The Instructions by Adam Levin
“You’re not going to convince anyone, though, ever. And what will happen when you realize that? I worry, Gurion. You’re not so good at disappointment. You get disappointed, you do rash things.”
I said, You say I won’t convince anyone because you believe it is true and you are loyal to your son, Aba. I said, You say it because I am your son, and you feel obligated to convince me of the truth. And you are obligated. And so you will always try to convince me of the truth. And you’re my father, and I’m loyal to you, and so I will always do the same for you. I know you understand that.
“So much fancytalk only to come to let’s agree to disagree?”
You’re making light of what I’m saying, I said.
“I’m trying to end this conversation on a nice note,” he said. “I’m trying to be the soft Yiddishe dad you admired in that Story of Stories. I’m trying not to be the angry father who killed rapists and made threats in the family room. I want you to be softer and more Yiddishe. I want you to be less angry.”
He’d said “killed” and not “murdered,” so I hugged him and kept my mouth shut. In time, I knew, he would come around.
There is love. There was always love, and there will be more love, forever. Were there ever to be less love, we would all be at war, and Your angels would learn suffering.
Alone in my room, I awakened my computer, then looked at what I’d written the day before, and I saw it wasn’t good. I liked the rhythm of the words, but that didn’t make them true. Though more war didn’t strike me as a particularly unlikely outcome of less love in the world, there was at least as good a case to be made for an outcome of less war. And to say that angels would learn suffering, ever—it was hard to figure out how that could be. Angels delighted in every aspect of Adonai’s creation of the world. That is what He’d made them to do. How could beings who delighted in everything suffer? It didn’t seem possible.
And these were the least of the paragraph’s problems.
The biggest one was that the whole third sentence read threatening—and in the lowest, least effective kind of way. It was a four-year old stomping grocery-store linoleum and telling his mom he’ll hold his breath til he dies if she doesn’t right this minute buy him brightly colored, mock-food, toy-bearing cereal. “You better not decrease the amount of love in the world, Hashem, or we’re gonna start killing each other, and You’ll really regret it then.”
Whatever consequences might come if there were less love in the world was beside the point, anyway. The point—rather, what should have been the point; what is always the point of scripture, even as it speaks about what has been and what will or might be—was to get across, directly or not, what is. So I deleted everything but the first seven words, and went from there:
There is love. There was always love, and it has always been righteous. Were love not righteous, then nothing would be righteous, and we would not serve justice, let alone study Law, but allow the peace of tyrants to fall upon us like a blanket, and all things dangerous to scare us away.
Bless Adonai for making Law of love’s corrolaries, and bless Him for making love’s protection Law’s objective. Blessed is Adonai, King of the Universe, for granting us our potential to be just.
I read the scripture over four or five times, eating two of three cookies my father had left me, and I thought it was good enough to deliver. I knew that to only think it was good enough was not a good enough reason to deliver it—I had to know for sure. But I saw that I couldn’t know for sure if it was good enough until it had actually been delivered. I decided I’d deliver it and find out for sure. How I’d do that—it unfolded as I wrote, as if the plan itself were being revealed.
Sent: November 15, 2006, 9:07 PM Central-Standard Time
Subject: NEW SCRIPTURE
From: [email protected] (me)
To: [email protected]
CC: NEW SCHECHTER LIST, NORTHSIDE HEBREW DAY LIST
Scholars:
When last I contacted you, I said I wouldn’t do so again until such a time when to disobey your parents, in regards to me, would be to honor them. But I might have been wrong about that. It is hard to tell. It is true that I am contacting you, yet I am not certain that a situation indicating an equivalence between disobedience and filial honor has arisen. I’m not certain it’s okay for you to contact me yet.
Nor am I certain, when I really get to thinking about it, what exactly contact means.
I am certain, though, of some of the things contact does not mean. For instance: If you went to shul last Saturday, and you davened with the congregation and then left, you did not—even though you knew he would be there, leading the service—you did not contact the rabbi. And if you were a Cohain, and the rabbi called out for Cohains to approach the bimah and bless the congregation, and you went up and stood near him and spread your fingers and blessed the congregation—even then, though it could reasonably be argued that the rabbi contacted you, it could not be said that you contacted the rabbi.
I am also certain of other things. I am certain that yesterday I fell in love with a red-haired girl, today I wrote scripture, and tomorrow, at 11:00 a.m., with the red-haired girl beside me, I will deliver this scripture atop the higher of the two hills across the street from Aptakisic Junior High School, directions to which are attached to this email. I am certain that were you to stand in the valley between the two hills and hear my recitation, it could not be said that in doing so you contacted me. And, finally, I am certain that if after the recitation—if, maybe, as a consequence of the recitation—we find that we have entered a time when to disobey our parents is to honor them, then we will all be certain of it, every last one of us.
Your friend,
Gurion
_________________
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I ate the third cookie as I read the email over. I had one bite left when the phone rang.
“Gurion,” whispered June.
June! I said, I’ve been eating the best poppyseed cookies in all of Chicago and—
“My mom said I could be Jewish if I wanted to be Jewish, but that I can’t just say I am and then be it,” said June. “I told her I didn’t just say I am. I told her you said I am, and so I was, and she said that was impossible and I yelled at her and got grounded.”
What did your dad say?
“I haven’t seen him in three years. Am I Jewish or not?”
I said, There are no more Jews. There are only Israelites. You are one of them.
“That’s what I said,” June said.
Three years? I said.
“I can’t wait to see you again,” she said. “I don’t want to wait til detention.”
Good, I said, because tomorrow I need you to get out of class at eleven and meet me in the doorway of the boys’ locker-room.
“You think cause I’m an Israelite you can just tell me when and where we’re gonna make out next?” she said.
It’s—
“Just kidding,” she said. “Of course I want to make out with you at 11 a.m.”
I said, I’m not talking about making out.
“Well so what’s so special about 11:00, then?” she said. “It’s third period. I’ve got Social Studies.”
I said, A bunch of my friends are gonna meet us in the two-hill field.
“Tell them to come after school,” she said.
They can’t, I said. They’ll be coming from Chicago, and by the time they’d get here, the intramural buses will be gone, and so you wouldn’t have a way to get home. Plus, where would we wait between the end of detention and what, like, seven-thirty? It’s gonna be cold tomorrow. And then now you’re saying you got grounded. So what my friends have to do is, they have to ditch school. To do that, though, they’re gonna have to act like they’re going to school, but instead come to Aptakisic.
“Can’t they come during recess?”
They’ll be walking from the Metra station in Deerbrook Park, so it??
“Hundreds?”
I’m guessing about two to three hundred, I said. And so if they get here at 10:45, and we make them wait til recess—
“You have hundreds of friends?”
That’s what I’m told, I said.
“Well then, no,” June said.
June, it’s really important, I said.
“No, I didn’t mean ‘No’ like ‘No, I won’t do it’—I’ll meet you. I meant ‘No’ like ‘You’re right, we can’t make them wait in the cold like that if they come all that way just to visit us.’”
“Good,” I said. I clicked SEND and the email was disseminated.
And then we both talked at the same time. June said, “I can’t wait to see you,” and I said, Three years?
Then she said, “Bring me a cookie, okay? I miss you so bad I hate the sound of your voice.” And then she hung up.
Goodnight, I said to no one.
I finished my cookie and there was night.
12
DEFACE
Thursday, November 16, 2006
6:00 a.m.–3rd Period
A
nd there was morning, Thursday. I woke to the smell of piping-hot fat, which meant my dad was restless. When I got to the kitchen, he was scrambling brie cheese and green peppers in a pan of frying eggs.
“You want a chub?” he said. A chub is a smoked whitefish with a head without eyeballs. “There’s chubs in the fridge,” he said, “also some sable. You want sable?”
I don’t like that stuff, I said.
“When’re you gonna learn?”
It smells fishy, I said.
“Fishy.”
I like lox, I said.
“Bully for you,” he said. “You know who likes lox? William F. Buckley likes lox. He calls it smoked salmon. He likes bagels, too. All those goy bluebloods like lox and bagels. Salmon and rolls. You know who William F. Buckley is?”
A goy? I said.
“A goy in a blazer with gold buttons,” said my father. “Men like him put lox-bagels in wicker baskets and eat them for lunch on their catamarans. You know what a catamaran is?”
No, I said.
“It’s some kind of boat,” he said.
Catamaran, I said.
I liked to say it.
“Or else a schooner,” he said. “If you’ve got a gold-buttoned blazer for the weekend and it’s blue, you might have a catamaran, but also you might have a schooner, which is what?”
Some kind of boat? I said.
“You got it. Do you have a schooner or a catamaran?”
I started laughing.
“Are you some kind of yachtsman in a special sports-jacket?”
No! I said.
“So learn to love fish that smells like fish,” he said, “or drop a syllable, become Greg, and add a prominent middle intial. An F, probably.” He turned the pan of cheese-eggs over a plate, but they wouldn’t come out. He tapped the pan with the spatula, once, twice, three times. The eggs flopped from the pan, landed on the plate as a single, crisp-edged glob. “Gregory F. McCabe,” said my dad, “of the textile and petroleum McCabes of West Texas. Not to be confused,” he said, sawing the egg-mass in half, shoving one of the portions onto a second plate, “with the shipping and armaments McCabes of East Texas.” He said, “I didn’t get you any lox, Clark Kent.” He set the plates on the table in front of me and went to the oven. “Christopher Peterson,” he said. He wrapped his hand in a towel, pulled a dish from the oven, said, “Bryce Matthew Pemberton-Exley.” He set the towel on the table and the dish on the towel, sat down next to me, then immediately got back up and took a chub from the fridge. “Lox you want a bagel for,” he said, “and I knew I was making cornbread. You can’t have bagels and cornbread in one meal. You’ll be snoozing by second period.” He cut me a piece of cornbread. He said, “Have some cornbread, Jimmy.”
We ate our cheese-eggs and cornbread.
You’ll win, I told him. I said, You probably won already.
“I know,” he said.
If you knew, I said, you wouldn’t have been up at five, mixing cornbread batter, waiting for the deli to open.
“I got up at four,” he said. “This is the second meal I’ve prepared today. Your mother—I went to the Jewel for the cornbread mix and got some plain yogurt and fresh fruit for her. I chopped the fruit, and she still wasn’t up, so I started peeling almonds. Not that she cares if they’re peeled, but it was something to do. Then I mixed it all into the yogurt. You know that when we yell, it’s not really fighting, right? Even when it sounds like it. We’re just yellers.”
I know, I said.
He said, “You come from a loud family, kiddo.” He slit the whitefish at the tail, pulled away its gold-scaled skin with his fingers, then flipped the fish over and repeated the process. “She left for work after the yogurt, and that’s when I went to the deli,” he said. “I went out twice for food already. This is the second meal I’ve prepared this morning. I said that already. But it’s not I don’t think I’ve won,” he said. “Probably I did—I usually do. But I don’t know for sure, and so I have to wait. I have to wait around til they call. For all I know they won’t call til next week. What do I do in the meantime? If I start working on the next thing, and it turns out I have to appeal this one, then…I don’t know.”
I said, Rambam.
“Rambam what?” he said.
I said, You don’t want to start the next thing before the first one’s finished. You’re trying to do things in the right order, like the Rambam said.
“I’m trying to do things in a certain order because I’m superstitious. You shouldn’t be like that. It’s foolish. And for future reference,” he said, “this is how you get the meat off the fish. You don’t want bones in it, okay? So you turn the guy upside-down, press lightly with the fork, right here, under his spine, and push, away from the spine. If he’s right-side up, you end up pulling—pulling, you get more bones. You probably get a couple bones, anyway, so you have to be careful. You have to push gentle.”
He ate a forkful of fish. “It’s delicious,” he said. “Salty. Try some.” He wedged a piece between knife and fork, held it up.
It looked mushy. And it wasn’t white, but beige with shots of bruisey purple.
No, I said.
“Well I don’t want it either,” he said. “I wasn’t even hungry the first time I ate today. It’s a shame to waste a nice chub like this. I’ll leave it for you while I take a shower. Then I’ll drive you to school because I have nothing else to do. Sound good?”
You got your car back? I said.
He said, “Ema took the train.”
Can we listen to the Fugees? I said.
“We can listen to anything you want as long as it’s on NPR,” he said. “Your mom put your lunch on the foyer table. I’ll be down in six minutes. Be ready.”
I went to the foyer, got my lunch off the table. Stapled to the fold of the bag was a note:
I SAVED YOU FOUR POPPYSEED COOKIES FOR LUNCH. DO NOT GIVE THEM ALL AWAY TO JUNE. IF YOU GIVE HER ALL YOUR COOKIES, THEN SHE WILL NOT BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE AS VALUABLE A GIFT AS WE KNOW THEY ARE. RATHER, SHE WILL WONDER, “IF THESE COOKIES ARE SO ENJOYABLE AND DELICIOUS, WHY DOES GURION NOT TAKE AT LEAST ONE FOR HIMSELF?” AN
SO KEEP NO FEWER THAN TWO FOR YOURSELF. MAKE SURE TO EAT AT LEAST ONE IN FRONT OF JUNE. IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO EAT A SECOND ONE IN FRONT OF HER, SHE SHOULD BE MADE AWARE THAT THERE IS A SECOND ONE, SO SHE WILL KNOW THAT YOU DID NOT EAT THE FIRST ONE OUT OF MERE POLITENESS. SHE NEEDS TO KNOW THAT ALTHOUGH YOU ARE GLAD AT THE IDEA OF GIVING HER DELICIOUS COOKIES, PARTING WITH THE COOKIES IS NOT IN ITSELF ANY KIND OF SPRING PICNIC.
AND ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT ALL OF THOSE COOKIES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN YOURS, AND THEY ALWAYS WILL BE.
LOVE, MOM THE PUPPET
When his celly chimed, my father was merging onto the highway at 50 while lighting a cigarette and lowering the driver-side window. He dropped his lighter in the center console, kept the lit cigarette in his mouth, reached for the phone in his pocket, set his window-button hand on the steering wheel, and then thrust us off the ramp, into the slow lane, which was going fast.
“Radio,” he said.
I turned the volume knob all the way left.
“What time?” he said into the mouthpiece. Then: “Good.”
He handed me the phone while pressing the end button.
What am I supposed to do with this? I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’ve got a verdict. Came in last night. I have to wait til 3:00 to hear it. We have to listen to music now, loudly.”