The Instructions by Adam Levin
I said, The color of your blushing is exactly the same as the color of the freckles on your face. I was thinking that the freckles were red until I saw you in your coat. Now I know the color of your freckles and your blushing is actually a very light pink color. What’s amazing is when you blush your freckles disappear. I’ve never seen that happen before. It’s beautiful.
“No one else thinks it’s beautiful,” she said.
I told her, Everyone thinks it’s beautiful. Everyone thinks you’re beautiful.
She said, “No one ever tells me.”
No one? I said. Really?
“No one I trust,” she said.
I said, I’m telling you. I said, I think that what happened is that when you were a baby, when you knew some words but you couldn’t talk yet, you were just as gorgeous then, and everyone who saw you would say how gorgeous you were and you knew what it meant, but you couldn’t say anything because you didn’t know how to speak, and so you blushed because you knew how to do that, and you knew it meant thank you, even though you’ve forgotten now. And so one day—
June said, “Gurion,” = “Stop/Go on,” and then she smiled like she was getting tickled and she liked getting tickled but she didn’t want to like getting tickled.
I said, One day your mom took you out somewhere, like to the beach, to Oak Street Beach, and you were on a striped blanket the size of a bath-towel and it was such a hot day that half of Chicago was there and so people kept walking by you non-stop, thousands of them, and they all saw you and said how gorgeous you were and you kept blushing to say thank you, and that is how you got your freckles, because you blushed so much that the freckles got left behind permanently, like the wrinkles my father has at the sides of his eyes from squinting while he reads. It looks like he is always reading and it looks like you are always saying thank you.
“Shh.”
I said, The reason people don’t tell you how gorgeous you are without cease is that they think you can read their minds because of the way your freckles make you look like you’re always saying thank you, which is lucky for you, since I’d imagine that conversation would get old fast.
I took a breath.
“So you don’t think I can read your mind?” June said.
I said, No one can read my mind, June. Not even God. Maybe you can read my face, though, like Him. But even if I knew you could read my face, I would still tell you you’re gorgeous. Because you make me into a kind of sissy is why I tell it to you. Because I am scared not to tell you because I am scared that if I don’t tell you, it will cripple me from the inside not to tell you and I’ll become a tyrant because I am in love with you.
She said, “Stop.”
I said, And plus your hair is no less than seventeen separate shades of red.
She said, “Stop it, Gurion.” Then she took the barrel of the gun of my hand and closed it and then she closed the thumb so I had a fist and she pushed the fist down onto the table between us and turned it over so the fingernails-side was up. She undid the fingers and pressed both of her hands on top of my open one.
It was quiet and it would have been the perfect time to start trying to kiss her by touching her hair with my hand that was under the table, but I was way too nervous to reach it up. We stared at each other very hard in the eyes, but not like a staring contest, and mine got heavy in the sockets and then numb and then I was about to start crying, but June started crying first, so I didn’t. But it was not like a crying contest.
I said, Why are you crying?
She said, “I am sad and worried.”
I said, Why are you sad and worried?
She said, “Because what if you die?”
What was wrong with everybody?
I told her, I won’t.
And then it made me sad and worried because what if she died? People died all the time, and what if June died? What would happen then? I was sitting there, across from her, and it was so much better than before when I wasn’t, when I was only thinking of her. And before, at least, I knew I’d soon sit across from her. If I couldn’t even walk around knowing that, though… If I knew that I could never see her again, I would have to go crazy. Time would pass and June would become like Hashem’s revelation at Sinai, like manna, like the parting of the sea, and I’d have to suspect that maybe there never really was a June I knew, let alone a June I loved, that she was only a person I once longed to believe and failed to fully believe had ever existed. I’d tell myself lies and believe my own lies, or else I’d have to go an even worse kind of crazy.
“I was sketching,” she said. She let go of my hand and took a sketchbook out of her lap. Then she stopped sitting cowboy-style so she could face me with her whole body. I looked at the picture in the sketchbook. It was a picture of a boy in the center of a large room kneeling on the chest of another boy in a way that made it look like he was trying to pull the second boy’s face off, but neither boy had a face.
I said, The boys have no faces.
She said, “It’s a sketch. I don’t know who they are yet.”
June wasn’t crying anymore and she touched her face with her arm to get the tears off. The tears got trapped in the overcoat fibers. They didn’t smear. They shivered like raindrops on a windshield on a highway when she set her arm down on the table. She said to me, “So do you like the drawing?”
I said, I don’t know.
June said, “Good.”
I said, Good?
“If you don’t know,” she said, “it is bad to pretend like you do.”
I didn’t say anything
She said, “Everyone is a liar.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “You are a liar.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “I’m a liar, too, but it doesn’t matter if we’re liars, as long as we lie about the same things.” She said, “What do you have to show me?”
I couldn’t remember which wrist had the י on it, so I pushed both her sleeves back and turned her hands over so the soft sides of her wrists were facing the ceiling. They both had a י.
That’s amazing, I said.
“What?” June said.
I pushed her wrists right next to each other so they were touching.
I rubbed the backs of my thumbs on my jeans til my skin burned. The makeup came off and I put my fists on the table, pinky-sides down. She saw myייs.
She looked a little freaked out.
I said, Are you freaked out?
“It’s weird,” she said.
Do you know what it says? I said.
“What what says?” she said.
The letters.
“They’re letters?”
They’re an abbreviation of Adonai’s best written name. It’s such a good name, most people can’t even pronounce it.
“Whose name?” she said.
God’s name, I said.
“He has another name?”
He has a lot of names, I said. I said, Don’t you go to Hebrew school?
She said, “I’m Unitarian.”
I said, What’s that?
“I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t go to Hebrew school.”
But you’re an Israelite, I said.
“No,” she said.
Come on, I said, you know what I mean—a Jew. You’re a Jew, right?
“I’m not,” she said.
I started to get up to get on the stage, to swing a rocking horse at a teddybear-head and snap the head off at the neck and then smash the rocking horse against the floor of the stage and chew on the head of the bear. It was all very clear in my mind what I would do.
Then June was standing up. She was hugging herself while I climbed over the table to go up the stage-steps to smash the prop monsters. I was walking up the steps and she said, “You don’t like me anymore.”
I was on the stage and I had a rocking horse by the nose ring. I held the nose ring in both hands and I dropkicked the horse in the front of the chest and its
I said, I’m in love with you. It’s everything else—these fucked-up props.
June dragged a teddybear to the back of the stage and laid it on a slant against the rocking horse I’d dropkicked. She jumped on the teddybear and it snapped in two. The jump jarred her hoods. The outer one was off completely, and mine hung onto her ponytail’s cinched part. She pulled it back on and I hid my eyes, pressing my forehead into the stagefloor.
Then June was standing next to my body.
I said, I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?
June said, “I do.”
I rolled onto my back. I said, But you’re not an Israelite. It’s impossible.
She laid down next to me.
“You’re so dark,” she said. “You don’t have to be so dark. I’ll convert.”
I said, But what about the Unit god? I mean the Unity god? I mean what about your parents? Won’t you be scared of the wrath of the Unit or the Unity or Unitary god that will come down on your head for betraying your parents?
She said, “My parents don’t care and their god has no wrath.”
What kind of God has no wrath? I said.
“Tell me,” she said.
Your parents’ god is nothing, I said. There’s only one.
June said, “Okay.”
What does that mean? I said.
She said, “I’m an Israelite.”
You still have to convert, I said.
“So convert me,” she said.
Could I convert her? There was a ceremony that couldn’t be performed there, on the stage—that is true. You needed a mikvah to perform the ceremony; there wasn’t any mikvah anywhere in sight. Even if we had a mikvah on the stage, though, I wouldn’t be allowed to perform the ceremony, but the ceremony, in the end, was mundane. In the end, when it came to Israelites, converts or otherwise, you’d either been one all along or you hadn’t. The conversion ceremony was more for the benefit of the Israelite community than it was for the convert; it announced to other Israelites that, all along, this person who was being ceremonied, despite not having an Israelite mother, was born with the soul of an Israelite, and no one worth listening to disagreed about that. That’s why calling it “conversion” was bad English. Because to convert something means to change it, and to convert an Israelite does not change that Israelite. To convert an Israelite means only that you recognize that all along, regardless of who their mother is or how she raised them, the Israelite has been an Israelite, and that they will continue forever to be one.
I thought: June is an Israelite.
Then I counted off silently to seven, waiting for the No! of Adonai, the paralysis. He did not say No!, and I was not paralyzed, but then I worried that maybe He couldn’t read my face, so I said it out loud in Hebrew.
I said, June is an Israelite, Adonai. I said, I will recognize that she is an Israelite.
I gave Him another seven-count, and again, there was no No! or paralysis.
I said to June, You’re an Israelite.
And it was true.
I got up on my knees.
June got up on her knees.
I said, We will stand under a chupa my father will build out of trees from our backyard.
I touched her hair.
She let me.
I said, I will smash a glass beneath my right foot in remembrance of our suffering and we will drink from one cup before thousands.
I bent my head.
June bent her head.
I said, We’ll raise sons who’ll lead armies and rule righteous city-states, and we will never die.
I leaned forward.
She didn’t lean forward.
I leaned back.
She laughed at me.
I was a bancer.
I pulled my hood on.
I said, I just tried to kiss you.
And then she leaned forward and I kissed her.
At first it was all tick-tock. I kept switching which side of June’s nose my nose was on and landed puckered ones rapidly. She did the same back to me. Our faces made smacking sounds and I couldn’t understand why kissing was important. It wasn’t that I was unhappy to be kissing her—I was happy—but I would have been at least as happy to thumb-wrestle, and even happier to play slapslap, if slapslap or thumb-wrestling signified what kissing signified.
For a second it seemed like maybe I was homosexual.
I thought: Are you homosexual? Maybe you’re a homosexual.
I didn’t want to be a homosexual. To be homosexual, I’d’ve had to like wangs, and wangs looked dumb to me: blind, fumbly animals needing sonar and lacking it. And also I’d probably have to like nuts, which looked even dumber—how they bulged out the sack, the way they’d flop and sway and that scarry line in the middle when it was cold. They were like brawn to the brain that was the wang atop them, and barely even that, for even when thinking of it as a personified animal, it was hard to grant the wang much beyond a basic invertbrate nervous system, let alone a brain capable of leadership, so the nuts thugged for wangs that were but stooges themselves; minions to lackeys were the nuts. It would’ve been too hard to be a homosexual. And plus I was in love with June, a girl.
Still, kissing her wasn’t great. And if it wasn’t great for me, then it could not have been so great for her, and it was obviously my fault. When she’d kissed me where my sideburns would be, that was perfect, but now that I was responsible for half the kissing, it was only a little bit nice. Something needed to be done.
She’d said she wanted us to lie about the same things, so I thought about asking her to lie with me about the meaning of slapslap—to agree with me that slapslap meant the same thing as kissing, and maybe even call the game of slapslap “kissing,” so that if she said to me, “Gurion, let’s kiss,” I would put my hands out, palms-down and parallel, and she would put her hands under mine, palms-up, and we’d start to play slapslap. I would always give her the first turn, unless she’d made me angry before. If she’d made me angry and she wanted to make up with me, then when she said, “Gurion, let’s kiss and make up,” she’d put her hands out palms down, offering me first turn, and when I put my hands under hers it would mean she was forgiven. Soon enough, no one would even have to say anything about kissing or forgiveness—we’d just put our hands out to play slapslap and know what we meant. So slapslap would make a lot more sense than kissing, because slapslap wouldn’t just signify love—it would also be fun to do.
I stopped switching nose-sides to make the slapslap proposition, but when I opened my eyes and saw her, the way her freckle-sprays were triangular and the colors of her eyelashes not black but one of the browner reds of her hair, I didn’t want to play slapslap, I wanted to kiss her, which didn’t make much sense, but we kissed some more, and it was more of the same tick-tocking, and I stopped again to look at her. The gaps in her top row winked, and we tick-tocked, and I stopped to look, and the lighter color of the hair above her ears that wasn’t long enough to be ponytailed, and tick-tock and stop, the one-stitch scar that notched her cheek beside the left mouthcorner, a permanent dimple…
It was impossible to not want to kiss her while I looked at her, but no matter how bad I wanted that, once I was kissing her the kissing wasn’t satisfying and I’d start thinking: slapslap. Slapslap’s no fun with your eyes closed, though, and looking at her made slapslap impossible to concentrate on because of how badly it made me want to kiss her. Looking at her, I couldn’t concentrate enough to even talk about slapslap. I was getting H.
There were freckles on her eyelids so I kissed the freckles on her eyelids, and while kissing on her eyelids I pushed her hood back and smelled her hair. It did smell sweet, though not as brightly as strawberries, not as red-and-greenly. It was a better, lazier kind of sweet than strawberrie
With my thumbs and pointers I worked her hair-tie back until the ponytail was gone. Her hair curtained down and I slipped my fingers into it, deep, the topjoints touching her scalp. Her hair was as thick as its smell, and I was glad to have my hands in it. I became more satisfied than when I was only looking, but still not really satisfied. I didn’t know what to do.
“Keep your hands there,” June whispered. Her eyes were still closed. She told me, “Close your eyes again.” I did. She pushed my hood back and her palms on the sides of my neck felt fresh and this time our mouths weren’t puckered when we kissed. And we didn’t tick-tock. There weren’t smacking sounds. June’s lips parted to surround my bottom one, to press down on it a little, warm and slippery here, cool and steady there; she did these small pullings on my bottom lip and soon I did the same to her top one at the same time and something splashed bluely across my lobe, left-to-right, and I saw it on my eyelids like a waveform with tracers and these muscles in my temples slackened. I thought: Who knew the muscles in my temples had always been flexed? Who knew I even had muscles in my temples?
I thought: This is exactly what we should be doing right now. This is exactly what needs to be done.
June turned her head then, like she was arguing with my thoughts, saying, “No not that, but this,” and her tongue brushed mine, and it was such a good thing, my hands fell from her hair. She squeezed my neck and our tongues brushed again and that is when the kiss became perfect. I couldn’t tell my face from her face. I couldn’t tell the difference between the movements of her mouth and the movements of mine. I couldn’t separate June from Gurion. It was like being in the first and third person at the same time, the kiss not just something we were doing, but something that was happening to us.
I thought: This is not us kissing; this kiss is ussing.
Ussing? I thought.
Like hyperventilators getting breathed, I thought.