The Instructions by Adam Levin
Teacher #7 came out of the lounge.
I was worried the hydraulics would only squeak twice before the door shut, like with the third teacher, so I revolved after the first squeak in order to get the pen in place before the second, but the teacher paused at the outer-edge of the doorway, then turned her head to sneeze right when I was about to activate the pen-block, and I had to keep still and shut my eyes so they wouldn’t betray me, flashing. The second squeak came and I opened my eyes, tossed the pen down. It landed well, right against the jamb. Another sneeze from the teacher. I closed my eyes again. There was a third squeak after all, and a third sneeze. Then the teacher’s departing footsteps.
Nothing clicked.
I was in.
I plugged what remained of the change Pinge had made for me into the Coke machine, added a dime from out of my watch pocket. None of it caught funny or got rejected and, wide-mouth in hand, I was headed for the door, when I realized that the Coke would be warm by the time detention came around and so there was no way June would know, unless I told her, that I’d gotten the Coke in the teachers lounge. I didn’t want to tell her because even though I knew she’d believe me if I did, I couldn’t think of any words to make it sound pretty. I needed a site-specific souvenir to do the bragging for me. The bragging of a site-specific souvenir would be more elegant. Elegant could be pretty. I couldn’t see anything worth taking, though. Just chairs around a long wood-colored table with a tray full of rubberbands and binderclips in the middle of it.
I pocketed the binder clips, seven in all, and saw in the gaps between the piled rubberbands a bright white something too unlikely to believe in. I picked up the rubberbands. I saw and believed. A pad of hall-passes. A thick, tall pad. I flipped through the pad. Every single one blank. A pile of freedom. I stuffed it in my bag beside the Coke. The pad wouldn’t brag that I got the Coke from the teachers lounge, but gotten Coke cotton shmoke—I’d give June the pad. No one had ever gotten a pad of blank hall-passes, let alone made a gift of one. It was almost as good as smashing the gym clock.
I’d tear one pass off and write the penumbra poem on the back of it, then binderclip the poem to the lip beneath the cap of the Coke and, in detention, when June took the Coke from my hands, I’d drop the pad on the table in front of her and say, Want a coaster?
She would laugh at the coaster joke til her face hurt, and she would tell me her face hurt and I would say it was killing me, but I wouldn’t mean it meanly and she’d know that.
It was time to exit.
I came to the hall-edge of the teachers lounge doorway and threw fast glances in both directions. The hall was filled with students and teachers. I ducked back and became the wall again. This time I wasn’t edgy, though. I felt very good. I was stealth and loved June and broke rules.
The beginning-of-class tone came over the intercom and the footsteps stopped in the hallways and all of the teachers who would go to the lounge for fourth period—five of them—had already passed me without seeing me and I knew I was safe. I thought: As long as no one sees you, you’re safe. But right when I was stepping out of the doorway, Eliyahu came around the corner, and the timing was so strange that I thought Hashem was trying to remind me that He saw me. Except that couldn’t be it: if He could somehow tell what I was thinking well enough to answer what I was thinking, He’d know I didn’t need reminding. So it had to be something else—like an argument. I didn’t know if His argument was “I see you, yet still you are safe,” or “I see you, and so you are safe,” but the difference was potentially huge. Flowers might have said I was “facing a monster of ambiguity” in the hallway. It was good to face a monster of ambiguity, but sometimes what you thought to be a monster of ambiguity was just a lack of clarity, and a lack of clarity wasn’t good at all. It was unclear to me if I was facing a monster of ambiguity or a lack of clarity, so that was definitely not good, but I couldn’t sort it out right then. My new friend was coming toward me. From the right.
The top half of Eliyahu’s body leaned forward like he was running but the bottom half walked and he was chewing his thumb. He had a pass in his hand.
He said, “I’m lost. I need to get to Science. I need to get to A-Hall.”
I said, A-Hall’s for A-holes.
Eliyahu said, “It may be so. Let me ask you, Gurion: are you a big macher? I have the sense that you’re some kind of a big macher around here and I want for you to protect me. And to tell me how to get to A-Hall.”
“Big macher” cracked me up.
Eliyahu said, “Already a boy yanked on my tzitzit and knocked the hat from my keppy. I’m late,” he said.
For a very important date? I said.
“You’ll quote cartoons to me in a singsong voice?” he said. “You’re late, too.”
I said, If you have a pass, it’s a different kind of late.
“What kind of different late? Late is late.”
I said, You won’t get in trouble. Who knocked your hat off?
“I don’t know his name. He was a tall boy in a basketball jersey. Taller than me, even, and also not so thin. Muscular. Two small diamonds in his ear. I was lost, trying to find this A-Hall, and then bip: a pulling of the tzitzit. And bop: there’s my hat on the floor. This tall boy with the diamonds, he says, ‘Nice hat, bancer’? I don’t know from bancer, but I bend to pick my hat up, and I see there’s another boy present, another tall muscular one—call him Aleph to avoid confusion—standing back by the lockers, and by the way this Aleph turns his eyes to the floor when he sees me seeing him, I know he has witnessed this whole humiliating incident, and by the rapid, unprotesting way he leaves the scene as soon as the boy with the diamonds—who has been cued by the direction of my gaze to look at him—says to him, ‘What? You have a problem with this?’ I see that I should be even more afraid of the one with the diamonds than I already am. And so I’m right. No sooner do I stand up than the boy with the diamonds knocks the hat from my keppy a second time, and says, ‘That’s a really nice hat, bancer,’ And so what’s this bancer? This is school-specific vernacular? Why laugh? Why laugh when I’m asking for protection? Why laugh?”
Eliyahu was hilarious. He talked like he was singing. A zadie in a movie.
I said, The kid who knocked your hat off is Co-Captain Baxter. He’s in eighth grade. We can damage him easy, but I can’t really protect you from anything. I’m in the Cage. They don’t even let me go to lunch.
He said, “So you’re saying if you weren’t in this Cage, you’d be willing and able to protect me?”
I said, We’re friends. I’d definitely try to protect you, but I don’t know how able I’d be, even if I wasn’t in the Cage. I can avenge you whenever, though. I could do that whenever. We could find Co-Captain Baxter at his locker, either right before or right after detention today, and I could put the cripple-grip on his clavicle, and then hold his arm so that his hand is partway inside the locker, and you could slam the door on his fingers as many times as you’d want, and he wouldn’t be able to shoot free-throws anymore—but protection’s different from vengeance.
Eliyahu showed me both his palms = “Please hold on a second.” Then he turned very suddenly and took a drink from the water fountain. The water fountain made the low whistling water fountain sound and Eliyahu’s curved back looked delicate, foldable like cardboard, like if I punched him between the shoulderblades, his spine would collapse. When he was done drinking, he unpressed the button and the whistling sound became a humming sound. Then Eliyahu lifted his head. Most people lift their head before unpressing the button. That way wastes water. And when Eliyahu turned back around, he did not wipe his mouth on his sleeve like most people, but skipped the water droplets from his lips and his chin with his thumb and his pointer. These were gentle things to do. They were very controlled. I noticed he was still bent forward on top. He still looked afraid of something. I thought: Maybe he always looks afraid of something.
I could not stop hearing the humming of the motor in the water fountain.
Eliyahu told me, “Not vengeance. No vengeance.”
Something about how he said it made me not try to convince him, despite the singsong. It was very final how he said it. Vengeance was out of the question. But then protection was impossible.
I explained to him, Even if I wasn’t in the Cage, we’d still be in different classes—I’d only be able to protect you at lunch and in the hallway.
He said, “A little bit of protection is better than none. And so what can we do to get you out of the Cage?”
Nothing, I said. I said, As long as there’s a Cage, I’m in it.
“Maybe we’ll get rid of this Cage,” he said.
I said, Not today. I said, Do you know how to fight at all? I’ve never fought the Co-Captain, but he looks like the kind of kid who’s never gotten hit, like if you hit him just once, he’ll run away.
“I can’t,” said Eliyahu. “I think of hitting someone? I think of hurting him. I think of hurting someone? I become sad. My stomach aches. I cry a little. I just can’t do it. So how does a boy get into the Cage?”
The Cage is locked down, I said to Eliyahu. You only get to leave for Lunch and Gym, and sometimes you can’t even leave for Lunch.
“So what?” he said.
You have to sit there all day in a carrel, facing forward. The teachers don’t teach. They tutor in the center, but you can’t just approach them. You have to get called on, and most of the time they’re not looking around to see if your hand’s raised. You sit there, waiting, and you can’t talk to anyone, or even see anyone—you’re not allowed to look.
“Okay,” he said. “So it’s quiet in there. So no kids can bother me.”
That’s not exactly true, that no kids can bother you. Ways can be found.
“But you wouldn’t let any kid bother me,” he said. “You’d protect me from that.”
That’s true, I said, but the Cage is no kid. The Cage will bother you. And Botha, I said, who’s the schmuck who’s in charge—he’ll bother you, too. He’s a horrible man. Cartoon-level horrible. He’s even got a claw instead of a hand.
“I’m bothered already by the school,” he said, “and I’m certain the teachers will bother me, too. Public school teachers—they’re always bothering.”
You’re a scholar, Eliyahu. You don’t want to be there.
“And you’re not a scholar?”
I’m a scholar, I said.
“So what, then?” he said. “Why should a scholar not be in the Cage? Who says it shouldn’t be? Rabbi Akiva, maybe? Not Rabbi Akiva: He died in a cage. In a torture chamber! At the hands of Romans! How do I get in?”
It was true about Rabbi Akiva. It was also true that Eliyahu was determined to stay near me, where he would feel protected, no matter what it meant, and that if I didn’t tell him how to get in the Cage, he’d figure out a way to get in there himself. And while it’s true I didn’t want him to be in the Cage because the Cage was terrible, it’s also true I wanted him to be in the Cage because I was in the Cage, and to have another friend there, let alone another scholar, couldn’t help but to make the place more tolerable.
“Nu?” said Eliyahu.
Break things, I said.
“Break things,” he said. “And what should I break?”
I said, It’s not just what you should break, but when you should break it.
“When should I break what I should break?” he said.
After you get told to do something you don’t want to do, I told him.
“And what is this that I won’t want to do, Gurion?”
The first thing you’re told.
“And if I want to do it?”
Pretend you don’t, and then break something.
“It sounds very simple,” he said. He chewed his thumb some more.
I said, Don’t be afraid, Eliyahu. It’ll be fun if you’re not afraid.
He said, “I’m not afraid of breaking things. I just don’t like this school. I don’t like that for protection I need to be violent. Violence causes death. I do not like death. I don’t want to cause death or contribute to death. I don’t want death to be. I don’t want us to die. I do not like it, how everyone dies.”
I said, I won’t die.
“Then I will try not to fear it,” he said. “I’ll break a window.”
I said, A window would be a perfect thing to break. It’s loud and dangerous and if you broke it with your fist, they’d think you were violent, but they’d also worry that you secretly wanted to kill yourself with glass in the armveins. It would get you in the Cage for sure, for two-week observation at least. The problem is all the windows in the classrooms are highly shatter-resistant. Swung chairs can’t even break them, much less fists. It’s been tried. Believe me. Too bad, too. That really is suck. A window would’ve been—
“Science!” said Eliyahu.
Science?
“In Science, there’s usually a fire-extinguisher.”
That won’t go through those windows, either, I said. Those are some serious windows. You can barely even open them—they’re casement windows.
“No. Not to put it through the window. The fire-extinguisher, at least at my last school, was always in a box on the wall, a glass-doored—”
Perfect, I said. That’s perfect. Break the glass door.
“I will break the glass door.”
You have to be careful, though, I said, so that you don’t kill yourself by accident. You can’t put your fist through the door. And you can’t wrap your hand in anything before you do it. If you wrap your hand, they’ll think you were making a cry for help, and they’ll only give you therapy. You have to do it barehanded, so you have to aim the punch.
“How do I aim the punch?”
It’s almost the opposite of what you do when you’re hitting a baseball, I said. You don’t follow through.
“I don’t play baseball.”
Even better, I said. Baseball is suck.
“I think so, too,” he said. “So much waiting. And then for what? For two seconds of action. Stop and go. Wait, wait, wait, and then wait some—”
I told him, Let me watch you throw some punches.
He dropped his bag. He jabbed the air. Whoever taught him fighting took karate in the suburbs = he held his fists at his waist. It’s hard, from that position, to throw a fast elbow, and elbows are important: they’re harder than hands, they tend to surprise, and when one connects with a nose or an orbit, the noise backs off potential interferers. It wasn’t, however, any big deal to show him the right way to raise his arms, and other than that he wasn’t bad at all. He knew to keep his thumbs outside of his fists, he knew how to stand with his feet apart so his base was wide and he wouldn’t lose balance in the middle of the punch, and he knew to turn his fist a full 90 degrees between launch and target to draw extra power from the muscles of his back. If he could punch people the way he punched air, he’d win most fights at Aptakisic, I thought. I could take him easy and so could the Flunky; Benji and Slokum went without saying. The teachers, of course, could take Eliyahu, and probably Leevon Ray could too. Though no one had ever seen Leevon fight, everyone seemed pretty sure he could fight because he never talked, and not ever talking had to get him in fights because it had to make a lot of kids crazy—it made teachers crazy, which is why he was in the Cage, and teachers get paid to not get crazy—and we’d never seen Leevon bruised up or bleeding. Or maybe it was just because he was a black guy that everyone seemed to think he could fight. About Jenny Mangey I couldn’t be certain: she always fought guys, and guys who fought girls were weak and sick, so even though Mangey had never lost a fight, it was hard to know if she was really any good. Vincie Portite, prior to the eye-trauma, could have defeated Eliyahu no sweat, but now the two would most likely be even. There were five or ten others at Aptakisic I’d have ranked Eliyahu even against, but the more that I watched him throw punches at air, the more certain I got he couldn’t throw them at people. Eliyahu wasn’t serious about damaging things.
Baruch Hashem, I thought, he isn’t out to hit someone; all he needs to learn to do is break glass.
You have good enough form, I said to Eliyahu. Now it’s just a matter of what you pretend.
“And what should I pretend?” he said.
I said, You have to pretend that your fist is a race car with amazing brakes and that there is some power in it, and the power is like two really fat guys sitting in the front seats of your fist, and that when you’re throwing a punch, your fist-car is going two hundred miles per hour, but when you hit the thing you’re trying to hit, the fist-car stops the instant its knuckle-bumper impacts the thing, and because your fist-car stops so suddenly, the fat people-power inside goes flying through the windshield since the fat guys aren’t wearing seatbelts, and they only stop flying after going through the surface of the thing you hit and smashing into the center of it.
“Okay,” he said. “I can pretend that.”
I said, We’ll test it. I said, The motor in the water fountain is whistling. It is a distraction. Do you hear it?
“Yes. I think I hear it now. It’s maybe more a hum than a whistle?”
I said, It’s a pretty whistley kind of hum. I said, Make it stop by punching the water fountain. Punch the water fountain so the fat guys smash onto the motor. They’ll splat on the motor and the motor will clog up and stop, and then there will be the sound of something dropping.
Eliyahu spun around and punched the water fountain. There was clanging noise. It was the sound of the metal shell of it getting vibrated. He shook his hand out in the air. “That hurts,” he said. “And I can still hear the motor.”