The Instructions by Adam Levin
I unwound the twine from the bobbin of the top envelope and started pulling out the contents—vaccinations, prescriptions for drugs I wouldn’t take, copies of birth certificate, Social Security card, admissions records—
Brodsky stood up fast behind his desk. He said, “The average number of students in Tuesday detention is twenty. Do you know how many students are in detention today?”
I shoved the contents back down in the envelope.
He said, “There are forty-one students in detention today. That’s over one fifteenth of the school. There are so many students in detention today, Gurion, that we had to assign a second detention monitor.”
The top item in the second envelope was my first Step 4 CASS from Botha. The offenses listed were “Destruction of School Property” and “Incitement to Destroy School Property” = I’d bent paper-clips into grasshoppers and taught Main Man and this slow boy, Winthrop, how to sculpt and trigger them.
Brodsky slammed his fist down onto the desk, wishing it was my nose. He said, “You, Ronrico and Mikey Bregman account for three of the students in detention. And Eliyahu, who, this morning, was every bit the tragic posterboy for sweetness and piety, put his fist through some glass some sixty minutes after meeting you. He’s a fourth.”
I said to Brodsky, I like Eliyahu. I said, He’s a scholar.
Brodsky said, “That’s just what he said when I asked him about you. No few people have said that about you, Gurion, but I am beginning to believe that the praise is hollow. You are failing to live up to expectations— Don’t smile!” he said.
I couldn’t help it—I’d found a copy of this letter from the social worker at Northside Hebrew Day that asked my parents for permission to meet with me regularly. I’d seen the letter before, right when my mom received it in the mail, but I hadn’t seen my mom’s response, which was stapled to the copy. The response was in her usual all-caps handwriting, in marker, sideways, on top of the text of the social worker’s original letter: “YOU WERE ALREADY TOLD ‘NO, THANK YOU’ ON THE TELEPHONE. THIS TIME IT IS ‘NO.’ I WOULD RATHER NOT HEAR MYSELF SAY WHAT I WILL SAY IF THERE IS A THIRD POLITE REQUEST. SINCERELY, TAMAR MACCABEE.” I covered my mouth with my hand.
Brodsky said, “Listen to me!” = “Look at me!”
But first I looked to see what the next document was—something by Sandy called “Assessment of a Client: Gurion Maccabee,” and the one under that was a letter to Brodsky from Rabbi Salt; I put both on top—and then, when I looked up, I saw the clock on Brodsky’s desk. It said 3:41. Four minutes til June.
I shoved all the contents back in the envelope.
Brodsky said, “After Eliyahu was sent here? Six other students in the lab advanced from step 1 to step 4 in under thirty minutes.”
Maybe it was because Brodsky’s “I’ve been doing some math” bit, which was about a thousand beats too long to be intimidating, was actually starting to intimidate me a little anyway; maybe it was how Sabra my mom was; maybe it was because I was thinking I’d see June in less time than it takes a beginning-of-class tone to follow an end-of-class tone; maybe it was because that made me nervous; maybe it made me nervous just because I was in love with her or maybe because I was in love with her and had seen her ex-boyfriend who she might have kissed; or maybe I was just nervous… whatever it was, I laughed a little. Something made me laugh a little.
Brodsky hit the desk again and leaned forward and his head was pinker than ever. He said, “Leevon Ray and Vincent Portite are in detention for taking wingnuts off the vents in A-Hall yesterday. They said they were having a contest.” He said, “Don’t interrupt me.”
I hadn’t interrupted him.
He said, “Not including you, eleven of the forty students in today’s detention are there as a result of your influence, whether directly or indirectly. What do you have to say about that?”
I said, I’m not only responsible for the actions of my friends, but for the actions of people who see my friends act—that’s what you’re saying to me.
“And now you choose to speak like an adult,” he said. “You only act like a mensch when your ass is on the line?” He pounded the desk rapidly, five times, once for each syllable in “ass is on the line.”
I said to him, I don’t know what speaking like an adult has to do with being a mensch, and I don’t know how it is that you expect a person to defend himself to you when you don’t even have a handle on free will.
“Free will!” Brodsky said.
I said, If those kids you listed aren’t responsible for their own actions, then why would I be for mine, let alone theirs? If I said there was a bomb in the cafeteria and people got trampled, that would be one thing, but I haven’t done anything like that.
His hands were shaking in the air. He stilled them, then knocked his pencil cup sideways off the blotter. It hit the wall and spilled and I got a little startled.
He said, “Who wrecked the scoreboard?”
I said, I don’t tell on people.
He said, “So you know who it was, then.”
I said, I don’t tell on people.
He said, “Was it Nakamook?”
I said nothing.
He said, “Was it Portite? Leevon Ray? Angelica Rothstein?”
I said nothing.
“Did you wreck the scoreboard?” he said.
I said nothing.
“I asked you if you wrecked the scoreboard,” he said.
I said, I heard you.
His whole face twitched then, like the muscles he was forcing to scowl were losing a rebellion, or starting one. “I will keep you here until I get a sufficient answer to my question,” he said.
It was a completely dumont condition. I’d never heard anything so babylike from Brodsky before, and that is when I understood—he was desperate.
It wasn’t just that he had no proof that I’d wrecked the scoreboard—I’d known he had no proof: I’d gotten rid of the pieces and was the only one who saw me do it = I had total control over all the evidence against me—it was that he actually needed proof.
Wrecking the scoreboard was big. I could get arrested for wrecking the scoreboard, taken to court, expelled. Wrecking the scoreboard was so big that suspicion, no matter how strong or who it belonged to, was not enough to nail me, and it never would be. I’d had the upper hand the whole time and I hadn’t known it.
“Answer me,” Brodsky said.
The clock said 3:45 and I was safe, but being safe was not getting me any closer to June. I knew Brodsky couldn’t keep me there forever, but he could definitely keep me there til the end of detention if he wanted.
“Did you wreck the scoreboard?” Brodsky said. “Did you?”
The first “did” was too loud and his voice faltered on the second, like he heard the first one and didn’t like what he’d heard.
I thought: He doesn’t like treating me the way he is treating me. He’s treating me differently than usual because he wants me to act differently than usual.
Click click click.
I thought: There are a million kinds of different-than-usual.
I decided to try the first one I could think of.
In between deciding and actually trying, though, I got completely paralyzed. The paralysis lasted twice as long as a decision to blink takes to become the action of my eyes blinking. That is less time, even, than it takes to say the word No. The first time I ever got paralyzed like that was in a shopping cart when I was four. My mom took me to the Jewel for fruit to make fruit salad for a barbecue at her colleague’s house. The lemons were shiny and I wanted one, but I didn’t want to ask my mom to buy it for me because I was playing a game that day where I would not ask my parents for anything, so I just grabbed one of the lemons and looked at it and waited for my mom, who was looking at whipped toppings, to see the lemon in my hand and offer to buy it for me. She didn’t see. She put some whipped topping in the cart and pushed us past the melon stand, where this kid in a baseball uniform was pulling on his little sis
I pretended to have a pretend itch in my eye, to pretend-rub that pretend itch with my wristbone, and in as trembling a voice as I could fake, I said to Leonard Brodsky:
I think you’re really bullying me.
It was like I’d suddenly died. It was like I’d pulled my own head off and tossed it in his lap. I said “bullying,” and the wrinkles around his mouth disappeared and he sat down in his chair and he sat back in his chair and, on the shelf behind where his head had been, three things glinted at me: the bell of his soundgun, the glass in the frame of his family portrait, and—this last one between the first two, and duller, barely visible—the wingnut I’d given him that morning.
With his hands on his knees, rubbing them, Brodsky said to me, “I didn’t… I got carried away, Gurion. Please accept my apology.” His eyes were suddenly very wet.
Another No! passed through me, and I did not deny it happened this time, but I kept up the fake-out, anyway: I ducked my head a little, like I was hesitating, and then I nodded many small nods = I reluctantly accept your apology.
While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who’d hurt him, and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted to hurt him or that I didn’t know how I’d hurt him. It didn’t matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn’t need a name to be wrong. It didn’t need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry.
Adonai had twice shouted No! at me and I had twice ignored it.
I was dismissed.
In the outer-office, Miss Pinge wrote me a hall-pass, my favorite thing to have at school. I went straight to detention.
It was 3:48 and I was safe, a miserable sinner. Then things got ironic.
I wasn’t allowed in detention: I had entered through the southern doorway of the cafeteria, but before I’d even gotten past the first bathroom, Miss Gleem rushed over, saying, “Go to the library.”
Why? I said.
Miss Gleem pressed a finger against her glossed lips and shooed me back into Main Hall. I spotted June at the table by the stage on the eastern side. She had her back to me. My sadness over having hurt Brodsky made me slow, so instead of shouting June’s name across the room, I only thought about shouting June’s name across the room, and by the time I decided I should actually do it, Miss Gleem had gently pushed me through the doorway.
“I’m so sorry,” Miss Gleem said. She meant about the push, but Miss Gleem was always exaggerating her emotions. Even if she was sorry, there’s no way she was so sorry. The push was fine with me, anyway. Miss Gleem was a big-time toucher, but it wasn’t perved. It was affectionate. In her head, I’m sure she called the push “encouragement.” She was the art teacher. She monitored detention on Tuesdays and Wednesdays against her will. She told me that once. I liked her. She wore fake tortoiseshell combs in her fuzzy hair, like the sweeter, less pretty sister of a bony princess whose combs are made of gold. It wasn’t just me who liked her, either. She was mostly pinged-out and everyone liked her, and if I’d met Miss Gleem first I’d have probably called Miss Pinge gleemed-out.
She bent her knees and leaned toward me and I could see the tops of her tits in her shirt. Her tits were really white and pushed together. I thought about how if I put a watercolor brush on her tits sideways, then while the brush rolled forward it would trail a fleeting, tubular dent in the skin behind it. By the time the brush fell on the ground there’d be goosebumps on her tits and maybe even her throat because the rolling watercolor brush would feel like how it feels when you run a hangnail along the paler side of your arm. I don’t know why I thought of that. What her tits mostly did was make me want to press the side of my face against their top parts while I was kneeling in between her legs and she was sitting in a rocking chair. I would reach up with my hands to put them on her ears and in her hair and then go to sleep on my knees, just like that. But then I thought about how I would rather put the side of my face on June’s tits and reach up with my hands and fall asleep. But June didn’t really have tits, so then I thought it would be better to put the side of my face on June’s stomach while we were laying down in the shape of the letter T, and my arms would be long like Nakamook’s, and only one of my hands would be in her hair and the other hand would be holding her ankle, and I would fall asleep hearing the sounds inside her stomach, and the sounds would be humming sounds, and she would have one of her hands on my head, too, but none of that could happen, not any time soon, not with me in the hall and her in the cafeteria, a sound-killing wall of cinderblocks between us.
“You’re so upset,” Miss Gleem said. “Why are you so upset?”
I said to her, I have to go in. I have detention.
She said, “We have too many students in here. We tried to seat everyone, but the chatter was too much for Mr. Klapper to handle, so he took ten of you folks to the library, and I’m sorry, but that’s where you’ve gotta go now.”
Again with the sorry.
Mr. Klapper taught Social Studies. I’d heard that he was very old. He was one of the only teachers at Aptakisic who didn’t have to teach in the Cage once a week. I never met him.
I said, But I’m here already.
She said, “I’d love to have you in detention with me, Gurion, except I don’t have your assignment form—Mr. Klapper took it.”
I said, I know the assignment by heart. I said, I’ll just write it out on looseleaf.
She said, “They make a big deal out of the forms. Looseleaf won’t cut it.”
I said, Miss Gleem! I said, No one even reads those things.
She said, “Who told you that?”
I said, It’s just I know some people fill the page up with swear words and no one gets in trouble for it.
She said, “I don’t think that’s true. I’ve never seen an assignment like that. And I read them all when I’m the monitor. It’s part of the STEP System. After we read them, we pass them on to Bonnie Wilkes and Sandy Billing
I said, I’m not ashamed.
She said, “But why should you be?”
I said, I shouldn’t.
She said, “I was just trying to compliment your writing.”
Thank you, I said.
She said, “Now go get a hall-pass from the Office before you go to the library—Mr. Klapper’s a stickler.”
I already had a hall pass. I had one from Miss Pinge, and one with a poem on it, and then a whole pad of them with no table to throw it on and make my coaster joke.
I headed slowly toward the Office, but once Gleem was back inside, I spun and ducked into the cafeteria’s northern doorway. That doorway was deep, but doorless. I leaned back against its sidewall and slid down onto the floor. I could see the back of June. She was sitting on her knees on the bench of the table, writing her detention assignment, crouched over the page with her shoulders up to her ears like she was cold.
I tried to move heat around. I thought of blankets, a pile of them. She didn’t look any less cold. I thought of the blankets catching fire, and a high-powered fan built into my chest. It didn’t work. I failed. No. I didn’t fail. I never had a chance. I didn’t fail at anything. A high-powered fan? Blankets catching fire? A high-powered fan in my chest and burning blankets? What the fuck was wrong with me? I was thinking like a whiny escapist specialkid, a nice little Jewish boy who’d tell Mr. Brodsky, “I think you’re really bullying me,” and actually mean it. Gee aw gee. Such heartbreaking heartbreak. So scared inside, so lonely and helpless, just wants to be accepted. Aw gee aw gee aw fuck you, Gurion. Kill the limp magic thinking, and act like a mensch. Figure out how you hurt him, see the sin for what it was. And repent. And atone.
I reviewed the encounter, beat by beat:
Brodsky starts flipping out, talking about math.