Page 42 of The Fault in Our Stars

I rolled my eyes. He hit his (real) knee with my knee and I hit his knee back with mine. “Are 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. Augustus’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 AIA, “specializes in the kind of battles wherein no one loses anything of any value, except arguably their lives.” And 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 Augustus, “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 Augustus 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 Augustus again. Even though the good guys had just lost, Augustus seemed downright joyful. I nuzzled up to him again, but kept my eyes closed until the battle was finished.

As the credits rolled, he took off his headphones and said, “Sorry, I was awash in the nobility of sacrifice. What were you saying?”