We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [175]
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 own bed. It’s the oldest switcheroo in the book, and a favorite of the faithless the world over: When 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 not sure what led me to go in there. I’d stayed home from AWAP to take Celia in for another oculist appointment, to check on her adaptation to the prosthesis. There was little enough in Kevin’s room to attract curiosity, though it may have been this very quality—its mysterious blankness—that I found so magnetic. When 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 homework 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. The bed was made with bootcamp precision. We’d offered him a bedspread of racing cars or Dungeons and Dragons; he’d been quite firm on preferring plain beige. The walls were unadorned; no posters of Oasis or the Spice Girls, no leering Marilyn Manson. The 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 own 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 when he was not watching the Weather Channel. Again, the CDs we’d given him when trying to sort out what he “liked” were nowhere in evidence. Though you could get delightful screen savers of leaping dolphins or zooming spaceships, the one on his Gateway merely pointillated random dots.
Was this what it looked like 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. Not a photograph at his bedside, nor keepsake on his bureau—the surfaces were slick and absent. How much 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 no-go teen lair that I understood, where I might discover safe, accessible secrets like a worn Durex packet under the socks or a baggie of cannabis stuffed in the toe of a smelly sneaker. By contrast, the secrets of this room 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 when 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 them out, put the rest back the way I found them, and slipped 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. Not about to give up easily, I went into the Explorer program and