Adam Levin - The Instructions

I explained about potential messiahs. Flowers got bored and spaced out. When I finished, he said, “Do better you write it out and show me. Know, though, that a boy who might or might not be the messiah — that’s no less interesting to me than a boy who’s the for-sure messiah. Maybe it’s even better. I know that because I like you a hell of a lot, and I ain’t sure you the messiah. Now I’m gonna have at this Jedi scripture of yours with my red pen, see what’s there to salvage. You want an ice-cream pop or something? I picked some up — they in the freezer if you want them.” He took my pages off the music stand and rolled them into a cylinder. Then he headed toward his desk, tapping the cylinder on his thigh.

I tried to break my fingers with the forces of diametrical opposition. The knuckles popped but nothing broke.

I said to Flowers, I’m starting over.

He said, “Starting over what?”

The scripture, I said.

Flowers said, “You given me, like, two hundred pages last couple months.”

Doesn’t matter, I said.

Flowers said, “If you can scrap that many pages, then I suppose you must scrap that many pages.”

I’m starting over tonight, I said. You want an ice cream? I’m getting one.

Flowers said, “Nah, man. I had one already.”

I’d been taught to never eat ice cream alone. I’d lived by that rule, and it had served me well, or at least it hadn’t harmed me; I’d never eaten ice cream without enjoying it. I buttoned back up and left for the Metra.

I searched my school record when I got on the train. No document by Headmaster Unger was in there. His signature appeared on a few official forms — e.g., an enrollment one one which he’d entered “ben-Judah” as my middle name; an expulsion one wherein a box beside the phrase FOR REASONS OTHER THAN THOSE LISTED ABOVE was checked, and beneath the box, on the two lines provided, were scrawled the words “unacceptable violence: student assaulted his headmaster (myself, the signatory, Headmaster Rabbi Lional Unger, M.Ed.) with a stapling implement”—but there was nothing that he’d authored all by himself, let alone an account of what preceded my flying stapler attack. Apart from what I’d already found in the Office while Principal Brodsky talked about math, there wasn’t much in my record I could use in my scripture. Rather, there was, but all of it was stuff that I’d written myself — detention assignments, a copy of Ulpan , an essay for English called “9-1-1 Is a Joke”—and as with everything else I’d ever written or read, I had all those writings memorized anyway.

I tried to decide whether to read Rabbi Salt’s letter to Brodsky or Call-Me’s Assessment , but then I remembered I had in-school suspension the next day, and if I saved them to read in ISS, then ISS almost became worth looking forward to. Plus I was tired.

I leaned on the window and fell asleep for a minute. I woke up more tired, and hungry, too.

In Evanston, I got a large coffee and a slice at this place called Pizza by the Davis Street station. I bolted the slice and brought the coffee to the el stop.

On the platform, I saw Emmanuel Liebman. He was staring at the sky and rocking heel to toe. A wobbly plank beneath him kept squeaking. The noise made the people under the heatlamp act nervous. One guy smoothed his mustache three times in a row. Another worked his eyebrows, and a third his pants-wrinkles. A woman with nostrils the size of dimes chomped on gum the way kids stomp bugs that keep not dying.

I sat in a patch of rock salt by the mapstand, holding my cigarette like a French guy to hide it. I couldn’t decide if I should say hello.

I knew that I wanted to. Along with Esther and Rabbi Salt, Emmanuel had been my favorite person at Schechter, and I hadn’t seen him since the day I got kicked out of Northside. He was taller and had some whiskers, very thin ones, but was easy to recognize from far away since his head was shaped like a mallet.

If you were a Cohain, having a mallet-shaped head would automatically bar you from becoming the Cohain Gadol, which translates to “the Big Cohain,” which means the high priest of the Temple, the one who’d get to speak Hashem’s true name once a year on Yom Kippur when we still had a temple. Some scholars think that Judah Maccabee — not my father, but the hero of Chanukah who led the rebellion against the Greeks to briefly take back the second Temple in the second century B.C.E. — was mallet-headed, and that that is why he was called Maccabee, because maccabee means hammer, or mallet. I don’t know why a mallet-head barred you from high-priesthood. Emmanuel was hugely smart and kind, despite his mallet-head, and I think that Judah Maccabee probably was, too, but maybe only because he had the same name as my father and the same-shaped head as my loyal friend, Emmanuel.

When the woman with the nostrils leapt from the bench, the smoothing guys leaned forward. She put her foot down on the wobbly plank, and the squeak got zeroed and they stopped their smoothing.

Emmanuel did a slow revolution, blinking his eyes like he’d just left a trance. He double-taked on seeing me, then chinned the air in the direction of the stairwell. I followed him there at a ten-pace distance.

“I’m sorry, Rabbi,” he said. “I thought I saw my mom’s friend Susanah on the other side of the tracks, and I didn’t want her to see me talking to — I’m probably just jumpy. My grandfather — Schechter’s closed today — service day for the teachers — I came up to visit him. We watched an awful documentary. Sabra and Shatila and Ariel Sharon. Not very cheering. Not very easy to come away from undistracted, unjumpy. But then look who’s here.” He clapped both my shoulders. “I was almost starting to think you were imprisoned in a juvenile hall,” he said. “Of all the rumors I’ve heard about you since the schoolyear started — death, flight to Israel, employment by the Mossad — the imprisonment one’s been the most popular. I’ve pooh-poohed it from the get-go, but then, last week, I looked at the last email you sent, the one called “Last Word.” I looked at the sent-date, and did some arithmetic, and realized it had been five months since we’d heard from you. I thought how five months is a lot longer than we were counting on, and when you consider all the strife in the Land of Israel in the last five months… I began to wonder if the rumors might be true. I began to think to myself, ‘Many of our tzadiks do end up imprisoned,’ but even then I would think, ‘not often while in middle school.’ So what are you doing in Evanston? And what are you doing with my collar?”

Even if it is said kiddingly, it is such a nice thing to be called a tzadik that I never knew how to act when someone called me it, so I’d started straightening Emmanuel’s collar with my free hand because that way I could make a face like I was concentrating and not look at his eyes.

He touched my cup and said, “Did you just eat at that pizza place Pizza? With the swastika guy?”

Emmanuel was referring to a guy called Mongo who sometimes worked behind the counter at Pizza. Mongo had a swastika on each of his wrists, but it wasn’t how it seemed. Mongo was Indian — you could tell by his accent. He wasn’t a Nazi. The tattoos were religious.

Mongo’s Indian, I said.

Emmanuel said, “That’s what I used to think: he’s Indian, the swastika means something else. But even if it does mean something else, he’s cruel about it. My grandfather took me there over the summer,” he said, “to Pizza. We were thirsty and we knew they had soda in cans. And my grandfather asked the guy, ‘What are these tattoos for? What do they mean?’—he was trying to understand. And the guy said, ‘I owe you no explanation.’ So we left without getting any cans of soda because even though it was true he didn’t have to explain anything he didn’t want to explain, so what? If he was nice, he would explain. If he was nice, he’d understand he was making an old man uncomfortable, that the old man was only trying to get comfortable, and that all it would take is a couple words to make the old man comfortable. Because what? It’s my grandfather’s fault the Nazis stole this guy’s religious symbol? What if some old guy from Mississippi came into Pizza in a Confederate flag bandanna and said to Mongo, ‘You coloreds are wonderful’? Do you think Mongo would say to himself, ‘It’s okay he says coloreds because he’s saying he likes me and coloreds used to mean something different when this guy was young, and all his bandanna stands for is Southern pride?’ Do you think Mongo would be thrilled about serving this guy pizza? I think Mongo would pore Borax into the cheese of such a guy’s pizza, but then you have my grandfather, who all he wants is Mongo to say, ‘Swastikas used to mean something different,’ and he’ll be happy to talk to Mongo, and Mongo won’t explain ? What kind of name is Mongo, anyway? You sure it’s Indian?”