The Instructions (138 page)

Who? Who does?… Tell me one more time.

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We kept sixteen chairs and dumped the rest in the pool. We locked down the B-Hall classrooms, locked down the gates at the B-Hall/2-Hall junction, and set half the chairs side-to-side to make barricades: one along the southern border of the Main Hall/B-Hall junction, another between the northern edge of the front entrance and the facing Main Hall-wall. The remaining eight chairs were to be wielded legs-forward by Ben-Wa’s soldiers, three at either barricade, two at the B-Hall fire alarm.

I opened the front doors and clicked out the stoppers. Wind blasted hailstones and rock salt onto the traction rug. The Side of Damage was shivering, big-eyed.

I told them: You’ll warm up fast.

“We’re not cold. We’re ready,” Nakamook said. “Listen up,”

he told the soldiers. “Listen to Gurion.”

It was time for the blessing on the Damage Proper. If they were Israelites and I the Cohain Gadol, I would have told them, “Hear O Israel, you are coming near to the battle against your enemies.

Let your heart not be faint, do not be afraid, do not panic, and do not break down before them, for Adonai, your God, is the One who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you,” but they were the Side of Damage and I was Gurion ben-Judah, so I said other things:

Strike all turned cheeks that aren’t hustling ass-cheeks. Anyone not with us is part of the Arrangement. Let the runners run, but 1303

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continue to attack in the face of any retreat less definite. There are far more of them than there are of us, and numbers can embolden cowards. We must overwhelm them with ferocity.

Soldiers at the barricades: remain steadfast. Let no one breach your lines. If someone tries to move you, break him down with your chair. If someone gets past you, shoot him. If you miss, chase him down. Lay him out. Don’t miss.

Soldiers on alarms: an alarm will almost definitely be pulled at some point. The later that happens, the better, but once it does happen, there’s no need to hold position. If you’re in the gym, get behind Vincie and reinforce the frontline. If you’re in B-Hall, get with Ben-Wa at the Main Hall junction and hold the lines til further instructed. You’ll see more action soon enough.

Ben-Wa had a question: “What about phones? Everyone’s got phones.”

“Everyone’s phones’re in their lockers,” said Dingle. “That’s the rules. And isn’t it iron—”

“Not everyone follows the rules,” Ben-Wa said. “And those aren’t the rules for the teachers, anyway.”

Sweat the alarms, I said, don’t sweat the phones. Don’t get distracted trying to confiscate phones. Someone pulls out a phone: shoot him, hurt him, he’s trying to stop us, he has to suffer, but every cop and fireman in the county is over at the high school.

One pulled alarm and they’re here in five minutes, but it’ll take a lot of calls to get any to leave Stevenson, and by the time those get made we’ll be ready or done for anyway.

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Soldiers coming to the gym: If the lights are still on when we get to the gym, we go quiet through the east doors, get under the bleachers, wait for darkness, then position on my cue. If it’s already dark, they’ll see hall-light when we enter, so we’ll come through the center and rush our locations.

Frontline soldiers: be relentless. Project all you can before the hand-to-hand comes on, and know it’ll come on fast. Show them the color of their blood. Teach them the sound of their snapping limbs. Almost anything in the gym you can lift can be a weapon, and almost none of our enemies know that yet. Put the enemies down before they can learn.

All of you: Let no numberdrunk fool believe he can defy
any
of us without suffering. If they pin you at the elbows, put your knee in their sack. If you can’t move your knee, remember you can headbutt—go for the nose, the eyes, the mouth. If you can’t reach to headbutt, remember your teeth—bite arms, bite wrists, bite fingers, taste bones. If you can’t bite, spit. If you can’t spit, scream—blow out their eardrums. Bring all the pain you can til one of us rescues you.

One of us will always rescue you.

The Arrangement would grind us fine as salt if it could. Do not forget that, much less forgive it. Do not feel sympathy for those we’re attacking. Hear no pleas and look away from any tears that may endear you.

Don’t sweat the press—they’ll just be making movies. Protect June Watermark at all and any cost. Protect my weaponed broth-1305

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ers as if they were your own. Always protect each other. Last chance for questions.

There weren’t any questions. Some of the soldiers were doing the pogo. Others banged fists on their shoulders and thighs.

I strike first, then no more stealth. Damage, damage, and damage, the end. Amen? I said.

“Amen,” they said.

PLATOONS

VANGUARD

MACCABEE

NAKAMOOK

Gurion ben-Judah

Benji Nakamook

June Watermark

Jelly Rothstein

Eliyahu of Brooklyn

Leevon Ray

The Five

Mark Dingle

Ally’n’Googy

Salvador Curtis

Josh Berman

Fulton Market

Other armed

Jerry Throop

Aptakisic Israelites

REARGUARD

PORTITE

WOLF

Vincie Portite

Ben-Wa Wolf

The Janitor

Chunkstyle

The Flunky

Anna Boshka

Ronrico Asparagus Forrest Kenilworth 1306

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Jennie Mangey Christian Yagoda Ansul Entsry

Jesse Ritter

Stevie Loop Cody von Braker We shut the door behind us and got beneath the bleachers.

Chemicals were firing and blood was swelling muscles, lungs and arteries opened wide as runways, our joints and ligaments super-elastic. Benji kept whispering, “Do not scream.” We pushed on the wall and pounded our fists, twetched ponds of gooze and touched the floor standing, not to let steam off but redistribute it, to stir the snat to delay the flood. Air-seal the spout and flip the boiling kettle. Potentiate, potentiate, potentiate potential.

“I give you… Boystar,” announced Chaz Black, and we gathered by the bleachers’ easternmost opening.

The gym went dark and I whispered to the soldiers: Wait for my go, then stay to the borders. Look away from the light.

“Do not scream.”

Feedback crackled.

Boystar spoke. “Whuddup ’Kisic.”

A spotlight revealed him.

He was outside the locker-rooms, tearing off an anorak. He flung it and stood there, touching his headset. Padlock for a buckle, his belt was a tirechain, the links hanging low between the loops and shining.

We averted our eyes as he dance-walked west, and soon our pupils were the widest in the gym.

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Everyone above us stomped and clapped. Shirts came untucked. The floor shook its dust. On its own, the crowd-noise would have zeroed our footfalls, but with the enhancements effected by the man at the soundboard—machine-made enthusiasm booming at his keystrokes—we could have warcried our lungs flat and stayed undetected.

I gave my go.

Half of Portite trailed Nakamook west beneath the bleachers.

The rest followed me out the same way we’d entered. We stealthed south and singlefile along the eastern border, our left arms brushing the wall.

On his unlit way from the locker-room to centercourt, Main Man tiptoed across our path. If he saw us, he pretended not to.

“Here we all are,” said Boystar to the crowd. “At last. Together.

Here we are.”

The crowd roared more, some still stomping. The man at the board jacked the volume on the synth. Cheerleaders jumped in the darkness, soundless.

By the time that Boystar was halfway to halfcourt, Portite owned both of his zones: Mangey, Ronrico, and the Janitor by the locker-rooms; by the pushbar-door, Vincie, Ansul, and the Flunky. Nakamook assembled near the southwest corner. I stood behind Desormie, searching the bleachers. I bent all my fingers with all of my fingers and none of my fingers would break.

The hundreds I looked on were blind to us.

Hands forward like a boxer, Boystar fancy-footworked. “You 1308

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ready?” he said. “Are you ready?” Every indicator light in the gym blinked green.

Eliyahu was sitting between the Five and Miss Pinge—western bleachers, middlemost bench. Floyd, eyes hooded, sat low in his chair in the special gallery with four local newsmen, Jelly’s sister Ruth, and the New Thing fatcats. I sightlined as obliquely to the spotlight as possible, but some of the photons got in my eyes. I located June—top corner northeast, Starla beside her—

then turned away south to recover dilation.

“Are you ready for some of
this
?” said Boystar. The chain around his waist clanked briefly. I didn’t have to look to know what he was doing.

Giggles, many ersatz, bounced off the walls.

“Whoa!” Boystar said, hoisting his crotch. “Ha ha!” he said: a hoist for each ha, a clank at each hoist.

“Haha!” added Main Man, unlit beside him. “Ha—” he said, and his mike-feed got cut.

Hoist-clank hoist-clank giggle giggle giggle.

“You guys are crazy, you know that?” said Boystar. “I’m just dancin here. All you guys have dirty minds. E
spec
ially all you Jennys… Now, you Jennys ready to get emotionalized?”

Ecstatic moaning, mostly bogus.

My night-vision maxed.

“You ready. To get. Ro
man
tacized?”

I drew my gun. I loaded a wingnut. Proceeded on my stomach toward the spotlight.

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“Are you ready. To get… In
fant
alized?”

The manufactured moans died warmly beneath a sampled orchestra’s doleful tuning. The audience grown all hush and tension. A long sighing rustle of fabric, of hundreds leaning forward at once.

The principal squeezed his chin in his fist. I was coming around on his right.

Swelling cellos bled a hesitant pianoline. The lightest of drum-rolls, a kind of sated cicada-sound—it murmured near the threshhold, almost subliminal. And then a tweet of birdsong. And then a muted waterfall. Boystar’s mom was futzing with her purse-zipper. Nothing got by me. Slokum’s popping knuckles. Chaz Black blinking rapidly to unseat a dust-mote. The music got louder, and I could still hear everything. The scratch of Brodsky’s mustache against his stroking pointer. Nakamook’s pulse. Jelly’s kiss on his hand. The tiny suck of disrupted pomade as Boystar’s father passed a comb through his hair. All the wet air Desormie pushed through his lips to prove he wasn’t gay and had contempt for birds and cellos. Eliza June Watermark whispered my name.

I looked hard inside the spotlit oval, sockets tingling behind my pinned eyes.

Posed and fitted for maximum exaltation—with platforms in his bootsoles to show off his height; his fringeless kneeholes arty-yet-unslovenly; pantslegs symmetrically a-riot with buckles, dec-orative zippers, glued-on snaps that couldn’t unsnap; his pitch-checking finger, bereft of utility, professionally pressed to his 1310

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headset’s earpiece; his tanktop in November attesting to his ruggedness as below it his chain-belt did his streetness; his earstud’s gleam bespeaking glamour, its ¼-carat weight counterpointing at humility; his orbits shadowed and his lashes mascaraed, his ecstatic tortured saint’s stare, aimed at one o’clock, thus thrown into starkest, most spectacular relief—Boystar opened his mouth to sing a sweet and abdominal measure-spanning nothing of the kind child-pop crooners who fancy themselves “vocal artists” precede all the kicks of their drumtracks with.

Had he oohed, mmmed, or even heyed, I might have targeted a different part of him. The vowel he trilled, though, the second in “robot,” required so much maw-gaping I took it for a sign.

And hooded I rose before the spotlight: completely invisible to those behind Boystar; to those in the bleachers but something in the way. A sudden blackness roughly boy-shaped.

I split the penumbra and blasted.

The wingnut ricocheted between his molars. The noise of its impacts, amplified tenfold, blared from the speakers, CHUCKETA-CRACKETA. He dropped looking up and his mouth sprayed particles. A sticky mist of atomized blood, pulverized teeth, spear-mint saliva.

Eliyahu was shouting, “Gurion is here!”

I cleared the pink grit from my eyes with a sleeve.

Fifty armed Israelites stood in the bleachers.

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20

PROPER

Friday, November 17, 2006

10:41 a.m.–10:49 a.m.

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Because otherwise scholars, once they start the next chapter, will wonder to distraction how it is I could have witnessed all that’s being described, I’ll clarify here: I didn’t witness all of it. There’s no way I could’ve. Not firsthand.

Yet it feels like I did. It feels like I did but, just like the rest of you, I’ve also seen the videos.* I’ve seen hundreds of the videos, many more than once, and while it’s easy to conclude that what I witnessed in the gym and what I’ve since seen on screens have overlapped in my memory in the six years between the Damage Proper and this writing, it is not at all easy to separate the overlap’s components. In fact, it’s impossible. I know because I’ve tried.

Just yesterday, for example, I watched a clip of the Five firing down on Shlomo. It looked like I remembered,
exactly
like I remembered, and I realized my memory must have been of the clip, not the experience.

* Though, unlike most of you, I tend to close my browser the moment any footage of the so-called

“11/17 Miracle” intrudes.

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