The problem is that he was life-size, Jelly. Do you remember he was life-size? The problem is that he had crazy long arms, and he was tougher than anyone, and sad, and smart, and too romantic, but still he was life-size, when he was alive, and I just can’t get that to come across on the page. All that he is now’s “Nakamook” or “Benji” or “Benji Nakamook,” larger than life or smaller than life, overly petty or overly noble, overly thoughtful or overly driven, not quite human or all too human, destined by his current state of representation to provide shallow lessons, to suffer shallow ironies, to die as an algorithm, wholly comprehensible, a Goliath of Gath where should be a David, a figure where should stand a boy.
And maybe that’ll still be the case if you tell me what happened once you got to the Nurse’s—I don’t know what happened, you’re the only one who knows, and my problem, in the end, might have nothing to do with my lack of information, and everything to do with my limited skills as an author—but The Instructions is finished, or nearly finished—I can’t do it much longer, it’s turning me ugly (or I guess, from where you stand: uglier)—and Benji’s last best shot at being remembered properly—my last best shot at rendering him accurately, as the person we loved… I won’t even be able to take that shot if you decide not to help me. And all the readers of The Instructions, of whom there’ll be millions, will proceed to make total, simple sense of our friend.
On bruised, purple knees,
Gurion ben-Judah
11-17
When I entered the nurse’s office, Benji was half-asleep at the desk, trying and failing to open a mint-tin. I said his name.
He said, “You’re a dream.”
I said, “You’re a dream, baby.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” he said.
I kissed his ear.
“Dreaming,” he said.
I pinched the ear.
“Okay,” he said.
I sat across the desk from him and opened the tin. The tin contained pills. I asked him what he wanted. He told me the spedspeed, the blue ones: crush them. I pushed aside the blotter to expose the steel desk and turned the pills to powder under the tin. From the powder, I cut lines with the edge of a postcard advertising flu-shots. I cut them the size I’d seen in the movies; the length of a cigarette, thick as a bicpen. “What is a chazer?” Benji said, like Tony Montana, and made a cough-laugh noise.
I halved the lines.
“Say goodnight to the bad guy.”
I halved them again, and rolled up a dollar, and helped him to hold it. He snorted two lines, took a breath, swallowed hard, did another two lines, took hold of my hand with his good one and frowned. I went around the desk and we started making out, but his mouth was bitter and he wouldn’t let me kiss it, so I did some lines and we were even and kissed.
A few minutes later, we were both a little sweaty, and our skin was tingling. The air tasted sweet.
“We’re fine,” I said.
Benji told me the nurse smoked; he’d seen him sneak out to the lot with Miss Pinge. I rifled through Clyde’s desk, found a fresh pack of menthols inside a first-aid kit inside of a file-drawer. Matches in the cellophane. We ashed in a watercup.
“We’re fine,” I said again.
“Right now,” Benji said. “Right this minute we’re fine. It’s not gonna last. We’ll get sent to different schools. We’ll never see each other. It’ll sound a lot worse when we’re done being high.”
“We’ll see each other sometimes.”
“Your mom won’t let you.”
“I can sneak away sometimes.”
“It won’t be enough. It’s not enough now.”
“Isn’t that good? To be enough would mean we—”
“But there shouldn’t be obstacles. It should fail to be enough despite a lack of obstacles. That’s the happy ending. Don’t get con-fused. This one’s fucked. Why did we do this?”
“Boystar hurt Main Man. Botha grabbed Gurion. Slokum had it coming for years. Once we rodneyed Botha, we were already fucked. All we could lose was the chance to act without anything to lose. Aren’t you glad we hurt the right people? And orange you glad I didn’t say banana?”
Benji didn’t smile. “There’s always something to lose,” he said. “There’s always something left to get damaged.”
He lit two more cigarettes, handed one over, said, “I’m finished with Gurion. Over him. Done.”
“He’s your closest friend.”
“You’re my closest friend.”
“Except for me,” I said.
He told me about the conversation you’d had. He said you’d betrayed him to protect Josh Berman, then lied about it.
I defended you. I said you loved him and you did what you thought you had to do at the time. (I don’t doubt that, even now, but your love back then, as now—though I didn’t know it then—was irrelevant.) I made a point of telling him you sent me, too. I told him the first thing you did when you returned to the gym was send me to him, and now we were there, high and smoking in school in love. Who else had ever gotten to be where we were?
He said that he wished we could run away together. It wasn’t a proposal; he said it wistfully. We’d already talked about running away, and why it wouldn’t work. Just the day before, we’d had the conversation. Benji’d stabbed himself with a pen and I’d passed out. Botha’d sent us to the Nurse’s; we’d dawdled in the hallway, discussed the possibility, the impossibility. We didn’t have money or transportation or places to stay, though it wasn’t finally those things which kept us from doing it: those things, with luck, could be overcome. We could have, for example, learned to be pickpockets or, failing that, conned or mugged people—Benji was strong and both of us tricky. And once we had money, we could stay at motels, pay the right people to get us our rooms, and sleep all day and steal all night, DO NOT DISTURB cards hanging on our doorknobs, sneaking in and out to avoid the manager, ordering our pizzas in deep parental voices, telling the delivery guys that mom was in the shower.
What stopped us was the likelihood that we’d get caught eventually, that we’d have to last seven years on the run, til I was eighteen; once we got caught, there was no way my parents would let us near each other. Better to stay in the Cage, we’d decided; tossing notes, stealing glances, hanging out alone fifteen minutes a day between the end-of-school tone and start of detention. Plus there were weekends. Plus after school sometimes. My parents were nice, just loud and spastic and a little bit paranoid; they’d like Benji when they met him; I’d convince Ruth to tell them he shouldn’t be in the Cage; I’d tell them I was in the Cage, what was wrong with the Cage? did they think I was hateful for being in the Cage? And I’d stop with the biting and the mouthing off; they’d let us hang out. They would. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad at all. Not only couldn’t we run away and make it, but there was no good reason to run away, it turned out. So we went to Nurse Clyde’s, he sprayed Benji’s wound, covered it in gauze, and gave me some orange juice. He sent us back to the Cage with a pass we didn’t need, and we went to the gym, out the pushbar door, and we killed what remained of the schoolday outside, walking to the beach and kissing in the sand, getting too cold and un-tarping a boat that was up on a trailer parked in the lot, crawling inside, kissing some more, smoking stolen cigarettes to catch our breaths, and a round or two of slapslap we each tried to lose.
That’s why Benji said he wished we could run, there in Nurse Clyde’s. Because none of that could ever happen again. Even if Aptakisic stayed open, we’d be expelled, sent to different schools, and nothing would be able to convince my parents that Benji was okay to hang out with after that. That’s what he was saying.
I told him that your plan might work, though. To be clear: I was sure that your plan would work. I completely believed in you, but I told Benji “might” instead of “would” because I didn’t want to argue; I felt too good. I said, “We’ll all just say that Gurion did it, and Gurion will say that Gurion did it, and we’ll all get a pass.”
“The ex-Shovers’ll ruin it,” Benji said.
“How?” I said.
“Like snakes,” said Benji.
“How like snakes?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“So how can you be sure?”
“They’re snakes,” he said, “and they’re following a snake. Can you hand me that postcard?”
I handed him the postcard. “They’re following Gurion.”
“No,” Benji said, cutting lines from the pile. “They’re just scared of Gurion. The second he can’t hurt them, they’ll fuck him over. Berman’ll find a way.”
“It’s better for them to do what Gurion says.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I doubt they’ll see that— Dollar?” he said. I gave him the dollar. His eyes were so shiny. “They’re too fucking stupid. It doesn’t matter anyway.” He snorted a line. “I don’t give a fuck anyway. Not about them. Not about Gurion. I’m not following him anywhere. I haven’t been following him. You want one?… You sure?” He snorted another. “Cause the thing is he didn’t ‘do it.’ All of us ‘did it.’ At least I did. And I won’t—glah! This tastes bad.” He showed me a finger, leaned to the side, spit into the wastebasket next to the desk. “I’m sorry. That was gross. Are you icked?”
“I’m not icked,” I said. “What were you just saying, though? All of us did it and you won’t what?”
“I won’t rat him out. That’s all I was saying. Not to save myself. I did what I did because I wanted to do it, and that’s what I’ll say to the cops.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I do,” Benji said. “Of course I do. If I don’t say anything, and everyone else says ‘Gurion did it,’ staying silent’s the same as backing their word, and I’ll profit like them. I’m not gonna owe Gurion anything.”
“You’re not gonna save him from anything, either.”
“I said, ‘Fuck him,’” he said. “I don’t care about him. I don’t, Jelly. Or at least I shouldn’t. I know that much.”
“You’ll hurt yourself for no good reason.”
“I’ll owe nothing to anyone. That’s a good reason. I’m done owing people for shit I didn’t ask for.”
“What about me?”
“I was just about to say—”
“You’re making me cry.”
He wasn’t exactly. I felt like I was crying, but I wasn’t really crying. I wasn’t gasping, there weren’t any tears, my nose didn’t run. Just this tension inside of my temples. A pressure. It hurt.
“I was just about to say that I’ve got an idea.”
His idea was that since we couldn’t run away, we should stay where we were for as long as we could. He said we should get in the Quiet Room and hide inside the big cabinet. He painted this whole fantasy about the school being shut down. He said that once you’d surrendered, the cops would sweep the school, and after that, the school would be shut down, at least for a little while. He said that if we could manage to stay hidden til the sweep was over, the school would be ours to roam around and make out in. There was food in the cafeteria, cigarettes on the desk, and surely more to be plundered in the desk of Pinge, in the lockers of skids whose combos we’d find—Benji’d seen the binder—in the vaunted hutch of Hector. He said that he thought we could last for weeks, unless they re-opened the school, in which case we could give running away a shot, since maybe—if we were lucky—we’d already be presumed dead, so no one would look for us, and staying on the run would be that much easier.
It sounded great. Not just great, but perfect, really. It sounded like a pipedream. I didn’t believe that Benji believed it was possible. I thought he was just trying to get me to stop non-crying, to press up against me inside of a cabinet, and maybe to work a hide-from-the-cops-type seduction. I saw nothing wrong with any of that. I wanted to feel better, wanted to be romanced into pressing against him, had wanted to press against him even without such romancing, and above all, I saw that it would buy us some time in which I could convince him not to incriminate himself. I was sure I could convince him.
Even better than that, when we finally came out, I’d tell my parents a story about Benji having protected me from all the craziness going down in the school. I’d tell them that as soon as Benji saw that things were getting dangerous, he brought me to the Nurse’s and put me in the cabinet, and got inside the cabinet and didn’t lay a hand on me, but stood at the ready to protect me from attackers. They’d know he was noble; they’d be endlessly grateful. We’d be allowed to see each other.
“I love your idea,” I told him. “Let’s go.”
He said, “Ladies first,” swept his arm at the Quiet Room.
I called him a dork, but stood up, started going.
That’s when Beauregard came in from Main Hall. “Gurion says to bring you,” Beauregard said.
“Where?” Benji said. He sat back down.
“Up by the entrance. The scholars are here.”
“So what?” Benji said.
“They’ll come through the barricade and we’ll join into them. Then we’re gonna walk to meet some other ones.”
“Who’s we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is Berman going?”
“I don’t know,” Pate said. “He stayed in the gym with the other Shovers. He said they’ll join us once the scholars break the barricade, but they keep backing out of plans, so who knows?”
Benji said, “What do you think?” to me.
“I think I want to hide,” I said.
“Maybe it’s better if you don’t,” he said. “If it’s gonna work out, I mean.”
“If you’re gonna get in trouble, I want to hide. I want more time with you.”
“Maybe I’ll stay quiet.”
“Maybe?” I said. “Maybe’s not good enough.”
“I know,” he said. “Let me think,” he said. He coughed, grabbed his throat. It was totally fake. I remember what it looked like, the color of his tongue, the back of his tongue, blue from the spedspeed—he stuck out his tongue. It was totally fake. If I knew it then, though, I didn’t suspect what he was up to. Sometimes things like that—they look so fake, you assume they must be real.
“Would you get me a water?” he asked me. “I just want to think a second.”
I took his glass off the desk and went to the Quiet Room, turned on the tap, heard Pate shout, “Don’t!” and the door shut behind me. Benji leaned against it. I couldn’t get out. Through the safetyglass I watched him reach for a chair, wedge it under the knob, then go toward Pate, who was lying on the floor, clutching at his knees. Benji said he was sorry—I saw his mouth form the words—and then he turned to me, told me, “I’m coming back,” and I remember the sound, though I couldn’t have heard it, not through the glass, and Benji grabbed a chair and threw it into Main Hall, and then he grabbed another chair and went out the door. One chair he wedged beneath the knob in Main Hall, the other he brought to the gym as a weapon. You already know that. There isn’t much else I can tell you.
Sometimes I don’t like him for having said he’d come back; sometimes it seems to make him a liar. It doesn’t, of course—he had no idea, he was no more clairvoyant than he was suicidal—but that’s how it seems sometimes. Plus he does keep coming back, though, doesn’t he, Gurion? Sometimes I even like that. Mostly I don’t. I can’t fall in love. All the boys who remain in the world are so weak.
I certainly can’t tell you what finally provoked him. Even ignoring that he was high on two drugs, Benji had always been a complicated boy. On reflection it seems that he might have been planning to lock me in the Quiet Room before Pate got there, but maybe he hadn’t been; maybe the news of what was happening outside led him to believe that your plan could work if he could stop Berman from somehow thwarting it. Or maybe the opposite; maybe he thought that your plan wouldn’t work if he attacked Berman, and he wanted it to fail. Or it could be that he wanted you to succeed, but he wanted to keep Berman from being a par
t of that success. Or maybe it had nothing to do with you at all, and he took what he saw to be his last chance to exact his vengeance on a snake who’d shot him and jumped on his back at the end of the battle.
What’s weird is I don’t even know what you’d prefer to believe. If you were a normal human being, you’d feel vindicated thinking that Benji’s last gesture might have been born of something other than hate for you. But through it all, and after all, you’ve been and remained the same Gurion Maccabee, enmity’s most religious celebrant. The possibility that your best friend’s dying wish might not have been to damage you—might even have been to protect you—probably wrecks you inside just as well as the others.
At least one can hope.
The first time you finish any truly great book that isn’t the Torah, you remember the end the best.******* You remember that event Y followed event X. You recall Y followed X because Y, though unpredictable, was also inevitable, given X’s nature, and given the patterns established by the author (between A and B, J and K, R and S…).******** You may even remember the sweep of the book; how A, itself, led eventually to Y, how each of the interceding events (B through X), if not wholly necessary to give rise to Y, worked to grant Y the resonance sufficient to cause you to supply the book its (unwritten) Z, which must not only follow as inevitably from Y as did B from A, or R from Q, but must, paradoxically, unmake sense (if the book is to be other than moralist preaching) of all the above-described causal relations, revealing they weren’t inevitable at all.