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 loaded one of the files; perplexingly, Microsoft Outlook Express came up on screen, at which point Celia called from the dining table that she needed help. I was gone for about fifteen minutes.
When I returned, the computer was blank. It had shut itself off, which it had never done without being told. Disconcerted, I turned it on again but got nothing but error messages, even when I took the disk from the drive.
You’re way ahead of me. I carted the thing into work the next day so that my technical people might sort it out, only to discover the entire office milling about. It wasn’t exactly pandemonium, more like the atmosphere of a party that had run out of drink. Editors were chatting aimlessly in one another’s cubicles. No one was working. They couldn’t. There wasn’t a terminal functioning. Later I was almost relieved when George informed me that my PC’s hard drive was so corrupted that I might as well buy a new one. Perhaps with the infectious object destroyed, no one would ever know that the virus had been forwarded by AWAP’s own executive director.
Furious at Kevin for keeping the modern equivalent of a pet scorpion, I held onto the disk as evidence for several days rather than discreetly sliding it back on his shelf. But once I simmered down, I had to admit that Kevin hadn’t personally wiped out my company’s files, and the debacle was my fault. So one evening I knocked on his door, was granted admission, and closed it behind me. He was sitting at the desk. The screen saver was blipping in its desultory fashion, dot here, dot there.
“I wanted to ask you,” I said, tapping his floppy. “What’s this?”
“A virus,” he said brightly. “You didn’t load it in, did you?”
“Of course not,” I said hastily, discovering that lying to a child feels much the same as lying to a parent; my cheeks prickled as they had when I assured my mother after losing my cherry at seventeen that I’d spent the night with a girlfriend she’d never heard of. Mother knew better; Kevin did, too. “I mean,” I revised mournfully, “only once.”
“Only takes once.”
We both knew that it would have been ridiculous for me to have sneaked into his room and stolen a disk, with which I subsequently ruined my computer and paralyzed my office, only to come storming in to accuse him of industrial sabotage. So the interchange proceeded with an evenness.
“Why do you have it?” I asked respectfully.
“I keep a collection.”
“Isn’t that a peculiar thing to collect?”
“I don’t like stamps.”
Just then I had a presentiment of what he might have said had you burst in determined to find out
why the heck
he had a stack of computer viruses above his desk:
Well, after we watched
Silence of the Lambs
, I decided I wanted to be an FBI agent! And you know how they have this whole task-force that, like, tracks down hackers who spread those terrible computer viruses? So I’m studying them and everything, ’cause I’ve read it’s a really big problem for the new economy and globalization and even for our country’s defense . . . !
That Kevin skipped such a performance—he collected computer viruses, end of story, so what?—left me feeling strangely flattered.
So I asked bashfully. “How many do you have?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Are they—difficult to find?”
He looked at me gamely, with that old sense of indecision, but on some whim he decided to experiment with talking to his mother. “They’re hard to
capture alive
,” he said. “They get away, and they bite. You have to know how to handle them. You know—like a doctor. Who studies diseases in a lab but doesn’t want to get sick himself.”
“You mean, you have to keep them from infecting your own machine.”
“Yeah. Mouse Ferguson’s been teaching me the ropes.”
“Since you collect them. Maybe you can explain to me—why do people make them? I don’t get it. They don’t achieve anything. What’s the appeal?”
“I don’t get,” he said, “what you don’t get.”
“I understand hacking into AT&T to get free phone calls or stealing encrypted credit card numbers to run up a bill at The Gap. But this sort of computer crime—nobody benefits. What’s the point?”
“That is the point.”
“I’m still lost,” I said.
“Viruses—they’re kind of elegant, you know? Almost—pure. Kind of like—charity work, you know? It’s
selfless
.”
“But it’s not that different from creating AIDS.”
“Maybe somebody did,” he said affably. “’Cause otherwise? You type on your computer and go home and the refrigerator comes on and another computer spits out your paycheck and you sleep and you enter more shit on your computer . . . Might as well be dead.”
“So it’s this—. Almost to, what, know you’re alive. To show other people they don’t control you. To prove you can do something, even if it could get you arrested.”
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said appreciatively. In his eyes, I had exceeded myself.
“Ah,” I said, and handed him his disk back. “Well, thanks for explaining.”
As I turned to go, he said, “You’re computer’s fucked, isn’t it.”
“Yes, it’s fucked,” I said ruefully. “I guess I deserved it.”
“You know, if there’s anybody you don’t like?” he offered. “And you got their e-mail address? Just lemme know.”
I laughed. “Okay, I’ll be sure to do that. Though, some days? The people I don’t like come to quite a list.”
“Better warn them you got friends in low places,” he said.
So this is
bonding
! I marveled, and closed the door.
Eva
MARCH 16, 2001
Dear Franklin,
Well, it’s another Friday night on which I gird myself for a visit to Chatham tomorrow morning. The halogen bulbs are trembling again, flickering like my stoic resolve to be a good soldier and live out what’s left of my life for the sake of some unnamable duty. I’ve sat here for over an hour, wondering what keeps me going, and more specifically just what it is I want from you. I guess it goes without saying that I want you back; the volume of this correspondence—though it’s more of a
respondence
, isn’t it?—attests heavily to that. But what else? Do I want you to forgive me? And if so, for what exactly?
After all, I was uneasy with the unsolicited tide of forgiveness that washed over the shipwreck of our family in the wake of
Thursday
. In addition to mail promising either to beat his brains out or to bear his babies, Kevin has received dozens of letters offering to share his pain, apologizing for society’s having failed to recognize his spiritual distress and granting him blanket moral amnesty for what he has yet to regret. Amused, he’s read choice selections aloud to me in the visiting room.
Surely it makes a travesty of the exercise to forgive the unrepentant, and I speak for myself as well. I, too, have received a torrent of mail (my e-mail and postal address were billboarded on both partnersnprayer.org and beliefnet.com without my consent; apparently at any one time, thousands of Americans have been praying for my salvation), much of it invoking a God in whom I was less disposed to believe than ever, while sweepingly acquitting my shortcomings as a mother. I can only assume that these well-meaning people felt moved by my plight. Yet it bothered me that nearly all this deliverance was bestowed by strangers, which made it seem cheap, and an undercurrent of preening betrayed that conspicuous clemency has become the religious version of driving a flashy car. By contrast, my brother Giles’s staunch incapacity to pardon us for the unwelcome attentions that our wayward son has visited upon his own family is a grudge I treasure, if only for its frankness. Thus I was of half a mind to mark the envelopes “Return to sender,” like Pocket Fishermans and Gensu knives I hadn’t ordered. In the early months, still asthmatic with grief, I was more in the mood for the bracing open air of the pariah than for the close, stifling confines of Christian charity. And the vengefulness of my hate mail was meat-red and raw, whereas the kindness of condolences was pastel and processed, like commercial baby food; after reading a few pages from the merciful, I’d feel as if I’d just crawled from a vat of liquefied squash. I wanted to shake these people and scream,
Forgive us! Do you know what he did?
But in retrospect it may grate on me most that this big dumb absolution latterly in vogue is doled out so selectively. Weak characters of an everyday sort—bigots, sexists, and panty fetishists—need not apply. “KK” the murderer harvests sheaves of pitying pen pals; an addled drama teacher too desperate to be liked is blackballed for the rest of her life. From which you may correctly construe that I’m not so bothered by the caprices of all America’s compassion as I am by yours. You bent over backward to be understanding about killers like Luke Woodham in Pearl and little Mitchell and Andrew in Jonesboro. So why had you no sympathy to spare for Vicki Pagorski?
The first semester of Kevin’s sophomore year in 1998 was dominated by that scandal. Rumors had circulated for weeks, but we weren’t in the loop, so the first we heard about it was when the administration sent that letter around to all Ms. Pagorski’s drama students. I’d been surprised that Kevin elected to take a drama course. He tended to shy from the limelight in those days, lest scrutiny blow his Regular Kid cover. On the other hand, as his room suggested,
he could be anybody
, so he may have been interested in acting for years.
“Franklin, you should take a look at this,” I said one November evening while you were grumbling over the
Times
that Clinton was a “lying sack of shit.” I handed you the letter. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
As you adjusted your reading glasses, I had one of those juddering update moments when I realized that your hair had now passed decisively from blond to gray. “Seems to me,” you determined, “this lady’s got a taste for tenderloin.”
“Well, you have to infer that,” I said. “But if someone’s made an accusation, this letter’s not defending her.
If your son or daughter has reported anything irregular or inappropriate
. . .
Please speak to your child
. . . They’re digging for more dirt!”
“They have to protect themselves.—KEV! Come into the den for a sec!”
Kevin sauntered across the dining area in tiny dove-gray sweats, their elastic ankles bunched under his knees.
“Kev, this is a little awkward,” you said, “and you haven’t done anything wrong. Not a thing. But this drama teacher, Ms.—Pagorski. Do you like her?”
Kevin slumped against the archway. “Okay, I guess. She’s a little . . . ”
“A little what?”
Kevin looked elaborately in all directions. “Hinky.”
“Hinky how?” I asked.
He studied his unlaced sneakers, glancing up through his eyelashes. “She like, wears funny clothes and stuff. Not like a teacher. Tight jeans, and sometimes her blouse—” He twisted, and scratched an ankle with his foot. “Like, the buttons at the top, they’re not ... See, she gets all excited when she’s directing a scene, and then . . . It’s sort of embarrassing.”
“Does she wear a bra?” you asked bluntly.
Kevin averted his face, suppressing a grin. “Not always.”
“So she dresses casually, and sometimes—provocatively,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Well, it’s not a big deal or anything, but she does use a lot of dirty words, you know? Like, it’s okay, but from a teacher and everything, well, like I said, it’s hinky.”
“Dirty like
damn
and
hell
?” you prodded. “Or harder core?”
Kevin raised his shoulders helplessly. “Yeah, like—sorry, Mumsey—”
“Oh, skip it, Kevin,” I said impatiently; his discomfiture seemed rather overdone. “I’m a grown-up.”
“Like
fuck,
” he said, meeting my eyes. “She says, like,
That was a fucking good performance
, or she’ll direct some guy,
Look at her like you really want to fuck her, like you want to fuck her till she squeals like a pig
.”
“Little out there, Eva,” you said, eyebrows raised.
“What does she look like?” I said.
“She’s got big, uh,” he mimed honeydews, “and a really wide,” this time he couldn’t contain the grin, “like, a huge butt. She’s old and everything. Sort of a hag, basically.”