The Instructions by Adam Levin
I don’t back down.
He tells me I won’t be able to see June until I tell him who broke the scoreboard.
I see that he doesn’t want to be flipping out.
I get an idea.
Adonai shouts No! at me about my idea.
I pretend I’m very scared by pretending to wipe pretend tears from my eyes that I’m pretending inside my pretend-game are actually an itch that I’m pretending inside my pretend-game to scratch with my wrist and then I say to Brodsky, I think you’re really bullying me.
He acts like someone died, then apologizes and lets me leave.
I thought: But his son died and that’s the worst person who can die and someone saying he thinks you’re a bully…it’s nothing compared to your son dying, especially when it’s just some boy who’s saying it, some boy who, when you look at him there, in front of you, the first thing you do is you wish it was him who’d been killed instead of Ben.
Then I thought: Oh no, because—
I thought: Another way to say that Brodsky wished the boy in front of him had been killed instead of his son was: Brodsky wished the boy in front of him were his son.
And I had been the boy in front of him.
And he would not have treated his son the way he’d been treating me. Ben, though a hacker of email accounts, was no stonewaller of principals. He did not drive his father crazy.
I’d pretended, to a good father, that I, the person he wished was his kind, dead son, was as afraid of him as his kind, dead son would have been if that son had just seen his father act the way Brodsky had acted.
And Brodsky became ashamed, and there was nothing pretend about it.
And now I wasn’t even looking at June’s face from across a table, but at her back through a doorway = I had shamed Brodsky needlessly.
I did math:
Of the forty-one students in detention, eleven of them, not including me, were there as a result of my influence, whether direct or indirect. And then eleven students, including me, were not allowed in the cafeteria. Why two elevens? Why not eleven of forty-one and then eight or nine of forty-one? I was the last one to arrive, so if Hashem merely wanted to keep me from June, it wouldn’t even matter if it had been one of forty-one and Klapper had left the cafeteria with no kids and one blank detention form—I’d have still been the one of the forty-one, the one who’d have gotten sent to the library to fill that one assignment out: I’d have still been barred from the cafeteria, still would have been sitting in that doorway, Juneless, punished, and that would have been suitably ironic and terrible. Being barred from the cafeteria would have caused me to suffer, regardless of how many others were barred.
But it was not one of forty-one, or eight or nine. It was eleven influenced and so eleven removed, and you only find Justice that symmetrical in scripture, and only when there is a message attached.
The elevens were a message.
And because Hashem knew I didn’t need reminders that He ran things, Him saying to me, “I run things,” could not have been the message. The message of the elevens was that He didn’t just want me to suffer, and He didn’t just want me to know that I had made Him make me suffer: Hashem wanted me to suffer from the knowledge that when I had made Him make me suffer—that when I had disobeyed his No! and made Brodsky suffer—I had made Him suffer, too, Hashem. I had made Hashem suffer.
So I dropped my head between my knees and suffered all of it.
Soon, setbuilders sent sawings and bangs through the fake-velvet stage-curtain, which hung slanted in the middle where whoever shut it caught the tassels at the bottom in a footlight, and I lifted my head. Every few seconds, a few hammers struck their targets at the same time and the noise boomed. When that happened, June’s back tensed and she’d cringe her neck.
After the fifth or sixth boom, she revolved her head, annoyed, and I saw her face. I didn’t think she saw me. I would not have let her see me right then—a sufferer, a sinner, unable to warm her—and I thought the combination of doorway-shadow and jamb blotted me out of her line of sight, but a couple booms later, she revolved a second time and was smiling. I didn’t smile back. I couldn’t. I was trying to suffer and she was such a good smiler and it stunned me.
Then she was raising her hand. Miss Gleem walked over.
June said to her, quietly, “I need to get out of here for a minute.”
Miss Gleem said, “What do you mean, Juney?”
June said, “It’s important.”
Miss Gleem whispered a question to her.
June made a single laughing noise: Tss. She said, “It’s not that.”
“Well…” Miss Gleem said. You could tell she wanted to let June leave.
June said, “It’s fine, Miss Gleem, I promise—and did I tell you about the idea I had for the sculpture competition?”
Miss Gleem lit up. “I thought you wouldn’t enter.”
June said, “I wasn’t going to, but then yesterday, I found this website with paintings by Jean Dubuffet, and also some Alberto Giacometti sculptures, and I had this idea about shadows and a flattened animal made of clay, glazed ultra-brightly—not like a cartoon roadkill or anything, but a very shiny and complicated mammal that won’t look right in two dimensions. Like say it’s a rhinocerous, but smashed down flat like a stingray, so how could she walk? is what you’ll ask yourself. How can the many chambers of her stomach perform the exertions required to digest exotic grasses? is the feeling I hope to evoke. And then an outline. A thick black one bordering the entire rhinoceros on both sides. Do you see what I mean about the outline? Because an outline is what you do before you learn shadows, right? And I’ll set the sculpture on its side, thin-way-down, on a set of casters, the super-cheap kind that won’t go in carpet, and then, attached to the back part of the back caster wheel will be a rigid length of wire that’ll be bent so that I can hang a sun-colored styrofoam lightbulb from the end of it, like the midmorning sun, and bracketed to the front part of the front caster wheel will be a large pane of smoked plexiglass that’ll lay flat, in what do you call it? perpendicular respect to the rhinoncerous plane—I have to learn to cut and stain plexiglass, first—but this plexiglass will be cut into the shape of what the shadow of the three-dimensional version of the rhino would be at midmorning, which will basically be the same shape as the 2-D rhino, but foreshortened to account for the rhino’s position relative to the lightbulb, which, like I said, will be at the angle of the midmorning sun, in summer I’m thinking, on the summer solstice, in Illinois. Don’t you think that would be a funny sculpture, though? A 2-D rhino with a fixed shadow in a 3-D world? Or is it pretentious? I think it’s funny, but my mom said it was pretentious, but I think that maybe when I told her about it, I did a bad job explaining.”
June looked at me when she said “Jean Dubuffet” and again when she said “rhinocerous” and “midmorning-height,” but didn’t make a face or anything. It was stealth.
“It does sound funny,” Miss Gleem said, “and also completely wonderful!” She said, “I take it you liked the Dubuffets?”
“I loved them,” June said.
Miss Gleem said, “There was an exhibit in Amsterdam a few summers back—I went right when I finished grad school, and they were so amazing.” She fiddled with her combs, remembering. “Did you have any favorites?”
June said, “Of course, and I’d tell you, but I don’t like titles, so I never checked them.”
Miss Gleem said, “That’s because you think visually, June, and you should be proud of it. Can you describe the paintings you liked? How about the cow ones?”
While June described cows by Jean Dubuffet, the Janitor farted twice with his armpit. I couldn’t see, but I knew it was him.
Miss Gleem turned from June and said, “Mikey Bregman! We know it’s you.”
“Sorry, Miss Gleem,” said the Janitor.
“Sorry, Miss Gleem,” said Vincie Portite, in a sissy voice. I couldn’t see him either, the liar—Vincie was the one who told me no one r
Miss Gleem said, “Vincie.”
Vincie said, “Miss Gleem.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay then,” said Vincie.
Miss Gleem clicked her tongue and turned back to June.
June said, “I’ve really gotta get out of here for a minute, Miss Gleem.”
Miss Gleem said, “Only a minute.”
“Maybe five or six,” June said.
“Five or six.”
June came toward me, not looking at me.
I heard Ronrico say, “Oh but I’ve got feminine problems, too, Miss Gleem!”
June laughed.
Miss Gleem said, “Just stop, Ronrico.”
Ronrico said, “Sorry, Miss Gleem,” and June flicked her eyes at me = “Get out of the doorway”/“Come into the hall,” and then turned into the doorway and continued past me.
As soon as I started getting up, I remembered how I was supposed to be suffering and, instead of standing, I crouch-walked along the doorway’s sidewall, and when I made the turn into Main Hall I pressed my spine on the corner as hard as I could.
We sat next to each other, leaning back against the lockers with our knees up.
“What happened?” June said.
I said, I’m sorry. I said, I got stuck in the Office and—
June said, “That’s fine. What happened to you is what I mean? You look like something happened to you. Or at least you did a minute ago—now you look happy.”
I told her, I said a terrible thing to Brodsky. I said, I hurt him in his own office.
“Why?” she said.
I was trying to speed things up, I said, so I could sit by you in detention.
“It worked out, then.”
How’s that? I said.
She said, “You hurt someone to get something you wanted, and then you didn’t get what you wanted and that hurt you. It’s fair.”
I said, But you’re here, now. I said, I’m not really hurting anymore.
“Probably Brodsky isn’t either,” she said.
I’d wanted her to look in my eyes and see me suffering, then tell me everything was fine. And, in a way, she did tell me that, but we were next to each other and she was facing forward, and I wasn’t suffering anymore. Still, I wished she would hug me, so I tried to think of something that might evince her sympathies which might become a hug. It was hard to think of anything like that, though. What did I have to complain about, really? If I had failed at something that might undermine my self-image or whatever, that might work, but—boom.
I said, And plus, the thing is, I couldn’t do this action.
June said, “What action?”
I said, Nakamook discovered this action that everyone at lunch could do except for me. I said, Your whole body shakes and your face gets red and tears fill up your eyes. It looks like a seizure.
June was already doing it. She I’m Tickinged for about half a minute. Her face became darker than her freckles and her irises shook inside the whites. I didn’t like to see it, but it was good to see it, because while she was doing it, I thought: If June had a disorder that made her I’m Ticking for minutes at a time out of every hour of every day, would you, Gurion, still want to sleep beside her on the beach of the Dead Sea, even though she would shake you awake every night and probably drool on you while she did it? and I thought: Yes, it would be hard to do, and sometimes very gross, but I believe I would still want to sleep next to her.
And then I got happy because June didn’t have any disorder like that.
When she was finished with the action, she said, “That’s called the Electric Chair.”
Benji calls it I’m Ticking, I said.
“It’s been the Electric Chair for years now,” she said. “Since 2003. That’s when I invented it.”
How’d you do it? I said.
She said, “I used to want to be a modern dancer, and one time, in the third, while I was home from school with strep, I was watching this amazing video of a solo dance by a choreographer from Philadelphia named Kathryn TeBordo who all she did was sit down in a folding chair and then get up from it, but it took her twenty minutes because the dance was so slow that you could hardly see her moving, and it hurt to watch it, in my sternum. My sternum vibrated and I started thinking how completely in control of all of her muscles Kathryn TeBordo was that she could move that slow, and how I wished I could do that with my body and I would never be able to, but that maybe I could do the opposite. I thought maybe I could be totally out of control of all of my muscles at the same time. But I couldn’t figure out how that would work because if I just started flopping around, it might look like I was totally out of control of my muscles, but really I’d be controlling them—I’d be making them flop around. And so then I thought—and it was only because I had this really sweaty fever that I was able to think it, I think—I thought that in order for a person to truly be out of control of all of their muscles, they first have to be trying to control all of their muscles, and their muscles have to disobey them, because you can’t actually try to be out of control, right? That doesn’t make sense. That was the problem. You can only try to be in control, and then fail to control—that’s what out of control is, a kind of failure. So I decided I would try to make my muscles do something impossible. I decided I would try to make my muscles tear themselves and maybe even crush my own bones while they tore. And I tried, and then I tried harder, and then I was doing the Electric Chair, which at first I called the anti-Kathryn TeBordo, but I changed that fast because I loved TeBordo’s dancing and ‘anti’ made it sound like I was some kind of hater.”
I said, You’re the smartest girl I’ve ever met.
June looked at her knees and shivered.
You’re my favorite person, I said.
She brought her knees up to her chest.
I remembered how I’d failed to warm her with specialkid visions and took off my hoodie to spread it over her shoulders.
She said, “I’m not cold. Take it back.”
I took it back.
You’re my favorite person, I said again.
But she wouldn’t look at me, so I tried to do the Electric Chair, and I thought I was maybe getting it.
I touched her left elbow and got a friction shock. When I pulled my hand back, I saw the corner of her mouth lift and fall and lift and fall. She was trying not to laugh.
I said, June.
She said, “You’re just nodding your head and flopping around. It’s the opposite of what you want to do.”
I stopped nodding and flopping.
She said, “Make a fist.”
I made a fist.
She said, “Close it as hard as you can… See, your whole arm’s shaking.” She said, “Just do that with your neck now, and then the rest of you.”
I did what she said and the brain-blood started whacking itself against my eardrums. A silver dot appeared in the center of June’s forehead and bloomed into a bright white flying saucer shape. I was doing the Electric Chair.
June said, “Stop now. You look gross.” It echoed when she said it.
I stopped.
“In a second,” she said, “I have to go back into detention, and there are still things we have to talk about.”
I said, I love you.
She said, “That’s what I mean. I’ve been thinking about you all day and I believe you, and I like believing you, but it’s too soon to believe you. You don’t really know me.”
Tell me what you think I need to know, I said.
She said, “I knew you’d say that, and I think that even if I told you, you’d love me anyway, if you really do love me, but the thing is that I don’t really want to tell you, so…”
I said, So then I don’t need to know. And so you don’t have to tell me. I love you anyway.
“But—”
All I need to know is there’s things you don’t want to tell me, and that those things are things that I don’t need to know. So now I k
“That’s—well—that’s a pretty good answer, actually, but—”
I said, Good.
She said, “But still, let me finish what I was saying—I was talking to Starla Flangent during lunch, and she thinks you’re not dark enough for me and I think she’s right.”
I said, I’m half-Ethiopian.
She said, “Really? You don’t look Ethiopian.”
I said, Half.
She said, “That’s not what I mean, anyway.” She said, “You have all this joy. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
I said, I get sad all the time lately.
She said, “It’s nice to be sad. You have to have joy to be sad, and if you’re dark you don’t get to have joy, so you don’t get to be sad. You only get to be anguished if you’re dark.”
I said, I’m angry, though. I said, I get in fights all the time.
She said, “Anger’s not anguish and I’ve seen you fight. I saw you fight Kyle McElroy at the beginning of the year. I saw you dance on his back after you finished choking him—you did a kind of pirhouette. It was fun for you. And this morning, with Boystar—”
I said, I fell in love with you this morning.
She said, “That’s not dark at all.”
I said, But I’ve got all these disorders. I’ve got ADHD and Conduct D. and Intermittent Explosive D. and Antisocial P. D., and you can’t even have the last two ones unless you’re an adult, but I have them.
She said, “You don’t really have any of them, though, and you know it.”
I said, But people think I do have them, so that’s how I’m explained. I said, I’m very dark. I said, I’ve been kicked out of three schools. You should have seen how cruel I just was to Brodsky. I said, It was awful. It was a dark way to treat a person—I’m a tyrant.
She said, “If you were cruel, you wouldn’t think it was awful.”
I said, I’m not cruel—I acted cruel. I said, And that is what makes me dark.
I didn’t even know what we were talking about anymore, only that I had to prove to June that I was dark.