Adam Levin - The Instructions

So was my Yahoo inbox. Not one scholar had emailed to tell me he wasn’t coming. And after all that Emmanuel had said on the el on Tuesday… It was hard enough to believe he could have been so mistaken about where they stood— Say that you’ll lead us; I’d give my life to save yours, Rabbi —but for him not to email: it stunk like a plot.

What else could explain their inaction’s uniformity? Simple apathy was not sufficient. Even if all two-hundred-plus kids I’d invited didn’t care enough to show, a few of them — or at least one of them — would have cared enough to RSVP. I knew them that well at least. They may have, every one of them, fallen away from me on their own, but they would not have done so identically.

My chemicals fired at this thought, dutifully catalyzed the simplifying process. They had to have been kept away or led away. From me, away. And as for Emmanuel… Whether he was keeping or kept, led or leading… That he’d manipulated me — using praise and flattery and false beholdenness, every single Roman trick he was able to muster, to fuel what now seemed the basest, dumbest kind of hubris, the Gurionic hubris — appeared undeniable.

And that Emmanuel would be able to manipulate me was no revelation — he’d always been the brightest of my fellow scholars — but that he would manipulate me… That is the thought that boggled me. Had I ever wronged him? No. Had I wronged my Israelite brothers? Never.

And so maybe my father had the right idea. Maybe all the scholars, despite their scholarship, were as blind and simple and reactionary as he claimed their parents were. Maybe they hated those they thought better than them, and maybe they thought I was better than them. That notion in itself was hubristic, true, yet it seemed so obvious — that they thought me better than them had always seemed obvious, and that was why I’d always rejected the suggestion. But what was it to deny the obvious if not to act from hubris? And yet and yet and meow and meow. What thought could I think that wasn’t hubristic? What concern that lacked hubris could be called responsible? I couldn’t imagine one. And since when did I care about hubris, anyway? The voice I was thinking in wasn’t mine — it was Nakamook’s. By the measure of Shakespeare and Euripides and any number of Benji’s other favorite wisemen, every Israelite scholar in the world was hubristic; to believe you are chosen by Adonai to bring justice, the messiah — what is that if not hubristic? And I never cared if I was hubristic before, so why should this — this betrayal, this harm done to me — why should this cause me to care? I was not the one who ditched his friend; I was the friend who got ditched. Yet I did care. Obviously.

Unless maybe not. Maybe it was the other thing, the thing that haunted my house. That type of needless complication of which my mom accused men and claimed boys innocent. Maybe I kept seeing hubris so as not to have to see my enemies. Maybe I was protecting my enemies. Fighting with myself to avoid fighting them . What, scholars (and this is not a real question), could be more Yiddishe?

It would not be true to say that while sitting in the library, before my Yahoo inbox, I decided the scholars of Schechter and Northside were my enemies. That was too much. Their offense, if it could be called that, was passive. They had not attacked me — not to my knowledge, at least — they had simply failed to help me.

After sneaking back out of the library, however, while making my way past hallway walls now dense as scripture with WE DAMAGE WE bombs, I did decide that the aforementioned scholars were not my friends . And what was peculiar, or rather not so peculiar — for I wasn’t obliged to suffer any longer, to expend half my energy awaiting permission, convincing myself that simple acts of malevolence on the part of my elders were complicated acts of misdirected loyalty, piously and reverently abiding the malice of their cowardly parents for the sake of their souls, their Israelite souls, the Israelite souls of my Israelite friends (we were no longer friends!), so they wouldn’t transgress the fifth commandment, just in case I’d been wrong , just in case I’d been bad for them in ways I couldn’t see, and because I felt beholden, all because I was their friend (we were no longer friends!) — but what struck me as peculiar at the time was this: I felt relieved. And relieved, I remembered all the kids in the Cage. I thought: I’m the leader of the Side of Damage; at least I’m the leader of the Side of Damage. And at last I’m the leader of no one else.

And I felt more relieved. Relieved, in neither case, in the sense of unencumbered , though; it wasn’t as if “a burden had been lifted.” It was more like I, with my burden yet shouldered, no longer had to worry how to lay it down properly; more like when you slouch on sore-arched feet, shivering and exhausted, beside your warm bed, a thick towel wrapped capelike around your clean body. How you can, if you want to — and you have for a while, it turns out you have; you’ve wanted to forever even though you didn’t know — just go ahead and fall. Finally, finally, and finally, the end.

I handed my pass to Mrs. Plotkin — Botha was in the bathroom — and dodged Benji’s glances on the way to my carrel. I didn’t want to talk about the two-hill field with him, let alone in hand-signs. I wanted to hold to that feeling of relief.

Already it was leaving me. The Cage was too — what? There wasn’t enough — what?

The Cage was still the Cage.

No cursing or throwing things, no yelling or breaking things, no defiant group action to greet my return. No defiance at all. If Chunkstyle, as instructed, had whispered my message, it certainly wasn’t apparent. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. Kids wrote, kids slept, kids read, faced forward. A few of them even had their hands in the air. Ben-Wa Wolf had his hand in the air.

I set my chin on my fist and attempted to doze, but those hands, raised hands — how you had to ask the question “May I ask a question?” before you asked a question, and how a raised hand was that question, how you had to raise your hand to ask that question, how handraising blinkered your own domination — those raised hands jacked up my pulse like a potion. Sleep was impossible. I couldn’t escape me.

My disappointment in the scholars came back on me amplified, enhanced now by disappointment in myself, my weak-kneed, cowardly, glass-jawed self. It wasn’t just that I’d been ditched by two-hundred-plus friends I’d been fool enough to count on; it wasn’t just that those friends had, it seemed, gone out of their way to maximize the pain they would cause by ditching me, but that, once ditched, once suffering that pain, I’d let myself trick myself into seeing a brighter side. I’d behaved like an angel, convinced myself that damage, plain-as-day damage, was actually a blessing — the consolation I’d taken was no consolation. That relief that I’d felt was a loser’s relief. A meek-shall-inherit/karma-will-balance/love-the-one-you’re-with scorned sucker’s relief. I was the leader of the Side of Damage? At least I was the leader of the Side of Damage?

You get socked in the mouth and wait a couple heartbeats, whoever you are — Nathan Zuckerman or Huckleberry Finn, Peter Tarnopol or Peter Pan, Tom Sawyer, Holden Caulfield, or Akaky Akakievich, Seymour or Zooey or Franny Glass — the sting will numb out, you’ll feel some relief. You wait a couple heartbeats, your chemicals will warm you, armor your nerves. Not just so you can abide the pain you’ve been dealt, though, let alone so you can stand there taking more of it, but rather so you can return the pain two-fold, ten-fold, twenty-fold, fifty-. So you can stop its inflicters from finishing you. So you can have a chance to save yourself. That’s why Muay Thai geeks kicked trees and punched rocks and used hurt extremities to strike the enemies who’d hurt them. That’s why you didn’t crumple when socked in the mouth, that’s why you didn’t lay there, why you came back swinging: to use what you were given — that advantageous, brief burst of numbness — to harness and use it, not wallow in the fleeting relief it provided.