The Instructions (37 page)

Gurion said, “but Simon didn’t see. So I got under the table to get the pencil, to show him that I knocked it down there. But then when I banged my head getting it, that was an accident, and I got very angry because I don’t like it when my head is touched, and so when I came up from under the table, I was thinking: Simon made me bang my head. That is why I spun and knocked the chalk-trough off the blackboard—because I wanted to jump across the table and knock Simon’s face off his head, but at the same time I didn’t want to. And 337

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it was good that I didn’t go after Simon, but still, I’m sorry I wrecked your blackboard.”)

And furthermore, as you might or might not have noticed by way of his permanent record, Gurion did not, after leaving Schechter, engage in any violence at Northside Hebrew Day School. He is not some loose canon. He wrote those instructions after having witnessed an act of antisemitic violence outside of the Fairfield Street Synagogue, where he used to attend services (without his parents, by the way—

their home is secular). If you followed the newspapers last Spring, then what you read was that a group of local Muslim teenagers, claiming to have been inspired by the current Intifada, threw stones at a group of Hasidic congregants on a Saturday and that no one was critically injured. What you did not read was that those congregants who did not duck back inside the synagogue for cover froze where they stood, and that the rabbi, a good man (I know him a little), came forward, apparently in an effort to reason with the stone-throwers, and managed to utter one word, “Please,” before receiving for his trouble a block of jagged concrete in his mouth.

Gurion was one of those who had frozen, and he told me that by the time it occurred to him to chase the fleeing boys, they were already too far ahead of him; that he ran after them fruitlessly, catching sight of them through gaps in backyard fences, turning numerous corners, and ducking into various alleys and gangways, until he became sick from exertion, and that it was not until he stopped running that he realized that no one was behind him, that he was the only one who had tried to catch them. This upset Gurion greatly, and when he returned to the synagogue, he was reprimanded by the rebbetsen for having endangered himself. He told me that, as 338

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he received his reprimand, a group of boys gathered behind the rebbetsen and that what he saw on their faces was not the remnant of fear and shock that he would have expected, but rather regret, and that he knew that what they regretted was that they had not helped him chase down the stone-throwers. And he also told me that the rebbetsen was right—that he
had
endangered himself—

and that he should not have endangered himself. He told me that what he should have done was picked up a brick of his own, “or something with better range,” he said, and convinced the others to do the same, and to follow him. Unreasonable? Maybe. Maybe not.

Not so very unreasonable, in any case. As Gurion put it: “We’re taught not to bow down before idols or men.
You
teach us that.

Torah
teaches that. We’re taught that it’s better to
die
than to bow, but isn’t it better yet to do neither? When someone comes at you and says, ‘Bow or die,’ isn’t it better to lay him out? And I know what you’ll say, Rabbi Salt, I know: You’ll say there’s a difference between ducking a blow and bowing down, that there’s no sin at all in ducking a blow. But that’s only true to a certain extent. To duck a direct blow is only to duck—I’ll give you that—but to duck a blow that has yet to be launched, let alone a blow that only might be coming, which is to say nothing of ducking in hopes of averting a blow’s being launched to begin with—that, Rabbi Salt, is to bow, is it not? It is. Of course. That’s exactly what it is. And I say this: It’s better to shoot. It’s better to shoot til you no longer have to, to shoot til those people who’d have you bow down duck to avert the launch of
your
blows.”

Once the rebbetsen had finished admonishing Gurion, the boys who had gathered behind her walked him home and, at his front 339

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stoop, he told them that if they were to return the following Saturday evening, after shul, he would teach them how to avoid losing face, how to live without bowing to idols or men. And he invented that weapon and wrote those instructions and he sent to those he’d invited an e-mail containing a list of supplies they should bring to his home, and the boys came to his home as originally planned, and the rest you know about. You can see, if you read
Ulpan
, that Gurion never instructed, or even suggested, that the weapons be used to attack other students, much less fellow Jewish students.

Now, if you put a weapon in the hands of a child, of course an accident is bound to happen. And of course Gurion knew this as well as any adult. Nonetheless, he is a boy. Despite his talents, a boy. And a boy is more idealistic than a man, and high ideals in the hands of children can be as dangerous as weapons. He thought he was in the right, and because he thought he was in the right, he thought there would be an exception. That’s that.

As for what happened at the Martin Luther King Middle School, it seems, now, to have been inevitable. Gurion, owing to that highly alienating and pejorative e-mail from Rabbi Kalisch, was made to see a social worker, who promptly diagnosed him with all sorts of nonsense disorders and then placed him in a lockdown program for disturbed children not dissimilar to this CAGE

program you described to me outside the shul on Saturday. On his fourth day there, being both new and the youngest, Gurion was attacked at recess by one of the boys from this program. He fist-fought the boy, apparently injured him badly, and then a number of the boy’s friends crept forth, ready to avenge the boy, and what did Gurion do? He did what you would have done and what I 340

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would have done, if we were not the types to run away—he took hold of a cinderblock. The friends stood their ground, but stayed their attack, and soon a recess supervisor had arrived on the scene, and saw Gurion holding the cinderblock, and saw the bleeding child at his feet. The friends claimed that Gurion had used the cinderblock to beat the boy, the boy confirmed the lie, and, owing to Rabbi Kalisch’s e-mail (which I really do believe should be expunged from Gurion’s record), this claim seemed more than plausible to the principal, and Gurion was expelled.

These days he’s not so fond of school. That is true. But it’s on you to fix that, Leonard. It’s your turn. I would remind you, sym-pathetically, that your very own sons came to Solomon Schechter because you felt—and correctly so—that the mental health people at their public school had wrongly damned them to what you yourself called “the ever-growing ghettos of special education.” I would remind you that your son, Ben, may he rest in peace, was a school-friend of Gurion’s, despite the gap in their ages, and that Gurion attended his shiva, and that Gurion wept at his burial.

Please forgive my tone if it is too strong. I only hope, in reminding you of these things, that you will reconsider your stance, and see your way to
not
placing Gurion in your CAGE program; that you will do everything in your power to be good to him, to understand that he is coming to you damaged but that the damage is not irreparable, that our prophets are always treated like criminals, and that if you treat Gurion like a mensch, he will act like one. And if it is, for some reason, impossible for you to keep my student out of your cage, maybe there’s a compromise—maybe a trial period, a couple of weeks to observe him. But I must say that 341

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I have a bad feeling about even that. For a ten-year-old, especially one who is so readily fascinated with the world as Gurion, a day is as rich and significant as a history of everything. A day can change everything.

A blessing on you and your family.

Your Friend,

Avel

P.S. Gurion’s new legal residence—on Lincoln Road between Holmes Parkway and Skinner Drive—is a motel (The Boarder, I think it’s called, or maybe The Border) with a rather large driveway. Gurion has been instructed to wait on the corner of Lincoln and Holmes for the bus, but his mother would prefer the bus to pick him up in this large driveway, which one can see from inside the motel office, where it is warm and dry, and where, for that very reason, the motel owner has given Gurion advance permission to wait. I told her I was certain you could speak to the driver or dispatcher and get them to accommodate her preference. If I was being presumptuous, please let me know, and please accept my apology in advance. If I was not being presumptuous, I thank you in advance, and if I was maybe being a little presumptuous, but you’ll nonetheless accommodate Mrs. Maccabee’s request, I thank you in advance, apologize in advance, and then thank you again for working with me here, despite my presumptuousness. In advance.

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Nakamook shoved through half the exit bottleneck to bookrocket Ronrico. I caught up as he lowered his fist.

I said, Benji.

Nakamook launched it.

The books popped from Ronrico’s grip and scattered.

“Jesus!” Ronrico said.

“Just shut the fuck up,” said Nakamook.

Botha, at the door, twenty kids plus two teachers–deep, shouted out “Hey!” except he didn’t know to who. He couldn’t see.

Ronrico was trying to back away from Benji, but Botha got the door open and the crowd was pushing forward, up to the gate, so Ronrico bounced off us. He said to Nakamook, “We’re all on the side—”

Nakamook plugged his hand in, beneath Ronrico’s chin, and lifted. He lifted swiftly til his mantis-arm was straight, and then, in smaller increments, at less rapid intervals, he lifted higher and higher from the shoulder. This action was called the Impossible because no one else at school could perform it. Also that’s how it looked: impossible. Nakamook often performed the action on people who, unlike Ronrico, were taller than him, and to keep his balance he had to stand bowlegged, which, to the eyes of observ-ers, always made him look shorter. I’d never been Impossibled before, but I didn’t think it would be that hard to disengage.

You’d just have to kick him a good one in the torso, or dig your thumbs deep into the soft part of his wrist til the tendons gave. It must have been that the suddenness of the action erased your sense 343

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of options though: no one had ever gotten out of a Nakamookian Impossible before Nakamook had let him, and many even seemed to cooperate with the action, bending their knees in midair the way a baby does when you lift it by the armpits.

The Janitor stepped out of the bottleneck as soon as Ronrico’s feet left the ground. Benji hammered down on his skull with his free hand and the Janitor said, “Ow. Ow. Ow.” He half-sat against the crowd, rubbing a sleeved forearm briskly through his hair, his dazed face slack.

Thirteen inches above Benji’s head, the bugged-out eyeballs of Asparagus revolved at me. He wrinkled between his pulsing temples = “Why?”

Nakamook didn’t miss it. “Don’t act ignorant,” he said to Ronrico, shaking him a little.

I set my hand on Benji’s elbow and waited for him to feel it.

When he felt it, he one-shoulder-shrugged at me = “Fine.” To Ronrico, he said, “Do not try to be
us,” then lowered him slow and let go of his throat.

Ronrico crouched down to gather his books. The Janitor helped him. Botha unlocked the gate. The crush of the bottleneck got heavy, then ended.

I picked a rocketed book up and gave it to Ronrico. I said, This won’t happen again.

Ronrico looked at his feet.

“The fuck!?” Nakamook said to the air next to my face. Then the Flunky walked past us. “Foog,” Benji told him.

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The Flunky stalled for a second, walked on.

Benji followed him past Botha, into C-Hall. I followed Benji.

C-Hall, lockerless, was always empty after school except for Cage students, who always got out of class last because of the gate.

I told Benji to hold on.

He slowed his pace. “You’re friends with the Flunky now, too?”

he said.

He’s not my enemy.

Nakamook stopped walking. He said, “None of these guys are your friends. They’re just scared of you.”

So what? I said.

“Whenever I’m scared? I wait for a chance to damage who’s scaring me, and then I do that. Isn’t that what you do?”

I don’t get scared of people.

Nakamook said, “Well that’s what everyone else does.”

I said to him, Even if you’re right, I still don’t lose anything, having them on my side.

He said, “Listen. When someone’s scared of me, I know they’ll try to damage me the second they have the chance, and that makes me scared of them. And so I think: I better damage them first, while I have the chance—You should be scared of these people
because
they fear you, Gurion. You should damage them first. You should damage them again and again. You should damage them until they stop being scared of you. Until your dangerousness is undeniable and you’re like highway traffic or the edge of a cliff—something they wouldn’t even
consider
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crossing.
Then
you make friends. It’s the only way.”

I said, You and I never damaged each other.

He said, “We weren’t ever scared of each other, but look, forget it—my mood just switched. So did yours.”

I touched my face. My face was smiling. We stood at the C-Hall/

Main Hall junction. People shouting and shoving and flirting with each other. At the other end, the front doors opened and shut and the hallway had wind. I could look in any direction I wanted.

Benji said, “I feel like a millionaire on the back of an armored jet-ski my samurai girlfriend who loves me is charging at a cartel speedboat to win a game of chicken. Isn’t this the day’s best part? You don’t even have to remember to enjoy it. It enjoys you into itself.”