The Fault In Our Stars Part 19

"You were the one who didn't want me to be a homebody," I said to her. Dad was still clutching my arm. "And now you want him to go ahead and die so I'll be back here chained to this place, letting you take care of me like I always used to. But I don't need it, Mom. I don't need you like I used to. You're the one who needs to get a life."

"Hazel!" Dad said, squeezing harder. "Apologize to your mother."

I was tugging at my arm but he wouldn't let go, and I couldn't get my cannula on with only one hand. It was infuriating. All I wanted was an old-fashioned Teenager Walkout, wherein I stomp out of the room and slam the door to my bedroom and turn up The Hectic Glow and furiously write a eulogy. But I couldn't because I couldn't freaking breathe. "The cannula," I whined. "I need it."

My dad immediately let go and rushed to connect me to the oxygen. I could see the guilt in his eyes, but he was still angry. "Hazel, apologize to your mother."

"Fine, I'm sorry, just please let me do this."

They didn't say anything. Mom just sat there with her arms folded, not even looking at me. After a while, I got up and went to my room to write about Augustus.

Both Mom and Dad tried a few times to knock on the door or whatever, but I just told them I was doing something important. It took me forever to figure out what I wanted to say, and even then I wasn't very happy with it. Before I'd technically finished, I noticed it was 7:40, which meant that I would be late even if I didn't change, so in the end I wore baby blue cotton pajama pants, flip-flops, and Gus's Butler shirt.

I walked out of the room and tried to go right past them, but my dad said, "You can't leave the house without permission."

"Oh, my G.o.d, Dad. He wanted me to write him a eulogy, okay? I'll be home every. Freaking. Night. Starting any day now, okay?" That finally shut them up.

It took the entire drive to calm down about my parents. I pulled up around the back of the church and parked in the semicircular driveway behind Augustus's car. The back door to the church was held open by a fist-size rock. Inside, I contemplated taking the stairs but decided to wait for the ancient creaking elevator.

When the elevator doors unscrolled, I was in the Support Group room, the chairs arranged in the same circle. But now I saw only Gus in a wheelchair, ghoulishly thin. He was facing me from the center of the circle. He'd been waiting for the elevator doors to open.

"Hazel Grace," he said, "you look ravishing."

"I know, right?"

I heard a shuffling in a dark corner of the room. Isaac stood behind a little wooden lectern, clinging to it. "You want to sit?" I asked him.

"No, I'm about to eulogize. You're late."

"You're . . . I'm . . . what?"

Gus gestured for me to sit. I pulled a chair into the center of the circle with him as he spun the chair to face Isaac. "I want to attend my funeral," Gus said. "By the way, will you speak at my funeral?"

"Um, of course, yeah," I said, letting my head fall onto his shoulder. I reached across his back and hugged both him and the wheelchair. He winced. I let go.

"Awesome," he said. "I'm hopeful I'll get to attend as a ghost, but just to make sure, I thought I'd-well, not to put you on the spot, but I just this afternoon thought I could arrange a prefuneral, and I figured since I'm in reasonably good spirits, there's no time like the present."

"How did you even get in here?" I asked him.

"Would you believe they leave the door open all night?" Gus asked.

"Um, no," I said.

"As well you shouldn't." Gus smiled. "Anyway, I know it's a bit self-aggrandizing."

"Hey, you're stealing my eulogy," Isaac said. "My first bit is about how you were a self-aggrandizing b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

I laughed.

"Okay, okay," Gus said. "At your leisure."

Isaac cleared his throat. "Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing b.a.s.t.a.r.d. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should have gotten more."

"Seventeen," Gus corrected.

"I'm a.s.suming you've got some time, you interrupting b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

"I'm telling you," Isaac continued, "Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a p.i.s.s without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness.

"But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him."

I was kind of crying by then.

"And then, having made my rhetorical point, I will put my robot eyes on, because I mean, with robot eyes you can probably see through girls' shirts and stuff. Augustus, my friend, G.o.dspeed."

Augustus nodded for a while, his lips pursed, and then gave Isaac a thumbs-up. After he'd recovered his composure, he added, "I would cut the bit about seeing through girls' shirts."

Isaac was still clinging to the lectern. He started to cry. He pressed his forehead down to the podium and I watched his shoulders shake, and then finally, he said, "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Augustus, editing your own eulogy."

"Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus," Gus said.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," Isaac said again. He raised his head and swallowed. "Hazel, can I get a hand here?"

I'd forgotten he couldn't make his own way back to the circle. I got up, placed his hand on my arm, and walked him slowly back to the chair next to Gus where I'd been sitting. Then I walked up to the podium and unfolded the piece of paper on which I'd printed my eulogy.

"My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have . . ." I started crying. "Okay, how not to cry. How am I-okay. Okay."

I took a few breaths and went back to the page. "I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and G.o.d, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him.

He was with his mom and dad and sisters. His mom called me at three thirty in the morning. I'd known, of course, that he was going. I'd talked to his dad before going to bed, and he told me, "It could be tonight," but still, when I grabbed the phone from the bedside table and saw Gus's Mom on the caller ID, everything inside of me collapsed. She was just crying on the other end of the line, and she told me she was sorry, and I said I was sorry, too, and she told me that he was unconscious for a couple hours before he died.

My parents came in then, looking expectant, and I just nodded and they fell into each other, feeling, I'm sure, the harmonic terror that would in time come for them directly.

I called Isaac, who cursed life and the universe and G.o.d Himself and who said where are the G.o.dd.a.m.ned trophies to break when you need them, and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters's death was Augustus Waters.

My parents stayed in my room forever until it was morning and finally Dad said, "Do you want to be alone?" and I nodded and Mom said, "We'll be right outside the door," me thinking, I don't doubt it.

It was unbearable. The whole thing. Every second worse than the last. I just kept thinking about calling him, wondering what would happen, if anyone would answer. In the last weeks, we'd been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I'd been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early on when I couldn't get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. A nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn't even speak, so I held up nine fingers.

Later, after they'd given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my hand while she took my blood pressure and she said, "You know how I know you're a fighter? You called a ten a nine."

But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

Finally I did call him. His phone rang five times and then went to voice mail. "You've reached the voice mail of Augustus Waters," he said, the clarion voice I'd fallen for. "Leave a message." It beeped. The dead air on the line was so eerie. I just wanted to go back to that secret post-terrestrial third s.p.a.ce with him that we visited when we talked on the phone. I waited for that feeling, but it never came: The dead air on the line was no comfort, and finally I hung up.

I got my laptop out from under the bed and fired it up and went onto his wall page, where already the condolences were flooding in. The most recent one said: I love you, bro. See you on the other side.

. . . Written by someone I'd never heard of. In fact, almost all the wall posts, which arrived nearly as fast as I could read them, were written by people I'd never met and whom he'd never spoken about, people who were extolling his various virtues now that he was dead, even though I knew for a fact they hadn't seen him in months and had made no effort to visit him. I wondered if my wall would look like this if I died, or if I'd been out of school and life long enough to escape widespread memorialization.

I kept reading.

I miss you already, bro.

I love you, Augustus. G.o.d bless and keep you.

You'll live forever in our hearts, big man.

(That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR G.o.d NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU! Thinking you won't die is yet another side effect of dying.) You were always such a great friend I'm sorry I didn't see more of you after you left school, bro. I bet you're already playing ball in heaven.

I imagined the Augustus Waters a.n.a.lysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketb.a.l.l.s? Who makes the basketb.a.l.l.s in question? Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play? Or did an omnipotent G.o.d create the basketb.a.l.l.s out of the vacuum of s.p.a.ce? Is this heaven in some kind of un.o.bservable universe where the laws of physics don't apply, and if so, why in the h.e.l.l would I be playing basketball when I could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

His parents called around noon to say the funeral would be in five days, on Sat.u.r.day. I pictured a church packed with people who thought he liked basketball, and I wanted to puke, but I knew I had to go, since I was speaking and everything. When I hung up, I went back to reading his wall: Just heard that Gus Waters died after a lengthy battle with cancer. Rest in peace, buddy.

I knew these people were genuinely sad, and that I wasn't really mad at them. I was mad at the universe. Even so, it infuriated me: You get all these friends just when you don't need friends anymore. I wrote a reply to his comment: We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim-as you will be-of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.

I posted it and waited for someone to reply, refreshing over and over again. Nothing. My comment got lost in the blizzard of new posts. Everyone was going to miss him so much. Everyone was praying for his family. I remembered Van Houten's letter: Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

After a while, I went out into the living room to sit with my parents and watch TV. I couldn't tell you what the show was, but at some point, my mom said, "Hazel, what can we do for you?"

And I just shook my head. I started crying again.

"What can we do?" Mom asked again.

I shrugged.

But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until finally I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

When we first got there, I sat in the back of the visitation room, a little room of exposed stone walls off to the side of the sanctuary in the Literal Heart of Jesus church. There were maybe eighty chairs set up in the room, and it was two-thirds full but felt one-third empty.

For a while, I just watched people walk up to the coffin, which was on some kind of cart covered in a purple tablecloth. All these people I'd never seen before would kneel down next to him or stand over him and look at him for a while, maybe crying, maybe saying something, and then all of them would touch the coffin instead of touching him, because no one wants to touch the dead.

Gus's mom and dad were standing next to the coffin, hugging everybody as they pa.s.sed by, but when they noticed me, they smiled and shuffled over. I got up and hugged first his dad and then his mom, who held on to me too tight, like Gus used to, squeezing my shoulder blades. They both looked so old-their eye sockets hollowed, the skin sagging from their exhausted faces. They had reached the end of a hurdling sprint, too.

"He loved you so much," Gus's mom said. "He really did. It wasn't-it wasn't puppy love or anything," she added, as if I didn't know that.

"He loved you so much, too," I said quietly. It's hard to explain, but talking to them felt like stabbing and being stabbed. "I'm sorry," I said. And then his parents were talking to my parents-the conversation all nodding and tight lips. I looked up at the casket and saw it unattended, so I decided to walk up there. I pulled the oxygen tube from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just him. I grabbed my little clutch and walked up the makeshift aisle between the rows of chairs.

The walk felt long, but I kept telling my lungs to shut up, that they were strong, that they could do this. I could see him as I approached: His hair was parted neatly on the left side in a way that he would have found absolutely horrifying, and his face was plasticized. But he was still Gus. My lanky, beautiful Gus.

I wanted to wear the little black dress I'd bought for my fifteenth birthday party, my death dress, but I didn't fit into it anymore, so I wore a plain black dress, knee-length. Augustus wore the same thin-lapeled suit he'd worn to Oranjee.

As I knelt, I realized they'd closed his eyes-of course they had-and that I would never again see his blue eyes. "I love you present tense," I whispered, and then put my hand on the middle of his chest and said, "It's okay, Gus. It's okay. It is. It's okay, you hear me?" I had-and have-absolutely no confidence that he could hear me. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. "Okay," I said. "Okay."

I suddenly felt conscious that there were all these people watching us, that the last time so many people saw us kiss we were in the Anne Frank House. But there was, properly speaking, no us left to watch. Only a me.

I snapped open the clutch, reached in, and pulled out a hard pack of Camel Lights. In a quick motion I hoped no one behind would notice, I snuck them into the s.p.a.ce between his side and the coffin's plush silver lining. "You can light these," I whispered to him. "I won't mind."

While I was talking to him, Mom and Dad had moved up to the second row with my tank, so I didn't have a long walk back. Dad handed me a tissue as I sat down. I blew my nose, threaded the tubes around my ears, and put the nubbins back in.

I thought we'd go into the proper sanctuary for the real funeral, but it all happened in that little side room-the Literal Hand of Jesus, I guess, the part of the cross he'd been nailed to. A minister walked up and stood behind the coffin, almost like the coffin was a pulpit or something, and talked a little bit about how Augustus had a courageous battle and how his heroism in the face of illness was an inspiration to us all, and I was already starting to get p.i.s.sed off at the minister when he said, "In heaven, Augustus will finally be healed and whole," implying that he had been less whole than other people due to his leglessness, and I kind of could not repress my sigh of disgust. My dad grabbed me just above the knee and cut me a disapproving look, but from the row behind me, someone muttered almost inaudibly near my ear, "What a load of horse c.r.a.p, eh, kid?"

I spun around.

Peter Van Houten wore a white linen suit, tailored to account for his rotundity, a powder-blue dress shirt, and a green tie. He looked like he was dressed for a colonial occupation of Panama, not a funeral. The minister said, "Let us pray," but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a moment, he whispered, "We gotta fake pray," and bowed his head.

I tried to forget about him and just pray for Augustus. I made a point of listening to the minister and not looking back.

The minister called up Isaac, who was much more serious than he'd been at the prefuneral. "Augustus Waters was the Mayor of the Secret City of Cancervania, and he is not replaceable," Isaac began. "Other people will be able to tell you funny stories about Gus, because he was a funny guy, but let me tell you a serious one: A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heartbroken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, 'I have wonderful news!' And I was like, 'I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now,' and Gus said, 'This is wonderful news you want to hear,' and I asked him, 'Fine, what is it?' and he said, 'You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!'"

Isaac couldn't go on, or maybe that was all he had written.

After a high school friend told some stories about Gus's considerable basketball talents and his many qualities as a teammate, the minister said, "We'll now hear a few words from Augustus's special friend, Hazel." Special friend? There were some t.i.tters in the audience, so I figured it was safe for me to start out by saying to the minister, "I was his girlfriend." That got a laugh. Then I began reading from the eulogy I'd written.

"There's a great quote in Gus's house, one that both he and I found very comforting: Without pain, we couldn't know joy."

I went on spouting bulls.h.i.t Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

After his sister Julie spoke, the service ended with a prayer about Gus's union with G.o.d, and I thought back to what he'd told me at Oranjee, that he didn't believe in mansions and harps, but did believe in capital-S Something, and so I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pa.s.s for me differently than it would for him-that I, like everyone in that room, would go on acc.u.mulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

And then one of Gus's brothers-in-law brought up a boom box and they played this song Gus had picked out-a sad and quiet song by The Hectic Glow called "The New Partner." I just wanted to go home, honestly. I didn't know hardly any of these people, and I felt Peter Van Houten's little eyes boring into my exposed shoulder blades, but after the song was over, everyone had to come up to me and tell me that I'd spoken beautifully, and that it was a lovely service, which was a lie: It was a funeral. It looked like any other funeral.

His pallbearers-cousins, his dad, an uncle, friends I'd never seen-came and got him, and they all started walking toward the hea.r.s.e.

When Mom and Dad and I got in the car, I said, "I don't want to go. I'm tired."