He had a hard time with debt. It started when he was four or five and realized that he was accruing debts he could never repay. He believed his parents would hold the notes for the rest of his life. (He could imagine himself dying but not his parents.) Just tracking all the money they spent on his food, clothing, school supplies, sports equipment and fees, zoo admission, movie tickets, and the rest of it would’ve been impossible. He hated the control Dirk and Alice exerted over his life because he was poor and dependent. They told him when to go to bed and when to clean his room, and what could he do? He owed them. He came to understand that his parents schemed to make him subservient and keep him that way. It was a system. As he learned more about slavery and other economic injustices, he saw his parents as worse than the worst pawn shop owners and company town bosses.
Despite the futility of his situation, he swore to them that he’d someday settle the debt. Dirk and Alice told him not to be crazy, that he didn’t owe them a thing, not a cent. They said that if it helped him, he could think of their expenditures as investments. He would take the enrichment they’d given him into adulthood, become a responsible man with a good job, and eventually take care of them in their old age. At other times, they said he could think about what they spent on him as charitable contributions, like the annually renewing contributions they gave to the public radio station. They also pointed out that there were tax advantages to having him as their child. But he wasn’t stupid, far from it. He saw right away that the investment thing was nothing more than a clever repackaging of the entanglements that set the constricted boundaries of his life. Same thing with thinking about his parents as his own private philanthropists. He was their ward, and he owed them in ways that were hard to understand — even though he hadn’t asked for any of it. And he knew that their earned income credit would never come close to what they were spending on him. His mind boiled.
He gave them half of his allowance, which was itself a touchy subject because he couldn’t choose the chores for which he would be paid or negotiate the pay rate. Even at that, Dirk and Alice thwarted him by secretly putting the money into a savings account that they gave him access to when he turned 18.
During his college years, one of his roommates told him late one night that someone who achieves a perfect credit score can kill people with no legal ramifications. They got a special dispensation from the government. He immediately fell in love with the idea and set about organizing his life to achieve a score of 850 as soon as he could.
But that required him to take on and maintain debts of various kinds and sizes — because you couldn’t handle debt perfectly without actually taking it in your hands. So he overrode the part of him that despised debt. Within a few years of graduating with a degree in computer engineering, he owned a car, a house, and boat, and he was routinely paying off and building balances on eight credit cards, always careful to keep his overall usage rate under ten percent. Once he had this system of credits and debits down, it was only a matter of repetition. But as his score approached 850, his progress slowed dramatically. It was down to time. The credit-rating agencies had to decide at which point he’d responsibly handled credit long enough. They decided on a little more than five years.
On the morning he checked Credit Karma and found that he’d finally attained a perfect score, he called his boss to say he was taking a personal day and pulled a box that contained a Glock and bullets from under his bed. He’d bought the gun with cash from his first real-job paycheck after college.
He parked up the street from his parents’ house and hid in the tall bushes next to the driveway. When his father came home for lunch, he followed him into the kitchen where his mother was waiting. He shot them both in the centers of their foreheads. He was an excellent shot. He’d gone target shooting hundreds of times.
An hour later, a small crowd of neighbors watched from the end of the driveway as he casually pulled up his credit score on his phone and showed it to the two officers standing in front of him. They frowned and slowly shook their heads — not because there was no such dispensation, but because it was never intended for people like him.
Birds of Bad Omen 