Adam Levin - The Instructions

“There’s a protocol,” Jerry said, grinding his kicking-toe into the pavement. Then he spoke the largest string of words I’d ever heard from him: “I’ve followed the protocol, but when it comes to what to do about someone who, after you’ve followed the protocol, continues to smoke, there’s just nothing in the manual. If you were a student, I suppose I’d go inside and write you up.”

“That is what you should do, then,” said my mom.

“But that’s just silly,” said Jerry.

“Maybe it is you who are silly, Jerry,” said my mom.

“May be !” Jerry said, eyes gone wide and hopeful at the sound of his name on her lips. He choked on something that would have bloomed into laughter if he wasn’t a robot.

“Look at this contraband,” said my mom. Jerry leaned forward. “The fire,” she said to him, “is burning the letters. There is more tar under the letters than I am willing to inhale.” She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it.

Then she stepped past Jerry and held the door open for me. Carved into the door’s pneumatic pushplate was another WE DAMAGE WE. I ran a finger over it, barely touching it, and the dry topskin of my fingertip perforated whitely from the roughness of the engraving. I wondered what Ronrico had used to make the words so mean — a nail? a key? If you held a guy by the hair on the crown of his skull, I was thinking, and pressed his forehead hard enough against the bar, the words would make the forehead bleed, and the guy would be marked by them. In a mirror, his scab would read WE DAMAGE WE.

“Let’s go,” my mom told me.

Right when we stepped into the Office — I had just got my hand up to wave hello to Miss Pinge — my mom asked, “Where is Leonard Brodsky?”

Brodsky’s door was open, and he was pacing. Hearing his name, he revolved to face us and I pointed at him. My mom entered before Brodsky had a chance to invite her. I wished she had waited, and thought to wait myself — after my Tuesday snakiness, I wanted to at least be polite to him — but followed anyway because she was my mom and he was only my principal.

“Leonard,” my mother said, “I am Tamar Maccabee and I would like you to excuse Gurion’s tardiness. It is my fault that he is late.”

“Fair enough,” Brodsky said, no hesitation or anything. He said, “Go on ahead to the Cage, Gurion.”

I have ISS, I told him.

“You can serve your ISS tomorrow,” Brodsky said.

My mom said, “I told him he would not have to serve ISS tomorrow, Leonard.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“Leonard, he spent all of yesterday and this morning mentally pre-paring himself to be in ISS today. We must take into account his mental preparation.”

The wingnut I’d given Brodsky glinted up from the palm of his half-open fist when he shrugged = “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

My mom could not have known what she was talking about, herself. As a rule, she avoided using the word mental —she did not believe the word described anything real. In the introduction to her doctoral dissertation, she wrote, “ Mind is to the study of human psychology what the ether once was to that of pre-Einsteinian physics — a convenient and groundless homuncular hypothesis that obscures exactly that which its proponents insist it describes; an illusion to be dispelled.” At best, she had mental preparation ed at Brodsky the way I’d sometimes Jew at Israelites who didn’t know they were Israelites . At worst, she was being a sophist. She was about to respond to Brodsky’s shrug when the beginning-of-lunch tone came through the intercom.

As soon as it ended, she said, “The mental preparation is arguably the largest part of the ISS punishment.” Sophist. “Beyond that, Leonard,” she continued, “I told him he would not have to serve ISS tomorrow. Will you make a liar of me before my son?”

Brodsky tried to gesture with his shoulders in a way that would have = flabbergasted, but midway through the gesture, the wingnut popped from his hand and bounced off the back of my mother’s. Brodsky bent to retrieve the wingnut, which interrupted the gesture and made it so the gesture, not only despite but also because of its failure to signify flabbergasted , actually heightened Brodsky’s signification of flabbergasted = Brodsky was so flabbergasted, he couldn’t even express flabbergasted . It was perfect, and I got a rush because I knew it was perfect, perfect in the exact way that I knew the entire universe would be perfect if I, or someone else, became the messiah. I knew of many outcomes in the universe that were affected either despite or because of a given reason — like for instance hatred of the Israelites and the contributions of Israelites: You can say that we are hated despite the good things that we have done for the world = the haters don’t care about the good things we’ve done; or you can say that we are hated because of the good things we’ve done for the world = the haters are sick of us being the ones who do so many of the good things; but for any given hater, it has to be one or the other in order to make sense; either the hater says, “There are no good Israelites, and the ones who seem good are but tricksters,” or he says, “The good ones are the exceptions that prove the rule that Israelites are bad”—but Brodsky’s expression of flabbergasted was one of the very first outcomes I knew of that came about both because of and despite the same reason. What spooked me out was that the last time I considered that kind of perfect relationship between an outcome and a reason — early on Tuesday, on page 41, when I thought about how it was good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether or not you do justice — I was also in Brodsky’s office. Brodsky hadn’t intended for me to consider what I considered either of those times, but I felt gratitude toward him anyway, for cueing me in to something perfect, only I could not come up with a way to thank him without sounding like I was making fun of him for accidentally hitting my mom’s hand with a wingnut, so I just smiled at him. He didn’t look at me, though. He didn’t see it.

Standing again, wingnut retrieved, Brodsky said to my mother, “I’d like to speak to you alone.”

“I would prefer if we could settle about Gurion’s ISS first,” she said.

“He can serve the rest of today and go back to the Cage tomorrow,” Brodsky said. “Go ahead,” he said to me.

He shut the door as I cleared the threshold.

Name:Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee

Grade:5 6 7 8

Homeroom:The Cage

Date:9/26/2006

Complaint Against Student (from Complaint Against Student Sheet)

Impersonating the following: Mr. Gerald’s walk, my step 1 warning for the impersonation, Mr. Gerald’s laughter, my step 3 warning for the impersonation. 5th period. 9/21/06. Mr. Botha.

Step 4 Assignment: Write a letter to yourself in which youexplain 1) why you are at step 4 (in after-school detention); 2) what you could do in order to avoid step 4 (receiving after-school detention) inthe future; 3) what you have learned from being at step 4 (in after-school detention); 4) what you have learned from writing this letter to yourself. Include a Title, an Introduction, a Body, and a Conclusion. This letter will be collected atthe end of after-school detention . This letter will be stored in your permanent file.

Title

Underdog

Introduction