Marlin regrouped. “Would you describe your relationship as close, then?”
“She’s been all over the world, know that? You can hardly name a country where she hasn’t got the T-shirt. Started her own company. Go into any bookstore around here, you’ll see her series. You know, Smelly Foreign Dumps on a Wing and a Prayer? I used to cruise into Barnes and Noble in the mall just to look at all those books. Pretty cool.”
“So you don’t think there’s any way she might have—”
“Look, I could be kind of a creep, okay? And she could be kind of a creep, too, so we’re even. Otherwise, it’s private, okay? Such a thing in this country anymore as private, or do I have to tell you the color of my underwear? Next question.”
“I guess there’s only one question left, Kevin—the big one. Why’d you do it?”
I could tell Kevin had been preparing for this. He inserted a dramatic pause, then slammed the front legs of his plastic chair onto the floor. Elbows on knees, he turned from Marlin to directly address the camera.
“Okay, it’s like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you’re not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. You read the paper, or if you’re into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you’ll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you’ve been watching. And you know, it’s got so bad that I’ve started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they’re watching TV. Or if you’ve got some romance in a movie? What do they do but go to a movie. All these people, Marlin,” he invited the interviewer in with a nod. “What are they watching?”
After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, “You tell us, Kevin.”
“People like me.” He sat back and folded his arms.
Marlin would have been happy with this footage, and he wasn’t about to let the show stop now. Kevin was on a roll and had that quality of just getting started. “But people watch other things than killers, Kevin,” Marlin prodded.
“Horseshit,” said Kevin. “They want to watch something happen, and I’ve made a study of it: Pretty much the definition of something happening is it’s bad. The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there’s more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.”
“On the contrary, Kevin,” Marlin observed sorrowfully, “all too many young people like yourself have gone on killing sprees in the last few years.”
“Lucky for you, too! You need us! What would you do without me, film a documentary on paint drying? What are all those folks doing,” he waved an arm at the camera, “but watching me? Don’t you think they’d have changed the channel by now if all I’d done is get an A in Geometry? Bloodsuckers! I do their dirty work for them!”
“But the whole point of asking you these questions,” Marlin said soothingly, “is so we can all figure out how to keep this sort of Columbine thing from happening again.”
At the mention of Columbine, Kevin’s face soured. “I just wanna go on the record that those two weenies were not pros. Their bombs were duds, and they shot plain old anybody. No standards. My crowd was handpicked. The videos those morons left behind were totally embarrassing. They copied me, and their whole operation was obviously designed to one-up Gladstone—”
Marlin tried quietly to intrude something like, “Actually, police claim that Klebold and Harris were planning their attack for at least a year,” but Kevin plowed on.
“Nothing, not one thing in that circus went according to plan. It was a 100-percent failure from top to bottom. No wonder those miserable twits wasted themselves—and I thought that was chicken. Part of the package is facing the music. Worst of all, they were hopeless geeks. I’ve read sections of Klebold’s whining, snot-nosed journal. Know one of the groups that chump wanted to avenge himself against? People who think they can predict the weather. Had no idea what kind of a statement they were making. Oh, and get this—at the end of the Big Day, those two losers were originally planning to hijack a jet and fly it into the World Trade Center. Give me a break!”
“You, ah, note that your victims were ‘handpicked,’” said Marlin, who must have been wondering, What was that about? “Why those particular students?”
“They happened to be the people who got on my nerves. I mean, if you were planning a major operation like this, wouldn’t you go for the priss-pots and faggots and eyesores you couldn’t stand? Seems to me that’s the main perk of taking the rap. You and your cameramen here leech off my accomplishments, and you get a fancy salary and your name in the credits. Me, I have to do time. Gotta get something out of it.”
“I have one more question, Kevin, though I’m afraid you may have answered it already,” said Marlin with a tragic note. “Do you feel any remorse? Knowing what you do now, if you could go back to April 8th, 1999, would you kill those people all over again?”
“I’d only do one thing different. I’d put one right between the eyes of that Lukronsky dork, who’s been making a mint off his terrible ordeal ever since. I read he’s now gonna be acting in that Miramax flick! Feel sorry for the cast, too. He’ll be quoting Let’s get in character from Pulp Fiction and doing his Harvey Keitel imitations and I bet in Hollywood that shit gets old quick. And while we’re on that, I wanna complain that Miramax and everybody should be paying me some kind of fee. They’re stealing my story, and that story was a lot of work. I don’t think it’s legal to swipe it for free.”
“But it’s against the law in this state for criminals to profit from—”
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.