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By Root 636 0

a preacher’s son with the novelistic name Ben Strong was feted from coast to coast for having advanced soothingly on the shooter, urging the boy to put down his weapon and putting himself in mortal danger in the process. In response, according to legend, Carneal dropped the pistol and collapsed. Due to nationwide hunger for heroes in events that were otherwise becoming irredeemable international embarrassments, the story was widely known. Strong was featured in Time magazine and interviewed on Larry King Live. Ziggy’s own familiarity with this parable may have bolstered his courage to confront their assailant, and the unprecedented admiration that had met Ziggy’s “coming out” to an assembly earlier that semester would have further enhanced his faith in his persuasive powers of oratory.

“I know you must be really upset about something, okay?” Ziggy continued; most of Kevin’s victims were not yet dead, and someone was already feeling sorry for him. “I’m sure you’re hurting inside! But this is no way out—”

Unfortunately for Ziggy, the apocryphal nature of Ben Strong’s stern, mesmerizing Michael? Put down the gun! would not come out until the spring of 2000, when a suit filed by the victims’ parents against more than fifty other parties—including parents, teachers, school officials, other teenagers, neighbors, the makers of “Doom” and “Quake” video games, and the film producers of The Basketball Diaries—came to trial in circuit court. Under oath, Strong confessed that an initially sloppy rendition of events to his principal had been further embellished by the media and taken on a life of its own. Trapped in a lie, he’d been miserable ever since. Apparently by the time our hero approached, Michael Carneal had already stopped shooting and had collapsed, his surrender unrelated to any eloquent, death-defying appeal. “He just got done,” Strong testified, “and he dropped it.”

Shsh-thunk. Ziggy staggered backward.

I hope I haven’t related this chronology in so dispassionate a fashion that I seem callous. It’s just that the facts remain bigger, bolder, and more glistening than any one small grief. I’m simply reiterating a sequence of events strung together by Newsweek.

In parroting its copy, however, I do not pretend any remarkable insight into Kevin’s state of mind, the one foreign country into which I have been most reluctant to set foot. Descriptions from Joshua and Soweto of our son’s expression from overhead depart from the reportage of similar events. Those Columbine children, for example, were manic, eyes glazed, grinning crazily. Kevin, by contrast, was described as “concentrated” and “deadpan.” But then, he always looked that way on the archery range, if only on the archery range, come to think of it—as if he became the arrow, and thus discovered in this embodiment the sense of purpose that his phlegmatic daily persona so extravagantly lacked.

Yet I have reflected on the fact that for most of us, there is a hard, impassable barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-life execution. It’s the same solid steel wall that inserts itself between a knife and my wrist even when I’m at my most disconsolate. So how was Kevin able to raise that crossbow, point it at Laura’s breastbone, and then really, actually, in time and space, squeeze the release? I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier. That like my trips abroad or this ludicrous scheme of bike locks and invitations on school stationery, the very squeezing of that release can be broken down into a series of simple constituent parts. It may be no more miraculous to pull the trigger of a bow or a gun than it is to reach for a glass of water. I fear that crossing into the “unthinkable” turns out to be no more athletic than stepping across the threshold of an ordinary room; and that, if you will, is the trick. The secret. As ever, the secret is that there is no secret. He must almost have wanted to giggle, though that is not his style; those Columbine kids did giggle. And once you have found out that there