The John Green Collection (124 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A
ugustus 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 God Himself and who said where are the goddamned 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 space 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. God 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 GOD
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 analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs 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 God create the basketballs out of the vacuum of space? Is this heaven in some kind of unobservable universe where the laws of physics don’t apply, and if so, why in the hell 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 Saturday. 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

W
hen 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 passed 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 space 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 pissed 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 crap, 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 titters 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 bullshit Encouragements as Gus’s parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.