The Instructions by Adam Levin

  He took it with the hand that covered his mouth and soon the weapon cheered him. He thumbed the button and the rod snicked out, and while he tested the bendy action, his tears sucked back into his ducts.

  I gave him a few seconds, then asked, Why haven’t I met you before?

  “We just moved here a couple weeks ago,” he said, reaching over Emmanuel to give the sap to Samuel Diamond—Samuel had been making grabbing movements from the moment I’d brandished the thing. “We came from New York,” said Solly. “Upstate. The Teitelbaum brothers are feuding with each other over who’s in charge.”

  I heard about that, I said.

  “It’s very ugly,” Solly said. “People throwing punches in shul. Breaking windows. My father didn’t want to take sides, so we moved here. We’re not really Satmars anymore. Still, I like to wear the flathat. It’s a very nice hat. And not cheap.” He took the hat off and held the brim between his pointers, then did circles with his wrists that spun it. He set it on my head. “Very handsome,” he said. “Please accept it as a token of peace. I am sorry for what I said before. I want us to be friends.”

  I gave the hat back. I said, It is a nice hat, but for now I like my hood.

  Solly seemed unconvinced.

  If we weren’t friends already, I said, I’d never have shown you that weapon.

  “We thought you would need friends to talk to is why we didn’t end up waiting for your response,” said Emmanuel, exhibiting no interest in the sap which Samuel now proferred.

  Mallet-headed or not, Emmanuel Liebman was one of my favorite people.

  My response? I said to him.

  “Yes, to my— Oh, of course!” said Emmanuel. “Of course. That’s how come you still thought I might be the vandal, even after you saw my face. You didn’t read our email, did you? Of course you didn’t. You hadn’t even gotten home yet. Here’s what happened: That email you sent—Solly didn’t show it to us til just a couple hours ago and…”

  Email? I thought. Oh, the email I sent them! “New Scripture”! I thought. The two-hill field! I hadn’t thought once about any of that stuff since they’d stepped up to Flowers. I was far more surprised to remember than angry. I tried to get angry. I thought I should be angry and found I wasn’t angry. I seemed to have forgiven them without really trying—no, I didn’t seem to, I had forgiven them—another surprise, though it shouldn’t have been. Just twenty minutes earlier, in under ninety seconds, I’d gone from suddenly wanting to murder a former best friend to suddenly discovering I didn’t have it in me to do so to suddenly seeing that this former best friend was not only not the enemy I’d thought he’d been, but a friend so good that, despite my having just attacked and injured him, he was willing to threaten a scary-sized man in order to protect me. To be surprised by anything at that point seemed dumb. So I made my voice angry, interrupting Emmanuel, who, while I’d spaced out on the above-described thoughts, had apparently not stopped speaking.

  “…but the ambiguous nature of—” Emmanuel was saying.

  And I said to him: Wait. Why didn’t you come to Aptakisic today?

  “Gurion, I just said… I just finished explaining…”

  I didn’t hear it.

  “You didn’t… What? Okay,” said Emmanuel. “So okay,” he said. “So Solly didn’t show us the email you sent til just a couple hours ago, so—”

  Solly? I said. What Solly? I said. What does he have to do with it? I sent it to all of you, every single scholar whose address I had.

  “Yes,” said Emmanuel. “We saw the CC box. And that’s why as soon as Solly showed us the email, we forwarded it to every scholar therein, but that wasn’t til just a couple hours ago.”

  “I would have myself forwarded it last night if I knew who you were,” said Solly, “but I didn’t know who you were til after school today, when I stopped by Emmanuel’s to borrow his graphing calculator and happened to mention the strange email I received. He gave me your Ulpan then, and explained—”

  Back up, I said. I don’t understand. I sent that email to all of you. I sent it to everyone at Northside and Schechter—and the Schechter list, at least, was totally updated from Rabbi Salt.

  “Yes, Rabbi,” said Shai, “but email from your Gurionforever address is blocked by our parents, ever since the meeting.”

  The meeting? I said.

  “You don’t know about the meeting?” said Shai.

  “I told you he didn’t know about the meeting,” Samuel said. “If he knew about the meeting, why would he have sent the email from Gurionforever?” To me, he said, “They had this meeting. At the J. Back in June. It wasn’t about blocking your email address, Rabbi—it was a planning session to do a fundraiser for Sudanese refugees. But. The meeting was right after everyone saw that email from the Northside Headmaster.”

  “And right after you sent that ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’ one,” said Shai.

  My parents never told me, I said.

  “With all due respect, Rabbi, our parents don’t speak to yours, so…”

  I know, I said, but Rabbi Salt speaks to them sometimes. And what’s more, he speaks to me, and he never told me either, I said. And Esther, I said. I said, Esther didn’t tell me, either.

  “They probably wanted to save you some pain,” said Shai.

  “They were probably trying to protect you,” Emmanuel said. “And if your parents knew, I’m sure they were, too. It wasn’t such a nice meeting.”

  Samuel said, “Once they were finished talking about African genocide, they started talking about you and your dangerous influence and, long made short: in the course of the discussion, Sidney Beber’s tech-savvy mom, who my mom said is the one who originally told her and every other scholar’s mom north of the Mason-Dixon about these stupid Nojacks*—Beber said how easy it would be to block your email address, and everyone at the meeting thought that was a good idea.”

  “A lot of them had seen the ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’ one, too, and got scared,” said Shai, “because the implication was you’d eventually get back in contact.”

  “So then instructions got emailed to everyone for how to block email through all the different email clients, and these emailed instructions all listed Gurionforever specifically,” said Samuel.

  “This egghead mump named Malinowitz even wrote some code called BanGurion.exe,” said Shai, “which was this small program for Windows users that you download and click it and it blocks Gurionforever just like that.”

  Samuel said, “People forwarded the instructions with the code attached and posted them to listservs and so on—you know how word spreads. It’s pretty surprising, actually, that Solly’s parents didn’t get those emails.”

  “I’m sure they did,” Solly said. “We were still in New York, though, in the middle of that feud, and my parents were probably receiving too much email about the alleged demagoguery of various New York–area Teitelbaums to be concerned with a supposedly false messiah from Chicago. Anyway, it turns out it was a blessing. If your address had been blocked by my parents, the email wouldn’t have ever gotten to me, and so it wouldn’t have gotten to anyone.”

  I said, Why didn’t any scholars tell me my address was blocked, though?

  Emmanuel said, “Please don’t be upset with us, Rabbi. I know I would have told you, but I thought you’d know, and I think everyone else thought the same, and that it didn’t really matter because how hard would it be for you to get a new address to send emails from? A new address—it’s free to get one. I have four, myself.”

  “And plus you told us not to contact you in that ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’ one,” said Shai.

  “Stop calling it that,” Samuel said. “It’s disrespectful. Call it by the title Gurion gave it.”

  “I can’t remember the title.”

  “‘Last Word.’ How hard is that to remember?”

  “But my kidneys hurt, Samuel.”

  I felt like I was in Romeo and Juliet, or maybe the Book of Esther. Happenstanc
e and simple misunderstandings—piling up, convoluting, resolving. I felt like I was in a sitcom. Had I known that my email address was blocked, I’d have sent them ‘New Scripture’ from a different address, and had ‘New Scripture’ gotten to them at the time I’d sent it, they’d have all shown up at Aptakisic. Had they all shown up at Aptakisic, I wouldn’t’ve gotten back to the Cage for third, let alone been distracted enough to forget to sign my pass, in which case Botha would not have yelled at me, in which case Ben-Wa might not have snapped, in which case there wouldn’t have been a hyperscoot, and if there hadn’t been a hyperscoot, I wouldn’t know the Side of Damage was my army, and if Ben-Wa’d snapped anyway and there had been a hyperscoot and someone—say, Benji—told me about it but I hadn’t felt betrayed by the Israelite scholars, I might not have cared that the Side was my army, and either way I, not having seen the hyperscoot, wouldn’t have argued at lunch about what to call it, and there’d’ve been no contest about what to call it, and I’d’ve not scraped my elbow during the Electric Chair and then gotten sent to Nurse Clyde’s and met the Five, and I’d’ve not offended Benji, and he’d’ve not pulled the alarm, and I wouldn’t know the source of Eliyahu’s damage, and there’d’ve been no attack on Shlomo Cohen, no ‘Death to the Jew,’ no humiliation at the hands of Bam Slokum, no failure of Nakamook to step in and help me, none of the post-alarm hyperscoots either, no self-stabbed Benji, no call down to Brodsky’s, no giggling Botha, no transformed Eliyahu, and as for my father—actually, no. What had happened to my father would’ve happened the same, and my sorrow and my anger at what happened would have been the same, though maybe, had I known that the scholars were still on my side, I’d’ve been able to address it all differently somehow, been able to do better than smash a remote and alienate Flowers: I’d’ve felt less helpless, at least a little. And I felt less helpless, at least a little, though still more helpless than I wanted to feel.

  To Emmanuel, I said: I don’t understand. How many listservs was this email-blocking email posted to?

  “A lot,” Emmanuel said.

  How could I have missed it? I said.

  “You subscribe to a lot of community listservs?”

  None, I said, but I subscribe to every scholarly listserv I know about.

  “Those are different, though,” Emmanuel said. “Why would a post about blocking your address be on a scholarly listserv?”

  Why wouldn’t it?

  “It was not a very scholarly kind of post. I mean, yes, it had to do with you, our greatest scholar, but it didn’t actually say much about you, other than your email address. I mean, it didn’t say anything about your teachings or anything.”

  They posted the one Kalisch wrote about me, I said.

  “Someone sent that to those listservs, though,” Emmanuel said. He said, “I’m not saying a scholarly listserv wouldn’t have posted the email about blocking your address if someone had sent it in, but who’d send it in? I mean it’s pretty strange anyone sent that Kalisch one to those scholarly listservs—pretty inelegant, no? If whoever was out to damage you had half a brain, he’d have posted it straight to the community ones. The scholarly listservs are there to discuss scripture. You getting kicked out of a school—to anyone who doesn’t know who you are, at least—it’s not exactly a talmudic type concern, right?”

  Well if they don’t know who I am, I said, then exactly.

  “Exactly what?” said Emmanuel.

  I mean: you’re right, I said.

  By then I was at my desk, waiting for my inbox to open. It was taking longer than usual.

  “In any case, Rabbi,” said Emmanuel. “We still haven’t addressed the ambiguity about which I wrote you.”

  The loading icon in the corner of my monitor—a tiny pair of animated thumbs—kept pausing mid-twiddle.

  “About whether your offer was a one-time offer,” said Samuel.

  My offer?

  “The offer to receive your scripture,” said Shai.

  “On one hand, you invite us to your school to receive your scripture,” said Emmanuel, “and you say that once it’s delivered, things might somehow change in such a way as to make disobeying our parents a form of honoring them—a big might to be sure, but a might nonetheless—and that after the scripture gets delivered, we’ll know if we can be in contact with you again.”

  “But then,” said Samuel, “we didn’t get the invitation til after the time you wanted us to come meet you.”

  “And so,” said Emmanuel, “it seemed to us that we might have blown our chance.”

  “And not just us as in the us who are talking to you right now,” said Shai, “but a lot of the scholars you meant to CC, who, from five minutes after Emmanuel forwarded your email to them, were jamming his phonelines and inbox, offering very clear opinions on the ambiguity.”

  The thumbs had grown still and become 2-D. I minimized the window, mazimized the window.

  “Most of them don’t see an ambiguity is what Shai means.”

  “That could have gone without saying, Samuel. Gurion knew exactly what I meant.”

  “Enough out of you.”

  “Most of the scholars think it’s one way or the other,” said Emmanuel. “Some say, ‘By having not gotten the invitation til it was too late, we blew our chance to be led by Gurion.’ And then the others say, ‘We did not blow our chance. We’ll visit him at his house on Saturday, after Havdallah, just like with his Ulpan, and he’ll deliver the new scripture as he delivered his Ulpan.’

  “So while it seems to us, us here in this room that is, that there is certainly an ambiguity,” Emmanuel continued, “we are in the minority. And the ones who are ready to come over after Havdallah; they’ve already gotten carried away. ”

  I clicked STOP, then RELOAD. My inbox flashed—just the frame—then disappeared, but now at least the thumbs twiddled rhythmically.

  Carried away like how? I said.

  “Like they’re already into the bobe-mayses,” said Emmanuel. “This girl you mentioned, for example—all you told us is she’s got red hair and you love her—but these scholars who are talking about visiting after Havdallah, they’re all convinced there’s some big story behind it, how you fell in love with her, and that it has to do with the new scripture. And granted, you mentioned her in the email, suggesting she’s got something to do with the scripture and with your contacting us, so it’s not unreasonable to assume there’s some kind of story, but the kind of stories these scholars are predicting—they’re not just stories, but parables or allegories about the diaspora and persecution or the diaspora and salvation or a coded set of further instructions, like a second Ulpan, wherein this girl you love is the Land of Israel or Torah or maybe Adonai Himself, and this Aptakisic the world or the United States or the whole of the Middle East, and this Cage the Canaanites or the Romans or the law of the land. And that’s not even the half of it.

  “Silly, Rabbi, in our opinion—they were all silly, these assumptions being made; ungrounded speculations the lot of them, Samuel and Shai and I felt,” said Emmanuel. “And then: potentially dangerous, too. For despite all the excitement, despite how grateful we would all be to receive this scripture from you, let alone to be in contact again, despite how thrilling it would be to let ourselves get carried away like these other nutsos, it still wasn’t clear to us—the three of us, I mean—whether or not we would even get to receive this scripture, now that we’d missed the invitation. And if we aren’t to receive the scripture, if that invitation was a one-time offer, and if, as the invitation seemed to be stating, the righteousness of being in contact with you again had been contingent on our having received the scripture, then all these scholars who are certain we are to receive it anyway… If they were to come over here on Saturday evening, they would not only be transgressing against their parents, but against you as well. And so the three of us, plus Solly, we gathered by my computer and took it upon ourselves to ask you to clarify the ambiguity via email. Although asking for such a clarification was no d
oubt a form of contact, which might count as a transgression against you (and if so, then certainly a transgression against our parents), we figured it would be a much smaller transgression than contacting you via telephone, let alone in person, and we figured that if, in your response to our email, you stated that it was not okay to resume contact with you, that the invitation had been a one-time offer, we would tell all the other scholars what you said, thus preventing hundreds of transgressions this Saturday, by way of our four today. And so we sent an email to all the CC’d scholars that told them of our plan, and we wrote you our email, and were ready to wait for however long was necessary for you to respond. But no sooner had I hit the send button than, as I mentioned earlier, we saw the news about your father on television, at which point we decided, ‘You know what? Enough of this. Whatever else he may be, Gurion is an Israelite and a friend of ours, and if it is a transgression to comfort our Israelite friend in the wake of a personal tragedy, if to do so is to dishonor our parents, then so be it. Let us transgress. Let us bring them shame and wrath and endless shame.’ And then we were here, waiting in the shadows so as not to be detected by any passersby who might fink to our parents, and then you were pummeling Shai’s internal organs, and then you were kicking me in the legs, and now we’re in your bedroom, asking: Was the invitation a one-time offer? Will you deliver us the new scripture despite our failure to appear at the appointed time? Do you sanction this visit we’ve made to your house? If so, does that mean you will lead us? And lastly, who is she, this girl you love?”

  Suddenly, my screen became a field of backlit blackness, and then it blipped and I was in. I had 248 new messages, every one of them titled “RE: FWD: NEW SCRIPTURE.”

  The thumbs in the corner continued to twiddle.

  Her name’s Eliza June Watermark, I said to the scholars.

  And all of them leaned in, and none of them looked at me funny.

  Flowers came back with the pizza in the middle of the story, so I told the rest of it in the kitchen, the rapt scholars pointing at slices and nodding at liter bottles, flicking their eyes in the direction of napkins and chinning at packets of parmesan and pepper flakes. They didn’t squint once—not when I told them I never loved Esther, or even when I described the conversion on the stage. With the exception of a couple whispered mazel tovs, no voice but my own was audible til I finished.