Adam Levin - The Instructions

And yet I see it is good to be in love, and were I still attending school with you, I could not have fallen in love. I hope to tell you the story one day. I hope that day will be soon.

Soon,

Gurion ben-Judah

I moved the cursor over the SEND button, daring myself to click it, knowing I wouldn’t. I’d known I wouldn’t since halfway through the first paragraph, but had kept writing anyway, hoping the message, completed, would reveal a justification for its own sending. The stated one was legless. Emmanuel Liebman would tell the scholars he’d spoken with me, and they would believe him because he was Emmanuel Liebman. They would know I wasn’t dead or in prison. And simply missing them wasn’t a good enough reason to contact them. If I contacted them, no few would conclude it meant that it was okay for us to be back in contact — it wasn’t. And they would contact me, and I would tell them it was not okay, that it was not yet time for them to disobey their parents, and some of them would listen, but most of them would argue, pointing to the wording I’d used in my “Last Word” email (p. 71), and though I’d eventually convince them, they would, in the meantime — while getting convinced — be breaking a commandment, and I’d be abetting the breakage.

I closed my browser and started writing scripture.

There is love. There was always love, and there will be more love, forever. Were there ever to be less love, we would all be at war, and Your angels would learn suffering.

I stared at these lines for a couple of minutes, then noticed the clock read 10:07—eight minutes til bedtime — and saved the document, shut down my computer, washed up and brushed, and got into bed. I lay there fake-reading Dostoevsky’s Adolescent , which Flowers had given me a couple weeks before.

My parents came in at 10:21. My dad thumbed my bookspine and told me he liked Notes From Underground better. My mother said Dostoevsky was an antisemite, and they each kissed my forehead, then went to their bedroom.

Ten minutes later I retrieved ammo and a pennygun from my Relics & Armaments Lockbox. Then I cut the lights and pulled my hood on. I set my chair before the open window and waited on my knees to blind the vandal.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

6:00 a.m. — Interim

And there was night, and there was morning, Wednesday.

Wednesday didn’t take as long as Tuesday.

My mom came into my room at 6:00 and pressed her chin to my forehead to wake me. “I have already turned your alarm off,” she said. “Sleep late today, but not in this chair. Why are you in this chair? Why is this chair set in front of the window? Get in your bed.” She was holding my pennygun.

My neck pinched when I turned and I remembered the vandal, saw that I’d failed to be vigilant.

I’ve got ISS, I said.

“Do not snap at your mother, who will drive you to school. Get under the blanket and bless your aba when he comes.” She dangled my pennygun by the firing pouch. “I will hide it,” she said, “but where?”

My schoolbag.

She put it in my schoolbag. “Sleep now,” she said.

I shut my eyes and pushed my face in a pillow. Soon I heard metal scraping flint by the doorway, then an exhalation.

Into the pillow I said, Judges love your voice. Wilmette will cower.

My father said, “You’re a good son.” He stepped into the room to ash in the wastebasket. “No more fistfights.”

I said, I can’t sleep when you’re watching. Intimidate Wilmette. I love you.

“I love you, too.”

I slept four hours and woke up angrier than the last time.

My mom wasn’t in the kitchen or the office, so I ran down to the basement. I found her in desert fatigues, in the punchingbag circle. She’d set it up when I was still a baby. There were seven bags, all heavies, and the circle’s diameter was ten feet. The bags, five feet tall, hung by eighteen-inch chains from a nine-foot ceiling.

You forget about me? I said.

“That is a stupid question,” she said. “Would you like to exercise?”

I’m late, I said.

She set the heavies in motion and started weaving and jumping and throwing blows while I tried to stay angry, watching her. The object of the exercise was to land as many blows as possible without being struck by the bags as they swung. It was a much easier exercise for me than for her because I fought from a squatty, wrestley stance, and was closer to the ground to begin with — I could duck any or all of the bags at even the lowest points of their arcs without dropping to my knees, which meant I could pop back up and deliver a worthy blow without having to regain my feet. My mom was tall, though, and her stance was the gawkiest, most uncomfortable-looking fighting stance anyone has ever seen. That was because of her neck. It was long and vulnerable-looking and had no wrinkles or horizontal lines on it at all. If she turned her head, even a little bit, tendons appeared and the hollowed area within the clavicle got deeper. My father called her neck striking whenever he’d kiss it, and that was a little bit poetic of him: if you were her enemy, the likelihood was high that you would strike first at her neck.

My mom’s fighting style was built to increase that likelihood, to make her neck even more difficult to resist. She’d accentuate the illusion of her neck’s vulnerability in every possible way, not only by using the gawky fighting stance — tiptoed and stiff, her shoulders back so the blades were almost touching, she’d bend slightly forward at the waist and keep her hands open at her sides the way Christian saints do in paintings — but by tipping her chin a few degrees higher than normal and swallowing as often as possible. If she knew in advance that she’d come across an enemy, she’d pin her braids up in a pile to cut down on the thickening and foreshortening effects the ropy shadows would otherwise create. She wore lots of V-necks, too.

If the enemy didn’t know my mom, he couldn’t possibly suspect the vulnerability was a fakeout; encountering the long, seemingly unprotected neck, he was as close to dead as an insect giving witness to the bright white promise of warmth in a bug-zapper’s coil. He would attack my mom’s neck, and because she was expecting exactly that, she could and would lay into him with a kind of suddenness that, even if he remained conscious afterward, would leave him too stunned to get up. And then she would kill him. Unless he was me. I’d only ever gone at her neck once — she put me on my back so fast I thought the ceiling was the floor. And that was when I was six, when she’d still handicap for my height by sparring on her knees. She put me on my back that fast, and she couldn’t even use her legs.

She landed nine blows — one to each of five bags, and two to the remaining two — before one of the bags caught her, in mid-roundhouse, on the outer right thigh. If that bag were an actual enemy, the hit to the thigh might have sealed her doom, but at the same time, if that bag were an actual enemy, he would not have kept swinging back and forth while my mother slayed his buddies. He would have been lying dead at her feet from the toe to the windpipe she’d delivered thirty seconds earlier.

“I will make you breakfast,” she said, bobbing and weaving as the bags swung dumbly toward exhaustion — it would be minutes before they were still.

I’m late, I said.

She ducked and bobbed.

Mom! I said. I grabbed a bag and pulled it back.

“‘Ma-ahm,’” she said. She never liked the word mom . She thought it sounded like the name of a puppet. Mom the puppet. She slipped through the gap I’d made and tugged at my hair. “I did not know you were in a rush to sit in ISS,” she said.