Adam Levin - The Instructions

I said, No one can kill me, anyway, Vincie.

“That’s all I’m saying,” said Vincie. “So why don’t you want to be the leader?”

I said, I just asked what if I didn’t.

“Why even ask that?” said Vincie. “Why make simple things complicated?”

Why play the dumb one? I said.

He said, “I don’t know —but it’s what I fucking do. Do you wanna go to the back of the bus and wreck Maholtz and that Shlomo kid now, or what?”

I kneeled on my seat and looked at the back of the bus. There they were, Maholtz and Shlomo Cohen, staring out opposite windows.

That’s really strange, I said.

“What’s really strange?” said Vincie.

They haven’t said anything to us, I said. I said, Did they say anything to you before I got here?

Vincie said, “They didn’t say fuck-all to me and it isn’t even a little strange — Slokum isn’t here. They’re not so bold by themselves, those two. Let’s bust the grins off their mugs.”

I said, They’re not grinning.

Vincie said, “They want to be grinning, but they’re scared of us.” He kneeled on his seat and looked back at them. He raised his fists over his head. “You dentists!” he shouted. “You bancers!”

The muscles in their faces tightened, but they kept looking out their windows, like Vincie wasn’t talking to them.

“Vincie!” yelled the busdriver.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Vincie. He sat down. “So?” he said to me. “We gonna go back there and fight?”

I did want to fight Maholtz. I wanted him to pull his sap so I could take it justly. But I didn’t want to fight Shlomo Cohen. And I definitely didn’t want Vincie to fight Shlomo Cohen. Shlomo Cohen was still an Israelite.

I said, We’re not fighting them.

“How come?” he said.

I said, Bad timing.

Since bad timing could mean almost anything, it was a certain kind of truth. A low kind.

“What do you mean ‘bad timing’?” said Vincie.

Just trust me, I told him.

And that was even lower.

I said, Let’s play slapslap to thirteen.

Vincie Portite trusted me, and about the time I was up seven-nothing, I was feeling awful. Then I had an idea that I thought could fix everything.

I thought: Make Vincie an Israelite.

But I was immediately struck with the paralysis of God’s No! and I couldn’t fix anything. And on second thought, that move wouldn’t have solved much anyway; an Israelite Vincie fighting Shlomo Cohen would be a little better than a Gentile Vincie fighting Shlomo Cohen, but it wouldn’t by any means be good . Here we’d have my brother hurting my brother, there we’d have an outsider hurting my brother. Either way, a brother would end up hurting, and though brother hurting brother was better than the other way, I was supposed to protect my brother in both cases, even when my brother was a bancer like Shlomo. The problem, ultimately, was that my brother was a bancer. To make Vincie an Israelite wouldn’t solve that problem — it didn’t even address that problem.

So on top of feeling low, I also felt stupid, and the paralysis inflicted by Adonai lasted just long enough to lose me a point.

And I noticed Vincie’s hand, which had gone to his eye each time I’d scored those first seven points, stayed in the air of the aisle when I lost that eighth one. I thought it better not to tell Vincie about it, at least not yet. Then I let him have the next point on purpose, and again the hand failed to rebel against him.

I started switching off — giving him this point, taking that one — til we got to twelve-twelve. Vincie’s hands stayed in the aisle every time he scored.

I thought: If he defeats you, his hand will never rebel again.

I thought: Let him defeat you.

And again, I was paralyzed by a No! from Adonai.

Vincie won the point, and the point the game. It was not the will of God, but it owed to the force of God. The force of God acted in accordance with the will of Gurion, against the will of God, and I saw that it was good. I had not sinned. I had not disobeyed. I’d only been as paralyzed as God forced me to be.

“I won!” Vincie shouted, clapping my shoulders with both hands, leaving them there. “I beat you,” he said. “I’m stealth!”

I said, Flinch!

“Don’t ruin my victory,” he said, shaking me.

I said, Flinch right now!

“No!” said Vincie.

“Oh,” said Vincie.

“Fuck,” he said. “Thank you.” He put his hands out, palms up.

We played slapslap to thirteen til the kids in front sang the rhyme of my bus stop.

A firefly touched down on my ear and Flowers shouted, “Come quick!” from the other side of the Welcome Office door. He was watching the Local 5 News in back. Edison, asleep on Flowers’s outstretched legs, startled when I came inside — he fell, struck the floor nose-first.

“Gift for timing,” Flowers said to one of us about the other.

The cat bolted at me, tripped on lint, laid there.

I set the previous night’s scripture on the music stand.

“You daddy,” said Flowers, pointing at the television.

“…v. the City of Wilmette is nearing its conclusion,” said an offscreen anchor. Onscreen was footage from outside the Drucker trial. The anchor said, “Here we see protesters gathered on the courthouse steps for the tenth consecutive day.” A mob of Israelites stabbed at the clouds with picket signs. Some of the signs said NEVER AGAIN and others showed a photo of Patrick Drucker sieg-heiling that didn’t look doctored. The majority of the signs were protests against my father, though. One kind featured his photo with a large-lettered legend that read ROY COHN FOR DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF COOK COUNTY on one side, and HAMAS, AL QUAEDA, HEZBOLLAH, MACCABEE on the other. Others inverted the arrangement — a photo of Roy Cohn and the legend JUDAH MACCABEE FOR DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF COOK COUNTY; ear-to-ear headshots of bin Laden, Nasrallah, the dead wheelchair guy from Hamas and a black circle with PASTE JUDAH MACCABEE HERE in white letters in its center. Another sign had no photo at all and just said PASTE JUDAH MACCABEE. I’d seen similar signs a few months earlier during Shmidt v. Skokie, but there were more of them for this trial, fifty easy.

The other side’s signs were more varied; unlike the protesting Israelites, who had all come to the courthouse on the same chartered bus, the other side, though smaller, comprised a number of separate factions. The Neo-Nazis’ signs read HEIL DRUCKER! over an American flag with fifty tiny swastikas where the stars should have been. The head Nazi waved an actual flag of that description in the air above his helmet. Another group, much larger, who stood nearly as far from the circle of Nazis as they did from the Israelites, carried signs that read ZIONISM = NAZISM and ADVANCED INSTITUTE FOR THE PUPPETEERING OF AMERICAN CORRUPTION. The graphic on those was an outdated caricature of Ariel Sharon (no longer the prime minister of Israel, he’d been in a coma for ten months by then), with an extra-hooked nose and blood-dripping fangs, his claw-tipped fingers in the loops of strings connected to the limbs of an Uncle Sam marionette who wept while stepping on the neck of a baby in a turban. A third group’s signs were maps of the Middle East, all beige, except for Israel, which was black — one legend read THE UNHOLY LAND and another LAND OF BILK AND MONEY. A lone, clueless man who wore a keffiyeh over his ski-mask carried a sign with a target on it, and WTO was written in the bullseye. There were at least five other small groups, all of them forming different circles and carrying different signs, but the camera didn’t linger long enough for me to make them out.