The Instructions (115 page)

You’re in love, I said. I said, You just described it perfectly.

“I don’t even understand what I described, Gurion. I just know that I said ‘fuck’ way too much. Who talks like me? No one.”

You’re Vincie Portite, I said. I said, Vincie Portite says ‘fuck’

a lot.

“Call-Me-Sandy says that when I say ‘fuck’ it’s because ‘fuck’

is a really angry word, and when I say it, I trick myself into getting angry and saying it more, and that gets me more angry, and I start believing that I’m completely right about everything, which is what I do when I’m angry is start believing I’m right about everything, which Sandy says is why I like to get angry to begin with, and I think Sandy’s right because I just said ‘fuck’ a whole lot and I believe I’m completely right about everything I just said, even though I have no idea what the fuck I just said.

What the fuck did I say?”

I said, You said you were in love with Starla and that being 1081

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in love with Starla makes it seem like it’s safe to act dangerous, and that if it’s safe to act dangerous, then maybe it’s dangerous to act safe; maybe if you act safe when it’s safe to act dangerous, you said, then you endanger the thing that made it safe to act dangerous. You said that not to be dangerous while you’re in love is to endanger your being in love.

“So how are we gonna destroy the Arrangement?”

We’ll act dangerous, I said.

“But how?”

It’s less dangerous if we plan it out, I said.

No one sang anything when we got to the Frontier.

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17

SCUFFLES

Thursday, November 16, 2006

5:05 p.m.–Bedtime

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Outside the Welcome Office, I bobbed and weaved to stealth past three sentries. I slammed the door behind me, but Flowers wasn’t there to surprise. Just Edison. He fell off the coucharm, landing on a haunch.

I called my dad so he could tell me how he’d won in court—he liked that—but I got sent to voicemail, and so I tried my mom, in case they were together. While it rang, I noticed a note was taped to the television:

G,

Amateur plumbing for screaming primadonnas. Fiercely clogged pot, engineer out with flu. Rm 16. Come get me.

—F

Without saying hello first—she must have recognized Flowers’s number and known it was me—my mother told me everything was fine, though they’d be at the hospital for a while.

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I asked her why she was at the hospital. She was surprised Arthur hadn’t said anything. I asked her again why she was at the hospital and she told me not to raise my voice. Then she told me there was a shuffle. And I didn’t know what she meant and she raised her voice and told me a scuffle, and not to pick on her, right now was not the time to pick on her. “There was a scuffle outside of the courthouse and your aba fell down.” What does that mean he fell? “In the scuffle. Do. Not. Yell at me.” Who was he in a scuffle with? “Who? Who?
He
was in a scuffle with no one. He was peripheral to the scuffle. This was an accident that he fell. They were after the Nazi.” They who? “No one tried to hurt your aba. And he is fine. He is in no danger. He has some bruises, and he may have torn a ligament, and this hurts, but it is not the end of the world, Gurion. And there is no concussion, just a little swelling on the outside. He is in no danger.” She’d said “no danger” twice and I told her so and she told me not to have crazy ideas, that she was my mother and she had never lied to me and I said, He’s fine? And she said, “I promise,” and I told her I didn’t ask her to promise and she made the kind of frustrated pleading sound that you do not need to clench your teeth to make but you always clench your teeth anyway, then took an audible breath, and said, “Please, Gurion. I am not happy that he has been hurt either, and I wish I could be with you right now, but Aba cannot be alone in a hospital, it upsets him.

Arthur said he will drive you home, and if we are not back yet, he will see to your dinner. I am very angry at him for not being 1085

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there when the bus dropped you from school.” I told her a toilet was overflowing and the janitor was sick. She told me it didn’t matter now anyway, that he would drive me home and wait with me til they got there. And then I asked her why Flowers had to wait with me and she told me it was because I was upset and I told her that
she
was upset and she agreed and told me I wasn’t helping and I told her I wanted to come to the hospital and she said she didn’t know how long they’d be there, that my father might talk to the reporters or might not and had yet to talk to policemen and that if certain tests showed certain results certain other tests would have to be administered and that could take hours or who knew how long and I was not welcome at the hospital but they would wake me if I was sleeping when they got back to the house and go get Arthur now and please do not, for God’s sake, watch the news, and I told her God didn’t care if I watched the news, and who did she think she was telling me I wasn’t welcome at the hospital when my father got in a scuffle and she told me she was my mother and my father’s wife and she could beat me up even if I had forgotten and that if I watched the news to spite her she would remind me and I told her I would not watch the news to spite her, and it was true that I would not watch the news to spite her, and it was true that I would watch the news, though I didn’t say that. She loved me and now the doctor had to talk to her so she hung up and I took the remote off the coffee table and hit POWER.

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I found my dad on CNN, shielding his eyes from the sun and descending the courthouse stairway beside a smiling Patrick Drucker, then stopping halfway down before a handful of reporters holding microphones.

“Mr. Drucker,” says one of the reporters, “is your—” and the rest of the question gets lost beneath a studio-imposed bleeping sound: someone offscreen has cursed.

The camera turns a 180 to reveal scores of protesters. Except for their consignment to the parking lot—six cops in sunglasses are holding a line at the bottom of the stairway—the scene looks no different than it did the day before. The same picket-signs stab the sky. The same swastikas-and-stripes flag flaps overhead.

That guy in the skimask and keffiyeh—he’s waving his fist.

A second camera feed is cued and the time signature in the corner jumps from 3:44:21 p.m. to 3:47:36 p.m. The new visual field contains the whole scene as witnessed from just above and behind the protestors.

“…feel great,” Drucker is saying. “I feel like this victory is—”

and there’s another bleeping sound, this one lasting five or six seconds.

Just before the bleeping stops, Drucker sieg-heils.

My father grabs the back of his own neck.

A stitch of blackness blinks on the screen and the time signature jumps again. 3:47:36 becomes 3:48:20. Same feed.

The entire parking lot has begun to roil. Shoulders press shoulders. The swastikas-and-stripes is tipping, draping a picket for 1087

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a second, now sucking under, now disappeared. “See, it’s these kinda people,” Drucker says, hand still aloft, “who control the media. Who control the money. Who don’t believe in the first ammend—”
Bleeeep
. Sieg heil. “…damage the—”
Bleep
. Sieg heil.

Protesters push onto the sidewalk, cops pull batons from their holsters.

My father backs up a step.
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeep
. Two cops walk into the fray, exit the fray.

“…parasites…”
Bleep
.

Sieg heil.

“…and Spielberg…”
Bleep
.

Double sieg heil.

Another stitch of blackness. The time-stamp reads 3:50:45.

The angle is the same as it was before the stitch, but it has to be a different feed with an unsynched time-stamp because it makes no sense for my father, Drucker, or any of the reporters to have continued standing there for two more minutes on the courthouse steps—they must have seen by then how the lot was roiling, and they must by now see what is starting to happen there: the pickets parallel to the ground, the pickets swinging.

The keffiah guy takes an elbow to the gut, stumbles out of frame.

All six cops ascend a step backward.

Drucker keeps talking, the bleeping keeps bleeping.

Drucker: Sieg heil.

A cop falls down.

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Drucker: Sieg heil. A picket flies like a spear.

Sieg heil. Bleeping. Nazis chased out of frame.

A flown picket hits a reporter in the ass. The reporters spray out in six directions.

The cops stutter-step, retreat. Drucker revolves, starts climbing stairs.

My father’s holding his ground, showing his palms, yelling something. A protester knocks him sideways. He falls. The crowd rolls over him slow, then fast. The backs of heads and torsos (vague pain in my hand) fill the screen where he’d stood.

More flown pickets. One of them, its sign torn off, strikes Drucker on the back of the neck as he reaches for the courthouse doorknob. He’s down. Protestors get there, stomp. Then more.

And more.

(More pain in my hand.)

The last of the mob having ascended the stairway, the center of the screen opens up. My father is laying across three steps, a lipstick-red disposable lighter peeking out of a tear in his nearer slash pocket. He’s blinking rapidly—the one eye I can see is. Then he’s rising, holding his head, turning toward the camera, looking beyond it, tieknot askew, blinking, squinting, sensing the lighter slipping through the tear, attempting to get the lighter back where it belongs, both hands off his head, using two hands, missing the mark, widening the tear, reaching to catch the lighter as it drops. His keychain follows, bounces off his wrist, lands on the lighter on the stair below. And then my father takes a step 1089

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toward the camera. His brow goes high. His jaw muscles bulge.

He stands up straight, straighter than straight, hard intake of breath. His eyes roll. His lids drop. He buckles and plunges.

I don’t know if the CNN producer intentionally froze the frame at that point, or if it was the outcome of technical difficulties, but my father, collapsing, arms limp at his sides, chin inches from concrete—the image lingered on the screen for seconds. The time signature in the corner read 3:51:18 p.m.

The pain in my hand throbbed sharp.

Cut to newsdesk.

A blue-eyed anchor with a wet-combed widow’s peak was saying that Patrick Drucker was in critical, then Flowers was standing there, blocking the screen, doing something to my wrist, saying, “Open up.”

He meant my hand. I opened it up. Shards and dusty particles of the shattered remote fell into my lap. Two slim Duracells. A splash of blood. I shook off what stuck.

Flowers reached back and offed the power just as the anchor started bungling a sentence. “The protestors, mostly comprised of Jews—Jewish people—”

“Gurion,” Flowers said.

It was not an uncommon syllable for a Roman to stammer, but when the Roman was a newsman it always chilled me up. I could remember three such newscasted “Jews” off the top of my head.

“You dad’s fine,” Flowers said.

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But the thing was I could remember three such newscasted

“Jews” off the top of my head, and since I could, I did. I heard the first one after the Ishmaelites attacked the Fairfield Street Synagogue: “The youths assaulted the Jews-the Jewish congregants with stones,” said an NBC 5 Local News reporter. A week later, on the ABC 7 Nightly News: “The Jews-the Jewish-the Israeli soldiers entered Gaza at seven this morning.” A month after that, in a round-table discussion on CSPAN, the Reuters Middle East Bureau Chief was asked by the moderator: “To the best of your knowledge, what percentage of Jew-Zionist-Israeli citizens would support the release of imprisoned Hamas freedom fighters in exchange for a cessation of hostilities against the militant settlers?” Those were just the ones I remembered verbatim. There were others, too, each of them uttered in a discussion occasioned by violent activity. Sometimes the Israelites had done the violence; other times they had suffered it. Sometimes the stammer seemed to unmask something and other times it just seemed like a stammer.

“Shit,” Flowers said, staring at my hand.

A plastic sliver was jammed in the muscle of my thumb. I pulled it with my teeth. The hole was triangular.

Flowers shuddered, wadded leaves of Kleenex the color of lemon ice cream, pressed the wad to the wound.

“You dad’s fine,” he said.

I spit the sliver into my cupped left hand, dropped it into a pocket, watched the tissue get wet and orange.

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“Say something,” said Flowers.

I said, Now I’ll say ‘a Jew’ and just the word ‘
Jew’
sounds like a dirty word and people don’t know whether to laugh or not.

“Lenny Bruce?” Flowers said.

Yeah, I said.

“Funny man,” said Flowers. “You—”

Sometimes, I said.

“You dad’s
fine
,” Flowers said.

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Scholars recognize three significant aspects of the conversation Avraham has with Hashem on the eve of Sodom’s destruction.

First, the conversation is an argument: the patriarch of patriarchs, the original model of exemplary Israelite behavior, tells Hashem that He is about to make a mistake. Second, Hashem, rather than smiting Avraham for arguing—He does not punish Avraham at all—listens to what Avraham has to say. Third, there is the substance of what Avraham says: that when faced with the choice, it is not only more important to save a righteous person than it is to destroy a wicked one, but more important to save a righteous person than to destroy
numerous
wicked ones.