The Instructions (158 page)

That’s why Benji said he wished we could run, there in Nurse Clyde’s. Because none of that could ever happen again. Even if Aptakisic stayed open, we’d be expelled, sent to different schools, and nothing would be able to convince my parents that Benji was okay to hang out with after that. That’s what he was saying.

I told him that your plan might work, though. To be clear: I was sure that your plan would work. I completely believed in you, but I told Benji “might” instead of “would” because I didn’t want to argue; I felt too good. I said, “We’ll all just say that Gurion did it, and Gurion will say that Gurion did it, and we’ll all get a pass.”

“The ex-Shovers’ll ruin it,” Benji said.

“How?” I said.

“Like snakes,” said Benji.

“How like snakes?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“So how can you be sure?”

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“They’re snakes,” he said, “and they’re following a snake. Can you hand me that postcard?”

I handed him the postcard. “They’re following Gurion.”

“No,” Benji said, cutting lines from the pile. “They’re just scared of Gurion. The second he can’t hurt them, they’ll fuck him over.

Berman’ll find a way.”

“It’s better for them to do what Gurion says.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I doubt they’ll see that—

Dollar?” he said. I gave him the dollar. His eyes were so shiny.

“They’re too fucking stupid. It doesn’t matter anyway.” He snorted a line. “I don’t give a fuck anyway. Not about them. Not about Gurion. I’m not following him anywhere. I haven’t been following him. You want one?… You sure?” He snorted another. “Cause the thing is he
didn’t
‘do it.’ All of us ‘did it.’ At least I did. And I won’t—glah! This tastes bad.” He showed me a finger, leaned to the side, spit into the wastebasket next to the desk. “I’m sorry. That was gross. Are you icked?”

“I’m not icked,” I said. “What were you just saying, though?

All of us did it and you won’t what?”

“I won’t rat him out. That’s all I was saying. Not to save myself.

I did what I did because I wanted to do it, and that’s what I’ll say to the cops.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I do,” Benji said. “Of course I do. If I don’t say anything, and everyone else says ‘Gurion did it,’ staying silent’s the same as backing their word, and I’ll profit like them. I’m not gonna owe Gurion anything.”

“You’re not gonna save him from anything, either.”

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“I said, ‘Fuck him,’” he said. “I don’t care about him. I don’t, Jelly. Or at least I shouldn’t. I know that much.”

“You’ll hurt yourself for no good reason.”

“I’ll owe nothing to anyone. That’s a good reason. I’m done owing people for shit I didn’t ask for.”

“What about me?”

“I was just about to say—”

“You’re making me cry.”

He wasn’t exactly. I felt like I was crying, but I wasn’t really crying. I wasn’t gasping, there weren’t any tears, my nose didn’t run. Just this tension inside of my temples. A pressure. It hurt.

“I was just about to say that I’ve got an idea.”

His idea was that since we couldn’t run away, we should stay where we were for as long as we could. He said we should get in the Quiet Room and hide inside the big cabinet. He painted this whole fantasy about the school being shut down. He said that once you’d surrendered, the cops would sweep the school, and after that, the school would be shut down, at least for a little while. He said that if we could manage to stay hidden til the sweep was over, the school would be ours to roam around and make out in. There was food in the cafeteria, cigarettes on the desk, and surely more to be plundered in the desk of Pinge, in the lockers of skids whose combos we’d find—Benji’d seen the binder—in the vaunted hutch of Hector. He said that he thought we could last for weeks, unless they re-opened the school, in which case we could give running away a shot, since maybe—if we were lucky—we’d already be presumed dead, so no one would look for us, and staying on the run would be that much easier.

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It sounded great. Not just great, but perfect, really. It sounded like a pipedream. I didn’t believe that Benji believed it was possible.

I thought he was just trying to get me to stop non-crying, to press up against me inside of a cabinet, and maybe to work a hide-from-the-cops-type seduction. I saw nothing wrong with any of that. I wanted to feel better, wanted to be romanced into pressing against him, had wanted to press against him even without such romancing, and above all, I saw that it would buy us some time in which I could convince him not to incriminate himself. I was sure I could convince him.

Even better than that, when we finally came out, I’d tell my parents a story about Benji having protected me from all the craziness going down in the school. I’d tell them that as soon as Benji saw that things were getting dangerous, he brought me to the Nurse’s and put me in the cabinet, and got inside the cabinet and didn’t lay a hand on me, but stood at the ready to protect me from attackers.

They’d know he was noble; they’d be endlessly grateful. We’d be allowed to see each other.

“I love your idea,” I told him. “Let’s go.”

He said, “Ladies first,” swept his arm at the Quiet Room.

I called him a dork, but stood up, started going.

That’s when Beauregard came in from Main Hall. “Gurion says to bring you,” Beauregard said.

“Where?” Benji said. He sat back down.

“Up by the entrance. The scholars are here.”

“So what?” Benji said.

“They’ll come through the barricade and we’ll join into them.

Then we’re gonna walk to meet some other ones.”

“Who’s we?”

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“What do you mean?”

“Is Berman going?”

“I don’t know,” Pate said. “He stayed in the gym with the other Shovers. He said they’ll join us once the scholars break the barricade, but they keep backing out of plans, so who knows?”

Benji said, “What do you think?” to me.

“I think I want to hide,” I said.

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t,” he said. “If it’s gonna work out, I mean.”

“If you’re gonna get in trouble, I want to hide. I want more time with you.”

“Maybe I’ll stay quiet.”

“Maybe?” I said. “Maybe’s not good enough.”

“I know,” he said. “Let me think,” he said. He coughed, grabbed his throat. It was totally fake. I remember what it looked like, the color of his tongue, the back of his tongue, blue from the spedspeed—he stuck out his tongue. It was totally fake. If I knew it then, though, I didn’t suspect what he was up to. Sometimes things like that—

they look so fake, you assume they must be real.

“Would you get me a water?” he asked me. “I just want to think a second.”

I took his glass off the desk and went to the Quiet Room, turned on the tap, heard Pate shout, “Don’t!” and the door shut behind me.

Benji leaned against it. I couldn’t get out. Through the safetyglass I watched him reach for a chair, wedge it under the knob, then go toward Pate, who was lying on the floor, clutching at his knees. Benji said he was sorry—I saw his mouth form the words—and then he turned to me, told me, “I’m coming back,” and I remember the sound, 1506

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though I couldn’t have heard it, not through the glass, and Benji grabbed a chair and threw it into Main Hall, and then he grabbed another chair and went out the door. One chair he wedged beneath the knob in Main Hall, the other he brought to the gym as a weapon.

You already know that. There isn’t much else I can tell you.

Sometimes I don’t like him for having said he’d come back; sometimes it seems to make him a liar. It doesn’t, of course—he had no idea, he was no more clairvoyant than he was suicidal—but that’s how it seems sometimes. Plus he does keep coming back, though, doesn’t he, Gurion? Sometimes I even like that. Mostly I don’t. I can’t fall in love. All the boys who remain in the world are so weak.

I certainly can’t tell you what finally provoked him. Even ignoring that he was high on two drugs, Benji had always been a complicated boy. On reflection it seems that he might have been planning to lock me in the Quiet Room before Pate got there, but maybe he hadn’t been; maybe the news of what was happening outside led him to believe that your plan could work if he could stop Berman from somehow thwarting it. Or maybe the opposite; maybe he thought that your plan wouldn’t work if he attacked Berman, and he wanted it to fail. Or it could be that he wanted you to succeed, but he wanted to keep Berman from being a part of that success. Or maybe it had nothing to do with you at all, and he took what he saw to be his last chance to exact his vengeance on a snake who’d shot him and jumped on his back at the end of the battle.

What’s weird is I don’t even know what you’d prefer to believe.

If you were a normal human being, you’d feel vindicated thinking that Benji’s last gesture might have been born of something other than hate for you. But through it all, and after all, you’ve been and 1507

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remained the same Gurion Maccabee, enmity’s most religious cel-ebrant. The possibility that your best friend’s dying wish might
not
have been to damage you—might even have been to protect you—probably wrecks you inside just as well as the others.

At least one can hope.

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The first time you finish any truly great book that isn’t the Torah, you remember the end the best.* You remember that event Y followed event X. You recall Y followed X because Y, though unpredictable, was also inevitable, given X’s nature, and given the patterns established by the author (between A and B, J and K, R and S…).* You may even remember the sweep of the book; how A, itself, led eventually to Y, how each of the interceding events (B

through X), if not wholly necessary to give rise to Y, worked to grant Y the resonance sufficient to cause you to supply the book its (unwritten) Z, which must not only follow as inevitably from Y as did B from A, or R from Q, but must, paradoxically,
un
make sense (if the book is to be other than moralist preaching) of all the above-described causal relations, revealing they weren’t inevitable at all.

All great books command re-reading, but you can’t ever read the same book twice. Knowing, as you do, from the second reading

* In Torah, you remember the opening the best, and the events described—on their first reading—often seem fractured, hard to connect, rarely emotional,
until
you subject them to serious analysis.

* If you don’t remember these things, you can’t possibly believe the book is good, let alone great; you must believe that someone has failed; whether you or the author depends on your temperament.

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forward, that A will lead to B, to Y to Z, your post-first readings are far more concerned with what exactly happens
between
those events, far more concerned with those parts you scanned (or even skipped) the first go-round in your rush to discover what would happen next. You look closely at the details—the wordplay, the rhythms, all the “minor” activity—and generate hypotheses as to why they are there, what purpose they serve in the cause of moving you, what they point at, where and to where they misdirect you. This act of analysis creates a sense of distance.*

When, for example, you already know that Holden Caulfield will run from his teacher who pet him on the forehead as he slept, you read
Catcher
looking for signs the petting’s coming; you read to determine if Holden’s right or wrong to assume the teacher’s perved. You read this way in order to determine exactly why it was

* The act of analysis can’t help but create a sense of distance between you and what’s analyzed. This seems much stranger than it actually is. It seems strange because not only does analysis require you to get up close to a thing, but analysis is undertaken (at least in the case of re-reading great books) with the overt desire to get up close to that thing. The resultant sense of distance thus seems to suggest that to get up close to something is to get away from it, to push it away or be pushed away by it.

That suggestion is false. That suggestion is nonsense.

To get up close to something is to get up close to something; to push something away is to push something away; to be pushed is to be pushed. The sense of distance created by the act of analysis indicates only that one shouldn’t trust his emotions to measure proximity (or, alternately, that one should not use metaphors of proximity to describe one’s emotional states). All that it means to have “a sense of distance” from something is that the emotions which that thing has provoked are less intense than one initially believed they should be. Yet when one acquires a sense of distance from something by way of analysis, instead of concluding that one was in error to believe that one’s emotions should be more intense, one believes that the thing that is under analysis has failed to provoke emotion as intensely as it should have; one believes the act of analysis has somehow ruined the thing’s ability to properly provoke (or, alternately, one’s capacity to be properly provoked).

At least
I
believe that, even when, as now, I would seem to know better. And if this has begun to sound apologetic, or defensive, probably it is—if not one, then the other, depending on your temperament.

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that the scene made you sad: Was it because a man the boy trusted acted like a perv, or was it because the man
didn’t
? Soon you realize it could’ve been either—there’s no way to know, each option’s supportable—and you attempt to determine which is sadder: for Holden to have been taken advantage of (or to have been on the verge of being taken advantage of) by a man that he trusted, or for Holden to have been so damaged by earlier experiences that innocent (however seemingly inappropriate) affection from a man he
should
trust gets misconstrued (misread by Holden as inappropriate) and sends him running out the door. It’s finally impossible to determine which is sadder; not even a hybrid of
both
is sadder.*