The Instructions by Adam Levin
“Wherever she wants,” Nakamook said to Botha. “I’m in love with her. Anyone in here have a problem with that?” he said to the Cage. He was standing. “Anyone in here wanna make a pun about it?”
“Stap two,” said Botha.
No one made a pun.
I was thinking: I get humiliated, and Nakamook courts a girl? Courts—wait—courts Jelly?
“C’mon,” Benji said to us, “pun’s right there for the taking. Right before your very ears. Jelly asks to meet me and the Monitor tells you about it in order to embarrass me, only he can’t pronounce the word ‘meet,’ so he says ‘mate,’ which is a verb as well as a noun.”
“Enough, Nackamake. You’re at stap three as of now.”
Benji said, “I asked you all a question. If someone who knows how to speak English says to you ‘Benji went to the bus circle to mate with Jelly,’ what would that person be saying? What’s ‘mate’ mean when it’s a verb?”
“You’ve got a detantion now. Anyone answers him’s gonna get a detantion, too.”
“If anyone answers my question,” Benji said to us, “I promise I won’t punish you for it.”
There was silence. No one was going to say anything. Least of all me, thinking: Benji wasn’t scared. Benji was done with you. Benji’s been done with you. Out in the field, he was already done with you, there’s no other explanation; if he’d not been done with you, then here in the Cage he’d be feeling ashamed, apologetic and ashamed, not in the mood to court Jelly Rothstein, flirt with Jelly Rothstein, whatever they’ve been doing. Nakamook was done with you. And now you’re done with him.
Then Jelly said, “Sex.”
And Botha said, “Detantion for the star-crest lovers, both.”
And that’s when I thought: Jelly’s an Israelite.
And I knew Nakamook knew I was thinking it. And I knew Nakamook had thought I was thinking it before I’d actually thought it.
And I saw that was the practical consideration that mattered to him—not the doctored copy of Ulpan. What mattered was that I didn’t think Israelites should—or really even could—marry Gentiles. What mattered to him was that I wouldn’t believe in their marriage if they ever got married. I’d basically told him as much during Tuesday’s detention in the library, when he kept trying to talk to me about June converting. He’d been thinking about Jelly. About him and Jelly. I could see that now. But what? How long had they been together, anyway? They flirted, I remembered, on Tuesday at lunch—“Say that for instance I was in love with you, Jelly,” he’d said, “and Mangey started saying I shouldn’t be because you bite people…” he’d said. “Are you in love with me?” she’d said—but both of them were flirts, and I’d thought it was just banter, but nothing was just banter, nothing was ever just banter, and no, it wasn’t true that both of them were flirts, Jelly wasn’t a flirt, and yet the two of them were flirting on Tuesday at Lunch, and I’d somehow missed it, or maybe not so much missed it (I couldn’t have missed it if I was now recalling it) as failed to consider what their flirting might mean—and I remembered Jelly’s email from Wednesday night, where after giving me her news about the Shovers and their scarves, she kept going on about what now essentially seemed like a proposal that we all double-date after school at the lake—“it should probably just be me and June and you and Benji”—which made it seem, by the tone, at least now it seemed this way, if I was remembering right… made it seem by the tone that they hadn’t hooked up yet; it seemed like Jelly was trying to get into a situation where the two of them could hang out with June and I, who she probably figured would go off to make out, leaving her alone with Nakamook, so…unless maybe I was wrong about the tone. Maybe they’d been hooked up for a while in secret and Jelly’s tone was toney in that email because she and Benji had been keeping their couplehood hidden and wanted to… what? To premiere it to me and June? But why would they keep that kind of secret? If they were in love with each other, why would they care what anyone else thought? Why hide it? Had they thought I’d disapprove or… If they’d disapproved of me and June, I wouldn’t care, or rather I’d care, I guess I would care, but I wouldn’t hide that I loved her; I’d tell them to get over it… But if they did keep that kind of secret from me, for whatever reason, then why would they choose to premiere it when… unless maybe they thought all along, before I’d ever said anything about it, that I didn’t think Israelites and Gentiles should be together, and then, once I told everyone I was in love with June, they thought that maybe they’d been wrong about me, or that I’d changed my mind about Israelites and Gentiles, because they knew—thought they knew—that June was a Gentile, and so now they could tell me that they were together… But… And Benji’d called her Tuesday night, after that conversation in detention. June. He’d called June. Had he called her to tell her she—had he told her I thought she was an Israelite? Had he told her I needed her to be an Israelite? What if he had?...Because she hadn’t hesitated, there on the stage; she hadn’t hesitated for a second to say to me, “I’ll convert”—she’d said, “You don’t have to be so dark. I’ll convert” and—and that lack of hesitation, it had meant a lot to me but—if Benji’d explained to her… no… It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter anyway: I’d said she was an Israelite and Adonai had failed to object, He’d sent no No! through my bones, through my muscles, my skin, no No! He hadn’t. Why June hadn’t hesitated was totally beside the point, and even considering it—questioning her motives, the authenticity of her Israeliteness… It was like my dad had explained the night before in my bedroom, about being scared about me; how finding out he hadn’t known that I’d been getting in fights made him scared that there were other things he didn’t know that he was supposed to know, and so now he was scared about things which I knew for a fact that he shouldn’t be scared about. But no, no way, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all. It was less called for than that, even. I’d found out nothing. This was all hypothetical. Why was I getting so hypothetical? I was getting worked up about one thing in order to avoid facing another. Yes. That’s what I was doing. I was thinking about June instead of thinking about Benji, who I should have been thinking about. About him and Jelly. Either they’d been together for a while in secret, or they’d only recently hooked up—or maybe they hadn’t even hooked up yet; maybe they’d only been talking, flirting; maybe they’d only liked each other, loved each other—“Wherever she wants,” he’d said, “I’m in love with her”—loved each other for the past couple days, which, how serious could that really be? Well but actually, well, so… Yes so maybe very serious, but that wasn’t the point… It wasn’t what mattered. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Benji’d gotten pissed off and silent in detention on Tuesday when I cut off our conversation about conversion—He’d said, “I’m just asking,” and I’d answered him, Why? You wanna marry me?—and then, when I gave him the stolen Coke and the passes, he’d gotten unpissed, which meant he must have decided, at that time, to believe I didn’t mean it; he must have decided to believe that I didn’t mean it when I’d told him that I didn’t believe Gentiles could or should marry Israelites, plus all that implied, and all that seemed to imply—to imply to him; seemed to imply to him—and whether he’d been with Jelly for a while, or just a couple days, or even just a couple hours—however long it had been—he, ever since I’d given him the Coke and the passes, must have been telling himself that I didn’t really mean it, that when push came to shove or worse came to worse (worse came to worst?) or whatever stock phrase he’d imagined best suited the occasion, I would change my beliefs—overcome my beliefs, is how he’d think of it—he’d thought that I would change my beliefs for practical reasons—because it isn’t practical to believe that Israelites and Gentiles shouldn’t be together if your best friend was a Gentile and his girlfriend an Israelite—or that I’d change my beliefs for reasons of loyalty—because it’s disloyal to believe that Israelites and Gentiles shouldn’t be together when your best friend’s a Gentile and his girlfriend an Isra
A lot of people think that about me, I thought. A lot of people believe I’m just talking. These people aren’t my friends, I thought, but Benji Nakamook had been. At least he was supposed to have been.
Benji’d quit our friendship and watched me get humiliated, I thought; he had quit because I didn’t believe a Gentile should marry an Israelite. Or because of what he thought that implied. And what did it imply? I didn’t necessarily know what it implied, but that didn’t matter. That was beside the point, or at least beside my point, so I didn’t have to think about it, at least not right then. At least I thought I didn’t have to think about it right then.
He quit being my friend because of what I believed. That was the point.
And I believed what I believed because I was an Israelite. That was the point.
Benji quit being my friend because I was an Israelite was the point. He wasn’t scared of Slokum at all. He was an anti—all along, a crypto-anti—but except no because he loved Jelly—so a closet fucken crypto-anti… Whatever he was it didn’t matter anymore. He wasn’t my friend, had quit our friendship for no good reason, so I wasn’t his. I wasn’t his friend.
We were no longer friends.
And for you scholars who protest, who say, “Wait now, wait a minute. This was your conclusion? Closet-crypto-anti dot-dot-dot? No longer friends? This seems a little crazy, Rabbi, no? It seems kind of easy, kind of—how should we say it? Not Gurionic. What about what June told you, in the two-hill field? She’d said Benji was crying. Why would Nakamook have cried in the two-hill field after you’d been humiliated if he wasn’t your friend? Shouldn’t that, to say the least, complicate matters? Why would you not take his tears into account?”
And I tell you, good scholars, I did. I took Benji Nakamook’s tears into account. I took his tears into account and rapidly dismissed them. I’d spent the six months since I’d been booted from Schechter taking all sorts of things into account that it turned out I shouldn’t have. I’d spent six months positing empathetic rationales for people who’d disappointed me, six months telling myself not to be disappointed, not to feel hurt, but to be understanding. That the scholars of Schechter and Northside who’d abandoned me had done so to be good sons and daughters—I’d convinced myself of that. That their parents had to fear me to be good parents—I’d made myself understand that as well. I’d told myself I wasn’t in any real trouble, nothing end-of-the-world, that the stakes were lower than they seemed to me to be, and that if ever I did face any real trouble, if push came to shove, if I was backed into a corner, caught in a pinch, if worse came to worse (worse came to worst?), all those who’d disappointed me would step up and… help me. Fight for me, even. They’d remember, all at once, that we were on the same side. They’d see I’d never cursed them, blamed them, mistreated them; they’d see I never thought of them the way they’d thought of me, and we would all reunite as if never divided. Except then I’d needed help. And none of them had helped me. None of them were helping me. Even the two who I’d believed were most separate from their like. First Rabbi Salt, then Emmanuel Liebmann. In rapid succession. In less than a day. And all at once it seemed I’d been offered a lesson from Adonai himself: quit counting blessings, start tallying offenses; quit providing excuses, start recognizing enmity; quit your forgiving, start bringing your vengeance. Nakamook had cried in the two-hill field? I was supposed to accept that as evidence of something good inside him? His tears were supposed to mitigate something? No. Not so. I’d been accepting too much, letting too much mitigate. I’d been acting like a Jew instead of an Israelite. When the twelve spies were sent out to scope the land of Israel, Caleb and Joshua said it was a go, and the other ten protested, saying to everyone, “Giants! Giants! There’s giants down there, Amalakites and Canaanites and Jebusites and giants! We’ll never be able to conquer them! They’ll smite us! We’re grasshoppers next to them! Grasshoppers, brothers!” and so God never let them, or anyone who believed them, into the land of Israel, and why? Because fuck those ten spies. Those spies were faithless. Those spies were crazy, as were all those who believed them. God took them from slavery and still they were faithless. Is that not crazy? To see God here, and not see Him there? They were crazy and they didn’t deserve to live in Israel. And even crazier than that? What’s even crazier, scholars, is on hearing God’s curse, a curse from a God in whom they lacked faith—on hearing the curse from a God they doubted, I tell you good scholars: all those spies cried, as did all of those who’d believed them. Crazy, all of them. And so was Nakamook. Nakamook, after all, was crazy. A psycho. A bully. After all, just a crazy psycho bully. And all crazies cried, all bullies and psychos. Who knew what they cried for? Really, who knew? Not me. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t like one of them. And not you, scholars—you’re not crazy either. So no. Just no. It just didn’t matter why Nakamook cried, and so it didn’t matter that Nakamook cried. All that really mattered was that Nakamook abandoned me. You don’t abandon friends. We were no longer friends. And just as I had earlier, just a couple hours earlier, on returning from the first of Thursday’s two two-hill-field abandonments, I felt relief. Things felt a lot simpler. Things felt like this: Fuck him, fuck them, fuck it all, it’s done.
And I pressed all my fingers against all my fingers and none of my fingers would break.
Benji was still grandstanding next to his chair. “No one else?” he said to all the Cage. “All this whispering about the side of this and the side of that and none of the rest of you wants to step up against the Monitor in solidarity? Not one of the rest of you has anything to say?”
The Side of Damage was more loyal to me than even I was—they’d been through with Benji since the moment they realized he wasn’t helping me on the high hill. And now they were all looking to me. It was just like the end of Group on Tuesday, except there were more of them. They were waiting for me to teach them something. They were waiting for me to show them what to do.
I revolved my chair and faced forward in my carrel.
All of us did.
Not a minute later, I heard a chair scoot, followed by Jelly yelling, “Don’t!”
Everyone turned again.
“Now give me a pass to the nurse lest this piddling wound grow fatal with infection,” said Benji to Botha. A black bic pen pinned his t-shirt to the flesh beneath his bottom right rib. The shirt was a light blue. When Jelly pulled the pen out, the stain the blood made was lavender. She fainted for a second, falling forward onto Benji, who caught her with a wince, and for a second, yes, I did wish I could hang out with them, but only for a second. Or maybe ten seconds.
Botha wrote passes and sent them to the nurse.
15
TACTICAL
Thursday, November 16, 2006
6th Period–End of Schoolday
J
ust before the end of sixth, Eliyahu returned to the Cage with a note. Small cuts were swelling below both his eyes, and some cotton plugged a nostril, but he’d quit the lean of the determined professor and acquired a menacing slouch. Head tipped to the left, he gave the note to Botha, then started toward my carrel, arms straight at his sides like holstered police batons, barely shifting and stiff. “Sit down, Aye-lie,” Botha said, as he read the note.
Eliyahu got taller and taller.
“Note says you’re wanted in the owfice, Make-bee—I said sit down, Aye-lie.”
“I need to talk to you,” Eliyahu said to me. Up close I saw that his tzitzit were mud-caked, his fedora in tatters. Its felt was all matted and the crown bore a pattern of tiny dents that matched the tread on the Co-Captain’s Jordans. Th
“What dad I jes’ say,” said Botha.
Eliyahu shot a glance at Ben-Wa Wolf, who scooted his chair.
And half the Side of Damage began to hyperscoot.
Eliyahu urged the other half on. He raised an arm overhead and beckoned nonchalantly, almost lazily, as if this were the ten-thousandth hyperscoot he’d captained that week. A black ribbon tied around his elbow—the one that used to band his hat—flapped pennant-like.
Botha went to the nearest chair—Stevie Loop’s—and stilled it. The rest of the hyperscoot continued.
“I want you to know!” Eliyahu shouted into my ear, “that I was given an in-school suspension, but I told Brodsky nothing of your part in the fight!”
You would never do that! I shouted back.
Botha moved on to still Renne Feldbons’s chair, and Stevie Loop started scooting again. Lang and Wadrow were covering their ears. They were not amused this time.
“I am nonetheless verklempt!” Eliyahu shouted. “What I do not under-stand! Is why you protected those five boys who yelled ‘Death to the Jew’! Why you said to me ‘Don’t hurt them!’ It makes me very uncomfortable!”
The Five are Israelites! I shouted.
“Now I am especially verklempt!” shouted Eliyahu.
The teachers hated the noise so much, their eyes were closed.
I pulled Mr. Goldblum’s copy of Ulpan from my pocket and pressed it into Eliyahu’s hand.
Read it! I told him. I’ll explain more later!
He spun to face the Side of Damage and the hyperscoot stopped.