Adam Levin - The Instructions

I said, I’m not only responsible for the actions of my friends, but for the actions of people who see my friends act — that’s what you’re saying to me.

“And now you choose to speak like an adult,” he said. “You only act like a mensch when your ass is on the line?” He pounded the desk rapidly, five times, once for each syllable in “ass is on the line.”

I said to him, I don’t know what speaking like an adult has to do with being a mensch, and I don’t know how it is that you expect a person to defend himself to you when you don’t even have a handle on free will.

“Free will!” Brodsky said.

I said, If those kids you listed aren’t responsible for their own actions, then why would I be for mine, let alone theirs? If I said there was a bomb in the cafeteria and people got trampled, that would be one thing, but I haven’t done anything like that.

His hands were shaking in the air. He stilled them, then knocked his pencil cup sideways off the blotter. It hit the wall and spilled and I got a little startled.

He said, “Who wrecked the scoreboard?”

I said, I don’t tell on people.

He said, “So you know who it was, then.”

I said, I don’t tell on people.

He said, “Was it Nakamook?”

I said nothing.

He said, “Was it Portite? Leevon Ray? Angelica Rothstein?”

I said nothing.

“Did you wreck the scoreboard?” he said.

I said nothing.

“I asked you if you wrecked the scoreboard,” he said.

I said, I heard you.

His whole face twitched then, like the muscles he was forcing to scowl were losing a rebellion, or starting one. “I will keep you here until I get a sufficient answer to my question,” he said.

It was a completely dumont condition. I’d never heard anything so babylike from Brodsky before, and that is when I understood — he was desperate.

It wasn’t just that he had no proof that I’d wrecked the scoreboard — I’d known he had no proof: I’d gotten rid of the pieces and was the only one who saw me do it = I had total control over all the evidence against me — it was that he actually needed proof.

Wrecking the scoreboard was big. I could get arrested for wrecking the scoreboard, taken to court, expelled. Wrecking the scoreboard was so big that suspicion, no matter how strong or who it belonged to, was not enough to nail me, and it never would be. I’d had the upper hand the whole time and I hadn’t known it.

“Answer me,” Brodsky said.

The clock said 3:45 and I was safe, but being safe was not getting me any closer to June. I knew Brodsky couldn’t keep me there forever, but he could definitely keep me there til the end of detention if he wanted.

“ Did you wreck the scoreboard?” Brodsky said. “Did you?”

The first “did” was too loud and his voice faltered on the second, like he heard the first one and didn’t like what he’d heard.

I thought: He doesn’t like treating me the way he is treating me. He’s treating me differently than usual because he wants me to act differently than usual.

Click click click.

I thought: There are a million kinds of different-than-usual.

I decided to try the first one I could think of.

In between deciding and actually trying, though, I got completely paralyzed. The paralysis lasted twice as long as a decision to blink takes to become the action of my eyes blinking. That is less time, even, than it takes to say the word No. The first time I ever got paralyzed like that was in a shopping cart when I was four. My mom took me to the Jewel for fruit to make fruit salad for a barbecue at her colleague’s house. The lemons were shiny and I wanted one, but I didn’t want to ask my mom to buy it for me because I was playing a game that day where I would not ask my parents for anything, so I just grabbed one of the lemons and looked at it and waited for my mom, who was looking at whipped toppings, to see the lemon in my hand and offer to buy it for me. She didn’t see. She put some whipped topping in the cart and pushed us past the melon stand, where this kid in a baseball uniform was pulling on his little sister’s hair while she cried and their mother sniffed cantoloupes. We got some apples and walnuts and went to the checkout line. We were right behind the mean kid’s family. The mother got her change and took the mean kid’s hand and told him to hold his sister’s hand while she pushed the cart, which was very full. I still had the lemon. I had put it in the pocket of my hoodie by then. The mean kid’s family started walking off, and I saw by the way that the sister was moving side-to-side in these little circles that the mean kid was either crushing her fingers together or twisting her arm, and I reached my hand into my pocket to take the lemon out and set it on the runway so my mother, who was looking in her wallet for her credit card, would offer to buy it, but then I thought: I will steal this lemon, and right when I was about to remove my hand from the lemon to leave it in my pocket, the paralysis passed through me and I knew it was my muscles reacting to the sound of Adonai telling them No! so I kept hold of the lemon and took it from my pocket after all. Then I threw it hard at the mean kid’s neck. His head jerked forward and he let go of his sister’s hand and spun around to see who did it. I pointed at him and he started crying. He didn’t revolve again til I dropped my finger, and then he was pulling on his mother’s shirt, but she shooed him off and I didn’t get in trouble. I still can’t say for sure how it is that Adonai knew I was about to steal the lemon, or how He ever knows when to shout No! at the muscles, but I do know He can’t hear your thoughts, and so I believe that He must be a highly talented reader of faces, and that there must be something very startling to Adonai that a human face does right before the human it belongs to is about to do wrong. In Brodsky’s office, it was different than the time with the lemon because I did not understand how what I was about to do was wrong, and the paralyzing No! of Adonai lasted only as long as it always does, which, if you’re not expecting it, is little enough time to deny it just happened. So I denied it, quick as a blink, and did what I’d decided to do to get out of there:

I pretended to have a pretend itch in my eye, to pretend-rub that pretend itch with my wristbone, and in as trembling a voice as I could fake, I said to Leonard Brodsky:

I think you’re really bullying me.

It was like I’d suddenly died. It was like I’d pulled my own head off and tossed it in his lap. I said “bullying,” and the wrinkles around his mouth disappeared and he sat down in his chair and he sat back in his chair and, on the shelf behind where his head had been, three things glinted at me: the bell of his soundgun, the glass in the frame of his family portrait, and — this last one between the first two, and duller, barely visible — the wingnut I’d given him that morning.

With his hands on his knees, rubbing them, Brodsky said to me, “I didn’t… I got carried away, Gurion. Please accept my apology.” His eyes were suddenly very wet.

Another No! passed through me, and I did not deny it happened this time, but I kept up the fake-out, anyway: I ducked my head a little, like I was hesitating, and then I nodded many small nods = I reluctantly accept your apology.

While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who’d hurt him, and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted to hurt him or that I didn’t know how I’d hurt him. It didn’t matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn’t need a name to be wrong. It didn’t need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry.