Perfect, I said. That’s perfect. Break the glass door.
“I will break the glass door.”
You have to be careful, though, I said, so that you don’t kill yourself by accident. You can’t put your fist through the door. And you can’t wrap your hand in anything before you do it. If you wrap your hand, they’ll think you were making a cry for help, and they’ll only give you therapy. You have to do it barehanded, so you have to aim the punch.
“How do I aim the punch?”
It’s almost the opposite of what you do when you’re hitting a baseball, I said. You don’t follow through.
“I don’t play baseball.”
Even better, I said. Baseball is suck.
“I think so, too,” he said. “So much waiting. And then for what? For two seconds of action. Stop and go. Wait, wait, wait, and then wait some—”
I told him, Let me watch you throw some punches.
He dropped his bag. He jabbed the air. Whoever taught him fighting took karate in the suburbs = he held his fists at his waist. It’s hard, from that position, to throw a fast elbow, and elbows are important: they’re harder than hands, they tend to surprise, and when one connects with a nose or an orbit, the noise backs off potential interferers. It wasn’t, however, any big deal to show him the right way to raise his arms, and other than that he wasn’t bad at all. He knew to keep his thumbs outside of his fists, he knew how to stand with his feet apart so his base was wide and he wouldn’t lose balance in the middle of the punch, and he knew to turn his fist a full 90 degrees between launch and target to draw extra power from the muscles of his back. If he could punch people the way he punched air, he’d win most fights at Aptakisic, I thought. I could take him easy and so could the Flunky; Benji and Slokum went without saying. The teachers, of course, could take Eliyahu, and probably Leevon Ray could too. Though no one had ever seen Leevon fight, everyone seemed pretty sure he could fight because he never talked, and not ever talking had to get him in fights because it had to make a lot of kids crazy — it made teachers crazy, which is why he was in the Cage, and teachers get paid to not get crazy — and we’d never seen Leevon bruised up or bleeding. Or maybe it was just because he was a black guy that everyone seemed to think he could fight. About Jenny Mangey I couldn’t be certain: she always fought guys, and guys who fought girls were weak and sick, so even though Mangey had never lost a fight, it was hard to know if she was really any good. Vincie Portite, prior to the eye-trauma, could have defeated Eliyahu no sweat, but now the two would most likely be even. There were five or ten others at Aptakisic I’d have ranked Eliyahu even against, but the more that I watched him throw punches at air, the more certain I got he couldn’t throw them at people. Eliyahu wasn’t serious about damaging things. I could see it on his face. Totally calm. Not calm with concentration like a zenned-out old sensei, but more like an uncle, drunk at a wedding, in the middle of dancing to his favorite song badly. Not even that. I didn’t think ill of him. His face was just… It was Eliyahuic. His violence was not sincere.
Baruch Hashem, I thought, he isn’t out to hit someone; all he needs to learn to do is break glass.
You have good enough form, I said to Eliyahu. Now it’s just a matter of what you pretend.
“And what should I pretend?” he said.
I said, You have to pretend that your fist is a race car with amazing brakes and that there is some power in it, and the power is like two really fat guys sitting in the front seats of your fist, and that when you’re throwing a punch, your fist-car is going two hundred miles per hour, but when you hit the thing you’re trying to hit, the fist-car stops the instant its knuckle-bumper impacts the thing, and because your fist-car stops so suddenly, the fat people-power inside goes flying through the windshield since the fat guys aren’t wearing seatbelts, and they only stop flying after going through the surface of the thing you hit and smashing into the center of it.
“Okay,” he said. “I can pretend that.”
I said, We’ll test it. I said, The motor in the water fountain is whistling. It is a distraction. Do you hear it?
“Yes. I think I hear it now. It’s maybe more a hum than a whistle?”
I said, It’s a pretty whistley kind of hum. I said, Make it stop by punching the water fountain. Punch the water fountain so the fat guys smash onto the motor. They’ll splat on the motor and the motor will clog up and stop, and then there will be the sound of something dropping.
Eliyahu spun around and punched the water fountain. There was clanging noise. It was the sound of the metal shell of it getting vibrated. He shook his hand out in the air. “That hurts,” he said. “And I can still hear the motor.”
It’s because you didn’t aim the punch, I said. You tried to put your fist through the shell of it. You’ll break your hands that way, and if it’s a fire-extinguisher case, you’ll glass up your armveins and bleed like a bibbit. What happened was you didn’t put the brakes on, so the car crashed into the building and the fat guys got pressed flat between the bumpers instead of going through the windshield because the building stopped the fist-car when it should’ve been the brakes that stopped it.
“It’s the splatting,” he said. “I kept picturing them splatting, the fat men, and how it would bring them such pain as no man should ever have to know.”
That’s okay, I said. I said, Don’t pretend they’re fat guys, then. Pretend they’re golems. Golems don’t splat, though, so imagine they shatter.
“It could be that golems feel pain, though, no? It’s possible, I think. Otherwise, the Prague golem would not have become so angry and rampaged. Without pain, there is no call for anger, much less rampaging.”
I don’t know about that, I said, but — forget the golems. Try boulders.
“Boulders,” he said, “I like boulders. Boulders are large and without nerves, without souls. Boulders can pass through a windshield without dilemma,” he said. Then he spun back around and punched the water fountain. No clanging. Then the sound of creaking and then of something dropping inside of the shell. A slow heavy sound.
Thung.
The motor stopped humming.
I said, You landed it.
Eliyahu smiled. “I want a drink,” he said.
I said, Have a drink.
He pressed the button on the fountain and nothing came out of the arcing hole.
“I broke it,” he said.
I said, How’s your hand feel?
“My hand feels strong,” he said.
I said, It’s very easy to break things, and if you think the right way, you won’t ever get hurt.
“This is good,” he said. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, how to get to A-Hall?”
I pointed in the direction of 2-Hall. I said, Go up to that opening, there. That’s 2-Hall. Go left at 2-Hall, and go all the way to the end. Then take a right.
“Thank you, Gurion. I will break glass shortly.”
Get told something first, I said. You don’t want to look like a crazy. You want them to know you’re a defiance.
“I will be a defiance,” Eliyahu said.
And then he grabbed my shoulders and then he was hugging me. He wasn’t pointy and cold like a skeleton, like he looked like he would be. He was softer and he smelled like oatmeal and a room of old books. He smelled like my dad’s overcoat smelled, except without the cigarette part of the smell, and it made me sad because it made me wish he was my brother so that I could have known him all my life and made sure no one hurt him. I could tell that people hurt him and that he was, at least for the most part, scared of them. I could tell because he was hugging me. It was a scared thing to do. Trying to hug a person like that, a person you just met who wasn’t sending any hug-me signals, might make them think that you were trying to harm them or get to their wang, and so they might try to harm you before finding out it was a hug you were going for. The only time you were supposed to do a thing like that was when you thought it was more dangerous not to do it. And even then most people didn’t do it. Most people got stunned by that kind of danger. I’d never heard of anyone using the floating seat on a crashing airplane, for example. And airplanes were always crashing. And they always had floating seats you could try to save yourself with by jumping out the airlock just above the ocean. Main Man would use the floating seat, I thought, and Main Man had hugged me a few times unsignalled, but Main Man didn’t really know that people hurt him and so he didn’t know why he got scared, just that he was scared, and he’d always say so, and when he said so, I’d tell him everything was fine and he would believe me and stop feeling scared. Eliyahu was different. Telling him everything was fine wouldn’t ever work. He’d know it wasn’t true. It was easy to tell he knew a lot about some things. It was all those Eliyahuic faces he made. Like an old tzadik who won’t squint even though his eyes are half-blind from reading so much. Soon he stopped hugging me. He picked up his bookbag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he jogged fists-up towards 2-Hall and punched the walls and lockers seven times on his way.