Adam Levin - The Instructions

“Here we all are,” said Boystar to the crowd. “At last. Together. Here we are.”

The crowd roared more, some still stomping. The man at the board jacked the volume on the synth. Cheerleaders jumped in the darkness, soundless.

By the time that Boystar was halfway to halfcourt, Portite owned both of his zones: Mangey, Ronrico, and the Janitor by the locker-rooms; by the pushbar-door, Vincie, Ansul, and the Flunky. Nakamook assembled near the southwest corner. I stood behind Desormie, searching the bleachers. I bent all my fingers with all of my fingers and none of my fingers would break.

The hundreds I looked on were blind to us.

Hands forward like a boxer, Boystar fancy-footworked. “You ready?” he said. “Are you ready?” Every indicator light in the gym blinked green.

Eliyahu was sitting between the Five and Miss Pinge — western bleachers, middlemost bench. Floyd, eyes hooded, sat low in his chair in the special gallery with four local newsmen, Jelly’s sister Ruth, and the New Thing fatcats. I sightlined as obliquely to the spotlight as possible, but some of the photons got in my eyes. I located June — top corner northeast, Starla beside her — then turned away south to recover dilation.

“Are you ready for some of this ?” said Boystar. The chain around his waist clanked briefly. I didn’t have to look to know what he was doing.

Giggles, many ersatz, bounced off the walls.

“Whoa!” Boystar said, hoisting his crotch. “Ha ha!” he said: a hoist for each ha, a clank at each hoist.

“Haha!” added Main Man, unlit beside him. “Ha—” he said, and his mike-feed got cut.

Hoist-clank hoist-clank giggle giggle giggle.

“You guys are crazy, you know that?” said Boystar. “I’m just dancin here. All you guys have dirty minds. E spec ially all you Jennys… Now, you Jennys ready to get emotionalized?”

Ecstatic moaning, mostly bogus.

My night-vision maxed.

“You ready. To get. Ro man tacized?”

I drew my gun. I loaded a wingnut. Proceeded on my stomach toward the spotlight.

“Are you ready. To get… In fant alized?”

The manufactured moans died warmly beneath a sampled orchestra’s doleful tuning. The audience grown all hush and tension. A long sighing rustle of fabric, of hundreds leaning forward at once.

The principal squeezed his chin in his fist. I was coming around on his right.

Swelling cellos bled a hesitant pianoline. The lightest of drumrolls, a kind of sated cicada-sound — it murmured near the threshhold, almost subliminal. And then a tweet of birdsong. And then a muted waterfall. Boystar’s mom was futzing with her purse-zipper. Nothing got by me. Slokum’s popping knuckles. Chaz Black blinking rapidly to unseat a dust-mote. The music got louder, and I could still hear everything. The scratch of Brodsky’s mustache against his stroking pointer. Nakamook’s pulse. Jelly’s kiss on his hand. The tiny suck of disrupted pomade as Boystar’s father passed a comb through his hair. All the wet air Desormie pushed through his lips to prove he wasn’t gay and had contempt for birds and cellos. Eliza June Watermark whispered my name.

I looked hard inside the spotlit oval, sockets tingling behind my pinned eyes.

Posed and fitted for maximum exaltation — with platforms in his bootsoles to show off his height; his fringeless kneeholes arty-yet-unslovenly; pantslegs symmetrically a-riot with buckles, decorative zippers, glued-on snaps that couldn’t unsnap; his pitch-checking finger, bereft of utility, professionally pressed to his headset’s earpiece; his tanktop in November attesting to his ruggedness as below it his chain-belt did his streetness; his earstud’s gleam bespeaking glamour, its ¼-carat weight counterpointing at humility; his orbits shadowed and his lashes mascaraed, his ecstatic tortured saint’s stare, aimed at one o’clock, thus thrown into starkest, most spectacular relief — Boystar opened his mouth to sing a sweet and abdominal measure-spanning nothing of the kind child-pop crooners who fancy themselves “vocal artists” precede all the kicks of their drumtracks with.

Had he oohed, mmmed, or even heyed, I might have targeted a different part of him. The vowel he trilled, though, the second in “robot,” required so much maw-gaping I took it for a sign.

And hooded I rose before the spotlight: completely invisible to those behind Boystar; to those in the bleachers but something in the way. A sudden blackness roughly boy-shaped.

I split the penumbra and blasted.

The wingnut ricocheted between his molars. The noise of its impacts, amplified tenfold, blared from the speakers, CHUCKETA-CRACKETA. He dropped looking up and his mouth sprayed particles. A sticky mist of atomized blood, pulverized teeth, spearmint saliva.

Eliyahu was shouting, “Gurion is here!”

I cleared the pink grit from my eyes with a sleeve.

Fifty armed Israelites stood in the bleachers.

Friday, November 17, 2006

10:41 a.m.–10:49 a.m.

Because otherwise scholars, once they start the next chapter, will wonder to distraction how it is I could have witnessed all that’s being described, I’ll clarify here: I didn’t witness all of it. There’s no way I could’ve. Not firsthand.

Yet it feels like I did. It feels like I did but, just like the rest of you, I’ve also seen the videos. *****I’ve seen hundreds of the videos, many more than once, and while it’s easy to conclude that what I witnessed in the gym and what I’ve since seen on screens have overlapped in my memory in the six years between the Damage Proper and this writing, it is not at all easy to separate the overlap’s components. In fact, it’s impossible. I know because I’ve tried.

Just yesterday, for example, I watched a clip of the Five firing down on Shlomo. It looked like I remembered, exactly like I remembered, and I realized my memory must have been of the clip, not the experience.

Except then, just a split-second later, where I expected to see Eliyahu vault the bleachers, the cameraman turned to a wide-eyed Ashley, and this seemed to suggest the memory of Eliyahu was not a memory of something I’d seen onscreen, but of something I’d witnessed firsthand.

Yet on second thought, I thought, it might not have been firsthand. There were, after all, nine cameras in the gym, most of them by that time filming, and Eliyahu’s leap may have been recorded with one of the other eight — I might have been remembering that camera’s footage from another video.

So I checked the footage and, sure enough, the Fox News cameraman had captured the airborne Eliyahu, and so had the CBS guy. But then again, yet again, that didn’t mean I hadn’t witnessed it firsthand as well.

I might have witnessed any of it firsthand is the thing. From centercourt you could see anything in the gym. You could see anything in the gym from nearly anywhere in the gym, just not everything at once. I could have seen any of what I remember, but I could not have seen all of it, yet I remember seeing all of it. At least I seem to.

“But so why, in light of your memory’s unreliability,” wonder scholars, “why write any of the scene, Rabbi? After all, there are, as you’ve already mentioned, those thousands of videos. Why not just point us toward one or two — even ten — of the best? Certainly most of them are chazerai and narishkeit. Certainly most of them — particularly those second-class mash-ups inspired by the latest in user-friendly software, crafted with mouseclicks and readymade algorithms by spendy technologists who claim to believe that authorship is just a kind of editing, who confuse DIY with owning an iMac, and artfulness for art, and Bal with Adonai: all those rap- and ska- and punk-scored fanvids; all those rapmetal-soundtracked hatervids; those fishlensed and widescreened and retro-black-and-whited; those overdubbed with soundbytes from rabbis and governors; those spliced with your baby pictures and paintings by June, with scenes from Columbine and the Seung-Hui Cho biopic, stills from the Six Day and the Yom Kippur Wars; and the ones with the halos cartooned on your heads, the ones with the halos on the heads of your enemies, those captioned with verses from Ezekiel and Judges, those with their titles atop Israeli flags, the ones that are bordered with stars of David, the Black Power ones that darken your skintone, the Gun Lobby ones that redden all the blood, the ones from the contest held by Al Jazeera, the ones from the festival funded quietly by Marlboro; the splitscreened ones with the footage on the right and the GIDEON MACYNTIRE: COMING OF RAGE RPG on the left, their auteurs moving their Gurion-shaped avatars through virtual ballcourts and doorways and bleachers (past bleeding STELLARKIDs and spooky LEAVE-OFFs, in the background SLAM HOKUMs cursing BANJO NICKYNACKs, ENDURING JANE PAPERSTAMPs proclaiming love for GIDEONs, JELLO ROSENs biting HEATHERs, and so on) in as much the same pattern and at as much the same pace as the filmed you in those filmed settings moves as possible… and all the rest of their ilk — are for the birds. Surely they are. Surely, surely. But what,” wonder scholars, “about all the others? like the more straightforward, documentary-type ones? What about the video your father commissioned? What couldn’t the right one or few of those show us that a description in here could? Why include the Damage Proper in the scripture at all?”