The Instructions by Adam Levin
“And then,” said Ronrico, “I told her that it was not me who was the fuckface since it was her mom who was the fuckface, because of how we already decided in Group that it was her mom who was the one who fucks like a fucker and that Gurion would not have said ‘We are all on the side of damage’ and left it that way if there was this whole other something else that we are against like Mangey is saying—I told Mangey it was maybe her that was the fuckface because of genetics and that you would have told us what the something else was, and I told her that it is true that I don’t know if we are on the right or the left side of damage, but I do know that it is one or the other. And that’s why I switched off the sides with the bombs. I did thirteen, starting with the WE on the left. So now there are seven WE DAMAGEs and six DAMAGE WEs.”
“Who’s right?” Mangey said.
Botha said, “In your seats.”
Those huddling around me pretended not to hear him.
I spoke fast. I said, We are all against the arrangement, always. I said, Sometimes we are on the left side of damage and other times on the right. Often we are on both sides, so both of you are correct.
“So I don’t have to fix the bombs?” Ronrico said.
I said, The bombs are good.
“Thank you,” Ronrico said. “Tomorrow I’ll scrape a huge WE DAMAGE WE into the four-square court with a rock. I would’ve done a four-square one today, but we had indoor recess, so I did the bleachers with a Darker instead—Oh we forgot!”
“Hey!” said Botha.
“Hey back at you!” said Vincie Portite, hand over eye. “I didn’t hear a tone yet!”
“The scoreboard,” Ronrico said.
Mangey said, “It’s smashed.”
Vincie said, “He knows already. God! You don’t listen to Vincie.”
“Did you really know already?” said the Janitor.
The beginning-of-class tone sounded and Botha scattered the huddlers to their carrels by shouting, “Mind the loin there!” What he meant was my tape-line.
Forty carrels were bolted to the walls of the Cage; sixteen to the east wall, and twelve to each the north and south. Stuck to the floor behind every student’s chair was a line of masking tape the width of his carrel. The rule was that you were supposed to keep the back legs of your chair in front of your line at all times. As long as your back chair-legs were in front of your line, your head would be between the walls of your carrel, which rose five feet higher than the surface of your desk and extended two feet beyond the desk’s edge. Because only the thinnest, most flaccid carpet covered the Cage’s concrete floor, and because all the feet of the chair-legs were metal, the noise of the feet rubbing the floor when you’d scoot your chair was a squeaky kind of groan that was wholly distinct from other Cage sounds, so breaking the Tape Rule was a risky move, since Botha—at his desk between the bathroom doors, in the middle of the west wall, facing east—or a teacher at the cluster in the center of the room, was likely to look in your groan’s direction. If you were over your tape-line, you’d get step 1. Step 1 was a warning. Three warnings in the same half-day = step 4: detention.
While following the Tape Rule, the only direction you could look that wasn’t walled off and didn’t end in floor or ceiling was behind you = you weren’t able look at anyone else without conspicuously revolving your head. And so there was also the rule of Face Forward, which was exactly what it sounds like. The rules of Quiet At All Times and Always Be Sitting—those were exactly what they sound like, too—combined with those aforementioned to make it near-impossible for students to initiate communication with other students without getting noticed, then stepped, by the robots.
On top of the rules, the stain-colored carrel walls were insulated thickly so that whispers below the robots’ audial threshold couldn’t break through them, and if you wanted to send a written message to someone, not only did you first have to ball the paper (folded notes’ trajectories just weren’t reliable), which got too noisy if you didn’t crumple slowly, but you basically had to be sharing a wall with the intended recipient, for it was near-impossible to arc even a balled note much greater a distance than the next carrel over with any kind of accuracy, which meant that if Benji Nakamook, say, was more than one carrel away from you, a note you wrote him, in order to get to him, would have to be tossed to every student between you, and since each between-student would need to unball it to see if it was intended for him or another, and because no student could see what any other was doing inside of his carrel anyway, every between-student could and would read the note without any fear of getting beaten up, so even if every kid between the two of you was willing to risk steps for tossing your note, and even if the note did eventually get to Nakamook without being detected by Botha or the teachers (the likelihood of which decreased with each potentially noisy de- and re-crumpling), you wouldn’t have written anything important in the note, and thus probably wouldn’t have bothered writing to begin with.
And for those of you scholars who, at this point, wish to accuse me of blithe exaggeration or of lying for effect; for those of you assuming I’m engaging with metaphor or trucking with expressionism, thinking to yourselves, “This place about which Rabbi Gurion tells us seemed so overbearingly stifling and hellish that it felt like he wasn’t ever allowed to speak to his friends, and at times it even felt like he wasn’t allowed to look at them; it was as if they had to stare at flat, unadorned surfaces six hours a day in total silence, and as though to do otherwise would garner them punishment”; for all of you scholars who’d like to insist that a classroom like the Cage, given all the violent uprisings its very existence would daily incite, couldn’t possibly abide for any longer than a week: believe me, I understand your objections. I was prepared no better by Schechter and Northside to experience the Cage’s smothering reality than you’ve been prepared by your Israelite schools to accept that smothering reality’s description.
As for why the Cage wasn’t plagued by daily (or weekly, or at least semi-annual) savage insurrections, the short answer’s this: Apart from me—the new kid still studying the others in the Cage to learn how it worked and how it got worked—its population was not comprised of scholars who’d spent their lives studying Torah and Talmud, but rather of kids for whom junior high had always = Aptakisic, if not the Cage itself.
The long answer’s harder, a lot more complicated. The long one will take a little while to get across, and I haven’t even finished describing the rules. I haven’t even gotten to the rule against me.
If you were me, you could rarely even toss notes to a kid sitting next to you. Unless there was no one absent that day, enough empty carrels would be available for Botha to enforce the Gurion Has to Sit Next to No One Whenever It Is Possible rule.
For a while, that rule had been unconditional—Gurion Has to Sit Next to No One, Ever—because, back in my third week at Aptakisic, when Botha originally made up the rule (after catching me toss eleven notes in one hour), it was always possible for me to sit next to no one since the number of carrels in the Cage was forty and, until the end of my seventh week—the week before the week before I fell in love with June—the number of students who were sentenced to the Cage, though it had increased fairly steadily from its initial thirty-five,***** never surpassed thirty-eight. Then came Ben-Wa Wolf, #39, a white-haired sixth-grader who cried all the time, which is why people called him The Boy Who Cried Wa-Wa. Other than how easy and often he cried, nobody really knew anything about him, let alone the reason he’d been removed from normal classes—he never broke rules or spoke to anyone at Lunch—but as soon as Ben-Wa got sentenced to the Cage, there was hope that I’d sometimes get to sit next to someone. For that to happen, there would have to be no absences at all, and although that circumstance rarely arose—just twice in all of my nine Caged weeks—having something to hope for, no matter how unlikely, was better than nothing (at least that’s how it seemed), and from the moment Botha banned me from sitting next to others til the day Ben-Wa thirty-nined our
I’ve learned forthright descriptions of hopelessness are boring, though. I learned that from Flowers on the same day that Botha issued the edict described above, which was also the first day I tried to write scripture concerned with the Cage, i.e., the first day I tried to start The Instructions (even though I didn’t know what it would be called yet, or what it was about, or who I wanted to read it). Right there at my carrel I wrote a whole chapter, and I saw it wasn’t good, but then I thought I might not be qualified to judge: the chapter wasn’t, after all—at least not directly—about Israelites, Torah, or Adonai. So that afternoon, at the Frontier Motel, I showed the chapter to Flowers to see what he could tell me.
“This boring,” he told me.
He was sitting on the couch in the Welcome Office waiting-space, chin on his hands, hands piled on the knob at the top of his walking cane, staring at a wall-mounted statue of Legba. I was on the couch next to him, waiting for more, but he wasn’t saying more; it was my turn to talk.
I said, the Cage is boring.
He said, “Don’t matter—pathetic fallacy.”
I didn’t hear it right, though. I heard, “Don’t matter, pathetic phallus,” like he was calling me a littlewang, or saying I had one.
I said, What do you know about the size of my wang?
He’d never seen my wang.
“The what?” he said. He took his chin off his hands and turned to me. “I’m telling you about the pathetic fallacy, and you’re talking to me about wang? Learn.”
I was embarrassed for hearing him wrong. I used to hear Flowers wrong a lot. He had an accent from Robert Taylor Homes combined with an accent from University of Chicago Law School, and his grammar, at times—especially when he was teaching you something—would become Hoodoo grammar, the kind he’d cast spells with. Before starting Aptakisic, I only met Flowers once—it was at a fundraising dinner for the United Civil Liberties Advocates of America, which was the organization my father worked for and the one for which Flowers used to work until he quit lawyering to be a writer when his brother died young and left him the Frontier—and for the first few weeks after starting Aptakisic, I’d get embarrassed to hear him wrong because he hardly knew me, and so when I’d hear him wrong, I’d think it seemed like I wasn’t paying attention, and I’d think that if I explained to him that I was paying attention then it would seem like I meant that the way he talked was banced, which is not what I’d have meant, so instead I’d say nothing and just be embarrassed. The pathetic fallacy day, though, was especially embarrassing because it wasn’t just that I heard him wrong, but that I heard him talking about my wang when he wasn’t talking about my wang, which made it seem like I was always thinking about my wang.
So I said to Flowers: Sorry. I said, Pathetic fallacy.
Flowers said, “Forget the pathetic fallacy. There’s what you write and there’s what you write about. Even if what you write about is boring, you can’t be writing boring. Seem to me like you want to write about you wang, anyhow. Now you wang—that’s a good example cause it’s boring to me. You wang is boring to most people. Half the world’s got wangs and half all writers already written bout em. Only thing ain’t boring to me about you wang is how you’re callin it wang. You’re a creative little boy, know some Yiddish slang like shvontz or schmuck or pizzle, could call it anything you want, and you call it you wang. Wang outlandish. I mean: wang. Wang nuts. As it were. Still, it ain’t much to write about. Say it enough, word sound lose it charm fast as anything. For fact, it already has.”
I don’t want to write about my wang, I said. I never even think about it.
“Never even think about he wang, he tells me. Now you’re lying. Don’t matter anyway. Point is, you want to write about some boring things, fine, just don’t make me feel you boredom. I don’t read because I want to get bored. Take this root,” he said. He pulled a root from the bag around his neck and put it in my hand. I put it in my mouth. It tasted like chalk and mushroom.
Flowers banged my rolled-up chapter on his knee. “That was harsh of me,” he said. “Ain’t all boring, actually. It was harsh of me, but you just gotta see what’s not worth keeping and wipe it out.”
I said, I can’t tell what’s not worth keeping.
“Cause you too obsessed with being methodical,” Flowers said. “Systematical. I wish you’d quit it. ’Cept I guess that like asking a bumblebee to leave some pollen alone. Click click click,” he said. It was one of my favorite things that Flowers would say. It was supposed to be the sound of thoughts gathering, and when he made it, it meant he’d forgotten what he wanted to say next but he wanted you to give him a second to think of what it was before you interrupted him… like spoken elipses… like he was trailing off, but would return in a moment with something important. Usually when he’d return, the subject of what he was talking about before would be changed a little…
“Click click click,” Flowers said, and then: “Main thing is it sound like you gotta find the chink in the system, Gurion.” He said, “Find that chink and exploit it.”
I said, Exploit a chink and my scripture gets better?
“Secondarily, yes,” he said. “What I’m talking about is you life’ll get better, though. This Cage sound like prison.”
Flowers was right. I re-read the chapter and the whole thing was swollen; full of abstract words like “desperate” and “hopeless” and “anguish” and “mental.” The whole thing was static. The whole thing was suck. I’d never skip a paragraph in a book I was reading—I was too afraid to miss something important—but I sometimes wished I was the kind of person who would skip a paragraph because then all I’d do is read the dialogue and the action. Those were the only parts of books I ever really enjoyed. The conflict parts. The parts where people act on things and words and other people. All the other parts seemed there to be gotten through: too many nouns and adjectives, too few verbs. This chapter was the kind that made me wish I was a skipper. I threw it away. I wiped it out.
And then, the next schoolday, I searched for a chink. For a little while, I even thought I found one. Late in the afternoon, I witnessed my first Hyperscoot: three kids scooted their chairs in rapid succession, each one loudly groaning the floor, and then a couple other kids groaned the floor with their chairs, and then another one, making six kids who groaned the floor in less than ten seconds. No one went over their tape-line, so no one got in trouble. What was even more interesting to me than that, though, was how the second three scooters never even got seen by Botha or the teachers, who were too occupied with checking to see if the first three were in violation of the Tape rule. And not only that, but a lot of us revolved to watch the action after the first three groans, and none of us got steps for breaking the Face Forward rule since we were done breaking it before the robots were done failing at trying to figure out who the second three scooters were.
As soon as school let out, I asked Nakamook about it. We were sitting in prop thrones on the stage in the cafeteria, waiting for the detention monitor to arrive. Nakamook said, “I’ve been in the Cage two years and seen maybe nine or ten Hyperscoots.”
So they happen once or twice a quarter? I said.
“Nine or ten divided by eight is somewhere between one and two,” said Nakamook = “Yes, once or twice a quarter on average, but I am not very interested in this subject.” He was using a house-key to scrape the gold paint off the dog-head on the arm of his throne.
I said, Why don’t people Hyperscoot more often? It’s so simple.
Nakamook said, “It’s not like anyone does it on purpose.”
But why not? I said.
“What do you mean?” he said. “It’s an accidental thing. A few spazzes groan their chairs at the same time by accident—that’s why it’s called Hyperscoot. Because it’s hyper. Hyper’s never on purpose. If it was on purpose it would be called Superscoot or something. Riotscoot.” He blew his pile of scraped paint off the dog-head and walked away
I disagreed with Nakamook about being H—I believed you could be H on purpose, or at least use your H with purpose—but I figured that the potential purposefulness of H was beside the point. I figured that Nakamook had simplified a good explanation; that he knew some complicated set of reasons why Hyperscoot couldn’t happen more often but didn’t want to talk about them because, for some reason, they made him touchy. Even though we’d blanked hallway bulbs together a few days earlier, and even though I’d drawn on his head and he’d gone to my house for dinner once, I hadn’t yet given him that copy of Ulpan with all the Israelite parts cut out, so I thought it was fair for him not to want to talk about touchy stuff, and I didn’t want him to get upset, so I dropped the conversation and gave up on Hyperscoot.
That afternoon, when I got to the Frontier, I told Flowers I couldn’t find the chink. He said I shouldn’t be a quitter and told me I should look where I didn’t usually look.
The next day, I revolved my head a conspicuous number of degrees to look behind me. This broke the Face Forward rule, but Botha was spaced out and didn’t see, and neither did the teachers at the cluster, who were busy grading papers.
Across the room, directly behind me, was Nakamook. Jelly’s and Mookus’s carrels were along the same wall. The problem was that all their backs were to me. Everyone’s back was to everyone else because of how the carrels were arranged to face the walls. Still, I stared at Nakamook’s back for no less than two minutes and none of the robots noticed. I thought of throwing something at Nakamook’s neck so that he’d turn around, but whatever it could have been would have had to be heavy enough to travel the length of the Cage while also being light enough not to hurt Nakamook, which didn’t leave me any options other than a very compressed ball of paper bound with Scotch tape, which would be inaccurate to throw, noisy to crumple, and also, since it would have to pass the teacher cluster in flight, too large and white to sneak under the robots’ radar. Plus then there’d be this ball of paper on the floor.