The Instructions (123 page)

Which is bad enough. And it will be even worse if this lack of rigor establishes itself as a habit, for such a habit will certainly have undermined—will certainly
be undermining
—the study and interpretation of this,
The Instructions
.

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Nothing, scholars, nothing in all the world is good because I say it is good. Nothing is right because I say it is right. What I say is good is good for the reasons I cite. What I say is right is right for those reasons. If you don’t understand the reasons, you will one day—if you study—but you can’t just take my word on what is right and good and expect that to suffice. If you could do that, I would never have mentioned my reasons.

And when I say something is bad or when I say that something I did was
wrong
or
foolish,
or when I say that something excellent that you want to ascribe to me is not something I am responsible for, or that something you call a miracle was the opposite of a miracle, then, as inconvenient as it may seem at first to believe it, the proper response is not “Gurion is too humble to admit that he was good all along, too humble to admit he was right all along,”

or “He is too humble to admit that he made a miracle happen, too humble to call it a miracle.” I am not humble, much less am I what the well-meaning doubletalkers among you have taken to calling “a humble egotist.” There is no such thing as a humble egotist. And for that matter, I’m not a “peacemaking warrior,”

either; I’m a scholar and a soldier. There is no paradox there, no euphemism, no contradiction. I’m both. And so should you be.

If you want to resist this commentary on commentaries, scholars, it’s because the notion I’m attacking—the notion that I’d had the Damage Proper elaborately planned well in advance of the opening sally—strikes you as appealing. Maybe it strikes you as appealing because it suggests that I am a gifted general, or 1158

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a talented forseer, maybe because it’s the easiest explanation to imagine. I don’t know exactly why the notion appeals to you.

However, I do know why it appeals to the Arrangement. It is in their best interests that you resist this commentary on commentaries; it is in their best interests to spread the claim that I planned the Damage Proper well in advance of when I actually did. The implications of the truth are bad for the Arrangement because the implications of the truth are good for us. In denying the truth, in spreading lies, the Arrangement protects the Arrangement.

The fact that I only planned the Damage Proper minutes before we executed it means that you are each a much greater threat than you know. It means that despite all the early-detection procedures and other “safeguards” that have, since the Damage Proper, been put in place by various houses of the Arrangement—and manifold they are, these “safeguards,” well designed to foil days and weeks of planning, as well—future war campaigns could be just as successful as the first one. They can be just as successful as long as they are undertaken as suddenly and spontaneously as the first one.

Damage, damage, and damage, the end.

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19

WE

Friday, November 17, 2006

12:13 a.m.–10:41 a.m.

THE INSTRUCTIONS

And there was night, and all through the night I kept waking from the same dream.

In the valley of the two-hill field stood a tower of restraint.

Slokum held Nakamook in the air like Slokum had held me during the false alarm, except Nakamook’s arms weren’t pinned to his chest. Instead, they held a second Slokum, and the second Slokum held me, and I a second Nakamook, and that second Nakamook a second me:

GURION

NAKAMOOK

GURION

SLOKUM

NAKAMOOK

SLOKUM

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The tower swayed. To keep from falling, we had to continually redistribute our weight. It took a lot of concentration at first, but soon I got the hang of it and noticed there was clapping.

There’d been clapping all along, but my earlids had been blocking it, pushing it into the background. I looked around to see where the sound came from and saw it was Patrick Drucker. He stood before the tower, applauding.

There were two things wrong with him. The first was his pants. It was windy in the field, but the pants lay perfect on his legs, unmoving. The second was his hair. The wind didn’t blow that either.

Soon clouds parted and the sun shone and both his nose and the apex of his left knee’s pant-crease glinted. The glint was identical and I knew both were plastic: the face and the pants. Then I saw his eyes did not look like eyes, but television snow. I saw that he was not Patrick Drucker. He was an angel in a Patrick Drucker mask, standing behind a legs-shaped podium, applauding.

It got me edgy.

The Slokums both said, “Thank you,” to the angel. “Really, you’re too kind,” they said. “We’d bow if we could, but as you can see…”

That got me even more edgy.

What should we do? said the Gurions.

“Which ‘we’?” said everyone.

I don’t know, said the Gurions.

“Is that right?” said the Nakamooks.

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The effect of both Benji-voices saying the same thing at once was that it flattened the question’s intonations so that I couldn’t tell if “Is that right?” = “Is it really true that you don’t know to which ‘we’ you are referring?” or if it was a sarcastic, accusatory question that = “No shit, Gurion. You
obviously
don’t know to which ‘we’ you’re referring,” or if I was being asked about the moral implications of not knowing to which “we” I had referred

= “Do you believe it is right to not know to which ‘we’ you’re referring when you ask the question ‘What should we do?’?”

This is when the dream would start to seem familiar, and I’d remember I was supposed to be pissed at Benji.

Meanwhile, the angel continued applauding, and the Bams kept talking about how they’d love to bow to show their appreciation for the applause, but they couldn’t bow, not responsibly at least. Everyone would fall if the Bams bowed, even if just one of the Bams bowed, mused the Bams, and the angel didn’t think it was worth everyone’s falling down just so a Bam could bow, did he?

The angel kept applauding.

The tower of restraint kept swaying. It was exhausting.

I kept wondering what we should do.

Nakamook kept asking me which “we” I meant.

I kept forgetting and then remembering I was pissed at him.

On waking, I’d decide I wasn’t pissed at him, but when I fell back asleep, the dream would start again and I’d forget what I had decided, then remember I was pissed at him, then forget I was pissed and then remember it again.

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When finally there was morning, and I woke for the last time, I was no longer pissed at him.

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While upstairs, painkillered, my father slept deep, I prepared a forkless breakfast with my mom in the kitchen. On a breadboard on the counter, I smashed walnuts with a rolling pin. She, at the table, opened soft-boiled eggs. I liked eggs soft-boiled, but in the morning couldn’t prep them, not if I wanted to put them in my stomach. Those insect-like screams emitted by the shell when you pried its fragments from that film they clung to—the mastication of wet chicken sounded musical by comparison.

Walnuts in pieces, I dumped the sip of cloudy topwater from a tub of Greek yogurt. I globbed honey from a jar across the yogurt’s flat surface. I folded and stirred til the color was even, then folded some more til my mom’s task was finished. When she signalled it was, I came to the table, the tub in one hand, breadboard in the other; we liked to add the walnuts as we went.

The yogurt of our forkless breakfasts was for the most part treated like dessert. Though we’d always cool our mouths before we ate our eggs, we’d only use a spoonful, never even two. While the roof-blisters you’d get from a scalding one stung, nothing eggy was as nasty as a gluey tepid yolk. Plus our egg-cups, glass, were shaped like half an ostrich, and the closer the temperature of what you drew from them matched yours, the less cute the 1164

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images your brain coughed up. Half-formed wings and beaks of high plasticity. Goo that would be claws and bone. A pulsing spaghetti of veins and tendons. Ligaments and cartilage not quite yet chewy. Throbbing, webbed red membranes.

Our attack on the eggs was double-fisted. We spooned them up rapidly and salted with abandon. Ninety seconds later it was over.

You inhaled your egg, I said.

My mom pinched my shoulder and I passed her the walnuts. We ate yogurt without speaking til I saw she wore fatigue pants and said so. She explained she was staying home with my father. I told her she could have slept in with him. She said not to talk nonsense because who would make me breakfast. I told her I would’ve made breakfast and she sneered at cold cereal and microwaved starches, praising flame-heat and animal protein by implication. I thanked her for making eggs. Then she told me what she’d heard on morning radio. She told me Patrick Drucker had died in the night.

Good, I said.

“That is not nice to say.”

I have to say nice things about him now?

“You should not dance on anyone’s grave. It could have been your father.”

It could not have been my father.

“We are lucky it was not your father.”

If hypothetical death is on the table, I thought, we are at least 1165

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as unlucky Drucker hadn’t died younger, before my father ever met him. But she wasn’t really talking about luck. It was just an expression, and though I didn’t agree with what she said, I did with what she meant.

I said, I’m glad it wasn’t Aba.

She kissed me on the cheek and handed me my lunch. I looked inside the bag. A sandwich in foil, a box of peach-apple fruit drink, and baggies of carrots and pretzel sticks.

“Do not give away your carrots,” she told me.

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Tracks were being rehabbed and the el moved slow. Near the front of my car, which was barely half-full, two women in headscarves I’d seen around my neighborhood threw me the Look of The End and whispered. They often walked along Devon, each with a grocery bag, a mother and daughter chattering. Whenever one saw me, she’d bite down on her lip, tug the sleeve of the other, and they’d lower their voices. I’d always taken them for typical haters of Maccabees—nothing I wasn’t used to near home—and decided, on the el, that that’s all they were; that the reason they appeared less harmless than usual was I wasn’t accustomed to getting hated on the train. I turned my eyes to my lap, read
My Life as a Man.

By the time we’d gotten to Davis, our car—the last—was empty except for some high-schoolers. The women got off first, the others, then me. By the exit, the women stepped aside for the 1166

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rest of them, but I didn’t see that til I came down the stairs, and by then the last high-schooler was out on the sidewalk. I went to the turnstile the younger woman blocked.

Excuse me, I said.

“You are Gurion,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

I pointed to the mother, said: You’re this woman’s daughter. I need to get to school.

“Do you know who my son is?”

I had no idea who her son was, and I didn’t like her questions. She could have just told me the answers. I read the stories in her face.

I said, Moshe Levin.

“That’s right,” she said, “I’m Michal Levin,” and though Moshe’s grandma grasped her hamsa between thumb and pointer, the mother was not impressed at all. Neither was I. Only a schmuck would pick on David Kahn for his stutter, and retinal detachment via pennygun or no, Moshe had finked to Headmaster Kalisch.

He’d told on David, on me, on all of the Israelites. I knew he didn’t mean to rat on anyone but David, but his ratting on David got me booted from Northside, and a rat was a rat was a rat was a rat. Moshe Levin was a rat-fink schmuck.

“Do you know what I think of you?” said the mother. “Do you want to know what I think of your injured father?”

Even before the No! rushed through me, I knew I would disobey it. I knew that if I didn’t disobey it—if instead I who’s-there’d her frenzied maternal knock-knock—she would spit some ver-1167

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sion of the following punchline: “I think your father is suffering for your sins, and you, in turn, are suffering for his.” And maybe that was true, but even if it was, I didn’t think I was obliged to hear it from her, so I sinned just as hard as I needed to sin in order to shame her into silence.

In superformal Hebrew, I said to this mother: Maybe ocular damage is not always so much the outcome of projectiles as of cruel words that invite projectiles, Michal Levin. And maybe such ocular damage is not merely the cause of psychological trauma, but its effect as well. Maybe Moshe wouldn’t be so quick to pick on younger boys with speech impediments if your husband wasn’t always bullying him. Maybe he wouldn’t pick on anyone if the one person who could protect him from your husband ever did so. Probably you should forget about my father and concern yourself with Moshe’s.

At which point Moshe’s grandmother struck me across the jaw.

Though I showed her my other cheek, it was not because I loved her.

You should have taught her that before she had a son, I said.

And the daughter struck me, and my sense of righteousness multiplied, hardening my bones, swelling my lungs.

Your Moshe may redeem you yet, I said. When I call, he’ll follow. Get out of my way now. We’re all shored up, you mothers and I.

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