We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [174]
Did Kevin take drugs? I’ve never been sure. You agonized enough about how 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 hell-raiser 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. The 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 lip. Privately I believed 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 “hump ’em and dump ’em” boast is up for grabs. If I’ve claimed, of us two, to “know” Kevin the better, that is only to say that I know him for being opaque. I know 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 computers were contaminated with a computer virus. Our technical staff traced it to an e-mail titled, cleverly, “WARNING: 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 file 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 when Wing and a Prayer couldn’t satisfy the brisk summer market with up-to-date listings. (We didn’t make any friends, either, when 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