Adam Levin - The Instructions

Yet here I was, wallowing, or trying to wallow; and there that relief, not fleeting but fled now. At least I was the leader of the Side of Damage? At most I was the leader of the the Side of Damage. At best I was the leader of the Side of Damage. And what the fuck was the Side of Damage? Forty kids inside a cage who were staring into boxes, asleep sitting up, waiting to get called on. At last I was only the leader of them . At best that meant nothing. My father’d been right, and Rabbi Salt too: Moses I wasn’t. I’d not have used my staff to strike the rock a second time. I’d have stove my brother’s head with it, then all the golden-calfers’, then laid in the sand to die of thirst with the rest of them.

My eyes were closed, but I still couldn’t sleep.

And then there was Botha, butchering my name. “Makebee!” he said. “I said Makebee!” he said. He was next to my chair. He dropped a pass on my desk — the one I’d handed Mrs. Plotkin. I’d forgotten the signature.

“Who wrote this?” he said.

Leave me alone.

“Whatsametteh, Makebee? Not feeling good? Sneppy answers eluding you?”

Just step me and leave me alone, I said.

“You’re the one brought this, though,” Botha said. “Mrs. Platkin?” said Botha to Mrs. Plotkin. “He’s the one what brought the pass, yes?”

“He gave me a pass and I put it on your desk,” Mrs. Plotkin said. “That’s all I know.”

“Well, sance this was the only pass on my dask,” Botha started to say, but his sentence’s predicate, whatever it was, got zeroed by a noise that came from behind us.

This noise was being furnished by Ben-Wa Wolf and, like so many other famous instances of defiance, it came on so suddenly that, at first, it didn’t seem like defiance; it seemed a mistake. It was, after all, just the groan of a chair being scooted on the thinly carpeted floor. The noise sounded no less accidental than it had on any of those thousand occasions we’d heard it in the past, those thousand times when it had been accidental. As the seconds passed, though, and the groaning failed to relent, no one in the Cage failed to break the Face-Forward rule, and all of us saw that Ben-Wa’s hand was in the air. We began to suspect the mistake was on purpose.

And then, so to speak, the second plane hit the building.

“I’ve been raising my hand for thirty-four minutes and all you care about is passes!” Ben-Wa shouted, his chair still scooting. “I have questions!”

“Stap one for you,” Botha said. “Aggrassive squeaking.”

Ben-Wa continued scooting. Back and forth and side-to-side. He was way beyond his tapeline.

“Questions!” he shouted, his neck showing muscles as he strained to look over his shoulder at the cluster.

The teachers did nothing.

Ben-Wa kept scooting.

Botha moved toward him, forgetting the forged pass — I tore it up.

“The Boston Tea Party!” Ben-Wa shouted.

“Stap two,” said Botha, closing in.

“It was terrorism! Why does this book call it a party?!” Ben-Wa dropped his raised hand to knock the history book from his desk. “Why won’t anyone answer my questions?!” he shouted at the teachers.

Then Botha stopped the scooting himself. He took Ben-Wa’s seatback in hand and claw and stilled him.

“Let go of my chair!” Ben-Wa yelled at Botha. “I’ve got questions about terrorism!” he yelled at the teachers.

“Why not answer his questions?” said Eliyahu.

“Stap one for you, Aye lie!”

Let his chair go, I said.

“And stap one for you, Make—”

“Let go of my chair!” Ben-Wa yelled at Botha. “Let go of my chair! Just—!” His voice cracked then, all pleading-sounding and defeated, and silence came over the Cage. Mrs. Plotkin took a breath, as if she was about to say something, and then didn’t. Mrs. Mingle did and then didn’t do the same things as Mrs. Plotkin. Botha kept his eyes down and held the seatback. He was the only one who believed he knew what should happen next.

The rest of us studied Ben-Wa.

He rocked his torso like he was crying, or praying. And there were tears on his cheeks, but they weren’t the weepy kind. He was squeezing the sides of his seat, struggling to scoot out of Botha’s grip and failing, the veins in his hands throbbing, those muscles in his neck, and the Cage seemed to dim, and he to smolder, his bright white hair drawing light from the periphery, channeling it down to his face. It became red and aglow, a speeding firetruck face, yet his chair remained still as a photo of a chair.

It hurt, to look at him trying so hard. It hurt the way it hurts to watch a baby stumble across a room — how your left side tenses when the baby’s about to fall to his right, your right when the baby’s about to fall to his left. And it hurt like watching great boxing does — that twelfth-round tightness gripping your chest and how your hands wince like Vincie’s to block telegraphed punches — the gasp and shiver when a knockout blow lands and then all the startled blinking. It hurt like visceral descriptions of hurt hurt, and it hurt all of us, and all at the same time, and we all knew at the same time that that was how it was for all of us at the same time.

And it is true that you cannot box a man who you are watching on television. And it’s true you can’t balance a stumbling baby who’s out of reach. You can never bleed from another’s wounds, and no one, no matter Whose son he says he is, can bleed from yours. But your body can describe the condition of another’s. Your body can describe the condition to you , and that kind of description is also an action. The action is sympathy. Sometimes you can push it. Sometimes it pushes.

Our vicarious suffering at the sight of Ben-Wa’s struggle couldn’t get his muscles strong enough to free his chair from Botha’s grasp, but the line between description and action in our own muscles was thin, erasable: we had our own chairs.

We acted on them. We forced them to describe us.

It happened all at once.

It was the most noise we had ever heard indoors. It was the noisiest noise we had ever heard anywhere. There wasn’t a rhythm, just constant inconstancy. No mappable peak or valley to the volume. No predictable ebb and flow of squeak and groan. No arc. It was hyper. It was everything at once.

After two minutes of everything at once, it was over.

If Cecil B. DeMille had directed the scene, the hair on all our heads would have been the color of Ben-Wa’s.

Instead, our battered eardrums vibrated to a tone no longer sounding. Our arms ached. The teachers’ faces were slack. Only Botha was un-changed.

Let Ben-Wa go, I said.

“Let go of his fucken chair!” shouted Vincie.

“He’s got questions!” shouted Eliyahu.

“Barbara Mingle!” shouted Chunkstyle.

Eliza June Watermark! I shouted.

“He’s got questions about terrorism!” shouted Nakamook.

“We’ve got questions about terrorism!” shouted Asparagus.

“Tea Party!” shouted Winthrop.

“And the hilly highways a-roll with the heads of infidels whose eyeholes—!” shouted Mookus.

“Barbara!” shouted Chunkstyle.

“Mingle!” shouted Chunkstyle.

June! I shouted. Maccabee!

“Let go of him!” “Terrorism!” “Emotionalize!” “Let his chair go!” “Questions!” “Fucken let go of him!” “I have questions!” “My love for you is a powerful thing that drove me to—!” “The chair!” “Get off me!” “Homotionalize! “My pee isn’t pungent!” “And the cities smashed against the mountains by tsunamis like flies breathed on by boy-Gods eating wantons—!” “Get off him!” “Foog!” “We have some fucken questions!” “I do not understand and so cannot honestly account for—!” “—Terrorism!” “The party!” “Let him go!” “Homo’s lotion in your eyes!” “I’m no foog!” “However I hold one belief forever true—!” Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee loves Eliza June Watermark! “My mother’s no fucker!” “Slokum dies Friday!” “All my desires and motivations—!” “Bleeding at our feet, begging for mercy on their families, vengeance on their enemies, and cinammon their toasts!” “ You’re the foog!” “Let go of my chair!” “Let go of his chair!” “Let go of our chair!” “Get off me!” “Get off us!” “Let us go!” “We damage we!” “The Side of Damage!” “Gurion!” “Gurion!” “Gurion Maccabee!” “Came out of love, truest love, the kind of love that never dies!” “Let go of him!” “We can be together like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “And love like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “And the world will be great for us like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “And the world will be smiling at us like—!” “The Side of Damage!” “For, in a certain way, the world will belong to—!” “The Side of Damage!” “—a terrorism party!”