The Instructions (157 page)
Authors: Adam Levin
“I won’t,” he said. “We
will.
Gurion
did it.”
Cory and three other ex-Shovers grabbed chairs. The four encircled Benji and raised the chairs high, saying, “Gurion.” “Gurion.”
“Gurion did it.”
“On ‘Go,’” Berman said.
Berman! I said.
“He’ll
kill
us if we don’t.”
“
I’ll
fucken kill you!” Vincie screamed.
Shut up, Vincie! It isn’t true! He’s barely alive, Josh. I’m talking to you. I’m talking to you, Josh. He can’t lift his arms. He can’t kill anyone. No one’ll kill anyone. I will protect you. I promise you, Josh. I can still forgive you for what you’ve done. I understand, okay? I understand why!
“He’s lying,” Berman said, “and he’ll be gone, anyway.”
I yelled, Someone stop them! I’m the messiah!
Then Aleph said “Go,” and brought down his sap, and the others their chairs, and Benji was gone.
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Sent: March 16, 2013, 5:56 AM Greenwich Mean Time (UTC +2) Subject: RE: PLEASE, JELLY (version 18)
From: [email protected] (Jelly Rothstein)
The account is attached.
______________________
11-17.doc
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----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: PLEASE, JELLY (version 18)
Date: March 10, 2013, 7:22 AM GMT (UTC +2)
Dear Jelly,
I’m too afraid to tell you how grateful I am; afraid you’ll regret the kindness you’re showing me… I’ll meet your terms. You know how to reach me if you ever change your mind. I hope you’ll change your mind.
A blessing on your head,
Gurion
PS Whoever you think I’ve got in your classes—I didn’t send him.
Probably it’s just some nice Orthodox boy with a crush. My dad was one of those once.
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----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: PLEASE, JELLY (version 18)
Date: March 9, 2013, 3:07 AM GMT (UTC +2)
Gurion:
I’ve been trying to forgive you for over six years. I keep almost writing back to you, but something always stops me. Sometimes it’s a call or a visit from June, who you’ve ruined, who you keep on ruining. She sings me your praises with such desperation—forget the ugly headscarf and all the baggy clothing, forget her far-off gazing and tic-like eruptions of “Baruch Hashem, Jelly! Baruch Hashem!”; her stunted voice alone, stuck fast in croaky girlhood, breaks my heart bad enough—I can’t even squint, much less protest, for fear that she’ll jump off a building.
Other times what stops me is your emails themselves. When my hatred burns its brightest, they often cooled it off a little, true enough, but the times the hate’s ebbing, they get it to flow. The times the hate’s ebbing, I find myself thinking: Gurion was only a little boy then, a smart boy, sure, but a boy nonetheless; little boys are bastards, little girls too, they don’t know any better, no matter how smart; you can’t hate a young man for what he did as a boy, he didn’t know what he was doing, he couldn’t help but make mistakes; I’ll respond when he sends his next email. But then I get your next email, and it reads no different than the ones from six years ago, and you say the same things you were saying six years ago. And you CAN hate a little boy for what he’s done as a little boy, and you CAN hate a young man for 1495
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what he’s done as a young man. Whether you’re still a little boy, or were always a young man (or maybe an old man, born fully formed), I have no idea, but you are who you were; you were who you are. You’re the same exact person I hated six years ago, the same exact person I’ve hated six years.
Still, hatred’s no picnic. I don’t like to hate you. It rips at my stomach, my mouth tastes like pennies. I don’t want to keep doing it. I’m writing you back now not because I forgive you, but because maybe writing back will help me forgive you. It’s just about the only thing I haven’t tried; that, and giving you what you think you want. And I WILL give you what you think you want, Gurion—I will go for broke here—but you have to agree to my terms first. My terms are simple.
You get my account if you leave me alone. No more emails.
No more sending June here to talk to me. No more Scholars Fund goons sitting near me in class, haunting me at yoga, or standing on the corner “watching over” me. Nothing. You give me your word and I’ll take you at your word—you were never a liar.
And just for the record, and your own edification: You went way over the line in that last one. You have no right whatsoever to make me feel guilty, even if that seems to you to be what it’s taken to get me to respond to you. ESPECIALLY if that seems to you to be what it’s taken. You’re a fucked up, terrible, impossible person.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
I still don’t feel better. I hate you even more now than before I typed “Gurion.” Maybe I need to actually send this first.
Sending this,
Angelica Rothstein
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----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
Subject: PLEASE, JELLY (version 18)
Date: March 8, 2013, 7:56 AM GMT (UTC +2)
Dear Jelly,
Do you remember when you told me that I shouldn’t love June because she drew “crazy things”? We were in the Cage, at the teacher cluster, eating our lunches, and Benji told you it didn’t matter what she drew. Then he went on to say, in so many words, that he loved you, even though YOU were crazy, you who bit people. Anything I’ve done to make you hate me, Jelly, it wasn’t to make you hate me, Jelly: I was only just biting people, drawing crazy things. I’m not asking you to love me. I’m asking you to remember that Benji did, at least for a while. And I’m asking you to honor that for long enough to really hear me out this time. The Benji I knew, regardless of what he might’ve thought of me at the very end of his life—he’d at least have wanted you to hear me out.
The problem is that he was life-size, Jelly. Do you remember he was life-size? The problem is that he had crazy long arms, and he was tougher than anyone, and sad, and smart, and too romantic, but still he was life-size, when he was alive, and I just can’t get that to come across on the page. All that he is now’s “Nakamook” or
“Benji” or “Benji Nakamook,” larger than life or smaller than life, overly petty or overly noble, overly thoughtful or overly driven, not quite human or all too human, destined by his current state of representation to provide shallow lessons, to suffer shallow ironies, 1497
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to die as an algorithm, wholly comprehensible, a Goliath of Gath where should be a David, a figure where should stand a boy.
And maybe that’ll still be the case if you tell me what happened once you got to the Nurse’s—I don’t know what happened, you’re the only one who knows, and my problem, in the end, might have nothing to do with my lack of information, and everything to do with my limited skills as an author—but
The Instructions
is finished, or nearly finished—I can’t do it much longer, it’s turning me ugly (or I guess, from where you stand: uglier)—and Benji’s last best shot at being remembered properly—my last best shot at rendering him accurately, as the person we loved… I won’t even be able to take that shot if you decide not to help me. And all the readers of
The Instructions
, of whom there’ll be millions, will proceed to make total, simple sense of our friend.
On bruised, purple knees,
Gurion ben-Judah
11-17
When I entered the nurse’s office, Benji was half-asleep at the desk, trying and failing to open a mint-tin. I said his name.
He said, “You’re a dream.”
I said, “
You’re
a dream, baby.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” he said.
I kissed his ear.
“Dreaming,” he said.
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I pinched the ear.
“Okay,” he said.
I sat across the desk from him and opened the tin. The tin contained pills. I asked him what he wanted. He told me the spedspeed, the blue ones: crush them. I pushed aside the blotter to expose the steel desk and turned the pills to powder under the tin. From the powder, I cut lines with the edge of a postcard advertising flu-shots.
I cut them the size I’d seen in the movies; the length of a cigarette, thick as a bicpen. “What is a
chazer
?” Benji said, like Tony Montana, and made a cough-laugh noise.
I halved the lines.
“Say goodnight to the bad guy.”
I halved them again, and rolled up a dollar, and helped him to hold it. He snorted two lines, took a breath, swallowed hard, did another two lines, took hold of my hand with his good one and frowned. I went around the desk and we started making out, but his mouth was bitter and he wouldn’t let me kiss it, so I did some lines and we were even and kissed.
A few minutes later, we were both a little sweaty, and our skin was tingling. The air tasted sweet.
“We’re fine,” I said.
Benji told me the nurse smoked; he’d seen him sneak out to the lot with Miss Pinge. I rifled through Clyde’s desk, found a fresh pack of menthols inside a first-aid kit inside of a file-drawer. Matches in the cellophane. We ashed in a watercup.
“We’re fine,” I said again.
“Right now,” Benji said. “Right this minute we’re fine. It’s not gonna last. We’ll get sent to different schools. We’ll never see each 1499
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other. It’ll sound a lot worse when we’re done being high.”
“We’ll see each other sometimes.”
“Your mom won’t let you.”
“I can sneak away sometimes.”
“It won’t be enough. It’s not enough now.”
“Isn’t that good? To be enough would mean we—”
“But there shouldn’t be obstacles. It should fail to be enough despite a
lack
of obstacles. That’s the happy ending. Don’t get confused. This one’s fucked. Why did we do this?”
“Boystar hurt Main Man. Botha grabbed Gurion. Slokum had it coming for years. Once we rodneyed Botha, we were already fucked.
All we could lose was the chance to act without anything to lose.
Aren’t you glad we hurt the right people? And orange you glad I didn’t say banana?”
Benji didn’t smile. “There’s always something to lose,” he said.
“There’s always something left to get damaged.”
He lit two more cigarettes, handed one over, said, “I’m finished with Gurion. Over him. Done.”
“He’s your closest friend.”
“You’re my closest friend.”
“Except for me,” I said.
He told me about the conversation you’d had. He said you’d betrayed him to protect Josh Berman, then lied about it.
I defended you. I said you loved him and you did what you thought you had to do at the time. (I don’t doubt that, even now, but your love back then, as now—though I didn’t know it then—
was irrelevant.) I made a point of telling him you sent me, too. I told him the first thing you did when you returned to the gym was send 1500
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me to him, and now we were there, high and smoking in school in love. Who else had ever gotten to be where we were?
He said that he wished we could run away together. It wasn’t a proposal; he said it wistfully. We’d already talked about running away, and why it wouldn’t work. Just the day before, we’d had the conversation. Benji’d stabbed himself with a pen and I’d passed out. Botha’d sent us to the Nurse’s; we’d dawdled in the hallway, discussed the possibility, the impossibility. We didn’t have money or transportation or places to stay, though it wasn’t finally those things which kept us from doing it: those things, with luck, could be overcome. We could have, for example, learned to be pickpockets or, failing that, conned or mugged people—Benji was strong and both of us tricky. And once we had money, we could stay at motels, pay the right people to get us our rooms, and sleep all day and steal all night, DO NOT DISTURB cards hanging on our doorknobs, sneaking in and out to avoid the manager, ordering our pizzas in deep parental voices, telling the delivery guys that mom was in the shower.
What stopped us was the likelihood that we’d get caught eventually, that we’d have to last seven years on the run, til I was eighteen; once we got caught, there was no way my parents would let us near each other. Better to stay in the Cage, we’d decided; tossing notes, stealing glances, hanging out alone fifteen minutes a day between the end-of-school tone and start of detention. Plus there were weekends. Plus after school sometimes. My parents were nice, just loud and spastic and a little bit paranoid; they’d like Benji when they met him; I’d convince Ruth to tell them he shouldn’t be in the Cage; I’d tell them
I
was in the Cage, what was wrong with the Cage? did 1501
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they think I was hateful for being in the Cage? And I’d stop with the biting and the mouthing off; they’d let us hang out. They would. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad at all. Not only couldn’t we run away and make it, but there was no good reason to run away, it turned out. So we went to Nurse Clyde’s, he sprayed Benji’s wound, covered it in gauze, and gave me some orange juice. He sent us back to the Cage with a pass we didn’t need, and we went to the gym, out the pushbar door, and we killed what remained of the schoolday outside, walking to the beach and kissing in the sand, getting too cold and un-tarping a boat that was up on a trailer parked in the lot, crawling inside, kissing some more, smoking stolen cigarettes to catch our breaths, and a round or two of slapslap we each tried to lose.
