The Instructions (9 page)
Authors: Adam Levin
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Tamar Maccabee was my mother. Whereas Judah Maccabee was my father, whose voice was louder than anyone’s. You were not Key:
supposed to bother him at work, especially not in the middle of
BOLD = HARD TRANSLUCENT PLASTIC
ITALICS = HIGHLY ELASTIC OPAQUE RUBBER
a trial, and he was at work, in the middle of a trial, representing Patrick Drucker, a local White Supremacist, in a case against the city of Wilmette, Illinois. My dad knew about my fight at King Middle School in Evanston, but he didn’t know about any of the ones at Aptakisic. My mom thought it was better if we didn’t mention those to him, and I agreed—I wanted to protect him from disappointment. I still remained calm though, for roughly three seconds, because I decided Brodsky had just made a mistake, and I was going to tell him that he must have dialed the wrong number, that he was supposed to dial the number for Tamar
Maccabee, not Judah, but right when I opened my 81
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mouth to speak, Brodsky nodded at me, half-smiling, his eyebrows cranked up to what used to be his hairline = “Surprise, Gurion, it’s you who’s made the mistake.”
I saw my curved reflection in the bend of Brodsky’s handset, down by the mouthpiece. My neck was three or four times the width of my face in there, just bulging out—begging, it seemed, for a chop—and the hairs June had touched were glossy and sharp.
When at last I found my eyes, just barely pinpoints, reflected blood-red by a trick of the light, I thought: I could take you. I could wipe you out, Gurion. I could end you, easy, with just these bare hands.
Then Brodsky moved the handset, held it out before me, and I was looking at the pattern of holes in the earpiece. Brodsky said,
“Gurion.” So did my father. I rumbled some gooze, brought the thing to my face.
Hello, I said.
“Are you hurt?” said my father.
I said, There was a charleyhorse, but I fixed it.
He said, “I’m glad you’re not hurt. I am not glad about this phone call.”
I said, I’m sorry you’re bothered at work.
He said, “It’s not that, boychical. It’s the fighting.”
That’s when I started crying. It happened sometimes when I’d get worked up and he’d call me something nice in Yiddish. I tried to cry quietly so he wouldn’t hear.
“Why haven’t you told me you’ve been getting in fights? And 82
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why did you fight with these boys today?” he said. “Did that Benji put you up to it?”
No, I said. And he’s my best friend, I said, and you shouldn’t talk about him like—
“He’s a criminal,” my dad said.
I sniffled back some gooze.
My dad heard it. He said, “Crying? Are you crying? What’s this crying? Is it Scott?”
Whenever I cried, my dad would ask if I was crying about the last thing I’d cried about, and the last time I’d cried was a week before, right after I’d read about Williams Cocktail Party Syndrome in my mom’s
Synopsis of Psychiatry
and found out Main Man would surely die young.
I said to my father, I didn’t break any laws. All I did was break rules.
He said, “This is something to cry about? Rules? If you did nothing wrong and you’re not hurt and your father loves you and so does your mother and these girls that call you at night on the phone who they love you too—and you know what just came in the mail? Front-row balcony for Chaplin just came in the mail.
Cry? Why cry?”
Girls hadn’t called me at night since I got kicked out of Northside Hebrew Day School. Front-row balcony for Chaplin, though, was good news. Once a year, around Christmas,
City
Lights
, which is the single best movie ever made, gets shown at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall with full orchestral accom-83
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paniment. We’d gone every year since I was four, but we’d never gotten balcony, and I always wanted balcony.
I had to sniffle again. I did it.
Then my father said, “Not that you
shouldn’t
cry. It’s fine, you know, if you like it. Don’t get me wrong. In fact, it’s good. You’re a ten-year-old boy. The world is big. It’s hard. I was just asking.”
I said, I’m in trouble.
“Trouble?” he said. “What trouble? You’re not in any trouble.
You’re loved. You’re unhurt. Maybe you have to sit in this in-school suspension. This is trouble? This is to cry about? No. This is the world, not trouble. Trouble is for when you do wrong, for when you break laws. A suspension: this is something else. This is a punishment. This is for when you break rules, an in-school suspension. You’re a good boy but you break rules. You just have to learn to not break rules. So you go to in-school suspension.
There’s no trouble there.”
The crying was pretty much gone. I said, I don’t want to be in suspen-sion.
He said, “If you wanted to be in suspension, it wouldn’t be a punishment. So you’re in suspension. So what. Avoid it from now on. Don’t fight. Don’t fight don’t fight don’t fight. Now listen, genius,” he said, “I have a late meeting after court today, and your mother’s seeing patients til seven. We
will
have dinner together—we need to discuss this fighting—but dinner will be a little late, so I want you to nosh on something after school.
Don’t go hungry. And kill some time at the Frontier. I already 84
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talked to Arthur. He has a song he wants to play you.”
Arthur = Flowers. Arthur was his first name.
“So what else?” my dad said.
I said, I want my record.
“What record?” he said.
My file, I said. I said, It’s got all my information in it. Mr.
Brodsky won’t let me have it.
My dad said, “Nonsense. If it’s yours, why won’t he let you have it?”
I said, It’s nonsense.
My dad said, “I’ll get it for you. Now what do you want for dinner? Your mother’s making chicken.”
I said, Chicken.
He said, “Good for you, because that’s what we’re having. Now wipe your face and go to class. Learn what you can learn. Let me talk to this Brodsky person, yes?”
I handed the phone to Brodsky. Brodsky was holding out a tissue.
I wiped my face on my sleeve and waited. I don’t know what my father said to him. All I could hear was Brodsky saying, “Yes”
and “I understand but” and then “Yes” again, and by the time he got off the phone, his head had lost all its pink. He set the tissue on the desk and told me I had an ISS tomorrow, which did not get me out of having to serve the detention that I was already scheduled to serve. Then he told me to go back to the Cage, that the Office would send word when my file was ready. He spun his chair around to face the soundgun.
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On my way out to Miss Pinge, I took the wingnut out of the dirt in Brodsky’s fan-shaped plant’s pot, but I’m not an Indian-giver—and neither were the Indians; it was the settlers—so I yanked a tall green leaf off the plant and dropped the wingnut on Brodsky’s blotter, where it rattled til it came to rest.
Sent: June 7, 2006, 6:34 PM Central-Standard Time Subject: RE: FWD: Headmaster Mamzer
From: [email protected] (Ben Brodsky)
To: [email protected] (me)
Rabbi,
I will do everything exactly as you’ve asked, no more no less.
And I want you to know that we all miss you at school. True, it is not as bad for me as it is for the littler kids, since I’m graduating anyway, and I was already prepared to not see you as often, but still it is suck.
Your Student,
Ben
----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Headmaster Mamzer
Date: Wed, 7 June 2006 6:07 PM CST
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Ben,
Thank you. You’re a good friend and I wish we’d been able to hang out more when we were still in school together. I won’t say a word to anyone about the hacking, but it’s very important to me that you let all the Schechter scholars with pennyguns know that they should not bring their weapons to school tomorrow, or any copies they might be carrying of Ulpan. Tell them that I told you so, and no one should have any reason to suspect the hack. If they need a deeper explanation, though, tell them I heard there were desk- and locker-searches being conducted at Northside, and I fear the same thing will happen at Schechter. If they ask HOW I heard, tell them you don’t know, which isn’t a lie, not, at least, if you think about it hard enough. After all, I haven’t yet said whether this is the first I’ve heard of the the searches at Northside, and I’m not saying that now, so you don’t know if it is.
All I’m saying now is thank you.
I will, myself, try calling as many students as I can, but a lot of them aren’t allowed to talk to me because of the thing with Unger and then also what happened at the Synagogue, so please do what I’ve asked.
It is no surprise to me that you are a great sniper.
Your Friend,
Gurion
----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
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Subject: Fwd: Headmaster Mamzer
Date: Wed, 7 June 2006 5:01 PM CST
Rabbi Gurion,
Remember how I told you they made me a SpEd at public school because I hacked into the faculty emails and got caught? And how you said that it’s no good to hack people’s emails, because emails are private, but then at the same time you were glad I did it because if I hadn’t done it then we wouldn’t have been able to study together since my parents wouldn’t have sent me to Schechter if I didn’t get turned into a SpEd at public school? You were right. It is wrong to hack faculty emails, but good that we got to study together. That is why I never told you about how I’ve been hacking faculty emails here, at Schechter. Because I didn’t want you to be disappointed, because it was only wrong, because nothing good came of it. And I am telling you about it now, not because anything GOOD has come of it, but because something I think you should know about has come of it. I was in Unger’s inbox and I read an email from your Headmaster Kalisch that was headered “Important” that said you got kicked out of Northside today, but then it also said a lot of other things that I thought you should know about. I almost forwarded it to myself, but then there would have been a sent receipt in Unger’s outbox, which would not be stealth at all, so instead I copied and pasted it into an email that I sent to myself, from myself, and that’s what I’m forwarding to you. I’ve told no one about this because no one can know that I hack faculty emails, and also I figured you should read it before others—I felt very weird reading it before you.
So just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. Also, I wanted 88
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to tell you that I was delivered your instructions Saturday night, and so was Itzy Wasserman, though in the backyards of different Israelites, and what I thought was funny is that we drew the same face on our targets—Unger’s! I like to shoot his eyes. I like to shoot them so much that I’ve gone through three targets already. Since yesterday, I’ve been able to nail him from thirty feet off, but it is most satisfying at twenty feet off, because even though twenty feet off doesn’t make me feel as snipery as thirty feet off, I still feel pretty snipery, and plus I can hear the cardboard tearing at twenty, if the wind doesn’t blow, while at thirty I can’t even hear the cardboard tearing at all, no matter what—just my breathing and the snap of the balloon—and the cardboard tearing is such a good sound.
Your Student,
Ben Brodsky
Miss Pinge was peeling a spotted banana. She held it close to her face to hear the hiss of the skin tearing. In the middle waiting-chair, where I fell in love with June, a thin kid wearing tzitzit and a black fedora was chewing on the ends of his peyes. I wanted to be dressed just like him, but couldn’t for another two years and seven months, when I would become a man. My father didn’t want me to dress like a Hasid, or even wear a keepah—he didn’t say these things, but it was easy to tell—and I had to honor him. Once I was a man, I would still have to honor him, but not at the cost of 89
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breaking the Law. My father used to be Hasidic himself, and that is why I thought for a second that I knew the kid in the middle waiting chair—it was from a picture in our family room. It’s a picture of my dad, at his bar-mitzvah, sitting on a stone bench in the sun outside the Kotel in Jerusalem. He’s not chewing on his peyes in the picture, but wind from the Al Aqsa side is blowing the left one against his lips, so it looks like he’s chewing it.
I missed my father, even though I just talked to him on the phone.
I wanted to have lunch with him. My old schools were much closer to my house, and sometimes he’d come by with my mom and take me out for lunch. The last time was my third—my second-to-last—day at Martin Luther King Middle School. My dad was working at home and my mom had a sudden cancellation, so they took me to Foxies in Skokie. We had cheese fries and root-beer from a glass bottle and my mom was going to let me skip the rest of the day but my dad said I couldn’t and he drove me back.
