Текст книги "The Fault in Our Stars "

Автор книги: John Green

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

On the flight home, twenty thousand feet above clouds that were ten thousand feet above the ground, Gus said, “I used to think it would be fun to live on a cloud.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like it would be like one of those inflatable moonwalk machines, except for always.”

“But then in middle school science, Mr. Martinez asked who among us had ever fantasized about living in the clouds, and everyone raised

their hand. Then Mr. Martinez told us that up in the clouds the wind blew one hundred and fifty miles an hour and the temperature was thirty below zero and there was no oxygen and we’d all die within seconds.”

“Sounds like a nice guy.”

“He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace, let me tell you. You think volcanoes are awesome? Tell that to the ten thousand

screaming corpses at Pompeii. You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It’s all just soulless molecules

bouncing against each other randomly. Do you worry about who will take care of you if your parents die? A s well you should, because they

will be worm food in the fullness of time.”

“Ignorance is bliss,” I said.

A flight attendant walked through the aisle with a beverage cart, half whispering, “Drinks? Drinks? Drinks? Drinks?” Gus leaned over me,

raising his hand. “Could we have some champagne, please?”

“You’re twenty-one?” she asked dubiously. I conspicuously rearranged the nubbins in my nose. The stewardess smiled, then glanced

down at my sleeping mother. “She won’t mind?” she asked of Mom.

“Nah,” I said.

So she poured champagne into two plastic cups. Cancer Perks.

Gus and I toasted. “To you,” he said.

“To you,” I said, touching my cup to his.

We sipped. Dimmer stars than we’d had at Oranjee, but still good enough to drink.

“You know,” Gus said to me, “everything Van Houten said was true.”

“Maybe, but he didn’t have to be such a douche about it. I can’t believe he imagined a future for Sisyphus the Hamster but not for A nna’s

mom.”

A ugustus shrugged. He seemed to zone out all of a sudden. “Okay?” I asked.

He shook his head microscopically. “Hurts,” he said.

“Chest?”

He nodded. Fists clenched. Later, he would describe it as a one-legged fat man wearing a stiletto heel standing on the middle of his chest.

I returned my seat-back tray to its upright and locked position and bent forward to dig pills out of his backpack. He swallowed one with

champagne. “Okay?” I asked again.

Gus sat there, pumping his fist, waiting for the medicine to work, the medicine that did not kill the pain so much as distance him from it

(and from me).

“It was like it was personal,” Gus said quietly. “Like he was mad at us for some reason. Van Houten, I mean.” He drank the rest of his

champagne in a quick series of gulps and soon fell asleep.

My dad was waiting for us in baggage claim, standing amid all the limo drivers in suits holding signs printed with the last names of their

passengers: JOHNSON, BARRINGTON, CARMICHAEL. Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).

I hugged him, and he started crying (of course). A s we drove home, Gus and I told Dad stories of A msterdam, but it wasn’t until I was

home and hooked up to Philip watching good ol’ A merican television with Dad and eating A merican pizza off napkins on our laps that I told him about Gus.

“Gus had a recurrence,” I said.

“I know,” he said. He scooted over toward me, and then added, “His mom told us before the trip. I’m sorry he kept it from you. I’m . . .

I’m sorry, Hazel.” I didn’t say anything for a long time. The show we were watching was about people who are trying to pick which house

they are going to buy. “So I read A n Imperial A ffliction while you guys were gone,” Dad said.

I turned my head up to him. “Oh, cool. What’d you think?”

“It was good. A little over my head. I was a biochemistry major, remember, not a literature guy. I do wish it had ended.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Common complaint.”

“A lso, it was a bit hopeless,” he said. “A bit defeatist.”

“If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree.”

“I don’t think defeatism is honest,” Dad answered. “I refuse to accept that.”

“So everything happens for a reason and we’ll all go live in the clouds and play harps and live in mansions?”

Dad smiled. He put a big arm around me and pulled me to him, kissing the side of my head. “I don’t know what I believe, Hazel. I

thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

He told me again that he was sorry about Gus, and then we went back to watching the show, and the people picked a house, and Dad

still had his arm around me, and I was kinda starting to fall asleep, but I didn’t want to go to bed, and then Dad said, “You know what I

believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, ‘Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.’

“That’s what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. A nd who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary?”

“You are fairly smart,” I said after a while.

“You are fairly good at compliments,” he answered.

The next afternoon, I drove over to Gus’s house and ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with his parents and told them stories about

A msterdam while Gus napped on the living room couch, where we’d watched V for Vendetta. I could just see him from the kitchen: He lay on

his back, head turned away from me, a PICC line already in. They were attacking the cancer with a new cocktail: two chemo drugs and a

protein receptor that they hoped would turn off the oncogene in Gus’s cancer. He was lucky to get enrolled in the trial, they told me. Lucky. I knew one of the drugs. Hearing the sound of its name made me want to barf.

A fter a while, Isaac’s mom brought him over.

“Isaac, hi, it’s Hazel from Support Group, not your evil ex-girlfriend.” His mom walked him to me, and I pulled myself out of the dining

room chair and hugged him, his body taking a moment to find me before he hugged me back, hard.

“How was A msterdam?” he asked.

“A wesome,” I said.

“Waters,” he said. “Where are ya, bro?”

“He’s napping,” I said, and my voice caught. Isaac shook his head, everyone quiet.

“Sucks,” Isaac said after a second. His mom walked him to a chair she’d pulled out. He sat.

“I can still dominate your blind ass at Counterinsurgence,” A ugustus said without turning toward us. The medicine slowed his speech a

bit, but only to the speed of regular people.

“I’m pretty sure all asses are blind,” Isaac answered, reaching his hands into the air vaguely, looking for his mom. She grabbed him,

pulled him up, and they walked over to the couch, where Gus and Isaac hugged awkwardly. “How are you feeling?” Isaac asked.

“Everything tastes like pennies. A side from that, I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, kid,” Gus answered. Isaac laughed. “How are

the eyes?”

“Oh, excellent,” he said. “I mean, they’re not in my head is the only problem.”

“A wesome, yeah,” Gus said. “Not to one-up you or anything, but my body is made out of cancer.”

“So I heard,” Isaac said, trying not to let it get to him. He fumbled toward Gus’s hand and found only his thigh.

“I’m taken,” Gus said.

Isaac’s mom brought over two dining room chairs, and Isaac and I sat down next to Gus. I took Gus’s hand, stroking circles around the space between his thumb and forefinger.

The adults headed down to the basement to commiserate or whatever, leaving the three of us alone in the living room. A fter a while,

A ugustus turned his head to us, the waking up slow. “How’s Monica?” he asked.

“Haven’t heard from her once,” Isaac said. “No cards; no emails. I got this machine that reads me my emails. It’s awesome. I can change

the voice’s gender or accent or whatever.”

“So I can like send you a porn story and you can have an old German man read it to you?”

“Exactly,” Isaac said. “A lthough Mom still has to help me with it, so maybe hold off on the German porno for a week or two.”

“She hasn’t even, like, texted you to ask how you’re doing?” I asked. This struck me as an unfathomable injustice.

“Total radio silence,” Isaac said.

“Ridiculous,” I said.

“I’ve stopped thinking about it. I don’t have time to have a girlfriend. I have like a full-time job Learning How to Be Blind.”

Gus turned his head back away from us, staring out the window at the patio in his backyard. His eyes closed.

Isaac asked how I was doing, and I said I was good, and he told me there was a new girl in Support Group with a really hot voice and he

needed me to go to tell him if she was actually hot. Then out of nowhere A ugustus said, “You can’t just not contact your former boyfriend

after his eyes get cut out of his freaking head.”

“Just one of—” Isaac started.

“Hazel Grace, do you have four dollars?” asked Gus.

“Um,” I said. “Yes?”

“Excellent. You’ll find my leg under the coffee table,” he said. Gus pushed himself upright and scooted down to the edge of the couch. I

handed him the prosthetic; he fastened it in slow motion.

I helped him to stand and then offered my arm to Isaac, guiding him past furniture that suddenly seemed intrusive, realizing that, for the

first time in years, I was the healthiest person in the room.

I drove. A ugustus rode shotgun. Isaac sat in the back. We stopped at a grocery store, where, per A ugustus’s instruction, I bought a

dozen eggs while he and Isaac waited in the car. A nd then Isaac guided us by his memory to Monica’s house, an aggressively sterile, two-

story house near the JCC. Monica’s bright green 1990s Pontiac Firebird sat fat-wheeled in the driveway.

“Is it there?” Isaac asked when he felt me coming to a stop.

“Oh, it’s there,” A ugustus said. “You know what it looks like, Isaac? It looks like all the hopes we were foolish to hope.”

“So she’s inside?”

Gus turned his head around slowly to look at Isaac. “Who cares where she is? This is not about her. This is about you.” Gus gripped the

egg carton in his lap, then opened the door and pulled his legs out onto the street. He opened the door for Isaac, and I watched through the mirror as Gus helped Isaac out of the car, the two of them leaning on each other at the shoulder then tapering away, like praying hands that don’t quite meet at the palms.

I rolled down the windows and watched from the car, because vandalism made me nervous. They took a few steps toward the car, then

Gus flipped open the egg carton and handed Isaac an egg. Isaac tossed it, missing the car by a solid forty feet.

“A little to the left,” Gus said.

“My throw was a little to the left or I need to aim a little to the left?”

“A im left.” Isaac swiveled his shoulders. “Lefter,” Gus said. Isaac swiveled again. “Yes. Excellent. A nd throw hard.” Gus handed him

another egg, and Isaac hurled it, the egg arcing over the car and smashing against the slow-sloping roof of the house. “Bull’s-eye!” Gus said.

“Really?” Isaac asked excitedly.

“No, you threw it like twenty feet over the car. Just, throw hard, but keep it low. A nd a little right of where you were last time.” Isaac reached over and found an egg himself from the carton Gus cradled. He tossed it, hitting a taillight. “Yes!” Gus said. “Yes! TA ILLIGHT!”

Isaac reached for another egg, missed wide right, then another, missing low, then another, hitting the back windshield. He then nailed

three in a row against the trunk. “Hazel Grace,” Gus shouted back to me. “Take a picture of this so Isaac can see it when they invent robot eyes.” I pulled myself up so I was sitting in the rolled-down window, my elbows on the roof of the car, and snapped a picture with my phone: A ugustus, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, his smile deliciously crooked, holds the mostly empty pink egg carton above his head. His other hand is draped around Isaac’s shoulder, whose sunglasses are turned not quite toward the camera. Behind them, egg yolks drip down the

windshield and bumper of the green Firebird. A nd behind that, a door is opening.

“What,” asked the middle-aged woman a moment after I’d snapped the picture, “in God’s name—” and then she stopped talking.

“Ma’am,” A ugustus said, nodding toward her, “your daughter’s car has just been deservedly egged by a blind man. Please close the door

and go back inside or we’ll be forced to call the police.” A fter wavering for a moment, Monica’s mom closed the door and disappeared. Isaac threw the last three eggs in quick succession and Gus then guided him back toward the car. “See, Isaac, if you just take—we’re coming to the curb now—the feeling of legitimacy away from them, if you turn it around so they feel like they are committing a crime by watching—a few

more steps—their cars get egged, they’ll be confused and scared and worried and they’ll just return to their—you’ll find the door handle

directly in front of you—quietly desperate lives.” Gus hurried around the front of the car and installed himself in the shotgun seat. The doors closed, and I roared off, driving for several hundred feet before I realized I was headed down a dead-end street. I circled the cul-de-sac and raced back past Monica’s house.

I never took another picture of him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Afew days later, at Gus’s house, his parents and my parents and Gus and me all squeezed around the dining room table, eating stuffed peppers on a tablecloth that had, according to Gus’s dad, last seen use in the previous century.

My dad: “Emily, this risotto . . .”

My mom: “It’s just delicious.”

Gus’s mom: “Oh, thanks. I’d be happy to give you the recipe.”

Gus, swallowing a bite: “You know, the primary taste I’m getting is not-Oranjee.”

Me: “Good observation, Gus. This food, while delicious, does not taste like Oranjee.”

My mom: “Hazel.”

Gus: “It tastes like . . .”

Me: “Food.”

Gus: “Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does not taste, how do I put this delicately . . . ?”

Me: “It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several

luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down all around your canal-side dinner table.”

Gus: “Nicely phrased.”

Gus’s father: “Our children are weird.”

My dad: “Nicely phrased.”

A week after our dinner, Gus ended up in the ER with chest pain, and they admitted him overnight, so I drove over to Memorial the next

morning and visited him on the fourth floor. I hadn’t been to Memorial since visiting Isaac. It didn’t have any of the cloyingly bright primary color–painted walls or the framed paintings of dogs driving cars that one found at Children’s, but the absolute sterility of the place made me nostalgic for the happy-kid bullshit at Children’s. Memorial was so functional. It was a storage facility. A prematorium.

When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, I saw Gus’s mom pacing in the waiting room, talking on a cell phone. She hung up

quickly, then hugged me and offered to take my cart.

“I’m okay,” I said. “How’s Gus?”

“He had a tough night, Hazel,” she said. “His heart is working too hard. He needs to scale back on activity. Wheelchairs from here on out.

They’re putting him on some new medicine that should be better for the pain. His sisters just drove in.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I see him?”

She put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. It felt weird. “You know we love you, Hazel, but right now we just need to be a

family. Gus agrees with that. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ll tell him you visited.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m just gonna read here for a while, I think.”

She went down the hall, back to where he was. I understood, but I still missed him, still thought maybe I was missing my last chance to see him, to say good-bye or whatever. The waiting room was all brown carpet and brown overstuffed cloth chairs. I sat in a love seat for a while, my oxygen cart tucked by my feet. I’d worn my Chuck Taylors and my Ceci n’est pas une pipe shirt, the exact outfit I’d been wearing two

weeks before on the Late A fternoon of the Venn Diagram, and he wouldn’t see it. I started scrolling through the pictures on my phone, a

backward flip-book of the last few months, beginning with him and Isaac outside of Monica’s house and ending with the first picture I’d taken of him, on the drive to Funky Bones. It seemed like forever ago, like we’d had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

* * *

Two weeks later, I wheeled Gus across the art park toward Funky Bones with one entire bottle of very expensive champagne and my oxygen

tank in his lap. The champagne had been donated by one of Gus’s doctors—Gus being the kind of person who inspires doctors to give their

best bottles of champagne to children. We sat, Gus in his chair and me on the damp grass, as near to Funky Bones as we could get him in the chair. I pointed at the little kids goading each other to jump from rib cage to shoulder and Gus answered just loud enough for me to hear

over the din, “Last time, I imagined myself as the kid. This time, the skeleton.”

We drank from paper Winnie-the-Pooh cups.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Atypical day with late-stage Gus:

I went over to his house about noon, after he had eaten and puked up breakfast. He met me at the door in his wheelchair, no longer the

muscular, gorgeous boy who stared at me at Support Group, but still half smiling, still smoking his unlit cigarette, his blue eyes bright and alive.

We ate lunch with his parents at the dining room table. Peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and last night’s asparagus. Gus didn’t eat. I

asked how he was feeling.

“Grand,” he said. “A nd you?”

“Good. What’d you do last night?”

“I slept quite a lot. I want to write you a sequel, Hazel Grace, but I’m just so damned tired all the time.”

“You can just tell it to me,” I said.

“Well, I stand by my pre–Van Houten analysis of the Dutch Tulip Man. Not a con man, but not as rich as he was letting on.”

“A nd what about A nna’s mom?”

“Haven’t settled on an opinion there. Patience, Grasshopper.” A ugustus smiled. His parents were quiet, watching him, never looking

away, like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town. “Sometimes I dream that I’m writing a memoir. A

memoir would be just the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.”

“Why do you need an adoring public when you’ve got me?” I asked.

“Hazel Grace, when you’re as charming and physically attractive as myself, it’s easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting

strangers to love you . . . now, that’s the trick.”

I rolled my eyes.

A fter lunch, we went outside to the backyard. He was still well enough to push his own wheelchair, pulling miniature wheelies to get the front wheels over the bump in the doorway. Still athletic, in spite of it all, blessed with balance and quick reflexes that even the abundant narcotics could not fully mask.

His parents stayed inside, but when I glanced back into the dining room, they were always watching us.

We sat out there in silence for a minute and then Gus said, “I wish we had that swing set sometimes.”

“The one from my backyard?”

“Yeah. My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched.”

“Nostalgia is a side effect of cancer,” I told him.

“Nah, nostalgia is a side effect of dying,” he answered. A bove us, the wind blew and the branching shadows rearranged themselves on

our skin. Gus squeezed my hand. “It is a good life, Hazel Grace.”

We went inside when he needed meds, which were pressed into him along with liquid nutrition through his G-tube, a bit of plastic that

disappeared into his belly. He was quiet for a while, zoned out. His mom wanted him to take a nap, but he kept shaking his head no when she suggested it, so we just let him sit there half asleep in the chair for a while.

His parents watched an old video of Gus with his sisters—they were probably my age and Gus was about five. They were playing

basketball in the driveway of a different house, and even though Gus was tiny, he could dribble like he’d been born doing it, running circles around his sisters as they laughed. It was the first time I’d even seen him play basketball. “He was good,” I said.

“Should’ve seen him in high school,” his dad said. “Started varsity as a freshman.”

Gus mumbled, “Can I go downstairs?”

His mom and dad wheeled the chair downstairs with Gus still in it, bouncing down crazily in a way that would have been dangerous if

danger retained its relevance, and then they left us alone. He got into bed and we lay there together under the covers, me on my side and Gus on his back, my head on his bony shoulder, his heat radiating through his polo shirt and into my skin, my feet tangled with his real foot, my hand on his cheek.

When I got his face nose-touchingly close so that I could only see his eyes, I couldn’t tell he was sick. We kissed for a while and then lay together listening to The Hectic Glow’s eponymous album, and eventually we fell asleep like that, a quantum entanglement of tubes and

bodies.

We woke up later and arranged an armada of pillows so that we could sit comfortably against the edge of the bed and played

Counterinsurgence 2: The Price of Dawn. I sucked at it, of course, but my sucking was useful to him: It made it easier for him to die

beautifully, to jump in front of a sniper’s bullet and sacrifice himself for me, or else to kill a sentry who was just about to shoot me. How he reveled in saving me. He shouted, “You will not kill my girlfriend today, International Terrorist of A mbiguous Nationality!”

It crossed my mind to fake a choking incident or something so that he might give me the Heimlich. Maybe then he could rid himself of

this fear that his life had been lived and lost for no greater good. But then I imagined him being physically unable to Heimlich, and me having to reveal that it was all a ruse, and the ensuing mutual humiliation.

It’s hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that’s what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn’t exist.

Finally, his dad came down and dragged Gus back upstairs, and in the entryway, beneath an Encouragement telling me that Friends A re

Forever, I knelt to kiss him good night. I went home and ate dinner with my parents, leaving Gus to eat (and puke up) his own dinner.

A fter some TV, I went to sleep.

I woke up.

A round noon, I went over there again.