The Instructions by Adam Levin
It’s because you didn’t aim the punch, I said. You tried to put your fist through the shell of it. You’ll break your hands that way, and if it’s a fire-extinguisher case, you’ll glass up your armveins and bleed like a bibbit. What happened was you didn’t put the brakes on, so the car crashed into the building and the fat guys got pressed flat between the bumpers instead of going through the windshield because the building stopped the fist-car when it should’ve been the brakes that stopped it.
“It’s the splatting,” he said. “I kept picturing them splatting, the fat men, and how it would bring them such pain as no man should ever have to know.”
That’s okay, I said. I said, Don’t pretend they’re fat guys, then. Pretend they’re golems. Golems don’t splat, though, so imagine they shatter.
“It could be that golems feel pain, though, no? It’s possible, I think. Otherwise, the Prague golem would not have become so angry and rampaged. Without pain, there is no call for anger, much less rampaging.”
I don’t know about that, I said, but—forget the golems. Try boulders.
“Boulders,” he said, “I like boulders. Boulders are large and without nerves, without souls. Boulders can pass through a windshield without dilemma,” he said. Then he spun back around and punched the water fountain. No clanging. Then the sound of creaking and then of something dropping inside of the shell. A slow heavy sound.
Thung.
The motor stopped humming.
I said, You landed it.
Eliyahu smiled. “I want a drink,” he said.
I said, Have a drink.
He pressed the button on the fountain and nothing came out of the arcing hole.
“I broke it,” he said.
I said, How’s your hand feel?
“My hand feels strong,” he said.
I said, It’s very easy to break things, and if you think the right way, you won’t ever get hurt.
“This is good,” he said. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, how to get to A-Hall?”
I pointed in the direction of 2-Hall. I said, Go up to that opening, there. That’s 2-Hall. Go left at 2-Hall, and go all the way to the end. Then take a right.
“Thank you, Gurion. I will break glass shortly.”
Get told something first, I said. You don’t want to look like a crazy. You want them to know you’re a defiance.
“I will be a defiance,” Eliyahu said.
And then he grabbed my shoulders and then he was hugging me. He wasn’t pointy and cold like a skeleton, like he looked like he would be. He was softer and he smelled like oatmeal and a room of old books. He smelled like my dad’s overcoat smelled, except without the cigarette part of the smell, and it made me sad because it made me wish he was my brother so that I could have known him all my life and made sure no one hurt him. I could tell that people hurt him and that he was, at least for the most part, scared of them. I could tell because he was hugging me. It was a scared thing to do. Trying to hug a person like that, a person you just met who wasn’t sending any hug-me signals, might make them think that you were trying to harm them or get to their wang, and so they might try to harm you before finding out it was a hug you were going for. The only time you were supposed to do a thing like that was when you thought it was more dangerous not to do it. And even then most people didn’t do it. Most people got stunned by that kind of danger. I’d never heard of anyone using the floating seat on a crashing airplane, for example. And airplanes were always crashing. And they always had floating seats you could try to save yourself with by jumping out the airlock just above the ocean. Main Man would use the floating seat, I thought, and Main Man had hugged me a few times unsignalled, but Main Man didn’t really know that people hurt him and so he didn’t know why he got scared, just that he was scared, and he’d always say so, and when he said so, I’d tell him everything was fine and he would believe me and stop feeling scared. Eliyahu was different. Telling him everything was fine wouldn’t ever work. He’d know it wasn’t true. It was easy to tell he knew a lot about some things. It was all those Eliyahuic faces he made. Like an old tzadik who won’t squint even though his eyes are half-blind from reading so much. Soon he stopped hugging me. He picked up his bookbag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he jogged fists-up towards 2-Hall and punched the walls and lockers seven times on his way.
While he jogged, I kept thinking: Eliyahu is damaged. It got me even more sad. I didn’t want to be sad, so I tried to fight it. I tried to think this: He wouldn’t be the same if he wasn’t damaged; you might not even like an undamaged Eliyahu.
But I knew that wasn’t true. I’d have liked him either way. Maybe not as much, but then also maybe more. Eliyahu was a scholar. Everyone I liked who wasn’t damaged was a scholar. Rather, everyone I liked who wasn’t a scholar was damaged. Or maybe the first way. The stress kept shifting.
A door squeaked behind me, and then there were footsteps.
Swinging an empty two-gallon milk jug, the perennially dry-mouthed Mister Todd Frazier—teacher of drama, Malkevichian inflector—came out of his classroom and headed for the fountain.
It’s broken, I told him.
He tried the button anyway. “It’s broken,” he said. “I am thirsty,” he said. “Let me see your pass.”
He wasn’t that bad. It was just the way he talked. I showed him my pass.
“Do not dawdle.”
He walked me the twenty-odd steps to the Cage, watched me ring the bell, and wouldn’t quit his hovering til after the monitor appeared in the doorway.
All schoolday long, the floor-to-ceiling gate made of chain-link fencing that blocked off the doorway of the Cage was locked. So was the door behind it. Students couldn’t leave the Cage unless they were going to Gym, Nurse Clyde, their therapist, the Office, or Lunch-Recess if they had cafeteria privilege. And if you wanted to come inside between 9:10 and 3:30, there was a protocol:
You’d ring the doorbell on the outer wall of the doorway.
The monitor would unlock the door of the Cage and step into the doorway, where he’d look at you through the diamond-shaped spaces of the gate.
You’d hand your pass to the monitor, and if the pass was acceptable, the monitor would open the gate and let you in.
or
If you didn’t have a pass or if your pass was unacceptable, then the monitor would write you a pass to go to the Office and get a new pass, and when you’d done that, you’d come back to the Cage and start over at 1.
There were only a few situations in which the entrance protocol didn’t apply. One was if you were coming back from Gym on time: there’d be a group of you, and after one of you rang the bell, the monitor would stand behind the gate and let the group in, single-file, checking each kid off on his clipboard as they passed him. Another situation was if you were coming back from Lunch-Recess. If you came back from Lunch-Recess at the end of Lunch-Recess, it worked just like coming back from Gym on time, except the group of you would be much larger since Lunch-Recess period was the same for everyone at Aptakisic (between periods 4 and 5). If you came back from Lunch-Recess within the first ten minutes of Lunch-Recess—in which case you’d be taking advantage of what the Cage Manual called “The Hot Lunch Caveat”***—you’d usually be alone, and your tray of hot lunch would, itself, be your pass. The only other situation where the entrance protocol didn’t apply was when you were coming back from your therapist’s—you didn’t need a pass then, either. You’d knock on the door that connected Call-Me-Sandy’s and Bonnie Wilkes PsyD’s office to the Cage, and Botha would unlock it, let you in, and that would be that.
Even though all but a very senior few teachers were regularly rotated into the Cage for two periods per week each, none of them had keys to get in, and, like the students, every one of them had to ring the bell and wait at the gate for the monitor to open it. There were, in all of Aptakisic, only five people who had keys to the Cage: Brodsky, Floyd, Jerry, Hector the janitor, and Victor Botha.
Victor Botha was the
That morning proved no exception. As I’d approached the gate, Mr. Frazier in tow, I’d done 1: I rang the bell and waited.
And Botha’d done 2: He came out and looked at me through the chain-link gate.
Seeing Botha, Mr. Frazier took off, and that’s when I’d executed my part of 3: I pushed my pass through a diamond-shaped space of the gate.
But then instead of doing his part of 3—checking to see if the pass was acceptable—Botha caulked a trickle. He didn’t even take the pass out of my fingers. He said, “Show me your pass.” He said the same thing every time. I had been at the gate at least a hundred times, and he knew I knew the protocol. Him saying “Show me your pass” was like a mugger holding a gun in your mouth and saying, “You better do what I say because I have a gun in your mouth.” Or if a man behind the counter of a hot-dog stand who just passed you a hot dog said, “Now pay me the money you owe me for that hot dog.” It makes it seem like if you do what the man says, you’ll be doing it because he says to, when that’s not true. When you do what the mugger says, you do it because he has a gun. When you pay the hot-dog guy, it’s because you owe money for the hot dog. If the mugger didn’t have a gun, you would not do what he said. If you didn’t owe money for the hot dog, you wouldn’t pay the hot-dog guy. If Botha wasn’t the monitor, or if we weren’t at school, I wouldn’t give him my pass.
When Adonai told Moses to bring water from the rock in the Sinai by speaking to the rock, Moses not only struck the rock instead of talking to it, but he said to the Israelites who were gathered for the miracle, “Listen now, O rebels, shall we bring forth water for you from this rock?” like it was him, Moses, who would bring forth the water, when it was God who would bring it forth. Even though these were the only wrong actions Moses took in all his life, and even though Moses was understandably upset—he had just come down the mountain only to discover his brothers engaged in acts of idolatry—it was for his having taken these two wrong actions that God never let him inside of Israel.
I wanted to remind Botha of his limitations, but I was not Hashem and Botha was no Moses. There was no promised land for me to lock him in a cave outside of. So I did what is called a Harpo Progression of Defiance. The first step in the progression was that I pulled the pass back out of the diamond-shaped space and dropped it on the floor.
“Pack it up,” Botha said.
Botha was the monitor and I had to do what the monitor said, so I picked the pass up.
Then I dropped it.
“Pack it up and do not drop it,” he said.
I picked it up and I folded it in four. I pushed it through the gate.
“Unfold it,” he said.
I unfolded it. Then I balled it up and threw it at the lockers behind me, then held up my pointer-finger = I’ll be right back, and I ran toward the lockers and picked the pass up and came back to the gate and folded the pass and unfolded it and tore a notch into each corner of it.
He could not ask me to untear a notch.
So I pushed the pass through the gate. That was the end of the progression.
Harpo Progressions make me laugh because they make both the Harpo and the mark look silly. When the mark doesn’t laugh at the progression, it is a sign of internal robotics, and I think that is even funnier.
Botha didn’t laugh because all he could think about was how stupid he would sound if he sent me to the Office. If he sent me to the Office for doing a progression, I would get a detention, but I always had one anyway, and Botha would look like he was failing at his job as the monitor. The monitor was supposed to know how to run the Cage and the kids inside it. The monitor was not supposed to get played like a straightman.
So he didn’t send me to the Office. He said, “You’re late for Group.”
I’d forgotten about Group. It was Tuesday. I had Group every Tuesday for half an hour before Lunch.
Let me in, then, I said.
He said, “Go around.” He pushed the pass back through the gate.
It would have been faster to go through the Cage; there was a door connecting it directly to Call-Me-Sandy’s office, and if I’d been allowed to enter the Cage, I could have walked a straight line to Group. Since he wouldn’t let me in, I had to walk C-Hall down to 2-Hall, then walk across 2-Hall to B-Hall, and walk up B-Hall for the same amount of steps that I walked down C-Hall to get to 2-Hall. It would take at least an extra minute to get to Sandy’s B-hall entrance. Botha knew it would, and he made me go around to punish me. He thought that because it was important to him that everyone got everywhere on time, it was important to me to be on time. But it was only important to him. I liked walking in the hallways. Especially by myself. And why would anyone rather go in the Cage?
But what was the most dumont about what Botha did was how he said “You’re late for Group” to me, like it mattered, like it was something to be concerned about, and how then he did the only small robot thing he could to make me even later to Group. My mom would call this passive-aggressive behavior. PAB. She’d also call certain forms of laughter PAB. She’d say that Harpo Progressions of Defiance were PAB, too, but then she’d laugh when I’d tell her about the progressions I performed at school. So would my dad. They always laughed at the same things. Except Woody Allen. On one of their first dates, they rented Broadway Danny Rose and nearly broke up. Even over a decade later, my dad still shivered when he recalled it. He described the experience as being “a little bit less fun, perhaps, than chain-smoking for ninety minutes while handcuffed to a dowager with asthma who used to teach Health and smells incontinent.”
“What do you think is so funny about this nebach?” my mother would shout from the kitchen whenever my dad and I watched Woody Allen. We would turn down the volume, but she’d come into the living room anyway, then enumerate the qualities that made Woody Allen a nebach. He was weak and ugly, defective and ineffective and far less clever than he thought, plus cowering and phlegm-complected and proud of it. Ineffective? I would sometimes ask her. And she would tell me to just stay out of it and not smartperson at her. Woody Allen was her Desormie.
For my dad, though, Woody Allen made the top five, behind Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, ahead of Larry David and Richard Pryor. My dad’s top five was the same as Nakamook’s, and, in both cases, Sacha Baron Cohen was encroaching on either Pryor or David, but he had yet to prove his longevity, and neither my father nor Benji wanted to jinx him by declaiming his genius too early. I told my dad that once at dinner—about him and Benji having the same top five—but he wasn’t impressed. He said, “What about the Beatles? Does he also enjoy the music of the Beatles, your Benji? Does he, like I, your mom, and Charles Manson—”
You’ve never even met him, I said to my dad.
“I don’t need to,” he said.
He’s my best friend, I said.
“You’ll see,” he said. “You’re already outgrowing him.”
The thing about my father was he wasn’t some kind of schmucky condescender who liked to act like he knew you better than you did; he was genuinely worried about my friendship with Benji. And the thing about Benji was that he was my best friend. So I was in this position, this suck position, where if I kept defending Benji my father would only worry more about our friendship, but if I quit defending Benji, then maybe that would mean that my father was right about our friendship since what kind of best friend doesn’t defend his best friend against his father’s assertions that their friendship is weak? I tried to break my fingers but my fingers wouldn’t break.
My mom said to stop it. She had met Benji—a few nights earlier he’d eaten at our house, but my dad was working late at the office??
She’d asked Benji what he thought of the students in the Cage, and he’d told her, “You don’t have to worry, Mrs. Maccabee. Gurion’s able to take care of himself, and most kids know that, and the ones who aren’t sure—they know that I’ll avenge any offense against his person.” He’d said that with half a mouthful of kufta, and it had sounded less kenobi than it looks written down.
“This is not a bad kind of friend to have, Judah.”
My dad kept his eyes down, sawed at his steak = “I’m dropping this subject.”
So I dropped it also, even though I’d wanted to say more about Benji because they didn’t just share the same top five comedians, he and my father, but both cited the same Woody Allen scene as their favorite (the one in Annie Hall where Alvie gets arrested after crashing his car). And as for Harpo Progressions—which my dad, unlike my mom, loved with no reservations—Nakamook was the champion. He had performed the only epic one that I had ever heard of. It was, in fact, by way of that progression that Benji and I became best friends. The whole thing lasted nearly two weeks and was performed on Monitor Botha, who was bald.
The baldness of Botha was the kind where the hair that remains rims the head like the seat on a public toilet. As did pretty much every other man in the world who’d balded similar while being a shmendrick, Botha grew the upper part of one side long and greased its strands flat across his sticky-looking pate. I still have a hard time understanding why men do that. Forgetting that the hairstyle doesn’t fool anyone, ignoring that it highlights what it’s meant to hide, the hairstyle’s name—combover—is in the same class of words as unibrow and needlenose and muffintop and trampstamp, i.e., not only does the name mock the thing it refers to, but it’s the only name there is for the thing it refers to. So any speaker of English old enough to sport a combover has to be aware of what it is called, and thereby aware that electing to do what he does each morning in front of his mirror invites disdain. One time after school, I said so to Flowers, and he offered the opinion that men who sported combovers had most likely been doing so since before the word combover gained all its prominence; that although in the course of the preceding few years these men couldn’t have avoided hearing the word and knowing the shmendiness that it connoted, a confused kind of pride kept them from changing hairstyles. Like those kids who when you tell them their foot-taps annoy you and then in response they tap faster and harder, these men kept their combovers intact to save face.