The Instructions by Adam Levin
Brodsky had startled at the sound of the smack, but instead of looking at the desk, he took a fast breath and said, “Inappropriate, Benji. That’s what we mean by acting out. I asked you if you could live with the way our conversation concluded, and you told me you could and I believed you. Do we need to go back inside and talk some more?”
“No,” said Benji, chewing a half-born smile to death. “I’m content with our mutual decision that I continue serving detention indefinitely. I was just feeling a little hyperactive for a second. It happens. I was acting out, like you said.”
“Get a pass and go back to the Cage,” said Brodsky.
As soon as Brodsky had closed his door for his meeting with Leevon, Miss Pinge pushed the lighter in Benji’s face and told him, “That wasn’t a very smart thing to do.”
“It worked out fine,” Benji said.
“Take it,” she said, waving the lighter, blinkering it.
“It’s yours,” said Benji. “It always has been.”
“And how did you know I’d cover it up when you put it on my desk like that? How do you know I won’t tell Mr. Brodsky that you’ve been carrying a lighter around?”
“You would never do that, Miss Pinge, because then Benji would get in trouble,” said Vincie.
“I’m throwing it away,” she said.
“Whatever you want to do with it, it’s yours,” said Benji. “Just try it out once before you junk it so you can see how cool it is.”
She put the lighter in her purse, saying, “I’m throwing it away as soon as I get home.” She scribbled on a hall-pass and handed it over.
“See you after school,” Benji said to me. “Bus circle, yeah?”
I said, I’m not going there today. I’m meeting June in the cafeteria.
“Nice!” he said. “I’ll walk you.”
Miss Pinge threw her arms up and shook her head side to side = “It will be more aggravating to enforce the no-talking-to-students-in-ISS rule than to just let them say goodbye.”
“I’ll come too,” Vincie said.
No, I said. I said, It’s gonna take too long for you guys to get out of the Cage. By the time we get there, I’ll only have twelve minutes before detention. I want fifteen. I can have fifteen if I go straight there and June also goes straight there.
“You don’t know if she’s going straight there?” said Vincie.
She said she’d meet me in detention today, but we weren’t clear on the time, I said.
“It’s better if she gets there first,” Benji said. “You don’t want to be the one waiting.”
“You don’t want to sit there and get all worked up and nervous and then screw up the big first kiss,” said Vincie.
“That’s got nothing to do with anything,” said Nakamook. “Vincie doesn’t know anything,” he said. “If you’re waiting for her, you’ll look anxious. You don’t want to look anxious.”
I am anxious, I said.
“You don’t want to look anxious,” said Benji. “You want to kiss her, and if you want to kiss her, it’s better you don’t look anxious, right Miss Pinge?”
“I don’t know about any of it,” Miss Pinge said, “but anxious isn’t usually an attractive quality.”
“That’s what I was saying,” Vincie said.
“No it’s not,” Nakamook said, “and you know it’s not, so you should watch out for that. What are you gonna tell Brodsky when he starts asking you things? Because when I was in there, he started asking me things, Vincie, not just about the wrestling but about the scoreboard which of course I have no idea about and I’m sure you have no idea about it either, but the way you’re pretending to know things that you don’t—worries me a little. What’re you gonna tell him?”
“Nothing!” Vincie said.
“You sure?” said Nakamook. “Because it seems like you can’t stop talking today.”
“Whatever, Nakamook,” said Vincie. “I hardly said anything that whole time the Chewer was in here and it was cause I was practicing for silent-mode, which you’re screwing up right now by accusing me of things and I have to defend myself. And don’t say that’s exactly what Brodsky is gonna do is accuse me and so then I’ll think I’ll have to defend myself by talking because I know that’s why you’re making that fucking face at me you fuckface I’m not stupid. Maybe it’s you who’s stupid for saying everything you’re saying in front of Mr. Brodsky’s secretary, because maybe she doesn’t like you as much as you think she likes you. For all you know, she thinks you’re doing that thing you’re always quoting about in weird old English about exclaiming too loud of a doth protest or whatever and how it makes you look suspicious and maybe she’ll say so to Brodsky. I at least know the difference between my friends and the Arrangement so don’t start up with me, just don’t start up with me.”
“Wait for us,” Nakamook said to me.
Vincie ripped a sleeve off his T-shirt. He could get very explosive when anyone ignored him, but especially Nakamook.
I said, It’s like a lie to pretend I’m not anxious when I’m anxious.
Benji said, “No one’s saying you should pretend anything. I’m just saying you should wait for us, and we’ll walk you. If you agree to wait for us, it’s true you’ll be a little late to your meeting with June and that’ll make you look less anxious than if you were early or on time, but that doesn’t mean you’re lying. All it means is you told us you’d wait for us and you didn’t want to break your word to your friends.”
But if I agree to do it now, I said, after you just said all of that, it’s fakey even if it isn’t a lie.
“Fakey shmakey,” Nakamook said. “If she asks you if you’re anxious, you’ll tell her the truth. There’s no reason to telegraph that you’re anxious if she doesn’t ask, though.”
I said, But if I hide it in advance—
“Gurion, say that detention comes around and you’re in the bathroom and it makes you late for your meeting with June, okay? When you finally get there, to detention, are you gonna say, ‘Hey June, the reason I’m late is I was playing Victor Dumpenstein to this brown monster I was sadly compelled to bring into the world?’”
Miss Pinge, who’d leaned in about nine times with the intention of telling Vincie to stop cursing and Benji to stop talking to me, made a grossout face and sat back in her chair.
I said, Of course I wouldn’t tell her that.
“Right,” said Benji. “Of course,” said Benji. “You wouldn’t tell her,” he said, “but wouldn’t not telling be fakey? I mean, if you were, in fact, a young Dumpenstein?”
No, I said.
“So why would it be fakey to not let her know that you’re anxious?”
I don’t know, I said.
I really couldn’t think of why right then.
“So I win the argument. Agree to wait for us,” he said.
I agreed to wait.
The whole rest of the schoolday, no one said anything to me except for Vincie, who mouthed “Ben-Wa Wolf” as he came out of Brodsky’s while shrugging his shoulders = “Can Ben-Wa Wolf be on the Side of Damage or not?”
I shrugged back with squinted eyes = Ask me later.
I still wasn’t sure what the Side of Damage was exactly, let alone how to make decisions about who was a part of it; I didn’t even know if I was the one who should make those decisions. I was too distracted by my anxious thoughts about June and my anxiousness itself and how to make it stop to consider the possibilities with any rigor.
Plus I still had to write my ISS assignment, or else I’d have to be in ISS again the next day. And so what I did was, I wrote about distraction, and once I was finished, I was no longer distracted, I was no longer anxious, I was ready to think about Ben-Wa Wolf or the Side of Damage or anything else I might’ve wanted to think about, but no sooner had I handed the assignment to Pinge than Boystar’s mom came in for an appointment, ushering a skinny, raccoon-eyed blond guy, a guy she bragged was “the best acoustics man in the business,” and this guy was wearing a com
Which of course got me anxious about June again.
Name: Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
Grade: 5 6 7 8
Homeroom: The Cage
Date: 11/15/2006
Complaint Against Student (from Complaint Against Student Sheet)
Fistfight with Ronrico Asparagus and on on top of that assaulting Michael Bregman by spitting on the guy. Gym locker-room. 2nd Period. 11/14/06._Mr. Desormie.
Step 5 Assignment: Write a letter to yourself in which you explain 1) why you are at step 5 (in-school suspension); 2) what you could do in order to avoid step 5 (receivingin-school suspension) in the future; 3) what you have learned from being at step 5 (in in--school suspension); 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 in-school supension. This letter will be stored in your permanent file.
Title
Kinetic Principles of Your A and H
Introduction
Attention (A) must fix itself on something. Once a thing is fixed on, that thing demands concentration.
If we measure A in units, and we assert that 100 units of A = the amount of A it takes to concentrate on one typical task (one fullthing), then most people in the world have exactly 100 units.
Some people, like me and Benji Nakamook, have more units of A than are needed to concentrate on a fullthing. People like us have 175 units of A. These people will henceforth be known as You.
Body
Hardly anything in the world demands exactly 75 A-units for concentration, let alone 175.
Normal Places
In normal places, ones that are filled with brief actions and randomness, there are, in addition to some fullthings, thousands of things for A to fix on that are not full. Therefore, if You are in one of these normal places, it is not unlikely that Your A will fix on a set of things that, together, demand exactly 175 units = It is likely, in a normal place, that You will be able to concentrate on whatever things You’re doing = Your A probably won’t get D’d.
Abnormal Places
In abnormally still and quiet places like classrooms, although there are many available fullthings for A to fix on—many available things that demand exactly 100 units of A—there are hardly any that demand less than 100 units. Fidgeting, for example, demands just 10–20 units, depending on the intricacy of the fidget. Another 20–30 units, depending on the quality of the sound, may be demanded by the task of listening to the background noise that gets past where Your earlids would be if You had any. But even if while concentrating on one fullthing, You fidget and listen to noise, 25–45 more units remain, and all of them must fix on something.
The Remainder
What the remainder fixes on will be the nearest thing, which—as You are in a place containing few brief actions and little randomness—is almost always going to be a fullthing.
Because a fullthing demands 100 units of A for concentration, the 25–45 unit remainder is insufficient.
But even if You don’t fidget or listen to noise—even if Your 175 units of A are divided between only two fullthings—You are still 25 units shy of the A required to concentrate on both: While 200 units are being demanded by a pair of fullthings, only 175 are available, and that is why the fullthings enter into a cycle of thievery.
An Ultimately Doomed,
However Momentarily Useful, Analogy
To understand the thievery cycle, it is a little bit useful to think of A-units as electrons—to think of A as being stolen back and forth between fullthings to fill their concentration-demands the way electrons get traded between bonded atoms to complete their outer-rings.
With atoms, the trading of the electrons happens at the speed of light—so fast that it is as if at any given time, each atom has a full outer ring, which is why it is only a little bit useful to think of A like electrons: A does not move nearly as fast as light, and so A is never as if in more than one place at a time. When demanded A arrives at one fullthing, that fullthing holds onto it for a second or two while the other fullthing demands it back; not only that, but the A takes time to travel from one fullthing to the other.
So then, with two fullthings demanding Your A, the following four arrangements cycle over a period of seconds:
Fullthing1 has 100 units and Fullthing2 has 75 units
Fullthing1 has 75 units, Fullthing2 has 75 units, and 25 units are traveling from Fullthing1 to Fullthing2
Fullthing1 has 75 units and Fullthing2 has 100 units
Fullthing1 has 75 units, Fullthing2 has 75 units, and 25 units are traveling from Fullthing2 to Fullthing1
In a vacuum, this cycle would repeat forever, but You are never in a vacuum. This cycle is only the beginning of a larger one.
The Larger One
Within a few passes, something, usually a fullthing, will get in the path of the traveling A-units (i.e., during arrangement 2 or 4) and the units will fix on that something so that now there are three fullthings demanding concentration = three fullthings demanding 100 units each. This not only decreases the frequency at which each fullthing within the cycle possesses 100 units, but increases the overall number of units being demanded at any given time. Worse than that, the amount of time that the A is in transit increases, which creates more opportunities for things—again, usually fullthings—to get in the path of your traveling A. The process thereby continues to degrade at an exponential rate. Nonetheless, it is not an entropic process. If it were entropic, it would eventually stabilize—single units of your A would come to free-float around the universe, fixing on and being stolen from so many random things, both fullthings and non-, that you could never concentrate again. That very sad kind of math, baruch Hashem, is entirely avoided by means of hyper (H).
A Blessing
H is a blessing. Here is how it arises:
After a certain number of things—usually between 9 and 11, depending on how many are fullthings—have entered the cycle, the paths of the traveling A criss-cross and the A begins to act like a thing, itself = the traveling A itself demands A = You get distracted by the fact of Your distraction = You find Yourself paying attention to Your attention.
And paying attention to Your attention, You find Yourself.
Before, You operated as if the A was You, as if it was You being divided and shuffled between fullthings. But now that the A has begun to demand A, You—the most basic You, the part of You that never changes, the part that is always there, that has always been there, watching—You think: If I can pay attention to my attention, then I must be something other than my attention. You don’t actually think that so much as You watch it get thought, yet it’s at this point that You come to know, however briefly, that You are neither Your A, nor what Your A fixes on, but a soul. This is where You find out, for the billionth time, that You are partly God. If You were not partly God, how could something like A, something that emanates from You, demand anything of You? If there were no God in You, how could something like A, something that is completely subject to Your will, be capable of willing things on its own, much less things that go against Your will? It couldn’t. And it is here that You become hyper = here You watch, in softer focus than is normally comfortable, every insufficiently concentrated-upon thing that Your A has fixed on at once, and You respond to all of it, at once. You do not necessarily respond in ways that are best for You, and You do not necessarily respond in ways that are best for the world around You, but You respond to everything. You respond to everything in some way or another because that is the nature of the most basic You, the nature of your God. The nature of God is hyper.
Conclusion
Unli
After a few minutes of H, the A units spasm like an overworked muscle. They lose their fix on the things they have fixed on, and the things they had been fixed on no longer demand them. Now only You demand them and so your A returns to You, a few units at a time. How long it all takes to amass depends on how far the units that were fixed on the farthest thing have to travel. Once it’s all gathered in You, the A quits spazzing and the cycle starts over.
For Further Consideration
The question arises as to whether or not Your A can be aggregated with the A of other Yous in such a way as to satisfy the concentration-demands of fullthings.
I.e. Suppose there are 4 Yous. With 175 A-units per You, the aggregate number of A-units is 700, which is exactly as many A-units as it takes to concentrate on 7 fullthings.
So, if A can be aggregated, then 4 Yous should be able to concentrate on 7 fullthings at once= 4 Yous should be able to perform the tasks of 7 normal people within the same amount of time and space as it would take 4 normal people to perform 4 tasks. In concentrating on 7 fullthings, then—if 4 Yous can in fact aggregate their A to do so—4 Yous would not become hyper; the kind of A-unit slippage that leads to the thievery cycle that occurs when 1 You attempts concentration on 2 fullthings would never begin, for there would be no remainder of A-units in the case of 4 Yous and 7 fullthings.
And just because 4 Yous who are concentrated on 7 fullthings would almost definitely look very H to an outsider, that does not make it so. Looking H to the eyes of outsiders may, in fact, be to the advantage of 4 Yous.