Adam Levin - The Instructions

Sneezing drew no real attention.

It took me less than five minutes to work out a sound-code. At lunchtime, I handed it out to those concerned. I would cough when I wanted Benji’s attention, fake-sneeze when I wanted Vincie’s attention, clear my throat to signal Mookus, pop my spine-nodes for Jelly, sniffle for Leevon, and wheeze for Mangey.

Without knowing sign language, there wasn’t much we could say once we were facing each other, so we resorted to gestures that didn’t mean what they seemed to — we shook our fists, thumbed our front teeth, dragged fingers across our throats like knives — yet performing these gestures, at least for a while, felt like a victory over the arrangement.

Within a few days of the sound-code’s inception, though, all of the Cage had caught on to its rudiments, and everyone likes to see rules get broken, so whenever I made a body noise, half the room would break the Face Forward rule to see what I’d do next, and Botha would notice and then he would yell and hand out some steps. Soon enough he figured out what I was doing — or at least he figured out that when I made a body noise, people got disarranged — and after that, I couldn’t even tongue-click or sigh in awe of a Philip Roth paragraph without getting shut down in booming Australian.

The most important thing, though — at least to me, at least at the time — was the new way that I learned to think about chinks: since they were spaces between rules, the more rules there were in an arrangement, the more chinks. Once the robots found out that a chink was being exploited, they’d create a new rule to fill the space between the two rules containing the chink, but the new rule never filled the space completely — there is always space between rules — and so what happened was that every time a new rule got shoved between two old ones, two new spaces would arise, two new chinks, one on either side of the new rule, so that

would become

The two new chinks would be much narrower than the one they’d replaced, but still they would be chinks. So the more that exploited chinks got filled with rules, the more chinks there were.

It was hard, however, to keep finding the chinks, and it was even harder than that to exploit them in a way that was fun.

Once the sound-code failed, we tried a time-code, i.e., we agreed that at certain times we’d revolve to face each other. Benji and I, for example, agreed that we would revolve at every eleventh, seventeenth, thirty-first, and fifty-third minute of the hour, whereas Vincie and I would revolve at the second, twenty-seventh, and forty-fifth minute, and Benji and Vincie at the fifth, thirty-ninth, and fifty-eighth minute. We arranged revolve-minutes with Main Man and Jelly and Leevon and Mangey also, but after a week the time-code died. This was partly because people would get confused and revolve at the wrong minute or face the wrong person, which caused a mutual and reflexive loss of faith (as Main Man put it: “Because when I revolted you did not revolt with me, I became revolted, and I revolted less, which got you revolted, so you revolted less”), but it was mostly because of how using the time-code felt too much like obeying the rules. With the sound-code, I’d been able to give the revolve signal whenever I felt like it, while with the time-code, it was all arranged in advance, like recess. Recess could be good because, unless you were banned from it like I was, you got to go outside. But at the same time, you only got to go outside when the arrangement let you go outside — at recess. It is true we picked the minutes for the time-code ourselves, but because they had to be decided on in advance, it was never as fun as it should have been. It was just another arrangement. Like recess.

A day or two after the time-code disappeared, we replaced it with a random three-code. Whenever three events of a certain type occurred, two of us would be signalled to act. Mine and Vincie’s event, for example, was rising = every third time anyone rose from their chair, like to go to the bathroom or the nurse or the teacher cluster, Vincie and I would revolve and gesticulate. Because the frequency of the three-part signals varied unpredictably, using the random three-code was a little bit more fun than using the time-code, but our revolving still depended on decisions we’d made in advance (we chose which events would elicit our responses), so there was no spontaneity (as there’d been with the sound-code). As well, and as with every other way we’d exploited the chinks, all we could manage in the way of communication was a gesture that, regardless of the movements of the hands comprising it, always meant the same thing: “Look, I exist, and you exist, too; but for the fact that you are seeing me make it, this gesture is totally meaningless.”

Nonetheless, the random three-code stuck. We’d been using it for a month; the robots couldn’t crack it. Even while I stared down at the WE DAMAGE WE piece of paper Jenny Mangey had given me, I was waiting on a third floor-groan to signal that I should revolve and show Benji my swear, or maybe pump a pointer inside of my fist at him, but it was so boring, so desperately boring. If asked beforehand, I probably would have guessed that having fallen in love a couple hours earlier would’ve made this boredom a lot more tolerable, but the opposite was true, for now I was imagining how weak June would think me if she were to know how I sat there perpetually, hopelessly suffering.

On Flowers’s sound advice, dear scholars, to write in the cause of averting your boredom, I’ve avoided directly describing our hopelessness in favor of describing how we tried to fight it, but make no mistake: our methods all failed. Even those that seemed to succeed were failures — especially those. The sound-code, the time-code, the random three-code; what did they get us? How many times could you give your best friend the finger before it just quit being any fun at all? And how dumont was it to believe that doing so accomplished anything meaningful, let alone useful? Wasn’t to believe that but a way to be arranged? Maybe even the worst kind of arranged? The kind where you think you’re overcoming the arrangement, when, in fact, you’re serving it perfectly? Flipping a covert bird instead of screaming a curse instead of throwing a punch instead of throwing a rock? Revolving in a chair you might have otherwise swung? Cheering for underdogs and calling it action? Smirking at the powerful and calling it subversive? Embracing your meekness instead of getting strong? All day long we coped with the insults, with being insulted; we did what we could to avoid further insults. But that original insult — the one I mentioned earlier, the one that took a while to really understand: that we were expected to accept all the insults the Cage dealt out, all of its rules; to accept that the Cage was allowed to deal them out, was the maker of rules, the only maker of rules, and rules, no less, that were only there to dominate us; only there to show us that the Cage made the rules — that one loomed, grew ever more evident, and even more powerful. And worst of all, we let its power grow; we helped its power grow. You can render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but if you don’t keep from Caesar that which is yours, Caesar will take some, and then take some more, and if you don’t put a stop to it, though you won’t lose everything — you can’t lose everything; there’s things he can’t take, at least one or two — a time will soon come when you’ll think you’ve lost everything, when you’ll think all is Caesar’s, and by then you’ll be too weak to take what’s yours back, too tired to remember what was yours to begin with, and you’ll end up, perversely, scheming for his leavings and, even more perversely, grateful when you get them.