The Instructions by Adam Levin
Frontline soldiers: be relentless. Project all you can before the hand-to-hand comes on, and know it’ll come on fast. Show them the color of their blood. Teach them the sound of their snapping limbs. Almost anything in the gym you can lift can be a weapon, and almost none of our enemies know that yet. Put the enemies down before they can learn.
All of you: Let no numberdrunk fool believe he can defy any of us without suffering. If they pin you at the elbows, put your knee in their sack. If you can’t move your knee, remember you can headbutt—go for the nose, the eyes, the mouth. If you can’t reach to headbutt, remember your teeth—bite arms, bite wrists, bite fingers, taste bones. If you can’t bite, spit. If you can’t spit, scream—blow out their eardrums. Bring all the pain you can til one of us rescues you.
One of us will always rescue you.
The Arrangement would grind us fine as salt if it could. Do not forget that, much less forgive it. Do not feel sympathy for those we’re attacking. Hear no pleas and look away from any tears that may endear you.
Don’t sweat the press—they’ll just be making movies. Protect June Watermark at all and any cost. Protect my weaponed brothers as if they were your own. Always protect each other. Last chance for questions.
There weren’t any questions. Some of the soldiers were doing the pogo. Others banged fists on their shoulders and thighs.
I strike first, then no more stealth. Damage, damage, and damage, the end. Amen? I said.
“Amen,” they said.
PLATOONS
VANGUARD
MACCABEE
Gurion ben-Judah
June Watermark
Eliyahu of Brooklyn
The Five
Ally’n’Googy
Josh Berman
Other armed Aptakisic Israelites
NAKAMOOK
Benji Nakamook
Jelly Rothstein
Leevon Ray
Mark Dingle
Salvador Curtis
Fulton Market
Jerry Throop
REARGUARD
PORTITE
Vincie Portite
The Janitor
The Flunky
Ronrico Asparagus
Jennie Mangey
Ansul Entsry
WOLF
Ben-Wa Wolf
Chunkstyle
Anna Boshka
Forrest Kenilworth
Christian Yagoda
Jesse Ritter
Stevie Loop
Cody von Braker
PIPELINE
GYMNASIUM at 10:38 AM on 11/17/0
We shut the door behind us and got beneath the bleachers. Chemicals were firing and blood was swelling muscles, lungs and arteries opened wide as runways, our joints and ligaments superelastic. Benji kept whispering, “Do not scream.” We pushed on the wall and pounded our fists, twetched ponds of gooze and touched the floor standing, not to let steam off but redistribute it, to stir the snat to delay the flood. Air-seal the spout and flip the boiling kettle. Potentiate, potentiate, potentiate potential.
“I give you… Boystar,” announced Chaz Black, and we gathered by the bleachers’ easternmost opening.
The gym went dark and I whispered to the soldiers: Wait for my go, then stay to the borders. Look away from the light.
“Do not scream.”
Feedback crackled.
Boystar spoke. “Whuddup ’Kisic.”
A spotlight revealed him.
He was outside the locker-rooms, tearing off an anorak. He flung it and stood there, touching his headset. Padlock for a buckle, his belt was a tirechain, the links hanging low between the loops and shining.
We averted our eyes as he dance-walked west, and soon our pupils were the widest in the gym.
Everyone above us stomped and clapped. Shirts came untucked. The floor shook its dust. On its own, the crowd-noise would have zeroed our footfalls, but with the enhancements effected by the man at the soundboard—machine-made enthusiasm booming at his keystrokes—we could have warcried our lungs flat and stayed undetected.
I gave my go.
Half of Portite trailed Nakamook west beneath the bleachers. The rest followed me out the same way we’d entered. We stealthed south and singlefile along the eastern border, our left arms brushing the wall.
On his unlit way from the locker-room to centercourt, Main Man tiptoed across our path. If he saw us, he pretended not to.
“Here we all are,” said Boystar to the crowd. “At last. Together. Here we are.”
The crowd roared more, some still stomping. The man at the board jacked the volume on the synth. Cheerleaders jumped in the darkness, soundless.
By the time that Boystar was halfway to halfcourt, Portite owned both of his zones: Mangey, Ronrico, and the Janitor by the locker-rooms; by the pushbar-door, Vincie, Ansul, and the Flunky. Nakamook assembled near the southwest corner. I stood behind Desormie, searching the bleachers. I bent all my fingers with all of my fingers and none of my fingers would break.
The hundreds I looked on were blind to us.
Hands forward like a boxer, Boystar fancy-footworked. “You ready?” he said. “Are you ready?” Every indicator light in the gym blinked green.
Eliyahu was sitting between the Five and Miss Pinge—western bleachers, middlemost bench. Floyd, eyes hooded, sat low in his chair in the special gallery with four local newsmen, Jelly’s sister Ruth, and the New Thing fatcats. I sightlined as obliquely to the spotlight as possible, but some of the photons got in my eyes. I located June—top corner northeast, Starla beside her—then turned away south to recover dilation.
“Are you ready for some of this?” said Boystar. The chain around his waist clanked briefly. I didn’t have to look to know what he was doing.
Giggles, many ersatz, bounced off the walls.
“Whoa!” Boystar said, hoisting his crotch. “Ha ha!” he said: a hoist for each ha, a clank at each hoist.
“Haha!” added Main Man, unlit beside him. “Ha—” he said, and his mike-feed got cut.
Hoist-clank hoist-clank giggle giggle giggle.
“You guys are crazy, you know that?” said Boystar. “I’m just dancin here. All you guys have dirty minds. Especially all you Jennys… Now, you Jennys ready to get emotionalized?”
Ecstatic moaning, mostly bogus.
My night-vision maxed.
“You ready. To get. Romantacized?”
I drew my gun. I loaded a wingnut. Proceeded on my stomach toward the spotlight.
“Are you ready. To get… Infantalized?”
The manufactured moans died warmly beneath a sampled orchestra’s doleful tuning. The audience grown all hush and tension. A long sighing rustle of fabric, of hundreds leaning forward at once.
The principal squeezed his chin in his fist. I was coming around on his right.
Swelling cellos bled a hesitant pianoline. The lightest of drumrolls, a kind of sated cicada-sound—it murmured near the threshhold, almost subliminal. And then a tweet of birdsong. And then a muted waterfall. Boystar’s mom was futzing with her purse-zipper. Nothing got by me. Slokum’s popping knuckles. Chaz Black blinking rapidly to unseat a dust-mote. The music got louder, and I could still hear everything. The scratch of Brodsky’s mustache against his stroking pointer. Nakamook’s pulse. Jelly’s kiss on his hand. The tiny suck of disrupted pomade as Boystar’s father passed a comb through his hair. All the wet air Desormie pushed through his lips to prove he wasn’t gay and had contempt for birds and cellos. Eliza June Watermark whispered my name.
I looked hard inside the spotlit oval, sockets tingling behind my pinned eyes.
Posed and fitted for maximum exaltation—with platforms in his bootsoles to show off his height; his fringeless kneeholes arty-yet-unslovenly; pantslegs symmetrically a-riot with buckles, decorative zippers, glued-on snaps that couldn’t unsnap; his pitch-checking finger, bereft of utility, professionally pressed to his headset’s earpiece; his tanktop in November attesting to his ruggedness as below it his cha
Had he oohed, mmmed, or even heyed, I might have targeted a different part of him. The vowel he trilled, though, the second in “robot,” required so much maw-gaping I took it for a sign.
And hooded I rose before the spotlight: completely invisible to those behind Boystar; to those in the bleachers but something in the way. A sudden blackness roughly boy-shaped.
I split the penumbra and blasted.
The wingnut ricocheted between his molars. The noise of its impacts, amplified tenfold, blared from the speakers, CHUCKETA-CRACKETA. He dropped looking up and his mouth sprayed particles. A sticky mist of atomized blood, pulverized teeth, spearmint saliva.
Eliyahu was shouting, “Gurion is here!”
I cleared the pink grit from my eyes with a sleeve.
Fifty armed Israelites stood in the bleachers.
20
PROPER
Friday, November 17, 2006
10:41 a.m.–10:49 a.m.
B
ecause otherwise scholars, once they start the next chapter, will wonder to distraction how it is I could have witnessed all that’s being described, I’ll clarify here: I didn’t witness all of it. There’s no way I could’ve. Not firsthand. Yet it feels like I did. It feels like I did but, just like the rest of you, I’ve also seen the videos.***** I’ve seen hundreds of the videos, many more than once, and while it’s easy to conclude that what I witnessed in the gym and what I’ve since seen on screens have overlapped in my memory in the six years between the Damage Proper and this writing, it is not at all easy to separate the overlap’s components. In fact, it’s impossible. I know because I’ve tried.
Just yesterday, for example, I watched a clip of the Five firing down on Shlomo. It looked like I remembered, exactly like I remembered, and I realized my memory must have been of the clip, not the experience.
Except then, just a split-second later, where I expected to see Eliyahu vault the bleachers, the cameraman turned to a wide-eyed Ashley, and this seemed to suggest the memory of Eliyahu was not a memory of something I’d seen onscreen, but of something I’d witnessed firsthand.
Yet on second thought, I thought, it might not have been firsthand. There were, after all, nine cameras in the gym, most of them by that time filming, and Eliyahu’s leap may have been recorded with one of the other eight—I might have been remembering that camera’s footage from another video.
So I checked the footage and, sure enough, the Fox News cameraman had captured the airborne Eliyahu, and so had the CBS guy. But then again, yet again, that didn’t mean I hadn’t witnessed it firsthand as well.
I might have witnessed any of it firsthand is the thing. From centercourt you could see anything in the gym. You could see anything in the gym from nearly anywhere in the gym, just not everything at once. I could have seen any of what I remember, but I could not have seen all of it, yet I remember seeing all of it. At least I seem to.
“But so why, in light of your memory’s unreliability,” wonder scholars, “why write any of the scene, Rabbi? After all, there are, as you’ve already mentioned, those thousands of videos. Why not just point us toward one or two—even ten—of the best? Certainly most of them are chazerai and narishkeit. Certainly most of them—particularly those second-class mash-ups inspired by the latest in user-friendly software, crafted with mouseclicks and readymade algorithms by spendy technologists who claim to believe that authorship is just a kind of editing, who confuse DIY with owning an iMac, and artfulness for art, and Bal with Adonai: all those rap- and ska- and punk-scored fanvids; all those rapmetal-soundtracked hatervids; those fishlensed and widescreened and retro-black-and-whited; those overdubbed with soundbytes from rabbis and governors; those spliced with your baby pictures and paintings by June, with scenes from Columbine and the Seung-Hui Cho biopic, stills from the Six Day and the Yom Kippur Wars; and the ones with the halos cartooned on your heads, the ones with the halos on the heads of your enemies, those captioned with verses from Ezekiel and Judges, those with their titles atop Israeli flags, the ones that are bordered with stars of David, the Black Power ones that darken your skintone, the Gun Lobby ones that redden all the blood, the ones from the contest held by Al Jazeera, the ones from the festival funded quietly by Marlboro; the splitscreened ones with the footage on the right and the GIDEON MACYNTIRE: COMING OF RAGE RPG on the left, their auteurs moving their Gurion-shaped avatars through virtual ballcourts and doorways and bleachers (past bleeding STELLARKIDs and spooky LEAVE-OFFs, in the background SLAM HOKUMs cursing BANJO NICKYNACKs, ENDURING JANE PAPERSTAMPs proclaiming love for GIDEONs, JELLO ROSENs biting HEATHERs, and so on) in as much the same pattern and at as much the same pace as the filmed you in those filmed settings moves as possible… and all the rest of their ilk—are for the birds. Surely they are. Surely, surely. But what,” wonder scholars, “about all the others? like the more straightforward, documentary-type ones? What about the video your father commissioned? What couldn’t the right one or few of those show us that a description in here could? Why include the Damage Proper in the scripture at all?”
To all of these questions, the best answer first: Torah is written. The one perfect narrative in the world is written, and not by default—not because Adonai, Creator of the Universe, lacked the technology it takes to make movies, nor because our ancient Israelite ancestors, for whom He bled rivers, split seas, and made manna, lacked the technology to play them—but because truth is best, if not exclusively, conveyed in writing.
The second best answer (for those with a more Nakamookian bent): Video is the chosen medium of tyrants, and that’s not because tyrants lack print technology, but rather because video cannot be examined as rigorously as can the written word. It cannot be as deeply plumbed—at least not yet. The reality a given video does or doesn’t convey, even without effects (allowing, hypothetically, that rendering three dimensions as two isn’t a host of effects in itself), cannot be fully parsed = The viewer can all too easily mistake realism for reality. E.g., every actor in a movie is wearing makeup, but few of them ever seem to be.
Furthermore, while filmed imagery may very well be possessed of a grammar, that grammar is either mostly unknown to us or changing at a pace with which we can’t keep up. It’s impossible to tell. Video may be like a beautiful girl whose every genuine emotion, thought, and intention gets betrayed by the expressiveness of her brow, but that’s of no consequence if we don’t look at her brow. And we don’t, scholars. Not at all. We can’t take our eyes off those fulsome… lips.
I could go on to enumerate video’s other problems—the thousands of ways in which the medium starves the muscles off signifiers, draping the bones that remain in sculpted fat—but that would, at this point, be redundant, I think. In any case, it’d be condescending. You’re well past page 798 by now. Were you not a scholar when you began this book, you’ve certainly become one, and you know it in your heart: books are truer than movies; when they are books of scripture, they are truer, even, than what they describe.
So the perspective you’ll get in this Damage Proper’s telling is that of the first-person-limited omniscient. This is not, of course, because I know everything, but rather because of my particular type of ignorance: because I don’t know how I know what I know, and there is no way to figure it out. First-person omniscience plus this disclaimer—it’s the only honest option. It’s the best I can do.
And lest that last line be read falsely, lest it read humble or apologetic, let me append it:
The best I can do is the best that can be done. I am the author of all of this.
Disoriented basketballers cursing in pain, Nakamook’s soldiers reloading. The Five plugged Shlomo in the eyes with pennies. Eliyahu of Brooklyn vaulted five bleachers. Desormie mumbling hey-nows ten feet east of me, Main Man two-stepping three feet west of me. Brooklyn landing, scanning for Baxter. June was equipping up in her corner, Israelites all across the bleachers were equipping, and all those around them remained ass-to-bench, the Shovers and bandkids and robots alike, and the Jennys and Ashleys, and the everykid no-ones, immobile as anvils, as hunted opposums, pillars of salt, anonymous animals all gawking courtward: here lay Boystar; there stood Gurion; sillhouettes, stage right, were ducking, scrambling; Brodsky as static as his name on a page.
A switch sent current through a circuit when the drums kicked. Panels of lights strobed. Movement looked gapped.
I fell upon Boystar’s chest knees-first, swiping his headset to throw it to Main Man—the rumble of the gooze in Scott’s clearing throat failed to boom like it should have; his feed was still dead—but a keyring was streaking, Boystar’s mother’s, a blur getting thicker in the corner of my eye. I blocked it, just barely, with the hand that held the headset. The ring’s junior maglight cracked the mouthpiece on contact. An asterisk of keys splayed on Boystar’s chin. Its rabbit’s foot, yellow, made his blood look orange. The rape whistle under his nostrils chirped. His mother had the mike by the cord and she swung it. On my knees, I couldn’t dodge but wouldn’t bow, so I turned. My kidney took the blow. I saw white and she tackled me. Ten seconds in, I was already down.
Co-Captain Baxter was still in his chair, a wide-open target, well within range. Brooklyn, just north of the northern sideline, raised his weapon, pulled the balloon back, shut one eye, and aimed. And aimed.