The Instructions (53 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

he’d itemized it in the will as item 37, right below the motel, which was item 36, which is why Flowers sometimes called the Frontier
36
and the cane
37
. He loved his brother and it reminded him. The cane was functional because guests at the Frontier often weren’t. A week before, I’d seen Flowers kick one out. There was a poisony smell coming from Room 12, which was right next to the Welcome Office, and Flowers told me to stay in the office while he took care of it, but I came out front and stood in Room 12’s doorway to watch, which was easy, because the Room 12 bathroom was opposite the doorway, and all the action was happening in the bathroom. This guy was making drugs in Room 12’s tub, and when Flowers came in, the guy spun around with eyes like tomatoes and he cursed Flowers and Flowers cursed back and told him he was ruining the bathtub and told him he had to leave. Then the guy stopped cursing and said to give him a couple hours and Flowers told him to leave again, and the guy went for this arm-length lucite rod that he’d been using to stir the mixture in the bathtub, and as soon as he got ahold of it, Flowers plugged the ball-end of his cane in between the guy’s shoulder and chest, right in the rotator cuff, which made the guy’s hand drop the rod and stumble backwards. Flowers followed through, using 37 to pin the guy against the wall, and told him, again, to leave. Then the guy swung at Flowers’s head with the hand of his free arm, and Flowers dodged it Tyson-style—not ducking or blocking, just tilting his head out of the path of the punch, the skin of the guy’s knuckles grazing the point of the ivory horn Flowers wore in his earlobe—

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and then Flowers lifted the cane and brought it down on top of the guy’s shoulder, which became like gravel. I heard the shattering.

The guy dropped to the tiles, screamed, and passed out. A lightning bug landed on my neck and Flowers spun around and told me to call the cops while he kept an eye on the guy. I didn’t want to call the cops, because it was a kind of ratting, but then I didn’t want the guy to come back at night and hurt Flowers in his sleep, so I called them. That was the first time I’d ever seen grown men fight who weren’t on a screen. I didn’t like it so much. It seemed like it shouldn’t have been happening. As stealth as Flowers was with the cane and his Tyson-style, the thing on the whole was very clumsy and ugly, especially the part when they were cursing each other and then when the guy swung his lame punch and the way he began to shudder, broken-shouldered and unconscious, while Flowers stood watch on him. I kept thinking that they were too big to be fighting each other—not too old, really, but too big. While they were fighting each other, they didn’t look like people, or even animals. They looked like giant marionettes constructed from meat who the puppeteer was frustrated with. My mom cooked steak for dinner that night and I made myself eat it because I always ate my steak and I knew that if I didn’t eat it my parents would be worried that I was psychologically harmed from seeing the fight, and then they would decide I shouldn’t go to the Frontier anymore after school which they were already considering since Flowers told my dad about the fight over the phone that evening. If I couldn’t go to the Frontier, then there’d have to be 486

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other arrangements made for where I’d get picked up and dropped off by the schoolbus, and that would be an extra hassle on top of all the hassle I’d already caused by getting kicked out of everywhere, and plus I really liked Flowers. So I ate all my steak and then I went to the bathroom and threw up quietly.

The squirrel behind the oak saw his moment and shot across the drop-off circle, startling Edison, who ran up the sidewalk til he fell on his throat, then made a hurt-cat noise and followed me back inside.

Flowers waited on the couch, seeking through “Zealots” with a remote. A chapter (#43, p. 199–205) of what I thought would be this scripture,
The Instructions
(though back then I was calling it
The Autobiography of Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
or
Another Guide
for the Perplexed
or
Israelite Scholarship among Gentile Friends in a
School Run by Romans
—I kept changing my mind), was leaned on a music-stand next to the ottoman. The margins on the front page were totally empty, and there weren’t any red marks anywhere. I wondered if Flowers thought the page was perfect, but I knew it was more likely that he just hadn’t read it yet.

I handed him his cane and sat down beside him, and Edison jumped up into his lap. “You ain’t paid enough attention to the girl,” he said. He paused the disc. He said, “Pay attention.” Then he hit play and Lauryn Hill of the Fugees rhymed, “Even after all my logic and my theory, I add a motherfucka so you ign’ant niggas hear me.”

Flowers stopped the song and thumb-flicked his swearfinger 487

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at the center of my chapter with so much force the music stand tilted and almost fell. Edison jumped over my legs and hid his face like an ostrich in the gap between two cushions. Flowers said, “Now listen to this.” Leaning forward on his cane, he read a sentence with a royal accent:

“‘When one wishes to render oneself undetectable in the doorway of a scholastic facility wherein authority figures bent to disciplinary action who long to beset one lurk vigilantly in the many vestibules and passageways, one must not only find shadows within which to bestill all of one’s own twitchings and other visible muscular activities, but these shadows must be engaged by one in only their darkest parts, for to even momentarily breach such shadows’ penumbras will surely invite one’s detection by said parties of the other.’” Flowers said, “Now why you gonna write like you Sir Alec Guinness?”

Who’s that? I said.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi, man. Why you writing Obi-Wan style?

You didn’t used to write Obi-Wan style at all. Every chapter you give me’s more kenobi than the last, though. Been gradual. This one here—it’s just too much. And I’m trying to understand.

You writing for the learned order of the Jedi or what?”

I said, I’m writing for rabbis.

Flowers said, “Why rabbis?”

I said, Because it’s scripture.

“Damn,” Flowers said, “you mean like capital-S scripture, don’t you? All this time I thought you speaking figuratively. That’s 488

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lofty,” he said. “Lofty and loftier. Not that lofty’s a bad thing. I admire the lofty impulse. What don’t make sense to me, though, is how come if it’s supposed to be scripture for rabbis, you ain’t writin in Hebrew?”

I said, Cause then you couldn’t read it, or Nakamook, or June.

“I don’t know who June is,” he said, “but I know you boy Nakamook ain’t but a fraction more a rabbi than Edison over there, who’s a fraidy fraidy fraidy, ain’t you kitty cat?”

Edison was walking in place, or maybe climbing in place. He was trying to get his whole body into the cushion-gap, but there was no room. He couldn’t push through.

I said, I’m in love with June.

He said, “I thought you loved that Esther what’s-her-name—

you other teacher’s little girl.”

I said, I was lying to myself. I didn’t know til today. I was eating cheesepuffs.

“You’re a funny little boy,” Flowers said. “At least you’re trying to be honest. You daddy the same way. Maybe you been lying to yourself about who you want for an audience, though, too.

Anyone else you want beside the forementioned?”

I said, All the Israelites and anyone who’s on the side of damage.

“What’s the side of damage?”

I don’t know yet, I said, but the people on the side of damage don’t know it either, so it’s okay I don’t know.

“Even better,” he said. “Click click click.” He took Edison by 489

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the scruff and held him over his face. Edison liked it. He kept trying to mark the wrist of Flowers, who said in a kitty-cat voice,

“How a bunch of autobiography gonna be scripture?”

I said, If I interpret or demonstrate law, or if I become an important leader, like the messiah, or—

Flowers dropped Edison then, on the floor, and burst out laughing. When Flowers bursts out laughing, it is so booming that after you see it, it is hard to describe anyone else’s sudden laughter as bursting out without feeling like a liar.

Once he caught his breath, he said, “That’s amazing, man. You just out-loftied ‘I wanna write scripture.’ For fact, you just out-loftied anything anyone’s ever said to me straightfaced. The messiah!”

I said
if
, I said. And that’s only one of the—

“
Hell
no on ‘if’ and ‘one the ways’,” Flowers said. “I say chuck the ‘if’ and pick the loftiest way. I hope you the messiah. Same time, I think you best not harp on about being the messiah too—”

I wouldn’t, I said.

“Let me finish. You don’t want to harp on about it too early in this scripture you gonna write, cause that could discredit you, being that it’s so lofty, but same time, unless you gonna hold onto you book until
after
you’re famous for saving the world, it’s not the kinda thing you should avoid mentioning altogether.

It’s something you’re gonna have to explain at some point. You know, like, leak it in slowly while you’re hooking everyone, and then blast! That’s first of all.

“Second, you should re-examine you people’s scriptures. They 490

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all got plots. They got dramatic arcs. Thus far, you don’t. And they don’t read Obi-Wan style, neither. That’s the most important thing for you to learn right now—nothing good reads Obi-Wan style. I thought you knew that—that
Story of Stories
, Obi-Wan couldn’t hack that, that piece was
on
—but maybe you got lucky, or maybe you forgot. Anyway, that’s why I played you the rhyme from the song. So as to give you the context needed to understand what I’m asking you when I ask you what’s you motherfucker.”

My motherfucker, I repeated dumbly.

He said, “So far we got rabbis, me, June, Nakamook, and Israelites for you niggas. And then the ign’ant niggas the ones on the side of damage don’t know what it mean. You got more than enough logic and theory, we both know that, but what is you motherfucker? Like you motherfucking vernacular? You goin’

get heard, you gotta signify, right?”

Flowers was always right.

I said, Bancer.

He said, “Bancer’s good. What else?”

I said, Pennygun? Chomsky? Snat? Dumont? Hyperscoot, blinker action, bookrocket?

He said, “Good. Use those.”

I said, What about firmament?

“Why firmament?”

I said, Not firmament, but the word in Hebrew that gets translated into firmament.

“A word that means firmament?”

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I said, It doesn’t mean firmament.

“What’s it mean?” Flowers said.

I said, No one knows. I said, In Torah the translation says,

‘God split the firmament into land and sea,’ but rabbis argue about what that means, so I’m thinking firmament is motherfucker for rabbis. Unless—wait—do the rabbis need a motherfucker, you’re saying, or just the people on the side of damage?

“Need it or don’t, no way a motherfucker for rabbis could hurt,” Flowers said.

I said, But if I signify Scholar and I signify I Am In Love and I signify The Side of Damage—if I signify all those things, it’ll be too confusing.

“
Could
be,” Flowers said. “But you can explain a little, and then the plot should make sense of the rest. That’s what all the best plots do, man—they bring together disparate elements, linguistic and otherwise. You web-search ‘brings together disparate elements,’ you gonna land a thousand pages of gushy book reviews.”

I said, My life has no plot.

He said, “Sure you life got plot. Especially if you’re the messiah, right? Being the messiah’s you conceit. As it were.”

I said, I’m not the messiah, though.

Flowers said, “But you say you might become the messiah, right?”

I said, Yes.

He said, “So pretend you know you’ll become the messiah—If 492

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you become the messiah, then you’ll always have been the messiah, right?”

I don’t know, I said.

“What you mean you don’t know?”

I explained about potential messiahs. Flowers got bored and spaced out. When I finished, he said, “Do better you write it out and show me. Know, though, that a boy who might or might not be the messiah—that’s no less interesting to me than a boy who’s the for-sure messiah. Maybe it’s even better. I know that because I like you a hell of a lot, and I ain’t sure you the messiah. Now I’m gonna have at this Jedi scripture of yours with my red pen, see what’s there to salvage. You want an ice-cream pop or something?

I picked some up—they in the freezer if you want them.” He took my pages off the music stand and rolled them into a cylinder. Then he headed toward his desk, tapping the cylinder on his thigh.

I tried to break my fingers with the forces of diametrical opposition. The knuckles popped but nothing broke.

I said to Flowers, I’m starting over.

He said, “Starting over what?”

The scripture, I said.

Flowers said, “You given me, like, two hundred pages last couple months.”

Doesn’t matter, I said.

Flowers said, “If you
can
scrap that many pages, then I suppose you
must
scrap that many pages.”

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I’m starting over tonight, I said. You want an ice cream? I’m getting one.

Flowers said, “Nah, man. I had one already.”

I’d been taught to never eat ice cream alone. I’d lived by that rule, and it had served me well, or at least it hadn’t harmed me; I’d never eaten ice cream without enjoying it. I buttoned back up and left for the Metra.