The Instructions (19 page)

“Mikey?” Call-Me-Sandy said to the Janitor, “Can you tell Gurion why you won’t help Ronrico to stand up?”

“You strike with a fury,” Main Man said to me, “and maybe you are out of control. People are afraid of you.”

I said, Why do you say that, Scott? Are you afraid of me?

Main Man said, “A little bit.”

It made me depressed for a second. Call-Me-Sandy saw it. I saw her lean forward. She wanted to make a moment of it. She always wanted to make a moment when Scott said something to me about feelings, but I stopped her.

I said to Scott, I protect you, though. I’ll always protect you.

I said to the Janitor, Help your friend up. I’m not gonna hurt 175

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you. Just be a good guy.

The Janitor said, “What if you chop my neck? I don’t want you to chop my neck.”

I said, I wouldn’t chop your neck like that. Why would I chop your neck for helping your friend? That’s stupid.

“Do you promise?” said the Janitor.

I said, I don’t promise. You know I don’t promise. If you promise it means that every time you don’t promise it’s okay for you to be lying. I won’t chop your neck. Have faith in my word.

“I need you to promise.”

I said, I’ll chop your neck if you don’t help him up.

The Janitor pulled his sleeve down over his hand and started helping his friend up.

Ronrico said “Thigh!” to the Janitor.

Vincie’s hand went to his eye. The Janitor let go of Ronrico’s hand and dropped Ronrico so Ronrico fell on his own wrists.

Vincie’s hand went to his eye again. The Janitor held one hand in the other and squeezed. Ronrico sat up and shook his hands out like they were asleep. Sandy’s hands were over her mouth. The thumbs of Main Man’s hands were in his mouth. Jelly was flicking everyone off with both hands. Mangey was scratching dry-legs with hers. Leevon sat on his. I didn’t know what to do with mine, but I had to do something, so I dug the right one under the rubberband around the left one, twisted my wrists twice, and stretched them apart, far and fast, and the rubberband handcuffs snapped in the middle. It did not make a loud-enough sound.

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I said to Scott: Mookus, you have released me from my bondage!

Scott took his thumbs out of his mouth. He said, “I have released you!”

“Bondage,” Call-Me-Sandy said. She was so nervous. You could tell from how she kept pushing her fingers through the buttonholes of her cardigan. I wished she wasn’t so nervous. She was actually a very kind person, Sandy. “Bondage is a curious word,” she said.

And you could see from her faces that she was best friends with her sisters and had proud parents who used to buy her ice cream and stickers for her sticker-book whenever she brought home an A on a test or even a quiz, which happened a lot, because she was also very smart. Call-Me-Sandy was going to the University of Chicago for graduate school like my dad and mom had, but for social work instead of law or psychology, and you had to be smart to go there.

Still, she was no good at what she did. When we got loud or wild or said unkind things, she thought it meant that she was doing something wrong and it worried her and she got scared and tried to arrange us with her calm voice that shook and it made us louder and wilder and more unkind. She said, “Does everyone in the group know what
bondage
means?”

Jenny Mangey stopped scratching and sat up really straight.

“It’s a kind of leather,” she said.

“It’s a kind of
sex
,” said Ronrico Asparagus. He got back in his chair.

“Fucking,” said Vincie.

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“Same thing,” said Ronrico.

Vincie disagreed. He said, “Sex is what you do with your wife.

Fucking is what you do to your mistress. You don’t make your wife wear leather, and that’s why bondage is a kind of fucking.”

“What the fuck?” said the Janitor. “I fucking want a fucking tissue.”

I said, Bondage is slavery.

“My mom doesn’t fuck,” Jenny Mangey said.

I said, And bondage is this school, but invisibly.

Jelly said, “No one said your mom fucks, Mange.”

The Janitor said, “Fuck this fucking school.”

It’s the arrangement, I said. Bondage is rules you are too scared to break.

“My mom is
not
a fucker,” said Jenny Mangey.

Vincie said, “No one
said
your mom’s a fucker.”

We were talking so fast Sandy couldn’t break in because it would be disrespectful. She would have had to break the rules to break in. She was supposed to keep us under control by showing us what control looked like and it was supposed to look like control was being able to follow the rules, but all the rules did was freeze her voice and spaz her fingers around in her buttonholes. It was proof that the arrangement was a kind of bondage.

Jenny said, “My mom wears bondage leather.”

“Then she
is
a fucker after all,” Vincie said.

Jenny said, “That’s what I said you said.”

“I didn’t say it til you did,” Vincie said. “You’re the one who 178

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said it, Mangey. If you’re not ready to say something, don’t say it.”

“You have to accept the consequences of what you say,” Ronrico said.

I said, You are a slave, Asparagus.

“A slave with pee so pungent,” said Jelly.

The Janitor said, “The consequences are fucked. I fucking hate the consequences.”

I said, I hate them too.

The Janitor looked at me, and he didn’t look scared, and he kept on looking at me. And then I noticed that everyone was looking at me, even the ones who were crying. We were all angry at the same thing. We always had been. And I felt just like I used to feel during Torah Study at Schechter: like everyone was waiting for me to teach something. Like they weren’t really looking at me, but looking
to
me. It was my second-favorite feeling. Before June kissed me in the Office, it had been my first-favorite feeling, and my second favorite, which became my third after I’d been kissed, was the one that would come when I performed the awaited teaching.

My ex-third-favorite that became fourth was the feeling I’d get when someone else threw the first punch in a fight and I became undeniably justified. Fifth was the explosion that followed. The order of sixth (ex-fifth) through thirteenth (now fourteenth) favorites switched around day to day, but it included the feelings I’d get when I heard Mookus sing; when Nakamook admired how I fought; when Vincie noticed he was smart; when my dad lit a cigarette while high-speed merging onto Lower Wacker with 179

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only one finger on the steering wheel; when Flowers would tell me that my latest chapter made him want to read the next one; when my mom cursed in Arabic in the middle of laughing at a new kind of joke I’d invented; when I’d meet a tough Israelite; when Rabbi Salt wrote down what I’d say to him; and whenever a thing that was breaking made a sound I hadn’t heard before.

But this time was the first time I had the second-favorite feeling at Aptakisic, and also the first time, ever, that I had trouble doing what was needed to have the third; except for Jelly, who never went to Hebrew School anyway, no one in Group was an Israelite. They might have been like Hashemites or Druzes, like Nakamook and Flowers—even the ones I thought were like Canaanites and Romans before, like Ronrico and the Janitor—but still they did not know Torah, so I could not teach them Torah, let alone Talmud, and I did not want to make things up.

The tone came out of the intercom. It sounded more like a nightmare than ever. Some teachers called it the bell, but it did not sound like a bell at all. It sounded like a malfunction alert; the sound that broken objects would make if they had souls and could complain to each other. Group was over.

No one moved.

Sandy said, “Lunchtime.”

No one moved.

I said to them, We are on the same side. I said, We are all on the side of damage.

No one moved til I did.

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4

FIRST

SCRIPTURE

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Story of Stories

Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee

Mrs. Diamond

4th Grade Reading

3/18/05

Dear Mrs. Diamond,

I love to read fiction, and I will never be able to fully express my gratitude to you for pointing me toward
Goodbye, Columbus
. I have since read
Operation Shylock,
and plan to read everything by Philip Roth before the end of the year, but I am not even remotely interested in writing a two-page short story about made-up Jewish people eating dinner, so instead I’ve written scripture.

I talked to Rabbi Salt about this on the phone last night and he said he didn’t think it would be a problem for me to hand in what I’m handing in, especially not if I wrote you a letter like this one, explaining my reasons, and also because the part of this scripture about my father and the fires he set, which I won’t spoil by telling you any more about before you get to read it, is a story that most people will not believe, and so you’ll think it’s fiction anyway. At the same time, though, I think it would be dishonest of me to pretend it’s fiction, and therefore disrespectful to you, and I want you to know that I’ve put a lot of thought and effort into making this scripture acceptable on all grounds—to make it feel fictiony enough so you know I’m not thumbing my nose at your assignment, but 182

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also to let it be as completely true as it is. For example, I’ve written sentences which are unlike those I have used in previous assignments, in that they have a lot of dependent clauses as well as occasional Yiddishe inversions and inflections, so that I sound like a narrator named Gurion ben-Judah, rather than the Gurion ben-Judah you know in real life. Also, I’ve arranged the contents in a fictiony way that withholds certain information to the last, to keep you in suspense, and I’ve done so by means of frames, like how Cervantes does in
Don Quixote
(already another of my favorites of your recommendations, even though I’m not even a fifth of the way through it yet). I did other stuff too, but— Is this letter as boring to read as it is to write? If so, I apologize. What follows, I assure you, is better than this.

Anyway, I hope you like it. And I hope that Samuel has gotten over his cold and that you are proud of him. Rabbi Salt took us to the playground for Torah Study the day the cold started, and it was gloomy out there, and we were talking about whether or not the prophet Jonah intended the ending of the Book of Jonah to be as hilarious as it is, and Samuel and I said, yes, that the Book of Jonah was the most deadpan comedy ever written, and someone, Ben Brodsky I think, said how he wished the sun would come out, and right then, the sun came out, and Samuel said, “I love when the playground gets sunny,” and then he looked at the sun and sneezed.

It was the best-timed sneeze ever, I think. No one in Torah Study ever illustrated the complex meaning of the Book of Jonah better than your son did with that sneeze, and it made me proud of him, and I’m not even his mother. I know that that sneeze was the first announcement of his cold, but I think it was worth it, and I hope 183

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he does, too. And I hope you do, too. And I hope you enjoy this, my first act of scripture. And a blessing on your head.

Your Student,

Gurion ben-Judah

P.S. I almost forgot! Tamar of Timneh. Rabbi Salt suggested I tell you her story in case you’d forgotten it. I told him that was crazy, because how could you forget it, and he agreed that I was probably correct, but by the time he agreed, I’d already gotten nervous he might be right, and I’ve decided to refer you to Genesis 38, in case you did forget, and also to tell you the story myself, below, in case you don’t feel like going to Genesis 38 because maybe you’ve gotten comfortable and your Chumash or Tanach is not within reach. If you do remember the story, though, or have a Chumash or Tanach at hand, there’s no need to read the rest of this postscript…

Judah ben-Israel had three sons with the daughter of Shua: Er, Onan, and Shelah. To Er, the oldest, Judah married Tamar of Timneh, daughter of Shem, who lived in Timneh, where Judah had his sheep sheered. Tamar was not only the most righteous woman alive, but also the most gorgeous.

Er, however, was kind of a schmuck. Fearing that pregnancy would ruin Tamar’s beauty, Er took measures not to get her pregnant, and God killed him for his evilness. As was customary, Judah’s next-oldest son, Onan, married her. Onan, fearing the same thing as Er, spilled seed like Er had, and God killed him, too. Now Judah had only one son left—Shelah. Judah was scared he’d lose Shelah if Shelah married Tamar, so he sent Tamar home to her father’s house in Timneh to live as a widow, telling her that Shelah wasn’t old 184

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enough yet to be married, but that when he came of proper age, Tamar would be sent for, and
then
she could marry him.

A long time passed—Shelah grew up, Judah’s wife died—and Tamar was still living as a widow. She realized Judah wouldn’t let Shelah marry her, and the next time news came to Timneh that Judah would be passing through to check on his sheep-shearers, Tamar donned the veil of a harlot and stood by the crossroads. Judah approached and, not recognizing Tamar (good, thick veil), asked her to consort. She asked what he was offering. He offered her a goat, but he had no goat on him. She said it was a deal, but she needed collateral until she got the goat. The collateral she needed, she explained, was his signet, his wrap, and his staff. Judah agreed.

The two consorted.

Tamar disappeared into the night with the collateral, removed her veil, and returned to her father’s house. When Judah went home, he sent his man to pay Tamar the promised goat and get back his signet, wrap, and staff. Judah’s man went to Timneh, asked after