Adam Levin - The Instructions

And had I left June behind to enter the valley, I would not have been able to lead my army to the State of Israel, for Adonai is elegant, and the Great Lake is landlocked, and in order for us to have made it to Israel we’d have needed any number of additional miracles — miracles to sustain us and take us over land, to the ocean, and through the ocean — and because He could have, from the very beginning, just constructed a bridge of reinforced manna to span the sky from Deerbrook Park to the State of Israel or dug a manna-lined tunnel from Deerbrook Park to the State of Israel, it would not have been elegant of Adonai to provide multiple miracles to get us to Israel, and so it can easily be deduced that He created the valley for another reason, and it can just as easily be deduced that this other reason was to trick the watching world into thinking it was me who created the valley, and it can also just as easily be deduced that the reason that He wanted to trick the world was that He didn’t want the soldiers to face prosecution for crimes related to the Damage Proper and that He knew that the world wouldn’t prosecute the soldiers if the world were to believe I was solely responsible for all that had happened on 11–17 and that He saw that the most elegant way to foment the belief that I was solely responsible for all that had happened on 11/17 was to convince the world that I was capable of miracles. Or Adonai is inelegant, even clumsy, and there would have been more miracles to take us to the ocean and through the ocean and sustain us until we got to Israel. Or Adonai is elegant and would have liked to build a bridge or dig a tunnel to Israel, but He knew that elegance, though impressive to scholars, was less impressive to the rest of the world, and He wanted to impress the rest of the world, and thus He would have provided multiple miracles to get us to Israel, for He knew that scholars would come to understand that His reasons for appearing inelegant to them (the scholars) were elegant reasons and that the rest of the world, lacking any sense of what elegance entailed, wouldn’t question Him anyway.

Or none of the above. Adonai was just winging it. Or Adonai is as elegant as first suggested and when He opened the valley He intended me to lead my army through the valley to the State of Indiana (if the valley, as some have insisted, juked a bit south just beyond its vanishing point) or the State of Michigan (if the valley, as others say, proceeded as eastwardly as it appeared to from the shore), certain as He was that by the time we arrived there, the entire world would be in awe of the valley and in awe of me and in awe of the soldiers, and that airplanes would, owing to the awe, be put at our disposal to get us to Israel, and believing as He did that our getting to Israel in state-sanctioned airplanes would be better for the world (one love, unity) than our getting to Israel strictly via miracle.

And as we came off the beach, all of the cops were just scared and confused, and all the cameras on the ground and in the sky got thrown off when (with or without guile) I entered the copse inside the ravine, and all the TSA workers at O’Hare or Midway were wholly incompetent and the Feds were too busy to watch the news or they watched the news but didn’t think the boy who split the lake could be a weapon or didn’t think it quick enough or thought they’d get me later out of sight of the cameras, or did come get me later out of sight of the cameras after the cops brought me into the station or the commandeered gym, or got to the beach as fast as they could but as fast as they could was way too slow or nearly but not quite fast enough, unless it was faster than you’d ever imagine in which case the cops who were stationed on Sheridan didn’t at first believe that the g-men were g-men because the g-men didn’t carry any badges or because their badges were unconvincing and the cops were suspicious and slowed down the g-men, or the g-men did have convincing badges but they spoke to the local cops like schmucks which led to a fistfight with slapstick dynamics involving mud and puddles and small icy inclines and one Fed got gang-stomped and the other was his lover and he sacrificed the mission to get him an ambulance and that’s why that ambulance screamed onto Sheridan just minutes after I entered the copse, or there wasn’t any fight but there was some condescension on the part of the Feds toward the local cop at whom their badges were flashed who was thereby incited to passively agress and thus took extra-long to examine the badges and meanwhile my mom or Israeli agents took advantage of the distraction and snuck past the barricade and into the ravine and stealthed me for miles through the ravine and put me in a car or a boat or hovercraft that got me to a plane that brought me to Israel or to a car that got me to a(nother) boat that brought me to Israel. Or everyone involved did their jobs right and well but my mother was smarter and stealther than all of them or was owed many favors by the State of Israel by virtue of her service in the IDF or by virtue of my grandfather’s service in the IDF or by virtue of her having always been Mossad, and/or because the State of Israel thought I might be a weapon and, having already — nearly two hours before they came to suspect that I was a weapon — arranged my escape at my mother’s behest, needed only to modify their plans by a modicum, and so they did. Or the g-men or the cops did come get me under shadow of the copse inside of the ravine, but on our way to the station or the commandeered gym or FBI headquarters or NSA headquarters or the Freemason Lodge in the White House basement, we came across my mom or agents of Mossad who blocked the road with a semi or Humvee or tricked-out Jeep or Ford Excursion and shot my captors or knocked them out or tied them up and then brought me to Israel. Or Gnostic or Papal or Evangelical Christian assassins brought me to Israel. Or Southside Chicago Black Hebrew assassins commanded in secret by Illinois’s junior U.S. Senator brought me to Israel and held me in Dimona til the special forces team that my zadie’d once commanded stormed their stronghold and brought me to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Or the Evangelicals didn’t have assassins but they pressured the President, who sent me to Israel in hopes of apocalypse, or the Secretary of Defense did it, or aliens beamed me, and because June Watermark was so far away or Benji was gone or Berman was wicked or my parents’ American lives were ruined or for all of those reasons or for some of those reasons or none of those reasons I did or didn’t try to die five times or three or two times or one time or none (never four, for some reason) or it looked like I tried because a hostile faction had attempted to end me and make it look like suicide or because one of the however many times it looked like I’d attempted suicide a hostile faction had tried to end me but not the other time(s) or no one was trying to end me to begin with or no one who tried to end me could get to me or it never looked like attempted suicide because there was no it to look like anything or there was an it but the it was what Call-Me-Sandy would call “a cry for help” or the it was intended to engender pity from the judge or the it was staged to help bolster my pleas of insanity which I changed last minute to pleas of guilty because I didn’t want to go out like that or it was staged to get me removed from the cell to a nutward, McMurphy-style, or none of it was staged or what was ostensibly staged never happened to begin with.

And Emmanuel Liebman and Eliyahu of Brooklyn were kidnapped by the State of Israel and brought here because I’d threatened to send my secret army to blow up Al Aqsa if they weren’t brought here or because I’d threatened to prevent my secret army from ever blowing up Al Aqsa if they weren’t brought here, or radical Gurionites or Scholars Fund agents or Scholars Fund scholars or Scholars Fund terrorists kidnapped the both of them because I asked them to or because they thought I’d asked them to when in fact I hadn’t, or Emmanuel was kidnapped but not Eliyahu, for Eliyahu’s aunt and uncle became afraid of Eliyahu and they pawned him off on West Coast cousins from whom Eliyahu kept running away til my mother reached out and offered to adopt him but then my father made it clear that he would be leaving her as soon as all of my trials concluded and my mother thought Eliyahu needed a father and so she arranged for him to stay with the Forems on the Tzur Shalem outpost of the Karmei Tzur settlement because Yuval’s house was armed and kosher and he only had daughters but wanted a son and I wanted Eliyahu to get to know some settlers, or Emmanuel wasn’t kidnapped either but sent to Sderot to stay with his uncle because that’s what he wanted and his parents believed in him or they feared bloody vengeance from Chicago’s anti-Gurionites.