Beautiful Children Read online

  Still, what was she supposed to do?

  1.4

  Dawn had broken, the dew still glistening on sun-browned lawns, his epic trek waiting, spread before him like some marvelously set picnic. Mindful of the sustenance he would require, Bing Beiderbixxe had disregarded his diet and purchased a drive-through sausage-and-egg sandwich. Just for kicks, he'd picked up sixty-four ounces of caffeinated carbonation. Then he'd set off, onto the normally knotted 405. Even on a Saturday morning, even as the sky above the cement husk of freeway was turning lighter shades, the four largely barren lanes had been a pleasant surprise for Bing, who, accelerating steadily, had driven with his sandwich in his free hand and the giant soda cup nestled between his thighs. A life-size cardboard cutout of Wendy Whitebread was crammed across the rear of his hatchback, a milk crate of comic books sat shotgun. Bing's newly purchased “going out outfit” (silver cabana shirt, black designer jeans) lay carefully draped over the crate. He'd headed north and east, making good time, passing Anaheim's tawdry theme parks and Corona's clot of auto malls, and then Riverside, which didn't have a river or any sides, but only, improbably, even more auto malls. Rough calculations had him reaching the Mojave well before the sun hit its zenith, which would allow him to avoid the desert's most intense heat, and keep his crappy little engine from blowing. Terrific. The scope of Beiderbixxe's genius did not include impromptu gasket fixing.

  The yucca trees and sagebrush and cacti; the sand dunes and pebble heaps and drum-hard earth; the breathtaking and seemingly endless desert; the emptiness; the lull. Six hours. Plenty of time to settle into a rhythm, to retreat inside the maze of his own thoughts, to straighten out just when he was supposed to hold ’em and why he should fold ’em; to recall the guideline about bringing into a casino only the cash he could afford to lose; to extrapolate how much this was, given his circumstances; to revise the figure to reflect worst- and best-case scenarios. Bing had played his latest favorite CD four times in a row. He'd learned the lyrics to all the songs and, for the sheer pleasure of it, indulged venomous thoughts about how much he disliked his two housemates. He'd fantasized about getting his own place and, then, about creatively carnal ways to piss away his gambling winnings.

  Yellow ribbons alternated with American flags, hanging from every other telephone pole and billboard. Eighteen-wheelers passed from the opposite direction, the hatchback shaking in their wake, the car threatening to run off the road. Somewhere around Barstow, with skeptical thoughts forming around whether the store would have any window promotion, Bing had wondered, too, if anyone would even bother to show.

  Male-pattern baldness had kicked in uncommonly early for Bing. When classmates had started expressing their personalities with hair sprays and tubes of dyes and even the occasional muttonchop, his wheat-brown hair was already receding from his temples, thinning around his crown, clinging to his shirts, and floating into his cereal. His increasingly shiny head served as an exclamation point atop what he saw as an already staggering assembly of bodily injustices: asthma; a mealy voice; a nearly pathological aversion to sweating and sweat-related activities; nearsighted and farsighted. As a child Bing had been challenged in the height department, though his tummy had been given no such restriction. His ass was the size of an elephant's skull. When nobody was looking, Bing sucked his thumb; when people were, he picked his nose. And that name! So what if his parents had loved jazz: what kind of goddamn name was that to pawn off on your kid?

  Was it any wonder that, even as a grade-schooler, Bing had felt far less comfortable with people than with images and technologies? That his developing intellect and nascent personality had suffered so greatly upon entering the arena where sex became a possibility? Even now, Bing couldn't offer a definitive answer about this stuff. This much was sure: where his older brothers, Satchmo and Jolson, had been gregarious and well-adjusted teenagers, where younger sisters, Dizzy and Bird, had been scholarly and well-liked, Bing had been awkward and ill-equipped, re-treating from and, in fact, surviving his adolescence via pop culture's many alleyways, entertainments that were neither fully active nor passive, obsessions that weren't social but, rather, asocial. He collected every comic under the X-Men umbrella (purchasing duplicate copies—one to read, one for posterity). He religiously updated his library of science fiction and pulp novels with the latest installments of each series (no matter how sloppy and half-assed each successive volume may have been). He constantly referenced the dialogue of sitcoms he'd memorized during afternoons of syndicated reruns (shows that hadn't been all that funny the first time he'd seen them). Bing inhaled kung fu videos and pay-per-view wrestling extravaganzas until vicarious testosterone all but burst through his flabby arms, then he headed out and played old-school stand-up arcade games until skill allowed him to stretch a quarter for like a week. On a daily basis, for three consecutive months, in an infamous phase whose mere recollection, to this day, still caused him physical pain, Bing Beiderbixxe had donned a cape. Beiderbixxe the Misguided! Bing the Misunderstood! The listless fat kid who could get only as close to a naked woman as the nearest Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, Maxim subscription, or Cinemax's Max After Dark episode would allow. The quiet, unthreatening loner who was told by the plain brunette at the next desk, “I like you—as a friend.” The wisecracking antihero who had convinced himself he would overcome insurmountable odds and rescue the planet from undefeatable evil and, in the process, melt the heart of the unwinnable babe! The bitter jaded mess, so deluded by television and movies, he actually believed himself capable of landing supermodel-caliber women and therefore refused to adjust his standards!

  No, he had not been the finest dandelion in the field. His diorama had not been in contention for the blue ribbon. And toward the end of his senior year, a certain genre of computer game had completely blown the petals off Bing's winsome little diorama. First-person shoot-’em-up was the genre's technical label; Deathmatch, the colloquial term. Originally, Deathmatch games seemed like little more than variations on the traditional hero-against-everyone battles; however, the genius of the genre, and the source of its addictive appeal, lay in its perspective. For as with the scene in a horror movie where the camera assumes the point of view of the killer, Deathmatch games provided the three-dimensional experience of being inside the battle, moving through some sort of darkened and foreboding domain. Advances in home computers made an encompassing, immersive perspective possible, the action blurringly disjointed all around you, bobbing and zagging as you inched around corners, performed leaping somersaults, searched for ammo and weaponry, and, most important, hunted. The goal was fresh meat. For disenfranchised males between the ages of twelve and twenty-eight, the games were a godsend. They gave you violence, constant and tangible, graphic and over-the-top, the splatters of blood never failing to impress and amuse, the physical recoil of victims always providing easy, guiltless thrills. Head shots were especially cool, but then again, everything about these games kicked ass.

  Thus, Bing had dabbled. He'd lost track of more than a few afternoons, blasted his way through more than a few nights, even participated in his share of weekend-long marathons at a nearby hotel convention center, competing against teenagers and scruffy twentysomethings who, from their dilapidated station wagons, wheeled in hard drives the size of mini-fridges. Bing's involvement had extended through his senior year and into the first of his six years at a small southern California college whose liberal arts curriculum had also produced Richard Milhous Nixon. Which isn't to say the game was the entirety of his campus life, mind you. Bing also had a work-study job in the computer center. He had a full schedule of classes in art, art history, art appreciation, graphic arts, life drawing, portraiture, and still life. He had aspirations to nothing less than the creation of sensitive, artistic, emotionally honest pictures that, just maybe, would get him laid. There was also a small island of friends with whom Bing shared his dreamy hopes—five or six castaways like him, fellow travelers from high school who'd scattered to different colleges
, as well as a few new buddies, like-minded thinkers that Bing had found on campus. Brought together as if responding to a siren audible only to them, they hung out; often in person, but just as often electronically, congregating in a chat room, chewing the fat during late-night bull sessions, forming and closing a small tight circle. The Knitting Room, they called themselves, since knitting was about as boring as anyone could come up with, and all the chat rooms with sexy and violent names were continually filled. Inside the Knitting Room, commentary went uninterrupted and undisturbed (sigh); the tone was unfailingly cynical. Each Knitter was a master in one-upmanship, secure in his superiority to the rest of the world, confidently voicing opinions on anything from rock and roll: ]1450SAT: Iz it possible tht Elvis Costello truly dzn't know what's so funny about peace love & understanding? to young celebrity hotties: ]DOMINATR69: I'd put it in her fartbox. Even ideas for reality game shows: ]KC_FTT_B: Ten big good looking d_des on an island. All testosterone machines, policemen, firemen, marines. They're homophobes, and there's no women on the island, only these ten d_des and a flock of sheep. Evry day the contestants get fed Viagra and Exctasy. Last one who doesn't bang a sheep wins a million dollars.

  Then came instances when someone needed a way to avoid a term paper, and a late-night missive would go out. The Knitters would meet at the computer lab. Flavored chips were mandatory, as were Big Slams of Mountain Dew, and carry-packs of Red Bull. By breakfast time, everyone would be so twitchy and wired and fucked up that there was no way back to the cerebral, internal processes that schoolwork demanded.

  You look back, you understand. But at the time, there's no way. Not while you're trapped, not from the middle of it.

  The first warm morning of spring. Around campus, Bing was commonly referred to as the Dork King, Butterbixxe, and the Creepy Loser in the Cape. Running late for class, he had come down from his room unshaven, fumbling with his backpack and notebook. The dorm lounge was on the ground floor, you had to pass through it to get outside, and five, eight, people were standing around the television, which was mounted in the corner. One frizz-haired girl stared in shock, which was bizarre since her intellectual energies were usually devoted to the latest twists in celebrities’ private lives. Another moron—his long white T-shirt reading party coed naked lacrosse—kept saying how unbelievable it was.

  A glance explained nothing. The screen was filled with the front of a sprawling, modernish building, a distant shot of wide cement steps leading up to a drab entrance, a series of double doors. SWAT troops were positioned along the perimeter, rifles trained. For long seconds nothing happened, then the scene shifted, to a half-open window on the top floor. The view shifted again to overhead, from a helicopter flying above; then to teenagers outside the school, standing behind barricades, crying and hugging one another. Then to stretchers loaded onto ambulances; frantic parents; more cops with guns.

  A crawl along the bottom of the screen provided cursory details: two instigators were believed responsible, a pair of students from the high school, part of a group known for wearing trench coats and indulging in computer games. A network announcer relayed the contents of cell phone calls made from students inside the school, which provided some sense of what was happening.

  Bing commandeered a love seat across from the screen. Seemingly born to opine about events like these, he refrained from providing a running commentary or so much as updating a newcomer on a new development. Rather, he settled in on the sagging couch and missed Comp Lit. In the day's ensuing hours, and then the week's subsequent days, through updates and reports and special investigations, Bing would gather more facts surrounding the true scope of what these young men had done, more information about the magnitude of their act. Bing would learn that this had not been a simple case where some postal employee had lost it. This had not been a prank phone call, or some copycat bringing Daddy's pistol to homeroom. Rather, the two high school students in question—each seventeen years of age—had procured the architectural blueprints for their school; they'd sawed down shotguns, used pliers to widen ends of CO2 cartridges. For fourteen months, they'd planned, they'd labored.

  Like the lady who protests too much to a rich suitor on their first date, Bing railed against the subsequent media focus on Deathmatch games. Sure, he told anyone who'd listen, the killers had been experts at the games. But everyone who saw Old Yeller didn't go shoot their dogs, did they? How many fans of the Road Runner sprinted off a cliff and expected to float on the air? Bing made sure to note the gap that existed between making a joke about blowing up your high school and actually trying to blow up your high school; the significant difference between a socially feeble and mixed-up kid who nursed a grudge against his teenage years and a cold-blooded mass murderer. And while, yes, it was true that, on occasion, one of the perpetrator's journals elicited sympathy—I hate you people for leaving me out of so many things—and while, admittedly, the second perp's website included a number of heartrending posts—You don't know how many hours I spent on this. Would someone please play it?—in the hard cold light of what became known as twentieth-century America's worst school yard slaughter, empathy had to be with the victims and their families. Bing Beiderbixxe understood this as much as anyone.

  But what Bing did not tell people, what to this day still freaked him out more than a little bit, was that he also possessed a firsthand understanding of the ways in which an act of destruction can be viewed as a piece of creation, the means by which an act of violence might translate into a perfect piece of art. Bing Beiderbixxe did not tell people that when he had come down from his room that morning and discovered the slaughter, he had done so after huddling all night in front of his computer, working on a special version of Deathmatch. Bing's version of the Deathmatch game was to take place inside an exact re-creation of his dormitory; his starting point was to be the dormitory lounge. But Bing did not mention this. Furthermore, he did not tell anyone that he'd watched the real-life slaughter play itself out while surrounded by the same neighbors whose doppelgängers were to be chased through his computer game's virtual hallways, who were to be cut down in his recreated stairwells and bedrooms—the exact people whom Bing had identically rendered, specifically so he could inflict bloody damage upon their images.

  This was Bing's dirty little secret, and he had shoved the zip disc that held it into the bottom drawer of his desk, burying the fact of Dormitory Deathmatch beneath loose papers and envelopes, hiding all evidence of his flirtation with the dark spirits, and spending years pretending the dance had never happened. Horrified by what he'd almost done, Bing had tried to change the way he thought about the people he interacted with, and he had tried to address the way he moved in and through the world. Bing had suffered his share of bad dreams since that day, and had learned his lesson, and knew this lesson had taken hold, because years later, on the awful morning when terrorists flew those planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Bing Beiderbixxe remembered that part of the teenagers’ original plan had involved hijacking a plane, which they'd wanted to fly into a New York skyscraper.

  After which he immediately thought about the one and only time that he'd removed the zip disc from his desk and shared the story of the half-finished program.

  He thought of the woman to whom he had first spoken the magic words I love you. She'd relocated to lower Manhattan, Bing remembered, and it took a fraction of a second for all his bitterness—including his morbid fantasies where she got it on with three stockbrokers in the dugout seats of Yankee Stadium—to dissolve. And it was with the world in chaos around him that Bing fired off more than a few e-mails to friends of his onetime love, making sure she was okay.

  So many things Bing wished to make right.

  He was more than ready to be finished driving when the first wave of billboards hit, leaping out from the washed-out desert to intrude on his ruminations: advertisements for entertainers who were famous or once had been famous, for 99-percent-return rates on slot machines and no limit hold-’em poker
, for gentlemen's clubs and adult cabarets and topless reviews. Bing gawked at each and every one of them, happy to have something distract him from the road's grind, from the workings of his mind. Ahead, gray and dusty grids appeared in an intricate sprawl: starter homes and tract homes, optimistically titled subdivisions and insipidly beautiful incorporated communities. Spanish tiled roofs were the law of the land. Sunlight glinted off a thousand backyard pools at once. Both sides of the road were dappled with dingy motels, coming and going at wide intervals of empty space, their paint jobs faded and cracking. And then, rising on the horizon, looming over the flat and wide basin from the moment they appeared, shining towers and popish theme-park façades. Built at a scale that was out of proportion with the rest of the city, they were impossible to ignore, newly unwrapped and shining toys amid a room of small wooden carvings. Forward Bing drove, toward their glitter, moving up the southern and outermost edge of the Strip, passing a visitors’ information center where tourists could get maps and make hotel reservations, then a one-story storefront hawking prop plane rides to the Grand Canyon, and then this weird little building that, in ancient neon, blinked out an offer: free aspirin and tender sympathy.

  At the base of a skyline that was far too ornate to take in at once, his eyes came upon that familiar benchmark. Sticking out of the middle of an otherwise barren traffic median, the sign was smaller than he'd thought it would be, but every bit as iconic as it looked on television.