The Instructions by Adam Levin
At the thirty second-mark, Benji’s eyes began to wobble in their sockets, and the saucer started throbbing. With every throb, the saucer expanded a little, covering more and more of Nakamook’s face. The ticking’s rhythm stayed steady, matched the throbbing’s beat for beat, and each drop of brainblood whacked the backs of my eardrums louder than the last.
I thought: The decibals are mounting at an incremental ratio equi-valent to the one by which the saucer expands, and language is turning weird on me.
The fuzz between the ticks thickened, and the voices of the Cage began to blot out. “Looks bad like____or a seizure.” “My uncle____and got comatose.” “___long?” “___til today.” “Youth______merciful thing.” “_______orkian.”
By sixty seconds, I wouldn’t have been able to see myself even if I was nose-to-glass with a mirror—Benji’s face was obscured to the neck and the hairline by bright white throbbing light. I couldn’t even see the corners of the saucer anymore. I felt good, though. Warm.
I thought: You need to breathe.
I breathed.
The saucer kept throbbing, growing. The brainblood whacked harder, the fuzz between the ticks became impenetrable. I lost count of the seconds at ninety, gave up tracking time. Breathe, I thought.
I breathed.
There was no more Nakamook. Only bright white light. Not even the saucer’s outline remained within my field of vision. There was throbbing, ticking, breathing, and me. Breathe, I thought.
I breathed.
A silver dot appeared in the center of the whiteness. It bloomed into a brighter, whiter flying-saucer shape that began to throb in time with a new ticking of blood against a less taut part of my eardrum. This ticking was basser than the first one.
I thought: I am making this happen. I don’t know how, though.
And then I thought: How do you make anything happen, like—?
Breathe, I thought.
I breathed.
How did you make yourself breathe? I thought.
You didn’t make yourself breathe, I thought. You let yourself breathe, I thought, and barely even that. You can slow your breathing—you can halt the in- and exhalations of your lungs temporarily—but you cannot halt them indefinitely. Eventually your lungs will inhale and exhale, whether or not you want them to. Eventually you will be breathing.
Breathe, I thought.
I lifted the halt on my lungs. My lungs breathed for me. Out, then in.
I thought: They are only your lungs in the way that June is your girlfriend, Nakamook your best friend, Judah your father, the Israelites your people: they are only your lungs inasmuch as you are their Gurion. To be yours does not mean you control them. To be theirs does not mean they control you. It only means there is mutual influence. And the more one element influences the other, the more the other influences the one. What you animate animates you back.
Exhale—no don’t, I thought.
And despite the hot pain in my chest, I did not lift the halt on my lungs. My lungs strained. Strained against what, though? Strained against the halt? Against me? My lungs strained against me? Against my will? The idea of me, an integrated being with a singular will, much less a will that could be exerted with predictable results—let alone desirable results—grew less comprehensible as my oxygen shortaged and the heat of my chestpain increased.
I thought: That control is an illusion is no new idea. But what produces the illusion? What is the thing the word control fails to describe? And if there is no such thing, then from where does the urge to describe it arise?
There was a sideways feeling.
There was a falling feeling.
There was a coarse feeling in my elbow and an upside-down feeling all over.
Then I leapt out of my chest, a silver dot centered on a throbbing field of white. The shape I’d thought was a flying saucer had been, I now understood, the outline of either of my eyes, of one stacked on the other, paralaxical. Free now from their boundaries, the throbbing white was limitless. I hovered silver in the center of it, a few feet above Gurion Maccabee.
Gurion had fallen sideways off his chair, rolled onto his back, and was now thrashing, spastically scraping his carpet-burned left elbow back and forth over the floor like some malfunctioning robot. His torso arched and then flattened, arched and then flattened. He was halting his lungs, clenching every muscle in his body, and this was the response of his lungs and muscles: to throw him down, to hurt him back. Parts in conflict take it out on the whole. The only way Gurion could end his own conflict would be to die. But Gurion was a death-proof Israelite. He was not remotely a cross-legged Buddhist.
And an angel came, from my right. One-legged and faceless, skin humming a thousand psalms. He knelt beside Gurion and placed his index finger in Gurion’s mouth, then his hand. Then his arm up to the elbow. I tried to stop him, but I had no mass. I was just this silver dot.
The angel continued climbing into Gurion. It was cheap. A low blow. Gurion gagged, coughed him out. All the air he’d held in his lungs left in a single burst. The angel shot past me, back into the white, and the lungs gathered new air, and again I was Gurion.
The ticking in my ears became the sound of my name and the throbbing white resolved into a face.
“Gurion! Gurion! Gurion!” shouted Eliyahu. He was crying.
Heavy, I said.
I did not mean it like hippies do on sitcoms.
“He’s not dead!” said Eliyahu. “It’s just he feels heavy!”
That’s almost how I meant it.
“Hyperscoot then,” said Nakamook. “And The Electric Chair.”
Botha pushed him aside. He said, “You’re blading. Go to the nurse.”
Leevon and Vincie lifted me to my feet. I’d carpet-burned my elbow raw. Little dots of blood in the bunchy part.
“You were dying from a seizure,” said Jelly Rothstein, “but you aren’t dying anymore.”
“What was it like to be dying?” asked Ben-Wa Wolf.
“And do you feel any lighter yet?” asked Eliyahu.
The Side of Damage was not a group of scholars, so I did not say: If ever you are asked whether Adonai can create a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, you will answer the fool who asked you: ‘Fool, we are two of seven billion such boulders, you and I.’ And when the fool insists that Adonai cannot then properly be called almighty, you will not argue, for the fool will be correct. Instead you will answer: ‘He is Adonai nonetheless.’
And the Side of Damage was not a group of Israelites, so I did not say: We are superior to the angels not because we control ourselves, but because Adonai does not control us.
What I said was this: We are better than the robots not because we control ourselves. We are better because the Arrangement can’t control us.
And whether the inspiration for that statement had been a holy vision—which I doubted (my ability to doubt it the best evidence that it wasn’t; i.e. shouldn’t a visitation from Adonai strike the person visited as being undeniably a visitation from Adonai?)—or a hallucination brought on by an oxygen-starved brain, I saw that what I’d said was good. That is: I saw that what I’d said was true, and so did the Side of Damage.
Botha handed me a pass to the nurse.
Nine of the twelve *EMOTIONALIZE* tags in C-Hall had already been monkeyed with. Seven of the nine were entirely blacked out. On the other two, the first Star of Boystar and the six letters following it were slashed through by the crossbar of an A.
I figured Ronrico had only sodomized two of the tags he’d monkeyed with because he didn’t think to do so to the first seven, but I wondered why he’d left the other three alone. It was probably because he’d seen someone coming and didn’t want to get in trouble, except his reason might have been better than that. It might have been that he wanted people to see what the blotted out and sodomized tags had originally said; if no one could see what the ostensibly Boystar-fanatical writers of the *EMOTIONALIZE* tags had ostensibly intended the tags to say, no one would know
Floyd the Chewer stood puzzled before the water fountain. He pressed the button and nothing came out. Then he pressed the button and nothing came out. He grasped the edges of the sink and shook it. Again he pressed the button and nothing came out. He punched the fountain in the grill and cursed. He pressed the button and nothing came out. He slapped the sink on the graffito and cursed. He pressed the button and nothing came out. He banged on the button and nothing came out.
To the spigot, he said, “I’ll explode. How do you like that? I’ll friggin explode! How do you like that?” He kicked the fountain in the guts and it dented.
I said, You’re gonna break the water fountain.
He revolved, raised his cone. “You know who wrote this?” His circuits were frying. He was so angry he didn’t even ask for a pass.
Who? I said.
“I’m asking you.”
Why do you care so much? I said.
“I’m the guard,” he said.
I said, But you’re not really the guard. I said, You’re just the guard because you’re paid to be the guard.
“I choose to be the guard,” Floyd said.
Because it pays you, I said. I said, If you could choose, you’d do crowd control, right? That’s what you said to Ruth Rothstein in that interview.
“If I could choose,” Floyd said, “I’d play starting linebacker for the Bears. Doesn’t mean you gotta be disrespectful, telling me why I do what I do is because of pay. I am the boss of me. Everyone is the boss of himself. I do what I want to do.”
Except play linebacker for the Bears, I said, or crowd control.
Floyd slurped his saliva thunderously and his knuckles got as white as his cheering cone. He looked over both shoulders, and on seeing no one else was in C-Hall, he said to me, “Hey, fuck you, Gurion. Eat shit. How’s that?”
A little bit funny, I said.
“Right. Funny. You think you’re all clever and cute? 2.5 and like that? I asked my wife and she told me what you meant. You think I think you’re cute? It’s not cute to make fun of a man’s job he’s gotta do so he can eat. It’s not decent. It’s not what decent people do. It’s what shitty people do. You’re not decent. You’re shitty. You should eat shit to see what you’re like.”
He checked over both shoulders again, and while he did that, I started getting scared. Not scared of Floyd, but scared that he was right; that I was wrong. It wasn’t decent to put someone down for their lousy job—it was snakey, low. It is true that Floyd had the pogromface, that it took no effort to picture him standing in some cobblestone town square, shoulder-to-shoulder with scores of other dummkopfs like Jerry, their eyes and the tines of their pitchforks flashing orange in the flickering light of their torches while they wait for Desormie to pick the right storefront, the worst usurer, the most defenseless wife… However, even if by looking at him I did know the crimes Floyd was capable of committing, the crimes he would commit if given the opportunity, that didn’t mean it was right, in advance of his committing those crimes, to treat him like a criminal. Not necessarily, at least. Adonai Himself did not deal with men according to their potential deeds; it’s what men did that mattered to Him, not what they would do or might.
I was about to apologize, but Floyd, satisfied C-Hall was still empty, picked up where he’d left off. “If I went to school here?” he said. “I’d make you eat shit, huh? Me and all my friends would. We would find some shit and make you eat it. In front of everyone. We’d take you out to the playground and feed you shit and when you passed out from humiliation, we’d piss in your eyes. For the rest of your life, you’d be the little bitch who ate shit and got pissed on. It’d help to solve the problems of the world. All you little smartasses who look at us like you know something we don’t. All you little know-it-all parasites with your comments and your sportscasts trying to make us feel bad about who we are, trying to make us feel bad for doing what we gotta do to make our way through this world that’s only fucked up because of guys like you, behind the scenes, whispering your poison into the air and meanwhile without us you’d be nothing? Without us you’d have nothing to feed on? If we made you eat shit and pissed on you, you wouldn’t have nothing to say to us. You wouldn’t have nothing to think about us except, ‘I am an abnormal piece of shit who clogs up the plumbing that’s the society these good men who pissed on me and made me eat shit are trying to make the world a good place with.’ Your mouth’s wide open, now, huh? You got something to say me?”
I did have something to say to him, or at least I should have had—it felt like something needed to be said by Gurion—but I didn’t know what. I just kept thinking: Why don’t You punish men for the wrongs they would do?
Floyd lowered his cone, leaned at me.
I thought: Because You don’t know what they’ll do. Not for sure. You don’t know what they’ll do for sure, and You believe their thoughts can change their course in the world—the course You’ve set them on, the future You know—yet You can’t read their thoughts any better than You can read mine. Our thoughts to You are what You are to us. Noisy, but hidden. Endless, but unseen. Even if You can read our faces, You can only do so in the way we read Your scripture. Our faces may potentially tell You everything that we think, but often You misread them, often enough that, out of fairness—because You are good—You will not act according only to what You’ve read.
I closed my gaping mouth and lowered my eyes, saw globs of saliva dripping from the bell of Floyd’s cone, pooling between the toes of our shoes. In case he’d start talking again, I took two steps back to get out of spraying range. Floyd understood it as a retreat, understood retreat as a show of weakness—maybe it was; I was rarely speechless—and liked it. It puffed him up, cued him to continue. The cone stayed down.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If I was in the junior-high school again, I’d do it better. All we ever did to guys like you was beat your asses til you hid in the corners, reading, jerking off, whatever you did. And you had years to tell yourselves that all it was was you were weaker, smaller, one against many. You made a hero-story out of it. You thought you were like Jesus. So many little Christs, suffering because you were the only good one in the world—thousands of you thinking that across the country. And my friends and me, while you were hiding in those corners, we had no idea—we thought you’d learned your lesson. Once in a while you’d come out and show yourself, and we’d beat your ass again, to teach you again, but we were decent, not like you, and innocent, not like you, and as soon as you hid again, we let you be. Every single time, we were sure we’d finally taught you. But you always came out of the corner eventually. You never learned your lesson, never learned to keep your head down or your mouth shut. We thought that while you hid you were getting decent, but all that time, all’s you were doing was rubbing your grimy palms together and plotting revenge. And eventually you grew up, all of us grew up, and you were out of our reach. You were safe. Protected. We were working, being productive Americans, we didn’t think about you, and if we did we still thought we’d crushed the evil right out of you, but then suddenly you’d pop up, you’d make even more wisecracks, you’d look at us even squintier than before. You would fuck with us, out of vengeance. Instead of learning the lesson we taught you and being grateful, you’d do vengeance from behind your desks, from behind your fucken glasses, behind your fucken telephones. And it’s our fault, partly. It’s our fault for being decent human beings, for believing in the good of man, believing a beating was all it would take to teach you humility. What we shoulda done is force-fed you shit. Pissed in your squinty little fucken eyes. God knows we wanted to. God knows the only thing kept us from it was respect for the idea of humanity a
Midway through Floyd’s monologue, the switch had come, and he’d lowered his voice accordingly. Seventh- and eighth-graders were shoving past us now, on their way from recess to the cafeteria while fifth- and sixth-graders headed in the opposite direction.
I was thinking: You can’t punish men for their potential wrongdoings, or else You would. You cannot fix Your own damage.
I thought: It is good I am not You.
“I’d start with you,” Floyd repeated, louder than the first time, in case I hadn’t heard him over the crowd noise. “You hear that, fuck?” he said. “I’d start with you.”
I said, You’re the one who’s like Jesus, Floyd.
“You don’t know anything about Jesus,” Floyd said.
I said, I know that by the time he’d gotten himself all covered in spit, he wasn’t able to do much more than talk.
Floyd shook like the Electric Chair, aching to hit me. Aching.
I held out my pass, said, This is my sheep’s blood.
I passed.
Stealth in a crowded hallway works the opposite of stealth in an empty one. You have to walk forward with your shoulders high and stare at the heads of the people you’re walking toward. They will sense you coming, even if their backs are turned to you, and they’ll move out of your way without ever looking at your face to see who you are. All you have to do is see them first. People feel when they’re being seen and it moves them.
I was not being stealth on the way to Nurse Clyde’s, and got bumped a few times. I was looking all around me, trying to spot June. The looking strained my neck and I got vertigo watching the faces turn.