The Instructions (42 page)

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 383

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like the iniquity of idolatry.

Adonai had twice shouted No! at me and I had twice ignored it.

I was dismissed.

In the outer-office, Miss Pinge wrote me a hall-pass, my favorite thing to have at school. I went straight to detention.

It was 3:48 and I was safe, a miserable sinner. Then things got ironic.

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I wasn’t allowed in detention: I had entered through the southern doorway of the cafeteria, but before I’d even gotten past the first bathroom, Miss Gleem rushed over, saying, “Go to the library.”

Why? I said.

Miss Gleem pressed a finger against her glossed lips and shooed me back into Main Hall. I spotted June at the table by the stage on the eastern side. She had her back to me. My sadness over having hurt Brodsky made me slow, so instead of shouting June’s name across the room, I only thought about shouting June’s name across the room, and by the time I decided I should actually do it, Miss Gleem had gently pushed me through the doorway.

“I’m so sorry,” Miss Gleem said. She meant about the push, but Miss Gleem was always exaggerating her emotions. Even if she was sorry, there’s no way she was
so
sorry. The push was fine with me, anyway. Miss Gleem was a big-time toucher, but it wasn’t perved. It 384

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was affectionate. In her head, I’m sure she called the push “encouragement.” She was the art teacher. She monitored detention on Tuesdays and Wednesdays against her will. She told me that once.

I liked her. She wore fake tortoiseshell combs in her fuzzy hair, like the sweeter, less pretty sister of a bony princess whose combs are made of gold. It wasn’t just me who liked her, either. She was mostly pinged-out and everyone liked her, and if I’d met Miss Gleem first I’d have probably called Miss Pinge gleemed-out.

She bent her knees and leaned toward me and I could see the tops of her tits in her shirt. Her tits were really white and pushed together. I thought about how if I put a watercolor brush on her tits sideways, then while the brush rolled forward it would trail a fleeting, tubular dent in the skin behind it. By the time the brush fell on the ground there’d be goosebumps on her tits and maybe even her throat because the rolling watercolor brush would feel like how it feels when you run a hangnail along the paler side of your arm. I don’t know why I thought of that. What her tits mostly did was make me want to press the side of my face against their top parts while I was kneeling in between her legs and she was sitting in a rocking chair.

I would reach up with my hands to put them on her ears and in her hair and then go to sleep on my knees, just like that. But then I thought about how I would rather put the side of my face on June’s tits and reach up with my hands and fall asleep. But June didn’t really have tits, so then I thought it would be better to put the side of my face on June’s stomach while we were 385

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laying down in the shape of the letter T, and my arms would be long like Nakamook’s, and only one of my hands would be in her hair and the other hand would be holding her ankle, and I would fall asleep hearing the sounds inside her stomach, and the sounds would be humming sounds, and she would have one of her hands on my head, too, but none of that could happen, not any time soon, not with me in the hall and her in the cafeteria, a sound-killing wall of cinderblocks between us.

“You’re so upset,” Miss Gleem said. “Why are you so upset?”

I said to her, I have to go in. I have detention.

She said, “We have too many students in here. We tried to seat everyone, but the chatter was too much for Mr. Klapper to handle, so he took ten of you folks to the library, and I’m sorry, but that’s where you’ve gotta go now.”

Again with the sorry.

Mr. Klapper taught Social Studies. I’d heard that he was very old. He was one of the only teachers at Aptakisic who didn’t have to teach in the Cage once a week. I never met him.

I said, But I’m here already.

She said, “I’d love to have you in detention with me, Gurion, except I don’t have your assignment form—Mr. Klapper took it.”

I said, I know the assignment by heart. I said, I’ll just write it out on looseleaf.

She said, “They make a big deal out of the forms. Looseleaf won’t cut it.”

I said, Miss Gleem! I said, No one even reads those things.

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She said, “Who told you that?”

I said, It’s just I know some people fill the page up with swear words and no one gets in trouble for it.

She said, “I don’t think that’s true.
I’ve
never seen an assignment like that. And I read them all when I’m the monitor. It’s part of the STEP System. After we read them, we pass them on to Bonnie Wilkes and Sandy Billings and they read them. Sometimes Mr.

Brodsky does, too. So a lot of people read them. And I’ve always liked yours, actually—they’re so angry, but in a very literary and deep way, and though it’s clear to me that you think verbally rather than visually, that’s nothing to be ashamed of, Gurion.”

I said, I’m not ashamed.

She said, “But why should you be?”

I said, I shouldn’t.

She said, “I was just trying to compliment your writing.”

Thank you, I said.

She said, “Now go get a hall-pass from the Office before you go to the library—Mr. Klapper’s a stickler.”

I already had a hall pass. I had one from Miss Pinge, and one with a poem on it, and then a whole pad of them with no table to throw it on and make my coaster joke.

I headed slowly toward the Office, but once Gleem was back inside, I spun and ducked into the cafeteria’s northern doorway.

That doorway was deep, but doorless. I leaned back against its sidewall and slid down onto the floor. I could see the back of June. She was sitting on her knees on the bench of the table, writ-387

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ing her detention assignment, crouched over the page with her shoulders up to her ears like she was cold.

I tried to move heat around. I thought of blankets, a pile of them. She didn’t look any less cold. I thought of the blankets catching fire, and a high-powered fan built into my chest. It didn’t work. I failed. No. I didn’t
fail
. I never had a chance. I didn’t fail at anything. A high-powered fan? Blankets catching fire? A high-powered fan in my chest and burning blankets? What the fuck was wrong with me? I was thinking like a whiny escapist specialkid, a nice little Jewish boy who’d tell Mr. Brodsky, “I think you’re really bullying me,” and actually mean it. Gee aw gee. Such heartbreaking heartbreak. So scared inside, so lonely and helpless, just wants to be accepted. Aw gee aw gee aw
fuck
you, Gurion. Kill the limp magic thinking, and act like a mensch. Figure out how you hurt him, see the sin for what it was. And repent. And atone.

I reviewed the encounter, beat by beat:

1. Brodsky starts flipping out, talking about math.

2. I don’t back down.

3. He tells me I won’t be able to see June until I tell him who broke the scoreboard.

4. I see that he doesn’t want to be flipping out.

5. I get an idea.

6. Adonai shouts No! at me about my idea.

7. I pretend I’m very scared by pretending to wipe pretend tears from my eyes that I’m pretending inside my 388

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pretend-game are actually an itch that I’m pretending inside my pretend-game to scratch with my wrist and then I say to Brodsky, I think you’re really bullying me.

8. He acts like someone died, then apologizes and lets me leave.

I thought: But his son died and that’s the worst person who can die and someone saying he thinks you’re a bully…it’s nothing compared to your son dying, especially when it’s just some boy who’s saying it, some boy who, when you look at him there, in front of you, the first thing you do is you wish it was him who’d been killed instead of Ben.

Then I thought: Oh no, because—

I thought: Another way to say that Brodsky wished the boy in front of him had been killed instead of his son was: Brodsky wished the boy in front of him were his son.

And I had been the boy in front of him.

And he would not have treated his son the way he’d been treating me. Ben, though a hacker of email accounts, was no stone-waller of principals. He did not drive his father crazy.

I’d pretended, to a good father, that I, the person he wished was his kind, dead son, was as afraid of him as his kind, dead son would have been if that son had just seen his father act the way Brodsky had acted.

And Brodsky became ashamed, and there was nothing pretend about it.

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And now I wasn’t even looking at June’s face from across a table, but at her back through a doorway = I had shamed Brodsky needlessly.

I did math:

Of the forty-one students in detention, eleven of them, not including me, were there as a result of my influence, whether direct or indirect. And then eleven students, including me, were not allowed in the cafeteria. Why two elevens? Why not eleven of forty-one and then eight or nine of forty-one? I was the last one to arrive, so if Hashem merely wanted to keep me from June, it wouldn’t even matter if it had been one of forty-one and Klapper had left the cafeteria with no kids and one blank detention form—

I’d have still been the one of the forty-one, the one who’d have gotten sent to the library to fill that one assignment out: I’d have still been barred from the cafeteria, still would have been sitting in that doorway, Juneless, punished, and that would have been suitably ironic and terrible. Being barred from the cafeteria would have caused me to suffer, regardless of how many others were barred.

But it was not one of forty-one, or eight or nine. It was eleven influenced and so eleven removed, and you only find Justice that symmetrical in scripture, and only when there is a message attached.

The elevens were a message.

And because Hashem knew I didn’t need reminders that He ran things, Him saying to me, “I run things,” could not have been 390

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the message. The message of the elevens was that He didn’t just want me to suffer, and He didn’t just want me to know that I had made Him make me suffer: Hashem wanted me to suffer from the knowledge that when I had made Him make me suffer—

that when I had disobeyed his No! and made Brodsky suffer—

I had made Him suffer, too, Hashem. I had made Hashem suffer.

So I dropped my head between my knees and suffered all of it.

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Soon, setbuilders sent sawings and bangs through the fake-velvet stage-curtain, which hung slanted in the middle where whoever shut it caught the tassels at the bottom in a footlight, and I lifted my head. Every few seconds, a few hammers struck their targets at the same time and the noise boomed. When that happened, June’s back tensed and she’d cringe her neck.

After the fifth or sixth boom, she revolved her head, annoyed, and I saw her face. I didn’t think she saw me. I would not have let her see me right then—a sufferer, a sinner, unable to warm her—

and I thought the combination of doorway-shadow and jamb blotted me out of her line of sight, but a couple booms later, she revolved a second time and was smiling. I didn’t smile back. I couldn’t. I was trying to suffer and she was such a good smiler and it stunned me.

Then she was raising her hand. Miss Gleem walked over.

June said to her, quietly, “I need to get out of here for a minute.”

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Miss Gleem said, “What do you mean, Juney?”

June said, “It’s important.”

Miss Gleem whispered a question to her.

June made a single laughing noise:
Tss
. She said, “It’s not that.”

“Well…” Miss Gleem said. You could tell she wanted to let June leave.

June said, “It’s fine, Miss Gleem, I promise—and did I tell you about the idea I had for the sculpture competition?”

Miss Gleem lit up. “I thought you wouldn’t enter.”

June said, “I wasn’t going to, but then yesterday, I found this website with paintings by Jean Dubuffet, and also some Alberto Giacometti sculptures, and I had this idea about shadows and a flattened animal made of clay, glazed ultra-brightly—not like a cartoon roadkill or anything, but a very shiny and complicated mammal that won’t look right in two dimensions. Like say it’s a rhinocerous, but smashed down flat like a stingray, so how could she walk? is what you’ll ask yourself. How can the many chambers of her stomach perform the exertions required to digest exotic grasses? is the feeling I hope to evoke. And then an outline. A thick black one bordering the entire rhinoceros on both sides. Do you see what I mean about the outline? Because an outline is what you do before you learn shadows, right? And I’ll set the sculpture on its side, thin-way-down, on a set of casters, the super-cheap kind that won’t go in carpet, and then, attached to the back part of the back caster wheel will be a rigid length of wire that’ll be bent so that I can hang a sun-colored styrofoam lightbulb from the end of it, like 392