The Instructions by Adam Levin

  Set down the piece that is not garbage so the pouring hole is facing the sky. Notice what you’ve got is a little bit tit-shaped. Laugh. Laughter is good. You are doing something important, though, and I’ve already made the joke, so once you are done laughing at it, don’t keep saying it. It gets less funny every time you say it. Tit-shaped. It is less funny, now. The more you say it, the less funny it will be when, later on, you remember how I said it. Tit-shaped. Booblike. Mammaryish. Finish laughing and pay attention to the instructions.

  Remove your four pennies from the plastic sack. Lay your pennies out in a safe place where you can see them. Lay them out so that you won’t knock them into the grass by accident. Lay them out in a row. Any combination of Lincoln-up or Roman-looking-building-up is fine. This is not about symbols.

  Remove the rubber balloon from the plastic sack.

  Use the fingers of both hands to pull the lip of the rubber balloon back on itself until the lip of the rubber balloon is at the fat part of the rubber balloon.

  With the pointer- and swear-fingers of both of your hands, stretch the rubber balloon opening wide.

  Fit the stretched rubber balloon opening over the threaded part of the pouring hole. Fit it over the nipple. Nipple.

  Make sure that the folded-back lip of the rubber balloon is on the threaded part. If it’s not, then push it down til it is.

  Turn the whole thing over and look inside. Make sure that the opening is clear, that it is a perfect circle, that no balloon skin is blocking the passage up.

  Now, hold what you have in your weak hand with your thumb and pointer pressed onto the rubber-balloon-covered part of the pouring hole. Hold it so that the balloon-covered end is facing your chest. Hold it so that your weak pointer is on top and your weak thumb is on the bottom. Press hard. Make sure that no meat on your weak thumb or weak pointer is edging past the pouring-hole in the direction of your chest. Make sure that the rest of your weak hand is either above or behind the sawed-off edge.

  With the thumb and forefinger of your strong hand, pinch the balloon.

  Pull back on the balloon.

  Let go.

  Look at the pennies you lined up earlier. Understand you hold a gun.

  Now you can hurt things far beyond arm’s reach.

  In a few more minutes you will all leave my yard. You will conceal your weapons inside your pockets. If you don’t have pockets, you will use your waistbands. You’ll stick the cap and other garbage inside the plastic sack, tie the sack off, and throw the whole thing in a dumpster or bin as you were instructed to earlier. You will keep your planks. You will turn them into targets. Draw bullseyes onto the faces of them, and then draw faces in the bullseyes of them. Lean them against the sides of your homes and fire on your targets with your weapons, your pennyguns. Fire first from a distance of ten feet. Once you hit three bullseyes, move back to fifteen feet. “Hit three bullseyes” does not mean get the penny to lightly graze the bullseye three different times. That will do nothing for you. “Hit three bullseyes” means get the penny to lodge itself in the bullseye portion of the plank or to cut straight through it. You have the power to do that and that is what you should do. Once you hit three bullseyes at a distance of fifteen feet, move back to a distance of twenty feet. Continue to increase the intervals by five feet after every three bullseyes until you are at a distance of thirty-five feet. Thirty-five feet is the farthest distance that you will be able to fire on someone or something from and still be able do it or him any worthwhile kind of damage.

  In a couple minutes, I will tell you to leave my yard. I will tell you that I will see you Monday, if not tomorrow, when you will all be stronger than you are today. Before I tell you that though, you need to understand: Hardly anyone in the world knows what you’re holding right now. They have not seen or heard of pennyguns. It is better for us that they don’t know. It is better for us that they have not seen or heard of what you are holding right now. Still, some people do know and some people have heard of and seen and even fired their own versions of what you are holding, so you don’t want to be a show-off. You don’t want to brandish. It could make some people nervous.

  Now that you have been delivered these instructions, you will receive an instruction sheet. It is a copy of the sheet I am reading from. Each one of you gets one copy. You will take your copy from beneath the paint-can at the gate. Fold it and put it in your shoe. Guard it closely. Do not guard it with your life, but guard it with your face. It is not worth getting killed over, but it is worth getting a broken face over. Tomorrow, you will make thirteen copies of your copy. You will invite thirteen Israelite boys to come to your backyard after Shabbos, like I invited you, and you will deliver these instructions from a high tree-limb, exactly the same as I have delivered them to you. If you do not have a tree with high limbs in your yard, or if the high-limbed tree you do have is unclimbable, sit on top of a swingset or fence.

  Tonight, the first night on which Israelites have received these instructions, is May 27, 2006. Do as you’re told and one week from tonight, 183 Israelite boys will be armed with pennyguns. Two weeks from tonight, 2,380 Israelite boys will be armed. Three weeks from tonight, 30,941 Israelite boys, and four weeks from tonight, just three days beyond the summer solstice, 402,234 Israelite boys will be armed with pennyguns. Well in advance of the start of next school year, all the Israelite boys in North America, if not the world, will be armed with pennyguns. Never again will we cower amidst the masses of the Roman and Canaanite children.

  Bless Adonai, who helps us protect us.

  Blessed is Elohim, Who blesses our weapons.

  Chazak! Chazak! Venischazeik!

  Say it.

  Now leave my yard. I will see you Monday, if not tomorrow. You will be stronger tomorrow than you are today.

  Brodsky had a megaphone on the shelf behind his desk. It was mostly white, but the mouthpiece and the trigger were red to match the jerseys of the Aptakisic Indians. It should have been Main Man’s. If people tried to stop him from singing through it, he could switch on the siren and scare them away, and if they kept on coming, he could blow out their eardrums. He wouldn’t get messed with so much.

  “Look at me,” said Brodsky.

  I like your soundgun, I said.

  “It’s a megaphone,” he said. “It’s not a gun.”

  It’s shaped like a gun, I said. It’s got a trigger and it shoots sound, I said.

  “That doesn’t make it a gun,” he said. “Guns are weapons.”

  Hot-glue gun, I said. I said, Nail gun. I said, Staple gun.

  “It’s a megaphone, Gurion.”

  He was trying to be nice. That’s why he said my name. I didn’t want him to be nice, though. It banced up the roles. So I didn’t look at him. I looked at the family picture next to the megaphone. Ben was in it. I knew him before he died. He was a scholar and he was loyal to me. We had Torah Study together at the Solomon Schecter School, before I got kicked out.

  Ben drowned at camp at the beginning of summer. No one knows how. He was missing for two days and his head was bruised when they found him in the lake. They thought he knocked it diving off the pier at night, but a drunken boater might have hit-and-runned him. Whatever happened, Brodsky’s face changed.

  I only ever saw Brodsky once before Ben died. It was at Ben’s bar-mitzvah. I got invited to more bar-mitzvahs than any other Schecter fourth-grader because Rabbi Salt had promoted me to eighth-grade Torah Study and it was a custom at Schecter to invite everyone in your Torah Study class.

  Before Ben got killed, Brodsky’s face was either joyous or sad, and the muscles in it made the bones and the skin fit themselves to those emotions. Even though Ben’s death made Brodsky bitter, his bones and skin were already finished being formed by the muscles, and it was too late for him to make convincing faces that were not joyful or sad. Like the one he was making right then: he meant to make a tough, sass-killing face, but he looked like a wifeless old cousin trying to hide his loneliness.

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bsp; He said, “Tell me why you fought these boys.” When he said “these boys,” he poked the CASS with his finger, like Ronrico and the Janitor were right there on the page in front of him. Like it wasn’t just their names, but them. I got a rush from thinking about it. My name was on the page, too. And my actions—Desormie’s version of them, at least.

  Brodsky said, “This is your sixth fight in the nine weeks you’ve been at Aptakisic.”

  It was my twenty-ninth fight in the nine weeks I’d been at Aptakisic, not counting exchanges like the Emotionalize one with Boystar. It was the sixth I got caught for. But what was important to me was that Brodsky’d poked the CASS again when he’d said the word this.

  “Next time it’s an OSS,” he said.

  How long til I get expelled?

  “We don’t want to expel you,” Brodsky said. “Are you trying to get expelled?”

  I said, Let’s call my mother.

  “Let’s have a conversation first,” he said. “Let’s talk about why you keep fighting.”

  I’m not telling on anyone, I said.

  “So Ronrico and Michael started up with you, then.”

  I’m not a rat, I said. I said, I wouldn’t rat on myself if I started up with them.

  He said, “I’m not a villain, Gurion. You can talk to me. I’m not your enemy.”

  I said, I never said you were a villain.

  “You’re implying I’m your enemy?”

  I said, Talk to me like I’m a kid. Don’t talk to me about implications.

  He said, “Rabbi Salt has told me you’re the most promising student he’s ever known. He has gone on at length about how articulate you are. Ben, may he rest in peace, was very fond of you and—”

  Can we call my mother?

  “Won’t you be a mensch and talk to me?”

  I said, Ben didn’t deserve it.

  Brodsky said, “That’s not what I mean, Gurion.”

  I said, That’s the only menschy thing that I have to say to you. I said, You keep me in a cage.

  Brodsky balanced his elbow on the desk and held his open hand out with all the fingers spread, like he was going to explain something important to me, but all he said was, “The Cage is not a cage.”

  Right, I said.

  I had sarcasm in my throat. That happened sometimes when I’d get treated like a shmendrick by sincere people.

  Brodsky looked hurt by it, and he wouldn’t stop performing the explaining thing with his hand. It made me want to have an intermittent explosion. If he saw me explode, he would be too frightened or too pissed at me to be hurt. I didn’t really care what Brodsky thought of me, but I didn’t want to hurt him. There was already too much sadness in his office. It would steam off the bright pink top of his head, then condense and fall in droplets into the carpet and onto the furniture and get on you.

  The second time I saw Brodsky was at Ben’s shiva, where I heard him say to Rabbi Salt that he wished it was himself who got killed instead of his son. It made me think of the part in Genesis Rabbah where Hashem shows Adam all the different versions of the future that could happen. I don’t know what Hashem used for a screen, but I hope it was the sky, and that Adam watched it while he floated on his back in a scumless lagoon.

  In one of the movies, David ben-Jesse slayed Goliath and became King of Israel. In another one, David died at birth. The version where David died is the one that Hashem said was fated to happen. But Adam told Hashem that he wanted David to live, because the Israelites, without David, would never have an empire and never build the Temple. So Hashem let Adam give seventy years of his life to David. That’s why Adam lived to be 930 instead of 1000.

  There in Brodsky’s office, I started thinking of how almost anyone who Hashem showed David’s futures to would do the same thing as Adam did, and how, if I knew a different version of the future, I might have known that if Brodsky died instead of Ben, it would have been worse for the Brodsky family and the world. I might have known, for example, that if Brodsky’d died instead, Ben would have saved the next Hitler from drowning at day camp. But that still wouldn’t make it any easier to find the justice, because why did Adam have to give up seventy years of his life for David to live? Why couldn’t God pull seventy years out of the serpent or a Sodomite? And so why did any Brodsky have to get killed at all? Why couldn’t it be that Ben would be changing into swim-trunks in the locker-room while the next Hitler drowned? Why should there have to be a next Hitler?

  None of those questions can get answered any easier than the others, but if Hashem was showing me futures, I would ask Him all the questions, and He would not be able to tell me the answers because either He doesn’t know, or because understanding those things would kill a person, or make the person something less than a person. And though I would, like I said, give David my seventy, it would piss me off, and I’d cut straight to the point and ask the main question. If all of this was happening in ancient scripture, I would ask it loud. It would be a lamentation.

  Gurion would lament: What is the good of trying to do justice if God will kill me and my family whether or not I do justice?

  And the answer would come from God or a judge or commentary in the margins. And God or the judge or the scholar who’d comment would say, “It is good to try to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether or not you do justice.”

  I was thinking too much about Ben to explode, so I dug my last wingnut out of my pocket and dropped it in the palm of Brodsky’s explaining-hand.

  “I don’t want this,” he said. I was chomsky to think he’d appreciate a wingnut. He tossed the wingnut back so it would land in my lap, but before its arc ended, I knocked it sideways with a sudden backhand. It bounced off the wall and landed in a planter that held a fan-shaped tree from Asia.

  “This fighting,” said Brodsky. “What can I do to get you to stop fighting?”

  Is my record in your cabinet?

  Brodsky said, “Yes.”

  I said, What’s in it?

  He said, “Your detention assignments, the CASS’s, grade reports...”

  I said, Does it have my documents from Schecter?

  Brodsky said, “Yes.”

  I want to see it.

  “It’s not for you to see.”

  I said, I want to know what Rabbi Unger wrote.

  Unger was the headmaster at Schecter. I wanted to know if he wrote down that I wasn’t the messiah. That’s what he told me the day he kicked me out of Schechter. That I was not the messiah. He yelled it at me. He did it in his office after I destroyed his lectern. Rabbi Salt was sick that day, and Unger was substituting for him in Torah Study. Emmanuel Liebman asked Unger why carbon-dating said the Earth was billions of years old when the Torah said it was less than six thousand** and Unger said that time was different in the Torah, that a day wasn’t just a day. He said that a day in the Torah was a day according to God, and that God was eternal, so that a God-day was “infinitely longer than a people-day.” That didn’t make sense as an answer because no one knows how reliable carbon-dating is, is the answer. But also it just didn’t make sense because if a God-day was infinitely longer than a people-day, and the Torah was written according to God-time, then no amount of God-days would have passed because infinity doesn’t end. That’s what infinity means. I said so. Unger said, “Don’t be a smart aleck with the minutiae. You know what I meant, Gurion.” Unger was always calling the objects of my rigor minutiae. I said, Did you mean that a God-day was just a lot longer than a people-day? He said, “That’s what I meant.” “How much longer?” said Emmanuel Liebman. “Much longer,” Unger said. “A thousand times longer?” Emmanuel said. “More,” said Unger. “A hundred thousand times longer?” said Emmanuel. “Something like that,” said Unger. So a God-day lasts about a hundred thousand times as long as a people-day, I said. “Yes,” said Unger. So then Adam didn’t live to be nine hundred thirty, I said. I said, He lived to be ninety-three million. “No,” said Unger. “You’re not listening,” he said. He s
aid, “Adam was a man. When men are being written about, they are written about in people-time, not God-time.” I said, Okay. I was ready to drop it, too, but then Samuel Diamond said, “Why did all the people at the beginning of Genesis get to live for hundreds of years and then after that, they didn’t. Like David. Why did David only get to live to be seventy?” Unger said, “Actually, Adam didn’t live for nine hundred thirty years. Torah says that, but what it means is nine hundred thirty months.” So David only lived to be seventy months? I said. Even if that’s solar-months, it’s not even six years old, I said. “David is not discussed in the Torah,” said Unger. “Prophets is not Torah,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?” Then Jacob, I said. I said, Torah says he lived a hundred and forty-seven years, so if a year is a solar month, then he fathered all twelve sons before he was thirteen, and if it’s a lunar month, then— “Years stop meaning months at a certain point,” said Rabbi Unger. It was an interruption. He interrupted me. I said, How do you know that? I said, I don’t think the stuff you’re telling us is accurate. Unger said, “Are you suggesting that I’m a liar, Gurion?” I wasn’t suggesting he was a liar. I was only suggesting he was mistaken. But then, when he asked me if I was suggesting that he was a liar, I saw he’d been lying all along, intentionally making stuff up to save face. I couldn’t say that, though. If I said that, I’d be undermining the authority of the Torah Study teacher, which, at the time, seemed to = undermining Torah Study. I’d never done that before. I’d always loved Torah Study. Then again, I’d always had Rabbi Salt for Torah Study, and even though we’d argue, it was the good kind of argument—the kind where the arguers don’t argue to prove they are dominant, but rather to find out what is right. And it is true that Rabbi Unger was playing the role of Torah Study teacher badly, and it is true he should not have been lying, but all the other scholars always paid so much attention to what I did and so I didn’t want to demonstrate to them that it was good to undermine someone playing the role of the Torah Study teacher, because it hardly ever was. At the same time, I didn’t want to tell a lie. So I decided not to answer the question Unger asked. He asked what I was suggesting, and I didn’t say anything about what I was suggesting. Instead I said: I didn’t call you a liar. And that was true. Slippery, but true. I didn’t call him anything. And this is what he said: “Then you’re calling the word of God a pack of lies.” And when he said that—pack of lies—it was too much. He sounded like a senator in a movie, not a teacher—pack of lies. He sounded like that casuist Rabbi Bender in The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth. And his beard was scattered. It was stringy. There were holes in it where I could see his skin. And he didn’t like me. He’d never liked me. He didn’t even like me in kindergarten. I stood up. Unger said, “We are here to study, not to defame.” I kicked my chair back into the wall. I said, You’re the one calling God a flip-flopper! “Go to my office and wait there,” he told me. I didn’t go. I said to the students: Adam lived to be nine hundred thirty years old and David lived to be seventy. The Earth is just under six thousand. “But the carbon-dating,” Ben Brodsky said. Unger banged his fist on the table. I said, It measures the decomposition of radio-isotopes. The geologists measure what’s missing, and to do that they have to decide what was there to begin with based on rates and constants and constant rates of decomposition that no one can really know if those rates have always been constant, but that doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter that no one’s ever monitored a lump of carbon for a billion years to see if the constant holds, and it also doesn’t matter that no one’s even been around for that long, because all that matters is do you know what radio-isotopes are? “I don’t,” said Ben. “What are they?” he said. “Enough!” said Unger. I said, I have no idea what radio-isotopes are. I said, But neither does Rabbi Unger, so he’s scared of what they could be. He’s been studying Torah his whole life and he doesn’t understand how Torah works, yet he somehow thinks that scientists who study the Earth can understand how the Earth works. “Right now!” Unger shouted. “Out!” He stood up and I leaned away fast. When I leaned, my head banged the wall and I got dangerous. I knocked his lectern off the table. It fell up-side-up, and before Unger got unshocked enough to grab me, I split the center of the lectern with a flying axe-chop. It’s a trick of the wrists my mother taught me—you twist them. It adds torque. A couple students were crying by then, and Unger had me around the chest with his arm, and Emmanuel and Samuel told Unger to leave me alone, and so did Ben Brodsky, who wasn’t crying at all. I yelled up into Unger’s ear: You’re scared of anything you don’t understand so you worship it. You kiss its ass! He dragged me into the hall and through the door of his office and said he was sick of this and he would kick me out. And I told him he wouldn’t. And then he said, “You’re not the messiah.” And I told him that all my actions had served justice, and he yelled, “You are not the messiah!” He yelled it so loud that if there was an audience, the audience would have suspected dramatic irony. They would have suspected that Unger had run out of reasons to think I wasn’t the messiah, so all he could do was yell really loud that I wasn’t. Which is even more ironic because I obviously wasn’t the messiah. First of all, if I was the messiah, there’d be perfect justice throughout the world and the schmuck across from whose desk I was sitting wouldn’t hold a position of authority over me. Secondly, we’d both be in Israel. Thirdly, all the dead would have begun to rise out of the peak of the Mount of Olives, the most righteous first, and I’d be studying Torah with Moses, who’d want to hear what I thought, and probably Rashi and Maimonedes and Samuel and Ruth and Rabbi Akiva too. Those are just some of the reasons why it should have been obvious to anyone who was scholarly that I wasn’t the messiah. And I never said I was the messiah, either, and when other kids said it in front of me, I set them straight, and if they couldn’t be set straight, I’d distract them off the subject, usually with pratfalls, which I had a serious talent for. What I did say, after the third time Unger yelled “You are not the messiah!” was: I might be. And that was also true. Even though my father’s name was Judah Maccabee, and the original Judah Maccabee was a Cohain, we weren’t Cohains. My father’s grandfather was a Judite who changed his name when he got to America—in Russia, his name was Macarevich. We were Judites, my family, and it is for sure that the messiah will be a Judite, and Unger knew the messiah would be a Judite, and he also knew that he, himself, was a Cohain, which meant he was in the line of Moses’s brother Aron, and Aron, like Moses, was a Levite, and a Levite can’t be a Judite, so Unger couldn’t be the messiah, and I think this made him angry. Cohains are assigned custodianship of the Temple, and that’s an honorable thing to be assigned—but there’s no Temple. It takes the messiah to build the Temple. It takes a Judite. And it’s true that lots of Israelites—especially Cohains—didn’t like to hear that. They didn’t like to hear that the Temple needed building. They liked to say the Temple would descend from the sky, but I never believed that, and neither did any number of other scholars, Maimonedes included. We did not believe the Temple would descend from the sky. So when I said to Unger what I was just about to say, and I used the word you, I did not mean we, and Unger knew that. What I said to him was this: You can’t build the Temple. And what Unger did was laugh at me, right in my face, and he told me, “The Temple will descend from the sky. No one will build it. That is the truth. But that’s well beside the point, isn’t it, Gurion? Because even if I’m wrong about that—even if the vast majority of the rabbinate is wrong and the Temple will after all be built by the messiah, Gurion—and who knows, right? it’s possible, I guess, that we’re all wrong about that—the one thing we know for sure, the one thing no one, not even anyone in this room disagrees with, is that the messiah will be… what? He’ll be Jewish. The messiah will be a Jew. Do you understand? Do you understand what I’m expressing? To you? To Gurion Maccabee? Do you understand what I’m telling you, Gurion? The messiah, Gurion, will be a Jew.” It was the all-time snakiest thing anyone had ever said to me. He was
talking about my mother. I was half lost-tribe. You couldn’t see it in my skin unless you were trying, but my mother’s parents were from Ethiopia, and a few Ashkenazis still thought that meant I wasn’t an Israelite. Unger was the only one who’d ever said it to me, though. Right to my face. I grabbed the nearest thing on his desk and I flung it. I flung it at his head. The nearest thing was a stapler. It opened in the air and caught him on the eye-corner. He shrieked. Blood streamed down onto his shoulder. That’s how I ended up at Northside Hebrew Day. And when I got kicked out of Northside for teaching my brothers to protect themselves in the one way our Israelite schools refused to, I went to public school in Evanston. And when I got banned from the Evanston School System for protecting myself in the most basic way, I went to Aptakisic in Deerbrook Park. It was all connected, all the things that kept happening with me and schools, and I wanted to read what others wrote about it, then use what was relevant to give my scripture—this scripture—more context. Context was the one thing I wished there was more of for Torah. That isn’t to say I thought Torah less than perfect—I didn’t think that at all—but if, say, archaeologists somehow dug up parchments that were authored by Pharoah or any one of the twelve spies, let alone by Aron, Zipporah, or Jethro, and especially if those parchments were commentaries on the events in Torah in which their authors played a role, I would want to read them. I would want that so much.