Adam Levin - The Instructions

Looking at Boystar, at his little celebration, I finally had a thought that was smart. I thought: It’s not that you like Bam Slokum despite the fact that he humiliated you, Gurion. I thought: You like Bam Slokum because he humiliated you. Like some cowardly Pascal wagering, you suspected all along that Bam could hurt you, so you decided to like him. As long as you told yourself you liked him, and for as long as you continue to tell yourself you like him, you have had and will continue to have an excuse not to fight him, an excuse to make excuses for him and his actions, actions you wouldn’t hesitate to condemn if anyone else had performed them.

I may have helped to wreck the pagan scoreboard, but I had made of Bam a Christian deity, and these days were not like the days of Avram. To smash idols was not enough. It only infuriated the idolaters. We must smash what the idols stand for, I thought. We must smash their gods, bone by bone, starting with the fingers and ending with the skulls, and that is only the beginning, for we must also bring down the shelves and the altars on which new idols could be mounted; we must bring down the walls to which new shelves could be attached and bury all the flooring on which new altars could be balanced, then smash apart the wreckage so that none of it may be salvaged.

I had been operating too symbolically. I had been too verbose. Verbosity was like the iniquity of idolatry. I had been iniquitous, a sinner, and there in the two-hill field I was repenting.

Repentance is easy when you’ve been defeated — I knew that. I needed to figure out how to atone.

Itching to flash his upturned thumbs some more, Boystar shouted Slokum’s name again. Slokum ignored him, and I enjoyed it too much, enjoyed it the wrong way. To enjoy the revelation that the bonds between two of my enemies were weak would have been fine, but what I enjoyed was so instantaneous that it could not have been that. What I enjoyed was that Bam showed Boystar disfavor, which meant being in Bam’s favor was still valuable to me.

You were humiliated by him, I thought, well before he laid hands on you, and yet even now, after he has held you helpless in the air, you can hear it echoing, the angelic robotvoice in your head that assures you might makes right even while might is wronging you, that it is good to accept the dominance of those who dominate you, that your enemies are friends as long as you cheer for them.

I thought: The more violent the measures of restraint, the less humiliation those measures inflict on the restrained; the less humiliated the restrained, the more violent need be the measures to restrain them.

I thought: Being humiliated only makes it easier to restrain you. And being restrained makes it possible to torture you, for the unrestrained cannot be tortured; the unrestrained can only be fought. So to be restrained is to be unable to fight, and to be humiliated is to be readied for torture. To know you have been readied for torture is to await torture. And to await torture is, itself, torture.

I thought: There is nothing more glaringly unmerciful than torture. Those who would restrain you will be subject to your atonement.

Botha started taking attendance.

“Haspaygus!” he said.

My eyes opened at the sound of it. I hadn’t known they’d been closed.

“Yeah,” said Ronrico Asparagus.

Looking on the Side of Damage, now, I thought of Nakamook’s judgment in the teachers lounge doorway: that they were only loyal because they wanted protection.

“What’s the proper response, Mister Haspaygus?”

The moment I was unable to protect them, they cowered, abandoned me.

“‘Here’ or ‘prasent’ is the proper response, Mister Haspaygus.”

Except so had I. I had cowered, was cowering.

“Yeah,” said Ronrico.

“That’s a detantion, Haspaygus. Bashker!”

They had cowered before the same false god that had humbled me, their protector.

“Tut,” said Anna Boshka.

And to see your protector being humbled — what can you do? Can you step in to protect him? Yes, you can. But do you think to? Do you ever think to protect your protector? You should, but you probably don’t. You probably take for granted that what overpowers him will overpower you. And you cower.

“Moykil Braigmin?”

So was that the end of their loyalty, then?

“Yeah,” said the Janitor.

Is loyalty measured by the ends to which you’d go to protect the object of your loyalty, or is it measured by the ends to which you’d hope you’d go to protect him?

“What’s that?” said Botha. “What’s that?”

Maybe, I thought, there is actual loyalty, and that is measured by the ends to which you’d go; and maybe then there is also potential loyalty — measured by the ends to which you’d hope you’d go. Surely the second kind is not as important as the first, but that wouldn’t make it un important; all things potential can be made actual — that is what it means to be potential. And apart from Adonai, what in all the universe was actual that wasn’t once potential?

“I said, ‘Yeah,’” said the Janitor.

“That’s so romentic,” said Botha, “to side with your baddy Hespaygus.” Then he fake-coughed. “Lotsa jairms out here,” he said. He fake-coughed again, said, “All that blad from Aye-lie and that Shy-lomo boy on the ground that you’re stendin’ on.”

The Janitor knew he was yards away from where Shlomo and Eliyahu had bled into the grass, but still you could almost see the germs he imagined floating up from near his shoes, their cellwalls slimily marbled hot pink and piss-colored, little barbs protruding from their goozy-shaped bodies, trying to cling to his skin, to crawl into his openings. Though he hesitated, the Janitor was only able to hold his ground for a three-count before succumbing to Botha’s power of suggestion and moving a couple steps back.

Botha, still trickling — doomed, as all caulkers, to trickle forever — said, “It’s in the air by now I’d think, the jairms. Enexcapable, I’d suppose.”

“Leave my brother alone,” said the Flunky.

The Janitor tightened his lips, hoisted the collar of his t-shirt over his nose.

“Your dumb behavior is the dumb behavior of a foog who’s like a fool except I don’t like him,” the Flunky said to Botha.

The sound of more than four consecutive words from the Flunky — let alone words acknowledging his genetic ties to the Janitor — startled all of us, but no one as much as Botha, whose claw, with a click, pinched so hard and suddenly on the drizzle-slick wood of his clipboard that the clipboard shot from his grasp. Reflexively, as if a champion of that shvontzy sport hackeysack, Botha extended a leg and kicked the clipboard, which bounced once then twice off his inner-arch before it hit the ground. He was bent over to retrieve it when he said, “I guess that mains Rachid Braigmin’s present,” but by the time he said, “and I guess Rachid Braigmin wants to serve a detantion with his little brother and his little brother’s little frand Haspaygus — I’ll oblige you that, Rachid Braigmin, I’ll oblige you that,” he was standing up even straighter than before, shoulders thrust back proudly. “Cattis!” he said.

“What did you just say to the Flunky, Mr. Botha? I couldn’t under-stand,” said Salvador Curtis.

“Jest mind yourself, Cattis, and kape your nose to the tesk at hand. Deerfailed!”

I thought: Maybe it’s the duty of loyalty’s object to transform the potential into the actual. Maybe it’s my fault they didn’t protect me. Maybe when they saw me being humiliated, they didn’t believe what they were seeing.

“Present,” said Rick Deerfield.

“Dangow,” said Botha.