Adam Levin - The Instructions

Is a forged pass really a lie? I said. I said, Because even if it is, you didn’t have any problem with me flashing one at the Deaf Sentinel.

“I don’t care about The Deaf Sentinel,” June said. “Did you bring me a cookie?”

I said, Are you dying to have one?

“You said they were the best,” she said.

I gave her all of them.

She took two from the baggie, handed one of them to me.

“These have a lot of butter in them,” she said, looking at the shine her cookie left on her fingertips. “Do you ever press really buttery cookies against the roof of your mouth til the butter starts falling down the sides of your tongue and the rest of the cookie becomes a dense ball that you store in your cheek and pull apart slowly by sucking it through the gaps of your teeth?”

It’s good to do it that way, I said. I said, But my mouth always wants to chew, so I chew.

“Me too,” she said. “I think what we should do is chew one cookie, and do the pressing thing with a second one.”

Which first? I said.

“It would be easier to do the pressing to the second one because the chewing desire will have already been fed by having chewed the first one,” she said, “but if we do the pressing first instead, then our teeth will be teased before they get satisfied by chewing the second one, and the teasing will make the chewing full of relief and that much better.”

So we should chew the second one, I said.

She said, “The only problem with that is that it might be impossible. If we try to do the pressing to the first cookie, but the cookie is so good that we can’t control ourselves and so we start chewing it, then what?”

What? I said.

“Well then we can’t justify having the second cookie on the heels of the first.”

Why do we need to justify a second cookie? I said.

She said, “You told me these are the best poppyseed cookies in Chicago, and we only have four, which means we can’t waste any, which means they need to be savored. To savor the second one immediately after we’ve already savored the first, we need to eat it differently from the way we ate the first — we need to eat it in a way that our mouths can’t remember. If we press and chew the first one, then what can we possibly do to the second one that our mouths won’t be able to remember?”

What? I said.

“Nothing, Gurion.”

So we should chew the first one, satisfy the chewing desire, and then press the second, I said.

“But that’s playing it safe,” she said. “And we’re in love, which means it’s safe for us to be dangerous. If we act safe while it’s safe for us to be dangerous, we’re not taking advantage of being in love, and we could ruin it that way.”

I didn’t understand exactly what June was saying, but I decided to believe her because it is dangerous to believe in what you don’t understand, and I thought she was saying she wanted me to be dangerous, and I wanted to be what she wanted me to be.

I said, So then let’s try to press the first cookie and chew the second, and if we end up chewing the first, we’ll wait til later, when our mouths forget, to have the second.

June agreed to the plan.

And we tried to press and ended up chewing the first cookie.

She started putting the cookies away, and I said, Wait. Eating the second cookie now would be a waste, and being wasteful is dangerous.

“Yes!” she said.

So we each ate a second cookie. I put the whole thing in my mouth and chewed it into a paste without swallowing and then stuck my paste-covered tongue out at June

She yanked down on my hood-strings and pretended to chop me on the throat. I staggered and came back to land a drunk-looking haymaker on the locker next to her and dented it. Then I collapsed against the dented locker, swallowed the cookie-paste, and put my pointer in my mouth. I flexed my swearfinger and dropped the thumb, made a shooting noise and shuddered. I was feeling very good.

“Is that how you’d do it?” June said. “With a gun in your mouth?”

I wouldn’t do it at all, I said.

“Me neither,” June said. “If I did do it, though, I’d want to do it with a gun in my mouth, except I’d have to be a cartoon first, so I could pull the trigger nine times.”

Nine? I said.

“Maybe,” she said, “Bangbang. Bangbangbang. Bang.” She extended a finger every time she said bang. “Six times,” she said, “not nine. And if I did it with my back to a sheet of clangy steel, I could pull it just three times because every gun report would get followed by the bang from the back of my jerking head smacking the clangy steel.”

I said, It wouldn’t be the same, though. It wouldn’t be the same rhythm as the one you just said. You said, ‘Bangbang. Bangbangbang. Bang.’ With three shots and a sheet of clangy steel, you’d get six bangs, but it would sound like: Bangbang. Bangbang. Bangbang.

“You’re right,” she said. “It would either have to be six shots, and no sheet of clangy steel, or there would have to be two sheets of clangy steel — the second one just behind the one behind me — attached to pulleys, and someone operating the pulleys, so that only the first sheet was lowered for the first gunshot (bangbang), then both for the second gunshot (bangbangbang), and none for the third (bang).” She kissed me on the left eye-corner. “You pay so much attention to what I say,” she said. She said, “So how would you do it?”

I said, I’d kill as many hard-to-kill enemies as possible. I said, I’d go straight to the center of the Arrangement and explode.

“Like with a bomb?” she said. “Like a suicide bomber?”

Like Samson, I said. I said, And probably with a bomb, but I wouldn’t be a suicide bomber. I’d only make power-kills, generals and political figures.

“If while bombing you commit suicide, you’re a suicide bomber — doesn’t matter who the target is.”

A forged pass is no more a lie if you use it on Miss Gleem than if you use it on Jerry, then, I said.

“That’s true,” June said. She said, “Showing a forged pass to Jerry is a lie. I never said it wasn’t. You’re the one who tried to say it wasn’t. What I was saying is everyone’s a liar, and I don’t care about the Deaf Sentinel, so lying to him isn’t any kind of betrayal. Miss Gleem, though — she’s my friend and I don’t want to betray her. I’m not a betrayer.”

I really wanted June to ditch with me.

I said, The pass doesn’t have to be your lie, anyway. It could be my lie. I told you I forged it, but maybe you didn’t see me forge it — maybe you thought you did when really you didn’t; maybe I was only faking the forgery — so for all you know I’ve been lying about it being a forgery; for all you know, it was given to me by Miss Pinge to give to you for being late to Art, and I’m just trying to impress you with forgery skills I don’t really have.

“But that’s cheap,” June said, “because I do know it’s forged. Plausible deniability is cheap.”

I said, So you might as well just ditch with me and then get punished.

“I like Art,” she said, “and if I ditch, Miss Gleem will feel bad — I know her. I’ll see you at 11:00.” She sandwiched my right hand between both of her hands, lifted it high, dropped it, and ran to class, twelve wingnuts jingling in the pockets of her stolen hoodie.

I had wingnuts too — I had thirteen in a drawstring bag. I had a lot of things. I had an Israelite girlfriend who I loved and I had nearly half a pad of hall-passes and an IDF fatigue jacket with a wide-mouthed pennygun in the secret pocket. And I had the Side of Damage. I thought: What is the Side of Damage? And I thought: The Side of Damage is the thing you lead. I thought: The Side of Damage is dangerous.