Текст книги "The Fault in Our Stars "

Автор книги: John Green

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Acouple 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 CA VE WA LL.”

Computer: “You attempt to ju—”

Me: “Thrust pelvis against the cave wall.”

Computer: “I do not—”

Isaac: “Make sweet love to the cave.”

Computer: “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 trickle 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 A ugustus Waters.”

Computer: “I don’t understand—”

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. A nd 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 A msterdam at some point.”

“A t 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

something, at least. There was still something of him, or by him at least, floating around out there. I needed it.

“I’m gonna go to his house,” I told Isaac.

I hurried out to the minivan and hauled the oxygen cart up and into the passenger seat. I started the car. A hip-hop beat blared from the

stereo, and as I reached to change the radio station, someone started rapping. In Swedish.

I swiveled around and screamed when I saw Peter Van Houten sitting in the backseat.

“I apologize for alarming you,” Peter Van Houten said over the rapping. He was still wearing the funeral suit, almost a week later. He

smelled like he was sweating alcohol. “You’re welcome to keep the CD,” he said. “It’s Snook, one of the major Swedish—”

“A h ah ah ah GET OUT OF MY CA R.” I turned off the stereo.

“It’s your mother’s car, as I understand it,” he said. “A lso, it wasn’t locked.”

“Oh, my God! Get out of the car or I’ll call nine-one-one. Dude, what is your problem?”

“If only there were just one,” he mused. “I am here simply to apologize. You were correct in noting earlier that I am a pathetic little man, dependent upon alcohol. I had one acquaintance who only spent time with me because I paid her to do so—worse, still, she has since quit,

leaving me the rare soul who cannot acquire companionship even through bribery. It is all true, Hazel. A ll that and more.”

“Okay,” I said. It would have been a more moving speech had he not slurred his words.

“You remind me of A nna.”

“I remind a lot of people of a lot of people,” I answered. “I really have to go.”

“So drive,” he said.

“Get out.”

“No. You remind me of A nna,” he said again. A fter a second, I put the car in reverse and backed out. I couldn’t make him leave, and I

didn’t have to. I’d drive to Gus’s house, and Gus’s parents would make him leave.

“You are, of course, familiar,” Van Houten said, “with A ntonietta Meo.”

“Yeah, no,” I said. I turned on the stereo, and the Swedish hip-hop blared, but Van Houten yelled over it.

“She may soon be the youngest nonmartyr saint ever beatified by the Catholic Church. She had the same cancer that Mr. Waters had,

osteosarcoma. They removed her right leg. The pain was excruciating. A s A ntonietta Meo lay dying at the ripened age of six from this

agonizing cancer, she told her father, ‘Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.’ Is that true, Hazel?”

I wasn’t looking at him directly but at his reflection in the mirror. “No,” I shouted over the music. “That’s bullshit.”

“But don’t you wish it were true!” he cried back. I cut the music. “I’m sorry I ruined your trip. You were too young. You were—” He broke

down. A s if he had a right to cry over Gus. Van Houten was just another of the endless mourners who did not know him, another too-late

lamentation on his wall.

“You didn’t ruin our trip, you self-important bastard. We had an awesome trip.”

“I am trying,” he said. “I am trying, I swear.” It was around then that I realized Peter Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I

considered the honesty with which he had written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn’t speak to me in A msterdam except to ask if I’d dressed like her on purpose; his shittiness around me and A ugustus; his aching question about the relationship between pain’s extremity and its value. He sat back there drinking, an old man who’d been drunk for years. I thought of a statistic I wish I didn’t know: Half of marriages end in the year after a child’s death. I looked back at Van Houten. I was driving down College and I pulled over behind a line of parked cars and asked, “You had a kid who died?”

“My daughter,” he said. “She was eight. Suffered beautifully. Will never be beatified.”

“She had leukemia?” I asked. He nodded. “Like A nna,” I said.

“Very much like her, yes.”

“You were married?”

“No. Well, not at the time of her death. I was insufferable long before we lost her. Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

“Did you live with her?”

“No, not primarily, although at the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that

increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.”

A fter a second, I said, “So it’s like you gave her this second life where she got to be a teenager.”

“I suppose that would be a fair assessment,” he said, and then quickly added, “I assume you are familiar with Philippa Foot’s Trolley

Problem thought experiment?”

“A nd then I show up at your house and I’m dressed like the girl you hoped she would live to become and you’re, like, all taken aback by

it.”

“There’s a trolley running out of control down a track,” he said.

“I don’t care about your stupid thought experiment,” I said.

“It’s Philippa Foot’s, actually.”

“Well, hers either,” I said.

“She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But

eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. A nd I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. A nd she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

A fter a while, I asked, “What happened to her mom?”

He smiled. “You’re still looking for your sequel, you little rat.”

I smiled back. “You should go home,” I told him. “Sober up. Write another novel. Do the thing you’re good at. Not many people are

lucky enough to be so good at something.”

He stared at me through the mirror for a long time. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. You’re right. You’re right.” But even as he said it, he pulled

out his mostly empty fifth of whiskey. He drank, recapped the bottle, and opened the door. “Good-bye, Hazel.”

“Take it easy, Van Houten.”

He sat down on the curb behind the car. A s I watched him shrink in the rearview mirror, he pulled out the bottle and for a second it

looked like he would leave it on the curb. A nd then he took a swig.

It was a hot afternoon in Indianapolis, the air thick and still like we were inside a cloud. It was the worst kind of air for me, and I told myself it was just the air when the walk from his driveway to his front door felt infinite. I rang the doorbell, and Gus’s mom answered.

“Oh, Hazel,” she said, and kind of enveloped me, crying.

She made me eat some eggplant lasagna—I guess a lot of people had brought them food or whatever—with her and Gus’s dad. “How are

you?”

“I miss him.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t really know what to say. I just wanted to go downstairs and find whatever he’d written for me. Plus, the silence in the room really bothered me. I wanted them to be talking to each other, comforting or holding hands or whatever. But they just sat there eating very small

amounts of lasagna, not even looking at each other. “Heaven needed an angel,” his dad said after a while.

“I know,” I said. Then his sisters and their mess of kids showed up and piled into the kitchen. I got up and hugged both his sisters and

then watched the kids run around the kitchen with their sorely needed surplus of noise and movement, excited molecules bouncing against

each other and shouting, “You’re it no you’re it no I was it but then I tagged you you didn’t tag me you missed me well I’m tagging you now no dumb butt it’s a time-out DA NIEL DO NOT CA LL YOUR BROTHER A DUMB BUTT Mom if I’m not allowed to use that word how come you

just used it dumb butt dumb butt,” and then, chorally, dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt, and at the table Gus’s parents were now

holding hands, which made me feel better.

“Isaac told me Gus was writing something, something for me,” I said. The kids were still singing their dumb-butt song.

“We can check his computer,” his mom said.

“He wasn’t on it much the last few weeks,” I said.

“That’s true. I’m not even sure we brought it upstairs. Is it still in the basement, Mark?”

“No idea.”

“Well,” I said, “can I . . .” I nodded toward the basement door.

“We’re not ready,” his dad said. “But of course, yes, Hazel. Of course you can.”

I walked downstairs, past his unmade bed, past the gaming chairs beneath the TV. His computer was still on. I tapped the mouse to wake it

up and then searched for his most recently edited files. Nothing in the last month. The most recent thing was a response paper to Toni

Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Maybe he’d written something by hand. I walked over to his bookshelves, looking for a journal or a notebook. Nothing. I flipped through

his copy of A n Imperial A ffliction. He hadn’t left a single mark in it.

I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem, the ninth sequel to The Price of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp,

the corner of page 138 turned down. He’d never made it to the end of the book. “Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,” I said out loud to him, just in case he could hear me.

A nd then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out

my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I

couldn’t distinguish among the pains.

I sat up in the bed after a while and reinserted my cannula and breathed for a while before going up the stairs. I just shook my head no

in response to his parents’ expectant looks. The kids raced past me. One of Gus’s sisters—I could not tell them apart—said, “Mom, do you

want me to take them to the park or something?”

“No, no, they’re fine.”

“Is there anywhere he might have put a notebook? Like by his hospital bed or something?” The bed was already gone, reclaimed by

hospice.

“Hazel,” his dad said, “you were there every day with us. You– he wasn’t alone much, sweetie. He wouldn’t have had time to write

anything. I know you want . . . I want that, too. But the messages he leaves for us now are coming from above, Hazel.” He pointed toward

the ceiling, as if Gus were hovering just above the house. Maybe he was. I don’t know. I didn’t feel his presence, though.

“Yeah,” I said. I promised to visit them again in a few days.

I never quite caught his scent again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Three days later, on the eleventh day AG, Gus’s father called me in the morning. I was still hooked to the BiPAP, so I didn’t answer, but I listened to his message the moment it beeped through to my phone. “Hazel, hi, it’s Gus’s dad. I found a, uh, black Moleskine notebook in the magazine rack that was near his hospital bed, I think near enough that he could have reached it. Unfortunately there’s no writing in the

notebook. A ll the pages are blank. But the first—I think three or four—the first few pages are torn out of the notebook. We looked through the house but couldn’t find the pages. So I don’t know what to make of that. But maybe those pages are what Isaac was referring to? A nyway, I hope that you are doing okay. You’re in our prayers every day, Hazel. Okay, bye.”

Three or four pages ripped from a Moleskine notebook no longer in A ugustus Waters’s house. Where would he leave them for me? Taped

to Funky Bones? No, he wasn’t well enough to get there.

The Literal Heart of Jesus. Maybe he’d left it there for me on his Last Good Day.

So I left twenty minutes early for Support Group the next day. I drove over to Isaac’s house, picked him up, and then we drove down to

the Literal Heart of Jesus with the windows of the minivan down, listening to The Hectic Glow’s leaked new album, which Gus would never

hear.

We took the elevator. I walked Isaac to a seat in the Circle of Trust then slowly worked my way around the Literal Heart. I checked

everywhere: under the chairs, around the lectern I’d stood behind while delivering my eulogy, under the treat table, on the bulletin board

packed with Sunday school kids’ drawings of God’s love. Nothing. It was the only place we’d been together in those last days besides his

house, and it either wasn’t here or I was missing something. Perhaps he’d left it for me in the hospital, but if so, it had almost certainly been thrown away after his death.

I was really out of breath by the time I settled into a chair next to Isaac, and I devoted the entirety of Patrick’s nutless testimonial to telling my lungs they were okay, that they could breathe, that there was enough oxygen. They’d been drained only a week before Gus died—I

watched the amber cancer water dribble out of me through the tube—and yet already they felt full again. I was so focused on telling myself to breathe that I didn’t notice Patrick saying my name at first.

I snapped to attention. “Yeah?” I asked.

“How are you?”

“I’m okay, Patrick. I’m a little out of breath.”

“Would you like to share a memory of A ugustus with the group?”

“I wish I would just die, Patrick. Do you ever wish you would just die?”

“Yes,” Patrick said, without his usual pause. “Yes, of course. So why don’t you?”

I thought about it. My old stock answer was that I wanted to stay alive for my parents, because they would be all gutted and childless in

the wake of me, and that was still true kind of, but that wasn’t it, exactly. “I don’t know.”

“In the hopes that you’ll get better?”

“No,” I said. “No, it’s not that. I really don’t know. Isaac?” I asked. I was tired of talking.

Isaac started talking about true love. I couldn’t tell them what I was thinking because it seemed cheesy to me, but I was thinking about

the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person

yet. What my dad had told me, basically.

I stayed quiet for the rest of Support Group, and Patrick said a special prayer for me, and Gus’s name was tacked onto the long list of the dead—fourteen of them for every one of us—and we promised to live our best life today, and then I took Isaac to the car.

When I got home, Mom and Dad were at the dining room table on their separate laptops, and the moment I walked in the door, Mom

slammed her laptop shut. “What’s on the computer?”

“Just some antioxidant recipes. Ready for BiPA P and A merica’s Next Top Model?” she asked.

“I’m just going to lie down for a minute.”

“A re you okay?”

“Yeah, just tired.”

“Well, you’ve gotta eat before you—”

“Mom, I am aggressively unhungry.” I took a step toward the door but she cut me off.

“Hazel, you have to eat. Just some ch—”

“No. I’m going to bed.”

“No,” Mom said. “You’re not.” I glanced at my dad, who shrugged.

“It’s my life,” I said.

“You’re not going to starve yourself to death just because A ugustus died. You’re going to eat dinner.”

I was really pissed off for some reason. “I can’t eat, Mom. I can’t. Okay?”

I tried to push past her but she grabbed both my shoulders and said, “Hazel, you’re eating dinner. You need to stay healthy.”

“NO!” I shouted. “I’m not eating dinner, and I can’t stay healthy, because I’m not healthy. I am dying, Mom. I am going to die and leave

you here alone and you won’t have a me to hover around and you won’t be a mother anymore, and I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about

it, okay?!”

I regretted it as soon as I said it.

“You heard me.”

“What?”

“Did you hear me say that to your father?” Her eyes welled up. “Did you?” I nodded. “Oh, God, Hazel. I’m sorry. I was wrong, sweetie.

That wasn’t true. I said that in a desperate moment. It’s not something I believe.” She sat down, and I sat down with her. I was thinking that I should have just puked up some pasta for her instead of getting pissed off.

“What do you believe, then?” I asked.

“A s long as either of us is alive, I will be your mother,” she said. “Even if you die, I—”

“When,” I said.

She nodded. “Even when you die, I will still be your mom, Hazel. I won’t stop being your mom. Have you stopped loving Gus?” I shook

my head. “Well, then how could I stop loving you?”

“Okay,” I said. My dad was crying now.

“I want you guys to have a life,” I said. “I worry that you won’t have a life, that you’ll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves.”

A fter a minute, Mom said, “I’m taking some classes. Online, through IU. To get my master’s in social work. In fact, I wasn’t looking at

antioxidant recipes; I was writing a paper.”

“Seriously?”

“I don’t want you to think I’m imagining a world without you. But if I get my MSW, I can counsel families in crisis or lead groups dealing

with illness in their families or—”

“Wait, you’re going to become a Patrick?”

“Well, not exactly. There are all kinds of social work jobs.”

Dad said, “We’ve both been worried that you’ll feel abandoned. It’s important for you to know that we will always be here for you, Hazel.

Your mom isn’t going anywhere.”

“No, this is great. This is fantastic!” I was really smiling. “Mom is going to become a Patrick. She’ll be a great Patrick! She’ll be so much better at it than Patrick is.”

“Thank you, Hazel. That means everything to me.”

I nodded. I was crying. I couldn’t get over how happy I was, crying genuine tears of actual happiness for the first time in maybe forever,

imagining my mom as a Patrick. It made me think of A nna’s mom. She would’ve been a good social worker, too.

A fter a while we turned on the TV and watched A NTM. But I paused it after five seconds because I had all these questions for Mom. “So

how close are you to finishing?”

“If I go up to Bloomington for a week this summer, I should be able to finish by December.”

“How long have you been keeping this from me, exactly?”

“A year.”

“Mom.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you, Hazel.”

A mazing. “So when you’re waiting for me outside of MCC or Support Group or whatever, you’re always—”

“Yes, working or reading.”

“This is so great. If I’m dead, I want you to know I will be sighing at you from heaven every time you ask someone to share their

feelings.”

My dad laughed. “I’ll be right there with ya, kiddo,” he assured me.

Finally, we watched A NTM. Dad tried really hard not to die of boredom, and he kept messing up which girl was which, saying, “We like

her?”

“No, no. We revile A nastasia. We like A ntonia, the other blonde,” Mom explained.

“They’re all tall and horrible,” Dad responded. “Forgive me for failing to tell the difference.” Dad reached across me for Mom’s hand.

“Do you think you guys will stay together if I die?” I asked.

“Hazel, what? Sweetie.” She fumbled for the remote control and paused the TV again. “What’s wrong?”

“Just, do you think you would?”

“Yes, of course. Of course,” Dad said. “Your mom and I love each other, and if we lose you, we’ll go through it together.”

“Swear to God,” I said.

“I swear to God,” he said.

I looked back at Mom. “Swear to God,” she agreed. “Why are you even worrying about this?”

“I just don’t want to ruin your life or anything.”

Mom leaned forward and pressed her face into my messy puff of hair and kissed me at the very top of my head. I said to Dad, “I don’t

want you to become like a miserable unemployed alcoholic or whatever.”

My mom smiled. “Your father isn’t Peter Van Houten, Hazel. You of all people know it is possible to live with pain.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. Mom hugged me and I let her even though I didn’t really want to be hugged. “Okay, you can unpause it,” I said.

A nastasia got kicked off. She threw a fit. It was awesome.

I ate a few bites of dinner—bow-tie pasta with pesto—and managed to keep it down.