The Instructions (119 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

ready to wait for however long was necessary for you to respond.

But no sooner had I hit the send button than, as I mentioned earlier, we saw the news about your father on television, at which point we decided, ‘You know what? Enough of this. Whatever else he may be, Gurion is an Israelite and a friend of ours, and if it is a transgression to comfort our Israelite friend in the wake of a personal tragedy, if to do so is to dishonor our parents, then so be it. Let us transgress. Let us bring them shame and wrath and endless shame.’ And then we were here, waiting in the shadows so as not to be detected by any passersby who might fink to our parents, and then you were pummeling Shai’s internal organs, and then you were kicking me in the legs, and now we’re in your bedroom, asking: Was the invitation a one-time offer? Will you deliver us the new scripture despite our failure to appear at the appointed time? Do you sanction this visit we’ve made to your house? If so, does that mean you will lead us? And lastly, who is she, this girl you love?”

Suddenly, my screen became a field of backlit blackness, and then it blipped and I was in. I had 248 new messages, every one of them titled “RE: FWD: NEW SCRIPTURE.”

The thumbs in the corner continued to twiddle.

Her name’s Eliza June Watermark, I said to the scholars.

And all of them leaned in, and none of them looked at me funny.

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Flowers came back with the pizza in the middle of the story, so I told the rest of it in the kitchen, the rapt scholars pointing at slices and nodding at liter bottles, flicking their eyes in the direction of napkins and chinning at packets of parmesan and pepper flakes. They didn’t squint once—not when I told them I never loved Esther, or even when I described the conversion on the stage. With the exception of a couple whispered mazel tovs, no voice but my own was audible til I finished.

Then Emmanuel suggested a metaphorical kinship between June’s Gurion-independent invention of the pennygun and the desert monotheism Zipporah had practiced before she met Moses which was, itself, Emmanuel insisted, certainly akin to the righteousness of the matriarchs in the days before they met and wed the patriarchs.

Samuel wanted to know when they’d receive the new scripture.

Solly wondered whether June had friends, or maybe sisters.

Shai asked what they should tell the other scholars about visiting me after Havdallah, and then Samuel asked Shai how he could fail to notice I’d risen from my chair and shown them my back.

Samuel had me wrong, though. Their reaction to the story had been perfect, the reaction I’d’ve wanted most from anyone, and it made me feel artful—in describing the moments leading up to the conversion, I’d skipped all mention of mine and June’s birthmarks. So the reason I’d risen was to go to the sink, to scrub the makeup from my thumbs and reveal the yuds, not doubting 1120

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for a second that my mom would understand. These were the last four brothers in the world who’d trample me.

Yet as they rose from their own chairs, apologizing for outstaying their welcome, expressing their gratitude for my “patience and hospitality in the midst of upsetting events” (Emmanuel), assuring me and each other that I’d answered enough of their questions for one day, “the longest day I’ve ever heard of outside Irish literature” (Samuel), I saw they were right—not right that I felt stretched or put out by their visit, but right that I’d already said enough.

One time, at the Frontier, Flowers and I watched this show about pets where a dog did the moonwalk when its owner held its elbows. It was so weird and funny it got all over the web.

Within a couple days, someone CGI’d the owner out and gave the dog a hat it doffed with a diamond-studded paw. We agreed the doctored video wasn’t as funny as the original—it wasn’t really funny at all—except I didn’t get why til Flowers explained it. He said, “Gild the lily, the stem collapse.”

It was the right explanation. And if faith and trust worked anything like comedy, which I suspected they did—I suspected most good things did—then the reason I wanted to show the scholars the yuds could just as easily be a reason not to show them the yuds. That is: They already believed June was an Israelite, and they believed it because I told them she was. So while the revelation of my birthmarks, which aspired to hard evidence, might strengthen that belief, it might also insult their intelligence, 1121

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damage their faith, and thereby endanger (structurally and otherwise) the integrity of the stem from which their trust blossomed.

I followed them out of the kitchen without a word or a gesture.

It is true they were mistaken about outstaying their welcome—

their visit made me feel much better, kept me from staring into my head at my falling father’s image, or at least from
ceaselessly
doing so—but it was, nonetheless, still time for them to go, time now to stare at that image excessively, to work myself up to inter-rogate my dad. I was angry at him, but not angry enough, and it was already 8:00, he’d have to come home soon. Plus, the later the scholars stayed, the more likely it got that
they’d
be interrogated. I knew they’d never fink on me or each other, but silence could get them grounded too, yet if I told them that, they’d only say grounding was a small price to pay, then attempt to stick around to prove that they meant it. Better if they thought they’d overstayed their welcome.

I have to make some decisions, I told them, but I’ll send word before Shabbos on what’s to come. Tell everyone we know to lay low til then.

All of them but Emmanuel were bundled. He’d gotten everything on except for his boots, then sat on the floor to attempt doomed contortions. Unable to reach past his knees, he rose and shed his entire wooly bulk—overcoat, pullover, hat, scarf, and gloves—then sat back down and pulled on the boots, the laces of which kept slipping from his fingers. The others, in the meantime, overheated. Shifting their weight from foot to foot, they 1122

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tucked their toplips and extended their bottom ones to aim huffy air at their darkening foreheads.

“Go ahead,” Emmanuel told them.

“We’re fine,” said Samuel. “Just hurry.”

“No, really,” said Emmanuel, “I have to stop at the pharmacy anyway.”

“For what?” Shai said.

“You don’t ask for what when it’s the pharmacy,” said Samuel.

“Why not?” said Shai.

“Because maybe he’s got a fungus or the runs,” offered Solly.

“Do you have a fungus or the runs?” said Shai to Emmanuel.

“You don’t ask that, Shai,” said Samuel.

“I bet Solly’s right, though. Look how silent Emmanuel’s being suddenly. He’s almost as silent as Solly,” said Shai. “We’ve come to expect that from Solly, silence, but silence we don’t readily associate with Emmanuel. It might be he’s been suffering all along. Suffering in silence. An uncharacteristic silence indicative of a medical unpleasantness. We’re all among friends, though, and what’s a fungus among friends? Who hasn’t had the runs? I’ve had the runs, we’ve all had the runs. You know what it is that my dad calls the runs? It’s the trots, what he calls them.

My dad calls the runs the trots.”

“My dad calls you ‘that shvontz with the gums,’ so let’s go already,” said Samuel.

“What’s wrong with my gums?”

“Nothing, you shvontz.”

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“Then why’s your dad specify the gums if it’s nothing?”

“
Specify
. He doesn’t even know who you are.”

“But I see him all the time.”

“You’re not memorable, Shai.”

“What’s wrong with my gums?”

“I’m telling you I made it up.”

“Why, though? Why’d you say ‘with the gums’?”

“It was the first thing that came to mind.”

“But
why
was it the first thing that came to mind?”

“Probably I was looking at your gums.”

“What’s wrong with my gums, you look at them?”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe
you’re
crazy, Samuel. Did you ever think of that? Maybe you can’t stop looking at my gums.”

“Now that you mention it, my eyes
are
drawn to them,” said Samuel. “What is it about them, I wonder, that draws my eyes?”

“Stop messing with me.”

“No,” said Samuel. “Before, I was messing with you. Now I’m thinking: you got a lot of gums. They’re…”

“What? No. You’re messing with me. No. What? They’re what?”

“Meaty.”

“Meaty?”

“You got a lot of gums, Shai.”

Shai looked to Solly. Solly looked away.

“What?” Shai said. “They’re meaty?”

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I missed you guys, I said.

“We missed you, too,” said Shai.

“You know, you’re thick sometimes,” said Samuel. “The Rabbi already knows you missed him. That was his polite way of saying,

‘Go home.’”

“Well, I did miss him, though,” said Shai.

Emmanuel had yet to tie his second boot, and I saw that he was trying to linger. Samuel now saw too and, saying goodbye, he shouldered the others outside.

I pressed my spine against the doorframe, bracing to hear June’s conversion get questioned. Emmanuel put his hat on, took it off, stared at it. Maybe I’d overestimated my effect—my lily a sun-flower, or even just a dandelion. He put the hat on again. Then he took it off again.

Nu? I said to him.

“This hiding,” he said. “That we’re supposed to ‘lay low.’ How you told us to tell the other scholars to ‘lay low’—it troubles me.”

I dropped to the floor beside him, pretended to give him a deadarm.

“What?” he said.

I thought you were gonna say something else, I said.

“Something having to do with June and your being in love with her and her so-called conversion, you thought.”

Yeah, I said.

“I might have. I might have unpacked the logics of love and 1125

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Israelite conversion and then discussed your theory of potential messiahs as it relates to those logics. I might have said something like,

‘Gurion, if love is forever, and therefore what it means to be in love is that you stay in love forever, then one can never truly know if he is in love until the moment he dies. And yet you say you are in love with June.’ That might have been premise one. If I wanted to introduce premise two, I might have gone on to say, ‘Since all it means to be an Israelite is you have the soul of an Israelite, and the soul is eternal, and the soul from its creation is immutably Israelite or non-, then no one can truly convert; they have or haven’t been an Israelite all along, and therefore conversion ceremonies are only ceremoni-ous. At best such ceremonies acknowledge a truth that requires no acknowledgment to be true—
This Israelite is an Israelite
—and at worst these ceremonies are but lying declarations—
This non-Israelite is an Israelite
. So if June is an Israelite, she has always been an Israelite, whether you or I or she believed it to be so, whether you or I or she
currently
believe it. And no matter what we say about it, either. Yet about it, you say, “June is an Israelite.” And in response, we say, “Amen.” And all of it is heartfelt.’

“Then,” he said, “if after presenting these premises, I felt you were still listening to me, I might have offered some preparatory commentary before arriving at the heart of the matter, like: ‘To fall in love, two people must meet somehow—fatefully, accidentally, or on purpose; doesn’t matter here—they must meet by way of their eyes, their ears, their scent, whatever. Maybe they have to do other things to fall in love, too—speak endearments, 1126

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write letters, kiss, who knows?—but we are certain that before they fall in love, some type of observable phenomenon that qualifies as ‘meeting’
must take place
. We know for a fact that no two people have ever fallen in love with each other without having met. To fall in love is to
become
in love. We all believe that is true. It is not controversial. Yet that there’s nothing anyone can do to become an Israelite—that’s not controversial either. As I already said, you are or you aren’t one, and we all believe
that
is true.’

“And after saying all that,” said Emmanuel, “I might have attempted to bring it all home like this: ‘So despite both truths, by nature, being immutable—once in love, forever in love; once an Israelite, always an Israelite—one truth is set in motion, at least partly, by human beings, and the other is set in motion solely by Adonai. And that is complicated enough. But now we move on to your theory of potential messiahs, which concerns itself with both types of immutable truth at once: Adonai creates a potential messiah, one per generation, and then that potential messiah becomes the actual messiah when human beings do or fail to do something or some set of things—who knows what exactly?—to set his potential in motion. So while the potential of a potential messiah is set in motion solely by Adonai, the actualization of that potential will be set in motion, at least partly, by human beings. Agreed?’—”

Agreed, I said.

“I was only asking the hypothetical Gurion, to whom I might 1127

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have said all of this, but I’m glad you agree. The hypothetical one would have agreed as well. He would have agreed exactly as you have, and I would have gone on to say, ‘According to you, Gurion, we should not say that anyone is the messiah until he has had “victory undeniable”; until perfect justice is visited upon the world; until calling the messiah “messiah” is, for all intents and purposes, redundant. And that seems cautious, safe.

And that is the appeal of your approach, for false messiahs haunt our history. We have followed them, and suffered greatly for it.