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shrink beneath us, and then I felt his hand relax beneath mine. He glanced at me and then back out the window. “We are flying,” he
a
“You’ve never been on a plane before?”
He shook his head. “LOOK!” he half shouted, pointing at the window.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I see it. It looks like we’re in an airplane.”
“NOTHING HA S EVER LOOKED LIKE THA T EVER IN A LL OF HUMA N HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist
leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.
“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your mother. Who held your hand as you took your first infantile
steps.”
“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.
“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When surprised and excited and i
Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined A ugustus, I literally could not resist.
It was a quick flight to Detroit, where the little electric car met us as we disembarked and drove us to the gate for A msterdam. That plane had TVs in the back of each seat, and once we were above the clouds, A ugustus and I timed it so that we started watching the same romantic
comedy at the same time on our respective screens. But even though we were perfectly synchronized in our pressing of the play button, his
movie started a couple seconds before mine, so at every fu
* * *
Mom had this big plan that we would sleep for the last several hours of the flight, so when we landed at eight A.M., we’d hit the city ready to suck the marrow out of life or whatever. So after the movie was over, Mom and A ugustus and I all took sleeping pills. Mom conked out within seconds, but A ugustus and I stayed up to look out the window for a while. It was a clear day, and although we couldn’t see the sun setting, we could see the sky’s response.
“God, that is beautiful,” I said mostly to myself.
“‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes,’” he said, a line from A n Imperial A ffliction.
“But it’s not rising,” I said.
“It’s rising somewhere,” he answered, and then after a moment said, “Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane
that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.”
“A lso I’d live longer.” He looked at me askew. “You know, because of relativity or whatever.” He still looked confused. “We age slower
when we move quickly versus standing still. So right now time is passing slower for us than for people on the ground.”
“College chicks,” he said. “They’re so smart.”
I rolled my eyes. He hit his (real) knee with my knee and I hit his knee back with mine. “A re you sleepy?” I asked him.
“Not at all,” he answered.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.” Sleeping meds and narcotics didn’t do for me what they did for normal people.
“Want to watch another movie?” he asked. “They’ve got a Portman movie from her Hazel Era.”
“I want to watch something you haven’t seen.”
In the end we watched 300, a war movie about 300 Spartans who protect Sparta from an invading army of like a billion Persians.
A ugustus’s movie started before mine again, and after a few minutes of hearing him go, “Dang!” or “Fatality!” every time someone was killed in some badass way, I leaned over the armrest and put my head on his shoulder so I could see his screen and we could actually watch the
movie together.
300 featured a sizable collection of shirtless and well-oiled strapping young lads, so it was not particularly difficult on the eyes, but it was mostly a lot of sword wielding to no real effect. The bodies of the Persians and the Spartans piled up, and I couldn’t quite figure out why the Persians were so evil or the Spartans so awesome. “Contemporaneity,” to quote A IA , “specializes in the kind of battles wherein no one loses anything of any value, except arguably their lives.” A nd so it was with these titans clashing.
Toward the end of the movie, almost everyone is dead, and there is this insane moment when the Spartans start stacking the bodies of
the dead up to form a wall of corpses. The dead become this massive roadblock standing between the Persians and the road to Sparta. I
found the gore a bit gratuitous, so I looked away for a second, asking A ugustus, “How many dead people do you think there are?”
He dismissed me with a wave. “Shh. Shh. This is getting awesome.”
When the Persians attacked, they had to climb up the wall of death, and the Spartans were able to occupy the high ground atop the
corpse mountain, and as the bodies piled up, the wall of martyrs only became higher and therefore harder to climb, and everybody swung
swords/shot arrows, and the rivers of blood poured down Mount Death, etc.
I took my head off his shoulder for a moment to get a break from the gore and watched A ugustus watch the movie. He couldn’t contain
his goofy grin. I watched my own screen through squinted eyes as the mountain grew with the bodies of Persians and Spartans. When the
Persians finally overran the Spartans, I looked over at A ugustus again. Even though the good guys had just lost, A ugustus seemed downright joyful. I nuzzled up to him again, but kept my eyes closed until the battle was finished.
A s the credits rolled, he took off his headphones and said, “Sorry, I was awash in the nobility of sacrifice. What were you saying?”
“How many dead people do you think there are?”
“Like, how many fictional people died in that fictional movie? Not enough,” he joked.
“No, I mean, like, ever. Like, how many people do you think have ever died?”
“I happen to know the answer to that question,” he said. “There are seven billion living people, and about ninety-eight billion dead
people.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d thought that maybe since population growth had been so fast, there were more people alive than all the dead combined.
“There are about fourteen dead people for every living person,” he said. The credits continued rolling. It took a long time to identify all those corpses, I guess. My head was still on his shoulder. “I did some research on this a couple years ago,” A ugustus continued. “I was
wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person,
would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?”
“A nd are there?”
“Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we’re disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare,
and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote So
“Yeah,” I said.
It was quiet for a minute, and then he asked, “You want to read or something?” I said sure. I was reading this long poem called Howl by
A llen Ginsberg for my poetry class, and Gus was rereading A n Imperial A ffliction.
A fter a while he said, “Is it any good?”
“The poem?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, it’s great. The guys in this poem take even more drugs than I do. How’s A IA ?”
“Still perfect,” he said. “Read to me.”
“This isn’t really a poem to read aloud when you are sitting next to your sleeping mother. It has, like, sodomy and angel dust in it,” I
said.
“You just named two of my favorite pastimes,” he said. “Okay, read me something else then?”
“Um,” I said. “I don’t have anything else?”
“That’s too bad. I am so in the mood for poetry. Do you have anything memorized?”
“‘Let us go then, you and I,’” I started nervously, “‘When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a
table.’”
“Slower,” he said.
I felt bashful, like I had when I’d first told him of A n Imperial A ffliction. “Um, okay. Okay. ‘Let us go, through certain half-deserted