Adam Levin - The Instructions

Patrick Drucker was in critical. A coma, the radio was saying. A broken back. Six ribs snapped. One punctured lung.

My father had some bruises. Maybe some torn ligaments. Was his damage ≤ 2.5 % of the total damage brought? I think it was — even if his ligaments were torn and Drucker didn’t die.

And so, assuming Drucker was wicked, my father’s damage was acceptable in the eyes of Hashem.

And so I found myself at odds with Hashem.

And not just Him.

Flowers turned off NPR and said, “Talk to me, man. You gotta talk.”

We were heading south on Sheridan in his old Volvo wagon. According to my dad, Sheridan was known as the second most beautiful road anywhere. It wound a lot, often sharply, and that kept you from driving too fast and missing it. For miles you could see Lake Michigan between the gaps of the tree-shaded mansions. The white one with the Spanish-tiled roof was supposedly built by Capone. A few miles farther, the road widened to four lanes and the B’hai temple appeared in the distance. In all the world, there were only seven B’hai temples. The one in Haifa was known for its garden.

“You need to talk, Gurion.”

I don’t feel like talking.

The first most beautiful road anywhere was said to be in Monte Carlo. I could never remember what it was called, but my mom had driven it, and she said Sheridan was prettier.

Flowers said, “You spooking me out.”

Heebie-jeebies, I told him.

“Oh, I see. We jokin’ around. You break my remote, quote some Lenny Bruce, stare out the window twenty minutes so salty you jaw muscles bout to tear through you cheeks, then make some silly wordplay with some racial slurs and now it’s all better. That something, man. Least it might be. I don’t think I believe you, though. I think you bottlin up. I think you gettin heavy.”

We passed Capone’s, then the B’Hai — a dome set atop a pair of stacked hexagons, all stone and white.

Flowers blew air through his lips, pulled a folded paper square from his jacket, dropped it in my lap. “Not a single redmark,” he said. “And it ain’t cause I didn’t read it.”

I unfolded it. “There is love,” it said. “There was always love, and there will be more love, always. Were there ever to be less love, we would all be at war and Your angels would learn suffering.”

I tore it seven ways.

Flowers said, “Why you do that?”

It’s nonsense, I said.

“You the one called it scripture.”

That was a mistake, I said. It’s just fiction.

He didn’t like that.

“ Just fiction. You believed it well enough yesterday. Maybe what you sayin right now is just fiction. Maybe you actin a little fictional.”

Fiction is lies, I said. I said, I have no use for lies.

He liked that even less.

“So why you tell me you don’t feel like talkin?” he said.

I don’t, I said.

“No,” he said. “You don’t feel like talkin to me . That different than you don’t feel like talkin. And what you said was, ‘I don’t feel like talkin.’”

I was being polite.

“Feedin me some maggoty-ass apple and callin it protein-enriched what you doin — polite’s evasive, man.”

I just saw my dad get trampled on television. I don’t feel like talking to you about it.

“It ain’t cause you saw you dad get trampled you ain’t feel like talkin.”

Why are you picking on me?

“Pickin on you — shit. What am I, some sadsack principal? I don’t like the reason you ain’t feel like talkin to me. You someone else, it be different. Might say to myself, ‘He into some stoic, Hemingway yang.’ That ain’t you, though — you nothing like stoic. You a little boy don’t shut the fuck up less he hidin something. And that what you doin. You leavin some vital information by the wayside. I pay attention to what you say. I pay attention to you scriptures , be they disavowed or not. I pay more attention than anyone else who reads them, if there even is anyone else, but that don’t matter to you cause who the fuck am I, right? A Gentile. You friend, sure, but just some goy. No kinda person to talk to about the people you want to read you work most — people who couldn’t care less what you have to say. And they the ones put you dad in the hospital. And they the ones—”

Stop treating my paradox like it’s irony, I said. It’s not that simple.

“Retreat to the abstract — that’s good. Paradox versus irony: discuss.”

I know who hurt my dad, I said, and I’m not retreating from that, I’m trying to figure out how to approach—

“Go on,” said Flowers. “Whizkid youself into total fucken anguish and confusion.”

Let me out of the car, I said.

“You cry all you want. I’m takin you to you folks.” He dropped his handkerchief in my lap.

I threw it back at him.

“Too common a mistake in this world,” he said. “Thinkin’ ingratitude a form of pride. What it get you but some crusty sleeves?”

We’re not friends anymore, I said. Let me out of the car.

He said, “The one ain’t up to you any more than the other, Gurion.”

Again he dropped the handkerchief in my lap. This time I used it. But let that not confuse any scholars. My tears, as usual, were well beside the point.

As we approached my stoop, the scrape of jostled pebbles sounded from the shadows beside the steps and there were whispers. We ascendend the stairway and I unlocked the door. Flowers went inside.

“You comin?” he said.

I’d already jumped the railing. A boy was crumpling beneath me.

Flowers said my name.

The boy hit the ground on his stomach, me atop him, and I dug my knuckles between his shoulderblades and then knee-hopped on his kidneys and he was still. I began to turn him over — I would deliver him his blindness with my bare hands — but I heard another vandal behind me.

I donkeykicked.

Though one of my heels connected, nothing buckled or squished = I’d missed both his knees and sack. I leapt off the still kid to finish the kicked one. That was when Flowers flipped the stooplight on and someone said, “Please.” It was the second kid who said it.

The second kid was Emmanuel Liebman. He was sitting in the pebbles, leaning on my house, clutching his thigh. The still one was Shai Bar-Sholem, another boy who I’d been in Torah Study with at Schechter. Two more — Samuel Diamond and a Satmar I didn’t recognize — were helping Shai to his feet.

“Why—?” said Emmanuel.

Why? I said.

I grabbed his face. I would dig my thumbs into the corners of his orbits and pull. Why are you bombing my house? I would pop his sockets. Why did you lie to me? And while his eyes swung from gory strands near his peyes—“Rabbi,” he was saying, “Rabbi!”—I would carve matching tunnels in his mallet-shaped brain.

I thought.

But all I was doing was pressing the heels of my palms against his jaws. And not even that hard.

When Flowers pulled me into his bearhug, I barely struggled. “Hell you doing?” he said.

“Unhand him, sir,” said Samuel, before us now.

“ Pardon me?” Flowers said.

Samuel lifted 37 from the spot on the ground where Flowers had dropped it. He gripped it like a bat and stepped behind us.

“Please let go of the Rabbi, sir,” said Emmanuel, the reflection of the stooplight’s bulb a white square in the bell of his drawn pennygun. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

And of Shai Bar-Sholem, the Satmar asked, “This is the tzadik?”