The Instructions by Adam Levin
Fugees? I said.
“Fugees?” he said. He said it like I was crazy. He said, “Find the Mix.”
The Mix was a CD of anthems, mostly punk rock ones he missed out on as a yeshiva boy. My dad made the Mix when I was two and he got his first burner. It was all he would listen to on days that a verdict was going to be delivered, and he would never listen to any of the songs it contained on other days. He made about twenty copies of the Mix and stashed them all over the place like a gangster does with his money. There were two copies in the car. I pulled out the one that was under the seat.
“Get the other one—that one’s scratched,” he said.
I got the other one from the glovebox.
It was also scratched. The only songs that worked were the first two: “Gotta Gettaway” by Stiff Little Fingers and “Guns of Brixton” by the Clash. As soon as “Guns” would end, the player would skip back to track 1 and “Gotta Gettaway” would start again.
“Gotta Gettaway” wasn’t fun to sing along with, but we traded off screaming verses at each other during the third round of “Guns” and came together on the choruses.
(Judah)
When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
(Gurion)
With your hands on your head
Or the trigger of your gun?
(Judah)
When the law break in
How you gonna go?
(Gurion)
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting on death row?
(Judah and Gurion)
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you’ll have to answer to
Oh, oh, the guns of Brixton
We were two-thirds through a fourth round of “Gotta Gettaway” when we pulled into the Aptakisic parking lot. I waited in the car for the song to finish. I didn’t want it to be stuck in my head all day and get ruined. Songs I knew always stuck when I’d quit them before they were over—they’d get stuck from the point where the song left off and repeat. It would have been especially bad if “Gotta Gettaway” got stuck right then because the last third of that song was, itself, a bunch of repetition: “Gotta. Gotta. Get away. Gotta. Gotta. Get away,” and then, “Gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta get away” over and over with another singer going, “Oh oh,” in the background.
Unfinished songs stuck to my father the same way, so I didn’t have to explain why I wasn’t getting out of the car. The two of us just sat there for a minute, watching students walk from the bus circle to the front entrance. The Main Hall Shovers poked each other and did secret handshakes, and I saw that some had, yes, drawn icthii on their blankspots. The Jennys and the Ashleys made exasperated faces and hugged basketballers. The basketballers acted bored and copped feels. Bandkids leaned left or right, depending on which hand held their instrument case. The jolt of every step taken by a tiny girl I’d never seen before pushed a looseleaf binder closer to ejection from her half-unzipped backpack. Then I saw Ben-Wa Wolf and three other Cage kids—Casper Lunt, Fulton Market, and Derrick Winnetka—doing this thing that looked like some kind of game. Ben-Wa would pratfall, and the others would surround him to help him up, but they didn’t help him immediately—they faced away from him for a few seconds first, as if they were worried others might see them. After the third pratfall, I gave up trying to deduce the game’s rules and decided I’d ask them about it later, but in the meantime “Gotta Gettaway” had ended and “Guns of Brixton” had started. I looked at my Dad and he waved a short wave with one hand = “So wait out ‘Guns of Brixton.’ I don’t have to be downtown til three.”
Soon, a yellow pickup truck driven by a girl with high bangs and blue eye-makeup pulled into the lot a couple spaces to our right and Bam Slokum got out of the passenger side. He chinned the air at me as he passed our car, and I chinned it back and felt dumb.
“What the hell does that guy teach?” my dad shouted over the music.
I said, Ha!
“Ha what? He’s wearing ripped jeans. That’s not a good examp— Who’s this?” he said, suddenly looking over my shoulder.
My shoulder got cold.
June had opened my door.
“Who are you?” my dad shouted at June.
She pinched my shoulder. “June!” she shouted back.
My father halved the volume of the Clash. “I’m Judah,” he said.
He’s my dad, I said.
“He’s not dark at all,” she said. “What’s this music?”
The Clash, I said.
“You’re not so dark either,” said my dad to one of us.
He’s not the Ethiopian one, I said to June.
“The Clash is good,” June said.
I said, June and I are getting married.
June squeezed my hand.
My dad said, “The same taste in hooded sweatshirts is a solid foundation on which to build—”
She stole it from me, I said.
“I stole it,” June confirmed.
“That strikes me as sweet for reasons I don’t quite understand. Why don’t you get in the car. You look cold.”
“You’re a stranger,” June said.
“So are you,” said my father.
“I’m the girl Gurion loves.”
“Gurion lives at my house.”
“Fine,” June said, and I moved over and she sat on my seat with me.
“Gotta Gettaway” had started up again.
“Now what?” June said.
“Now we all listen to this song by Stiff Little Fingers, and then the two of you go to class.”
We listened to the song, then got out of the car, but I was way too happy to go to class so I didn’t.
The spots where Ben-Wa pratfell all said WE DAMAGE WE. The words were jagged-looking, and some of the letters were barely there—he’d used a rock to scrape them into the pavement. I knelt and touched one, and June knelt next to me.
She said, “These things are everywhere now. I like it the best when they’re scraped like this.”
Me too, I said, but I don’t know why.
“It looks like the words have always been here, waiting to get uncovered,” she said. “They look revealed. Like old marble sculptures—like the art was hidden inside the stone and all the sculptor did was chisel away the stuff covering it.”
I said, If I hugged you right now, then your ribs would snap and cut your heart.
“I had this dream the other night I made a cage for a piglet by tying spareribs together with tendons,” she said. “When I woke up, decoding it, my thigh had this cramp, and I was sure I’d torn my hamstring, but I hadn’t—I was fine.”
We entered the school a couple minutes after the first-period tone, and Jerry sent us to the Office for a pass. We walked toward the Office until he stopped watching us, then ducked into B-Hall where I wrote one with my left hand, and on the way I saw that June was right: the bombs were everywhere—I counted thirteen without even turning my head to look for them—and all the scraped ones were better because of subtractiveness.
Deface, I thought. Deface. To deface is to damage; to scrape DAMAGE to deface. The words were enacting what they described, and I got a rush from thinking about it.
Even the guard-booth was bombed. I showed Jerry the forged pass and he waved us on to our lockers, but then June wouldn’t ditch with me because she had Art.
I offered her a pass to give to Miss Gleem.
“I don’t want to lie to her again,” she said. She was hanging her coat and pretend-accidentally bumping me with her left shoulder and hip. “I want to hand her a ruler,” she said, “and hold out my knuckles so she can bash them like nuns do in books by angry Catholics. I want to look in her face so she’ll see my eyes blur when I wince.”
Is a forged pass really a lie? I said. I said, Because even if it is, you didn’t have any problem with me flashing one at the Deaf Sentinel.
“I don’t care about The Deaf Sentinel,” Ju
I said, Are you dying to have one?
“You said they were the best,” she said.
I gave her all of them.
She took two from the baggie, handed one of them to me.
“These have a lot of butter in them,” she said, looking at the shine her cookie left on her fingertips. “Do you ever press really buttery cookies against the roof of your mouth til the butter starts falling down the sides of your tongue and the rest of the cookie becomes a dense ball that you store in your cheek and pull apart slowly by sucking it through the gaps of your teeth?”
It’s good to do it that way, I said. I said, But my mouth always wants to chew, so I chew.
“Me too,” she said. “I think what we should do is chew one cookie, and do the pressing thing with a second one.”
Which first? I said.
“It would be easier to do the pressing to the second one because the chewing desire will have already been fed by having chewed the first one,” she said, “but if we do the pressing first instead, then our teeth will be teased before they get satisfied by chewing the second one, and the teasing will make the chewing full of relief and that much better.”
So we should chew the second one, I said.
She said, “The only problem with that is that it might be impossible. If we try to do the pressing to the first cookie, but the cookie is so good that we can’t control ourselves and so we start chewing it, then what?”
What? I said.
“Well then we can’t justify having the second cookie on the heels of the first.”
Why do we need to justify a second cookie? I said.
She said, “You told me these are the best poppyseed cookies in Chicago, and we only have four, which means we can’t waste any, which means they need to be savored. To savor the second one immediately after we’ve already savored the first, we need to eat it differently from the way we ate the first—we need to eat it in a way that our mouths can’t remember. If we press and chew the first one, then what can we possibly do to the second one that our mouths won’t be able to remember?”
What? I said.
“Nothing, Gurion.”
So we should chew the first one, satisfy the chewing desire, and then press the second, I said.
“But that’s playing it safe,” she said. “And we’re in love, which means it’s safe for us to be dangerous. If we act safe while it’s safe for us to be dangerous, we’re not taking advantage of being in love, and we could ruin it that way.”
I didn’t understand exactly what June was saying, but I decided to believe her because it is dangerous to believe in what you don’t understand, and I thought she was saying she wanted me to be dangerous, and I wanted to be what she wanted me to be.
I said, So then let’s try to press the first cookie and chew the second, and if we end up chewing the first, we’ll wait til later, when our mouths forget, to have the second.
June agreed to the plan.
And we tried to press and ended up chewing the first cookie.
She started putting the cookies away, and I said, Wait. Eating the second cookie now would be a waste, and being wasteful is dangerous.
“Yes!” she said.
So we each ate a second cookie. I put the whole thing in my mouth and chewed it into a paste without swallowing and then stuck my paste-covered tongue out at June
She yanked down on my hood-strings and pretended to chop me on the throat. I staggered and came back to land a drunk-looking haymaker on the locker next to her and dented it. Then I collapsed against the dented locker, swallowed the cookie-paste, and put my pointer in my mouth. I flexed my swearfinger and dropped the thumb, made a shooting noise and shuddered. I was feeling very good.
“Is that how you’d do it?” June said. “With a gun in your mouth?”
I wouldn’t do it at all, I said.
“Me neither,” June said. “If I did do it, though, I’d want to do it with a gun in my mouth, except I’d have to be a cartoon first, so I could pull the trigger nine times.”
Nine? I said.
“Maybe,” she said, “Bangbang. Bangbangbang. Bang.” She extended a finger every time she said bang. “Six times,” she said, “not nine. And if I did it with my back to a sheet of clangy steel, I could pull it just three times because every gun report would get followed by the bang from the back of my jerking head smacking the clangy steel.”
I said, It wouldn’t be the same, though. It wouldn’t be the same rhythm as the one you just said. You said, ‘Bangbang. Bangbangbang. Bang.’ With three shots and a sheet of clangy steel, you’d get six bangs, but it would sound like: Bangbang. Bangbang. Bangbang.
“You’re right,” she said. “It would either have to be six shots, and no sheet of clangy steel, or there would have to be two sheets of clangy steel—the second one just behind the one behind me—attached to pulleys, and someone operating the pulleys, so that only the first sheet was lowered for the first gunshot (bangbang), then both for the second gunshot (bangbangbang), and none for the third (bang).” She kissed me on the left eye-corner. “You pay so much attention to what I say,” she said. She said, “So how would you do it?”
I said, I’d kill as many hard-to-kill enemies as possible. I said, I’d go straight to the center of the Arrangement and explode.
“Like with a bomb?” she said. “Like a suicide bomber?”
Like Samson, I said. I said, And probably with a bomb, but I wouldn’t be a suicide bomber. I’d only make power-kills, generals and political figures.
“If while bombing you commit suicide, you’re a suicide bomber—doesn’t matter who the target is.”
A forged pass is no more a lie if you use it on Miss Gleem than if you use it on Jerry, then, I said.
“That’s true,” June said. She said, “Showing a forged pass to Jerry is a lie. I never said it wasn’t. You’re the one who tried to say it wasn’t. What I was saying is everyone’s a liar, and I don’t care about the Deaf Sentinel, so lying to him isn’t any kind of betrayal. Miss Gleem, though—she’s my friend and I don’t want to betray her. I’m not a betrayer.”
I really wanted June to ditch with me.
I said, The pass doesn’t have to be your lie, anyway. It could be my lie. I told you I forged it, but maybe you didn’t see me forge it—maybe you thought you did when really you didn’t; maybe I was only faking the forgery—so for all you know I’ve been lying about it being a forgery; for all you know, it was given to me by Miss Pinge to give to you for being late to Art, and I’m just trying to impress you with forgery skills I don’t really have.
“But that’s cheap,” June said, “because I do know it’s forged. Plausible deniability is cheap.”
I said, So you might as well just ditch with me and then get punished.
“I like Art,” she said, “and if I ditch, Miss Gleem will feel bad—I know her. I’ll see you at 11:00.” She sandwiched my right hand between both of her hands, lifted it high, dropped it, and ran to class, twelve wingnuts jingling in the pockets of her stolen hoodie.
I had wingnuts too—I had thirteen in a drawstring bag. I had a lot of things. I had an Israelite girlfriend who I loved and I had nearly half a pad of hall-passes and an IDF fatigue jacket with a wide-mouthed pennygun in the secret pocket. And I had the Side of Damage. I thought: What is the Side of Damage? And I thought: The Side of Damage is the thing you lead. I thought: The Side of Damage is dangerous.
I was still too happy to just go to the Cage. I wanted to do something—I wasn’t sure what. I flipbooked the passpad, made it a cylinder, flattened the cylinder, pocketed the passpad. I tried to break my fingers and my fingers wouldn’t break. I poured the bag of wingnuts in my hand and they jingled. The paint on the wings of the black one was nicked; this was the one with which Nakamook had blown off the rockinghorse’s face while June and I kissed on the stage in the lunchroom. CHUCKETA-CRACKETA. That was the noise it made. I pinched it between my thumb and po
The gym wasn’t empty like it should have been. Boystar was throwing a tantrum under the hoop beneath the clock. The heap of scoreboard wreckage had been removed, and he stomped on the spot it used to occupy, yelling “Jesus! Jesus Christ!” At “Jesus!” he raised his arms. At “Jesus Christ!” he slapped his hips. The person he was yelling at was his father, who stood slump-shouldered at the free-throw line, his pomade bending light into a halo. He shook his head = “No, this behavior is nothing I can brag about,” and the halo got dull and tilted.
I was in the midcourt doorway, trying to be a wall. It wasn’t easy. B-Hall doorways were smaller than C-Hall ones. They barely buffered sound and their shadows were thin.
“Listen to me!” Boystar was yelling. “Please! I’m telling you!” He kept raising his arms up and slapping his hips.
There were other people there, too, but none of them watched the tantrum.
At the top of the key, Boystar’s mother was crouching beside the Highway 61 acoustics man I’d seen the day before. He knocked his fist twice on the floor in front of him, then revolved and did it again. The mother leaned in.
Another man was on his knees on the bleacher-side sideline at half-court. He was outlining three sides of an air-rectangle like actors playing directors do in art movies about old Hollywood. He squinted through the rectangle and tsked his tongue in concentration.
My chemicals were ticking. How could I smash the clock with all these people in my way? Why was this guy framing shots on the sidelines? I dropped the black wingnut into my pennygun.
If I shot the clock and the shattered glass fell like I imagined, shards would slice off Boystar’s nosetip and knife deep into his shoulders, his feet. The problem was the bleachers—they blocked my vector of attack and there was nothing I could do about it. Even if I risked moving to the center of the doorway and edging into the gym proper, where anyone in there could see me if they turned their head, the post the hoop hung from would deflect the projection.