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recognized the place from The Price of Dawn. A s I approached, I saw nothing unusual: just two guys sitting in the lightwash of a huge
television pretending to kill people.
Only when I got parallel to them did I see Isaac’s face. Tears streamed down his reddened cheeks in a continual flow, his face a taut
mask of pain. He stared at the screen, not even glancing at me, and howled, all the while pounding away at his controller. “How are you,
Hazel?” asked A ugustus.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Isaac?” No response. Not even the slightest hint that he was aware of my existence. Just the tears flowing down his
face onto his black T-shirt.
A ugustus glanced away from the screen ever so briefly. “You look nice,” he said. I was wearing this just-past-the-knees dress I’d had
forever. “Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose co
wear a dress for him.”
“A nd 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,” A ugustus explained. “Isaac, I don’t know about you, but I have the vague sense that we are being outflanked.”
A nd 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 A ugustus fired a machine gun wildly in a series of quick bursts, ru
“A nyway,” A ugustus 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.
A ugustus nodded at the screen. “Pain demands to be felt,” he said, which was a line from A n Imperial A ffliction. “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,” A ugustus 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 ru
“You could go over the bridge and circle back,” I said, a tactic I knew about thanks to The Price of Dawn.
A ugustus 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,” A ugustus 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,” A ugustus 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!” A ugustus 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!” A ugustus 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 A ugustus, who was shot once and then twice but still ran, A ugustus shouting, “YOU CA N’T
KILL MA X MA YHEM!” 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 red. A throaty voice said, “MISSION FA ILURE,” but A ugustus 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.
“A ll salvation is temporary,” A ugustus 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 go
“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. A ugustus snapped his head back to him. “A nother
go at the mission, corporal?”
Isaac shook his head no. He leaned over A ugustus 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. A nd 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? ‘A lways’ 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. “A nd I love her. A nd 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 around, like he couldn’t remember why he’d stood up
in the first place, and then A ugustus 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 A ugustus.
Isaac chased after the chair and kicked it again. “Yes,” A ugustus 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.