The Kevin Show

by Mary Pilon

  •

  On the second day of their excursion, Kevin emerged in great spirits from the 4-D Lego movie with his children. Inside the theater, there had been smoke, sound, and sensory excitement—the chairs they had sat in had even moved according to the action on screen. All was going according to plan in this family togetherness episode of The Show, featuring them all in an interactive performance piece, Kevin thought. The kids that had been cast as his had been prepared perfectly—they were adorable and playful with their dad as they romped through the park together.

  Next, it was time to go to the gift shop for the part of The Show that was all about the role of capitalism in children’s lives. Kevin’s kids, right in character, asked if they could take a look inside. Kevin walked in, dressed in shorts, bucket hat, T-shirt, and shades, and began singing at the top of his lungs “That I Would Be Good” by Alanis Morissette, the song he and Amanda had danced to at their wedding.

  Leo, Kevin, Rainer, Stevie (courtesy Kevin Hall)

  He held up a Lego set of the Sydney Opera House, making sure the cameras had a good view, thinking that his gesture would lead to an influx of callers ordering their own sets. It was not a cheap set,13 around $500, but he was getting ready to pay for it when Amanda stopped him and explained that they had already purchased several sets for the kids as birthday and Christmas gifts. He argued with her. Why didn’t she understand that they needed this set? That The Show, in fact, depended on it?

  They compromised and settled on a book,14 Beautiful Lego, which had lavish full-color photographs of Lego creations: faces, snakes, snails, cupcakes, typewriters, trucks.

  Reluctantly, Kevin put the Sydney Opera House set back on the shelf and made his way out of the park with his family. He felt very proud of himself for complying with Amanda’s wishes.

  AMANDA

  It was like having a fourth child.

  Her three actual children had enjoyed themselves at Legoland, but they were ready to leave, dinner and rest beckoning. Kevin, on the other hand, was arguing with her about whether or not he could buy a Lego set. Setting aside that he had just quit his job, aside from the fact he had already spent too much money on a Salvador Dalí book, he was a grown man begging for a Lego set.

  She thought about dinner the night before, when the family had gone to a pizza place where Kevin behaved like a babbling idiot, singing to himself outside in the parking lot in a voice loaded with emotion, on the verge of tears. At the table with the rest of the family, he had been obsessed with rearranging the silverware15 on the table into patterns and shapes.

  It was time for an intervention.

  GORDON

  Kevin’s behavior was embarrassing and, even more than that, disappointing.

  Gordon’s son-in-law, Bud, had taken the four grandkids to another hotel room to babysit so the other adults could confer about what to do. They agreed upon the goal of persuading Kevin to check in to an institution.

  Kevin never told anyone, Gordon thought angrily, when he was going to go off his meds. Instead, time and time again, he left others to deal with the wreckage that his mania left in its wake.16 It was one thing if he wanted to screw up his own life with his mental illness, but now he was a husband, a father, a provider. People were depending on him. Gordon couldn’t understand why Kevin resisted taking a pill that everyone told him would help him. Why was that so hard?

  He thought of a photo he had snapped of Kevin at Kristina’s MBA graduation from Portland State University several years earlier. In the photo, Kristina was beaming, Kevin’s eyes wide as saucers. How could Gordon have missed that at the time? Gordon later described Kevin’s face in the photograph as looking “practically on fire.”

  Having a common interest in business had helped Gordon bridge the chasm between him and Kristina, making them closer in adulthood than they had been when she was a child. It also helped that she had finally, at age thirty, quit smoking. Oddly, he felt that he could talk with her more easily at times than with Kevin. How strange that it was the daughter who had been a hippie, a party child in high school and college, would end up becoming the stable small business owner. Yet his son, the meticulous champion and Olympian, gave him more emotional stress.

  The idea that the whole family could get along together at Legoland had felt nothing short of manufactured to Gordon from the beginning. Then, Kevin had wandered off, and yelled and argued with Amanda, something Gordon had never seen him do before. Gordon had noticed the look in his grandchildren’s eyes, mirroring his own fright and surprise, and had told Kevin that he was out of line, to no avail. Gordon had worn his disappointment and shame in his face. Anger, too. All the time and money spent to pull the family together and his son didn’t even have it in him to take his medicine.

  In 2001, Gordon had told Amanda that Kevin was off his desk and onto hers. At Legoland, it felt as if Kevin was back on his desk again. This wasn’t what he had signed up for.

  KRISTINA

  Kristina watched as her brother paced back and forth in the hotel room, muttering. Some things were audible; others, words beyond meaning tossed into the air. She could see that her father was angry about Kevin’s mania, that he felt he once again was being put in the position of being the bad guy. Her mother remained mostly silent, politely listening, recognizing the insufficiency of words.

  As Kevin half-listened to his family’s talk of his going to a hospital, he asked whether, if he started taking his medications, he could avoid having to be admitted. He also wondered to himself if the Kevin on The Show was supposed to have a mental illness, maybe as a way to stir up advocacy. Kevin suggested that he could stay at a hospital that had a sound studio so that he could record some things. He thought he recalled one in the Pasadena facility where he had stayed years before, even though it was far from where he and Amanda and the kids were living now in Berkeley.

  This wasn’t a bargaining meeting, Gordon said. This was a declaration that Kevin was going to have to go to a hospital and that he would be expected to take his medication right now whether he liked it or not.17 Gordon spoke to Kevin about how he had responsibilities, he had children, a family. The father and son circled each other, weaving invisible threads of logic, patterns in the air.

  Listening to her father and brother, Kristina thought about how different her and Kevin’s childhoods had been, in spite of being siblings growing up in the same home. Kevin had conformed to their parents’ expectations, whereas Kristina had done anything but. So often it is forgotten, she thought, that siblings often end up sharing only some of their genes and that their experiences in their environments growing up can vary widely.18 Family and home, in fact, are not monolithic and can be the site of a variety of early Darwinian fights of human development.19 Kristina had fought to find space that Kevin hadn’t already claimed, and that, perhaps ironically, ended up creating an openness in her that was serving her well in adulthood, particularly in stressful moments like these.

  Kristina had had ordinary jobs as a kid and teenager like delivering newspapers or waiting tables, while her brother had had prestigious, yet competitive, sailing on which to pin his identity. She had gone to parties and been forced to make her own friends, whereas just about all of Kevin’s closest confidants were fellow sailors and he had far less spare time to hang out with them. Later-borns were seventeen times more likely than firstborns to adopt a revolutionary point of view, but firstborns craved digging deeper into the status quo,20 often bending and examining it in new and fascinating ways.

  Kevin inexplicably snapped at Kristina when she used the phrase “on the same page.” It was virtually impossible to tell what his triggers were. It felt as if they were going around and around and around with him on the merits of his going to a hospital not in Pasadena, but in the Bay Area, where he would be near home. There was no easy cure,21 chemical or otherwise.

  Behind the façade that Kristina knew she was wearing, a piece of her inner little sister maintained a presence. Never mind that she had found a gr
eat husband, raised a curious and bright son, and started her own successful business. Once again, it was all about her big brother.

  It was the Kevin Show. And Kristina and everyone else were nothing but supporting actors.

  KEVIN

  The idea of staging an intervention scene for The Show worked, he supposed.

  This dialogue in the hotel room was testing him, splitting him in two. Being on The Show in Legoland was fun, although more and more, Kevin could see how a plot involving his going to a hospital could provide an immense public service by raising awareness about mental illness.

  The David Foster Wallace biography he had binge-read in the bathtub the night before reverberated in his head. Echoing Wallace’s writing about imposter syndrome, Kevin told his family that he felt like a fraud. A fraud as an athlete, as a husband, as a father. He had been faking it for years.22 How could they not see that?

  He agreed to go to a hospital in the Bay Area after they returned home the next day.

  It was difficult for those in the room to know if he really meant it or not.

  AMANDA

  As advertised, Dini’s by the Sea had a wall of windows that looked directly onto the vast, glimmering blue Pacific Ocean, a view that looked more like a painting than reality. A local bar and restaurant featuring seafood, steak, and burgers, the restaurant was flanked by flat screen TVs and a long bar bedecked with surfboards.

  It felt miraculous that they had persuaded Kevin to go to the hospital the next morning. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that when a waiter came to their table, some of the adults ordered beer or wine to go with their dinner.

  Kevin ordered a Guinness.

  Amanda was surprised when she heard her husband speak up.

  She wondered what he was thinking. Then she realized that he wasn’t. He was already looped out of his mind and now he wanted to have alcohol. She could feel another conflict sprouting before them.

  She had to say something. She calmly told Kevin he couldn’t have it.

  He erupted, pounding his fist on the table and yelling. Their three children stared at their father with fright—a contorted, angry version of him having emerged. The roar of his voice, the overwhelming presence of his body, the reddening of his face, garnered glances from fellow patrons as well.

  Kevin stormed away from the table to the bar nearby.

  KRISTINA

  Kristina surveyed the table. Amanda needed to tend to her frightened children. Her father’s face looked too angry and frustrated to offer any kind of aid to Kevin. Her mother, too, looked shocked. A waitress came over and asked if everything was okay. The family nodded yes, yes, yes, everything was fine, a collective fib they could all agree on.23

  Her brother needed an ally. Calmly, Kristina made her way over to the bar, where Kevin sat with his back to the rest of the restaurant, sipping his beer.

  He was still wound up, seething in a new way. She struggled with what to say to him, knowing that if her voice had a tone that was anything short of calm, considerate, and empathetic, he could erupt. Hell, even the most tranquil approach might make him flee.24

  She was there to help him, she said. She was an ally, on his side. She and Kevin compromised on his being allowed to have one beer, provided that he return to the table and act sedately. To Kristina’s surprise, this worked.

  Kevin made his way back to the table, a slightly calmer version of the man who had stormed off a few minutes earlier.

  The children were confused by their father’s outburst and wondered if he was mad at them. Kevin and Amanda tried to explain that that wasn’t the case. The toxic mood still hung in the air, but it had dissipated slightly.

  Kevin thought it was nice that his little sister, his parents, and his own wife and children were finally getting some screen time, too.

  SUSANNE

  More than twenty years had passed since Kevin’s first episode, yet it felt as though nothing had changed. Susanne offered to change her plans in order to fly with Kevin and his family to the Bay Area and help Amanda with the children and logistics instead of going home to Ventura. She would drive him up the highway to the airport, Amanda and the kids in a separate car.

  Susanne remembered the exuberance of Kevin’s junior and senior high school years, and how he would stay up late at night in his darkroom developing photographs even after a long day of sailing and schoolwork. She wondered now whether that had been just the excitement of youth or an early sign of mania, where the gray had started and the black begun.25 As a teenager, too, Kevin would go flying, sometimes with his father, who taught him about aviation in much the same way he’d taught him about sailing: with a focus on detail and precision. Kevin flew occasionally during college, but in adulthood, as sailing took over, he eventually let his instrument pilot’s license lapse. If flying wasn’t an attempt at trying to feel closer to the sky, away from the earth, and to escape reality, she didn’t know what was.

  AMANDA

  Somehow, she had finally gotten some medications into him, but it was unclear how long it would take for them to take effect. How Susanne had managed to get him to the airport without anyone’s getting hurt along the way was one of the great miracles of the weekend. It appeared the elixir was putting Kevin in the backseat with Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” on repeat, apparently allowing him to smoke the occasional cigarette. As the family walked through the brightly lit and buzzing corridors of the airport, Amanda felt relieved when Kevin chose to pass the baggage carousels without darting off and onto the tarmac as he told her he had done in Tokyo.

  Once they all boarded the plane and were up in the air, Kevin sat in his seat with what Amanda felt was suspicious calmness. Every second that passed felt like a victory.

  The plane touched down at San Francisco International Airport.

  They had made it home.

  SUSANNE

  As she led her son in through the doors of the mental institution, Susanne realized that Kevin was still wearing his Google Glass.

  KEVIN

  The drugs were starting to kick in the way they usually did, radiating a sense of almost contagious relief to those around him, even though they hadn’t also ingested them. Kevin slowly started to realize where he was, but he still didn’t have a clear idea who he was or how he had ended up in a hospital. As he was coming down, he read a Stephen King book, not for literary pleasure or to pass the time, but for clues. Maybe this scene had been designed to offer him hints on how to get out of the hospital, or maybe the book contained a code that needed to be cracked.

  Reality returned and the fantasy of The Show receded. Worse than the loss of The Show itself was the realization that, once again, it had all been a lie manufactured in his own head. His jaunt to Legoland hadn’t done anything to save the world. Not only that, all he had done was inflict emotional pain on those he loved the most, perhaps this time to a new degree. The guilt of the vacation weighed on his shoulders like an unwanted, wet backpack. Having lost track of the number of times he had been in hospitals didn’t help, either.

  A doctor came in and introduced himself. In chatting with him, Kevin found that he had studied with Dr. Joel Gold, the same man Kevin had written to regarding the “Truman Show” delusion and who had also been in his year at Brown. It was hard, at first, not to wonder whether this was another sign from the Director that The Show was still going.

  As Kevin came down and the drugs started to kick in, Amanda and the doctor both agreed that this was another uncanny coincidence.

  •

  Amanda visited Kevin in the hospital and they talked about their children. Legoland had marked the first time that the children had witnessed their father’s mania in full force, but Rainer was now nine years old, old enough to understand that something was amiss.

  Kevin thought of when he was Rainer’s age. Back then, he had believed that there was an absolute right and wrong, success and failure. Some of that he felt had been because of his parents and a culture that had made him feel tha
t one’s worth came from being as close to the line of achievement as possible. Now, doubts that had been slowly building up in his mind for years came crashing down on him as a revelation: there was no line, and if there had been, there was more to life than coming close to it. Or, more closely tied to the crash, what good was an Olympic gold medal if one was dead?

  Kevin and Amanda knew they faced a decision. Should they tell Rainer about Kevin’s madness? Kevin could hold his emotions in, the way he felt his own father had, or he could try to explain to his children his relationship with the Director, the false comfort of The Show, and the implications of his mania. He could tell them what he really thought about failure and the quest for perfection and the gold. Tell them that he hoped they would go through their teenage years and lives sheltered from his tempest, but also not afraid to find their own strength in vulnerability.

  It had been thirteen years since Kevin had been an inpatient. All this time later, regardless of now being an Olympian, a husband, a two-time cancer survivor, and, most important, a father, The Show was still with him. The Director was still finding new and creative ways to interrupt all that he had built, all that he had fought for.

  He chose to tell the children about all of it.

  Amanda agreed. They would bring the children to the hospital and explain to them what had happened. It wouldn’t be easy, but it felt right. Kevin also thought about his battle with medication.26 The way he later put it: “The world is round, yet I am flat.”

  During the children’s visit, Rainer described what he had seen in his father at Legoland. He had thought his dad was acting just like one of the children. Kevin listened to his son, then began telling him his story as openly and honestly as he could.27

  GORDON

  A couple of weeks after Legoland, the family reassembled for Thanksgiving. They hadn’t spoken much since their vacation, but it wasn’t long before the subject came up again, however awkward. Gordon told Kevin how he had felt at Legoland: disrespected.

  Kevin was shocked. He asked him to repeat what he had said. He wanted to be sure that he had heard it correctly. Disrespected?