Adam Levin - The Instructions

This isn’t to say that the great degree to which her thoughts were muddled was solely an outcome of my love declaration. There was also my father — he enhanced the muddle, muddled it further. Had my dad reacted the same way as my mom when I told them about June at the night before’s dinner, I doubt she’d have thought to give me the book. Instead, he got all calm and laissez-faire. This wasn’t because he took my declaration more seriously than my mom had, though — at least not necessarily. His thinking most likely went something like this: “Gurion is just a boy and so is probably not actually in love with June, but just excited about her; if he is in love with June, though, really and truly in love, there is no way to stop it; so either he isn’t in love and there’s nothing to worry about, or he is in love and there’s no use in worrying.”

In any case, that was their usual pattern: my father believing I’d warp if taken too seriously, and my mother that I’d warp if not taken seriously enough; the one going one way, and the other the other, pressing against each other, further and further, til they overlapped deep into one another’s spaces like the fingers of a cage you might make with your hands to surround a ladybug or firefly. It was how they loved me and, on the whole, it was nothing to complain about.

I wasn’t thinking too much about any of that, though. I hadn’t even read My Life as a Man yet. After my mother had left the Office, I read the summary on the back of the cover and from that I got a basic handle on her motives, and, deciding that knowing them would interfere too greatly with my enjoyment of the novel — I wasn’t in the mood to feel condescended to — I put the book away and instead I read Rabbi Salt’s letter to Brodsky.

At first the letter cheered me — thrilled me even. He testified to nearly everything I wanted to believe about myself. But at the end of the letter, where he claimed that the Cage would be the end of me — that got to me a little, then more than a little. I tried to tell myself he was just hamming things up in order to persuade Brodsky not to put me in the Cage, but I knew Rabbi Salt, I knew him well, so I knew that he wouldn’t have brought out the big guns — Brodsky’s dead son, my old friend Ben, “Gurion attended his shiva… wept at his burial”—if he didn’t desperately believe in his argument. Rabbi Salt was not a heartless man. To use another’s emotions about a dead son to strengthen an argument he didn’t fiercely believe in; that was beyond him. That was beneath him. At the time he wrote that letter he had to have believed that the Cage would destroy me.

Or maybe I was wrong about him. I might have been wrong about him. I was wrong about something, because if he wasn’t the kind of person who’d use a dead son on that son’s loving father (in the same nasty way, no less, as I had the day before; same father, same son — I’m not trying to be coy), he’d either lost faith in me and since pretended — every time I’d seen him since the letter was written — to still have faith in me, or he’d lost faith in me at the time he wrote the letter but gotten it back before the next time I saw him.

Since it neither entailed his being cruel or condescending, the last of the three options seemed to be the most generous to Rabbi Salt, so that’s the one I chose, but it wasn’t like that option got me feeling all joyful — it still meant he’d thought less of me than I wanted him to think of me, even if just for a day or two. The Cage couldn’t break me. Nothing could break me. I wanted him to know that; I wanted him to have always known that.

I put the letter away to write my ISS assignment, but I couldn’t get my mind off Rabbi Salt, and to ignore a thing you have to concentrate on another thing, so I read Call-Me-Sandy’s “Assessment of a Client: Gurion Maccabee.” When I got to the end, my reaction was the opposite of the one I’d just had to the letter. I wanted to feel more upset at its writer. I wanted to hate her. I thought: You should hate her. If it wasn’t for her, you would be in normal classes; you might even be in class with June right now.

But that whole Klingon bit, and how she’d concluded that Flowers was imaginary, and the codeswitching part where she thinks she’s being slick, asking her professor on a date in a footnote — I couldn’t see her doing anything with malice, let alone to a student she seemed to like. To hate Call-Me-Sandy for dooming me to the Cage would be like hating a dog for farting. And so I gave up, and then gave up some more: on attempting to be happy about Rabbi Salt’s faith-loss, my mother’s muddled thinking, my father’s skepticism.

At least Philip Roth was good for the Israelites.

I put “Assessment” away and was about to ask Pinge for a pass to the bathroom when Desormie burst into the Office, frothing.

He said, “You think you’re funny, Maccabee? You think I’m funny?” Some of the froth had built up and hardened into paste in his lipcorners and I didn’t know what he was talking about. I could barely think is how bad I wanted his paste to disintegrate.

I looked away, saying, The Gym teacher is talking to me during ISS, Miss Pinge.

Desormie leaned at me.

“Ron—” said Miss Pinge.

“And now you’re tattling like a tattle-tale telling tales outside school? Isn’t that ironic!”

“Lower your voice,” Miss Pinge said.

“Lower my voice?” Desormie mock-whispered. “I’ll lower my voice,” he mock-whispered.

He was leaning with his hands on my desk and he wanted to break my nose. He was leaning so close, and he wanted to break my nose so bad, that his eyes were crossing to keep my nose in focus. I scratched it on the septum. I should have used my swearfinger, but instead I used my ring one. The one good thing about him being that close was I could look right at his eyes like a killer and not see the paste in the periphery.

“The Indians,” Desormie said, “have worked their butts off to get good enough to bring you glory on Friday. They’ve slaved to develop the skills it takes to bring decisive victory that will reflect for the better on all of us. It! Is! Un! Grateful! To! Damage! Their!—”

“Stop yelling, Ron,” Miss Pinge said.

“Stop yelling?” Desormie said, standing up straight. “Don’t you want to know why I’m yelling, Ginnie? Don’t you wanna know? Because I wanna tell you why I’m yelling.”

“What’s the yelling about?” Miss Pinge said.

“I’m gonna tell you,” said Desormie.

Tell it, I said.

“You don’t tell me what to tell.”

I said, Stepitup, man. Tell ’em where it’s at.

“Oh, I will, and—”

Break it down righteous. Take ’em to the bridge.

Miss Pinge said, “Are you making James Brown jokes, Gurion?”

“Who knows what kinda jokes he’s making? They’re inappropriate jokes is what I know. And what else I know is whatever kinda jokes it is, ever, not only don’t I think his jokes are funny, ever,” said Desormie, before revolving to look at my nose again. “Not only don’t I think your jokes are funny, ever,” he said to me, “but I don’t even get your jokes. And I don’t think any one does. And even if they do, I don’t think they think your jokes are funny either, because you’re not mature. Maturity, Maccabee, is control of yourself, and I don’t think you’ve got control of yourself. You make jokes because you can’t help it is what I think. If you had some intestinal fortitude, you could help it, but you don’t have any intestinal fortitude because that’s a part of maturity, too. For example, I don’t think you’ve got the intestinal fortitude to fess up to what you or those so-called friends of yours did today is an example of what I mean by maturity. Maybe you think what you did took a whole lot of intestinal fortitude, but it didn’t. Maybe you think the silence you’re keeping about the crimes you and your friends have committed is the same kind of silence Frank Pentangeli kept to protect Michael Corleone, but it isn’t. The silence of Frankie Five Angels was the silence of omerta , which is honorable, and Frankie Five Angels became a suicide in a bathtub to keep that silence so he wouldn’t dishonor himself and shame his family, which believe me he was tempted. That is the kind of silence that requires intestinal fortitude. And I don’t see you in a bathtub. And I definitely don’t see you bleeding from the wrists in a bathtub. What I see is you sitting beside an administrative assistant, reading a book, trying to save your own hide and thinking, ‘I’ll never rat on my friends and I’ll always keep my mouth shut,’ like that’s omerta, but it isn’t. It’s not omerta. It’s what Henry Hill thought is what it is, and guess what. Eventually he did rat on his friends. He didn’t keep his mouth shut. And look at him. Look at where his path has led him. To witness protection, probably in Arizona — no one’s for sure about it, of course — but what is for sure is the marinara there is ketchup and he’s a shnook. I don’t think you want to be a shnook, Maccabee. I don’t think you want to be on that path, but the way you’re mistaking the saving of your own hide for omerta, and the way you’re mistaking jokes for control, not to mention how you’re mistaking gutless silence for intestinal fortitude, well let me tell you: You’re worse than on that path. You’re taking the shortcut . The shortcut to shnooksville.”