Adam Levin - The Instructions

“It’s a megaphone,” he said. “It’s not a gun.”

It’s shaped like a gun, I said. It’s got a trigger and it shoots sound, I said.

“That doesn’t make it a gun,” he said. “Guns are weapons.”

Hot-glue gun, I said. I said, Nail gun. I said, Staple gun.

“It’s a megaphone, Gurion.”

He was trying to be nice. That’s why he said my name. I didn’t want him to be nice, though. It banced up the roles. So I didn’t look at him. I looked at the family picture next to the megaphone. Ben was in it. I knew him before he died. He was a scholar and he was loyal to me. We had Torah Study together at the Solomon Schecter School, before I got kicked out.

Ben drowned at camp at the beginning of summer. No one knows how. He was missing for two days and his head was bruised when they found him in the lake. They thought he knocked it diving off the pier at night, but a drunken boater might have hit-and-runned him. Whatever happened, Brodsky’s face changed.

I only ever saw Brodsky once before Ben died. It was at Ben’s bar-mitzvah. I got invited to more bar-mitzvahs than any other Schecter fourth-grader because Rabbi Salt had promoted me to eighth-grade Torah Study and it was a custom at Schecter to invite everyone in your Torah Study class.

Before Ben got killed, Brodsky’s face was either joyous or sad, and the muscles in it made the bones and the skin fit themselves to those emotions. Even though Ben’s death made Brodsky bitter, his bones and skin were already finished being formed by the muscles, and it was too late for him to make convincing faces that were not joyful or sad. Like the one he was making right then: he meant to make a tough, sass-killing face, but he looked like a wifeless old cousin trying to hide his loneliness.

He said, “Tell me why you fought these boys.” When he said “these boys,” he poked the CASS with his finger, like Ronrico and the Janitor were right there on the page in front of him. Like it wasn’t just their names, but them. I got a rush from thinking about it. My name was on the page, too. And my actions — Desormie’s version of them, at least.

Brodsky said, “This is your sixth fight in the nine weeks you’ve been at Aptakisic.”

It was my twenty-ninth fight in the nine weeks I’d been at Aptakisic, not counting exchanges like the Emotionalize one with Boystar. It was the sixth I got caught for. But what was important to me was that Brodsky’d poked the CASS again when he’d said the word this.

“Next time it’s an OSS,” he said.

How long til I get expelled?

“We don’t want to expel you,” Brodsky said. “Are you trying to get expelled?”

I said, Let’s call my mother.

“Let’s have a conversation first,” he said. “Let’s talk about why you keep fighting.”

I’m not telling on anyone, I said.

“So Ronrico and Michael started up with you, then.”

I’m not a rat, I said. I said, I wouldn’t rat on myself if I started up with them .

He said, “I’m not a villain, Gurion. You can talk to me. I’m not your enemy.”

I said, I never said you were a villain.

“You’re implying I’m your enemy?”

I said, Talk to me like I’m a kid. Don’t talk to me about implications.

He said, “Rabbi Salt has told me you’re the most promising student he’s ever known. He has gone on at length about how articulate you are. Ben, may he rest in peace, was very fond of you and—”

Can we call my mother?

“Won’t you be a mensch and talk to me?”

I said, Ben didn’t deserve it.

Brodsky said, “That’s not what I mean, Gurion.”

I said, That’s the only menschy thing that I have to say to you. I said, You keep me in a cage.

Brodsky balanced his elbow on the desk and held his open hand out with all the fingers spread, like he was going to explain something important to me, but all he said was, “The Cage is not a cage.”

Right, I said.

I had sarcasm in my throat. That happened sometimes when I’d get treated like a shmendrick by sincere people.

Brodsky looked hurt by it, and he wouldn’t stop performing the explaining thing with his hand. It made me want to have an intermittent explosion. If he saw me explode, he would be too frightened or too pissed at me to be hurt. I didn’t really care what Brodsky thought of me, but I didn’t want to hurt him. There was already too much sadness in his office. It would steam off the bright pink top of his head, then condense and fall in droplets into the carpet and onto the furniture and get on you.

The second time I saw Brodsky was at Ben’s shiva, where I heard him say to Rabbi Salt that he wished it was himself who got killed instead of his son. It made me think of the part in Genesis Rabbah where Hashem shows Adam all the different versions of the future that could happen. I don’t know what Hashem used for a screen, but I hope it was the sky, and that Adam watched it while he floated on his back in a scumless lagoon.

In one of the movies, David ben-Jesse slayed Goliath and became King of Israel. In another one, David died at birth. The version where David died is the one that Hashem said was fated to happen. But Adam told Hashem that he wanted David to live, because the Israelites, without David, would never have an empire and never build the Temple. So Hashem let Adam give seventy years of his life to David. That’s why Adam lived to be 930 instead of 1000.

There in Brodsky’s office, I started thinking of how almost anyone who Hashem showed David’s futures to would do the same thing as Adam did, and how, if I knew a different version of the future, I might have known that if Brodsky died instead of Ben, it would have been worse for the Brodsky family and the world. I might have known, for example, that if Brodsky’d died instead, Ben would have saved the next Hitler from drowning at day camp. But that still wouldn’t make it any easier to find the justice, because why did Adam have to give up seventy years of his life for David to live? Why couldn’t God pull seventy years out of the serpent or a Sodomite? And so why did any Brodsky have to get killed at all? Why couldn’t it be that Ben would be changing into swim-trunks in the locker-room while the next Hitler drowned? Why should there have to be a next Hitler?

None of those questions can get answered any easier than the others, but if Hashem was showing me futures, I would ask Him all the questions, and He would not be able to tell me the answers because either He doesn’t know, or because understanding those things would kill a person, or make the person something less than a person. And though I would, like I said, give David my seventy, it would piss me off, and I’d cut straight to the point and ask the main question. If all of this was happening in ancient scripture, I would ask it loud. It would be a lamentation.

Gurion would lament: What is the good of trying to do justice if God will kill me and my family whether or not I do justice?

And the answer would come from God or a judge or commentary in the margins. And God or the judge or the scholar who’d comment would say, “It is good to try to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether or not you do justice.”

I was thinking too much about Ben to explode, so I dug my last wingnut out of my pocket and dropped it in the palm of Brodsky’s explaining-hand.

“I don’t want this,” he said. I was chomsky to think he’d appreciate a wingnut. He tossed the wingnut back so it would land in my lap, but before its arc ended, I knocked it sideways with a sudden backhand. It bounced off the wall and landed in a planter that held a fan-shaped tree from Asia.

“This fighting,” said Brodsky. “What can I do to get you to stop fighting?”