The Instructions by Adam Levin
“Where are Mikey and Ronrico?” Miss Pinge asked him.
Not a bad question.
Desormie chinned the air at me. He said, “Brodsky’s last email said this one fights, we bring him in separate from who he fought with.”
It was the first I’d heard of that policy.
Same with Miss Pinge. “Really?” she said = “That doesn’t seem right.”
“I do what Brodsky says,” Desormie said.
Miss Pinge handed him a Complaint Against Students Sheet. Some people called it a CASS. It was the standard document for the STEP System. Cage students like me were outside the STEP system, even though everyone pretended we were in it. If I’d been in the STEP system, I’d have been expelled by then. So would at least half the rest of the Cage. You got expelled after three out-of-school suspensions. Those were OSS’s. You got an OSS after three in-school suspensions in the same semester, which were ISS’s. You got an ISS if you had four detentions for the same reason in one quarter. All they ever gave me was detentions and once in a while ISS’s.
Desormie’s auto-tinting eyeglasses were almost as big as laboratory goggles. He took them off and blew steam on the lenses. Then he wiped the lenses on his shirt and put the glasses back on to read the standard document. He’d answered the CASS questions at least five times in front of me, but still he had to mouth the words of them as he went along. I noticed a red lint-string attached to his shirt-hem by static and I wanted it removed but it wouldn’t remove itself and I wouldn’t ever touch him, so I scratched an itch on my head and read the pervy stories in his face: He was a notorious de-pantser in the hallways of his grade school. The first time he went to the bathroom after eating beets, he looked in the toilet and thought he was dying, so he played with himself. His wife was scared of him was why he married her. He thought polack was the Polish word for Polish person. That’s the story of his life that his face told. It was the story of a perv in the making. The story of a perv on the make.
And the story was true. He was always caressing between his tits when he talked to women and making girls who wore spandex tights sit in front during sit-ups and leg-stretches. It was all there in the mouth. Its top lip had a pointy edge. Its word-forming movements made it look like he was chewing food that he thought was gross but wouldn’t say was gross because it was impolite but he wanted you to know it was gross so he showed you—like the food was so bad he couldn’t hide the ugliness of his own mouth-actions so you were supposed to admire how polite he was for not saying anything. I hated him. And that’s not just an expression. I hated him the way the tongues of smart girls prefer bittersweet chocolate to milk. I hated him the way Jews endangered Jews and burning matter grabs oxygen. I hated him from the moment I met him, and at the moment I met him it was as if I’d always hated him. I hated him the way he hated me. Helplessly, I hated him. Without volition. And it is true that there were others as despicable as Desormie, even within the walls of Aptakisic, but I had to learn to hate those others. They had to teach me how to hate them. Desormie was the only person I ever hated a priori. Our enmity was mystical.
Miss Pinge told me Brodsky was in a meeting. She said I’d have to wait. I was already waiting, but what she meant was I didn’t have to wait on my feet. To get that across, she stuck out her pointer and jabbed it back and forth. The jabbing was something Emmanuel Liebman had long ago taught me to call a blinker action. That label referred to the orange blinkers that were mounted on the tops of construction horses; the horse showed you where it was that you shouldn’t go, and the blinker showed you the horse. I.e., it showed you a showing. The jabbing of the finger was a blinker action because it was a pointing at a pointing. It pointed at how the finger was pointing at the three fake-oak waiting-chairs next to the door.
I didn’t like it when people blinkered for me—it seemed condescend-ing—but I did like Miss Pinge, so I decided I’d wait just a three- (not a five-) count, before I revolved and went to the chairs. Before I’d even counted to two, though, something flat sailed over my shoulder, then landed with a clap on Miss Pinge’s desk. A wooden bathroom pass the size of a textbook.
“I was nice to give you that pass,” Pinge said. “It would’ve been nice of you not to throw it at me.”
“I threw it on the blotter,” said Eliza June Watermark.
No one called her Eliza. They all called her June. I’d seen June around, but never close up. She was flat but so pretty. She sat before I did, and not in the middle chair. I didn’t know if I should sit next to her or sit so a chair was empty between us, so I tried to read her face, but I couldn’t read her face because she wasn’t bat-mitzvah yet—the stories wouldn’t tell. They weren’t available.
I did a quick eenie-meenie with my chin and the words inside my head so no one would know. I landed on sit with the chair between us, then knew I didn’t want that, so I sat down next to her and asked why she was there. She said she was there for talking in Spanish.
I said, That’s racist.
June said, “Spanish. Class.” There were three slim gaps between the teeth of her top-row. She whispered, “Next stop, Frontier Motel.”
“Next stop, Frontier Motel,” was the first part of a rhyme people said to me on the bus, right before I’d get dropped off at the Frontier Motel. The rest of the rhyme was, “The place where Gurion’s fat black dad who fell dwells.” They thought I lived at the Frontier Motel, but I only got picked up and dropped off there.
I never knew what to do when I’d hear the rhyme because the guy they called my black dad was the motel owner, Flowers, a three-hundred-pound bachelor hoodooman with silvershot dreadlocks and a chrome-knobbed walking cane who’d written four novels he said cast spells. He said I shouldn’t read them; not because of the spells, but because he was my teacher, and his books would interfere. So I didn’t read them, because he was my teacher, and my father’s old friend. He was helping me to write my third work of scripture. I.e., he was helping me out with this work of scripture, The Instructions, although, at the time, I hadn’t known its title, let alone its true substance. At the time, all I’d known was that it would be different from my first two scriptures—The Story of Stories and Ulpan—which I hadn’t needed help with from anyone at all, since they were exclusively concerned with my people, who I already knew how to speak to and about. My people, when I’d written those first two scriptures, were the only people I knew.
Apart from forbidding me to read his four novels, though, the only thing Flowers ever forbade was for me to portray him as a wise old black man who gave life-lessons to an Israelite boy, part lost-tribe or not, because, he said, that would signify wrong, and signifying was important to him, and since he wasn’t some kind of zealous forbidder, I knew it should be important to me. And that was the reason I didn’t know what to do when people called him my black dad who fell. The first thing I’d think to do was violence, because they were making fun of him, but if I did violence then they could think I was doing violence because they called a black guy my dad and that it made me ashamed. So violence would signify wrong. Plus I didn’t know who they were exactly—just that they sat up front with the bandkids. They might have even been the bandkids. So I didn’t do anything to them at all. Instead, I’d tell Flowers and he’d give me a book that was by someone else, or sometimes a root he’d tell me to chew. The roots all tasted like chalk.
June didn’t say the black guy part of the bus-rhyme, but I was being nice to her, so it was suck of her to say any of it. I didn’t even know how she knew the rhyme—she wasn’t on my bus. She sneezed after she said it, though, and after she sneezed, I said God bless you. I didn’t really want to be mean to her anyway.
Desormie kept trying to talk to Miss Pinge while she typed. “So,” he said.
Miss Pinge shrugged = “So what?”
He said, “I guess you’re recording attendance.”
Miss Pinge nodded = “Yes already.”
“I see you’ve got a system,” Desormie said. “You just sorta bring
I thought: If history’s taught us anything, it’s that any man can be killed.
That’s from Part II.
Miss Pinge stopped typing and tilted her head = “Please go away, Ron Desormie,” but Desormie thought = “Please continue, you interesting gym teacher.” He turned around and saw me watching him. Then he made his eyes wide at June and thumbed air at me = “Look at this intermittently disordered exploder who does not attend and is hyper and who thinks you want to sit next to him when what you really want is to sit in my lap.” He ran the thumb up and down his cleavage. Then he winked at June and turned back to Miss Pinge.
He said, “I bet there used to be an old system where you didn’t have those pop-up boxes and you had to type the entire name in. How fast our technology moves. Jeez. Look at all those absents.”
Miss Pinge didn’t look.
Desormie said, “What I mean is, there’s a whole lot of absents you got there.” Then he said, “Gotta teach gym.”
He pretended to scratch his arm so he could flex it, and then he left the CASS on the desk and then he left.
I hate that perv, I said to June.
She said, “Me too.”
Yeah? I said.
June made the noise “Tch” = “That was a useless thing to say, Gurion.” = “What you just asked me was not a real question.”
I said, Tch. It sounded inauthentic and I tried to ignore her.
It was hard for me to ignore people, especially pretty ones. It was hard to ignore noises, too. Call-Me-Sandy said the same thing as my mom said about it. They said that to be a good ignorer you had to concentrate on another thing because if you just concentrated on ignoring what you were supposed to ignore then you wouldn’t really be ignoring what you were supposed to ignore because you’d be thinking about ignoring it, which was just another way of thinking about it.
So I concentrated on the face of Miss Pinge instead of June. It was not as fun as concentrating on the face of June. June was pretty and also hot. Miss Pinge was hot but she wasn’t pretty. It’s the faces she made that were hot. But the face that she had when she was not making a face was not pretty. It was beat-looking, her resting face. When she was my age, she got her period early and her father dragged her in front of a mirror in her pajamas. He forced her to look into it and say, “You are an ugly girl and I hate you.” The face she made in the mirror acted powerfully on the bones and muscles of her resting face so that now it was a hint of the mirror-face. Certain kinds of men, on seeing the hint, would try to seduce her in hopes that once they’d gotten her naked, they could say something cruel to her and thereby elicit that original face she’d made for her father. Certain kinds of men like Ron Desormie. What a name. What a pervy name. What a perfect name for a perv like him. It could even be verbed like pasteurize. I thought: It could be? No. It will be. I thought: From now on, desormiate = perv the world, and rondesormiate will, for a while, be an acceptable, however overly formal, variant in the vein of irregardless, then become archaic, whereas sorm and desorm, the slang of tomorrow, will eventually dominate, rendering desormiate itself the over-formal variant.
At that, I was tapped, though. I’d killed about a minute, but it felt like twenty. On the June-side, my neck ached from fighting my head.
I let my head turn and said, Here’s the new adjective you didn’t know you asked for.
Miss Pinge said, “Shh.”
I whispered, Junish: easy on the eyes, but—
June cut me off. She said, “You need to shave yourself.”
A couple people had told me that, but when I looked in the mirror, I could not see where they were talking about. There were no hairs on my face. I looked very hard every day. I wanted big sideburns.
Where? I said.
June said, “Uch.” Then she touched me near the area where my apple would obtrude if I grew up to have the neck of my father, and also she touched me right above that, which was the bottom of my chin, which was a part of my head, but it didn’t make me dangerous to get touched there that time. It made me want to hug her in a standing position and nose her in the hair. I wanted to kiss her fingers, too. They were cool on my skin, and I thought they would have a strawberry taste. I was sure that her hair would have a strawberry smell. The hair was red, all kinds of red, and I noticed on her wrist she had a pink freckle, very light pink, shaped like a י. I had two like it, one on each thumb-knuck, but mine were as black as felon tattoos and under two layers of waterproof makeup my mom made me apply every morning to hide them. I was going to rub off the makeup right there to show June the freckles, but exit-laughter rumbled behind Brodsky’s door. The laughter was the sound of the Boystar family, and once the door opened and Brodsky emerged I couldn’t start talking without getting us in trouble, and I worried that if I just rubbed off the makeup to reveal her the letters without a word June might feel creeped. Better, I decided, to show her later.
Name: Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
Grade: 5 6 7 8
Homeroom: The Cage
Date of Detention: 9/22/2006
Complaint Against Student (from Complaint Against Student Sheet) Fight in the hallway with Kyle McElroy. B-Hall. Passing period (2nd–3rd). 9/19/06. Mr. Novy.
Step 4 Assignment: Write a letter to yourself in which you explain 1) why you are at step 4 (in after-school detention); 2) what you could do in order to avoid step 4 (receiving after-school detention) in the future; 3) what you have learned from being at step 4 (in after-school detention); 4) what you have learned from writing this letter to yourself. Include a Title, an Introduction, a Body, and a Conclusion. This letter will be collected at the end of after-school detention. This letter will be stored in your permanent file.
Title
Face
Introduction
There is snat and there is face. Snat is like water, but invisible. It can become violence, depending on what kind of shape the face is in.
The face is the dam that holds the snat back.
Body
Flood
If the face is suddenly wiped out by an enemy, the snat floods, and the faceless person spends all the snat’s violent possibilities in a single burst of attempted tackling, choking, or slamming the enemy’s head on the floor.
While the possibilities get spent, the faceless person shakes and cries. His aim is off, and his attack, unless he gets lucky, does no serious damage to the enemy: it is usually very easy for the enemy to dodge the burst.
Once all the snat has flooded out of the faceless person, his muscles disobey him and his fists quit. The enemy can stomp him into pudding without resistance.
Trickle
If, instead of being suddenly wiped out by an enemy, the face just gets cracked a little, then the snat trickles. If the trickler tries to caulk the crack, another crack will form. If he then tries to caulk the second crack, a third crack will form. Caulking a
Cannon
The best is when a brick pops out of the face. It can happen two ways.
The first way is by trickles. Trickles further corrode cracks that go uncaulked. Enough corrosion will cause the snat to pop the brick that’s trickling. Snat will cannon through a brick-sized hole, and the person whose hole it is can aim the snat. He can turn the whole face in the direction of the enemy and blast that enemy faceless.
If the blast isn’t perfect, the enemy might pop a brick of his own—that is the second way a brick gets popped.
Once the enemy has popped a brick, he can aim snat through his brick-hole. That’s what a fight is: brick-popped enemies aiming their holes til faces wipe out.
After it’s over, whoever’s not faceless gets all his bricks and snat back.
Conclusion
The Judge Samson always knew what kind of shape his face was in. Because the Philistines were running Israel, his face trickled at the sight of them, even if they were sleeping. But Samson knew not to throw down while he was trickling. That is why he spent so much time getting the Philistines to start up with him. They would cheat him or attack him and these actions would pop a brick out of his face. Then Samson would aim his hole and smite everyone. He’d aim his hole as soon as his brick popped and he never waited til his face got completely wiped out. Not til the very last second of his life.
At the very last second of his life, his sense of timing was gone, and his face trickled non-stop, but it wouldn’t pop a brick, so Samson got started-up-with by the trickling of the snat itself. His own snat wiped his face out all at once. Because he was Samson, his aim was amazing, even though he was blind, and his strength was astounding, even though he was shaven, and his flooding massacred every Philistine in the palace. Samson judged Israel for twenty years. In those days, there was no king in Israel and a man would do whatever seemed proper in his eyes.