The Instructions by Adam Levin
“So Aleph apologizes. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ he says. And when that apology fails to soften Nakamook, Aleph tries a second one: ‘I didn’t mean to do what I was doing.’ Nothing. He tries a third: ‘I thought I was doing something else.’
“‘Put your dollar away,’ Nakamook tells him, ‘and pray you never again mistake dignity for a toll, nor safety for peace, let alone justice.’ High-minded stuff, right? Or crazy stuff. Carried-away stuff, maybe. Who can really tell? Not Aleph—not him. Aleph, he’s frozen. What’s Nakamook saying? He forgive him or what? It isn’t so clear. Benji’s made it sound like he’s forgiven Aleph, but his legs, Gurion, are still stretched across the aisle, and Aleph doesn’t understand, and neither do I. The silence: it grows. It grows and grows more, Aleph just standing there, and Nakamook’s legs.
“Finally, Nakamook, he says to Aleph: ‘I told you to put your dollar in your pocket. Put your filthy effing dollar in your filthy effing pocket with your filthy trembling effing hand.’ Aleph swallows hard. Does it. Puts the dollar in his pocket. Benji’s legs haven’t moved. They’re still across the aisle. He says, ‘Now get past me. Do so with the understanding that I will be unable to bear any further insult. Understand that I will be unable to bear the insult of contact. Get past without touching me, or to preserve my own dignity, I will show you your blood, and I will be just.’
Here, Eliyahu took a fast breath, then blew out slow.
“Am I to trust a boy who would get this carried away, Gurion?”
I said, But what happened?
“It was shameful what happened!” Eliyahu said. “Aleph, first he removes his scarf and folds it and tucks it inside of his coat. Then he reaches over Nakamook’s legs and drops his backpack onto the floor of the bus. And then he makes the decision—and, look, it’s the only decision he can possibly make, for Nakamook’s legs are bent at the knees and so too high to jump, and Aleph, he’s too tall to get under them in a crouch—he makes the decision to crawl under Nakamook’s legs. He crawls along the floor on his belly. Am I to trust a boy who would act so crazy as to make another crawl on his belly? Gurion?”
That wasn’t the only decision he could have made, I said. I said, He could have fought.
“He would have lost,” Eliyahu said.
I said, He would have lost, but it would not have been shameful.
“It might not have been as shameful,” said Eliyahu, “but it would have been at least a little bit shameful, and he would be damaged.”
I said, I’m sure Benji had his reasons for doing what he did. What was Aleph’s real name?
“If I knew, I wouldn’t call him Aleph.”
I said, He must have done something wrong to Benji.
“When?” said Eliyahu. “In daycare? Benji himself said they hadn’t spoken in all the years they’d gone to school together… Say he had wronged Benji in daycare—it was a long time ago. Why not let it go?”
I said, Maybe Aleph did wrong him in daycare, and Benji was unable to do anything about it at the time. The million different answers to ‘Why not let it go?’ have just as many good ones among them as the million you can get from ‘Why should I let it go?’ And look, Eliyahu, I know this place is weird, and the people in it—this school is not a member of the Associated Talmud Torahs Network. But you should trust Benji, and the reason you should trust Benji is that he is loyal to everyone who has ever shown him loyalty. He can’t help it. He is loyal to me, and so he’s loyal to you, so he wouldn’t mislead you about something like whether or not I’m in the Office for ISS.
“But he did mislead me, Gurion. You weren’t here before.”
He told you I was here because he knew I had ISS today, I said. I said, He told you what he thought was true, and not because he was crazy or carried away, but because it should have been true, what he told you. I said, There was no reason for him to believe it wasn’t true.
“He threatened me,” said Eliyahu. “He told me to stop looking at him in fear, or else—”
That was not a threat, I said. It was a warning.
“I hear this phrase in gangster movies,” said Eliyahu, “cowboy movies, television reruns about oil barons and men who own vineyards—I have never understood its meaning.”
I said, A boy makes a threat when he wants to damage you. The threat itself is a minor form of damage—it makes your snat trickle. When a boy gives you a warning, though, it’s because he doesn’t want to damage you.
“What is snat?” said Eliyahu. “It sounds like something sticky and unpleasant.”
Brodsky’s door opened.
I said, I’ll give you something I wrote about it.
“Eliyahu,” said Brodsky, “you cannot talk to students who are in ISS.”
Eliyahu didn’t even look at Brodsky, though. He started speaking Hebrew to my mother. “You are Gurion’s mother,” he said, “I can tell.”
This is Eliyahu, I said to my mom.
She touched his cheek with the bottom of her hand and said, “Eliyahu? I am glad to meet you, Eliyahu.”
“Thank you,” he said. Then he looked at his feet. Then he went to lunch.
My mother bent as if to kiss me, and she whispered in my ear, “Eliyahu is an orphan. You—”
How do you know that? I whispered back.
Into my other ear she whispered, “Do not be thick. I know the face of an orphan when I see one. Protect him. He loves you. So do I. Now act like I have told you that we must have a long talk when you come home from school.” Then she stood up straight.
A long talk about what? I said.
She made her voice weary and said, “We will discuss it at home, Gurion,” and, with her back still to Brodsky, she winked.
I thought: My mother is not carried away or crazy, but some third thing—she is something else.
It’s true that Philip Roth wasn’t good for the Jews, but it bothered me that other Jews ever said so. It bothered me not only because he was as good for the Jews as any Jew of his generation could have hoped to have been, but because they—Roth’s accusers—were also bad for the Jews, and for the most part worse than Roth, who was always trying to protect them from themselves, which is what they believed themselves to be doing by accusing Roth of being bad for the Jews. I knew it wasn’t really their fault, though—not most of them, anyway—nor his for that matter: Jews couldn’t help trying to protect themselves from themselves any moreso than they could have helped being bad for the Jews. That is a lot of what made them Jews. And that is why it wasn’t good to be Jews. And that is why I’ve been good for the Jews: because I’ve been the end of the Jews (except, of course, for the fictional Jews: Zuckerman and Glick, Stern and Kravitz and Golk, Shylock, Gimpel, Tevye, and Flesh, each Paley-made granny and sister and aunt, Kosinski’s boy and all his Ruthenians—Jews forever the lot, and baruch Hashem: fiction needs Jews). All Israelites know this now. Even Philip Roth. Especially him.
But he didn’t used to. Not when he wrote My Life as a Man; not til after the so-called “11/17 Miracle.” In that he was no different than most of the rest of you.
I, on the other hand, had known all my life—or at least since age three, when I’d first read Torah—that I was never a Jew, but always an Israelite, and that all of us were. Therefore I knew, whether there in the Office on 11/15 or anywhere else on any day prior, that I could not have been so very much like Roth, no matter what my mother might have thought; no matter what she might have thought that I thought.
My mom thought I thought I was like Philip Roth, and because she thought I thought myself like Philip Roth, she assumed I’d be willing to take a lesson from Roth. That’s why she gave me My Life as a Man.
(Briefly, for scholars unfamiliar with the book: My Life as a Man contains three distinct parts. The first two are short stories about a fictional Jewish writer called Zuckerman******** who marries a crazy, lying shiksa who ruins his life and then kills herself. The Zuckerman stories are written by another fictional Jewish writer called Tarnopol, and the
The lesson I was supposed to take was this: I shouldn’t marry a shiksa.
But that wasn’t the lesson of the book at all—there was no lesson; books with lessons are not good books; My Life as a Man was a good book (a great book)—nor was June a shiksa, let alone a crazy, lying shiksa; and Tarnopol marries the crazy, lying shiksa in the book not because he loves her as I loved June, but because she lies to him about being pregnant.
To be clear, scholars, my mother was as lucid and concise a thinker as just about anyone I’d ever heard of. Among radical behaviorists, her renown as an innovator was spreading before she’d even finished grad school. Whenever she started to think about her son, though, her thoughts, like so many moms’, got seriously disorganized.
Thus, while she knew Roth’s book contained no lesson concerning shiksas (she had to have known; she was too smart not to), she wished it did, and she gave it to me thinking something along the lines of, “Gurion will see the lesson that I wish Roth was teaching him, and Gurion will come away from that wished-for lesson no longer wanting to marry June.” And that didn’t make sense. It wouldn’t have even made sense if My Life as a Man did contain her wished-for lesson. = While she took me seriously enough to believe that I loved and would marry June because I’d said so, she not only didn’t believe it when I’d said June was Israelite, but she believed that a book by Philip Roth would have the power to fall me out of love with June. How could you believe your son was in love with a girl and at the same time believe a novel could make him stop loving her? Muddledly is how, and only muddledly.
This isn’t to say that the great degree to which her thoughts were muddled was solely an outcome of my love declaration. There was also my father—he enhanced the muddle, muddled it further. Had my dad reacted the same way as my mom when I told them about June at the night before’s dinner, I doubt she’d have thought to give me the book. Instead, he got all calm and laissez-faire. This wasn’t because he took my declaration more seriously than my mom had, though—at least not necessarily. His thinking most likely went something like this: “Gurion is just a boy and so is probably not actually in love with June, but just excited about her; if he is in love with June, though, really and truly in love, there is no way to stop it; so either he isn’t in love and there’s nothing to worry about, or he is in love and there’s no use in worrying.”
In any case, that was their usual pattern: my father believing I’d warp if taken too seriously, and my mother that I’d warp if not taken seriously enough; the one going one way, and the other the other, pressing against each other, further and further, til they overlapped deep into one another’s spaces like the fingers of a cage you might make with your hands to surround a ladybug or firefly. It was how they loved me and, on the whole, it was nothing to complain about.
I wasn’t thinking too much about any of that, though. I hadn’t even read My Life as a Man yet. After my mother had left the Office, I read the summary on the back of the cover and from that I got a basic handle on her motives, and, deciding that knowing them would interfere too greatly with my enjoyment of the novel—I wasn’t in the mood to feel condescended to—I put the book away and instead I read Rabbi Salt’s letter to Brodsky.
At first the letter cheered me—thrilled me even. He testified to nearly everything I wanted to believe about myself. But at the end of the letter, where he claimed that the Cage would be the end of me—that got to me a little, then more than a little. I tried to tell myself he was just hamming things up in order to persuade Brodsky not to put me in the Cage, but I knew Rabbi Salt, I knew him well, so I knew that he wouldn’t have brought out the big guns—Brodsky’s dead son, my old friend Ben, “Gurion attended his shiva… wept at his burial”—if he didn’t desperately believe in his argument. Rabbi Salt was not a heartless man. To use another’s emotions about a dead son to strengthen an argument he didn’t fiercely believe in; that was beyond him. That was beneath him. At the time he wrote that letter he had to have believed that the Cage would destroy me.
Or maybe I was wrong about him. I might have been wrong about him. I was wrong about something, because if he wasn’t the kind of person who’d use a dead son on that son’s loving father (in the same nasty way, no less, as I had the day before; same father, same son—I’m not trying to be coy), he’d either lost faith in me and since pretended—every time I’d seen him since the letter was written—to still have faith in me, or he’d lost faith in me at the time he wrote the letter but gotten it back before the next time I saw him.
Since it neither entailed his being cruel or condescending, the last of the three options seemed to be the most generous to Rabbi Salt, so that’s the one I chose, but it wasn’t like that option got me feeling all joyful—it still meant he’d thought less of me than I wanted him to think of me, even if just for a day or two. The Cage couldn’t break me. Nothing could break me. I wanted him to know that; I wanted him to have always known that.
I put the letter away to write my ISS assignment, but I couldn’t get my mind off Rabbi Salt, and to ignore a thing you have to concentrate on another thing, so I read Call-Me-Sandy’s “Assessment of a Client: Gurion Maccabee.” When I got to the end, my reaction was the opposite of the one I’d just had to the letter. I wanted to feel more upset at its writer. I wanted to hate her. I thought: You should hate her. If it wasn’t for her, you would be in normal classes; you might even be in class with June right now.
But that whole Klingon bit, and how she’d concluded that Flowers was imaginary, and the codeswitching part where she thinks she’s being slick, asking her professor on a date in a footnote—I couldn’t see her doing anything with malice, let alone to a student she seemed to like. To hate Call-Me-Sandy for dooming me to the Cage would be like hating a dog for farting. And so I gave up, and then gave up some more: on attempting to be happy about Rabbi Salt’s faith-loss, my mother’s muddled thinking, my father’s skepticism.
At least Philip Roth was good for the Israelites.
I put “Assessment” away and was about to ask Pinge for a pass to the bathroom when Desormie burst into the Office, frothing.
He said, “You think you’re funny, Maccabee? You think I’m funny?” Some of the froth had built up and hardened into paste in his lipcorners and I didn’t know what he was talking about. I could barely think is how bad I wanted his paste to disintegrate.
I looked away, saying, The Gym teacher is talking to me during ISS, Miss Pinge.
Desormie leaned at me.
“Ron—” said Miss Pinge.
“And now you’re tattling like a tattle-tale telling tales outside school? Isn’t that ironic!”
“Lower your voice,” Miss Pinge said.
“Lower my voice?” Desormie mock-whispered. “I’ll lower my voice,” he mock-whispered.
He was leaning with his hands on my desk and he wanted to break my nose. He was leaning so close, and he wanted to break my nose so bad, that his eyes were crossing to keep my nose in focus. I scratched it on the septum. I should have used my swearfinger, but instead I used my ring one. The one good thing about him being that close was I could look right at his eyes like a killer and not see the paste in the periphery.
“The Indians,” Desormie said, “have worked their butts off to get good enough to bring you glory on Friday. They’ve slaved to develop the skills it takes to bring decisive victory that will reflect for the better on all of us. It! Is! Un! Grateful! To! Damage! Their!—”
“Stop yelling, Ron,” Miss Pinge said.
“Stop yelling?” Desormie said, standing up straight. “Don’t you want to know why I’m yelling, Ginnie? Don’t you wanna know? Because I wanna tell you why I’m yelling.”
“What’s the yelling about?” Miss Pinge said.
“I’m gonna tell you,” said Desormie.
Tell it, I said.
“You d
I said, Stepitup, man. Tell ’em where it’s at.
“Oh, I will, and—”
Break it down righteous. Take ’em to the bridge.
Miss Pinge said, “Are you making James Brown jokes, Gurion?”
“Who knows what kinda jokes he’s making? They’re inappropriate jokes is what I know. And what else I know is whatever kinda jokes it is, ever, not only don’t I think his jokes are funny, ever,” said Desormie, before revolving to look at my nose again. “Not only don’t I think your jokes are funny, ever,” he said to me, “but I don’t even get your jokes. And I don’t think anyone does. And even if they do, I don’t think they think your jokes are funny either, because you’re not mature. Maturity, Maccabee, is control of yourself, and I don’t think you’ve got control of yourself. You make jokes because you can’t help it is what I think. If you had some intestinal fortitude, you could help it, but you don’t have any intestinal fortitude because that’s a part of maturity, too. For example, I don’t think you’ve got the intestinal fortitude to fess up to what you or those so-called friends of yours did today is an example of what I mean by maturity. Maybe you think what you did took a whole lot of intestinal fortitude, but it didn’t. Maybe you think the silence you’re keeping about the crimes you and your friends have committed is the same kind of silence Frank Pentangeli kept to protect Michael Corleone, but it isn’t. The silence of Frankie Five Angels was the silence of omerta, which is honorable, and Frankie Five Angels became a suicide in a bathtub to keep that silence so he wouldn’t dishonor himself and shame his family, which believe me he was tempted. That is the kind of silence that requires intestinal fortitude. And I don’t see you in a bathtub. And I definitely don’t see you bleeding from the wrists in a bathtub. What I see is you sitting beside an administrative assistant, reading a book, trying to save your own hide and thinking, ‘I’ll never rat on my friends and I’ll always keep my mouth shut,’ like that’s omerta, but it isn’t. It’s not omerta. It’s what Henry Hill thought is what it is, and guess what. Eventually he did rat on his friends. He didn’t keep his mouth shut. And look at him. Look at where his path has led him. To witness protection, probably in Arizona—no one’s for sure about it, of course—but what is for sure is the marinara there is ketchup and he’s a shnook. I don’t think you want to be a shnook, Maccabee. I don’t think you want to be on that path, but the way you’re mistaking the saving of your own hide for omerta, and the way you’re mistaking jokes for control, not to mention how you’re mistaking gutless silence for intestinal fortitude, well let me tell you: You’re worse than on that path. You’re taking the shortcut. The shortcut to shnooksville.”