The Instructions (62 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

walked into the shoved one’s elbows. And occasionally the heel-toer’s own heel would get toed by a fourth Main Hall Shover, then the fourth by a fifth, then the fifth by a sixth, and etc. and so on. The only thing that might vary was the size of the sandwich.

None of the Shovers ever wrecked school property, or ever got in trouble, let alone damaged, yet from the way they’d chin air and slap backs post-routine, you could tell that they thought they got away with being dangerous. Mischief wasn’t danger, though, and they’d only been mischievous, and you didn’t have to get away with that during Lunch—mischievous was what you were supposed to be. The whole purpose of Lunch outside of the classroom was to provide time and space for students to engage in benign little fits of halfhearted assault that would dull their urges to damage the arrangement. So while the Main Hall Shovers thought themselves defiant, like some paddling gang of finns on the foamy rapids, they were just a bunch of sawyers in school-colored scarves eating candy in a barn before supper.

They’d have brought more damage singing Aptakisic’s fight-song while marching down Main Hall in a singlefile line—at least then their behavior might have seemed ironic.

After their first routine (a three-man sandwich), I looked past them to the action on the farther side of Main Hall. The seventh-grade Jennys—Jennys April, Khouri, and Flagg—knelt under the fire alarm to retie their shoes. The shoes were brand-new white with a steel toe on the outside and a bright-colored tongue: a red tongue for April, a green one for Khouri, and an orange 573

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for Flagg. No one in the hallway seemed to notice the Jennys, so they pulled the knots loose and tied them again, and then again, and again once more, when finally two Ashleys—Dunkel wearing an EMOTIONALIZE head-band, and Doer a wrist one embossed with a Star of Boystar—stopped to admire the shoes.

Dunkel slapped her forehead, and Doer used her wrist to touch each Jenny on the shoulder. They kissed each other’s halos and giggled loud giggles.

Then an Israelite Shover thumped the window chin-first, and my line of sight got blocked, and he fell. A second kid tripped on the fallen one’s body, and the tripped one got grundied by Maholtz. Maholtz then blindly collided with Slokum, who one-arm bounced him off the window hard and continued forward without breaking stride.

Maholtz saw me see him, stuck his hand in his pocket, and pulled out his sap and snicked it. I stood up fast and he backpedaled. I reached in my hoodie and pulled out my swearfinger, mouthed the word “Bryguy,” and there might have been a stare-down, and Maholtz might have won it, but I looked at the ground, overcome with confusion, and so I didn’t know if there’d been any staredown.

What confused me was how it was that I’d known that the Shover who’d slammed against the window was an Israelite. To read a face takes too much effort to do it without noticing, so I knew I hadn’t, inadvertantly or otherwise, read an Israelite story in the slammed Shover’s face. I could barely remember the shape 574

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of the face. What I did remember was blonde hair and light eyes, and though no few Israelites had such features, the features themselves far from signified Israelite. His nose I couldn’t picture, but big-nosedness would have indicated little, anyway. To really get across that Nazi propaganda look, you had to reveal your profile to the viewer, and the glance that I’d gotten was totally frontal.

By the time I started picturing the area under his scarf-knot to see if he wore a hamsa or chai or mogen David, the image was already becoming unreliable—it flickered and the chest expanded and contracted, cycling through various breadths and shirt-colors, none of which seemed to be accurate. Was it possible I made a mistake? What kind of mistake was that to make, though? Why would I see an Israelite where there was no Israelite? Because I
wished
he were an Israelite?
Did
I wish that? What I really wished was that
no
Israelites were Shovers. However, being that some were, did I wish them more harm than I did the other Shovers?

Did I wish hard enough that the wish banced my eyesight, banced it enough to Israelitelate a window-slammed Gentile? I didn’t think so. I didn’t believe people’s brains worked like that, or at least not mine, and I still don’t. But that stopped mattering, anyway. What came to matter was that, yes, when I thought about it, I did wish the Israelite Shovers more harm than the others. I wished them all harm, all of the Shovers, but there was a sharper kind of satisfaction in my stomach when I thought of the Israelite ones getting damaged. They seemed, somehow, to deserve it more.

Or maybe it was just that I would never hurt them myself, at 575

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least not for being Shovers. All Shovers were chomsky for being Shovers, but the Israelite ones, in addition to being chomsky, got me disappointed. Despite that disappointment, I wouldn’t bring them damage, because they were my brothers, chomsky or not.

And because I wouldn’t bring them damage despite the disappointment, because they were my brothers, chomsky or not, it made me feel frustrated and wish them extra damage.

To have even thought these explanations
could be
correct, seems now, in itself, to mean that they were. Right then, though, I didn’t have time to sort it out. Eliyahu, having spotted me through the sound-resistant window, charged into the Office with a hand atop his hat and shouted my name. Then he was hugging me. I hugged him back one-armed, looking over his shoulder. Maholtz was gone, having maybe won a staredown.

We sat in the waiting chairs.

“Baruch Hashem,” Eliyahu said.
“I thought you’d died.”

I told you, I said, I’m not gonna die. And I asked him, Where’s Nakamook?

“Nakamook,” he said. “Nakamook, exactly. Nakamook, he’s in the Cage eating lunch with your friend Jelly Rothstein. And I know you told me that you wouldn’t die, yet still I worry. You were not in the Cage this morning, and when I asked Nakamook did he know where you were, he said you were here in this office. But the word of Nakamook…” His mouth half-open, Eliyahu used both hands to wave the rest of the sentence away from his body.

What? I said.

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“Maybe it’s not so important,” said Eliyahu. “And a blessing on Benji’s head. What I am trying to explain is that I thought it better to see with my own eyes that what he said of you this morning was true. So, to see with my own eyes, I raised high my textbooks, one by one, and dropped them the flat way. Such a boom they made upon meeting the floor! For each boom, Monitor Botha gave me a step. And so boom and boom-boom and a fourth boom: detention.

Then bip: he wrote a CASS. Bop: he sent me to Mr. Brodsky, who revoked the detention when I explained my concerns. That was two hours ago and you were not here, and so what else could I think?

I thought maybe you were dead. What else was there to think?”

That I’d stayed home with a cold? I said.

“Maybe,” said Eliyahu, “and I did consider the possibility, but then I began to think of how you’d told me that you wouldn’t die. I thought: If I’m to believe that Gurion won’t die, it’s the same as believing that Gurion
can’t
die, and if Gurion can’t die, then is it so likely he can catch cold? It didn’t seem so likely. It didn’t seem likely at all. It seems to me that if you can catch cold, you can die. So I thought: Maybe he was mistaken when he said he wouldn’t die—maybe he would, in which case he could, which is to say he
can
, so he probably has a cold. So probably a cold, I thought, and thank God it is probably just a cold. And this was comforting for a moment, until the stress shifted, at which point I thought: If Gurion can have a cold, he can die, so it is not so outlandish to worry that he is dead. So I worried you were dead.”

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I don’t have a cold, I whispered. I slept in. And Nakamook can be trusted—he’s loyal.

“I am glad you don’t have a cold, and it is not really a question of is Benji loyal, or even does he lie,” Eliyahu said. “It’s maybe he’s a little crazy. Maybe he gets a little carried away sometimes.

For instance, yesterday: On the bus-ride home, we sat next to each other, and this Co-Captain person did not come near me—I could see in his eyes that he wanted to bother me, but he did not bother me—and yes, it made me grateful for Nakamook’s protection. But then Nakamook became crazy, or maybe just carried away. Is there a difference? I don’t know. Who am I to know the difference? It seems as though to act
carried away
is to respond excessively to something actual, and that to act
crazy
is to respond improbably to something that may or may not be actual.

It seems like the
carried away
person, if he slips like a clown on a banana peel, assaults those who laugh at him, whereas
crazy
, it seems, would be a person who, when people are laughing at a clown who has slipped on a banana peel, believes the people are laughing at him—laughing at the crazy person, I mean, not the clown—and then he, this crazy person, assaults the people. The ones who are laughing. Or maybe the crazy person is the one who, even when people aren’t laughing at all, and there is no banana peel, he attacks people because he believes they
would
laugh at him
if
he slipped on a banana peel. Whether Benji is crazy or just gets carried away, when this morning he told me you were serving ISS there was no reason for me to think he would lie, but 578

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there was also no reason for me to believe him—he could have seen you, true, but also he could have thought he’d seen you and seen someone else, or he could have seen no one else but believed he’d seen you.”

What did he do on the bus? I said.

“Aye! The legs! I got ahead of myself. I forgot to explain. I left out the important part. It happens sometimes, you should know it about me—I get ahead of myself. I get carried away and leave out the important part. The important part is what Benji did with his legs. True, it began harmlessly, it was a little funny even: He stretched his legs onto the seat across the aisle from the one on which we sat, and he kept them there, the legs. At bus-stops, when a girl needed to pass him, he would clear the path, but when it was a boy who needed to get by, Benji would keep the legs stretched until the boy did something for his entertainment. It was, at first, playful, like a game. Some of the fifth-graders seemed to like it. On reflection, I suppose they enjoyed how the fearsome Nakamook was talking to them without any threat of smashing up their bones, or maybe just that he wanted something from them that they could deliver. He would have them tell a joke or sing the chorus of a song, and he would applaud when they did so, even when the joke wasn’t funny or the song was off-key. He was nice to them.

“But then Aleph comes along—that tall, muscular boy I told you about yesterday, the one who looked away when the Co-Captain knocked my hat off—he’s also on the bus—and the 579

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nonsense with the legs stops being playful. Nakamook tells him,

‘Sing me a song,’ and Aleph, he doesn’t want to sing, so he offers Nakamook a dollar.

“‘What is this?’ says Nakamook.

“‘A toll,’ Aleph tells him.

“‘A
toll
?’ says Nakamook.

“‘For so I can pass by you—I’m offering to pay you a toll,’

explains Aleph.

“And Nakamook, here, gets all verklempt. He gives Aleph this speech, this carried-away, if not crazy, speech, and then he says to me—”

Wait, I said. What speech? I said. You’re getting ahead of yourself.

“You want the speech?” said Eliyahu.

Do you remember the speech?

“Who could forget such a speech!” said Eliyahu.

So nu? I said. I’m stuck here all day. Give me something to think about.

“Okay, so okay, so Aleph proffers the dollar, Benji says what is it, Aleph tells him it’s a toll for so he can pass, and then, and then…” Eliyahu cleared his throat, made his eyes squinty, and held his hands before him in half-open fists, fingernails up, and made the fists rotate in little circles. “‘
Toll
?’ Benji says. ‘
Toll
?’ he says.” Having gotten into character, Eliyahu stilled his wrists.

“‘
Toll
is not what you mean.
Toll
sounds like a lie.
Toll
you pay a builder to cross a bridge he built.
Toll
you owe the builder 580

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because he built the bridge. When
you
say
toll,
kid,
it sounds like something else. When you say
toll
, it sounds like the price of safe passage, and
the price of safe passage
like a fee being extorted from you, an unjust price; a price you pay to prevent the advances of unjust forces against your physical integrity. But to pay a price like that, to pay a price in advance, to the
unjust
, a price
to prevent advances against your physical integrity
—that is to compromise your dignity.’”

Eliyahu stopped squinting. “Just to be clear,” he said, “you know I’m doing Nakamook—this isn’t me saying this.”

Right, I said. It’s good. It’s a good impression.

“Really? Thank you. Okay, so, okay, so where…”

‘To pay a price in advance to—’

“Right. Exactly.” He fell back into character, and this time spoke louder: “‘To pay a price in advance, to the
unjust
, a price
to prevent
advances against your physical integrity
—that is to compromise your dignity. And dignity compromised is no longer dignity. Whoever says otherwise is selling you a bridge, kid. And I am no extortionist. I’m only a person with his legs across an aisle. Why not just ask me,
Benji please move your legs
? Years we go to school together, never speaking… Years go by, you never introduce yourself to me, you never nod hello to me in the hallway or even so much as drink a Coke at my lunch table—and all this time I give you the benefit of the doubt. I tell myself,
He’s shy. He is not avoiding you. He is not
snubbing you.
But now, when you would have me do something for you, some nothing so small as moving my legs, a gesture I never 581