Adam Levin - The Instructions

The Side of Damage was not a group of scholars, so I did not say: If ever you are asked whether Adonai can create a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, you will answer the fool who asked you: ‘Fool, we are two of seven billion such boulders, you and I.’ And when the fool insists that Adonai cannot then properly be called almighty, you will not argue, for the fool will be correct. Instead you will answer: ‘He is Adonai nonetheless.’

And the Side of Damage was not a group of Israelites, so I did not say: We are superior to the angels not because we control ourselves, but because Adonai does not control us.

What I said was this: We are better than the robots not because we control ourselves. We are better because the Arrangement can’t control us.

And whether the inspiration for that statement had been a holy vision — which I doubted (my ability to doubt it the best evidence that it wasn’t; i.e. shouldn’t a visitation from Adonai strike the person visited as being undeniably a visitation from Adonai?) — or a hallucination brought on by an oxygen-starved brain, I saw that what I’d said was good. That is: I saw that what I’d said was true, and so did the Side of Damage.

Botha handed me a pass to the nurse.

Nine of the twelve *EMOTIONALIZE* tags in C-Hall had already been monkeyed with. Seven of the nine were entirely blacked out. On the other two, the first Star of Boystar and the six letters following it were slashed through by the crossbar of an A.

I figured Ronrico had only sodomized two of the tags he’d monkeyed with because he didn’t think to do so to the first seven, but I wondered why he’d left the other three alone. It was probably because he’d seen someone coming and didn’t want to get in trouble, except his reason might have been better than that. It might have been that he wanted people to see what the blotted out and sodomized tags had originally said; if no one could see what the ostensibly Boystar-fanatical writers of the *EMOTIONALIZE* tags had ostensibly intended the tags to say, no one would know that the ostensible writers and what they ostensibly stood for were under inostensible attack. The thought of a real attack on non-existent beings filled me with the feeling I’d get from watching Mookus do the Joy of Living Dance, so I looked around for something to damage, and that’s when I noticed I wasn’t the only one in C-Hall.

Floyd the Chewer stood puzzled before the water fountain. He pressed the button and nothing came out. Then he pressed the button and nothing came out. He grasped the edges of the sink and shook it. Again he pressed the button and nothing came out. He punched the fountain in the grill and cursed. He pressed the button and nothing came out. He slapped the sink on the graffito and cursed. He pressed the button and nothing came out. He banged on the button and nothing came out.

To the spigot, he said, “ I’ll explode. How do you like that? I’ll friggin explode! How do you like that?” He kicked the fountain in the guts and it dented.

I said, You’re gonna break the water fountain.

He revolved, raised his cone. “You know who wrote this?” His circuits were frying. He was so angry he didn’t even ask for a pass.

Who? I said.

“I’m asking you.”

Why do you care so much? I said.

“I’m the guard,” he said.

I said, But you’re not really the guard. I said, You’re just the guard because you’re paid to be the guard.

“I choose to be the guard,” Floyd said.

Because it pays you, I said. I said, If you could choose, you’d do crowd control, right? That’s what you said to Ruth Rothstein in that interview.

“If I could choose,” Floyd said, “I’d play starting linebacker for the Bears. Doesn’t mean you gotta be disrespectful, telling me why I do what I do is because of pay. I am the boss of me. Everyone is the boss of himself. I do what I want to do.”

Except play linebacker for the Bears, I said, or crowd control.

Floyd slurped his saliva thunderously and his knuckles got as white as his cheering cone. He looked over both shoulders, and on seeing no one else was in C-Hall, he said to me, “Hey, fuck you, Gurion. Eat shit. How’s that?”

A little bit funny, I said.

“Right. Funny. You think you’re all clever and cute? 2.5 and like that? I asked my wife and she told me what you meant. You think I think you’re cute? It’s not cute to make fun of a man’s job he’s gotta do so he can eat. It’s not decent. It’s not what decent people do. It’s what shitty people do. You’re not decent. You’re shitty. You should eat shit to see what you’re like.”

He checked over both shoulders again, and while he did that, I started getting scared. Not scared of Floyd, but scared that he was right; that I was wrong. It wasn’t decent to put someone down for their lousy job — it was snakey, low. It is true that Floyd had the pogromface, that it took no effort to picture him standing in some cobblestone town square, shoulder-to-shoulder with scores of other dummkopfs like Jerry, their eyes and the tines of their pitchforks flashing orange in the flickering light of their torches while they wait for Desormie to pick the right storefront, the worst usurer, the most defenseless wife… However, even if by looking at him I did know the crimes Floyd was capable of committing, the crimes he would commit if given the opportunity, that didn’t mean it was right, in advance of his committing those crimes, to treat him like a criminal. Not necessarily, at least. Adonai Himself did not deal with men according to their potential deeds; it’s what men did that mattered to Him, not what they would do or might.

I was about to apologize, but Floyd, satisfied C-Hall was still empty, picked up where he’d left off. “If I went to school here?” he said. “I’d make you eat shit, huh? Me and all my friends would. We would find some shit and make you eat it. In front of everyone. We’d take you out to the playground and feed you shit and when you passed out from humiliation, we’d piss in your eyes. For the rest of your life, you’d be the little bitch who ate shit and got pissed on. It’d help to solve the problems of the world. All you little smartasses who look at us like you know something we don’t. All you little know-it-all parasites with your comments and your sportscasts trying to make us feel bad about who we are, trying to make us feel bad for doing what we gotta do to make our way through this world that’s only fucked up because of guys like you, behind the scenes, whispering your poison into the air and meanwhile without us you’d be nothing? Without us you’d have nothing to feed on? If we made you eat shit and pissed on you, you wouldn’t have nothing to say to us. You wouldn’t have nothing to think about us except, ‘I am an abnormal piece of shit who clogs up the plumbing that’s the society these good men who pissed on me and made me eat shit are trying to make the world a good place with.’ Your mouth’s wide open, now, huh? You got something to say me?”

I did have something to say to him, or at least I should have had — it felt like something needed to be said by Gurion — but I didn’t know what. I just kept thinking: Why don’t You punish men for the wrongs they would do?

Floyd lowered his cone, leaned at me.

I thought: Because You don’t know what they’ll do. Not for sure. You don’t know what they’ll do for sure, and You believe their thoughts can change their course in the world — the course You’ve set them on, the future You know — yet You can’t read their thoughts any better than You can read mine. Our thoughts to You are what You are to us. Noisy, but hidden. Endless, but unseen. Even if You can read our faces, You can only do so in the way we read Your scripture. Our faces may potentially tell You everything that we think, but often You misread them, often enough that, out of fairness — because You are good — You will not act according only to what You’ve read.