The Instructions (33 page)

The next day, I revolved my head a conspicuous number of degrees to look behind me. This broke the Face Forward rule, but Botha was spaced out and didn’t see, and neither did the teachers at the cluster, who were busy grading papers.

Across the room, directly behind me, was Nakamook. Jelly’s and Mookus’s carrels were along the same wall. The problem was that all their backs were to me. Everyone’s back was to everyone 300

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else because of how the carrels were arranged to face the walls.

Still, I stared at Nakamook’s back for no less than two minutes and none of the robots noticed. I thought of throwing something at Nakamook’s neck so that he’d turn around, but whatever it could have been would have had to be heavy enough to travel the length of the Cage while also being light enough not to hurt Nakamook, which didn’t leave me any options other than a very compressed ball of paper bound with Scotch tape, which would be inaccurate to throw, noisy to crumple, and also, since it would have to pass the teacher cluster in flight, too large and white to sneak under the robots’ radar. Plus then there’d be this ball of paper on the floor.

Having thought, for the second time in two days, that I’d found a chink, and then, for the second time in two days, finding that I hadn’t, I started getting angry that I’d ever looked, and angrier still that I’d ever had to look. My friends were sitting just yards away, but I couldn’t communicate with any of them openly… Rather, I
could
communicate with any of them openly—all I’d have to do was use my voice—but I would get in trouble if I did so. And that I was expected to accept that was…

what? An insult. One of a thousand that went with being in the Cage. And I
did
accept it. All of us did. That was the thing. That was the thing that started to eat at me, even though I didn’t yet understand it. This is the thing that was starting to eat at me, even though I didn’t understand it yet: In trying to find a chink with which to game the Cage, I, like the rest of them, was 301

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playing along with the Cage, accepting the insult, accepting—in action (or lack thereof), if not in thought—that the Cage possessed the authority to lay down rules = Even when the actions that would get us in trouble were good, human actions—e.g., talking to friends, making eye-contact, searching out something other than solitude and blankness—we did our best to stay out of trouble. And why? For what? They didn’t teach. They didn’t even
teach
. If someone were teaching, it might have been different; if you had to be quiet so as not to interfere with a teacher’s lessons, that, although stifling and totally unlike the way I’d been schooled at Schechter and Northside, would at least have made a little sense, but quiet
at all times
? Quiet at all times, though no one was speaking, let alone about anything you’d be better off knowing, plus always facing forward,
away
from the teachers? The Cage Manual said that students in the Cage were there to learn through “self-direction,” but all that meant was that since we were all in different grades, with different abilities, there was no way for the teachers to give us group lessons. What they did was give us “individually tailored” writing assignments and readings, and then “tutored” us on an “as-needed basis” at the teacher cluster. If you had a question, you could raise your hand and wait to get called on, but since the teacher cluster was in the center of the room and your back was to the cluster while you faced forward, you couldn’t tell if the teachers had seen your raised hand; until they looked up and called on you to join them, you just had to wait, arm held high. Newer students often tried 302

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to groan the floor inside their tape-line to get the teachers to look in their direction and see their raised hands, but this drove people crazy, teachers and students both, and Botha called it Aggressive Squeaking, and Aggressive Squeaking broke the Quiet At All Times rule. Those words: Aggressive Squeaking! They got me explosive, and just before third period on that second day of my search for a chink, I couldn’t stop hearing them inside my head, Aggressive Squeaking Aggressive Squeaking, and I probably would have exploded by fourth, but my nose beat me to it; my nose had to sneeze.

I didn’t like anyone to see me sneezing, so I revolved to face forward and sneezed into my carrel, and Botha said, “Gehbless you,” and I thought: God damn you! and within half a second, I’d discovered the chink and how to exploit it, for as soon as Botha had said “Gehbless you,” I’d revolved in my chair, breaking the Face Forward rule once again, and I found that he was just as spaced out as before. Despite my sneeze and his automatic blessing, he wasn’t even looking in my direction. Neither were the teachers.

Sneezing drew no real attention.

It took me less than five minutes to work out a sound-code. At lunchtime, I handed it out to those concerned. I would cough when I wanted Benji’s attention, fake-sneeze when I wanted Vincie’s attention, clear my throat to signal Mookus, pop my spine-nodes for Jelly, sniffle for Leevon, and wheeze for Mangey.

Without knowing sign language, there wasn’t much we could 303

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say once we were facing each other, so we resorted to gestures that didn’t mean what they seemed to—we shook our fists, thumbed our front teeth, dragged fingers across our throats like knives—

yet performing these gestures, at least for a while, felt like a victory over the arrangement.

Within a few days of the sound-code’s inception, though, all of the Cage had caught on to its rudiments, and everyone likes to see rules get broken, so whenever I made a body noise, half the room would break the Face Forward rule to see what I’d do next, and Botha would notice and then he would yell and hand out some steps. Soon enough he figured out what I was doing—or at least he figured out that when I made a body noise, people got disarranged—and after that, I couldn’t even tongue-click or sigh in awe of a Philip Roth paragraph without getting shut down in booming Australian.

The most important thing, though—at least to me, at least at the time—was the new way that I learned to think about chinks: since they were spaces between rules, the more rules there were in an arrangement, the more chinks. Once the robots found out that a chink was being exploited, they’d create a new rule to fill the space between the two rules containing the chink, but the new rule never filled the space completely—there is always space between rules—and so what happened was that every time a new rule got shoved between two old ones, two new spaces would arise, two new chinks, one on either side of the new rule, so that 304

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chink

Rule 1 ^ Rule 2

would become

chink chink

Rule 1a ^ Rule 1b ^ Rule 2

The two new chinks would be much narrower than the one they’d replaced, but still they would be chinks. So the more that exploited chinks got filled with rules, the more chinks there were.

It was hard, however, to keep finding the chinks, and it was even harder than that to exploit them in a way that was fun.

Once the sound-code failed, we tried a time-code, i.e., we agreed that at certain times we’d revolve to face each other. Benji and I, for example, agreed that we would revolve at every elev-enth, seventeenth, thirty-first, and fifty-third minute of the hour, whereas Vincie and I would revolve at the second, twenty-seventh, and forty-fifth minute, and Benji and Vincie at the fifth, thirty-ninth, and fifty-eighth minute. We arranged revolve-minutes with Main Man and Jelly and Leevon and Mangey also, but after a week the time-code died. This was partly because people would get confused and revolve at the wrong minute or face the wrong person, which caused a mutual and reflexive loss of faith (as Main Man put it: “Because when I revolted you did not revolt with me, I became revolted, and I revolted less, which got you revolted, so you revolted less”), but it was mostly because of how 305

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using the time-code felt too much like obeying the rules. With the sound-code, I’d been able to give the revolve signal whenever I felt like it, while with the time-code, it was all arranged in advance, like recess. Recess could be good because, unless you were banned from it like I was, you got to go outside. But at the same time, you only got to go outside when the arrangement let you go outside—at recess. It is true we picked the minutes for the time-code ourselves, but because they had to be decided on in advance, it was never as fun as it should have been. It was just another arrangement. Like recess.

A day or two after the time-code disappeared, we replaced it with a random three-code. Whenever three events of a certain type occurred, two of us would be signalled to act. Mine and Vincie’s event, for example, was rising = every third time anyone rose from their chair, like to go to the bathroom or the nurse or the teacher cluster, Vincie and I would revolve and gesticulate.

Because the frequency of the three-part signals varied unpredictably, using the random three-code was a little bit more fun than using the time-code, but our revolving still depended on decisions we’d made in advance (we chose which events would elicit our responses), so there was no spontaneity (as there’d been with the sound-code). As well, and as with every other way we’d exploited the chinks, all we could manage in the way of communication was a gesture that, regardless of the movements of the hands comprising it, always meant the same thing:

“Look, I exist, and you exist, too; but for the fact that you are 306

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seeing me make it, this gesture is totally meaningless.”

Nonetheless, the random three-code stuck. We’d been using it for a month; the robots couldn’t crack it. Even while I stared down at the WE DAMAGE WE piece of paper Jenny Mangey had given me, I was waiting on a third floor-groan to signal that I should revolve and show Benji my swear, or maybe pump a pointer inside of my fist at him, but it was so boring, so desperately boring. If asked beforehand, I probably would have guessed that having fallen in love a couple hours earlier would’ve made this boredom a lot more tolerable, but the opposite was true, for now I was imagining how weak June would think me if she were to know how I sat there perpetually, hopelessly suffering.

On Flowers’s sound advice, dear scholars, to write in the cause of averting
your
boredom, I’ve avoided directly describing our hopelessness in favor of describing how we tried to fight it, but make no mistake: our methods all failed. Even those that seemed to succeed were failures—especially those. The sound-code, the time-code, the random three-code; what did they get us? How many times could you give your best friend the finger before it just quit being any fun at all? And how dumont was it to believe that doing so accomplished anything meaningful, let alone useful? Wasn’t to believe that but a way to be arranged? Maybe even the worst kind of arranged? The kind where you think you’re overcoming the arrangement, when, in fact, you’re serving it perfectly? Flipping a covert bird instead of screaming a curse instead 307

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of throwing a punch instead of throwing a rock? Revolving in a chair you might have otherwise swung? Cheering for underdogs and calling it action? Smirking at the powerful and calling it sub-versive? Embracing your meekness instead of getting strong? All day long we
coped
with the insults, with being insulted; we did what we could to avoid further insults. But that original insult—

the one I mentioned earlier, the one that took a while to really understand: that we were expected to accept all the insults the Cage dealt out, all of its rules; to accept that the Cage was allowed to deal them out, was the maker of rules, the
only
maker of rules, and rules, no less, that were only there to dominate us; only there to show us that the Cage made the rules—that one loomed, grew ever more evident, and even more powerful. And worst of all, we let its power grow; we
helped
its power grow. You can render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but if you don’t keep from Caesar that which is yours, Caesar will take some, and then take some more, and if you don’t put a stop to it, though you won’t lose everything—you
can’t
lose everything; there’s things he
can’t
take, at least one or two—a time will soon come when you’ll
think
you’ve lost everything, when you’ll think
all
is Caesar’s, and by then you’ll be too weak to take what’s yours back, too tired to remember what was yours to begin with, and you’ll end up, perversely, scheming for his leavings and, even more perversely, grateful when you get them.

The Cage was no Rome, nor Botha a Caesar, and if I had been a Yeshua I wouldn’t know to be ashamed, but the sound-code, 308

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the time-code, and the random three-code, all of our meaningless gesticulations—these were our schemes to get Botha’s leavings, and we were verging on grateful, at least I was. Ashamed is just grateful waiting to happen. You only taste your own dignity right before you puke it up.

My tongue was all sticky and dignified.

Fuck, I said.

A bunch of kids laughed.

“Who said that?” said Botha.

No one told.

I kept my head low, stared down at the WE DAMAGE WE

slip of paper. I felt a little better.

Then I felt a lot stupid. Why should I take pleasure in getting away with something that I should have been entitled to do to begin with?

Fuck it, I said. I said, I’m the one who said it. I could’ve fucken gotten away with it, too.

“Stap four for three curses,” Botha said. “That’s one detantion for Garrion Makebee. Two staps for speaking twice; that’s two thirds to a second. Have anything more to add, Mister Makebee?

Would you like another stap, a second detantion?”