We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [192]
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