The Instructions by Adam Levin
If the enemy didn’t know my mom, he couldn’t possibly suspect the vulnerability was a fakeout; encountering the long, seemingly unprotected neck, he was as close to dead as an insect giving witness to the bright white promise of warmth in a bug-zapper’s coil. He would attack my mom’s neck, and because she was expecting exactly that, she could and would lay into him with a kind of suddenness that, even if he remained conscious afterward, would leave him too stunned to get up. And then she would kill him. Unless he was me. I’d only ever gone at her neck once—she put me on my back so fast I thought the ceiling was the floor. And that was when I was six, when she’d still handicap for my height by sparring on her knees. She put me on my back that fast, and she couldn’t even use her legs.
She landed nine blows—one to each of five bags, and two to the remaining two—before one of the bags caught her, in mid-roundhouse, on the outer right thigh. If that bag were an actual enemy, the hit to the thigh might have sealed her doom, but at the same time, if that bag were an actual enemy, he would not have kept swinging back and forth while my mother slayed his buddies. He would have been lying dead at her feet from the toe to the windpipe she’d delivered thirty seconds earlier.
“I will make you breakfast,” she said, bobbing and weaving as the bags swung dumbly toward exhaustion—it would be minutes before they were still.
I’m late, I said.
She ducked and bobbed.
Mom! I said. I grabbed a bag and pulled it back.
“‘Ma-ahm,’” she said. She never liked the word mom. She thought it sounded like the name of a puppet. Mom the puppet. She slipped through the gap I’d made and tugged at my hair. “I did not know you were in a rush to sit in ISS,” she said.
I said, If I show up too late, I’ll have to serve it tomorrow. Don’t you have clients to see?
“It is Wednesday. I had class this morning, so I cancelled class. I had one client, and I rescheduled with him. I did this so you would not have to sit in ISS all day—I know you do not like ISS. And I will not allow your principal to put you in ISS tomorrow. You will wash up and I will make you breakfast and then I will drive you to school for the second half of the day. Why did you fall asleep on a chair by the window holding a projectile weapon?”
I said, How will you stop Brodsky from giving me another ISS?
She said, “Uch” = Tch = “That is such a stupid question that I am going to walk up the stairs without saying anything else and cook an omelette.”
She walked upstairs and cooked an omelette.
On the way to my room, I opened the front door and checked the stoop. The stoop was clear, so I went outside and did a perimeter-check. Nothing. I hadn’t missed my chance to blind him, whoever he was, and the omelette was perfect, not a foldover, and not the kind they make at diners where the ingredients go on top either, but a fully integrated cheddar and tomato one like chefs cook at brunches in hotel lobbies. It was a delicious omelette, and eleven o’clock, and a forty-minute drive—just a half day’s wait til detention, June.
In the car, we listened to National Public Radio. There was a long, sad story about a family whose house got bulldozed by the IDF in Gaza in 2003, and then a shorter one on Drucker vs Wilmette. In the second story, my father’s name got mentioned more than anyone’s, even Drucker’s. NPR loved my father. At least three times a year, he’d participate in on-air panels as their Constitutional law expert.
My mother did not love NPR. She said, “These mamzers. One story about the violent Jews of Israel, and then another about the ethical Jewish defender of Constitutional rights.” She drew fire into the end of her cigarette. “This seems like balanced press for the Jews, yes, Gurion? The balance is an illusion. In the first story, it is the bad Jew, they are telling us, who harms those who would destroy him. And in the second story, it is the good Jew who protects those who would destroy him. It is the same argument both times: the Jews should let themselves be destroyed. I could kill them for how they use your father.”
No one uses Aba, I said.
“You are right,” she said. “I spoke with too much force.”
She kissed her hand three times—loudly, rapidly—and touched the crown of my head with it, and then we were quiet.
I kept trying to fix my eyes on a single tree along the highway so it wouldn’t blur when we passed it, but all of them blurred.
My mom had lit a cigarette just before we pulled into the Aptakisic parking lot and was still smoking it on the way to the front entrance when she tried handing me a paperback. I was spaced out, looking at the school’s outer wall. A WE DAMAGE WE bomb spanned six bricks above the bushes. I still didn’t know what exactly it meant, but it had to mean something, and I liked that. I could see my mom’s hand insisting with the book in my left periphery, but my eyes were doing a nice soft-focus on the bomb and I didn’t want to break the trance.
My mom wagged the book and the pages flapped, sharpening everything. “To read in ISS,” she told me.
Thank you, I said.
I took it from her hand. It was Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, one of his only three books that I hadn’t read yet, unless you counted the autobiographies, which I didn’t; I was determined never to read those. I didn’t want to know what was true and what wasn’t when it came to Roth, or any other writer of fiction I liked for that matter, but him especially. As long as the information I’d learned about him and what he believed did not come directly from him, I could ignore or embrace it at will, and it couldn’t then interfere with the fictions he made—at least not that much—nor with what others made of those fictions, which was also important. Sometimes at least.
I said to my mom, I thought you said Roth was an antisemite.
“I have never said that,” she said.
We stopped before the doors of the front entrance so she could finish her cigarette.
I remember, though, I said. I said, You argued with Aba about it once. You said, ‘Roth is bad for the Jews.’
“He is,” she said, “bad for the Jews. But that does not make him an antisemite. He loves the Jews.”
But you argued—
“Ask Aba what I argued. You misunderstood. That can happen when you hear conversations you were not meant to hear. In the meantime, I just gave you a book by Philip Roth that I liked when I was younger, a book I rushed to the bookstore to buy for you this morning while you were asleep so that you would have something to read in ISS, so—”
So thank you, I said.
“You are welcome,” she said.
That is when Jerry the Deaf Sentinel came outside. He said, “Ma’am, I have to let you know that there is no smoking permitted on school grounds.”
“Good morning,” my mother said, flashing teeth. She flicked ashes and took a drag.
Jerry waited til she took another drag to say, “I’m going to have to ask you to extinguish your cigarette.”
“Very shortly,” she said. “First I must finish it.”
“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the school grounds, Ma’am.”
“And now you have done so,” said my mother.
“Ma’am—”
“Sir,” my mother said, “I do not know who you are, or what authority that beaten felt crest on your pocket is meant to represent, but I am confident—I am certain—that I am not within the, the, the—what is the word, Gurion?”
Reach, I said.
“Not reach,” she said. “There are more syllables.”
Jurisdiction is too fancy, I said. I said, You want to say jurisdiction but reach has more force. Reach sounds like punch.
“Pow!” she shout-whispered, mock-swinging a fist at my chin.
“Ma’am—” said Jerry.
“I am certain, sir,” said my mother, “that I am not within the reach of whatever authority it is that you represent. Stop bothering us.”
And Jerry said, “I really don’t know how to respond to that, ma’am.” His whole face was twitching, but especially this one jumpy muscle
“Maybe you should let it go,” my mom said. She said it in her concerned voice, the same voice in which she must have said the same thing a thousand times before to clients.
“I’d like to let it go,” Jerry said, “but I’ve gotta do something.” He kicked his left heel with the toe of his right boot, concentrated on the pavement.
My mom exhaled some smoke. “How would you usually respond?” she said.
“There’s no precedent,” Jerry said. He raised his head, and I saw his eyes twinkled a little. The muscle under his left eye had gone still, as if the twinkling were an outcome the earlier jumping had manufactured. It was not entirely surprising to me, the way Jerry was acting. My mom is seriously pretty, and not the way everyone else thinks his mom is pretty because she is his mom and he gets confused because she is nice to him, but truly pretty, and in an uncommon way, at least in America; to be addressed by her at all, let alone in the concerned voice, makes people weak, even me sometimes, and I see her every day. “I’m Jerry,” Jerry said.
“No precedent at all?” my mother soothed, ignoring the introduction. “Would you have me believe,” she said, “that your superiors have failed to establish a protocol for dealing with those who illicitly smoke cigarettes on school grounds?” The cherry was almost down to the letters. Probably three more drags.
“There’s a protocol,” Jerry said, grinding his kicking-toe into the pavement. Then he spoke the largest string of words I’d ever heard from him: “I’ve followed the protocol, but when it comes to what to do about someone who, after you’ve followed the protocol, continues to smoke, there’s just nothing in the manual. If you were a student, I suppose I’d go inside and write you up.”
“That is what you should do, then,” said my mom.
“But that’s just silly,” said Jerry.
“Maybe it is you who are silly, Jerry,” said my mom.
“Maybe!” Jerry said, eyes gone wide and hopeful at the sound of his name on her lips. He choked on something that would have bloomed into laughter if he wasn’t a robot.
“Look at this contraband,” said my mom. Jerry leaned forward. “The fire,” she said to him, “is burning the letters. There is more tar under the letters than I am willing to inhale.” She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it.
Then she stepped past Jerry and held the door open for me. Carved into the door’s pneumatic pushplate was another WE DAMAGE WE. I ran a finger over it, barely touching it, and the dry topskin of my fingertip perforated whitely from the roughness of the engraving. I wondered what Ronrico had used to make the words so mean—a nail? a key? If you held a guy by the hair on the crown of his skull, I was thinking, and pressed his forehead hard enough against the bar, the words would make the forehead bleed, and the guy would be marked by them. In a mirror, his scab would read WE DAMAGE WE.
“Let’s go,” my mom told me.
Right when we stepped into the Office—I had just got my hand up to wave hello to Miss Pinge—my mom asked, “Where is Leonard Brodsky?”
Brodsky’s door was open, and he was pacing. Hearing his name, he revolved to face us and I pointed at him. My mom entered before Brodsky had a chance to invite her. I wished she had waited, and thought to wait myself—after my Tuesday snakiness, I wanted to at least be polite to him—but followed anyway because she was my mom and he was only my principal.
“Leonard,” my mother said, “I am Tamar Maccabee and I would like you to excuse Gurion’s tardiness. It is my fault that he is late.”
“Fair enough,” Brodsky said, no hesitation or anything. He said, “Go on ahead to the Cage, Gurion.”
I have ISS, I told him.
“You can serve your ISS tomorrow,” Brodsky said.
My mom said, “I told him he would not have to serve ISS tomorrow, Leonard.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“Leonard, he spent all of yesterday and this morning mentally pre-paring himself to be in ISS today. We must take into account his mental preparation.”
The wingnut I’d given Brodsky glinted up from the palm of his half-open fist when he shrugged = “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
My mom could not have known what she was talking about, herself. As a rule, she avoided using the word mental—she did not believe the word described anything real. In the introduction to her doctoral dissertation, she wrote, “Mind is to the study of human psychology what the ether once was to that of pre-Einsteinian physics—a convenient and groundless homuncular hypothesis that obscures exactly that which its proponents insist it describes; an illusion to be dispelled.” At best, she had mental preparationed at Brodsky the way I’d sometimes Jew at Israelites who didn’t know they were Israelites. At worst, she was being a sophist. She was about to respond to Brodsky’s shrug when the beginning-of-lunch tone came through the intercom.
As soon as it ended, she said, “The mental preparation is arguably the largest part of the ISS punishment.” Sophist. “Beyond that, Leonard,” she continued, “I told him he would not have to serve ISS tomorrow. Will you make a liar of me before my son?”
Brodsky tried to gesture with his shoulders in a way that would have = flabbergasted, but midway through the gesture, the wingnut popped from his hand and bounced off the back of my mother’s. Brodsky bent to retrieve the wingnut, which interrupted the gesture and made it so the gesture, not only despite but also because of its failure to signify flabbergasted, actually heightened Brodsky’s signification of flabbergasted = Brodsky was so flabbergasted, he couldn’t even express flabbergasted. It was perfect, and I got a rush because I knew it was perfect, perfect in the exact way that I knew the entire universe would be perfect if I, or someone else, became the messiah. I knew of many outcomes in the universe that were affected either despite or because of a given reason—like for instance hatred of the Israelites and the contributions of Israelites: You can say that we are hated despite the good things that we have done for the world = the haters don’t care about the good things we’ve done; or you can say that we are hated because of the good things we’ve done for the world = the haters are sick of us being the ones who do so many of the good things; but for any given hater, it has to be one or the other in order to make sense; either the hater says, “There are no good Israelites, and the ones who seem good are but tricksters,” or he says, “The good ones are the exceptions that prove the rule that Israelites are bad”—but Brodsky’s expression of flabbergasted was one of the very first outcomes I knew of that came about both because of and despite the same reason. What spooked me out was that the last time I considered that kind of perfect relationship between an outcome and a reason—early on Tuesday, on page 41, when I thought about how it was good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether or not you do justice—I was also in Brodsky’s office. Brodsky hadn’t intended for me to consider what I considered either of those times, but I felt gratitude toward him anyway, for cueing me in to something perfect, only I could not come up with a way to thank him without sounding like I was making fun of him for accidentally hitting my mom’s hand with a wingnut, so I just smiled at him. He didn’t look at me, though. He didn’t see it.
Standing again, wingnut retrieved, Brodsky said to my mother, “I’d like to speak to you alone.”
“I would prefer if we could settle about Gurion’s ISS first,” she said.
“He can serve the rest of today and go back to the Cage tomorrow,” Brodsky said. “Go ahead,” he said to me.
He shut the door as I cleared the threshold.
Name: Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
Grade: 5 6 7 8
Homeroom: The Cage
Date: 9/26/2006
Complaint Against Student (from Complaint Against Student Sheet)
Impersonating the following: Mr. Gerald’s walk, my step 1 warning for the impersonation, Mr. Gerald’s laughter, my step 3 warning for the impersonation. 5th period. 9/21/06. Mr. Bo
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
Underdog
Introduction
The underdog is a story. This is the story: Someone is trying to overcome unlikelihood and therefore that someone is the hero.
Unlikelihood describes size or numbers relative to power.
Body
The underdog in one-on-one combat
When two individuals engage in combat with one another, the underdog is rendered by the storyteller as either a) large but weak, or b) small yet powerful. The larger the underdog, the lesser his strength; the smaller the underdog, the greater his strength:
SUPERPOWERFUL
vs./=
POWERFUL
vs./=
WEAK
The underdog army at war
When armies war, the underdog army is rendered by the storyteller as either a) consisting of few soldiers, all or most of whom are powerful, or b) many soldiers, all or most of whom are weak. The greater the underdog army’s numbers, the weaker its soldiers; the lesser the underdog army’s numbers, the stronger its soldiers:
Some examples of the large one or the many who fight the small one or the few
Unionized Workers vs. Factory Owners. Any sweetheart-fatboy vs. any prettyboy-bully. Fijian Natives vs. Indian Colonists. Russian Peasantry vs. Tzarists. Russian Army vs. Nazi Army. Big Chief vs. Nurse Ratchett. The U.S. vs. the American Indians. Europeans vs. Israelites.