Adam Levin - The Instructions

Yet maybe, though splitting hairs, I’m not merely splitting hairs. In either case, who am I to split hairs? To you. Who, to you, am I to split hairs? You don’t know me from Adam. Not really. Not yet.

Come heavy next year in Jerusalem.

— Eliyahu of Brooklyn, December 2013

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

4th Period–5th Period

Fourth period, I had individual therapy. Call-Me-Sandy had a bag of wrapped caramels. She held it out across her desk. A one-pound bag, an inch above the blotter, her elbow at rest between the lips of a tissuebox.

“So?” she said. “How are things?” she said.

Her bony wrist, her medium-length nails, raggedy cuticles, the bag slightly trembling, its stiff plastic rattling. The overhead light panel flickered twelve times.

“I’m worried about you.”

Thirty more flickers, and she set the bag of caramels to rest on the blotter, put her hand in her lap, took a sip from her coffee.

Ninety-six flickers. Three sips from her coffee. Uncountable flickers. She chinned the air at the bag of caramels.

Twenty-seven flickers.

She lifted the bag, held it over the blotter. Again the bag rattled.

“I’m worried about you.”

You said that already.

“You didn’t respond.”

You’re not worried about me. You’re worried because you’re nervous.

“I worry that I’m nervous?”

Maybe that too, I said. What I meant is you’re a nervous person and nervous people worry. The nervousness comes first with nervous people. The vector proceeds from nervousness. Like how you’re worrying that bag of candy. As it were. Your hand’s not shaking because the bag’s rattling — the bag’s rattling because your hand is shaking. And maybe you don’t notice the bag rattling and it stops there, or maybe you do notice the bag rattling and you realize your hand is shaking, and so maybe you stop your hand from shaking, or maybe seeing that your hand shakes makes your hand shake worse, which makes the bag shake worse. Either way, though, your worries are a rattling bag of caramels in the hand of your nervousness. Some people, though: their nervousness is a rattling bag of caramels in the hand of their worries. Those people look calmly on the world until they come across something worrisome, and only then do they worry, and only when they worry do they get nervous. They act upon themselves prior to being acted upon by themselves. They’re the healthier kind of people.

“That’s an almost gestalt kind of observation.”

No it’s not, I said. I said, It’s homuncular. It’s nonsense. Games with prepositions to impress and intimidate.

“Was your mother a gestalt practitioner at any point?”

Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates.

“Are you upset with me, Gurion?”

Why should I be upset?

“I’m asking.”

Why are you asking?

“You don’t usually make fun of me.”

Was I making fun? I said. I knew I was having fun, but—

“It sounded like you were making fun of me,” she said.

How long have you known you were a lesbian? I said.

She choked and coughed — wrongpiped coffeespit — and dropped the caramels. “Excuse me?” she said.

You heard me, I said.

“I don’t…”

How long have you known you wanted sex from women?

“This isn’t appropriate.”

If someone with a vagina likes vaginas but tells herself she doesn’t like vaginas, or tells herself she likes penises but just hasn’t found the right one, or admits to herself that she does like vaginas and doesn’t like penises but consistently refuses to act on her desires for vaginas, is she a lesbian, Sandy? What do you think?

“This is not appropriate.”

How about this one: If someone with a vagina, at age, say, twenty, realizes she likes vaginas and has never liked penises — i.e., realizes she’s a lesbian — has she been a lesbian all along, or has she only been a lesbian since the moment she realized she liked vaginas? And if it turns out to be one of the latter two cases, is ‘realize’ the correct verb? That is: Do lesbians become lesbians, or are they born lesbians?

“I can see that you’re angry, Gurion. That’s why—”

Are you getting any? Sex from women, I mean. Have you gotten any sex from your professor? Did you switch voices over coffee and decide to get beers?

“Please, Gurion. You’re worrying me.”

But did you say it like Obama or Daley, Call-Me? That is, if you said anything, how did you suggest it? ‘Join me for a beer, Professor Lakey?’ Or ‘What say we blow dis popstand and get some beerce?’ Which code did you use? Was the moment all postmodern and meta and intertextual and post-ironic because both of you knew that Professor Lakey had read “Assessment of a Client: Gurion Maccabee”? Or was the moment, after all, just nice and straightforward and full of tension and potential romance because even though she’d read the paper, you couldn’t be sure she’d read it right —you couldn’t tell if your encoded, footnoted professions of love for her had even come across — and your professor herself was worried that maybe she’d only seen in the footnotes what she wanted to see, a student with a desirable vagina who wanted to see her vagina where there was but a desirably vaginaed student who wanted to talk about linguistics? Did you end up going home together? Did Professor Lakey take you home, Call-Me, or did you end up alone that night, using her, in fantasy, as a tool for venting?

“You were never supposed to have read that paper.”

That’s the response you’re settling on? Blame the victim? That’s the response?

“The victim?” she said.

The victim being me. The victim being sentenced to the Cage indefinitely.

“Gurion, you hurt people.”

I hurt people.

“You hurt people, Gurion. You have a history of hurting people. You cause physical harm to people, and you show no remorse. That’s why you’re in the Cage. I will admit that a lot of what I said about you was inaccurate. This owed partly to my not having known you so well at the time I wrote the paper, but—”

University of Chicago dialect, now. Nearly stentorian. And from such a small head. You are one bold lesbian. You are—

“Make fun of me all you want, Gurion, but I’m coming clean here. I will even admit that many of the inaccuracies in the paper weren’t mistakes, per se, as much as they were — how should I say this? In grad-school — well—”

Sometimes you have to go analytically overboard to prove to your teachers that you’re worth their time.

“Yes. That’s about—”

You constructed me in such a way as to allow yourself room to riff. You needed room to riff on all the valuable knowledge you absorbed in your beloved professor’s writings and lectures. That would get you the A. Or the date.

“Yes.”

Did I mention that I think professor Lakey is imaginary? I think she’s your imaginary friend.

Sandy pushed me the tissuebox. I pushed it back. I wasn’t crying. Not even close.

“You were never supposed to have read the paper. I don’t know why Bonnie filed it with your records. I didn’t know she would when I wrote it. She’s—”

It’s your supervisor’s fault.

“Yes.”

The buck stops there.

“Stop it now. Please. If you know half as much as you seem to, you know that despite my mistakes, I care about you, Gurion. I am fond of you. I worry about you. You should not have read that paper. You should never have seen it. I am very worried about you right now.”

You’re nervous.

“That too.”

And I’m in the Cage because I’m remorselessly violent.