The Instructions (137 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

of love. If things don’t change, if you don’t love us back, our love dies tomorrow, then you and your students. You’ve got twenty-one minutes til the first explosion. We love you, Ms. Sampsel, each and every one of you. We love each and every one of you and so you are warned and so you are saved. By us, Ms. Sampsel, not the authorities. As-salamu alaykum, shalom and om. Evacuate now or return to dust.

I hung up on Sampsel and dialed 911. Two more calls to finish hyperblinkering.

“Emergency Services.”

Please help, I whispered, Miles Nolan’s got a gun.

“Who is this?”

Matty Manx. Please help. Miles Nolan’s got a gun.

“Okay then, ‘Matty,’ where are you this time?”

I’m under the desk. Oh Jesus. Please.

“Under the—”

I hung up.

I counted to seven and dialed again.

This is Bobby Banks! Matty Manx just got shot! Mr. Abel said call you and I’m callin!

“Who is this?”

Bobby Banks!—hold on! Okay!—We’re at Twin Groves junior high. Bolan went toward the gym—Twin Groves Junior High I’m supposed to tell you. Niles Bolan!—Hold on! What?—Send everything you’ve got I’m supposed to tell you: Jiles Brolan’s crazy.

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I hung up, left the bathroom, stood on a chair. The Side of Damage stopped shooting their guns.

You
will
, I told them,
be asked about what happened, and when you’re asked—whether it’s by teachers or the cops, reporters or historians, your parents or your children, whether today, tomorrow, or years from now, whether the question’s why, how, or who—I want to make this clear—I want you to stay safe. I want you to tell the truth.

“It was Gurion.” “Gurion.” “Gurion did it.”

Good, I said.

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10:29 AM: C2 (C1; C3;
C4
;
C6
;)

APTAKISIC SQUAW SQUAD

(DISMOUNT PYRAMID; BACKFLIP INTO TWO FACING

LINES {“LEFT” AND “RIGHT”})

(ALL)

And one and two and three and

(LEFT)

Ready?

(RIGHT)

Yeah, go!

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(ALL)

We’re Bamming!

We’re slamming!

B-A-M-M-I-N-G!

We’re Bamming!

We’re jamming!

B-A-M-M-I-N-G!

(LEFT)

Hey Bam.

(RIGHT)

Yeah Jen?

(LEFT)

Won’t you come and do the Bam

With me?

(RIGHT)

Sure Jen,

But first I must go put the Bam to him

(LEFT)

Who’s he?

(RIGHT)

Just some guy I’ll make my prop er ty!

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(LEFT)

Go Bam

We all think that’s

H-O-T-T-T!

(RIGHT)

Yo Bam,

Bring that hot

D-A-M-A-G-E

(ALL)

We’re bamming!

B-A-M-M-I-N-G!

We’re jamming!

We’re Bamming!

B-A-M-M-I-N-G!

Bamming! Bamming!

Yay!

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In C-Hall, winter thunder rumbled ceiling panels. It was helpful—heightening anticipation, jacking our chemicals up an extra tick—but I worried the weather it indicated would stall the scholars, if not discourage some of them entirely. Without a schoolbus to take them from the Metra station to Aptakisic, they had miles to walk. I knew a storm wouldn’t stop the likes of Emmanuel 1295

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or Shai or Samuel Diamond, but the rest of them… What they would or wouldn’t do was no longer up to me, at least not for the moment, and I decided that was a blessing. It had to be. And if they didn’t show up, I could still protect the Side. They’d say I did it, and I’d say I did it, and most of the world would be happy to believe it. Fine, I thought. We’re fine, I thought.

I wrote Ben-Wa a pass to the Deaf Sentinel.

Tell him he’s needed in the Cage, I said.

“What if he asks why? I’m a really bad liar.”

“Start crying,” Jelly Rothstein told him. “He’ll follow you.”

“I can’t just start. Something needs to make me sad first.”

“You’re a tiny albino with a stupid name,” said Jenny Mangey,

“and girls don’t think about you sexually.”

“I know,” Ben-Wa said. “It’s true. I know. I hate my name.”

He walked away crying.

Three minutes later, they stood at the chain-link gate. We stepped out of doorways and surrounded Jerry.

He said, “Show me your passes.” He had no idea. This stitchy-looking vein in his temple was throbbing: once, twice—

I projected a penny at it and he dropped, unconscious.

The soldiers all looked at their weapons, and for the length of a breath the only sound in the hall was the whispery ticking of hailfall on the roof.

Imagine what a quarter’ll do, I said.

“We’re gonna win,” said Christian Yagoda.

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“No fucken shit,” said Vincie.

I recovered my penny, rolled Jerry for his keys and phone.

Nakamook’s platoon dragged the body to the Cage.

“What should we tie him to?” Fulton Market asked.

“No time to tie him,” said Benji. “He won’t be able to break out of here, anyway.”

“He’ll find the Monitor when he wakes up, and untie
him
,”

said Ronrico.

“Maybe,” Benji said. “Maybe he’ll be afraid to. Either way, he’ll already know what we’re willing to do, and anyone else we lock in here—Jerry’ll tell them how lucky they are.”

“They’ll be way too fucken scared to fuck around with us then,”

said Vincie.

Or too scared not to, I thought. If I was prisoner to a faction I knew had brutalized my cop, I’d wait beside the door with an improvised weapon: the next member of the faction who walked into my cage would get ambushed hard.

I told the Side of Damage: Remove all the chairs.

While they worked, I got the number off Jerry’s phone, saved it into Botha’s as “Wolf.”

I gave Ben-Wa Jerry’s, and called it with Botha’s.

It rang.

That’s the only number you answer, I said. Save it as “Gurion.”

Ben-Wa saved it.

The Flunky came back for more chairs. He tried to grab five and dropped his weapon. Potentials I’d not yet foreseen occurred to me.

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Flunky, I said.

The Flunky came over.

I climbed on a chair so he wouldn’t have to kneel, then wrote DAMAGE on his forehead in 12-gauge Darker.

“What is it?” he asked.

A blessing on your head.

“What for?” he said.

Protection.

I blessed all the rest of them and Benji blessed me.

The sentinel, blinking, started to mutter. Leevon kicked him.

Then he was quiet.

“He wakes up again, he’ll pull the alarm,” Jelly said.

“The alarm’ll get pulled anyway,” said the Janitor.

“But maybe not so soon, though,” said Jelly.

Jelly was right. We put Jerry in the girls bathroom and closed the door, tore a carrel from the wall, and wedged it under the knob. The part of the wall the carrel’d covered looked naked. The Side began to strip the rest of the Cage.

Don’t waste your damage on symbols, I told them.

They followed me out into C-Hall.

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10:35 AM: C2 (C1; C3;
C4
; C5;
C6
;
C7
;
C8
;
C9
) CHAZ BLACK

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(AT HALF-COURT MICROPHONE)

I’m Chaz Black and I’m happy to be here. I’m happy cause you’re here and I’m here at the same time and we’re about to hear—are you ready for this?—the
freshest
single in the world right now performed live by Boystar and his special guest. Now. When I say the freshest single in the world, how fresh do I mean? I’ll tell you. Not including the suits at New Thing for whom I middleman to the talent packager—The Boystar Incorporated’s what I mean by the talent packager—except for them, only nine people have ever heard this single.
Nine
. (USES FINGERS TO COUNT OFF) I’m one of them.

Boystar’s another. His parents. That’s four. Two producers—Biz Nagle and Jimmy Mineo. Our very special mystery guest. And then the two guys who wrote the song with Boystar—the brothers Chip and Rafe “I’m telling you it’s not a pseudonym!” Hottenstein. You students are privileged. The freshness of a new single—let alone a single that’s gonna be a hit—is rarely as fresh as the freshness of the single you’re about to hear, which is called “Infantalize,” by the way.

Believe me. The freshness is overwhelming. It’ll make you wanna dance in your seats, which I’ll get to in just a minute. Point I’m trying to make first is: We at New Thing and The Boystar Incorporated wanted to give this freshness to you—it’s a once-in-a-lifetime kinda freshness, unless you’re planning on working for a major label, which: good luck with that dream, you’ll need it—we wanted to give you students this once-in-a-lifetime type freshness so bad that during soundcheck, we rehearsed the B-side of the song—not “Infantalize”

itself, see, but the B-side, “Your Special”—so as not to pollute the freshness of “Infantalize” any further with the listenings of our four sound technicians. The difference between nine people having heard 1299

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the song and thirteen people having heard the song—it’s a difference of nearly fifty percent in terms of relative freshness, so what we did was: we kept it nearly fifty percent fresher for you than some of the more conservative members of our contingent might’ve thought wise if we’d told them our plan is what I’m telling you. And I’m not asking you to applaud me. I sense the respect in your silence, and I feel good about it, so just keep on keeping the silence, and I’ll tell you what we’ve got. We’ve got the album pressed. We’ve got the singles pressed. We’ve got the cover art sitting in a factory. We’ve got the website ready for launch. We’ve got the tour-dates lined up.

We’ve got the stickers. We’ve got the flyers. We’ve got the t-shirts.

We’ve got the street team to distribute all that stuff. But what we don’t have is the video. That’s why we’re doing the video here.

Right here in the gym with you. With
you
. And I can see by your smiles that you like that. And I can see by the way you’re at the edges of your seats, you’re thinking: “Will I be in the video, Chaz?

Will I, personally, as an individual student here at Aptakisic Junior High School, be in the video, Chaz?” And the answer is: Maybe.

And when I say “Maybe,” what I mean is: I sure hope so. In music, there’s something called harmony. Maybe you’ve heard of it. What harmony is is the product of two or more sounds doing what? You guessed it: harmonizing. There’s also such a thing as harmony in the world outside of music. You and I, friends: we’re in that kind of harmony. You want to be in the video, I want you to be in the video. That’s a kind of harmony that we’ll call the harmony of our most heartfelt wishes. Yet the question remains: How do we make our most heartfelt and harmonizing wishes come true? How do we get these wishes on tape? How do we get you guys on TV? Here’s 1300

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how: First of all I’ll give you second of all, and second of all is: If we decide you should be in the video, you have to get your parents to sign a slip we’ll mail to them that says we’re allowed to put you in the video. Ask me, that infringes on your rights as individuals, but that’s the cost of harmony. And like I said that’s second of all, because first of all, as you may or may not have picked up on by now, we at New Thing and The Boystar Incorporated have to decide that you
should
be in the video: Much as right now we’re all
wishing
har-monically for you to be in the video, for us to
decide
that you should be in the video depends on how you act once we start shooting. I’m gonna tell you a little about that. As soon as I’m done up here, I’m gonna sit down, and the lights are gonna go off. Boystar’s gonna come out of the locker-room with the super special mystery guest.

Spotlight’s gonna be on Boystar. He’s gonna do his shout-outs, and then he’s gonna start emotionalizing you. He’s gonna start singing

“Infantalize.” “Infantalize” starts out slow, quiet, smooth—sounds like it’s gonna be a ballad. But it’s a rocker. A real bootyshaker, if I may. And as soon as “Infantalize” starts rocking, the lights are gonna come up—and there’s gonna be our very special mystery guest harmonizing with Boystar, and then who else is there gonna be? You guessed it: You. Rather: Maybe you. For us to decide that you should be in the video, you need to be seriously emotionalized when the lights go up, and since we’ve got only five cameras here—those other four are for the news—and since of those five cameras, three are gonna be on Boystar, and one on the very special mystery guest, that leaves how many cameras dedicated to shooting the audience? That’s right. One camera, exactly. And one camera means what? One camera means that sometimes we’ll have some 1301

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tape of you, and other times we won’t. And so: You not only have to be seriously emotionalized when the lights come up, but you have to be seriously emotionalized for all of “Infantalize.” Simple way to put it: Dance in your seats, you might make the video. Sit still and be boring and you definitely won’t make the video. No one who’s seriously emotionalized sits still. Now, that said: being seriously emotionalized is not the same as being a spasticated dork. Don’t dork out. We’ve got expensive equipment here. We’ve got chore-ography. We’ve got one take. Do not come off the bleachers and try to dance with Boystar, no matter how beckoning his star presence seems to you. If you think he wants you to come be the co-star of his video: you’re wrong. He’s just really sexy and likable—that’s why he gets to be Boystar. And neither would you want him to come co-star in your video. Not if you were him and he were you. So if you dork out, you’ll be ejected, and you’ll ruin a part of the video, and everyone will be angry at you because maybe the part of the video you ruined is a part they would have been in, and suddenly you’ll find yourself out of harmony with everyone. You’ll find yourself friendless, alone, and in serious need of being emotionalized, but no one’s gonna want to emotionalize you because of how you acted like a hyper loo, and all you’ll have for solace will be
Emotionalize
, the new album by Boystar, which, since it’s such a kickin’ album, will work to give you solace, but it will do so in a bittersweet way, because even as it comforts you, you’ll know you could have been a part of it if you hadn’t screwed up and acted like such a spaz. And what’s more: you’ll have to buy it. Whereas, if you make it into the video we’ll pay you with a free copy. Now who wants a free copy?