The Instructions by Adam Levin
And inflicting blindness on the vandal would not be an extreme reaction like my father told me it would during Shmidt vs Skokie, when a vandal wrote “jewhater” on our garage door and the squadcar got called against my protests, for how much simpler would it be to take the King-Middle Brick of My False Accusation from my Relics Lockbox and just drop it on the head of the vandal? My bedroom window overlooked our front stoop, and it was surely easier to drop a brick accurately on a head than to get a pair of pennies into a pair of eyes from the same distance as you’d drop the brick. And a dropped brick would kill the vandal, or at least leave him retarded, and that was far harsher a punishment than blindness, and to exercise a gentler option when a harsher one was more readily available was to exercise restraint, and that was the opposite of being extreme.
Before going inside, I pushed the WELCOME mat on top of the graffito, then went back down the steps and placed five pairs of pebbles at twelve-inch intervals along the walk-up.
When I got to my room, I took a pennygun and some pennies from my Armaments Lockbox and set my deskchair at the open window. Kneeling on the chair, I nailed the first seven pebbles in consecutive projections, missed the eighth, hit the last two, and then tried for the one I missed and missed it again. It was weird to miss the same pebble twice. I got it the third time. The whole thing took fifty-three seconds.
After retrieving the pennies and the eighth pebble from the walk-up, I returned to my room and turned my computer on. While the OS loaded, I pulled all my lockboxes from under my bed. I dropped the eighth pebble into the Relics Lockbox. Into the Documents Lockbox, I filed the paper-bag plate with my love declaration in the Aptakisic manila, and then I unfolded and filed the note I’d tossed with Eliyahu of Brooklyn right next to the manila, but when I got my School Record out of my bag, I could see that there wasn’t enough room for even one of the two folders.
I had known that this problem would eventually come up—my lockboxes were only half the size of banker’s boxes and I kept on making and finding documents—and I’d decided weeks before that when the time came I’d consolidate my Armaments Lockbox with my Relics Lockbox and put some of the documents from the Documents Lockbox into the former Armaments Lockbox, except I’d thought I had at least another few months before I’d have to come up with an organizing principle that determined which documents went into which box, and now I had to come up with one immediately.
I sat there and tried and I couldn’t come up with one. I kept getting distracted, thinking about the vandal, and Emmanuel on the el talking strife in Israel and rumors about me, and poor Ben-Wa Wolf, and Israelite Shovers, how to start my new scripture, and Slokum on the bus, and how I had trickled and how I had caulked. Plus I was starving. It was like I never even ate that slice of pizza. The sound of my thoughts was whiny, too, like “Plus I was meowmeow. It was like I meowmoew even meow that slice of meowmeow.”
I punched my desk on the fake copper mailslot—my desktop used to be our front door—and it dented in the middle, but I didn’t feel better, I felt even worse, that desk was important, a gift from my father, I felt like a jerk, I meow like a meow, and then the chime chimed, the hopeful new-mail chime, I opened my inbox, found stuff off listservs, got disappointed, but what was I expecting? something from June? vandal fucken vandal, vandal at the threshold, consolidate the lockbox you’ll get the vandal later, it was time to stop whining, to get something done, something simple that functioned, something that worked. I wrote Rabbi Salt:
Sent: November 14, 2006, 6:49 PM Central-Standard Time
Subject: Updated List Please?
From: [email protected] (me)
To: [email protected] (Avel Salt, Solomon Schechter School)
Rabbi Salt,
I was hoping you could send me an updated list of email addresses of Schechter students, both former and current—mine’s from last year.
Your Student,
Gurion ben-Judah
I thought I heard the back door open, but decided to ignore it. Something about typing the words “Your student, Gurion ben-Judah,” cleared my head a little, so I typed the words another ten times. Then I deleted all of them but one and sent the email. I still didn’t have an organizing principle for my documents, but I saw I might as well consolidate the relics and armaments. The consolidation was a cinch. (Except for the bells of a couple pennyguns, the Armaments Lockbox didn’t contain anything that could get crushed too easily—there were washers, some coins, a bunch of wingnuts, and a very primitive, however effective mace that I’d made by wrapping a fist-sized ball of penny-laden duct tape around a doubled-over bootlace—and apart from the eighth pebble, the Relics Lockbox only held my passport, my broken water-resistant watch, an envelope with a cut-off dreadlock that had formed in the middle of my head after I’d refused to let my mom brush my hair for a week one time when I was four, the King-Middle Brick of My False Accusation, and some teeth I’d lost.) All I had to do was remove the pennyguns, dump the Armaments Lockbox into the Relics Lockbox, then put the pennyguns on top, lock the box down and call it my Relics & Armaments Lockbox.
Performing the consolidation completely un-D’d my A, and I came up with an organizing principle that was so easy and simple it embarrassed me to think how the problem had gotten me explosive enough to dent my mailslot:
The original Documents Lockbox would become my Documents By Or About Gurion Lockbox, and it would contain all my emails and letters, my school record (minus, for the moment, Call-Me-Sandy’s Assessment and Rabbi Salt’s letter to Brodsky, which I set aside to read in ISS the next day), the original copy of Ulpan, the scripture that Flowers had been redpenning, the scripture that I told Flowers I’d start that evening (once I started it), and The Story of Stories.
The former Armaments Lockbox became my Other Documents Lockbox, and that is where I put the hand-to-hand combat manual my Grandfather Malchizedek wrote for the IDF; an upublished manuscript my father wrote at yeshiva called Justice in Samuel I; my mom’s doctoral dissertation, The Creation and Utilization of “Accidental” Contingencies in Diadic Behavioral Modication Therapy; and her galley-proofs of New Directions in Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, which was about to be published by University of Chicago Press.
I’d just gotten all the documents into their boxes when I heard my mom yelling up the stairway.
“Gurion, bavakasha boy.” (Please come here!)
A “please” from my mother, especially a Hebrew “please,” is its own exclamation point. Probably she’d been calling me for a while and I hadn’t heard her.
Five minutes! I shouted.
I wanted to fix my desk’s mailslot before going downstairs. My dad built the desk when I was five, after my parents got an addition on the house. He told me he’d had a frontdoor desk at yeshiva just like it, and I thought it was the nicest present, and that it was important that he wanted me to have the same kind of desk that he used to have, and now I’d damaged it with my fist like a real schmuck. I could pound the dent out later, but if I didn’t start the fix—if I didn’t at least find my screwdriver and take the lid off its brackets—I’d have too much sadness to eat dinner across the table from him.
“Now!” my mom shouted.
Is Aba home? I shouted.
“He’s coming now from the garage!” she shouted.
Three minutes!
“Now!”
There was no way that dinner would be on the table in less than ten minutes, though, and I found my screwdriver on the windowsill.
Twenty-five minutes! I shouted.
“Gurion: boy!” Boy without a “please” is for puppies and three-year-olds who are readying to stumble into highway traffic.
Seventeen hours and twenty-three minutes! I shouted.
I heard her walk back to the kitchen.
My screwdriver was too thick for the bracket-screws’ X’s. I threw it like a dagger and it stuck in the wall, then fell a second later. I was about to punch the mailslot again when I saw my envelope-slash
“I’m home!” my father shouted.
“Tell your son to get down here,” my mother said.
“Soup’s on, boychic!”
I didn’t want him to come get me in my room and see me removing the mailslot lid; he’d ask me why was I monkeying, and I’d have tell him, and then he’d be disappointed. He wouldn’t be disappointed because I showed disrespect to a thing that he built for me, but because I’d exploded, and that was not the right reason to be disappointed, which would disappoint me, so after finishing the screw I was working on, I laid the envelope-slasher on the mailslot for later and came down the stairs shouting, Forty days and forty nights! at the two of them.
My father let go of my mother’s hand and headed to his room to change from his suit into jeans and a t-shirt. When he passed me, he poked me and pinched at my shoulder and then, like a rowing viking, he sang,
Detention, detention,
And in-school suspension!
What shall
Become of
My son?
=
I killed in court!
Oh, how I killed!
My Nazi
Shall be
Free!
I walked to the kitchen with my mom, who kissed me. “So are you hungry for a nice chicken from Selig’s?” she said.
I snatched a glass from the clean-rack and filled it with tapwater. I glugged it down.
No, I told her.
“It is what we are having,” she said. “So what? You were in trouble today?”
Not trouble, I said.
“What do you think? That you can beat me up suddenly? I can beat up all of you. I have carried up hills in one arm a carbine that weighs two Gurions. Do not lie to me.”
A carbine, I said, is smaller than a rifle.
She said, “Why was the crazyman singing on the stairs?”
I broke rules and got an ISS, I said. I said, That’s not trouble, that’s punishment. And no carbine weighs two Gurions.
“You will make fun of my language?” she said. “I am fluent in four and hold a Ph.D. and people pay me to speak, it is how I heal them. You, in junior high school, know three languages, one of which is dead, you spend the money that people pay me to speak to them, and you will make fun of me? It is not nice. I do not find it to be very charming.”
Aramaic isn’t dead, I said. Not exactly.
“And if I say a carbine when I cannot possibly mean a carbine, then you should know that I meant a cannon, smartperson. It was a cannon for making helicopters drop. Do you think no cannon could weigh two Gurions?”
You blew up helicopters with a cannon? I said.
She wasn’t paying attention anymore. She was pouring matzoball soup from a styrofoam cylinder into three bowls. She said, “I must carve the chicken. Kiss my cheek and bring the long knife.”
She’d never told me she used to blow up helicopters.
If chicken is a certain level of wet, it squeaks between my teeth and my tongue gets heavy. I swallow that kind of chicken as fast as I can, trying not to picture the chewed-looking meat that dangles near the throats of roosters like earlobe. Sometimes I swallow too fast, but not usually, and when I coughed at the beginning of dinner, it was not because chicken choked me. Apple juice had entered the wrong pipe.
“You are inhaling your chicken,” my mom said.
It was juice in the airpipe, I told her.
“Yet you are inhaling your chicken,” my mom said.
It’s wet.
“Don’t talk that way at dinner,” said my father.
She asked, I said. And plus if I was actually inhaling the chicken—
“She didn’t ask,” my mother said. “She observed. And ‘inhaling’ was meant figuratively and you know this, you are being a wiseass today.”
I said, Your observation was wiseass—it was a question, disguised. It was, ‘Why are you inhaling your chicken?’ That’s a question.
She said, “Not a question, Gurion, a request: Stop inhaling chicken.”
That’s a command, I said.
“When the request was not met, it became a command, but never was it a question,” she said. “There is never good reason to inhale chicken, and so there is no purpose in asking you why you have inhaled chicken.”
Whenever my mom was upset with me at dinner, we’d have a conversation about our conversation. I thought it was because she’d spend all day practicing FAP, which is a kind of psychotherapy where talking is called verbal behavior. If you were my mom’s client and you told her, “I want to kill myself,” she would not tell you, “You should not kill yourself,” or “If you kill yourself, you will never be able to decide to kill yourself again,” and she’d never ask, “When do you plan to kill yourself?” or “How do you plan to kill yourself?” or even “Why do you want to kill yourself?” This is what she’d ask: “Why are you telling me that you want to kill yourself? What do you get out of it? What is it that you are trying to elicit from me by telling me you want to kill yourself?” Since I’d been old enough to remember conversations at dinner, no fewer than thirty people had told my mom they wanted to kill themselves, and this is how many of those people killed themselves: zero.
I said to her, Eyelids.
It was a little bit cheap of me, but I didn’t feel like having a conversation about a conversation.
My dad said, “That is very impolite.” He cracked a chickenwing in half.
I rubbed my eyes with my thumbknuckles and my eyes made squishing sounds.
My mother told me, “It does not affect me, Gurion. And it would be cruel of you if it did.” She said that flatly, but her upperlip kept trying to smile itself because she liked it when I teased her. She didn’t want to have a conversation about a conversation, either. “Did you hear what I said to you?” she said.
I did simultaneous eyelid flips and she spit chicken into her napkin and pushed her plate away, laughing.
“You are so mean,” she said. “How can you be so mean? Your father, he is not mean.”
My father, his mouth full of chicken, jabbed air with his pointer in the direction of my mother.
“I am mean?” she said. “I am not mean!” she said. “Gurion, do you think I am mean? Is that why you told your principal to call your father instead of me?”
Yes, I said.
“Because you thought I would be mean to you? I am not mean to you. I am your mother and I love you.”
My father touched a sideburn and lifted one eyebrow = “How ironic that my wife is upset with my son over this tiny aspect of a larger phenomenon about which I am upset with her,” and said, “Your son’s winding you up for kicks, so relax a little. This Brodsky called of his own volition. When he called I told him that he was to call you, that you were the one who handled such calls, and Brodsky said he knew of the arrangement, but that he was hoping for a different approach, which, as you would likely expect, led me to wonder aloud: ‘Different from what?’ He then explained that by different, he meant different from the approach my wife takes when he calls to tell her that our son has been in a fight. And then I wondered: What fights has my son been in? Of course, that latter wondering was performed silently.”
“If you are angry at me,” my mother said to my father, “please do not be coy about it.”
He slid his knife beneath the skin of a breast and sawed and pried til the skin came off in one piece, and then he set it on my plate. I liked the skin when it crackled. This skin flapped. I poked it. My dad said, “That was not coyness, Tamar. That was a question: Why is it I’m not told my own son is getting into fights at his new school?”
My mom pulled her plate back onto the placemat to fork meat, but dropped the fork and said “Uch,” and touched her eyes to make sure they were still there, and put her hands in her lap to stop checking on her eyes. Then she said, “If there was something for you to be concerned about, I would have told you. The fighting is normal.”