Adam Levin - The Instructions

I tucked the note in my pocket. I would save it in my Documents lock-box and, on the twentieth anniversary of their wedding day, I would give it to Bathsheba, along with a drawing I would ask June to make of Eliyahu as a boy. Bathsheba would weep tears of happiness and all of our sons would practice stealth in the yard together, speaking Hebrew to each other. This would be in Jerusalem, behind the limestone house where my mother was a girl. We had pictures. One was in a frame on the living room wall. My mother is sitting under some blossoms in it, eating a Jaffa orange that her father is peeling apart the segments of and handing to her. It was the first picture I ever saw of my grandfather, who was a very dark-skinned person who died the same year I was born. I’d seen it a million times in the frame on the wall, but one time, when I was three, I saw my mom stare at it, and I looked at it more closely and I asked her, Who is the man?

It is the earliest conversation I can remember.

My mom said, “He is my aba.”

I said, No he is not.

She said, “Why do you say that?”

I said, He is not Jewish.

She said, “He is.”

I said, No.

She said, “I do not lie to my son.” But I didn’t believe her and she knew it, so she showed me his medals. The letters engraved in them were Hebrew. I couldn’t read it yet.

“You see?” she said to me. “He was a soldier in the Six-Day War, in the Yom Kippur War, and in Lebanon. He was a hero. Do you see how young I was! Just older than you.”

I said, Why was he a hero?

“What?” she said.

What made him a hero?

“He kept the people he loved from being killed by others.”

How? I said.

She said, “Speak in sentences to your mother.”

I said, How did he stop the others from killing?

My mother said, “He killed them first.”

I can never remember when my father came in the room, or where he was sitting or standing, but he was there by then and they had a fight. I do not remember what they said to each other, either, just that it was loud, and that while I cried the tears magnified everything, and my mother looked browner than me, and my father pinker. After they finished fighting, we all got ice cream on Devon, and then we went to Rosenblum’s Books, where they bought me a Chumash with a leather-colored cover. I read half of Bereishis in English before I went to bed, and in 14, at the part where Avram arms his 318 servants and takes war to the five armies under Chedorlaomer, who had captured Lot, I could see Avram put his fist to the ground and the desert cracking open to swallow his enemies and I could see his face. It was the face of my grandfather and I saw that it was good.

The fly whacked himself against the inner walls of my carrel. The buzzing and the ticking D’d my A like crazy, so I turned the wrapper inside-out and rubbed a streak of butterscotch dust across the desk. The fly put his hose down and fed on the thinnest part. I moved my hand and he flew to the wall, clung on a fiber. I remained still until he returned to the streak.

A minute before the end of the period, a girl on the other side of the Cage said, “No!”

Then someone else said, “Aww!”

“Quoydanawnsinz!” Botha said. “Sit down!”

I revolved. There was a half-circle of students standing around Ben-Wa Wolf. I could see his white hair through the gaps between the hips.

The whole Cage had revolved.

Botha told the standers to get back in their seats. They shifted. That is when I and everyone saw that Ben-Wa Wolf was wet. He was crying without tears and without any throat-sounds — only with his breath — and his hand was raised. His hand is raised, I thought, and he wet himself, I thought. His right hand is raised and his piss is dripping into the carpet, I thought, staining the carpet, I thought, his hand in the air.

The end-of-class tone sounded as Botha approached Ben-Wa with a pass. “Go to the nurse and clane up,” he said.

Ben-Wa ignored him, revolved his chair slowly til he faced the center of the Cage. He said to us, “This isn’t normal. I am eleven years old. This is not normal at all. Can you believe this? I can’t believe this. Can you believe this?”

No one answered him.

It was the worst thing.

“Ben-Wa,” said Botha.

“It was past twelve minutes. Why couldn’t you call on me?” Ben-Wa said. You could hardly hear it, but you couldn’t help but hear it.

Botha shook the pass until Ben-Wa finally lowered his hand and took it.

I thought of a song, a terrible, cloying, cute little meansong:

Hey Ben-Wa Wolf/ Why’s your hand in the air?/ You’re crying and soaking/ Piss streams from your chair/ I wonder and wonder/ And wonder and wonder/ I wonder and wonder/ What makes you so scared?

I had to press my tongue to my mouth-roof with my eyes rolled up while I dug a thumbnail into my neck to make the song go away. There were always songs and they always rhymed and everyone laughed when they sang them. No one sang any songs this time. The day’s last teachers came in and sat at the cluster. It was English. Mr. Meineke, Ms. Kost, Miss Beepee, and Mrs. Anoko. Ms. Kost assigned me a Kurt Vonnegut story called “Harrison Bergeron.” Flowers had me read it two weeks before and I loved it. I read it again there, in the Cage, and loved it less. The ending was cheap. It happened too fast.

When Ronrico and the Janitor returned from the Office, we all revolved at the gong of the doorbell.

Benji pointed to Ronrico and then to the Janitor and then he did the shrug/lip-curling very frantically at me = “That’s who I was making confusing gestures about before.”

I showed him the power-fist. = They’re friends now.

He waved me off with two hands and looked sad doing it.

Ronrico took a look around the Cage. “Who died?” he said.

“Wolf,” said Main Man.

“The Boy Who Cried Wa-Wa?” the Janitor said.

“The Boy Who Went Wee-Wee,” said Forrest Kennilworth.

I was across the room before I knew I’d left my chair, across it so quick Botha hadn’t finished chuckling yet. Nakamook already had Kennilworth’s wrist bent. Kids crowded fast and thickly behind us, shoving close together to get a better vista, their jammed-together bodies blocking all Botha’s sightlines.

“Entertain the monitor,” Benji said to Forrest. “Make him laugh again.”

Kids were saying, “Hurt him.” Kids were saying, “Break it.” By “kids,” I mean all of them but Jelly, Eliyahu, Main Man, and me.

Botha was shouting, trying to clear his way, shouting for the teachers to help him clear the way.

“He should get more than a wrist-twist,” Vincie told Benji.

“Please,” Forrest said. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just fucked up. I was making a joke. It’s just fucked up.”

Main Man said, “Nakamook, Forrest is sorry. He was making a joke and it’s just effed up.”

“He’s crying,” said Jelly. “He means it. He’s sorry.”

Benji let Forrest go as Botha got through, and we all dispersed. The teachers stood dumbly by their chairs at the cluster. Even though Vincie, retreating to his carrel, thumb-stabbed him stealth on the side of the neck, Forrest didn’t rat anyone.

Botha handed out steps for the following offenses: noise, talking, swears, standing.

The fly was on my desk, his hose in the candy dust. I cupped my hand and covered him, then brushed him past the edge to see where he’d go. He returned to the dust, as if I hadn’t just demonstrated that I could kill him, as if I hadn’t just shown him right there in the dust.

I snuck the hall-passes out of my bag and wrote the penumbra poem on the back of one. I held the bottle of Coke between my knees, under the desk, and binder-clipped the poem to the lip beneath the cap.