The Instructions (15 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

people the way he punched air, he’d win most fights at Aptakisic, I thought. I could take him easy and so could the Flunky; Benji and Slokum went without saying. The teachers, of course, could take Eliyahu, and probably Leevon Ray could too. Though no one had ever seen Leevon fight, everyone seemed pretty sure he could fight because he never talked, and not ever talking had to get him in fights because it had to make a lot of kids crazy—it made teachers crazy, which is why he was in the Cage, and teachers get paid to not get crazy—and we’d never seen Leevon bruised up or bleeding. Or maybe it was just because he was a black guy that everyone seemed to think he could fight. About Jenny Mangey I couldn’t be certain: she always fought guys, and guys who fought girls were weak and sick, so even though Mangey had never lost a fight, it was hard to know if she was really any good. Vincie Portite, prior to the eye-trauma, could have defeated Eliyahu no sweat, but now the two would most likely be even. There were five or ten others at Aptakisic I’d have ranked Eliyahu even against, but the more that I watched him throw punches at air, the more certain I got he couldn’t throw them at people. Eliyahu wasn’t serious about damaging things. I could see it on his face. Totally calm. Not calm with concentration like a zenned-out old sensei, but more like an uncle, drunk at a wedding, in the middle of dancing to his favorite song badly. Not even that. I didn’t think ill of him. His face was just… It was Eliyahuic. His violence was not sincere.

Baruch Hashem, I thought, he isn’t out to hit someone; all he 139

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needs to learn to do is break glass.

You have good enough form, I said to Eliyahu. Now it’s just a matter of what you pretend.

“And what should I pretend?” he said.

I said, You have to pretend that your fist is a race car with amazing brakes and that there is some power in it, and the power is like two really fat guys sitting in the front seats of your fist, and that when you’re throwing a punch, your fist-car is going two hundred miles per hour, but when you hit the thing you’re trying to hit, the fist-car stops the instant its knuckle-bumper impacts the thing, and because your fist-car stops so suddenly, the fat people-power inside goes flying through the windshield since the fat guys aren’t wearing seatbelts, and they only stop flying after going through the surface of the thing you hit and smashing into the center of it.

“Okay,” he said. “I can pretend that.”

I said, We’ll test it. I said, The motor in the water fountain is whistling. It is a distraction. Do you hear it?

“Yes. I think I hear it now. It’s maybe more a hum than a whistle?”

I said, It’s a pretty whistley kind of hum. I said, Make it stop by punching the water fountain. Punch the water fountain so the fat guys smash onto the motor. They’ll splat on the motor and the motor will clog up and stop, and then there will be the sound of something dropping.

Eliyahu spun around and punched the water fountain. There 140

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was clanging noise. It was the sound of the metal shell of it getting vibrated. He shook his hand out in the air. “That hurts,” he said.

“And I can still hear the motor.”

It’s because you didn’t aim the punch, I said. You tried to put your fist through the shell of it. You’ll break your hands that way, and if it’s a fire-extinguisher case, you’ll glass up your armveins and bleed like a bibbit. What happened was you didn’t put the brakes on, so the car crashed into the building and the fat guys got pressed flat between the bumpers instead of going through the windshield because the building stopped the fist-car when it should’ve been the brakes that stopped it.

“It’s the splatting,” he said. “I kept picturing them splatting, the fat men, and how it would bring them such pain as no man should ever have to know.”

That’s okay, I said. I said, Don’t pretend they’re fat guys, then.

Pretend they’re golems. Golems don’t splat, though, so imagine they shatter.

“It could be that golems feel pain, though, no? It’s possible, I think. Otherwise, the Prague golem would not have become so angry and rampaged. Without pain, there is no call for anger, much less rampaging.”

I don’t know about that, I said, but—forget the golems. Try boulders.

“Boulders,” he said, “I like boulders. Boulders are large and without nerves, without souls. Boulders can pass through a windshield without dilemma,” he said. Then he spun back around and 141

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punched the water fountain. No clanging. Then the sound of creaking and then of something dropping inside of the shell. A slow heavy sound.

Thung.

The motor stopped humming.

I said, You landed it.

Eliyahu smiled. “I want a drink,” he said.

I said, Have a drink.

He pressed the button on the fountain and nothing came out of the arcing hole.

“I broke it,” he said.

I said, How’s your hand feel?

“My hand feels strong,” he said.

I said, It’s very easy to break things, and if you think the right way, you won’t ever get hurt.

“This is good,” he said. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, how to get to A-Hall?”

I pointed in the direction of 2-Hall. I said, Go up to that opening, there. That’s 2-Hall. Go left at 2-Hall, and go all the way to the end. Then take a right.

“Thank you, Gurion. I will break glass shortly.”

Get told something first, I said. You don’t want to look like a crazy. You want them to know you’re a defiance.

“I will be a defiance,” Eliyahu said.

And then he grabbed my shoulders and then he was hugging me. He wasn’t pointy and cold like a skeleton, like he looked 142

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like he would be. He was softer and he smelled like oatmeal and a room of old books. He smelled like my dad’s overcoat smelled, except without the cigarette part of the smell, and it made me sad because it made me wish he was my brother so that I could have known him all my life and made sure no one hurt him. I could tell that people hurt him and that he was, at least for the most part, scared of them. I could tell because he was hugging me. It was a scared thing to do. Trying to hug a person like that, a person you just met who wasn’t sending any hug-me signals, might make them think that you were trying to harm them or get to their wang, and so they might try to harm you before finding out it was a hug you were going for. The only time you were supposed to do a thing like that was when you thought it was more dangerous not to do it. And even then most people didn’t do it. Most people got stunned by that kind of danger.

I’d never heard of anyone using the floating seat on a crashing airplane, for example. And airplanes were always crashing. And they always had floating seats you could try to save yourself with by jumping out the airlock just above the ocean. Main Man would use the floating seat, I thought, and Main Man had hugged me a few times unsignalled, but Main Man didn’t really know that people hurt him and so he didn’t know why he got scared, just that he
was
scared, and he’d always say so, and when he said so, I’d tell him everything was fine and he would believe me and stop feeling scared. Eliyahu was different. Telling him everything was fine wouldn’t ever work. He’d know it wasn’t 143

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true. It was easy to tell he knew a lot about some things. It was all those Eliyahuic faces he made. Like an old tzadik who won’t squint even though his eyes are half-blind from reading so much. Soon he stopped hugging me. He picked up his bookbag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he jogged fists-up towards 2-Hall and punched the walls and lockers seven times on his way.

While he jogged, I kept thinking: Eliyahu is damaged. It got me even more sad. I didn’t want to be sad, so I tried to fight it.

I tried to think this: He wouldn’t be the same if he wasn’t damaged; you might not even like an undamaged Eliyahu.

But I knew that wasn’t true. I’d have liked him either way.

Maybe not as much, but then also maybe more. Eliyahu was a scholar. Everyone I liked who wasn’t damaged was a scholar.

Rather, everyone I liked who wasn’t a scholar was damaged. Or maybe the first way. The stress kept shifting.

A door squeaked behind me, and then there were footsteps.

Swinging an empty two-gallon milk jug, the perennially dry-mouthed
Mister
Todd Frazier—
teacher
of drama, Malke
vich
ian inflector—came out of his classroom and headed for the fountain.

It’s broken, I told him.

He tried the button anyway. “It’s
broken
,” he said. “I am
thirsty
,”

he said. “Let me
see
your pass.”

He wasn’t that bad. It was just the way he talked. I showed him my pass.

“
Do
not dawdle.”

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He walked me the twenty-odd steps to the Cage, watched me ring the bell, and wouldn’t quit his hovering til after the monitor appeared in the doorway.

GURION

GATE GATE GATE GATE GATE

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BOTHA

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G

E

L

W

D O O R WAY

L

A

D O O R WAY

A

D O O R WAY
L

D

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All schoolday long, the floor-to-ceiling gate made of chain-link fencing that blocked off the doorway of the Cage was locked. So was the door behind it. Students couldn’t leave the Cage unless they were going to Gym, Nurse Clyde, their therapist, the Office, or Lunch-Recess if they had cafeteria privilege. And if you wanted to come inside between 9:10 and 3:30, there was a protocol: 1. You’d ring the doorbell on the outer wall of the doorway.

2. The monitor would unlock the door of the Cage and step into the doorway, where he’d look at you through the diamond-shaped spaces of the gate.

3. You’d hand your pass to the monitor, and if the pass was acceptable, the monitor would open the gate and let you in.

or

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If you didn’t have a pass or if your pass was unacceptable, then the monitor would write you a pass to go to the Office and get a new pass, and when you’d done that, you’d come back to the Cage and start over at 1.

There were only a few situations in which the entrance protocol didn’t apply. One was if you were coming back from Gym on time: there’d be a group of you, and after one of you rang the bell, the monitor would stand behind the gate and let the group in, single-file, checking each kid off on his clipboard as they passed him. Another situation was if you were coming back from Lunch-Recess. If you came back from Lunch-Recess at the end of Lunch-Recess, it worked just like coming back from Gym on time, except the group of you would be much larger since Lunch-Recess period was the same for everyone at Aptakisic (between periods 4 and 5). If you came back from Lunch-Recess within the first ten minutes of Lunch-Recess—in which case you’d be taking advantage of what the Cage Manual called “The Hot Lunch Caveat”*—you’d usu-

* “The Cage is an ever-available island of physical and emotional safety. If, for any reason, you wish to spend the Lunch-Recess period in the Cage, you may. It is your right and privilege to do so.

If you would like to exercise this right, but you are in need of hot lunch, you will be permitted a ten-minute window at the start of the Lunch-Recess period (regardless of what grade you are in) in which to purchase hot lunch in the cafeteria and return with it to the Cage. Simply tell the lunch monitor that you are taking advantage of the Hot Lunch Caveat, and he or she will escort you to the front of the serving line so that you may receive your hot lunch in a timely fashion. NOTE: IF YOU

REQUIRE HOT LUNCH BUT YOUR CAFETERIA PRIVILEGES HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED, YOU WILL BE GRANTED THE SAME TEN-MINUTE WINDOW AS DESCRIBED ABOVE

IN WHICH TO GET YOUR HOT LUNCH AND RETURN WITH IT TO THE CAGE. IN

SUCH CASES, YOU MUST IDENTIFY YOURSELF TO THE LUNCH MONITOR, WHO

WILL HAVE BEEN INFORMED THAT YOUR CAFETERIA PRIVILEGES HAVE BEEN SUS-146

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ally be alone, and your tray of hot lunch would, itself, be your pass.

The only other situation where the entrance protocol didn’t apply was when you were coming back from your therapist’s—you didn’t need a pass then, either. You’d knock on the door that connected Call-Me-Sandy’s and Bonnie Wilkes PsyD’s office to the Cage, and Botha would unlock it, let you in, and that would be that.

Even though all but a very senior few teachers were regularly rotated into the Cage for two periods per week each, none of them had keys to get in, and, like the students, every one of them had to ring the bell and wait at the gate for the monitor to open it. There were, in all of Aptakisic, only five people who had keys to the Cage: Brodsky, Floyd, Jerry, Hector the janitor, and Victor Botha.

Victor Botha was the monitor. His righthand was just an oppos-able thumb, which is something certain monkeys don’t have.

The hand had been chopped by a crop-grinder on the island of Australia when Botha was small. It was probably a tragedy when it happened, but it was hard to tell so many years later because he became an adult who deserved a chopped hand. Botha always went beyond the entrance protocol.

That morning proved no exception. As I’d approached the gate, Mr. Frazier in tow, I’d done 1: I rang the bell and waited.

And Botha’d done 2: He came out and looked at me through the chain-link gate.

PENDED, AND YOU WILL, AS WHEN ELECTING TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE HOT

LUNCH CAVEAT, BE ESCORTED TO THE FRONT OF THE CAFETERIA LINE BY HIM OR