He signals for you to crouch down beside him, then he runs his dirty fingers through his hair until flakes of his scalp fall onto his shoulders and his beard. Spotting you only four feet away from the sliding glass door, he gestures for you to come over, and though you are tired and sweaty, with your feet aching and the most important game of the decade hidden inside your underwear, you approach him.
You leave the bike behind the trash cans at the side of the house and hop the wooden fence into the back yard and, if the door to the garage is open, you slip in, and if it’s not, which it isn’t, you’ve got to take a chance on the screen door in the back yard, but, lo and behold, your father is ankle deep in the dirt, hunched over, yanking at weeds with his bare hands the way he used to as a farmer in Logar, before war and famine forced him to flee to the western coast of the American empire, where he labored for many years until it broke his body for good, and even though his doctor has forbidden him to work in the yard, owing to the torn nerves in his neck and spine-which, you know from your mother, were first damaged when he was tortured by Russians shortly after the murder of his younger brother, Watak, during the Soviet War-he is out here clawing at the earth and its spoils, as if he were digging for treasure or his own grave.
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.įirst, you have to gather the cash to preorder the game at the local GameStop, where your cousin works, and, even though he hooks it up with the employee discount, the game is still a bit out of your price range because you’ve been using your Taco Bell paychecks to help your pops, who’s been out of work since you were ten, and who makes you feel unbearably guilty about spending money on useless hobbies while kids in Kabul are destroying their bodies to build compounds for white businessmen and warlords-but, shit, it’s Kojima, it’s Metal Gear, so, after scrimping and saving (like literal dimes you’re picking up off the street), you’ve got the cash, which you give to your cousin, who purchases the game on your behalf, and then, on the day it’s released, you just have to find a way to get to the store.īut, because your oldest brother has taken the Civic to Sac State, you’re hauling your two-hundred-and-sixty-pound ass on a bicycle you haven’t touched since middle school, and thank Allah (if He’s up there) that the bike is still rideable, because you’re sure there’ll be a line if you don’t get to GameStop early, so, huffing and puffing, you’re regretting all the Taco Bell you’ve eaten over the past two years, but you ride with such fervor that you end up being only third in line, and it’s your cousin himself who hands you the game in a brown paper bag, as if it were something illegal or illicit, which it isn’t, of course, it’s Metal Gear, it’s Kojima, it’s the final game in a series so fundamentally a part of your childhood that often, when you hear the Irish Gaelic chorus from “The Best Is Yet to Come,” you cannot help weeping softly into your keyboard.įor some reason, riding back home is easier.