The Instructions (60 page)

I stared at these lines for a couple of minutes, then noticed the clock read 10:07—eight minutes til bedtime—and saved the document, shut down my computer, washed up and brushed, and got into bed. I lay there fake-reading Dostoevsky’s
Adolescent
, which Flowers had given me a couple weeks before.

My parents came in at 10:21. My dad thumbed my bookspine and told me he liked
Notes From Underground
better. My mother said Dostoevsky was an antisemite, and they each kissed my forehead, then went to their bedroom.

Ten minutes later I retrieved ammo and a pennygun from my Relics & Armaments Lockbox. Then I cut the lights and pulled my hood on. I set my chair before the open window and waited on my knees to blind the vandal.

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ADAM LEVIN

9

SOPHISTRY

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

6:00 a.m.–Interim

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And there was night, and there was morning, Wednesday.

Wednesday didn’t take as long as Tuesday.

My mom came into my room at 6:00 and pressed her chin to my forehead to wake me. “I have already turned your alarm off,”

she said. “Sleep late today, but not in this chair. Why are you in this chair? Why is this chair set in front of the window? Get in your bed.” She was holding my pennygun.

My neck pinched when I turned and I remembered the vandal, saw that I’d failed to be vigilant.

I’ve got ISS, I said.

“Do not snap at your mother, who will drive you to school.

Get under the blanket and bless your aba when he comes.” She dangled my pennygun by the firing pouch. “I will hide it,” she said, “but where?”

My schoolbag.

She put it in my schoolbag. “Sleep now,” she said.

I shut my eyes and pushed my face in a pillow. Soon I heard metal scraping flint by the doorway, then an exhalation.

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Into the pillow I said, Judges love your voice. Wilmette will cower.

My father said, “You’re a good son.” He stepped into the room to ash in the wastebasket. “No more fistfights.”

I said, I can’t sleep when you’re watching. Intimidate Wilmette.

I love you.

“I love you, too.”

I slept four hours and woke up angrier than the last time.

My mom wasn’t in the kitchen or the office, so I ran down to the basement. I found her in desert fatigues, in the punching bag circle. She’d set it up when I was still a baby. There were seven bags, all heavies, and the circle’s diameter was ten feet. The bags, five feet tall, hung by eighteen-inch chains from a nine-foot ceiling.

You forget about me? I said.

“That is a stupid question,” she said. “Would you like to exercise?”

I’m late, I said.

She set the heavies in motion and started weaving and jumping and throwing blows while I tried to stay angry, watching her. The object of the exercise was to land as many blows as possible without being struck by the bags as they swung. It was a much easier exercise for me than for her because I fought from a squatty, wrestley stance, and was closer to the ground to begin with—I could duck any or all of the bags at even the lowest points of their arcs without dropping to my knees, which meant I could pop back up and deliver a worthy blow without 555

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having to regain my feet. My mom was tall, though, and her stance was the gawkiest, most uncomfortable-looking fighting stance anyone has ever seen. That was because of her neck. It was long and vulnerable-looking and had no wrinkles or horizontal lines on it at all. If she turned her head, even a little bit, tendons appeared and the hollowed area within the clavicle got deeper. My father called her neck
striking
whenever he’d kiss it, and that was a little bit poetic of him: if you were her enemy, the likelihood was high that you would strike first at her neck.

My mom’s fighting style was built to increase that likelihood, to make her neck even more difficult to resist. She’d accentuate the illusion of her neck’s vulnerability in every possible way, not only by using the gawky fighting stance—tiptoed and stiff, her shoulders back so the blades were almost touching, she’d bend slightly forward at the waist and keep her hands open at her sides the way Christian saints do in paintings—but by tipping her chin a few degrees higher than normal and swallowing as often as possible. If she knew in advance that she’d come across an enemy, she’d pin her braids up in a pile to cut down on the thickening and foreshortening effects the ropy shadows would otherwise create. She wore lots of V-necks, too.

If the enemy didn’t know my mom, he couldn’t possibly suspect the vulnerability was a fakeout; encountering the long, seemingly unprotected neck, he was as close to dead as an insect giving witness to the bright white promise of warmth in a bug-zapper’s coil. He would attack my mom’s neck, and because she 556

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was expecting exactly that, she could and would lay into him with a kind of suddenness that, even if he remained conscious afterward, would leave him too stunned to get up. And then she would kill him. Unless he was me. I’d only ever gone at her neck once—she put me on my back so fast I thought the ceiling was the floor. And that was when I was six, when she’d still handicap for my height by sparring on her knees. She put me on my back that fast, and she couldn’t even use her legs.

She landed nine blows—one to each of five bags, and two to the remaining two—before one of the bags caught her, in mid-roundhouse, on the outer right thigh. If that bag were an actual enemy, the hit to the thigh might have sealed her doom, but at the same time, if that bag were an actual enemy, he would not have kept swinging back and forth while my mother slayed his buddies. He would have been lying dead at her feet from the toe to the windpipe she’d delivered thirty seconds earlier.

“I will make you breakfast,” she said, bobbing and weaving as the bags swung dumbly toward exhaustion—it would be minutes before they were still.

I’m late, I said.

She ducked and bobbed.

Mom! I said. I grabbed a bag and pulled it back.

“‘Ma-ahm,’” she said. She never liked the word
mom
. She thought it sounded like the name of a puppet. Mom the puppet. She slipped through the gap I’d made and tugged at my hair. “I did not know you were in a rush to sit in ISS,” she said.

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I said, If I show up too late, I’ll have to serve it tomorrow.

Don’t you have clients to see?

“It is Wednesday. I had class this morning, so I cancelled class. I had one client, and I rescheduled with him. I did this so you would not have to sit in ISS all day—I know you do not like ISS. And I will not allow your principal to put you in ISS

tomorrow. You will wash up and I will make you breakfast and then I will drive you to school for the second half of the day.

Why did you fall asleep on a chair by the window holding a projectile weapon?”

I said, How will you stop Brodsky from giving me another ISS?

She said, “Uch” = Tch = “That is such a stupid question that I am going to walk up the stairs without saying anything else and cook an omelette.”

She walked upstairs and cooked an omelette.

On the way to my room, I opened the front door and checked the stoop. The stoop was clear, so I went outside and did a perimeter-check. Nothing. I hadn’t missed my chance to blind him, whoever he was, and the omelette was perfect, not a foldover, and not the kind they make at diners where the ingredients go on top either, but a fully integrated cheddar and tomato one like chefs cook at brunches in hotel lobbies. It was a delicious omelette, and eleven o’clock, and a forty-minute drive—just a half day’s wait til detention, June.

In the car, we listened to National Public Radio. There was 558

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a long, sad story about a family whose house got bulldozed by the IDF in Gaza in 2003, and then a shorter one on Drucker vs Wilmette. In the second story, my father’s name got mentioned more than anyone’s, even Drucker’s. NPR loved my father. At least three times a year, he’d participate in on-air panels as their Constitutional law expert.

My mother did not love NPR. She said, “These mamzers. One story about the violent Jews of Israel, and then another about the ethical Jewish defender of Constitutional rights.” She drew fire into the end of her cigarette. “This seems like balanced press for the Jews, yes, Gurion? The balance is an illusion. In the first story, it is the bad Jew, they are telling us, who harms those who would destroy him. And in the second story, it is the good Jew who protects those who would destroy him. It is the same argument both times: the Jews should let themselves be destroyed. I could kill them for how they use your father.”

No one uses Aba, I said.

“You are right,” she said. “I spoke with too much force.”

She kissed her hand three times—loudly, rapidly—and touched the crown of my head with it, and then we were quiet.

I kept trying to fix my eyes on a single tree along the highway so it wouldn’t blur when we passed it, but all of them blurred.

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My mom had lit a cigarette just before we pulled into the Aptakisic 559

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parking lot and was still smoking it on the way to the front entrance when she tried handing me a paperback. I was spaced out, looking at the school’s outer wall. A WE DAMAGE WE

bomb spanned six bricks above the bushes. I still didn’t know what exactly it meant, but it had to mean
something
, and I liked that. I could see my mom’s hand insisting with the book in my left periphery, but my eyes were doing a nice soft-focus on the bomb and I didn’t want to break the trance.

My mom wagged the book and the pages flapped, sharpening everything. “To read in ISS,” she told me.

Thank you, I said.

I took it from her hand. It was Philip Roth’s
My Life as a
Man
, one of his only three books that I hadn’t read yet, unless you counted the autobiographies, which I didn’t; I was determined never to read those. I didn’t want to know what was true and what wasn’t when it came to Roth, or any other writer of fiction I liked for that matter, but him especially. As long as the information I’d learned about him and what he believed did not come directly from him, I could ignore or embrace it at will, and it couldn’t then interfere with the fictions he made—at least not that much—nor with what others made of those fictions, which was also important. Sometimes at least.

I said to my mom, I thought you said Roth was an antisemite.

“I have never said that,” she said.

We stopped before the doors of the front entrance so she could finish her cigarette.

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I remember, though, I said. I said, You argued with Aba about it once. You said, ‘Roth is bad for the Jews.’

“He is,” she said, “bad for the Jews. But that does not make him an antisemite. He loves the Jews.”

But you argued—

“Ask Aba what I argued. You misunderstood. That can happen when you hear conversations you were not meant to hear. In the meantime, I just gave you a book by Philip Roth that I liked when I was younger, a book I rushed to the bookstore to buy for you this morning while you were asleep so that you would have something to read in ISS, so—”

So thank you, I said.

“You are welcome,” she said.

That is when Jerry the Deaf Sentinel came outside. He said,

“Ma’am, I have to let you know that there is no smoking permitted on school grounds.”

“Good morning,” my mother said, flashing teeth. She flicked ashes and took a drag.

Jerry waited til she took another drag to say, “I’m going to have to ask you to extinguish your cigarette.”

“Very shortly,” she said. “First I must finish it.”

“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the school grounds, Ma’am.”

“And now you have done so,” said my mother.

“Ma’am—”

“Sir,” my mother said, “I do not know who you are, or what 561

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authority that beaten felt crest on your pocket is meant to represent, but I am confident—I am
certain
—that I am not within the, the, the—what is the word, Gurion?”

Reach
, I said.

“Not
reach
,” she said. “There are more syllables.”

Jurisdiction
is too fancy, I said. I said, You want to say
jurisdiction
but
reach
has more force.
Reach
sounds like
punch
.

“Pow!” she shout-whispered, mock-swinging a fist at my chin.

“Ma’am—” said Jerry.

“I am certain, sir,” said my mother, “that I am not within the
reach
of whatever authority it is that you represent. Stop bothering us.”

And Jerry said, “I really don’t know how to respond to that, ma’am.” His whole face was twitching, but especially this one jumpy muscle under his left eye. He didn’t seem angry, though, just confused.

“Maybe you should let it go,” my mom said. She said it in her concerned voice, the same voice in which she must have said the same thing a thousand times before to clients.

“I’d like to let it go,” Jerry said, “but I’ve gotta do
some
thing.”

He kicked his left heel with the toe of his right boot, concentrated on the pavement.

My mom exhaled some smoke. “How would you usually respond?” she said.

“There’s no precedent,” Jerry said. He raised his head, and I saw his eyes twinkled a little. The muscle under his left eye had gone 562

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still, as if the twinkling were an outcome the earlier jumping had manufactured. It was not entirely surprising to me, the way Jerry was acting. My mom is seriously pretty, and not the way everyone else thinks his mom is pretty because she is his mom and he gets confused because she is nice to him, but truly pretty, and in an uncommon way, at least in America; to be addressed by her at all, let alone in the concerned voice, makes people weak, even me sometimes, and I see her every day. “I’m Jerry,” Jerry said.