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breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and
gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.”
“And yet,” I said, “Isaac won’t so much as glance over at me. Too in love
with Monica, I suppose,” which resulted in a catastrophic sob.
“Bit of a touchy subject,” Augustus explained. “Isaac, I don’t know about
you, but I have the vague sense that we are being outflanked.” And then back to
me, “Isaac and Monica are no longer a going concern, but he doesn’t want to
talk about it. He just wants to cry and play Counterinsurgence 2: The Price of
Dawn.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Isaac, I feel a growing concern about our position. If you agree, head over
to that power station, and I’ll cover you.” Isaac ran toward a nondescript
building while Augustus fired a machine gun wildly in a series of quick bursts,
running behind him.
“Anyway,” Augustus said to me, “it doesn’t hurt to talk to him. If you have
any sage words of feminine advice.”

---

“I actually think his response is probably appropriate,” I said as a burst of
gunfire from Isaac killed an enemy who’d peeked his head out from behind the
burned-out husk of a pickup truck.
Augustus nodded at the screen. “Pain demands to be felt,” he said, which
was a line from An Imperial Affliction. “You’re sure there’s no one behind us?”
he asked Isaac. Moments later, tracer bullets started whizzing over their heads.
“Oh, goddamn it, Isaac,” Augustus said. “I don’t mean to criticize you in your
moment of great weakness, but you’ve allowed us to be outflanked, and now
there’s nothing between the terrorists and the school.” Isaac’s character took off
running toward the fire, zigging and zagging down a narrow alleyway.
“You could go over the bridge and circle back,” I said, a tactic I knew about
thanks to The Price of Dawn.
Augustus sighed. “Sadly, the bridge is already under insurgent control due
to questionable strategizing by my bereft cohort.”
“Me?” Isaac said, his voice breathy. “Me?! You’re the one who suggested
we hole up in the freaking power station.”
Gus turned away from the screen for a second and flashed his crooked
smile at Isaac. “I knew you could talk, buddy,” he said. “Now let’s go save some
fictional schoolchildren.”
Together, they ran down the alleyway, firing and hiding at the right
moments, until they reached this one-story, single-room schoolhouse. They
crouched behind a wall across the street and picked off the enemy one by one.
“Why do they want to get into the school?” I asked.
“They want the kids as hostages,” Augustus answered. His shoulders
rounded over his controller, slamming buttons, his forearms taut, veins visible.
Isaac leaned toward the screen, the controller dancing in his thin-fingered hands.
“Get it get it get it,” Augustus said. The waves of terrorists continued, and they
mowed down every one, their shooting astonishingly precise, as it had to be, lest
they fire into the school.
“Grenade! Grenade!” Augustus shouted as something arced across the
screen, bounced in the doorway of the school, and then rolled against the door.
Isaac dropped his controller in disappointment. “If the bastards can’t take
hostages, they just kill them and claim we did it.”
“Cover me!” Augustus said as he jumped out from behind the wall and
raced toward the school. Isaac fumbled for his controller and then started firing
while the bullets rained down on Augustus, who was shot once and then twice
but still ran, Augustus shouting, “YOU CAN’T KILL MAX MAYHEM!” and with
a final flurry of button combinations, he dove onto the grenade, which detonated
beneath him. His dismembered body exploded like a geyser and the screen went

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red. A throaty voice said, “MISSION FAILURE,” but Augustus seemed to think
otherwise as he smiled at his remnants on the screen. He reached into his pocket,
pulled out a cigarette, and shoved it between his teeth. “Saved the kids,” he said.
“Temporarily,” I pointed out.
“All salvation is temporary,” Augustus shot back. “I bought them a minute.
Maybe that’s the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys
them a year. No one’s gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought
them a minute. And that’s not nothing.”
“Whoa, okay,” I said. “We’re just talking about pixels.”
He shrugged, as if he believed the game might be really real. Isaac was
wailing again. Augustus snapped his head back to him. “Another go at the
mission, corporal?”
Isaac shook his head no. He leaned over Augustus to look at me and
through tightly strung vocal cords said, “She didn’t want to do it after.”
“She didn’t want to dump a blind guy,” I said. He nodded, the tears not like
tears so much as a quiet metronome—steady, endless.
“She said she couldn’t handle it,” he told me. “I’m about to lose my
eyesight and she can’t handle it.”
I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get
handled. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He wiped his sopping face with a sleeve. Behind his glasses, Isaac’s eyes
seemed so big that everything else on his face kind of disappeared and it was just
these disembodied floating eyes staring at me—one real, one glass. “It’s
unacceptable,” he told me. “It’s totally unacceptable.”
“Well, to be fair,” I said, “I mean, she probably can’t handle it. Neither can
you, but she doesn’t have to handle it. And you do.”
“I kept saying ‘always’ to her today, ‘always always always,’ and she just
kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you
know? ‘Always’ was a promise! How can you just break the promise?”
“Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when
they make them,” I said.
Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway.
That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in
true love?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did
exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
“Well, I believe in true love,” Isaac said. “And I love her. And she
promised. She promised me always.” He stood and took a step toward me. I
pushed myself up, thinking he wanted a hug or something, but then he just spun

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around, like he couldn’t remember why he’d stood up in the first place, and then
Augustus and I both saw this rage settle into his face.
“Isaac,” Gus said.
“What?”
“You look a little . . . Pardon the double entendre, my friend, but there’s
something a little worrisome in your eyes.”
Suddenly Isaac started kicking the crap out of his gaming chair, which
somersaulted back toward Gus’s bed. “Here we go,” said Augustus. Isaac chased
after the chair and kicked it again. “Yes,” Augustus said. “Get it. Kick the shit
out of that chair!” Isaac kicked the chair again, until it bounced against Gus’s
bed, and then he grabbed one of the pillows and started slamming it against the
wall between the bed and the trophy shelf above.
Augustus looked over at me, cigarette still in his mouth, and half smiled. “I
can’t stop thinking about that book.”
“I know, right?”
“He never said what happens to the other characters?”
“No,” I told him. Isaac was still throttling the wall with the pillow. “He
moved to Amsterdam, which makes me think maybe he is writing a sequel
featuring the Dutch Tulip Man, but he hasn’t published anything. He’s never
interviewed. He doesn’t seem to be online. I’ve written him a bunch of letters
asking what happens to everyone, but he never responds. So . . . yeah.” I stopped
talking because Augustus didn’t appear to be listening. Instead, he was squinting
at Isaac.
“Hold on,” he mumbled to me. He walked over to Isaac and grabbed him by
the shoulders. “Dude, pillows don’t break. Try something that breaks.”
Isaac reached for a basketball trophy from the shelf above the bed and then
held it over his head as if waiting for permission. “Yes,” Augustus said. “Yes!”
The trophy smashed against the floor, the plastic basketball player’s arm
splintering off, still grasping its ball. Isaac stomped on the trophy. “Yes!”
Augustus said. “Get it!”
And then back to me, “I’ve been looking for a way to tell my father that I
actually sort of hate basketball, and I think we’ve found it.” The trophies came
down one after the other, and Isaac stomped on them and screamed while
Augustus and I stood a few feet away, bearing witness to the madness. The poor,
mangled bodies of plastic basketballers littered the carpeted ground: here, a ball
palmed by a disembodied hand; there, two torsoless legs caught midjump. Isaac
kept attacking the trophies, jumping on them with both feet, screaming,
breathless, sweaty, until finally he collapsed on top of the jagged trophic
remnants.

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Augustus stepped toward him and looked down. “Feel better?” he asked.
“No,” Isaac mumbled, his chest heaving.
“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me.
“It demands to be felt.”

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