Adam Levin - The Instructions

I found my dad on CNN, shielding his eyes from the sun and descending the courthouse stairway beside a smiling Patrick Drucker, then stopping halfway down before a handful of reporters holding microphones.

“Mr. Drucker,” says one of the reporters, “is your—” and the rest of the question gets lost beneath a studio-imposed bleeping sound: someone offscreen has cursed.

The camera turns a 180 to reveal scores of protesters. Except for their consignment to the parking lot — six cops in sunglasses are holding a line at the bottom of the stairway — the scene looks no different than it did the day before. The same picket-signs stab the sky. The same swastikas-and-stripes flag flaps overhead. That guy in the skimask and keffiyeh — he’s waving his fist.

A second camera feed is cued and the time signature in the corner jumps from 3:44:21 p.m. to 3:47:36 p.m. The new visual field contains the whole scene as witnessed from just above and behind the protestors.

“…feel great,” Drucker is saying. “I feel like this victory is—” and there’s another bleeping sound, this one lasting five or six seconds.

Just before the bleeping stops, Drucker sieg-heils.

My father grabs the back of his own neck.

A stitch of blackness blinks on the screen and the time signature jumps again. 3:47:36 becomes 3:48:20. Same feed.

The entire parking lot has begun to roil. Shoulders press shoulders. The swastikas-and-stripes is tipping, draping a picket for a second, now sucking under, now disappeared. “See, it’s these kinda people,” Drucker says, hand still aloft, “who control the media. Who control the money. Who don’t believe in the first ammend—” Bleeeep . Sieg heil. “…damage the—” Bleep . Sieg heil.

Protesters push onto the sidewalk, cops pull batons from their holsters.

My father backs up a step. Bleeeeeeeeeeeeep . Two cops walk into the fray, exit the fray.

“…parasites…” Bleep .

Sieg heil.

“…and Spielberg…” Bleep .

Double sieg heil.

Another stitch of blackness. The time-stamp reads 3:50:45. The angle is the same as it was before the stitch, but it has to be a different feed with an unsynched time-stamp because it makes no sense for my father, Drucker, or any of the reporters to have continued standing there for two more minutes on the courthouse steps — they must have seen by then how the lot was roiling, and they must by now see what is starting to happen there: the pickets parallel to the ground, the pickets swinging.

The keffiah guy takes an elbow to the gut, stumbles out of frame.

All six cops ascend a step backward.

Drucker keeps talking, the bleeping keeps bleeping.

Drucker: Sieg heil.

A cop falls down.

Drucker: Sieg heil. A picket flies like a spear.

Sieg heil. Bleeping. Nazis chased out of frame.

A flown picket hits a reporter in the ass. The reporters spray out in six directions.

The cops stutter-step, retreat. Drucker revolves, starts climbing stairs.

My father’s holding his ground, showing his palms, yelling something. A protester knocks him sideways. He falls. The crowd rolls over him slow, then fast. The backs of heads and torsos (vague pain in my hand) fill the screen where he’d stood.

More flown pickets. One of them, its sign torn off, strikes Drucker on the back of the neck as he reaches for the courthouse doorknob. He’s down. Protestors get there, stomp. Then more. And more.

(More pain in my hand.)

The last of the mob having ascended the stairway, the center of the screen opens up. My father is laying across three steps, a lipstick-red disposable lighter peeking out of a tear in his nearer slash pocket. He’s blinking rapidly — the one eye I can see is. Then he’s rising, holding his head, turning toward the camera, looking beyond it, tieknot askew, blinking, squinting, sensing the lighter slipping through the tear, attempting to get the lighter back where it belongs, both hands off his head, using two hands, missing the mark, widening the tear, reaching to catch the lighter as it drops. His keychain follows, bounces off his wrist, lands on the lighter on the stair below. And then my father takes a step toward the camera. His brow goes high. His jaw muscles bulge. He stands up straight, straighter than straight, hard intake of breath. His eyes roll. His lids drop. He buckles and plunges.

I don’t know if the CNN producer intentionally froze the frame at that point, or if it was the outcome of technical difficulties, but my father, collapsing, arms limp at his sides, chin inches from concrete — the image lingered on the screen for seconds. The time signature in the corner read 3:51:18 p.m.

The pain in my hand throbbed sharp.

Cut to newsdesk.

A blue-eyed anchor with a wet-combed widow’s peak was saying that Patrick Drucker was in critical, then Flowers was standing there, blocking the screen, doing something to my wrist, saying, “Open up.”

He meant my hand. I opened it up. Shards and dusty particles of the shattered remote fell into my lap. Two slim Duracells. A splash of blood. I shook off what stuck.

Flowers reached back and offed the power just as the anchor started bungling a sentence. “The protestors, mostly comprised of Jews — Jewish people—”

“Gurion,” Flowers said.

It was not an uncommon syllable for a Roman to stammer, but when the Roman was a newsman it always chilled me up. I could remember three such newscasted “Jews” off the top of my head.

“You dad’s fine,” Flowers said.

But the thing was I could remember three such newscasted “Jews” off the top of my head, and since I could, I did. I heard the first one after the Ishmaelites attacked the Fairfield Street Synagogue: “The youths assaulted the Jews-the Jewish congregants with stones,” said an NBC 5 Local News reporter. A week later, on the ABC 7 Nightly News: “The Jews-the Jewish-the Israeli soldiers entered Gaza at seven this morning.” A month after that, in a round-table discussion on CSPAN, the Reuters Middle East Bureau Chief was asked by the moderator: “To the best of your knowledge, what percentage of Jew-Zionist-Israeli citizens would support the release of imprisoned Hamas freedom fighters in exchange for a cessation of hostilities against the militant settlers?” Those were just the ones I remembered verbatim. There were others, too, each of them uttered in a discussion occasioned by violent activity. Sometimes the Israelites had done the violence; other times they had suffered it. Sometimes the stammer seemed to unmask something and other times it just seemed like a stammer.

“Shit,” Flowers said, staring at my hand.

A plastic sliver was jammed in the muscle of my thumb. I pulled it with my teeth. The hole was triangular.

Flowers shuddered, wadded leaves of Kleenex the color of lemon ice cream, pressed the wad to the wound.

“You dad’s fine,” he said.

I spit the sliver into my cupped left hand, dropped it into a pocket, watched the tissue get wet and orange.

“Say something,” said Flowers.

I said, Now I’ll say ‘a Jew’ and just the word ‘ Jew’ sounds like a dirty word and people don’t know whether to laugh or not.

“Lenny Bruce?” Flowers said.

Yeah, I said.

“Funny man,” said Flowers. “You—”

Sometimes, I said.

“You dad’s fine ,” Flowers said.

Scholars recognize three significant aspects of the conversation Avraham has with Hashem on the eve of Sodom’s destruction. First, the conversation is an argument: the patriarch of patriarchs, the original model of exemplary Israelite behavior, tells Hashem that He is about to make a mistake. Second, Hashem, rather than smiting Avraham for arguing — He does not punish Avraham at all — listens to what Avraham has to say. Third, there is the substance of what Avraham says: that when faced with the choice, it is not only more important to save a righteous person than it is to destroy a wicked one, but more important to save a righteous person than to destroy numerous wicked ones.