The Instructions

  “What?” said my father. “The vandals what?”

  They always come back.

  “It is true,” my mother said.

  “Don’t encourage him, Tamar. He’s not joking, and neither should we joke. If you blind someone, Gurion, you think no one will ever bother us again? Because that would be a fantasy. They will always bother us. You will always be bothered by others. And if you act violently toward those who bother you today, then tomorrow, they will return the favor.”

  I’m—hiccup—stronger than them, I said.

  “You know what?” he said. “Let’s accept your baseless premise, for the sake of argument, and see where it takes us. So fine, you’re the strongest person in the world, no one can harm you, you can kick everyone’s ass, you’re safe… I’m not, though. Not me. Not safe. I can’t kick everyone’s ass. And your mom can’t either, believe it or not; not everyone’s. So imagine one day the father of someone you blinded, vengeance-hungry, gathers his friends together and, knowing you’re an immortal asskicker, he rationally—notice I’m not even bothering to quibble over whether someone acting on vengeful impulses can properly be called rational—this vengeful father, he rationally decides to come after me, or your mother—both of us, say, for an eye for an eye is not good enough for this fellow and his buddies, he wants a two-for-one—and you’re at school, busy fighting janitors and vegetables with padlocks when they come—what then? We’re both blind is what then, your mother and I. And that’s only if the man and his friends settle on the two-for-one exchange, and I don’t see why they should; if two-for-one is acceptable, if an-eye-for-an-eye goes out the window, why not an eye for a life, two lives even? Especially when the woman keeps getting up, cursing in Arabic, breaking noses—any vengeful shmo with half a brain would certainly worry how your mother might avenge herself later, no? And even if they didn’t have half a brain, the damage she brings to these attackers before they get to her eyes—this is damage for which they would seek even more vengeance. And so what? What happens? We’re dead is so what. You’ve effectively killed your parents is what happens. How’s that for a fantasy? You blind a vandal and get to be an orphan. Gurion ben-No One,” he said. “Is that what you want? No one around to stop you from burning down houses with your delinquent friends and going to jail? To sink like a fucking ball of lead, no one to obstruct you?”

  I wouldn’t, I said and hiccupped. I said, I wouldn’t let anyone kill you.

  My mother said, “We know. No one will kill us, Gurion. You won’t be an orphan. Your father has had a hard day.”

  “Please keep feeding the fire!” said my father. “Please undo everything I say to him!”

  “You are yelling, Judah.”

  “And you, Tamar, are not paying attention! You spoke to Avel Salt earlier, did you not? Your son is delusional. This is our fault.”

  “Our son is imaginitive. You, on the other hand, are as touchy as you always become whenever you have just made closing arguments, and this is making you delusional.”

  My father chewed a lip, turned away from my mother. My mother changed her posture. Good, I thought. Pinch him. Pinch him on the neck. Pinch him or reach out and thumb-stab his thigh. Instead she lit a cigarette and studied the cherry.

  My parents were fighting.

  “So tell me,” said my father. “You converted someone today?”

  Yes, I said.

  “And how is that possible?”

  I explained. Or I tried to. The more I talked, the worse the hiccups got. The worse the hiccups got, the more H I got. And I had to look at Seinfeld, which looked like disrespect—I could look at Seinfeld or I could look at my father, who my hiccups were annoying, who I didn’t want to look at, whose lips got twistier, whose nostrils got wider, whose eyes got squintier with each word I spoke.

  “Wow,” he said, once I’d finished explaining. “Wow!” he said. “I had no idea! Sabbatai Zevi and Shimon bar-Kokhba, Yeshua of Nazareth himself—how violently their bones must be quaking with jealousy. Your power to deceive yourself, Gurion—it’s unmatched. And that’s to say nothing of your ability to articulate your self-deceptions. Truly amazing. You keep it up, sonnyboy, you might actually be the end of us. And by ‘us’ I mean the Jews, of whom your girlfriend is one. Of course she is. Of course she’s Jewish. Your girlfriend is Jewish because she has a couple birthmarks and you’ve got a gift for casuistry.”

  And you’ll have the cops watch over your house because you’ve got a gift for bravery, I said.

  He pulled me from the couch and held me in the air, under the arms so we were eye-to-eye. He was giving me The Look of The End.

  “This is the gaze of someone you would do better to hide from,” he said, in a whisper so calm Bam Slokum would envy it. “Someone looks at you like this, no matter who it is, it always means the same thing. It is how I’ve been looking at you for the past ten minutes. Memorize this gaze, and the next time you encounter it, you’ll know to run in the opposite direction before you lose the use of your legs.”

  He set me down on the couch, onto my feet. Outside of daydreams, I had never seen him so dangerous, and I just stood there, slouching, on cushions, staring. How can I explain it? My father could have exploded and turned all of Chicago to dust at that moment, and though I, if he did explode, would have been ground zero, he was my father, and the thrill that filled me was not just the thrill of being afraid—it wasn’t even mostly that. I kept on thinking: Look what he can do. I am his son.

  “Did you not hear me?” he said.

  My mother stepped between us. She lifted me off the couch and set me down on the floor beside the nearer arm. “Go to your room,” she said.

  I went to my room. My hiccups were gone.

  If the point of fighting with people you love is to kill your desire to fight them; if it is best, in the course of this killing, to inflict as little lasting damage as possible; and if that means fights fought smartest by loved ones can’t but scream topspeed toward stalemate, then let no scholar confuse the following for overstatement: My parents fought like geniuses that night.

  Though their words got incoherent by the time they reached my bedroom—the shapes of their vowels lost between the floorboards, their consonants made mush by the rugs and insulation—there was no mistaking that those words were being shouted. I didn’t enjoy that, but I saw it was good. Charged with enough decibals, any verbal attack, no matter how ugly, could later be blamed with little effort on the heat of the moment. As long as they stayed loud, I knew we’d be fine. By bedtime, the fight would seem as much a thing that happened to them as it would a thing they made happen. By morning it would seem like a place, static and passable; not “That time I fought you” or even “That time we were fighting,” but “That time we got into a fight.”

  Knowing everything would eventually be fine was not the same as everything actually being fine, though. If it were, then scholars wouldn’t try to bring the messiah, my parents wouldn’t have fought, and I’d have had the concentration to write immortal scripture. Instead I checked email, where nothing was personal—two weekly digests from scholarly listservs and a spam from a pornsite: “I’m Suzy CUM fly me.”

  I tried calling Nakamook, but his mother picked up. “What?” she said.

  Can I please speak to Benji?

  “No,” she said, and then she hung up.

  I tried calling Vincie, but the phone was off the hook.

  Eliyahu wasn’t listed in the Aptakisic directory, and I didn’t know his uncle’s last name for 411. He’d never told me his own last name either. All I knew was it wasn’t Of Brooklyn.

  Main Man’s dad said, “Scott’s in bed,” but Mookus picked up on a different extension, saying “Gurion is the leader of the Side of Damage, and that which he brings will be once and for all yet all for one. Our plastic muskets, though powderless, will frontload, and our coup will not be bloodless, nor will the blood be lambly. It will stain the lion’s den whose bars though invisible are verily there as we roll along,
doo-da doo-da and a thousand lonely dirges. Time alone oh time will tell, and peanuts to you there, pally. When first he is king we’ll be first against the wall, then it’s pop goes the weasel in your opinion, but that’s hardly of consequence goodnight.”

  Scott sounded tired.

  Ha-ha, I said.

  “Ha-ha!” said Main Man. “Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”

  “Goodnight, Gurion,” said Mr. Mookus. “Goodnight, Scott,” he said. The phone clicked.

  “Ha-”

  The phone clicked again and they were both gone. The noise from downstairs had ebbed and cut out.

  Soon my father came in with the pastry box, twineless. He opened the lid and showed me stacks of flour-dappled poppyseed cookies. These cookies were a longtime family favorite he got from a bakery whose name and locale he refused to divulge. He sat on my bed and tried to look at my face. I didn’t let him. We ate a couple cookies without saying anything. They were better than I remembered. They were hard and they crumbled and the crumbs were buttery.

  “We should never again speak to each other the way we spoke to each other downstairs,” said my dad. He lit a cigarette. “Do you agree with that?” he said.

  I did not disagree.

  “I am not used to being scared for you,” he said. “I have always believed you, and I have always believed in you. When you were kicked out of Schechter, I thought: My son reacted to a provocation that would have caused me to react as well. He overreacted, I thought, but he is a boy, and a boy is a child, and a child overreacts. I wasn’t scared.”

  He ashed his cigarette into the cup of his hand.

  He said, “When you were kicked out of Northside, again I thought you’d overreacted, but you were overreacting to a provocation that would have also caused me to react, albeit not by telling people to take up arms, let alone teaching them how to do so, but still… Your intentions were good. I believed that, and I still do. And when I read that email from the Northside headmaster, Gurion, I was going to destroy his life as thoroughly as I could without doing the same to ours. He was trying to harm you, and I am not willing to let anyone harm you. You told me that if I sued him, it would make the whole episode worse for you. I didn’t sue him.”

  He half-stood and leaned across me. He flipped my desk’s mailslot open, turned his cupped palm over it, and then he flicked his cigarette against its lip. The ashes hit the floor beneath my desk and flattened. I stepped on them, caught them up in my sock fibers.

  “And I will not pretend,” he said, “that the idea of your being prevented from studying Torah with those people didn’t strike me as a blessing in disguise. I didn’t think that studying with them was doing much in the way of helping you live a good life. I still don’t think so. That said, I knew that my experiences as a scholar—as one of them—were peculiar and misled, and that surely it was impossible for me to consider what studying with them was doing to you without that consideration being haunted by what I knew it had done to me. And so when you resolved to continue working with Rabbi Salt, I did not raise any objections.”

  Again he leaned over me and ashed into the mailslot. And again I stepped on the ashes and caught them in my sock fibers.

  What are you doing? I said.

  “Did I just ash in your mailslot?”

  Twice, I said.

  “I’m sorry—I’m tired. It’s what I used to do at yeshiva. I had the same kind of desk, you know—I lined the mailslot with tinfoil, though. I thought I was very clever. A desk with a secret built-in ashtray. We weren’t supposed to smoke in the dorm. Why don’t you pass me the wastebasket.”

  I passed it to him.

  “Where was I?” he said.

  You didn’t object to me studying with Rabbi Salt.

  “No. I did object. Just not wholeheartedly—I didn’t object enough to raise objections. And in August, when they kicked you out of the King School, I believed what you said, I believed you were innocent of hurting anyone with that brick. I worried about what your mother had been teaching you—it worried me that the thought to even heft that brick occurred to you—but also I was glad you picked up the brick. I was glad because, in the end, doing so prevented you from being hurt by those other boys. None of it scared me, Gurion. I worried like a father worries, but I did not experience fear.

  “But then yesterday, when I heard that you’d been fighting all this time, it got me a little scared. Not because you were fighting, which is worrisome, and not even because you and your mother have hidden it from me, which is very worrisome, but rather because all the time you were hiding this from me, I never suspected it. I never suspected it for a moment. And so I have to wonder what other hidden business I am failing to suspect. And that is not a nice thing to wonder about. That is a fearsome thing to wonder about. And then, just now, downstairs, you say to me—”

  I said, I didn’t mean what I said, Aba.

  He said, “I know you didn’t. You wanted to hurt me because I had hurt you. That is natural—to want to hurt what has hurt you is natural—but what hurt you, Gurion, is not that I said what I said. It is that what I said was accurate, and a large part of you knows it. A large part of you knows you are not the messiah.”

  All of me knows I’m not the messiah, I said. I said, And all of me knows I might be. I am a Judite.

  “If that’s the only criteria, then so might I be the messiah, and millions of others, but I don’t act as if I am just because I might be. Nor do the vast majority of them.”

  Maybe you should, I said. I said, Maybe if you act like the messiah, you’ll become the messiah. Maybe that’s what the messiah needs to do.

  “I don’t want to be the messiah, Gurion. I don’t even think I believe in the messiah. This is an absurd line of inquiry. We’re talking about you.”

  I said, Well I didn’t do anything messianic, anyway. I don’t have to be the messiah to convert somebody. Moses wasn’t the messiah.

  “You’re not Moses either, Gurion.”

  I said, I know I’m not Moses. I just had this conversation with Rabbi Salt. You are in total agreement with the Blackhats, Aba. You have returned to the fold to unite with those you abandoned in an orgy of total dismissal of your son’s heartfelt words.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” said my father. “I’m not uniting with—”

  I wasn’t being dramatic, I said. I said, I was being arch. Bitingly ironic.

  My dad laughed = “I want everything to be right with us.”

  I don’t have to be Moses, I said. I said, Israelites will read the scripture I’ll write—I’ll have authority like Moses.

  “Are you still being bitingly ironic?”

  I said, I’m being completely sincere.

  “That’s a hard sentence to pull off without sounding a little ironic. If someone were listening, they might think you were making fun of your father.”

  I’m not making fun of you, I said.

  “Even that one—hard to take at face value after the ones just preceding it, no?”

  He lit a new cigarette off the old one, set the old one on its filter, cherry-side-up on my desk so it could go out.

  “Moses didn’t have authority just because he wrote Torah,” he said. “He also led the Jews out of bondage. God chose him to do both of those things, and writing the Torah was the second one, which is pretty significant, I’d think. And even if I’m wrong about that; even if his taking us from bondage was causally unrelated to his being chosen to write the Torah—even if God would have given the Torah to Moses regardless of what Moses did for us in Egypt and the Sinai—I think it’s pretty safe to assume no Jew would have listened to Moses if he hadn’t ended our slavery. I mean, would you? If he hadn’t led you from bondage? Would you have listened to him? I wouldn’t have. Why should I believe some dandy prince with a stutter should be the one to receive the word of God?”

  I said, Torah is what tells you the story of the stuttering prince. And it’s the stuttering prince who wrote it down.

  “The Torah’s important,
” said my father. “It’s the most important thing the Jews have—I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just saying that its author… Uch! This is all beside the point. It’s not even that you’re delusional—you are, but it’s not that; it’s the nature of your delusions. If you wanted to believe your girlfriend was a Jew and so you merely insisted that she was a Jew, that wouldn’t be so bad. But why you want those who have hurt you to think that she is a Jew—”

  An Israelite, I said.

  “Fine. An Israelite… what you call it doesn’t change anything. That it is important to you that she be known to them as an Israelite… that you feel the need to prove it, or anything else, to the same people who have expelled you from their schools, the same mamzers who have kept you from your friends, who have vandalized our home and threatened our family, who have rejected you at every opportunity… It doesn’t follow for you to want their approval. You were just telling me you wanted to blind one of them. Why do you want to blind someone who you want to accept you? Why do you want acceptance from someone who you wish blindness on? What does it matter if they think your girlfriend is an Israelite?”

  I said, I am loyal to June, and—

  “If you’re so loyal to June, what do you care if she converts or not? Why can’t you just love her regardless? When I married your mother, there were still a lot of Jews who did not consider her Jewish, and I—”

  Those Jews were wrong, I said. They didn’t know the truth and you did and you married Ema without any hesitation because you loved her and you knew the truth. And I know you were defiant. I know all about you. You were defiant, and because you were defiant you married her without regard for what your community endorsed. But we aren’t talking about you, anyway, right? That is what you said a minute ago. We are talking about me. That is what you said. And I am not defiant, not like you were. I am loyal.

  I said, I am loyal to the Israelites as well as to June and to Adonai and to you, Aba. I don’t care if June converts. Whether or not she converts, she is an Israelite and that is the truth. I said, I know it and June knows it and Adonai knows it. The Israelites don’t know it, though, and neither do you. So it would be disloyal of me not to convince you and them of the truth. I am obligated by loyalty to do so.