But understanding is not the same as approval. I could have very easily understood how someone would fall in love with June, for example. And I could understand why someone in love with June would try to kiss June, but still I would not have hesitated to wreck anyone who tried to kiss June. And because he would love her, this boy who would try to kiss June, he would understand why Gurion would wreck him, and he would try to wreck Gurion for trying to kiss June. And that would have been fine with me, because that boy would not have been Gurion, and so he would’ve been unable to wreck me. And no matter what justification whoever spraypainted our stoop thought he had for spraypainting our stoop, it was the stoop of the Maccabees, and even though the meaning of the “Maccabees Aren’t” graffito was made as limp by its over-clever use of the WELCOME mat as any WAR ever tagged beneath the STOP of a stopsign, the vandal had been bold enough to climb our seven steps and crouch before our front door to convey his limp insult, and for that trespass he would have to suffer.
In the past, no vandal had ever breached our sidewalkline. They would bomb our fence or the city-owned curb, fling boxes of eggs at our greystone façade, and brick our windshields and sugar our gastanks before we built the garage off the alley, and once, when I was six, someone slung a rock through our living room window and my mother ran outside with a fireplace poker as the vandal’s squealing tires smudged lines on the street — but this was different. This time the vandal had been only a crobar and a wish away from overstepping our very threshold, and it isn’t hard at all to get hold of a crobar, and to make a wish is even easier than that, so I decided I’d stay awake at my window that night with my weapon at the ready. If I crumpled his lenses with U.S. currency, the vandal would never return.
I would first have to hide the graffito, though, so my dad wouldn’t see it and call the cops. If he called the cops, they would send a squadcar like they had in the past, and the squadcar would scare the vandal off before he got close enough for me to target properly. After a few days, the squadcar would stop coming around, and the vandal would return. It’s what always happened. And it made sense that the vandals kept returning. When a particular threat has been keeping you from doing something dangerous, and then that threat suddenly disappears, you feel twice as safe doing the dangerous thing as you felt before you ever encountered the threat, like how all the enemies of Jelly Rothstein who believed the untrue version of the Angie Destra milk-spilling/pouring incident would — once the truth revealed itself — flood into Jelly’s biting-range at a higher rate than they had before they believed the spilling was pouring. And the squadcar was a weak threat, anyway: for the squadcar to be effective, a vandal not only had to imagine what would happen to him if he got caught, but he had to imagine it was likely that he would get caught. That was too hypothetical. Even though the squadcar threat had kept the vandals at bay in the past, I knew it was too hypothetical because it wouldn’t have kept me at bay if I was one of the vandals; if I was one of the vandals, I would know that the likelihood of me getting caught would be very low, and I would do what I came to do. That the vandals of the past were cowards without stealth, or maybe just cowards with no faith in their stealth, was only a matter of chance. And who knew what kind of person the vandal who bombed my stoop with “Maccabees Aren’t” was? Was he like me, or was he like those who’d vandalized us in the past? He was probably not so much like the ones from the past, I thought, because the ones from the past never breached the sidewalkline. But even if he was like those other vandals, he would, like those other vandals, come back once the squadcar was gone. So I knew the new vandal would eventually return, and I knew that other vandals would follow, unless, maybe, the new vandal was marked with something that required little imagination, like blindness. If while bombing the Maccabeean stoop you were made unable to see, you would be unable to bomb the stoop again, and those who’d learn what you’d been up to when you were blinded wouldn’t have to use their imaginations so terribly much, because there you’d be, before them; falling all over the place while learning to walk with a stick and a dog, your shirt scabby with foodsmears you didn’t even know about. You would be marked by Gurion ben-Judah as a penalty for vandalizing his family’s property, and all the vandals would give witness.
And inflicting blindness on the vandal would not be an extreme reaction like my father told me it would during Shmidt vs Skokie, when a vandal wrote “jewhater” on our garage door and the squadcar got called against my protests, for how much simpler would it be to take the King-Middle Brick of My False Accusation from my Relics Lockbox and just drop it on the head of the vandal? My bedroom window overlooked our front stoop, and it was surely easier to drop a brick accurately on a head than to get a pair of pennies into a pair of eyes from the same distance as you’d drop the brick. And a dropped brick would kill the vandal, or at least leave him retarded, and that was far harsher a punishment than blindness, and to exercise a gentler option when a harsher one was more readily available was to exercise restraint, and that was the opposite of being extreme.
Before going inside, I pushed the WELCOME mat on top of the graffito, then went back down the steps and placed five pairs of pebbles at twelve-inch intervals along the walk-up.
When I got to my room, I took a pennygun and some pennies from my Armaments Lockbox and set my deskchair at the open window. Kneeling on the chair, I nailed the first seven pebbles in consecutive projections, missed the eighth, hit the last two, and then tried for the one I missed and missed it again. It was weird to miss the same pebble twice. I got it the third time. The whole thing took fifty-three seconds.
After retrieving the pennies and the eighth pebble from the walk-up, I returned to my room and turned my computer on. While the OS loaded, I pulled all my lockboxes from under my bed. I dropped the eighth pebble into the Relics Lockbox. Into the Documents Lockbox, I filed the paper-bag plate with my love declaration in the Aptakisic manila, and then I unfolded and filed the note I’d tossed with Eliyahu of Brooklyn right next to the manila, but when I got my School Record out of my bag, I could see that there wasn’t enough room for even one of the two folders.
I had known that this problem would eventually come up — my lockboxes were only half the size of banker’s boxes and I kept on making and finding documents — and I’d decided weeks before that when the time came I’d consolidate my Armaments Lockbox with my Relics Lockbox and put some of the documents from the Documents Lockbox into the former Armaments Lockbox, except I’d thought I had at least another few months before I’d have to come up with an organizing principle that determined which documents went into which box, and now I had to come up with one immediately.
I sat there and tried and I couldn’t come up with one. I kept getting distracted, thinking about the vandal, and Emmanuel on the el talking strife in Israel and rumors about me, and poor Ben-Wa Wolf, and Israelite Shovers, how to start my new scripture, and Slokum on the bus, and how I had trickled and how I had caulked. Plus I was starving. It was like I never even ate that slice of pizza. The sound of my thoughts was whiny, too, like “Plus I was meowmeow. It was like I meowmoew even meow that slice of meowmeow.”