Adam Levin - The Instructions

Brodsky said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you promise to stop fighting, I’ll have Miss Pinge give you a copy of your file.”

Promising’s against the Law, I said. If I tell you I won’t fight anymore, that should be good enough.

“That is good enough,” he said. “You agree not to fight anymore?”

I said, No.

“You’re impossible!” he said. Now he was pissed at me.

I felt better and I egged him on. I said, My mom’ll get my record anyway.

“That’ll be up to her,” said Brodsky. He picked up the telephone and dialed. A few seconds later, he said, “I’d like to speak to Judah Maccabee…Yes, I’ll wait.”

Tamar Maccabee was my mother. Whereas Judah Maccabee was my father, whose voice was louder than anyone’s. You were not supposed to bother him at work, especially not in the middle of a trial, and he was at work, in the middle of a trial, representing Patrick Drucker, a local White Supremacist, in a case against the city of Wilmette, Illinois. My dad knew about my fight at King Middle School in Evanston, but he didn’t know about any of the ones at Aptakisic. My mom thought it was better if we didn’t mention those to him, and I agreed — I wanted to protect him from disappointment. I still remained calm though, for roughly three seconds, because I decided Brodsky had just made a mistake, and I was going to tell him that he must have dialed the wrong number, that he was supposed to dial the number for Tamar Maccabee, not Judah, but right when I opened my mouth to speak, Brodsky nodded at me, half-smiling, his eyebrows cranked up to what used to be his hairline = “Surprise, Gurion, it’s you who’s made the mistake.”

I saw my curved reflection in the bend of Brodsky’s handset, down by the mouthpiece. My neck was three or four times the width of my face in there, just bulging out — begging, it seemed, for a chop — and the hairs June had touched were glossy and sharp. When at last I found my eyes, just barely pinpoints, reflected blood-red by a trick of the light, I thought: I could take you. I could wipe you out, Gurion. I could end you, easy, with just these bare hands.

Then Brodsky moved the handset, held it out before me, and I was looking at the pattern of holes in the earpiece. Brodsky said, “Gurion.” So did my father. I rumbled some gooze, brought the thing to my face.

Hello, I said.

“Are you hurt?” said my father.

I said, There was a charleyhorse, but I fixed it.

He said, “I’m glad you’re not hurt. I am not glad about this phone call.”

I said, I’m sorry you’re bothered at work.

He said, “It’s not that, boychical. It’s the fighting.”

That’s when I started crying. It happened sometimes when I’d get worked up and he’d call me something nice in Yiddish. I tried to cry quietly so he wouldn’t hear.

“Why haven’t you told me you’ve been getting in fights? And why did you fight with these boys today?” he said. “Did that Benji put you up to it?”

No, I said. And he’s my best friend, I said, and you shouldn’t talk about him like—

“He’s a criminal,” my dad said.

I sniffled back some gooze.

My dad heard it. He said, “Crying? Are you crying? What’s this crying? Is it Scott?”

Whenever I cried, my dad would ask if I was crying about the last thing I’d cried about, and the last time I’d cried was a week before, right after I’d read about Williams Cocktail Party Syndrome in my mom’s Synopsis of Psychiatry and found out Main Man would surely die young.

I said to my father, I didn’t break any laws. All I did was break rules.

He said, “This is something to cry about? Rules? If you did nothing wrong and you’re not hurt and your father loves you and so does your mother and these girls that call you at night on the phone who they love you too — and you know what just came in the mail? Front-row balcony for Chaplin just came in the mail. Cry? Why cry?”

Girls hadn’t called me at night since I got kicked out of Northside Hebrew Day School. Front-row balcony for Chaplin, though, was good news. Once a year, around Christmas, City Lights , which is the single best movie ever made, gets shown at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall with full orchestral accompaniment. We’d gone every year since I was four, but we’d never gotten balcony, and I always wanted balcony.

I had to sniffle again. I did it.

Then my father said, “Not that you shouldn’t cry. It’s fine, you know, if you like it. Don’t get me wrong. In fact, it’s good. You’re a ten-year-old boy. The world is big. It’s hard. I was just asking.”

I said, I’m in trouble.

“Trouble?” he said. “What trouble? You’re not in any trouble. You’re loved. You’re unhurt. Maybe you have to sit in this in-school suspension. This is trouble? This is to cry about? No. This is the world, not trouble. Trouble is for when you do wrong, for when you break laws. A suspension: this is something else. This is a punishment. This is for when you break rules, an in-school suspension. You’re a good boy but you break rules. You just have to learn to not break rules. So you go to in-school suspension. There’s no trouble there.”

The crying was pretty much gone. I said, I don’t want to be in suspen-sion.

He said, “If you wanted to be in suspension, it wouldn’t be a punishment. So you’re in suspension. So what. Avoid it from now on. Don’t fight. Don’t fight don’t fight don’t fight. Now listen, genius,” he said, “I have a late meeting after court today, and your mother’s seeing patients til seven. We will have dinner together — we need to discuss this fighting — but dinner will be a little late, so I want you to nosh on something after school. Don’t go hungry. And kill some time at the Frontier. I already talked to Arthur. He has a song he wants to play you.”

Arthur = Flowers. Arthur was his first name.

“So what else?” my dad said.

I said, I want my record.

“What record?” he said.

My file, I said. I said, It’s got all my information in it. Mr. Brodsky won’t let me have it.

My dad said, “Nonsense. If it’s yours, why won’t he let you have it?”

I said, It’s nonsense.

My dad said, “I’ll get it for you. Now what do you want for dinner? Your mother’s making chicken.”

I said, Chicken.

He said, “Good for you, because that’s what we’re having. Now wipe your face and go to class. Learn what you can learn. Let me talk to this Brodsky person, yes?”

I handed the phone to Brodsky. Brodsky was holding out a tissue. I wiped my face on my sleeve and waited. I don’t know what my father said to him. All I could hear was Brodsky saying, “Yes” and “I understand but” and then “Yes” again, and by the time he got off the phone, his head had lost all its pink. He set the tissue on the desk and told me I had an ISS tomorrow, which did not get me out of having to serve the detention that I was already scheduled to serve. Then he told me to go back to the Cage, that the Office would send word when my file was ready. He spun his chair around to face the soundgun.

On my way out to Miss Pinge, I took the wingnut out of the dirt in Brodsky’s fan-shaped plant’s pot, but I’m not an Indian-giver — and neither were the Indians; it was the settlers — so I yanked a tall green leaf off the plant and dropped the wingnut on Brodsky’s blotter, where it rattled til it came to rest.