The Instructions by Adam Levin
I stood up to check, but then, in this whisper that seemed to project like a shout—even as it managed, because of its whisperiness, to sound like the voice of total reason, like he was explaining something neutral and scholarly—Bam, leaning further into the aisle, said to me, “I don’t like Benji Nakamook, but I do respect him.”
I should have left right then. If Bam wasn’t starting up with me, I couldn’t fight him—even if I’d wanted to, Benji had my word—and if I couldn’t fight him, I had no good moves. With every beat that passed, although I didn’t quite know it yet (I rarely ever trickled; the feeling was foreign), I was losing snat. Yet instead of leaving, I sat back down. I sat back down and tried to caulk. That like-and-respect line was just too tempting; I’d heard it in movies and never thought it meant much—all its abstraction, its gangster profundity. I thought I’d caught Slokum speaking out of his depth.
And so I played dumb, to get him to talk more.
I said, I’ve never really understood what that means—you like a person, but you don’t respect him. Sounds like nonsense.
Bam said, “It means I want to empty your best friend’s face but I wouldn’t want to do that if I didn’t know how much snat was behind it.”
I thought: So much for caulking.
And yet I caulked more.
I said, Why should I care what you think about Benji, anyway?
Bam whispered, “Should? Who said should? I’m not the one who told you you should. That said, it’s pretty normal you care what I think of him—you’re his friend. But the thing is, you want to be my friend, too—why wouldn’t you, right? We’re sitting here, talking, totally peace. The thing is, you want to be my friend too, but you don’t believe you can be a friend to both of us. Why is that, Gurion? Did I say you couldn’t? I’m not really asking that. I know I didn’t say it. So who was it said you can’t be my friend? Actually, I guess I’m not asking that either. We know who said it. What I guess I’m asking is why you would listen. That’s a question for real. You don’t have to answer out loud you don’t want to, you think it’ll somehow betray him or whatever. I understand. Believe.”
I don’t need your—
“Permission. Right. I know. You don’t need my permission to speak or withhold. I didn’t even kind of mean it that way, kid—colloquial trappings, my mistake. And I know you think you’re trickling, here, but you’re the only one who thinks that. All you’re really doing is hearing me out, and listening never compromised anyone.”
The bus stopped in front of the Frontier Motel, balding brakes squealing; Bam paused til they quit.
“You want me to put out my hand?” he said. “I’m gonna do the friendly thing and put out my hand. I’m gonna put out my hand just so you can refuse it, and when you refuse it, you’ll see what I do. You’ll see I’ll do nothing. So here goes,” he said. “Get ready for victory.”
He put out his hand. I walked past his hand. I went to the wheel-well seat for my bag. I banged fists with Vincie and crept off the bus.
Flowers kneeled on a striped blanket, arranging pebbles and sticks in the mud under an evergreen shrub along the outer wall of the Frontier’s Welcome Office. He sang his spells quietly, almost mumbling them, so no one could make out the words. A generator next to the shrub gave the songs extra cover with its fan-noise. On the shrub’s other side, where Flowers had laid the blanket, was a concrete walkway that led from the motel’s drop-off circle to the front door of the Welcome Office. A whole hedge of evergreen shrubs grew on the opposite side of the walkway, but Flowers only ever hoodooed the one shrub. He’d been doing it for a couple weeks by then, since autumn had kicked in.
It was already November, but the hoodooed shrub had berries, and bugs and insects got confused into hatching. In the mornings, when I went there to wait for the schoolbus, the walkway would be speckled with the dew-covered bodies of newborn ants and beetles who’d died trying to get across to the shrubs that weren’t hoodooed. I’d ring the bell and Flowers would come out the door with broomy paintbrushes we’d use to sweep the bodies into square, sand-colored envelopes. It always chilled me up to do it because I couldn’t help thinking how the bugs died freezing. I’d seen flies invade air-conditioned houses and get slow til they fell, but air-conditioned houses aren’t as cold as Illinois at night, in the autumn, where it gets below 32 degrees sometimes, and I’d wonder if the liquids in the bugs I’d swept started turning to ice before or after they’d died. When I’d imagine before I’d get chilled up the most.
All the winged insects, though—lived. Flowers called them sentries. The sentries nested in the hoodoo shrub, never flying farther than the drop-off circle, and they always returned to the shrub after a minute or two. Somehow they didn’t freeze to death. They never tried to get inside the Welcome Office either. Mostly the sentries were lightning bugs, but also there were earwigs and at least ten cocoons between the branches, so there would be butterflies soon, or moths. I didn’t know how long the insects would survive, and Flowers only gave me a funny look when I’d ask him, but I hoped they’d make it through winter—I wanted to see the glow of lightning bugs during a snowstorm.
Aside from that, I didn’t really know what to think of the hoodoo Flowers did on the shrub. He said hoodoo wasn’t magic but a science derived from arcane knowledge, except what was magic if not a science derived from arcane knowledge? Even that question seemed to piss him off, though, so I called hoodoo science when I didn’t call it hoodoo.
Being magic wouldn’t make it bad anyway. Not necessarily at least. Adonai disliked magic that looked like miracles since that kind of magic threatened to screw up the arrangement, but not all kinds of magic were wrong, I didn’t think, even though former Kabbalists (not the moviestar kind with the red bracelets and bottled water, but the real kind), like my dad, would have disagreed. Avraham himself not only knew magic, but taught it to the sons that he had with Keturah, and the way that moment’s described in Torah, it says that Avraham, on his deathbed, “gave all that he had to Isaac. But to the concubine-children who were Avraham’s, Avraham gave gifts.” The gifts were the magic, and gifts are good things.
I think Flowers got touchy when I called hoodoo magic because he wanted to teach me to be a hoodooman and he assumed that I thought magic was bad (even though I’d told him I didn’t), and that that’s why I didn’t want to learn to be a hoodooman. That’s not how it was, though. Good or bad, arcane science or magic, I didn’t care to practice hoodoo any more than I cared to practice Kabbalah. I didn’t care to make golems or help fireflies live through autumn and winter. Golems always backfired and fireflies were bugs. What I wanted was to learn to write better scripture and to be a better scholar, and since I could learn those things from Flowers—an experienced writer with a scholarly brain—and since those things were infinitely learnable, those were the only things I wanted him to teach me.
I walked across the drop-off circle from the bus and stopped when I saw him atop his blanket. He had his back to me, and I knew that between my stealth and the fan-noise of the generator there was no way he could hear me if I didn’t want him to. And I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to interrupt his spell-casting. After about ten seconds of watching him, though, one of the roving insects—an earwig—landed on my pointer, and even though I stayed still and kept silent Flowers revolved to face me as soon as the thing touched down.
“Why you all pissy?”
Pissy? I said.
“You face all pissy. Don’t bring the pissy here.”
Don’t bring the pissy.
“You like that one.”
I did. It was funny. I was no longer pissy. Don’t bring the pissy’d knocked the pissy right out of me. Fun words to say. I said them once more, and wanted to again, but then I got afraid that I’d wear them out, so I tentatively offered up another one to Flowers: Quit hauling that pissy?
“Not so much,” Flowers said.
Keep the pissy in the commode?
“I don’t even—”
“That’s actually alright, but don’t put I said that in you scripture. People take the joke wrong cause you’re lousy at funny, and by the time you get done with it, I’m the angry black man, no sense of irony, hates all the white people and Morgan Freeman til one day a whiteboy melts his hard heart. I do not hate white people, or Morgan Freeman, nor are you white. But you’re gonna put it in, I can tell the way you’re grinning. So fine. You put any of this in, though, you put all of it in. Right?”
Right, I said.
“And I’m no kind of fucken Queequeg, either. I’m a lawyer wrote three novels, old friend of your dad’s—a white man, Judah, I hasten to add.”
I said alright, I said.
“This doubly important because soon I’m gonna talk about a rap song.”
Really? I said. You listen to rap now?
“You listen to rap, and you put this one on that mix you made me.”
The mix was actually a mix that Vincie’d made me. I liked it so I burned it for Flowers.
‘Zealots’? I said.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” said Flowers. He was folding up his blanket. The earwig flexed its pincers and flew back to the hoodoo shrub. “So what’s your favorite rhyme? Take a minute to decide.” He opened the door and his deformed cat, Edison, bounded out to the lawn in the center of the drop-off circle. Edison’s front legs were half the length of his back ones and he looked jacked-up like a hotrod. Whenever he leapt too high or ran too fast, he’d fall on his throat.
I followed Flowers inside, saying, My favorite’s when Pras goes, ‘And for you bitin’ zealots, your rap styles are relics. No matter who you damage, you’re still a false prophet.’
“Yeah,” said Flowers. “See, that’s the wrong one.”
It’s my favorite, though, I said.
“Well it shouldn’t—something ain’t right. Click click click.” Flowers set the blanket under the altar in the corner. “I left 37 outside,” he said.
37 was Flowers’s cane. When I went out to get it, I saw this squirrel hiding behind an oak in the drop-off circle. The squirrel was hiding from Edison, who was chewing the end of a fallen branch. The cane was in the grass by the hoodoo shrub. It came up to my elbows and weighed eleven pounds. Its shaft was cut from a petrified redwood, and the silvery knob screwed into the top of it was a chromed ball of lead, about twenty times the size of the one at the end of the sap of Maholtz. The cane was functional, but not because Flowers had a limp—he didn’t. The Frontier Motel was thirty miles from Chicago, which meant it wasn’t close to anything good, unless your family was good and they lived in Deerbrook Park or Glenfield, and even then, since Deerbrook Park and Glenfield families mostly lived in houses, there was usually enough room for relatives to stay over. Especially with all the finished basements. Flowers lamented the basements and so had his brother Aaron, who’d had a fatal heart-attack a few years earlier, and left Flowers the Frontier. Aaron had had the cane made and he’d itemized it in the will as item 37, right below the motel, which was item 36, which is why Flowers sometimes called the Frontier 36 and the cane 37. He loved his brother and it reminded him. The cane was functional because guests at the Frontier often weren’t. A week before, I’d seen Flowers kick one out. There was a poisony smell coming from Room 12, which was right next to the Welcome Office, and Flowers told me to stay in the office while he took care of it, but I came out front and stood in Room 12’s doorway to watch, which was easy, because the Room 12 bathroom was opposite the doorway, and all the action was happening in the bathroom. This guy was making drugs in Room 12’s tub, and when Flowers came in, the guy spun around with eyes like tomatoes and he cursed Flowers and Flowers cursed back and told him he was ruining the bathtub and told him he had to leave. Then the guy stopped cursing and said to give him a couple hours and Flowers told him to leave again, and the guy went for this arm-length lucite rod that he’d been using to stir the mixture in the bathtub, and as soon as he got ahold of it, Flowers plugged the ball-end of his cane in between the guy’s shoulder and chest, right in the rotator cuff, which made the guy’s hand drop the rod and stumble backwards. Flowers followed through, using 37 to pin the guy against the wall, and told him, again, to leave. Then the guy swung at Flowers’s head with the hand of his free arm, and Flowers dodged it Tyson-style—not ducking or blocking, just tilting his head out of the path of the punch, the skin of the guy’s knuckles grazing the point of the ivory horn Flowers wore in his earlobe—and then Flowers lifted the cane and brought it down on top of the guy’s shoulder, which became like gravel. I heard the shattering. The guy dropped to the tiles, screamed, and passed out. A lightning bug landed on my neck and Flowers spun around and told me to call the cops while he kept an eye on the guy. I didn’t want to call the cops, because it was a kind of ratting, but then I didn’t want the guy to come back at night and hurt Flowers in his sleep, so I called them. That was the first time I’d ever seen grown men fight who weren’t on a screen. I didn’t like it so much. It seemed like it shouldn’t have been happening. As stealth as Flowers was with the cane and his Tyson-style, the thing on the whole was very clumsy and ugly, especially the part when they were cursing each other and then when the guy swung his lame punch and the way he began to shudder, broken-shouldered and unconscious, while Flowers stood watch on him. I kept thinking that they were too big to be fighting each other—not too old, really, but too big. While they were fighting each other, they didn’t look like people, or even animals. They looked like giant marionettes constructed from meat who the puppeteer was frustrated with. My mom cooked steak for dinner that night and I made myself eat it because I always ate my steak and I knew that if I didn’t eat it my parents would be worried that I was psychologically harmed from seeing the fight, and then they would decide I shouldn’t go to the Frontier anymore after school which they were already considering since Flowers told my dad about the fight over the phone that evening. If I couldn’t go to the Frontier, then there’d have to be other arrangements made for where I’d get picked up and dropped off by the schoolbus, and that would be an extra hassle on top of all the hassle I’d already caused by getting kicked out of everywhere, and plus I really liked Flowers. So I ate all my steak and then I went to the bathroom and threw up quietly.
The squirrel behind the oak saw his moment and shot across the drop-off circle, startling Edison, who ran up the sidewalk til he fell on his throat, then made a hurt-cat noise and followed me back inside.
Flowers waited on the couch, seeking through “Zealots” with a remote. A chapter (#43, p. 199–205) of what I thought would be this scripture, The Instructions (though back then I was calling it The Autobiography of Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee or Another Guide for the Perplexed or Israelite Scholarship among Gentile Friends in a School Run by Romans—I kept changing my mind), was leaned on a music-stand next to the ottoman. The margins on the front page were totally empty, and there weren’t any red marks anywhere. I wondered if Flowers thought the page was perfect, but I knew it was more likely that he just hadn’t read it yet.
I handed him his cane and sat down beside him, and Edison jumped up into his lap. “You ain’t paid enough attention to the girl,” he said. He paused the disc. He said, “Pay attention.” Then he hit play and Lauryn Hill of the Fugees rhymed, “Even after all my logic and my theory, I add a motherfucka so you ign’ant niggas hear me.”
Flowers stopped the song and thumb-flicked his swearfinger at the center of my chapter with so much force the music stand tilted and almost fell. Edison jumped over my legs and hid his face like an ostrich in the gap between two cushions. Flowers said, “Now listen to this.” Leaning forward on his cane, he read a sentence with a royal accent:
“‘When one wishes to render oneself undetectable in the doorway of a scholastic facility wherein authority figures bent to disciplinary action who long to beset one lurk vigilantly in the many vestibules and passageways, one must not only find shadows within which to bestill all of
Who’s that? I said.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi, man. Why you writing Obi-Wan style? You didn’t used to write Obi-Wan style at all. Every chapter you give me’s more kenobi than the last, though. Been gradual. This one here—it’s just too much. And I’m trying to understand. You writing for the learned order of the Jedi or what?”
I said, I’m writing for rabbis.
Flowers said, “Why rabbis?”
I said, Because it’s scripture.
“Damn,” Flowers said, “you mean like capital-S scripture, don’t you? All this time I thought you speaking figuratively. That’s lofty,” he said. “Lofty and loftier. Not that lofty’s a bad thing. I admire the lofty impulse. What don’t make sense to me, though, is how come if it’s supposed to be scripture for rabbis, you ain’t writin in Hebrew?”
I said, Cause then you couldn’t read it, or Nakamook, or June.
“I don’t know who June is,” he said, “but I know you boy Nakamook ain’t but a fraction more a rabbi than Edison over there, who’s a fraidy fraidy fraidy, ain’t you kitty cat?”
Edison was walking in place, or maybe climbing in place. He was trying to get his whole body into the cushion-gap, but there was no room. He couldn’t push through.
I said, I’m in love with June.
He said, “I thought you loved that Esther what’s-her-name—you other teacher’s little girl.”
I said, I was lying to myself. I didn’t know til today. I was eating cheesepuffs.
“You’re a funny little boy,” Flowers said. “At least you’re trying to be honest. You daddy the same way. Maybe you been lying to yourself about who you want for an audience, though, too. Anyone else you want beside the forementioned?”