With david levithan dutton books

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

---

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 
A
couple days later, I got up around noon and drove over to Isaac’s house. He answered the
door himself. “My mom took Graham
to a movie,” he said.
“We should go do something,” I said.
“Can the something be play blind
-
guy video games while sitting on the couch?”
“Yeah, that’s just the kind of something I had in mind.”
So we sat there for a couple hours talking to the screen together, navigating this invisible 
labyrinthine cave without a single lumen of light. The most entertaining part of the game by far 
was trying to get the computer to engage us in humorous conversation: 
Me: “Touch the cave wall.”
Computer: “You touch the cave wall. It is moist.”
Isaac: “Lick the cave wall.”
Computer: “I do not understand. Repeat?”
Me: “Hump the moist cave wall.”
Computer: “You attempt to jump. You hit your head.”
Isaac: “Not
 jump. HUMP
.”
Computer: “I don’t understand.”
Isaac: “Dude, I’ve been alone in the dark in this cave for weeks and I need some relief.
HUMP THE CAVE WALL.”
Computer: “You attempt to ju—”
Me: “Thrust pelvis against the cave wall.”
Computer: “I do not—”
Isaac: “Make sweet love to the cave.”
Compute
r: “I do not—”
Me: “
FINE.
Follow left branch.”
Computer: “You follow the left branch. The passage narrows.”

---

Me: “Crawl.”
Computer: “You crawl for one hundred yards. The passage narrows.”
Me: “Snake crawl.”
Computer: “You snake crawl for thirty yards. A tri
ckle of water runs down your body. 
You reach a mound of small rocks blocking the passageway.”
Me: “Can I hump the cave now?”
Computer: “You cannot jump without standing.”
Isaac: “I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters.”
Computer: “I don’t unde
rstand
—”
Isaac: “Me neither. Pause.”
He dropped the remote onto the couch between us and asked, “Do you know if it hurt or
whatever?”
“He was really fighting for breath, I guess,” I said. “He eventually went unconscious, but
it sounds like, yeah, it wasn
’t great or anything. Dying sucks.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. And then after a long time, “It just seems so impossible.”
“Happens all the time,” I said.
“You seem angry,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking
about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus when Gus told us that he 
feared oblivion, and I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and 
how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved 
meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely
 
inhuman nihilism of suffering. I thought of my 
dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. But what we want is to be noticed by the 
universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us
—
not the collective idea of 
sentient life but each of us, as individuals. 
“Gus really loved you, you know,” he said.
“I know.”
“He wouldn’t shut up about it.”
“I know,” I said.

---

“It was annoying.”
“I didn’t find it that annoying,” I said.
“Did he ever give you that thing he was writing?”
“What thing?”
“That sequel or whatever to that book you liked.”
I turned to Isaac. “What?”
“He said he was working on something for you but he wasn’t that good of a writer.”
“When did he say this?”
“I don’t know. Like, after he got back from Amsterdam at some point.”
“At which point?” I pressed. Had he not had a chance to finish it? Had he finished it and
left it on his computer or something?
“Um,” Isaac sighed. “Um, I don’t know. We talked about it over here once. He was over
here, like
—uh, we played with my email machine and I’d just gotten an email from my
grandmother. I can check on the machine if you
—”
“Yeah, yeah, where is it?”
He’d mentioned it a month before. A month. Not a good month, admittedly, but still—
a month. 
That was enough time for him to have written