The Instructions (101 page)

wasn’t a thing I had to get over.

I pressed all my fingers against all my fingers while cracking sounds echoed all across Main Hall; Benji was flying at ceiling-hung EXIT plaques, overhead-punching them off their cheap mounts.

My fingers wouldn’t break.

The cracking sounds stopped.

For three or four seconds, Main Hall was quiet.

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Then Benji set off the fire alarm.

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The sky was always prettiest when I hadn’t known I’d see it. It seemed less round, more like a blanket. The clouds all looked sewn in and deliberate.

As soon as we got outside, I felt watched.

For mid-November, it wasn’t cold. The air didn’t make steam of our breath or crust our gooze, but still I was coatless and I shivered a little.

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Nurse Clyde, who was holding the puker in a fireman’s carry, led me and the Five across Rand Road to the two-hill field and told us to find our fifth-period teachers and let them know we were safe. Then the nurse set the girl in the grass and she puked more.

Most students and teachers were still exiting the school. The Five followed me past the ones who’d already exited—none of whom were June—and I took us up the high hill for a better view. I started a circle by leaning on a stump. The Five finished the circle and we sat facing west.

A paramedic and a cop were consulting with each other outside the front entrance, from which students and teachers continually emerged to cross the street in single-file lines. Each teacher, once her class arrived in the field, ordered her students to stay where they were, then headed to an area just east of the sidewalk where a growing group of teachers huddled and gossiped. No one else climbed the high hill, but many of the students, once their teachers had gone, abandoned their classes to find their friends, and they all faced the school, some hugging themselves and some rubbing others’ shoulders and others playing slapslap for warmth.

As their numbers grew and their density thickened, more and more of them stood, and more cop cars and fire engines came up Rand Road.

The Levinson said, “This is the best. Look at that crowd!”

“That crowd doesn’t see us!” said GlassMan. “But we see them!”

Shpritzy said. “And look at those clouds!” said Pinker. He pointed 946

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his Cubs-gloved finger at the blankety sky. “It’s a cluster of commas,” said Mr. Goldblum. “It’s a bunch of apostrophes,” said GlassMan. Shpritzy said, “It’s a gang of yuds.” “We’re a gang of Yids.” “We’re a gang of kids.” “We’re a gang of Yid kids under clouds of yud, and despite the chill, we’re not catching pneumonia!” “Where’s that one kid?” “Let’s find that kid.” “Let’s kill that kid.” The Five looked around for the kid who hurt Shpritzy and I looked around to try to spot June, but got spotted first by Eliyahu of Brooklyn. I felt a tap on my elbow and looked to my right. He was blowing into his hands.

He said, “Are you okay?”

I said, Where did you come from?

He said, “I came from Israel, I came from Brooklyn, I came from the other side of this tree stump. I came to my uncle’s house to live and they sent me to this Aptakisic where I broke a window.

I came to the Cage, and you kept disappearing. I went to my new gym class and waited to change—I’m shy—and no sooner had the last boy gone to the pool than this alarm goes off and I’m all alone. I rebuckled my belt and I ran. I’m troubled.” He got inside the circle and sat close, facing me. He said, “This kind of thing doesn’t thrill me at all.” He was shivering, too, and not looking me in the face. With his teeth, he kneaded the corners of his lips.

I said, I didn’t disappear, I just went to the Nurse. Here, I said, meet the Five.

The Five revolved, waved, then got back to the task of finding their guy.

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Eliyahu wasn’t paying attention anyway. He said, “This kind of thing happens? I think about my family. How I was washing my face. Have you heard about my family? If you heard, it doesn’t matter,” he said. His eyes were darting around and he rocked back and forth as he spoke. “If you heard, you heard wrong.” he said, “because no one knows about my face. We had mango ice cream at a café on Ben Yehuda street. Do you know Jerusalem?

My sisters and I and my mother, we had mango ice cream at a café on Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem, and my father drank coffee with ice in it. It was hot outside and the Jerusalem-stone was blinding. It was too bright outside. There were no shadows.

You would squint just to look at a building. I finished my ice cream before anyone else, and my father he says for me to lean close to him? He was on the other side of the table and, when I leaned, I leaned over the whole table, and my father licked his thumbs, saying, ‘You’ve got shmutz,’ and he started to rub the thumbs on my cheek. I didn’t like it because I was eleven already and it was embarrassing. I pushed his hands off and he smiled.

He said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He said, ‘You’re a grown boy.’ And when he said it, I knew he didn’t mean it. It’s not the kind of thing you can say and mean it. You can’t tell someone he’s a grown boy and mean it, even if you think you mean it. And my father didn’t even think he meant it, and it made me angry because if you say that someone is a grown boy, then you’re saying they’re not a man yet, but what’s a grown boy if not a man? I was thinking of this so much, then, because we were in Israel for my sis-948

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ter Miriam’s bat mitzvah, and I kept thinking she was a woman now and what was I? It was a very important question. I leaned away from my father and he said to me, ‘So go wash your face.’

And it made me even angrier because now he was telling me to wash my face, and a grown boy, or a man,
would
go wash his face. A grown boy would not leave his face shmutzy just because his father said to clean it, but that’s what I was going to do. I was going to leave my face shmutzy because he said I should clean it. And I knew I should clean it, but I wasn’t going to, because I was not a grown boy. I said nothing to my father and I didn’t move. He said, ‘Look, there’s a napkin, there’s a glass of water. You can dip it.’ I told him, ‘No.’ I said to him that it was not something that I was going to do. And then I decided to go to the bathroom in the café to wash, because now that he was telling me I should dip the napkin in the water, it gave me the chance to wash my face like a grown boy, like I wanted to do, without doing it how he told me, like I also wanted. So I got up and went to wash my face in the café, in the bathroom in the back of it, and my father, as I stood up, he reached over the table and touched his hand on the top part of my arm, right here, almost on the shoulder. He wanted to get me to look at him, because now he was sorry and he wanted me to look at him so he could say it, and what I thought was how tall of a man he was that his arms could be so long, that he could sit on the other side of the table and reach over to me while I’m standing and get his hand on my shoulder. And I thought how before he 949

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could have just reached over with the spitty thumbs if he’d wanted to. He didn’t have to ask me to lean closer to get the shmutz; he could have just reached, you know? I thought it was strange he said for me to lean close to him when he could have reached. He was six and a half feet tall, my father, and I did not want to look at him because I thought I would cry. It was something I did a lot at that time was to cry when he was sorry for something he said to me. So I shook off his hand from my arm and went inside the café, to the bathroom, without looking at him, and in the bathroom I looked in the mirror and I saw there was nothing on my face. There wasn’t any ice cream on my cheek at all. Not anything, and I would’ve seen it. The ice cream was a very bright orange color, it was mango-flavored, and I’ve always been a very pale person, even after a week of sun on my face in Israel, I was pale because I wore sunblock. I washed my face anyway. I bent forward into the sink and splished some water here, some water there. I thought to myself, why would my father kid me about having shmutz and, when I thought it, the door of the bathroom, it got bent a little, curved. The door curved in and I heard this blast. It was louder than anything, and my ears must have been ringing from it and the door was curved, but I didn’t think to myself about an explosion yet—I wouldn’t think about an explosion for a long time. I kept thinking about why my father would kid me like that and I thought maybe he just wanted to touch my face, you know? I’m in this bathroom thinking maybe he wanted to touch my face because 950

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I’m a grown boy or not a grown boy and now Miriam has become a woman and then I stop thinking about it because there was that blast. The door was curved. My face was clean and I had to leave. I had to force my way out by laying down on the tile and kicking the door since it was curved and as I walked through the café, out to Ben Yehuda Street, there were people on stools with their heads down on the counter and there were people by the tables in front and these people were torn. I never thought about living things being torn. Blankets I think of are torn.

Paper. Shirts and sheets. Living things are not the things you think about when you think about things that can be torn, but these people were torn and I knew not to look at it, but I thought I saw Leah, my other sister. I didn’t want to see her, but I was out in front of the café, on the sidewalk, and I was trying to get between the fires and I did not want to trip on the torn people on the ground, so I looked down, to see where to put my feet to walk and like I said I think I see my sister Leah. She has a nail in her face. And she has no legs? My sister has a nail in her face?

She should take the nail out of her face, I think. She has hands.

She can take the nail out of her face. My sister Leah is a quiet person and she does not make many jokes. She is not a very funny person yet. She won’t be very funny for a long time. All the things that are very funny about her are accidental. She falls down and she says, ‘Oops, I must have fallen down,’ and that is very funny. The cat comes into the room while my mother gives her Hebrew lessons and Leah points at the cat and says, ‘
Chatul
,

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chatul
.’ It’s not her. She wouldn’t put a nail in her face for a joke because she does not make jokes yet. Her jokes are accidents. I thought: This is a joke my father is making on me because I didn’t want him to touch my face. This is his kind of joke. He tells jokes when he becomes angry. They are not funny, but it is how he stops being angry, telling these jokes. And I knew they weren’t my family because none of them looked like they were supposed to look. My father had gotten the faces right, but the bodies were not right. The bodies were in pieces. He didn’t get the pieces right, you could see they didn’t fit together. I knelt on the ground and I waited a few seconds because I was not tricked by my father and I wanted him to see it was not funny.

Sometimes I would laugh at his jokes just to make him stop making his jokes. It’s the laughing we’d do that would make him less angry, I was wrong before when I said it was the joke-telling, it was not the joke-telling that made him less angry, it was the joke-telling that made
us
less angry, it was the joke-telling he did to
make
us less angry—
at him
, less angry—and I would laugh sometimes when it was not funny because it was the only way to make him stop making the joke and I don’t like to hear jokes when I’m trying to be angry, but I did not want to laugh on Ben Yehuda because I was still angry and still trying to be angry but I wanted the joke to stop so in the end I decided I should laugh and I laughed in a fake way. I said, ‘Ha ha.’ I said, ‘Ha ha ha,’ and still he didn’t stop making this joke on me, since he could tell that my laugh was not a real laugh, but 952

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a laugh to make him stop, and he wanted a real laugh, but that was impossible because his joke wasn’t funny at all and that is why I started looking at everything closely because none of them looked like who they were supposed to be, do you understand?

I looked at all of them. I crawled around on my knees and moved the people around because I did not believe that I had seen my family and I wanted the proof that I hadn’t seen them and that it was only a joke my father was making on me that he wouldn’t stop making because I couldn’t laugh. I wanted to find them, my family, underneath the joke-bodies, because it would be proof. I thought I could prove that they weren’t torn, that these were dummies, made of cloth, burned closed at the edges, paint splashed upon them, and I—it doesn’t make any sense, but that is what I was thinking and how it ended up I saw everything very close, on my knees, touching all of them, pushing on them with my hands to move them, and how heavy they were, I could only tilt them, and the sirens began and a soldier lifting me up and this sort of thing, here, it does not thrill me at all, Gurion.

I am not a good defiance and I don’t like it here. It doesn’t feel safe. Everything becomes unsafe.”

I was crying pretty hard. I kept imagining my father telling me to wash my clean face. I needed to say something to Eliyahu, and I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing I thought of: You knew I was in the nurse’s office.

But when I said it, I was wiping my nose off, and the words went into my sleeve. When I said it, Eliyahu didn’t respond, and 953

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I thought he hadn’t heard me, that I had a second chance, and I said what I should have said:

I said, I wasn’t joking on you.

And he said, “Someone is.”

And that was when GlassMan whispered, “Kill.” He’d spotted their guy.