I thought: That control is an illusion is no new idea. But what produces the illusion? What is the thing the word control fails to describe? And if there is no such thing, then from where does the urge to describe it arise?
There was a sideways feeling.
There was a falling feeling.
There was a coarse feeling in my elbow and an upside-down feeling all over.
Then I leapt out of my chest, a silver dot centered on a throbbing field of white. The shape I’d thought was a flying saucer had been, I now understood, the outline of either of my eyes, of one stacked on the other, paralaxical. Free now from their boundaries, the throbbing white was limitless. I hovered silver in the center of it, a few feet above Gurion Maccabee.
Gurion had fallen sideways off his chair, rolled onto his back, and was now thrashing, spastically scraping his carpet-burned left elbow back and forth over the floor like some malfunctioning robot. His torso arched and then flattened, arched and then flattened. He was halting his lungs, clenching every muscle in his body, and this was the response of his lungs and muscles: to throw him down, to hurt him back. Parts in conflict take it out on the whole. The only way Gurion could end his own conflict would be to die. But Gurion was a death-proof Israelite. He was not remotely a cross-legged Buddhist.
And an angel came, from my right. One-legged and faceless, skin humming a thousand psalms. He knelt beside Gurion and placed his index finger in Gurion’s mouth, then his hand. Then his arm up to the elbow. I tried to stop him, but I had no mass. I was just this silver dot.
The angel continued climbing into Gurion. It was cheap. A low blow. Gurion gagged, coughed him out. All the air he’d held in his lungs left in a single burst. The angel shot past me, back into the white, and the lungs gathered new air, and again I was Gurion.
The ticking in my ears became the sound of my name and the throbbing white resolved into a face.
“Gurion! Gurion! Gurion!” shouted Eliyahu. He was crying.
Heavy, I said.
I did not mean it like hippies do on sitcoms.
“He’s not dead!” said Eliyahu. “It’s just he feels heavy!”
That’s almost how I meant it.
“Hyperscoot then,” said Nakamook. “And The Electric Chair.”
Botha pushed him aside. He said, “You’re blading. Go to the nurse.”
Leevon and Vincie lifted me to my feet. I’d carpet-burned my elbow raw. Little dots of blood in the bunchy part.
“You were dying from a seizure,” said Jelly Rothstein, “but you aren’t dying anymore.”
“What was it like to be dying?” asked Ben-Wa Wolf.
“And do you feel any lighter yet?” asked Eliyahu.
The Side of Damage was not a group of scholars, so I did not say: If ever you are asked whether Adonai can create a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, you will answer the fool who asked you: ‘Fool, we are two of seven billion such boulders, you and I.’ And when the fool insists that Adonai cannot then properly be called almighty, you will not argue, for the fool will be correct. Instead you will answer: ‘He is Adonai nonetheless.’
And the Side of Damage was not a group of Israelites, so I did not say: We are superior to the angels not because we control ourselves, but because Adonai does not control us.
What I said was this: We are better than the robots not because we control ourselves. We are better because the Arrangement can’t control us.
And whether the inspiration for that statement had been a holy vision — which I doubted (my ability to doubt it the best evidence that it wasn’t; i.e. shouldn’t a visitation from Adonai strike the person visited as being undeniably a visitation from Adonai?) — or a hallucination brought on by an oxygen-starved brain, I saw that what I’d said was good. That is: I saw that what I’d said was true, and so did the Side of Damage.
Botha handed me a pass to the nurse.
Nine of the twelve *EMOTIONALIZE* tags in C-Hall had already been monkeyed with. Seven of the nine were entirely blacked out. On the other two, the first Star of Boystar and the six letters following it were slashed through by the crossbar of an A.
I figured Ronrico had only sodomized two of the tags he’d monkeyed with because he didn’t think to do so to the first seven, but I wondered why he’d left the other three alone. It was probably because he’d seen someone coming and didn’t want to get in trouble, except his reason might have been better than that. It might have been that he wanted people to see what the blotted out and sodomized tags had originally said; if no one could see what the ostensibly Boystar-fanatical writers of the *EMOTIONALIZE* tags had ostensibly intended the tags to say, no one would know that the ostensible writers and what they ostensibly stood for were under inostensible attack. The thought of a real attack on non-existent beings filled me with the feeling I’d get from watching Mookus do the Joy of Living Dance, so I looked around for something to damage, and that’s when I noticed I wasn’t the only one in C-Hall.
Floyd the Chewer stood puzzled before the water fountain. He pressed the button and nothing came out. Then he pressed the button and nothing came out. He grasped the edges of the sink and shook it. Again he pressed the button and nothing came out. He punched the fountain in the grill and cursed. He pressed the button and nothing came out. He slapped the sink on the graffito and cursed. He pressed the button and nothing came out. He banged on the button and nothing came out.
To the spigot, he said, “I’ll explode. How do you like that? I’ll friggin explode! How do you like that?” He kicked the fountain in the guts and it dented.
I said, You’re gonna break the water fountain.
He revolved, raised his cone. “You know who wrote this?” His circuits were frying. He was so angry he didn’t even ask for a pass.
Who? I said.
“I’m asking you.”
Why do you care so much? I said.
“I’m the guard,” he said.
I said, But you’re not really the guard. I said, You’re just the guard because you’re paid to be the guard.
“I choose to be the guard,” Floyd said.
Because it pays you, I said. I said, If you could choose, you’d do crowd control, right? That’s what you said to Ruth Rothstein in that interview.
“If I could choose,” Floyd said, “I’d play starting linebacker for the Bears. Doesn’t mean you gotta be disrespectful, telling me why I do what I do is because of pay. I am the boss of me. Everyone is the boss of himself. I do what I want to do.”
Except play linebacker for the Bears, I said, or crowd control.
Floyd slurped his saliva thunderously and his knuckles got as white as his cheering cone. He looked over both shoulders, and on seeing no one else was in C-Hall, he said to me, “Hey, fuck you, Gurion. Eat shit. How’s that?”
A little bit funny, I said.
“Right. Funny. You think you’re all clever and cute? 2.5 and like that? I asked my wife and she told me what you meant. You think I think you’re cute? It’s not cute to make fun of a man’s job he’s gotta do so he can eat. It’s not decent. It’s not what decent people do. It’s what shitty people do. You’re not decent. You’re shitty. You should eat shit to see what you’re like.”
He checked over both shoulders again, and while he did that, I started getting scared. Not scared of Floyd, but scared that he was right; that I was wrong. It wasn’t decent to put someone down for their lousy job — it was snakey, low. It is true that Floyd had the pogromface, that it took no effort to picture him standing in some cobblestone town square, shoulder-to-shoulder with scores of other dummkopfs like Jerry, their eyes and the tines of their pitchforks flashing orange in the flickering light of their torches while they wait for Desormie to pick the right storefront, the worst usurer, the most defenseless wife… However, even if by looking at him I did know the crimes Floyd was capable of committing, the crimes he would commit if given the opportunity, that didn’t mean it was right, in advance of his committing those crimes, to treat him like a criminal. Not necessarily, at least. Adonai Himself did not deal with men according to their potential deeds; it’s what men did that mattered to Him, not what they would do or might.