Adam Levin - The Instructions

And it’s true we held hands for the next few minutes, standing in place while the scholars pressed east, deeper and deeper into the valley, and true that what we said was not prolific. The lipreader-dictated subtitles are true. It’s true June said, “You have to go.”

It’s true I responded, Fuck Him, I don’t.

It’s true she said, “Please.”

It’s true I said, No. Enough is enough.

It’s true that I tried, one last time, in hopes He was bluffing, to enter the valley holding June’s hand, and it’s true that the walls began to splash down, and it’s true I removed my foot from the valley and that all that was falling again became walls.

And it’s true the police, some fifty police, had, by then, begun to close in. It’s true that I told them, as they’ve faithfully reported, that if they came any closer I’d stop what I was doing.

I’ll stop what I’m doing is exactly what I said.

And they came no closer; that is true.

And it’s true the implications of what I’d said were that I was holding the valley open, and that the valley would close and drown all the scholars if I were to cease to hold it open — it’s true I implied I was performing a miracle. And it’s true I knew that’s what I implied, and true that’s what I intended to imply. It’s also true my implications were false, and true I knew my implications were false, and true as well, and finally true, that there wasn’t any miracle — a feat of God certainly, a spectacle stinking of divine interference, a holy stunt sure, but not a miracle. Only a test.

“Please go,” June said. “This isn’t a test. I mean it,” she said. “It’s not like when I kicked you and made you bring my sketchbook. I won’t love you less if you go,” she said.

I said, ‘Fuck Him,’ I said.

I raised the soundgun.

“Wait,” she said. “Let’s wait then,” she said. “This part we don’t have to rush, okay? Let’s wait here a minute and look at the valley.”

And it’s true we waited and looked at the valley, and it’s true it was more a chasm than a valley — a valley a space between graded planes, between hills or mountains that might be worth trying to climb if you wanted — but still it was less a defile than a valley — a defile a thin breach through which only one person could pass at a time, a space that an army would have to break ranks in order to trek — and yet I’d been thinking, before June said valley , that it was a defile, and that seems important, how I’d formerly thought of it, especially in light of how I came to think of it, and maybe it is, except not like you think, but only because I’d decided to call it whatever June Watermark thought we should call it.

We looked at the valley, looked into the valley, and all of the soldiers, some hundred yards east, forty columns of soldiers, twenty-five deep, were looking at us, and soon Eliyahu walked up to the mouth and said, “Nu? Are you coming?”

I told him we weren’t.

“I’ll tell them,” he said, and returned to the soldiers.

As soon as they were all within range of the soundgun, I delivered them the blessings of the Gurionic War and the blessings of what would become The Instructions .

The soldiers, in their columns, then followed us west, and once the last row had emerged from the valley, the walls of the valley buckled and plunged.

And men of conspicuous height and fitness popped out of a window-blackened SUV in the evergreen copse inside the ravine into which I had walked hand-in-hand with June and forced on me and another scholar who was roughly my shape (or, in one version, a lookalike boy they’d brought along with them) a clothing switcheroonie to misdirect the cameras. Or else they were barrel-chested, thin-haired men in rumpled khakis and schlubby parkas who looked like dads in their late-model Dodge or Ford sedan, and they offered either bribes too big to refuse, or grave, fascistic threats that, however cartoonish, cowed each and every member of the on-site media into shooting all that footage of the scholars being boarded onto the buses and taken to the commandeered gym at the J to be processed and questioned and retrieved by their parents.

Then a chloroformed handkerchief or tranquilizer dart or a video on a laptop- or PDA-screen showing both of my parents or one of my parents chained to a rail and held at gunpoint, or a gun put to June right there in the ravine (or in the SUV or late-model Dodge or Ford sedan), or promises of protection and pleas for cooperation uttered in fluent, even beautiful Hebrew, after or instead of the threats to my parent(s) or June, in the ravine or the pertinent vehicle (in the trunk or backseat of which — behind tinted windows — my mom was or wasn’t hidden or hiding, handcuffed and bound at the ankles or not).

And a million-dollar chamber in an undisclosed locale in a secret facility somewhere out west where my brain was examined with a billion-dollar scanner while a holodeck-quality VR-device worth seventeen billion ran me through a set of provocative scenarios and found that, under battlestress, as well as in the throes of sexual pleasure, I emitted a stream of “omega wave packets” at the same exact frequency — according to the U.S. President’s coterie of mystics, who’d discovered said frequency via numerological analyses of ancient scripture — as Yeshua had or Cain or Esau, or that I didn’t emit any such packets, as Yeshua hadn’t nor Cain nor Esau, or that unlike Yeshua or Cain or Esau, I did or didn’t emit such packets. Or a magnetized “theta-blocking” rubberwalled cell in a secret brig underneath the Pentagon where the U.S. President, through shatterproof glass, looked in my eyes, saw my soul in my eyes, and saw that the soul in my eyes was good. Or a torture chamber in the Air Force Two cargo-hold where the U.S. Vice President himself tazed my nutsack and told me that if I didn’t “play the game right” he would “personally gut every single little person [I] care[d] for in America.” Or a feast in my honor on the cruiseship owned by the Elders of Zion where we hogtied blue-eyed Christian infants and held them over pans to bleed thick streams from their tiny throats on fine white flour that we baked into matzo and then ate the matzo and danced a wild hora.

Then bewigged and bespectacled and in a pink dress, or shorn-headed and neck-clocked and in a black track-suit, or smallfroed and hoodied and buttonfly bluejeaned, I entered the State of Israel through the port of Haifa or Jaffa or Ashdod or Eilat by cruiseship or carrier or speedboat or yacht or sailboat or paddleboat or catamaran, or I entered the State of Israel via Ben-Gurion International or Haifa Airport or Ramat David Airfield by an El Al Boeing 747 or an American Airlines Boeing 767 or an Air France Airbus A340 or Air Force 1 or Air Force 2 or a USAF C-130 Hercules or an IDF Air Corps Boeing 707, or I entered the state of Israel via teleportation booth which caused one of three brownouts that week in Virginia (the other two, in this version, having been manufactured to throw Russian or Iranian or Chinese enemies off my trail), and my mother went with me or was there to greet me or came the next day, and I made aliya and was immediately arrested and taken into custody or was immediately arrested and taken into custody and then made aliya or made aliya and was immediately fake-arrested and taken into custody slash-vice-versa.

And then I did or didn’t try to die by hanging from a noose I made of the sheet on my bunk or the string in my hoodie or I used my belt, or did or didn’t open my wrists with a ripped-open Coke can, or I punctured my carotid with a ballpoint or didn’t, or climbed my cell’s bars and dove at the floor to snap my neck but had second thoughts and turned midair and broke my shoulder or turned midair and didn’t even break my shoulder or had no second thoughts but wasn’t high up enough to get the job done or was high up enough but somehow survived because I can’t die or I never climbed the bars of my cell to begin with.