The Instructions (4 page)

2. It is true that my head, like anyone else’s, contains my brain, and that my brain, like anyone’s, generates thoughts that, if unexpressed, cannot be accessed by anyone—including Adonai—but me. The idea, however, that my head-touch-triggered danger would arise because I wanted to protect my “one true sanctum” from “invaders” is patently false. I’d been exploding from head-touches since before I could remember; since the day I was born, according to my mother; since before I could make the (silly) leaps in symbology necessary to conclude that protecting my brain-case = guarding my unexpressed thoughts; since before I even knew that I
had
a brain.

3. There is no genetic or biological link between my mother’s “ocular neuroses” and my head-touch explosions. As my
Story of Stories
(p. 115) faithfully reports, my mother
learned
to guard her eyes zealously; she wasn’t born doing it.

And so, in sum: As a rule I’d get dangerous when my head got touched, and as a rule I’d use my right hand to hold a glass of water. The former fact bears mention because it is peculiar and because it has potentiated important events and decisions I’ve made, whereas the latter fact doesn’t bear mention (except to make this rhetorical point), for it isn’t peculiar and it hasn’t potentiated anything important. Both facts, however, are
simple
facts, in that they owe to chance, neurology, or the whim of Adonai, depending on the flavor of your reductive urges. Simple facts, good scholar, aren’t worthy of your disquisitions, not with so many complex ones at hand.

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“Socking it out with Ronrico Asparagus and spitting like an animal on the Janitor,” said Desormie. “Probably the Janitor said B.D. to him in a disparaging tone. That’s his new thing he calls people and to me it’s hilarious and ironic.”

“The janitor makes fun of your behavioral disorders?” Miss Pinge said. She should have put her hand on the back of her head, where the lizard brain sits and the alarms blasts out from, but she put it on her chest instead, and kept it there.

“Not Hector with the mop, Miss Pinge, ya big loony toon.

That FOB can’t hardly speaky the English. You think he knows what B.D. is? I’m talking about the Flunky’s little brother Mikey Bregman. The neatfreak kid. The Janitor. It’s his nickname. Get it? That’s why it’s so ironic. Cause he’s got the B.D. himself. The Janitor. Tch.”

“That’s not very funny,” Miss Pinge said. “Where are—”

“Hey, now, it’s the kid’s nickname,” said Desormie, “and there’s a reason for that and sometimes you gotta do as the Romans and sometimes you gotta let ’em reap what they sow, cause if you’re B.D. and you start saying B.D. in the disparaging tones? Then it’s just like with the n-word. You’re gonna get treated like you’re the n-word because you’re acting like someone who’s the n-word.

Law of the jungle. That’s all I’m saying. It’s the facts of life. These Cage students need to cultivate some intestinal fortitude and stop acting like they hate themselves because we know it’s not very mature and it’s probably why they got put in the Cage in the first place, which is also pretty ironic if you ask me, don’t you think?”

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“Where are Mikey and Ronrico?” Miss Pinge asked him.

Not a bad question.

Desormie chinned the air at me. He said, “Brodsky’s last email said this one fights, we bring him in separate from who he fought with.”

It was the first I’d heard of that policy.

Same with Miss Pinge. “Really?” she said = “That doesn’t seem right.”

“I do what Brodsky says,” Desormie said.

Miss Pinge handed him a Complaint Against Students Sheet.

Some people called it a CASS. It was the standard document for the STEP System. Cage students like me were outside the STEP system, even though everyone pretended we were in it.

If I’d been in the STEP system, I’d have been expelled by then.

So would at least half the rest of the Cage. You got expelled after three out-of-school suspensions. Those were OSS’s. You got an OSS after three in-school suspensions in the same semester, which were ISS’s. You got an ISS if you had four detentions for the same reason in one quarter. All they ever gave me was detentions and once in a while ISS’s.

Desormie’s auto-tinting eyeglasses were almost as big as labo-ratory goggles. He took them off and blew steam on the lenses.

Then he wiped the lenses on his shirt and put the glasses back on to read the standard document. He’d answered the CASS questions at least five times in front of me, but still he had to mouth the words of them as he went along. I noticed a red lint-string 36

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attached to his shirt-hem by static and I wanted it removed but it wouldn’t remove itself and I wouldn’t ever touch him, so I scratched an itch on my head and read the pervy stories in his face: He was a notorious de-pantser in the hallways of his grade school. The first time he went to the bathroom after eating beets, he looked in the toilet and thought he was dying, so he played with himself. His wife was scared of him was why he married her.

He thought
polack
was the Polish word for Polish person. That’s the story of his life that his face told. It was the story of a perv in the making. The story of a perv on the make.

And the story was true. He was always caressing between his tits when he talked to women and making girls who wore spandex tights sit in front during sit-ups and leg-stretches. It was all there in the mouth. Its top lip had a pointy edge. Its word-forming movements made it look like he was chewing food that he thought was gross but wouldn’t say was gross because it was impolite but he wanted you to know it was gross so he showed you—like the food was so bad he couldn’t hide the ugliness of his own mouth-actions so you were supposed to admire how polite he was for not
saying
anything. I hated him. And that’s not just an expression. I hated him the way the tongues of smart girls prefer bittersweet chocolate to milk. I hated him the way Jews endangered Jews and burning matter grabs oxygen. I hated him from the moment I met him, and at the moment I met him it was as if I’d always hated him. I hated him the way he hated me. Helplessly, I hated him. Without volition. And it is true 37

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that there were others as despicable as Desormie, even within the walls of Aptakisic, but I had to learn to hate those others.

They had to teach me how to hate them. Desormie was the only person I ever hated a priori. Our enmity was mystical.

Miss Pinge told me Brodsky was in a meeting. She said I’d have to wait. I was already waiting, but what she meant was I didn’t have to wait on my feet. To get that across, she stuck out her pointer and jabbed it back and forth. The jabbing was something Emmanuel Liebman had long ago taught me to call a blinker action. That label referred to the orange blinkers that were mounted on the tops of construction horses; the horse showed you where it was that you shouldn’t go, and the blinker showed you the horse. I.e., it showed you a showing. The jabbing of the finger was a blinker action because it was a pointing at a pointing.

It pointed at how the finger was pointing at the three fake-oak waiting-chairs next to the door.

I didn’t like it when people blinkered for me—it seemed condescend-ing—but I did like Miss Pinge, so I decided I’d wait just a three- (not a five-) count, before I revolved and went to the chairs. Before I’d even counted to two, though, something flat sailed over my shoulder, then landed with a clap on Miss Pinge’s desk. A wooden bathroom pass the size of a textbook.

“I was nice to give you that pass,” Pinge said. “It would’ve been nice of you not to throw it at me.”

“I threw it on the blotter,” said Eliza June Watermark.

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No one called her Eliza. They all called her June. I’d seen June around, but never close up. She was flat but so pretty. She sat before I did, and not in the middle chair. I didn’t know if I should sit next to her or sit so a chair was empty between us, so I tried to read her face, but I couldn’t read her face because she wasn’t bat-mitzvah yet—the stories wouldn’t tell. They weren’t available.

I did a quick eenie-meenie with my chin and the words inside my head so no one would know. I landed on
sit with the chair
between us
, then knew I didn’t want that, so I sat down next to her and asked why she was there. She said she was there for talking in Spanish.

I said, That’s racist.

June said, “Spanish. Class.” There were three slim gaps between the teeth of her top-row. She whispered, “Next stop, Frontier Motel.”

“Next stop, Frontier Motel,” was the first part of a rhyme people said to me on the bus, right before I’d get dropped off at the Frontier Motel. The rest of the rhyme was, “The place where Gurion’s fat black dad who fell dwells.” They thought I lived at the Frontier Motel, but I only got picked up and dropped off there.

I never knew what to do when I’d hear the rhyme because the guy they called my black dad was the motel owner, Flowers, a three-hundred-pound bachelor hoodooman with silvershot dreadlocks and a chrome-knobbed walking cane who’d written four novels he said cast spells. He said I shouldn’t read them; not because of the spells, but because he was my teacher, and 39

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his books would interfere. So I didn’t read them, because he was my teacher, and my father’s old friend. He was helping me to write my third work of scripture. I.e., he was helping me out with
this
work of scripture,
The Instructions
, although, at the time, I hadn’t known its title, let alone its true substance.

At the time, all I’d known was that it would be different from my first two scriptures—
The Story of Stories
and
Ulpan—
which I hadn’t needed help with from anyone at all, since they were exclusively concerned with my people, who I already knew how to speak to and about. My people, when I’d written those first two scriptures, were the only people I knew.

Apart from forbidding me to read his four novels, though, the only thing Flowers ever forbade was for me to portray him as a wise old black man who gave life-lessons to an Israelite boy, part lost-tribe or not, because, he said, that would signify wrong, and signifying was important to him, and since he wasn’t some kind of zealous forbidder, I knew it should be important to me.

And that was the reason I didn’t know what to do when people called him my black dad who fell. The first thing I’d think to do was violence, because they were making fun of him, but if I did violence then they could think I was doing violence because they called a black guy my dad and that it made me ashamed.

So violence would signify wrong. Plus I didn’t know who they were exactly—just that they sat up front with the bandkids. They might have even been the bandkids. So I didn’t do anything to them at all. Instead, I’d tell Flowers and he’d give me a book that 40

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was by someone else, or sometimes a root he’d tell me to chew.

The roots all tasted like chalk.

June didn’t say the black guy part of the bus-rhyme, but I was being nice to her, so it was suck of her to say any of it. I didn’t even know how she knew the rhyme—she wasn’t on my bus. She sneezed after she said it, though, and after she sneezed, I said God bless you. I didn’t really want to be mean to her anyway.

Desormie kept trying to talk to Miss Pinge while she typed.

“So,” he said.

Miss Pinge shrugged = “So what?”

He said, “I guess you’re recording attendance.”

Miss Pinge nodded = “Yes already.”

“I see you’ve got a system,” Desormie said. “You just sorta bring up the name of an absent kid on your spreadsheet, there—

Oh! Look at that. You don’t even have to type the whole name in. You just sorta type the first couple letters of the last name and then there’s like a box pops up you can select from… I see, sometimes it’s quicker to just type the whole name in so you don’t have to move your hand off the home-row of the keyboard there to use the mouse or the arrow-pad. There’s a coupla systems there, huh?

There’s the system you’re using, like in the computer, and then there’s the system you’re using of your own. If the kid’s last name is Yamowitz—wow, you’re already in the Y’s and it’s barely third period. As I was saying, if the kid’s name is Yamowitz—and what a crappy name!—I see you just sorta type in Y A and hit enter cause there aren’t any other kids with last names start with Y A 41

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in the box and you know that so you just hit enter and there’s the kid’s file, and then you hit shift-A. Absent! On the record.

There you go. I can respect your system. I
do
respect your system.

I am Luca Brasi and you are Don Vito Corleone and I am at your daughter’s wedding and your daughter’s wedding is the system you’re using. I like it. You know what I mean?”

I thought: If history’s taught us anything, it’s that any man can be killed.

That’s from
Part II
.

Miss Pinge stopped typing and tilted her head = “
Please
go away, Ron Desormie,” but Desormie thought = “Please continue, you interesting gym teacher.” He turned around and saw me watching him. Then he made his eyes wide at June and thumbed air at me = “Look at this intermittently disordered exploder who does not attend and is hyper and who thinks you want to sit next to him when what you really want is to sit in my lap.” He ran the thumb up and down his cleavage. Then he winked at June and turned back to Miss Pinge.

He said, “I bet there used to be an old system where you didn’t have those pop-up boxes and you had to type the entire name in.

How fast our technology moves. Jeez. Look at all those absents.”