Adam Levin - The Instructions

He set me down on the couch, onto my feet. Outside of daydreams, I had never seen him so dangerous, and I just stood there, slouching, on cushions, staring. How can I explain it? My father could have exploded and turned all of Chicago to dust at that moment, and though I, if he did explode, would have been ground zero, he was my father, and the thrill that filled me was not just the thrill of being afraid — it wasn’t even mostly that. I kept on thinking: Look what he can do. I am his son.

“Did you not hear me?” he said.

My mother stepped between us. She lifted me off the couch and set me down on the floor beside the nearer arm. “Go to your room,” she said.

I went to my room. My hiccups were gone.

If the point of fighting with people you love is to kill your desire to fight them; if it is best, in the course of this killing, to inflict as little lasting damage as possible; and if that means fights fought smartest by loved ones can’t but scream topspeed toward stalemate, then let no scholar confuse the following for overstatement: My parents fought like geniuses that night.

Though their words got incoherent by the time they reached my bedroom — the shapes of their vowels lost between the floorboards, their consonants made mush by the rugs and insulation — there was no mistaking that those words were being shouted. I didn’t enjoy that, but I saw it was good. Charged with enough decibals, any verbal attack, no matter how ugly, could later be blamed with little effort on the heat of the moment. As long as they stayed loud, I knew we’d be fine. By bedtime, the fight would seem as much a thing that happened to them as it would a thing they made happen. By morning it would seem like a place, static and passable; not “That time I fought you” or even “That time we were fighting,” but “That time we got into a fight.”

Knowing everything would eventually be fine was not the same as everything actually being fine, though. If it were, then scholars wouldn’t try to bring the messiah, my parents wouldn’t have fought, and I’d have had the concentration to write immortal scripture. Instead I checked email, where nothing was personal — two weekly digests from scholarly listservs and a spam from a pornsite: “I’m Suzy CUM fly me.”

I tried calling Nakamook, but his mother picked up. “What?” she said.

Can I please speak to Benji?

“No,” she said, and then she hung up.

I tried calling Vincie, but the phone was off the hook.

Eliyahu wasn’t listed in the Aptakisic directory, and I didn’t know his uncle’s last name for 411. He’d never told me his own last name either. All I knew was it wasn’t Of Brooklyn.

Main Man’s dad said, “Scott’s in bed,” but Mookus picked up on a different extension, saying “Gurion is the leader of the Side of Damage, and that which he brings will be once and for all yet all for one. Our plastic muskets, though powderless, will frontload, and our coup will not be bloodless, nor will the blood be lambly. It will stain the lion’s den whose bars though invisible are verily there as we roll along, doo-da doo-da and a thousand lonely dirges. Time alone oh time will tell, and peanuts to you there, pally. When first he is king we’ll be first against the wall, then it’s pop goes the weasel in your opinion, but that’s hardly of consequence goodnight.”

Scott sounded tired.

Ha-ha, I said.

“Ha-ha!” said Main Man. “Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”

“Goodnight, Gurion,” said Mr. Mookus. “Goodnight, Scott,” he said. The phone clicked.

“Ha-”

The phone clicked again and they were both gone. The noise from downstairs had ebbed and cut out.

Soon my father came in with the pastry box, twineless. He opened the lid and showed me stacks of flour-dappled poppyseed cookies. These cookies were a longtime family favorite he got from a bakery whose name and locale he refused to divulge. He sat on my bed and tried to look at my face. I didn’t let him. We ate a couple cookies without saying anything. They were better than I remembered. They were hard and they crumbled and the crumbs were buttery.

“We should never again speak to each other the way we spoke to each other downstairs,” said my dad. He lit a cigarette. “Do you agree with that?” he said.

I did not disagree.

“I am not used to being scared for you,” he said. “I have always believed you, and I have always believed in you. When you were kicked out of Schechter, I thought: My son reacted to a provocation that would have caused me to react as well. He over reacted, I thought, but he is a boy, and a boy is a child, and a child overreacts. I wasn’t scared.”

He ashed his cigarette into the cup of his hand.

He said, “When you were kicked out of Northside, again I thought you’d overreacted, but you were overreacting to a provocation that would have also caused me to react, albeit not by telling people to take up arms, let alone teaching them how to do so, but still… Your intentions were good. I believed that, and I still do. And when I read that email from the Northside headmaster, Gurion, I was going to destroy his life as thoroughly as I could without doing the same to ours. He was trying to harm you, and I am not willing to let anyone harm you. You told me that if I sued him, it would make the whole episode worse for you. I didn’t sue him.”

He half-stood and leaned across me. He flipped my desk’s mailslot open, turned his cupped palm over it, and then he flicked his cigarette against its lip. The ashes hit the floor beneath my desk and flattened. I stepped on them, caught them up in my sock fibers.

“And I will not pretend,” he said, “that the idea of your being prevented from studying Torah with those people didn’t strike me as a blessing in disguise. I didn’t think that studying with them was doing much in the way of helping you live a good life. I still don’t think so. That said, I knew that my experiences as a scholar — as one of them —were peculiar and misled, and that surely it was impossible for me to consider what studying with them was doing to you without that consideration being haunted by what I knew it had done to me. And so when you resolved to continue working with Rabbi Salt, I did not raise any objections.”

Again he leaned over me and ashed into the mailslot. And again I stepped on the ashes and caught them in my sock fibers.

What are you doing? I said.

“Did I just ash in your mailslot?”

Twice, I said.

“I’m sorry — I’m tired. It’s what I used to do at yeshiva. I had the same kind of desk, you know — I lined the mailslot with tinfoil, though. I thought I was very clever. A desk with a secret built-in ashtray. We weren’t supposed to smoke in the dorm. Why don’t you pass me the wastebasket.”

I passed it to him.

“Where was I?” he said.

You didn’t object to me studying with Rabbi Salt.

“No. I did object. Just not wholeheartedly — I didn’t object enough to raise objections. And in August, when they kicked you out of the King School, I believed what you said, I believed you were innocent of hurting anyone with that brick. I worried about what your mother had been teaching you — it worried me that the thought to even heft that brick occurred to you — but also I was glad you picked up the brick. I was glad because, in the end, doing so prevented you from being hurt by those other boys. None of it scared me, Gurion. I worried like a father worries, but I did not experience fear .

“But then yesterday, when I heard that you’d been fighting all this time, it got me a little scared. Not because you were fighting, which is worrisome, and not even because you and your mother have hidden it from me, which is very worrisome, but rather because all the time you were hiding this from me, I never suspected it. I never suspected it for a moment. And so I have to wonder what other hidden business I am failing to suspect. And that is not a nice thing to wonder about. That is a fearsome thing to wonder about. And then, just now, downstairs, you say to me—”