The Instructions (117 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

used it. But let that not confuse any scholars. My tears, as usual, were well beside the point.

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RAILING

RAILING

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As we approached my stoop, the scrape of jostled pebbles sounded from the shadows beside the steps and there were whispers. We ascendend the stairway and I unlocked the door. Flowers went inside.

“You comin?” he said.

I’d already jumped the railing. A boy was crumpling beneath me.

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Flowers said my name.

The boy hit the ground on his stomach, me atop him, and I dug my knuckles between his shoulderblades and then knee-hopped on his kidneys and he was still. I began to turn him over—

I would deliver him his blindness with my bare hands—but I heard another vandal behind me.

I donkeykicked.

Though one of my heels connected, nothing buckled or squished

= I’d missed both his knees and sack. I leapt off the still kid to finish the kicked one. That was when Flowers flipped the stooplight on and someone said, “Please.” It was the second kid who said it.

The second kid was Emmanuel Liebman. He was sitting in the pebbles, leaning on my house, clutching his thigh. The still one was Shai Bar-Sholem, another boy who I’d been in Torah Study with at Schechter. Two more—Samuel Diamond and a Satmar I didn’t recognize—were helping Shai to his feet.

“Why—?” said Emmanuel.

Why?
I said.

I grabbed his face. I would dig my thumbs into the corners of his orbits and pull.
Why are you bombing my house?
I would pop his sockets.
Why did you lie to me?
And while his eyes swung from gory strands near his peyes—“Rabbi
,
” he was saying, “Rabbi!”—I would carve matching tunnels in his mallet-shaped brain.

I thought.

But all I was doing was pressing the heels of my palms against his jaws. And not even that hard.

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When Flowers pulled me into his bearhug, I barely struggled.

“Hell you doing?” he said.

“Unhand him, sir,” said Samuel, before us now.

“
Pardon
me?” Flowers said.

Samuel lifted 37 from the spot on the ground where Flowers had dropped it. He gripped it like a bat and stepped behind us.

“Please let go of the Rabbi, sir,” said Emmanuel, the reflection of the stooplight’s bulb a white square in the bell of his drawn pennygun. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

And of Shai Bar-Sholem, the Satmar asked, “This is the tzadik?”

“That’s him,” said Shai.

And now the Satmar drew his weapon and, training it on Flowers, said, “Am I holding it right, Rabbi Gurion?”

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“Had we known about your vandals,” said Emmanuel Liebman, once I’d finished apologizing and given him an icepack, “we would have hidden
behind
your house.” He sat on the floor in front of me, leaning against my dresser, the Satmar and Samuel Diamond flanking him. On the other side of the room, Shai Bar-Sholem stood stooped at my window and held his kidneys.

Flowers had left. Having spent no small amount of energy squinting to reconcile the bruised scholars’ testimonies of our friendship with the very battery that had bruised them—“He’s 1104

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our teacher, sir,” had said Shai; “We trust this bit of violence, if anything other than an unfortunate mishap, must certainly be some kind of valuable lesson,” Emmanuel had added—he eventually became placated enough (or maybe just weirded out enough) to suggest we all eat some dinner, then ordered us Pizza Pnina, which, though glat kosher, and therefore suitable for the scholars to ingest, wouldn’t deliver south of Devon. And then he left us there on the stoop, gladly it seemed—chuckling as soon as he flipped his phone closed, and continuing all the way to his car—to go pick it up, along with some paper plates.

“At the very least,” said Emmanuel, pressing down on the icepack, “we should have thought to come out from the shadows in a more timely fashion—after these horrible things that happened to your father, we should have guessed you’d be jumpy.”

“I can’t even imagine,” said the Satmar. “A broken neck is bad enough. To have it broken by trampling protesters, though—

much less Jewish—”

“Don’t remind him,” said Samuel Diamond.

The Satmar covered his mouth in shame.

“What’s
wrong
with you, Weiss?” snapped Shai Bar-Sholem.

He winced, clutched his kidneys.

I chinned the air from him to the heating pad I’d set on my bed = Lay down already.

He said, “Your sheets, Rabbi—I’m all muddy.”

I said, I made you all muddy.

“That’s true,” he said, and laid down.

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The Satmar’s mouth was still covered. He reminded me of Eliyahu a little.

I said to him, What is your first name, Weiss?

“Solly,” said Solly Weiss the Satmar, from behind his hand.

It’s okay, Solly Weiss, I said. My father’s neck’s not broken. You must have heard an early report—they inflate those for drama.

He might have torn some ligaments in his knee is all.

Is all
? I thought. Maybe, I thought.

“Baruch Hashem,” said the scholars.

But I wasn’t willing to join them. It was certainly good that my father hadn’t suffered greater damage, but that didn’t mean it was a blessing, or that I should thank Hashem. If anything that fails to be worse than it is is a blessing, then no one would say anything
but
baruch Hashem, for everything could be worse, and so everything would be a blessing. We would all be angels, one-legged and faceless, seething with endless, hopeless praise.

Desormie desormiated all the girls in spandex, but he never raped them; I should say baruch Hashem? Eliyahu’s family was murdered, but, baruch Hashem, they weren’t tortured first? The Shoah—as many Israelites had remained as were destroyed—

baruch Hashem?

That they—the three who I knew—had ever been my friends at all, though, let alone that they’d remained my friends after I’d attacked two of them: that was certainly a blessing, and for
that
blessing I might have thought to echo their baruch Hashem, but I was distracted by Solly, who continued to suffer from Shai’s 1106

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unnecessary, however well-intended, shaming; he was sniffling, and I saw his eyes had begun to well, golden swirls in the blue iris of the nearer one magnifying.

I removed the sap from my pocket and held it out to him, said, Look what I got today.

He took it with the hand that covered his mouth and soon the weapon cheered him. He thumbed the button and the rod snicked out, and while he tested the bendy action, his tears sucked back into his ducts.

I gave him a few seconds, then asked, Why haven’t I met you before?

“We just moved here a couple weeks ago,” he said, reaching over Emmanuel to give the sap to Samuel Diamond—Samuel had been making grabbing movements from the moment I’d brandished the thing. “We came from New York,” said Solly.

“Upstate. The Teitelbaum brothers are feuding with each other over who’s in charge.”

I heard about that, I said.

“It’s very ugly,” Solly said. “People throwing punches in shul.

Breaking windows. My father didn’t want to take sides, so we moved here. We’re not really Satmars anymore. Still, I like to wear the flathat. It’s a very nice hat. And not cheap.” He took the hat off and held the brim between his pointers, then did circles with his wrists that spun it. He set it on my head. “Very handsome,” he said. “Please accept it as a token of peace. I am sorry for what I said before. I want us to be friends.”

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I gave the hat back. I said, It
is
a nice hat, but for now I like my hood.

Solly seemed unconvinced.

If we weren’t friends already, I said, I’d never have shown you that weapon.

“We thought you would need friends to talk to is why we didn’t end up waiting for your response,” said Emmanuel, exhibiting no interest in the sap which Samuel now proferred.

Mallet-headed or not, Emmanuel Liebman was one of my favorite people.

My response? I said to him.

“Yes, to my— Oh, of course!” said Emmanuel. “Of course.

That’s
how come you still thought I might be the vandal, even after you saw my face. You didn’t read our email, did you? Of course you didn’t. You hadn’t even gotten home yet. Here’s what happened: That email you sent—Solly didn’t show it to us til just a couple hours ago and…”

Email? I thought. Oh, the email I sent them! “New Scripture”!

I thought. The two-hill field! I hadn’t thought once about any of that stuff since they’d stepped up to Flowers. I was far more surprised to remember than angry. I tried to get angry. I thought I should be angry and found I wasn’t angry. I seemed to have forgiven them without really trying—no, I didn’t
seem to
, I
had
forgiven them—another surprise, though it shouldn’t have been. Just twenty minutes earlier, in under ninety seconds, I’d gone from suddenly wanting to murder a former best friend to suddenly discovering I 1108

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didn’t have it in me to do so to suddenly seeing that this former best friend was not only not the enemy I’d thought he’d been, but a friend so good that, despite my having just attacked and injured him, he was willing to threaten a scary-sized man in order to protect me. To be surprised by anything at that point seemed dumb. So I made my voice angry, interrupting Emmanuel, who, while I’d spaced out on the above-described thoughts, had apparently not stopped speaking.

“…but the ambiguous nature of—” Emmanuel was saying.

And I said to him: Wait. Why didn’t you come to Aptakisic today?

“Gurion, I just said… I just finished explaining…”

I didn’t hear it.

“You didn’t… What? Okay,” said Emmanuel. “So okay,” he said. “So Solly didn’t show us the email you sent til just a couple hours ago, so—”

Solly? I said. What Solly? I said. What does he have to do with it? I sent it to all of you, every single scholar whose address I had.

“Yes,” said Emmanuel. “We saw the CC box. And that’s why as soon as Solly showed us the email, we forwarded it to every scholar therein, but that wasn’t til just a couple hours ago.”

“I would have myself forwarded it last night if I knew who you were,” said Solly, “but I didn’t know who you were til after school today, when I stopped by Emmanuel’s to borrow his graphing cal-culator and happened to mention the strange email I received. He gave me your
Ulpan
then, and explained—”

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Back up, I said. I don’t understand. I sent that email to
all
of you. I sent it to everyone at Northside and Schechter—and the Schechter list, at least, was totally updated from Rabbi Salt.

“Yes, Rabbi,” said Shai, “but email from your Gurionforever address is blocked by our parents, ever since the meeting.”

The meeting? I said.

“You don’t know about the meeting?” said Shai.

“I told you he didn’t know about the meeting,” Samuel said.

“If he knew about the meeting, why would he have sent the email from Gurionforever?” To me, he said, “They had this meeting. At the J. Back in June. It wasn’t
about
blocking your email address, Rabbi—it was a planning session to do a fundraiser for Sudanese refugees. But. The meeting was right after everyone saw that email from the Northside Headmaster.”

“And right after you sent that ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’

one,”said Shai.

My parents never told me, I said.

“With all due respect, Rabbi, our parents don’t speak to yours, so…”