Adam Levin - The Instructions

Soon clouds parted and the sun shone and both his nose and the apex of his left knee’s pant-crease glinted. The glint was identical and I knew both were plastic: the face and the pants. Then I saw his eyes did not look like eyes, but television snow. I saw that he was not Patrick Drucker. He was an angel in a Patrick Drucker mask, standing behind a legs-shaped podium, applauding.

It got me edgy.

The Slokums both said, “Thank you,” to the angel. “Really, you’re too kind,” they said. “We’d bow if we could, but as you can see…”

That got me even more edgy.

What should we do? said the Gurions.

“Which ‘we’?” said everyone.

I don’t know, said the Gurions.

“Is that right?” said the Nakamooks.

The effect of both Benji-voices saying the same thing at once was that it flattened the question’s intonations so that I couldn’t tell if “Is that right?” = “Is it really true that you don’t know to which ‘we’ you are referring?” or if it was a sarcastic, accusatory question that = “No shit, Gurion. You obviously don’t know to which ‘we’ you’re referring,” or if I was being asked about the moral implications of not knowing to which “we” I had referred = “Do you believe it is right to not know to which ‘we’ you’re referring when you ask the question ‘What should we do?’?”

This is when the dream would start to seem familiar, and I’d remember I was supposed to be pissed at Benji.

Meanwhile, the angel continued applauding, and the Bams kept talking about how they’d love to bow to show their appreciation for the applause, but they couldn’t bow, not responsibly at least. Everyone would fall if the Bams bowed, even if just one of the Bams bowed, mused the Bams, and the angel didn’t think it was worth everyone’s falling down just so a Bam could bow, did he?

The angel kept applauding.

The tower of restraint kept swaying. It was exhausting.

I kept wondering what we should do.

Nakamook kept asking me which “we” I meant.

I kept forgetting and then remembering I was pissed at him.

On waking, I’d decide I wasn’t pissed at him, but when I fell back asleep, the dream would start again and I’d forget what I had decided, then remember I was pissed at him, then forget I was pissed and then remember it again.

When finally there was morning, and I woke for the last time, I was no longer pissed at him.

While upstairs, painkillered, my father slept deep, I prepared a forkless breakfast with my mom in the kitchen. On a breadboard on the counter, I smashed walnuts with a rolling pin. She, at the table, opened soft-boiled eggs. I liked eggs soft-boiled, but in the morning couldn’t prep them, not if I wanted to put them in my stomach. Those insect-like screams emitted by the shell when you pried its fragments from that film they clung to — the mastication of wet chicken sounded musical by comparison.

Walnuts in pieces, I dumped the sip of cloudy topwater from a tub of Greek yogurt. I globbed honey from a jar across the yogurt’s flat surface. I folded and stirred til the color was even, then folded some more til my mom’s task was finished. When she signalled it was, I came to the table, the tub in one hand, breadboard in the other; we liked to add the walnuts as we went.

The yogurt of our forkless breakfasts was for the most part treated like dessert. Though we’d always cool our mouths before we ate our eggs, we’d only use a spoonful, never even two. While the roof-blisters you’d get from a scalding one stung, nothing eggy was as nasty as a gluey tepid yolk. Plus our egg-cups, glass, were shaped like half an ostrich, and the closer the temperature of what you drew from them matched yours, the less cute the images your brain coughed up. Half-formed wings and beaks of high plasticity. Goo that would be claws and bone. A pulsing spaghetti of veins and tendons. Ligaments and cartilage not quite yet chewy. Throbbing, webbed red membranes.

Our attack on the eggs was double-fisted. We spooned them up rapidly and salted with abandon. Ninety seconds later it was over.

You inhaled your egg, I said.

My mom pinched my shoulder and I passed her the walnuts. We ate yogurt without speaking til I saw she wore fatigue pants and said so. She explained she was staying home with my father. I told her she could have slept in with him. She said not to talk nonsense because who would make me breakfast. I told her I would’ve made breakfast and she sneered at cold cereal and microwaved starches, praising flame-heat and animal protein by implication. I thanked her for making eggs. Then she told me what she’d heard on morning radio. She told me Patrick Drucker had died in the night.

Good, I said.

“That is not nice to say.”

I have to say nice things about him now?

“You should not dance on anyone’s grave. It could have been your father.”

It could not have been my father.

“We are lucky it was not your father.”

If hypothetical death is on the table, I thought, we are at least as unlucky Drucker hadn’t died younger, before my father ever met him. But she wasn’t really talking about luck. It was just an expression, and though I didn’t agree with what she said, I did with what she meant.

I said, I’m glad it wasn’t Aba.

She kissed me on the cheek and handed me my lunch. I looked inside the bag. A sandwich in foil, a box of peach-apple fruit drink, and baggies of carrots and pretzel sticks.

“Do not give away your carrots,” she told me.

Tracks were being rehabbed and the el moved slow. Near the front of my car, which was barely half-full, two women in headscarves I’d seen around my neighborhood threw me the Look of The End and whispered. They often walked along Devon, each with a grocery bag, a mother and daughter chattering. Whenever one saw me, she’d bite down on her lip, tug the sleeve of the other, and they’d lower their voices. I’d always taken them for typical haters of Maccabees — nothing I wasn’t used to near home — and decided, on the el, that that’s all they were; that the reason they appeared less harmless than usual was I wasn’t accustomed to getting hated on the train. I turned my eyes to my lap, read My Life as a Man.

By the time we’d gotten to Davis, our car — the last — was empty except for some high-schoolers. The women got off first, the others, then me. By the exit, the women stepped aside for the rest of them, but I didn’t see that til I came down the stairs, and by then the last high-schooler was out on the sidewalk. I went to the turnstile the younger woman blocked.

Excuse me, I said.

“You are Gurion,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

I pointed to the mother, said: You’re this woman’s daughter. I need to get to school.

“Do you know who my son is?”

I had no idea who her son was, and I didn’t like her questions. She could have just told me the answers. I read the stories in her face.

I said, Moshe Levin.

“That’s right,” she said, “I’m Michal Levin,” and though Moshe’s grandma grasped her hamsa between thumb and pointer, the mother was not impressed at all. Neither was I. Only a schmuck would pick on David Kahn for his stutter, and retinal detachment via pennygun or no, Moshe had finked to Headmaster Kalisch. He’d told on David, on me, on all of the Israelites. I knew he didn’t mean to rat on anyone but David, but his ratting on David got me booted from Northside, and a rat was a rat was a rat was a rat. Moshe Levin was a rat-fink schmuck.