The Instructions by Adam Levin
And I felt more relieved. Relieved, in neither case, in the sense of unencumbered, though; it wasn’t as if “a burden had been lifted.” It was more like I, with my burden yet shouldered, no longer had to worry how to lay it down properly; more like when you slouch on sore-arched feet, shivering and exhausted, beside your warm bed, a thick towel wrapped capelike around your clean body. How you can, if you want to—and you have for a while, it turns out you have; you’ve wanted to forever even though you didn’t know—just go ahead and fall. Finally, finally, and finally, the end.
I handed my pass to Mrs. Plotkin—Botha was in the bathroom—and dodged Benji’s glances on the way to my carrel. I didn’t want to talk about the two-hill field with him, let alone in hand-signs. I wanted to hold to that feeling of relief.
Already it was leaving me. The Cage was too—what? There wasn’t enough—what?
The Cage was still the Cage.
No cursing or throwing things, no yelling or breaking things, no defiant group action to greet my return. No defiance at all. If Chunkstyle, as instructed, had whispered my message, it certainly wasn’t apparent. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. Kids wrote, kids slept, kids read, faced forward. A few of them even had their hands in the air. Ben-Wa Wolf had his hand in the air.
I set my chin on my fist and attempted to doze, but those hands, raised hands—how you had to ask the question “May I ask a question?” before you asked a question, and how a raised hand was that question, how you had to raise your hand to ask that question, how handraising blinkered your own domination—those raised hands jacked up my pulse like a potion. Sleep was impossible. I couldn’t escape me.
My disappointment in the scholars came back on me amplified, enhanced now by disappointment in myself, my weak-kneed, cowardly, glass-jawed self. It wasn’t just that I’d been ditched by two-hundred-plus friends I’d been fool enough to count on; it wasn’t just that those friends had, it seemed, gone out of their way to maximize the pain they would cause by ditching me, but that, once ditched, once suffering that pain, I’d let myself trick myself into seeing a brighter side. I’d behaved like an angel, convinced myself that damage, plain-as-day damage, was actually a blessing—the consolation I’d taken was no consolation. That relief that I’d felt was a loser’s relief. A meek-shall-inherit/karma-will-balance/love-the-one-you’re-with scorned sucker’s relief. I was the leader of the Side of Damage? At least I was the leader of the Side of Damage?
You get socked in the mouth and wait a couple heartbeats, whoever you are—Nathan Zuckerman or Huckleberry Finn, Peter Tarnopol or Peter Pan, Tom Sawyer, Holden Caulfield, or Akaky Akakievich, Seymour or Zooey or Franny Glass—the sting will numb out, you’ll feel some relief. You wait a couple heartbeats, your chemicals will warm you, armor your nerves. Not just so you can abide the pain you’ve been dealt, though, let alone so you can stand there taking more of it, but rather so you can return the pain two-fold, ten-fold, twenty-fold, fifty-. So you can stop its inflicters from finishing you. So you can have a chance to save yourself. That’s why Muay Thai geeks kicked trees and punched rocks and used hurt extremities to strike the enemies who’d hurt them. That’s why you didn’t crumple when socked in the mouth, that’s why you didn’t lay there, why you came back swinging: to use what you were given—that advantageous, brief burst of numbness—to harness and use it, not wallow in the fleeting relief it provided.
Yet here I was, wallowing, or trying to wallow; and there that relief, not fleeting but fled now. At least I was the leader of the Side of Damage? At most I was the leader of the the Side of Damage. At best I was the leader of the Side of Damage. And what the fuck was the Side of Damage? Forty kids inside a cage who were staring into boxes, asleep sitting up, waiting to get called on. At last I was only the leader of them. At best that meant nothing. My father’d been right, and Rabbi Salt too: Moses I wasn’t. I’d not have used my staff to strike the rock a second time. I’d have stove my brother’s head with it, then all the golden-calfers’, then laid in the sand to die of thirst with the rest of them.
My eyes were closed, but I still couldn’t sleep.
And then there was Botha, butchering my name. “Makebee!” he said. “I said Makebee!” he said. He was next to my chair. He dropped a pass on my desk—the one I’d handed Mrs. Plotkin. I’d forgotten the signature.
“Who wrote this?” he said.
Leave me alone.
“Whatsametteh, Makebee? Not feeling good? Sneppy answers eluding you?”
Just step me and leave me alone, I said.
“You’re the one brought this, though,” Botha said. “Mrs. Platkin?” said Botha to Mrs. Plotkin. “He’s the one what brought the pass, yes?”
“He gave me a pass and I put it on your desk,” Mrs. Plotkin said. “That’s all I know.”
“Well, sance this was the only pass on my dask,” Botha started to say, but his sentence’s predicate, whatever it was, got zeroed by a noise that came from behind us.
This noise was being furnished by Ben-Wa Wolf and, like so many other famous instances of defiance, it came on so suddenly that, at first, it didn’t seem like defiance; it seemed a mistake. It was, after all, just the groan of a chair being scooted on the thinly carpeted floor. The noise sounded no less accidental than it had on any of those thousand occasions we’d heard it in the past, those thousand times when it had been accidental. As the seconds passed, though, and the groaning failed to relent, no one in the Cage failed to break the Face-Forward rule, and all of us saw that Ben-Wa’s hand was in the air. We began to suspect the mistake was on purpose.
And then, so to speak, the second plane hit the building.
“I’ve been raising my hand for thirty-four minutes and all you care about is passes!” Ben-Wa shouted, his chair still scooting. “I have questions!”
“Stap one for you,” Botha said. “Aggrassive squeaking.”
Ben-Wa continued scooting. Back and forth and side-to-side. He was way beyond his tapeline.
“Questions!” he shouted, his neck showing muscles as he strained to look over his shoulder at the cluster.
The teachers did nothing.
Ben-Wa kept scooting.
Botha moved toward him, forgetting the forged pass—I tore it up.
“The Boston Tea Party!” Ben-Wa shouted.
“Stap two,” said Botha, closing in.
“It was terrorism! Why does this book call it a party?!” Ben-Wa dropped his raised hand to knock the history book from his desk. “Why won’t anyone answer my questions?!” he shouted at the teachers.
Then Botha stopped the scooting himself. He took Ben-Wa’s seatback in hand and claw and stilled him.
“Let go of my chair!” Ben-Wa yelled at Botha. “I’ve got questions about terrorism!” he yelled at the teachers.
“Why not answer his questions?” said Eliyahu.
“Stap one for you, Aye lie!”
Let his chair go, I said.
“And stap one for you, Make—”
“Let go of my chair!” Ben-Wa yelled at Botha. “Let go of my chair! Just—!” His voice cracked then, all pleading-sounding and defeated, and silence came over the Cage. Mrs. Plotkin took a breath, as if she was about to say something, and then didn’t. Mrs. Mingle did and then didn’t do the same things as Mrs. Plotkin. Botha kept his eyes down and held the seatback. He was the only one who believed he knew what should happen next.
The rest of us studied Ben-Wa.
He rocked his torso like he was crying, or praying. And there were tears on his cheeks, but they weren’t the weepy kind. He was squeezing the sides of his seat, struggling to scoot out of Botha’s grip and failing, the veins in his hands throbbing, those muscles in his neck, and the Cage seemed to dim, and he to smolder, his bright white hair drawing light from the periphery, channeling it down to his face. It became red and aglow, a speeding firetruck face, yet his chair remained still as a photo of a chair.
It hurt, to look at him trying so hard. It
And it is true that you cannot box a man who you are watching on television. And it’s true you can’t balance a stumbling baby who’s out of reach. You can never bleed from another’s wounds, and no one, no matter Whose son he says he is, can bleed from yours. But your body can describe the condition of another’s. Your body can describe the condition to you, and that kind of description is also an action. The action is sympathy. Sometimes you can push it. Sometimes it pushes.
Our vicarious suffering at the sight of Ben-Wa’s struggle couldn’t get his muscles strong enough to free his chair from Botha’s grasp, but the line between description and action in our own muscles was thin, erasable: we had our own chairs.
We acted on them. We forced them to describe us.
It happened all at once.
It was the most noise we had ever heard indoors. It was the noisiest noise we had ever heard anywhere. There wasn’t a rhythm, just constant inconstancy. No mappable peak or valley to the volume. No predictable ebb and flow of squeak and groan. No arc. It was hyper. It was everything at once.
After two minutes of everything at once, it was over.
If Cecil B. DeMille had directed the scene, the hair on all our heads would have been the color of Ben-Wa’s.
Instead, our battered eardrums vibrated to a tone no longer sounding. Our arms ached. The teachers’ faces were slack. Only Botha was un-changed.
Let Ben-Wa go, I said.
“Let go of his fucken chair!” shouted Vincie.
“He’s got questions!” shouted Eliyahu.
“Barbara Mingle!” shouted Chunkstyle.
Eliza June Watermark! I shouted.
“He’s got questions about terrorism!” shouted Nakamook.
“We’ve got questions about terrorism!” shouted Asparagus.
“Tea Party!” shouted Winthrop.
“And the hilly highways a-roll with the heads of infidels whose eyeholes—!” shouted Mookus.
“Barbara!” shouted Chunkstyle.
“Mingle!” shouted Chunkstyle.
June! I shouted. Maccabee!
“Let go of him!” “Terrorism!” “Emotionalize!” “Let his chair go!” “Questions!” “Fucken let go of him!” “I have questions!” “My love for you is a powerful thing that drove me to—!” “The chair!” “Get off me!” “Homotionalize! “My pee isn’t pungent!” “And the cities smashed against the mountains by tsunamis like flies breathed on by boy-Gods eating wantons—!” “Get off him!” “Foog!” “We have some fucken questions!” “I do not understand and so cannot honestly account for—!” “—Terrorism!” “The party!” “Let him go!” “Homo’s lotion in your eyes!” “I’m no foog!” “However I hold one belief forever true—!” Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee loves Eliza June Watermark! “My mother’s no fucker!” “Slokum dies Friday!” “All my desires and motivations—!” “Bleeding at our feet, begging for mercy on their families, vengeance on their enemies, and cinammon their toasts!” “You’re the foog!” “Let go of my chair!” “Let go of his chair!” “Let go of our chair!” “Get off me!” “Get off us!” “Let us go!” “We damage we!” “The Side of Damage!” “Gurion!” “Gurion!” “Gurion Maccabee!” “Came out of love, truest love, the kind of love that never dies!” “Let go of him!” “We can be together like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “And love like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “And the world will be great for us like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “And the world will be smiling at us like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “For, in a certain way, the world will belong to—!” “The Side of Damage!” “—a terrorism party!”
Suddenly Ben-Wa stood, and just as suddenly the shouting stopped.
The teachers uncovered their ears.
“Sit down,” said Botha to Ben-Wa Wolf.
The Side of Damage stood, awaited his next mis-step.
“Detantion for all of you for that first nawnsinz,” said Botha. “And lunch in the Cage for all of you for this nawnsinz.”
The end-of-class tone harmonized with our acute tinnitus.
Botha returned to the monitor’s desk.
“We are a defiance,” Ben-Wa said to us.
“But we’ve all got detention.” “And lunch in the Cage.” “And no one answered your questions.” “And Botha didn’t let your chair go til the tone sounded.”
“That’s right!” snapped Botha from the monitor’s desk. “You’ve done nathin’ but catch a banch of trouble for yourselves. Kape it up and I’ll kape giving you all the trouble I ken.”
“Botha says,” Benji said, “that he’ll keep giving us all of the trouble he can.”
“All of it?” said Vincie.
“He’s been giving us all the trouble he can?” said Eliyahu.
What the monitor’s given us, I said to my army, is all the trouble he can.
The Gurionic War
Emmanuel Liebman: Diaspora Judaism is what? I missed the last part.
Terry Gross: “Diaspora Judaism is masturbation.”
Emmanuel Liebman: And who’d you say you were quoting?
Terry Gross: A.B. Yehoshua.
Emmanuel Liebman: Who’s that?
Terry Gross: A novelist.
Emmanuel Liebman: He sounds Israeli.
Terry Gross: He is Israeli.
Emmanuel Liebman: An Israeli novelist?
—Fresh Air with Terry Gross, 11/17/12
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Except for where otherwise noted, Rabbi Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee wrote all of what you have read so far, the first twelve books of The Instructions—our most important work of scripture but for Torah itself—in English between the ages of ten and twelve years (between late 2006 and early 2009), and the latter ten books in Hebrew between the ages of thirteen and sixteen years (between mid-2009 and mid-2013). Upon completing the first twelve books (which the Rabbi had yet to title “The Side of Damage”), Rabbi Gurion asked Emmanuel Liebman—who has, of late, gone completely underground and thus could not, regrettably, help me write this introduction—to translate them into Hebrew. The rabbi gave Emmanuel eight weeks to do so. Considering that Books One through Twelve comprise approximately 230,000 words, this was no small task. Nonetheless, Emmanuel met his deadline, the rabbi approved the translation, and a couple days later (on March 14, 2009), asked me to translate Emmanuel’s translation back into English by June 18, 2009, which was three days before the Rabbi would become bar-mitzvah, at which point he would cease to speak English, write English, and—inasmuch as it would be possible—hear or (with the exception of studying the canons of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, whose End Zone he has lately, for hobby purposes, been translating into Hebrew) read English.
Of course I protested: Why so Borgesian an assignment? Weren’t there more important things for me to do than translate a translation back into its original language?
“No,” said the Rabbi. Nor would he let me see the original. Just Emmanuel’s translation.
Long made short, my task was surprisingly easy. I brought the re-translation to Gurion on June 18, 2009, and I told him so. He informed me that Emmanuel had reported similarly. He took out his original English version and compared paragraphs for a few minutes, a quarter-hour tops, then told me, “It’s good. Thank you, Eliyahu.”
To have three months of work, however easy, merely browsed by the friend for whom you did that work, and even if he tells you it’s good—not to mention that it seemed insinc
I said so.
The Rabbi pushed the two versions across the table. “See for yourself,” he said.
And so I saw: My re-translation was, word for word and jot for jot, identical to the original.
“I thought it might be this way,” the rabbi said. “I guess I probably knew it would. I guess this means I have to finish.”
My re-translation’s having turned out identical to the rabbi’s original meant—to him—that his scripture was translingual, and therefore definitive. That is what he told me. Had it turned out otherwise, i.e., not definitive, he would have, he explained, ceased to write scripture and stayed silent forever, never allowing what he’d written to be read by anyone other than myself and Emmanuel, never completing what he’d spent nearly three years starting. As scholars can imagine, the thought of that shook me, still shakes me today (had I somehow managed to screw up the re-translation, “The Gurionic War” would not have been written; The Instructions would not exist), though not half as much as did the look on Gurion’s face when he uttered the words, “I guess this means I have to finish.” That look, scholars, the grimness of which I’d not seen in evidence since the so-called “11/17 Miracle” itself… That look would have wilted young David ben-Jesse astride Gath’s giant in the Valley of Elah; the head would have dropped from his capable hands.