘loves’ you and hasn’t a [bleep]ing clue who you are? What’s he love, then? Some kid in Happy Days. Not me.”

“What about your mother?”

“What about her?” Kevin snapped, though until now he’d been affable, expansive.

“Well, there was that civil suit brought for parental negligence—”

“Totally bogus,” said Kevin flatly. “Rank opportunism, frankly. More culture of compensation. Next thing you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly. My view runs, life sucks; tough luck. Fact is, the lawyers knew Mumsey had deep pockets, and that Woolford cow can’t take bad news on the chin.”

Just then the camera angle panned ninety degrees, zooming in on the room’s only decoration that I could see taped over his bed. Badly creased from having been folded small enough to fit in a pocket or wallet, it was a photograph of me. Jesus Christ, it was that head-shot on an Amsterdam houseboat, which disappeared when Celia was born. I was sure he’d torn it to pieces.

“But whether or not your mother was legally remiss,” Marlin proceeded, “maybe she paid you too little attention—?”

“Oh, lay off my mother.” This sharp, menacing voice was alien to me, but it must have been useful inside. “Shrinks here spend all day trying to get me to trash the woman, and I’m getting a little tired of it, if you wanna know the truth.”

Marlin regrouped. “Would you describe your relationship as close, then?”

“She’s been all over the world, know that? You can hardly name a country where she hasn’t got the T-shirt. Started her own company. Go into any bookstore around here, you’ll see her series. You know, Smelly Foreign Dumps on a Wing and a Prayer? I used to cruise into Barnes and Noble in the mall just to look at all those books. Pretty cool.”

“So you don’t think there’s any way she might have—”

“Look, I could be kind of a creep, okay? And she could be kind of a creep, too, so we’re even. Otherwise, it’s private, okay? Such a thing in this country anymore as private, or do I have to tell you the color of my underwear? Next question.”

“I guess there’s only one question left, Kevin—the big one. Why’d you do it?”

I could tell Kevin had been preparing for this. He inserted a dramatic pause, then slammed the front legs of his plastic chair onto the floor. Elbows on knees, he turned from Marlin to directly address the camera.

“Okay, it’s like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you’re not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. You read the paper, or if you’re into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you’ll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you’ve been watching. And you know, it’s got so bad that I’ve started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they’re watching TV. Or if you’ve got some romance in a movie? What do they do but go to a movie. All these people, Marlin,” he invited the interviewer in with a nod. “What are they watching?”

After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, “You tell us, Kevin.”

“People like me.” He sat back and folded his arms.

Marlin would have been happy with this footage, and he wasn’t about to let the show stop now. Kevin was on a roll and had that quality of just getting started. “But people watch other things than killers, Kevin,” Marlin prodded.

“Horseshit,” said Kevin. “They want to watch something happen, and I’ve made a study of it: Pretty much the definition of something happening is it’s bad. The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there’s more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.”

“On the contrary, Kevin,” Marlin observed sorrowfully, “all too many young people like yourself have gone on killing sprees in the last few years.”

“Lucky for you, too! You need us! What would you do without me, film a documentary on paint drying? What are all those folks doing,” he waved an arm at the camera, “but watching me? Don’t you think they’d have changed the channel by now if all I’d done is get an A in Geometry? Bloodsuckers! I do their dirty work for them!”

“But the whole point of asking you these questions,” Marlin said soothingly, “is so we can all figure out how to keep this sort of Columbine thing from happening again.”

At the mention of Columbine, Kevin’s face soured. “I just wanna go on the record that those two weenies were not pros. Their bombs were duds, and they shot plain old anybody. No standards. My crowd was handpicked. The videos those morons left behind were totally embarrassing. They copied me, and their whole operation was obviously designed to one-up Gladstone—”

Marlin tried quietly to intrude something like, “Actually, police claim that Klebold and Harris were planning their attack for at least a year,” but Kevin plowed on.

“Nothing, not one thing in that circus went according to plan. It was a 100-percent failure from top to bottom. No wonder those miserable twits wasted themselves—and I thought that was chicken. Part of the package is facing the music. Worst of all, they were hopeless geeks. I’ve read sections of Klebold’s whining, snot-nosed journal. Know one of the groups that chump wanted to avenge himself against? People who think they can predict the weather. Had no idea what kind of a statement they were making. Oh, and get this—at the end of the Big Day, those two losers were originally planning to hijack a jet and fly it into the World Trade Center. Give me a break!”

“You, ah, note that your victims were ‘handpicked,’” said Marlin, who must have been wondering, What was that about? “Why those particular students?”

“They happened to be the people who got on my nerves. I mean, if you were planning a major operation like this, wouldn’t you go for the priss-pots and faggots and eyesores you couldn’t stand? Seems to me that’s the main perk of taking the rap. You and your cameramen here leech off my accomplishments, and you get a fancy salary and your name in the credits. Me, I have to do time. Gotta get something out of it.”

“I have one more question, Kevin, though I’m afraid you may have answered it already,” said Marlin with a tragic note. “Do you feel any remorse? Knowing what you do now, if you could go back to April 8th, 1999, would you kill those people all over again?”

“I’d only do one thing different. I’d put one right between the eyes of that Lukronsky dork, who’s been making a mint off his terrible ordeal ever since. I read he’s now gonna be acting in that Miramax flick! Feel sorry for the cast, too. He’ll be quoting Let’s get in character from Pulp Fiction and doing his Harvey Keitel imitations and I bet in Hollywood that shit gets old quick. And while we’re on that, I wanna complain that Miramax and everybody should be paying me some kind of fee. They’re stealing my story, and that story was a lot of work. I don’t think it’s legal to swipe it for free.”

“But it’s against the law in this state for criminals to profit from—”

Again, Kevin swung to the camera. “My story is about all I got to my name right now, and that’s why I feel robbed. But a story’s a whole lot more than most people got. All you people watching out there, you’re listening to what I say because I have something you don’t: I got plot. Bought and paid for. That’s what all you people want, and why you’re sucking off me. You want my plot. I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way. TV and video games and movies and computer screens… On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee. Ever since, I’ve known what my life is about. I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it. You ate it up. Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll. Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, ’cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president’s dog.”

I turned off the set. I couldn’t take any more. I could feel another interview with Thelma Corbitt coming up, bound to include an appeal for the “Love for Kids with Determination” scholarship fund she’d set up in Denny’s honor, to which I’d already contributed more than I could afford.

Obviously, this flashy thesis about the passive spectating of modern life was but a twinkle in Kevin’s eye two years ago. He has time on his hands at Claverack, and he’d knocked together that fancy motive in much the way older convicts manufacture vanity license plates. Still, I reluctantly have to admit that his post hoc exegesis contained a nugget of truth. Were NBC to broadcast an unabating string of documentaries on the mating habits of sea otters, viewership would dwindle. Listening to Kevin’s diatribe, I was struck despite myself by what a sizable proportion of our species feeds off the depravity of a handful of reprobates, if not to earn a living then to pass the time. It isn’t only journalists, either. Think tanks generating mountains of paper over the sovereign disposition of fractious little East Timor. University Conflict Studies departments issuing countless Ph.D.s on ETA terrorists who number no more than 100. Filmmakers generating millions by dramatizing the predations of lone serial killers. And think of it: the courts, police, National Guard—how much of government is the management of the wayward 1 percent? With prison building and warding one of the biggest growth industries in the United States, a sudden popular conversion to civilization across the board could trigger a recession. Since I myself had craved a turn of the page, is it really such a stretch to say of KK that we need him? Beneath his bathetic disguise, Jack Marlin had sounded grateful. He wasn’t interested in the mating habits of sea otters, and he was grateful.

Otherwise, Franklin, my reaction to that interview is very confusing. A customary horror mixes with something like—pride. He was lucid, selfassured, engaging. I was touched by that photograph over his bed, and no little chagrined that he hadn’t destroyed it after all (I guess I’ve always assumed the worst). Recognizing snippets of his soliloquy from my own tirades at table, I’m not only mortified, but flattered. And I’m thunderstruck that he has ever ventured into a Barnes and Noble to gaze at my handiwork, for which his “Meet My Mother” essay didn’t betray great respect.

But I’m dismayed by his unkind remarks about you, which I hope you don’t take to heart. You tried so hard to be an attentive, affectionate father. Yet I did warn you that children are unusually alert to artifice, so it makes sense that it’s your very effort that he derides. And you can understand why in relation to you of all people he feels compelled to portray himself as the victim.

I was grilled at length by Mary’s lawyers about the “warning signs” that I should have picked up sufficiently in advance to have headed off calamity, but I think most mothers would have found the tangible signals difficult to detect. I did ask about the purpose of the five chain-and-padlock Kryptonites when they were delivered to our door by FedEx, since Kevin had a bike lock, along with a bike he never rode. Yet his explanation seemed credible: He’d come across a terrific deal on the Internet, and he planned to sell these Kryptonites, which went for about $100 apiece retail, at school for a profit. If he’d never before displayed such entrepreneurial spunk, the aberration only seems glaring now that we know what the locks were for. How he got hold of school stationery I’ve no idea, and I never ran across it. And while he laid in a generous supply of arrows for his crossbow over a period of months, he never ordered more than half a dozen at a time. He was always ordering arrows, and the stockpile, which he kept outside in the shed, didn’t attract my attention.

The one thing that I did notice through the rest of December and the early months of 1999 was that Kevin’s Gee, Dad routine now extended to Gee, Mumsey. I don’t know how you put up with it. Gosh, are we having some of that great Armenian food tonight? Terriff! I sure want to learn more about my ethnic heritage! Lots of guys at school are plain old white-bread, and they’re superjealous that I’m a member of a real-live persecuted minority! Insofar as he had any tastes in food at all, he hated Armenian cuisine, and this disingenuous boppiness hurt my feelings. With me, Kevin’s behavior had been hitherto as unadorned as his bedroom—stark, lifeless, sometimes hard and abrasive, but (or so I imagined) uncamouflaged. I preferred that. It was a surprise to discover that my son could come to seem even farther away.

I interpreted his transformation as induced by that conversation in the kitchen that he’d overheard—to which neither you nor I had alluded again, even in private. Our prospective separation loomed as a great smelly elephant in the living room, trumpeting occasionally or leaving behind massive piles of manure for us to trip over.

Yet astonishingly, our marriage blossomed into a second honeymoon, remember? We pulled off that Christmas with unequaled warmth. You secured me a signed copy of Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate, as well as Michael J. Arlen’s Passage to Ararat, Armenian classics. In turn, I gave you a copy of Alistair Cooke’s America and a biography of Ronald Reagan. If we were poking fun at one another, the teasing was tender. We indulged Kevin with some sports clothes that were grotesquely too small, while Celia, typically, was every bit as entranced with the bubble wrap it came in as with her glass-eyed antique doll. We made love more often than we had in years under the implicit guise of for-old-time’s-sake.

I was unsure whether you were reconsidering a summer split or were merely impelled by guilt and grief to make the most of what was irrevocably terminal. In any event, there is something relaxing about hitting bottom. If we were about to get a divorce, nothing worse could possibly happen.

Or so we thought.