Lionel Shriver

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least.

—ERMA BOMBECK

Which is just where my story takes place. I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria.

This is the one place in the world where the ramifications of my life are fully felt, and it’s far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

But Kevin's displeasure is not the only thing that his victims had in c o m m o n . Okay, throw out the cafeteria worker, clearly there by mistake; Kevin has a neat mind, and he'd prefer a tidy group of ten. Otherwise, every one of t h e m enjoyed something.

Soweto Washington loved sport and at least the illusion of a future with the Knicks; Miguel Espinoza, learning (at any rate, Harvard); Jeff Reeves, Telemann; D e n n y Corbitt, Tennessee Williams; Mouse Ferguson, the Pentium III processor; Ziggy Randolph, West Side Story, not to mention other men; Laura Woolford loved herself; and Dana R o c c o — t h e ultimate unforgivable—loved Kevin.

I realize that Kevin doesn't experience his aversions as envy.

like my wallpaper of maps, impenetrable passions have never made Kevin laugh. From early childhood, they have enraged him.

Sure, most children have a taste for spoliation. Tearing things apart is easier than making them; however exacting his preparations for Thursday, they couldn't have been nearly as demanding as it would have been to befriend those people instead. So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides

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the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am. Besides, for most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon.

ssion to abandon. And there's an ownership to destruction, an intimacy; an appropriation. In this way, Kevin has clutched D e n n y Corbitt and Laura Woolford to his breast, inhaled their hearts and hobbies whole. Destruction may be motivated by nothing more complicated than acquisitiveness, a kind of h a m -

handed, misguided greed.

I watched Kevin despoil other people's pleasures for most of his life.

Fair enough. But if I was so all-fired responsible, w h y did I still feel so helpless?

"I got something in my eye. Kevin helped me wash it out."