The Instructions (32 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

tossed to every student between you, and since each between-student would need to unball it to see if it was intended for him or another, and because no student could see what any other was doing inside of his carrel anyway, every between-student could and would read the note without any fear of getting beaten up, so even if every kid between the two of you was willing to risk steps for tossing your note, and even if the note did eventually get to Nakamook without being detected by Botha or the teachers (the likelihood of which decreased with each potentially noisy de- and re-crumpling), you wouldn’t have written anything important in the note, and thus probably wouldn’t have bothered writing to begin with.

And for those of you scholars who, at this point, wish to accuse me of blithe exaggeration or of lying for effect; for those of you assuming I’m engaging with metaphor or trucking with expressionism, thinking to yourselves, “This place about which Rabbi Gurion tells us
seemed
so overbearingly stifling and hell-ish that it
felt like
he wasn’t ever allowed to speak to his friends, and at times it even
felt
like
he wasn’t allowed to look at them; it

was
as if
they had to stare at flat, unadorned surfaces six hours a day in total silence, and
as though
to do otherwise would garner them punishment”; for all of you scholars who’d like to insist that a classroom like the Cage, given all the violent uprisings its very existence would daily incite, couldn’t possibly abide for any longer than a week: believe me, I understand your objections. I was prepared no better by Schechter and Northside to 292

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experience the Cage’s smothering reality than you’ve been prepared by your Israelite schools to accept that smothering reality’s description.

As for
why
the Cage wasn’t plagued by daily (or weekly, or at least semi-annual) savage insurrections, the short answer’s this: Apart from me—the new kid still studying the others in the Cage to learn how it worked and how it got worked—its population was not comprised of scholars who’d spent their lives studying Torah and Talmud, but rather of kids for whom junior high had always = Aptakisic, if not the Cage itself.

The long answer’s harder, a lot more complicated. The long one will take a little while to get across, and I haven’t even finished describing the rules. I haven’t even gotten to the rule against me.

If you were me, you could rarely even toss notes to a kid sitting next to you. Unless there was no one absent that day, enough empty carrels would be available for Botha to enforce the Gurion Has to Sit Next to No One Whenever It Is Possible rule.

For a while, that rule had been unconditional—Gurion Has to Sit Next to No One, Ever—because, back in my third week at Aptakisic, when Botha originally made up the rule (after catching me toss eleven notes in one hour), it was
always
possible for me to sit next to no one since the number of carrels in the Cage was forty and, until the end of my seventh week—the week before the week before I fell in love with June—the number of students who were sentenced to the Cage, though it had increased fairly 293

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steadily from its initial thirty-five,* never surpassed thirty-eight.

Then came Ben-Wa Wolf, #39, a white-haired sixth-grader who cried all the time, which is why people called him The Boy Who Cried Wa-Wa. Other than how easy and often he cried, nobody really knew anything about him, let alone the reason he’d been removed from normal classes—he never broke rules or spoke to anyone at Lunch—but as soon as Ben-Wa got sentenced to the Cage, there was hope that I’d sometimes get to sit next to someone. For that to happen, there would have to be no absences at all, and although that circumstance rarely arose—just twice in all of my nine Caged weeks—having something to hope for, no matter how unlikely, was better than nothing (at least that’s how it seemed), and from the moment Botha banned me from sitting next to others til the day Ben-Wa thirty-nined our roster, nothing’s what I’d had in the way of hope.

I’ve learned forthright descriptions of hopelessness are boring, though. I learned that from Flowers on the same day that Botha issued the edict described above, which was also the first day I tried to write scripture concerned with the Cage, i.e., the first day I tried to start
The Instructions
(even though I didn’t know what it would be called yet, or what it was about, or who I wanted to read it). Right there at my carrel I wrote a whole chapter, and I saw it wasn’t good, but then I thought I might

* I.e., I was #35, then Egon and Mia Marsh disappeared; Renee Feldbons, Jerry Throop, and Ansul Entsry arrived a week later, all the same day, bringing the tally to thirty-six; #37, Remus “Chunkstyle” Heany, came a couple weeks after that; and Forrest Kennilworth, who arrived in mid October, was #38.

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not be qualified to judge: the chapter wasn’t, after all—at least not directly—about Israelites, Torah, or Adonai. So that afternoon, at the Frontier Motel, I showed the chapter to Flowers to see what he could tell me.

“This boring,” he told me.

He was sitting on the couch in the Welcome Office waiting-space, chin on his hands, hands piled on the knob at the top of his walking cane, staring at a wall-mounted statue of Legba. I was on the couch next to him, waiting for more, but he wasn’t saying more; it was my turn to talk.

I said, the Cage is boring.

He said, “Don’t matter—pathetic fallacy.”

I didn’t hear it right, though. I heard, “Don’t matter, pathetic phallus,” like he was calling me a littlewang, or saying I had one.

I said, What do you know about the size of my wang?

He’d never seen my wang.

“The what?” he said. He took his chin off his hands and turned to me. “I’m telling you about the pathetic fallacy, and you’re talking to me about wang? Learn.”

I was embarrassed for hearing him wrong. I used to hear Flowers wrong a lot. He had an accent from Robert Taylor Homes combined with an accent from University of Chicago Law School, and his grammar, at times—especially when he was teaching you something—would become Hoodoo grammar, the kind he’d cast spells with. Before starting Aptakisic, I only met Flowers once—it was at a fundraising dinner for 295

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the United Civil Liberties Advocates of America, which was the organization my father worked for and the one for which Flowers used to work until he quit lawyering to be a writer when his brother died young and left him the Frontier—and for the first few weeks after starting Aptakisic, I’d get embarrassed to hear him wrong because he hardly knew me, and so when I’d hear him wrong, I’d think it seemed like I wasn’t paying attention, and I’d think that if I explained to him that I
was
paying attention then it would seem like I meant that the way he talked was banced, which is not what I’d have meant, so instead I’d say nothing and just be embarrassed. The pathetic fallacy day, though, was especially embarrassing because it wasn’t just that I heard him wrong, but that I heard him talking about my wang when he wasn’t talking about my wang, which made it seem like I was always thinking about my wang.

So I said to Flowers: Sorry. I said, Pathetic fallacy.

Flowers said, “Forget the pathetic fallacy. There’s what you write and there’s what you write
about
. Even if what you write
about
is boring, you can’t be
writing
boring. Seem to me like you want to write about you wang, anyhow. Now you wang—that’s a good example cause it’s boring to me. You wang is boring to most people. Half the world’s got wangs and half all writers already written bout em. Only thing
ain’t
boring to me about you wang is how you’re callin it
wang
. You’re a creative little boy, know some Yiddish slang like
shvontz
or
schmuck
or
pizzle
, could call it anything you want, and you call it you wang. Wang outlandish. I 296

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mean: wang. Wang nuts. As it were. Still, it ain’t much to write about. Say it enough, word sound lose it charm fast as anything.

For fact, it already has.”

I don’t want to write about my wang, I said. I never even think about it.

“Never even think about he wang, he tells me. Now you’re lying. Don’t matter anyway. Point is, you want to write about some boring things, fine, just don’t make me feel you boredom.

I don’t read because I want to get bored. Take this root,” he said.

He pulled a root from the bag around his neck and put it in my hand. I put it in my mouth. It tasted like chalk and mushroom.

Flowers banged my rolled-up chapter on his knee. “That was harsh of me,” he said. “Ain’t all boring, actually. It was harsh of me, but you just gotta see what’s not worth keeping and wipe it out.”

I said, I can’t tell what’s not worth keeping.

“Cause you too obsessed with being methodical,” Flowers said.

“Syste
matical
. I wish you’d quit it. ’Cept I guess that like asking a bumblebee to leave some pollen alone. Click click click,” he said.

It was one of my favorite things that Flowers would say. It was supposed to be the sound of thoughts gathering, and when he made it, it meant he’d forgotten what he wanted to say next but he wanted you to give him a second to think of what it was before you interrupted him… like spoken elipses… like he was trailing off, but would return in a moment with something important.

Usually when he’d return, the subject of what he was talking about before would be changed a little...

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“Click click click,” Flowers said, and then: “Main thing is it sound like you gotta find the chink in the system, Gurion.” He said, “Find that chink and exploit it.”

I said, Exploit a chink and my scripture gets better?

“Secondarily, yes,” he said. “What I’m talking about is you
life
’ll get better, though. This Cage sound like prison.”

Flowers was right. I re-read the chapter and the whole thing was swollen; full of abstract words like “desperate” and “hopeless” and “anguish” and “mental.” The whole thing was static.

The whole thing was suck. I’d never skip a paragraph in a book I was reading—I was too afraid to miss something important—

but I sometimes wished I was the kind of person who would skip a paragraph because then all I’d do is read the dialogue and the action. Those were the only parts of books I ever really enjoyed.

The conflict parts. The parts where people act on things and words and other people. All the other parts seemed there to be gotten through: too many nouns and adjectives, too few verbs. This chapter was the kind that made me wish I was a skipper. I threw it away. I wiped it out.

And then, the next schoolday, I searched for a chink. For a little while, I even thought I found one. Late in the afternoon, I witnessed my first Hyperscoot: three kids scooted their chairs in rapid succession, each one loudly groaning the floor, and then a couple other kids groaned the floor with their chairs, and then another one, making six kids who groaned the floor in less than ten seconds. No one went over their tape-line, so no one got 298

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in trouble. What was even more interesting to me than that, though, was how the second three scooters never even got
seen
by Botha or the teachers, who were too occupied with checking to see if the first three were in violation of the Tape rule. And not only that, but a lot of us revolved to watch the action after the first three groans, and none of us got steps for breaking the Face Forward rule since we were done breaking it before the robots were done failing at trying to figure out who the second three scooters were.

As soon as school let out, I asked Nakamook about it. We were sitting in prop thrones on the stage in the cafeteria, waiting for the detention monitor to arrive. Nakamook said, “I’ve been in the Cage two years and seen maybe nine or ten Hyperscoots.”

So they happen once or twice a quarter? I said.

“Nine or ten divided by eight is somewhere between one and two,” said Nakamook = “Yes, once or twice a quarter on average, but I am not very interested in this subject.” He was using a house-key to scrape the gold paint off the dog-head on the arm of his throne.

I said, Why don’t people Hyperscoot more often? It’s so simple.

Nakamook said, “It’s not like anyone does it on purpose.”

But why not? I said.

“What do you mean?” he said. “It’s an accidental thing. A few spazzes groan their chairs at the same time by accident—that’s why it’s called Hyperscoot. Because it’s hyper. Hyper’s never on purpose. If it was on purpose it would be called Superscoot or 299

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something. Riotscoot.” He blew his pile of scraped paint off the dog-head and walked away from me.

I disagreed with Nakamook about being H—I believed you
could be
H on purpose, or at least use
your H
with
purpose—but I figured that the potential purposefulness of H was beside the point.

I figured that Nakamook had simplified a good explanation; that he knew some complicated set of reasons why Hyperscoot couldn’t happen more often but didn’t want to talk about them because, for some reason, they made him touchy. Even though we’d blanked hallway bulbs together a few days earlier, and even though I’d drawn on his head and he’d gone to my house for dinner once, I hadn’t yet given him that copy of
Ulpan
with all the Israelite parts cut out, so I thought it was fair for him not to want to talk about touchy stuff, and I didn’t want him to get upset, so I dropped the conversation and gave up on Hyperscoot.

That afternoon, when I got to the Frontier, I told Flowers I couldn’t find the chink. He said I shouldn’t be a quitter and told me I should look where I didn’t usually look.