The Instructions by Adam Levin
Having thought, for the second time in two days, that I’d found a chink, and then, for the second time in two days, finding that I hadn’t, I started getting angry that I’d ever looked, and angrier still that I’d ever had to look. My friends were sitting just yards away, but I couldn’t communicate with any of them openly… Rather, I could communicate with any of them openly—all I’d have to do was use my voice—but I would get in trouble if I did so. And that I was expected to accept that was… what? An insult. One of a thousand that went with being in the Cage. And I did accept it. All of us did. That was the thing. That was the thing that started to eat at me, even though I didn’t yet understand it. This is the thing that was starting to eat at me, even though I didn’t understand it yet: In trying to find a chink with which to game the Cage, I, like the rest of them, was playing along with the Cage, accepting the insult, accepting—in action (or lack thereof), if not in thought—that the Cage possessed the authority to lay down rules = Even when the actions that would get us in trouble were good, human actions—e.g., talking to friends, making eye-contact, searching out something other than solitude and blankness—we did our best to stay out of trouble. And why? For what? They didn’t teach. They didn’t even teach. If someone were teaching, it might have been different; if you had to be quiet so as not to interfere with a teacher’s lessons, that, although stifling and totally unlike the way I’d been schooled at Schechter and Northside, would at least have made a little sense, but quiet at all times? Quiet at all times, though no one was speaking, let alone about anything you’d be better off knowing, plus always facing forward, away from the teachers? The Cage Manual said that students in the Cage were there to learn through “self-direction,” but all that meant was that since we were all in different grades, with different abilities, there was no way for the teachers to give us group lessons. What they did was give us “individually tailored” writing assignments and readings, and then “tutored” us on an “as-needed basis” at the teacher cluster. If you had a question, you could raise your hand and wait to get called on, but since the teacher cluster was in the center of the room and your back was to the cluster while you faced forward, you couldn’t tell if the teachers had seen your raised hand; until they looked up and called on you to join them, you just had to wait, arm held high. Newer students often tried to groan the floor inside their tape-line to get the teachers to look in their direction and see their raised hands, but this drove people crazy, teachers and students both, and Botha called it Aggressive Squeaking, and Aggressive Squeaking broke the Quiet At All Times rule. Those words: Aggressive Squeaking! They got me explosive, and just before third period on that second day of my search for a chink, I couldn’t stop hearing them inside my head, Aggressive Squeaking Aggressive Squeaking, and I probably would have exploded by fourth, but my nose beat me to it; my nose had to sneeze.
I didn’t like anyone to see me sneezing, so I revolved to face forward and sneezed into my carrel, and Botha said, “Gehbless you,” and I thought: God damn you! and within half a second, I’d discovered the chink and how to exploit it, for as soon as Botha had said “Gehbless you,” I’d revolved in my chair, breaking the Face Forward rule once again, and I found that he was just as spaced out as before. Despite my sneeze and his automatic blessing, he wasn’t even looking in my direction. Neither were the teachers.
Sneezing drew no real attention.
It took me less than five minutes to work out a sound-code. At lunchtime, I handed it out to those concerned. I would cough when I wanted Benji’s attention, fake-sneeze when I wanted Vincie’s attention, clear my throat to signal Mookus, pop my spine-nodes for Jelly, sniffle for Leevon, and wheeze for Mangey.
Without knowing sign language, there wasn’t much we could say once we were facing each other, so we resorted to gestures that didn’t mean what they seemed to—we shook our fists, thumbed our front teeth, dragged fingers across our throats like knives—yet performing these gestures, at least for a while, felt like a victory over the arrangement.
Within a few days of the sound-code’s inception, though, all of the Cage had caught on to its rudiments, and everyone likes to see rules get broken, so whenever I made a body noise, half the room would break the Face Forward rule to see what I’d do next, and Botha would notice and then he would yell and hand out some steps. Soon enough he figured out what I was doing—or at least he figured out that when I made a body noise, people got disarranged—and after that, I couldn’t even tongue-click or sigh in awe of a Philip Roth paragraph without getting shut down in booming Australian.
The most important thing, though—at least to me, at least at the time—was the new way that I learned to think about chinks: since they were spaces between rules, the more rules there were in an arrangement, the more chinks. Once the robots found out that a chink was being exploited, they’d create a new rule to fill the space between the two rules containing the chink, but the new rule never filled the space completely—there is always space between rules—and so what happened was that every time a new rule got shoved between two old ones, two new spaces would arise, two new chinks, one on either side of the new rule, so that
would become
The two new chinks would be much narrower than the one they’d replaced, but still they would be chinks. So the more that exploited chinks got filled with rules, the more chinks there were.
It was hard, however, to keep finding the chinks, and it was even harder than that to exploit them in a way that was fun.
Once the sound-code failed, we tried a time-code, i.e., we agreed that at certain times we’d revolve to face each other. Benji and I, for example, agreed that we would revolve at every eleventh, seventeenth, thirty-first, and fifty-third minute of the hour, whereas Vincie and I would revolve at the second, twenty-seventh, and forty-fifth minute, and Benji and Vincie at the fifth, thirty-ninth, and fifty-eighth minute. We arranged revolve-minutes with Main Man and Jelly and Leevon and Mangey also, but after a week the time-code died. This was partly because people would get confused and revolve at the wrong minute or face the wrong person, which caused a mutual and reflexive loss of faith (as Main Man put it: “Because when I revolted you did not revolt with me, I became revolted, and I revolted less, which got you revolted, so you revolted less”), but it was mostly because of how using the time-code felt too much like obeying the rules. With the sound-code, I’d been able to give the revolve signal whenever I felt like it, while with the time-code, it was all arranged in advance, like recess. Recess could be good because, unless you were banned from it like I was, you got to go outside. But at the same time, you only got to go outside when the arrangement let you go outside—at recess. It is true we picked the minutes for the time-code ourselves, but because they had to be decided on in advance, it was never as fun as it should have been. It was just another arrangement. Like recess.
A day or two after the time-code disappeared, we replaced it with a random three-code. Whenever three events of a certain type occurred, two of us would be signalled to act. Mine and Vincie’s event, for example, was rising = every third time anyone rose from their chair, like to go to the bathroom or the nurse or the teacher cluster, Vincie and I would revolve and gesticulate. Because the frequency of the three-part signals varied unpredictably, using the random three-code was a little bit more fun than using the time-code, but our revolving still depended on decisions we’d made in advance (we chose which events would elicit our responses), so there was no spontaneity (as there’d been with the sound-code). As well, and as with every other way we’d exploited the chinks, all we could manage in the way of communication was a gesture that, regardless of the movements of the hands comprising it, always meant the same thing: “Look, I exist, and you exist, too; but for the fact that you are seeing me make it, this gesture is totally meaningless.”
Nonetheless, the random three-code stuck. We’d been using it for a month; the robots couldn’t crack it. Even while I stared down at the WE DAMAGE WE piece of paper Jenny
On Flowers’s sound advice, dear scholars, to write in the cause of averting your boredom, I’ve avoided directly describing our hopelessness in favor of describing how we tried to fight it, but make no mistake: our methods all failed. Even those that seemed to succeed were failures—especially those. The sound-code, the time-code, the random three-code; what did they get us? How many times could you give your best friend the finger before it just quit being any fun at all? And how dumont was it to believe that doing so accomplished anything meaningful, let alone useful? Wasn’t to believe that but a way to be arranged? Maybe even the worst kind of arranged? The kind where you think you’re overcoming the arrangement, when, in fact, you’re serving it perfectly? Flipping a covert bird instead of screaming a curse instead of throwing a punch instead of throwing a rock? Revolving in a chair you might have otherwise swung? Cheering for underdogs and calling it action? Smirking at the powerful and calling it subversive? Embracing your meekness instead of getting strong? All day long we coped with the insults, with being insulted; we did what we could to avoid further insults. But that original insult—the one I mentioned earlier, the one that took a while to really understand: that we were expected to accept all the insults the Cage dealt out, all of its rules; to accept that the Cage was allowed to deal them out, was the maker of rules, the only maker of rules, and rules, no less, that were only there to dominate us; only there to show us that the Cage made the rules—that one loomed, grew ever more evident, and even more powerful. And worst of all, we let its power grow; we helped its power grow. You can render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but if you don’t keep from Caesar that which is yours, Caesar will take some, and then take some more, and if you don’t put a stop to it, though you won’t lose everything—you can’t lose everything; there’s things he can’t take, at least one or two—a time will soon come when you’ll think you’ve lost everything, when you’ll think all is Caesar’s, and by then you’ll be too weak to take what’s yours back, too tired to remember what was yours to begin with, and you’ll end up, perversely, scheming for his leavings and, even more perversely, grateful when you get them.
The Cage was no Rome, nor Botha a Caesar, and if I had been a Yeshua I wouldn’t know to be ashamed, but the sound-code, the time-code, and the random three-code, all of our meaningless gesticulations—these were our schemes to get Botha’s leavings, and we were verging on grateful, at least I was. Ashamed is just grateful waiting to happen. You only taste your own dignity right before you puke it up.
My tongue was all sticky and dignified.
Fuck, I said.
A bunch of kids laughed.
“Who said that?” said Botha.
No one told.
I kept my head low, stared down at the WE DAMAGE WE slip of paper. I felt a little better.
Then I felt a lot stupid. Why should I take pleasure in getting away with something that I should have been entitled to do to begin with?
Fuck it, I said. I said, I’m the one who said it. I could’ve fucken gotten away with it, too.
“Stap four for three curses,” Botha said. “That’s one detantion for Garrion Makebee. Two staps for speaking twice; that’s two thirds to a second. Have anything more to add, Mister Makebee? Would you like another stap, a second detantion?”
I wanted to say something because fuck him, but what? I wanted to say a thing that didn’t mean anything, to say a thing to show him that I was breaking a rule for no other reason than to break the rule… It was written before me.
We damage we, I said.
“What was that, Makebee? Whadjeh say? Now that you’ve earned yourself a second detantion in ander a minute, you’ve got three more whole staps to burn before your third. Say more. Please.”
I wanted to say another meaningless thing, and Botha wanted me to say another any old thing. No matter what I said, he’d give me a step.
And so I kept my mouth shut, choosing not to do what I wanted to do over doing what it was that he wanted me to do because what, scholars, really—what was the point? To take pleasure in getting away with something you should have been entitled to do to begin with was dumont enough; to take pleasure in pretending to take pleasure in not getting away with it, though… that was about as useful as trickling. In fact, it was trickling. And what ever did we do in the Cage but trickle, except for submit? We trickled in submission, or we just submitted.
I kept facing forward, and stared at my walls, and I swallowed til Botha quit trying to bait me.
Right when the end-of-class tone sounded, the doorbell gonged. It was such an unlikely timing of sounds that no one gesticulated or rose to stretch legs and bang fists like they usually did during passing-periods.
Botha let the teachers out of the Cage, and when he came back inside, Eliyahu was behind him, and was no longer leaning; not as much, at least, as he had been before. He looked more like a determined professor than a late white rabbit. It made me glad.
Monitor Botha said, “Lasten up.”
Everyone revolved.
“This here is a new student named Ay lie… Ay lie… Ay lie…” Botha looked to Eliyahu for help.
Eliyahu said, “I am—”
Mookus said, “He’s wearing a hat!”
The Flunky said, “A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid.”
“Enough,” Botha said. “This is Aye lie—”
Main Man said, “But I wasn’t telling, the Flunky. I was only just saying.”
“I don’t see the difference,” the Flunky said.
“That’s because you’re a foog,” said Nakamook.
“I am not a fool,” said the Flunky.
“Students!” Botha said.
“Botha!” said students. It wasn’t as tough a thing to shout as it seemed; since we were between tones, Botha couldn’t really do anything unless we cursed or hit each other.
Eliyahu loudly de-pocketsed his hands and placed them on his hips. His upper row of teeth shone from under the hat-shadow.
“No one said you were a fool,” Nakamook told the Flunky. “I would never call you a fool. I like fools. Fools know that they’re fools. It’s a kind of wisdom. What I said was that you are a foog and a foog—”
“I’m a fool,” said Main Man. “A fool for you. I’m a fool to do your dirty work,” he said. “I’m a fool for love and an ice-cold pop on a sunny day when the ground splits open under America and the sky falls down and so forth.”
“But what’s a foog?” the Flunky said.
“It’s almost exactly the same thing as a fool, except I don’t like you,” Benji told him.
“At least I’m not a fool,” the Flunky said.
“But why does that boy get to wear a hat, though?” said Mookus.
Eliyahu said, “I am—”
The Flunky said, “Why do you get to wear a hat?” to Eliyahu.
Eliyahu very suddenly removed his fedora and held it out for all the Cage to look at, but no one looked at it because they were all looking at his face. Eliyahu’s eyes were doing something I hadn’t ever seen eyes do before, something I knew at once was called “burning.” “Burning eyes” is a confusing thing to call eyes like that, though. Eyes like that have lids so narrowed that the only reason you can even see the sliver of white at the outside corners is the contrast against the irises which have gone completely black with pupil. They are called burning eyes not because they look like they are on fire, but because they make you feel like you are in danger of catching fire, like they could set you on fire from the inside if you do the wr
Eliyahu said, “I am Eliyahu of Brooklyn and I am a defiance. Will you try to take my hat from me?”
No one answered him.
Eliyahu put his hat back on. Then he pointed to the empty carrel to my right. He said to Botha, “There is where I will sit.”
Botha started to say “No,” but then he saw he couldn’t argue. Except for the one on my left, the one on my right was the only carrel that was open. To reduce his loss of snat, Botha turned to welcome the teachers who’d entered, then went to the doorway and locked it down early.
I pulled Eliyahu’s chair out for him, and Nakamook flashed me almost the same crumpled face as when Ronrico’d walked next to me, except it was a little more crumpled than that first time.
I whispered to Eliyahu, “You got tough sudden.”
“It was a blessing to break that case,” he said.
I thought: You are the blessing.
Eliyahu said, “The glass didn’t cut me at all, and I thought to myself: Nothing can cut me. True, it is not a thought I haven’t had before, but this time it felt good to think it.”
I squeezed him on the neck, like how my father will sometimes squeeze me on the neck, and then Eliyahu did what I usually do when that happens. He looked down at his own chest and nodded his head a few times = “Yes, okay, yes okay” = “This is nice, but if you don’t stop, I will become embarrassed for reasons I don’t understand.”
Like my father usually does, I stopped squeezing the neck before his embarrassment started.
Botha was back. He said to me, “Don’t get so appy, Makebee—it’s only tempory.”