by Green, John
“She didn’t want to dump a blind guy,” I said. He nodded, the tears not like tears so much as a quiet metronome—steady, endless.
“She said she couldn’t handle it,” he told me. “I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it.”
I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He wiped his sopping face with a sleeve. Behind his glasses, Isaac’s eyes seemed so big that everything else on his face kind of disappeared and it was just these disembodied floating eyes staring at me—one real, one glass. “It’s unacceptable,” he told me. “It’s totally unacceptable.”
“Well, to be fair,” I said, “I mean, she probably can’t handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn’t have to handle it. And you do.”
“I kept saying ‘always’ to her today, ‘always always always,’ and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? ‘Always’ was a promise! How can you just break the promise?”
“Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.
Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
“Well, I believe in true love,” Isaac said. “And I love her. And she promised. She promised me always.” He stood and took a step toward me. I pushed myself up, thinking he wanted a hug or something, but then he just spun around, like he couldn’t remember why he’d stood up in the first place, and then Augustus and I both saw this rage settle into his face.
“Isaac,” Gus said.
“What?”
“You look a little…Pardon the double entendre, my friend, but there’s something a little worrisome in your eyes.”
Suddenly Isaac started kicking the crap out of his gaming chair, which somersaulted back toward Gus’s bed. “Here we go,” said Augustus. Isaac chased after the chair and kicked it again. “Yes,” Augustus said. “Get it. Kick the shit out of that chair!” Isaac kicked the chair again, until it bounced against Gus’s bed, and then he grabbed one of the pillows and started slamming it against the wall between the bed and the trophy shelf above.
Augustus looked over at me, cigarette still in his mouth, and half smiled. “I can’t stop thinking about that book.”
“I know, right?”
“He never said what happens to the other characters?”
“No,” I told him. Isaac was still throttling the wall with the pillow. “He moved to Amsterdam, which makes me think maybe he is writing a sequel featuring the Dutch Tulip Man, but he hasn’t published anything. He’s never interviewed. He doesn’t seem to be online. I’ve written him a bunch of letters asking what happens to everyone, but he never responds. So…yeah.” I stopped talking because Augustus didn’t appear to be listening. Instead, he was squinting at Isaac.
“Hold on,” he mumbled to me. He walked over to Isaac and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Dude, pillows don’t break. Try something that breaks.”
Isaac reached for a basketball trophy from the shelf above the bed and then held it over his head as if waiting for permission. “Yes,” Augustus said. “Yes!” The trophy smashed against the floor, the plastic basketball player’s arm splintering off, still grasping its ball. Isaac stomped on the trophy. “Yes!” Augustus said. “Get it!”
And then back to me, “I’ve been looking for a way to tell my father that I actually sort of hate basketball, and I think we’ve found it.” The trophies came down one after the other, and Isaac stomped on them and screamed while Augustus and I stood a few feet away, bearing witness to the madness. The poor, mangled bodies of plastic basketballers littered the carpeted ground: here, a ball palmed by a disembodied hand; there, two torsoless legs caught midjump. Isaac kept attacking the trophies, jumping on them with both feet, screaming, breathless, sweaty, until finally he collapsed on top of the jagged trophic remnants.
Augustus stepped toward him and looked down. “Feel better?” he asked.
“No,” Isaac mumbled, his chest heaving.
“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I did not speak to Augustus again for about a week. I had called him on the Night of the Broken Trophies, so per tradition it was his turn to call. But he didn’t. Now, it wasn’t as if I held my phone in my sweaty hand all day, staring at it while wearing my Special Yellow Dress, patiently waiting for my gentleman caller to live up to his sobriquet. I went about my life: I met Kaitlyn and her (cute but frankly not Augustinian) boyfriend for coffee one afternoon; I ingested my recommended daily allowance of Phalanxifor; I attended classes three mornings that week at MCC; and every night, I sat down to dinner with my mom and dad.
Sunday night, we had pizza with green peppers and broccoli. We were seated around our little circular table in the kitchen when my phone started singing, but I wasn’t allowed to check it because we have a strict no-phones-during-dinner rule.
So I ate a little while Mom and Dad talked about this earthquake that had just happened in Papua New Guinea. They met in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea, and so whenever anything happened there, even something terrible, it was like all of a sudden they were not large sedentary creatures, but the young and idealistic and self-sufficient and rugged people they had once been, and their rapture was such that they didn’t even glance over at me as I ate faster than I’d ever eaten, transmitting items from my plate into my mouth with a speed and ferocity that left me quite out of breath, which of course made me worry that my lungs were again swimming in a rising pool of fluid. I banished the thought as best I could. I had a PET scan scheduled in a couple weeks. If something was wrong, I’d find out soon enough. Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.
And yet still I worried. I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.
Finally I finished and said, “Can I be excused?” and they hardly even paused from their conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of Guinean infrastructure. I grabbed my phone from my purse on the kitchen counter and checked my recent calls. Augustus Waters.
I went out the back door into the twilight. I could see the swing set, and I thought about walking out there and swinging while I talked to him, but it seemed pretty far away given that eating tired me.
Instead, I lay down in the grass on the patio’s edge, looked up at Orion, the only constellation I could recognize, and called him.
“Hazel Grace,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. “How are you?”
“Grand,” he said. “I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely basis, but I have been waiting until I could form a coherent thought in re An Imperial Affliction.” (He said “in re.” He really did. That boy.)
“And?” I said.
“I think it’s, like. Reading it, I just kept feeling like, like.”
“Like?” I asked, teasing him.
“Like it was a gift?” he said askingly. “Like you’d given me something important.”
“Oh,” I said quietly.
“That’s cheesy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said. “No. Don’t apologize.”
“But it doesn’t end.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Torture. I totally get it, like, I get that she died or whatever.”
“Right, I assume so,” I said.
“And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling defensive of Peter Van Houten. “That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death
truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence. But I do—God, I do really want to know what happens to everyone else. That’s what I asked him in my letters. But he, yeah, he never answers.”
“Right. You said he is a recluse?”
“Correct.”
“Impossible to track down.”
“Correct.”
“Utterly unreachable,” Augustus said.
“Unfortunately so,” I said.
“‘Dear Mr. Waters,’” he answered. “‘I am writing to thank you for your electronic correspondence, received via Ms. Vliegenthart this sixth of April, from the United States of America, insofar as geography can be said to exist in our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity.’”
“Augustus, what the hell?”
“He has an assistant,” Augustus said. “Lidewij Vliegenthart. I found her. I emailed her. She gave him the email. He responded via her email account.”
“Okay, okay. Keep reading.”
“‘My response is being written with ink and paper in the glorious tradition of our ancestors and then transcribed by Ms. Vliegenthart into a series of 1s and 0s to travel through the insipid web which has lately ensnared our species, so I apologize for any errors or omissions that may result.
“‘Given the entertainment bacchanalia at the disposal of young men and women of your generation, I am grateful to anyone anywhere who sets aside the hours necessary to read my little book. But I am particularly indebted to you, sir, both for your kind words about An Imperial Affliction and for taking the time to tell me that the book, and here I quote you directly, “meant a great deal” to you.
“‘This comment, however, leads me to wonder: What do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortably as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether—to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteen-year-olds you no doubt revile—there is a point to it all.
“‘I fear there is not, my friend, and that you would receive scant encouragement from further encounters with my writing. But to answer your question: No, I have not written anything else, nor will I. I do not feel that continuing to share my thoughts with readers would benefit either them or me. Thank you again for your generous email.
“‘Yours most sincerely, Peter Van Houten, via Lidewij Vliegenthart.’”
“Wow,” I said. “Are you making this up?”
“Hazel Grace, could I, with my meager intellectual capacities, make up a letter from Peter Van Houten featuring phrases like ‘our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity’?”
“You could not,” I allowed. “Can I, can I have the email address?”
“Of course,” Augustus said, like it was not the best gift ever.
•••
I spent the next two hours writing an email to Peter Van Houten. It seemed to get worse each time I rewrote it, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Dear Mr. Peter Van Houten
(c/o Lidewij Vliegenthart),
My name is Hazel Grace Lancaster. My friend Augustus Waters, who read An Imperial Affliction at my recommendation, just received an email from you at this address. I hope you will not mind that Augustus shared that email with me.
Mr. Van Houten, I understand from your email to Augustus that you are not planning to publish any more books. In a way, I am disappointed, but I’m also relieved: I never have to worry whether your next book will live up to the magnificent perfection of the original. As a three-year survivor of Stage IV cancer, I can tell you that you got everything right in An Imperial Affliction. Or at least you got me right. Your book has a way of telling me what I’m feeling before I even feel it, and I’ve reread it dozens of times.
I wonder, though, if you would mind answering a couple questions I have about what happens after the end of the novel. I understand the book ends because Anna dies or becomes too ill to continue writing it, but I would really like to know what happens to Anna’s mom—whether she married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether she ever has another child, and whether she stays at 917 W. Temple, etc. Also, is the Dutch Tulip Man a fraud or does he really love them? What happens to Anna’s friends—particularly Claire and Jake? Do they stay together? And lastly—I realize that this is the kind of deep and thoughtful question you always hoped your readers would ask—what becomes of Sisyphus the Hamster? These questions have haunted me for years—and I don’t know how long I have left to get answers to them.
I know these are not important literary questions and that your book is full of important literary questions, but I would just really like to know.
And of course, if you ever do decide to write anything else, even if you don’t want to publish it, I’d love to read it. Frankly, I’d read your grocery lists.
Yours with great admiration,
Hazel Grace Lancaster
(age 16)
After I sent it, I called Augustus back, and we stayed up late talking about An Imperial Affliction, and I read him the Emily Dickinson poem that Van Houten had used for the title, and he said I had a good voice for reading and didn’t pause too long for the line breaks, and then he told me that the sixth Price of Dawn book, The Blood Approves, begins with a quote from a poem. It took him a minute to find the book, but finally he read the quote to me. “‘Say your life broke down. The last good kiss / You had was years ago.’”
“Not bad,” I said. “Bit pretentious. I believe Max Mayhem would refer to that as ‘sissy shit.’”
“Yes, with his teeth gritted, no doubt. God, Mayhem grits his teeth a lot in these books. He’s definitely going to get TMJ, if he survives all this combat.” And then after a second, Gus asked, “When was the last good kiss you had?”
I thought about it. My kissing—all prediagnosis—had been uncomfortable and slobbery, and on some level it always felt like kids playing at being grown. But of course it had been a while. “Years ago,” I said finally. “You?”
“I had a few good kisses with my ex-girlfriend, Caroline Mathers.”
“Years ago?”
“The last one was just less than a year ago.”
“What happened?”
“During the kiss?”
“No, with you and Caroline.”
“Oh,” he said. And then after a second, “Caroline is no longer suffering from personhood.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I’d known plenty of dead people, of course. But I’d never dated one. I couldn’t even imagine it, really.
“Not your fault, Hazel Grace. We’re all just side effects, right?”
“‘Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness,’” I said, quoting AIA.
“Okay,” he said. “I gotta go to sleep. It’s almost one.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
I giggled and said, “Okay.” And then the line was quiet but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.
“Okay,” he said after forever. “Maybe okay will be our always.”
“Okay,” I said.
It was Augustus who finally hung up.
•••
Peter Van Houten replied to Augustus’s email four hours after he sent it, but two days later, Van Houten still hadn’t replied to me. Augustus assured me it was because my email was better and required a more thoughtful response, that Van Houten was busy writing answers to my questions, and that brilliant prose took time. But still I worried.
On Wednesday during American Poetry for Dummies 101, I got a text from Augustu
s:
Isaac out of surgery. It went well. He’s officially NEC.
NEC meant “no evidence of cancer.” A second text came a few seconds later.
I mean, he’s blind. So that’s unfortunate.
That afternoon, Mom consented to loan me the car so I could drive down to Memorial to check in on Isaac.
I found my way to his room on the fifth floor, knocking even though the door was open, and a woman’s voice said, “Come in.” It was a nurse who was doing something to the bandages on Isaac’s eyes. “Hey, Isaac,” I said.
And he said, “Mon?”
“Oh, no. Sorry. No, it’s, um, Hazel. Um, Support Group Hazel? Night-of-the-broken-trophies Hazel?”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, people keep saying my other senses will improve to compensate, but CLEARLY NOT YET. Hi, Support Group Hazel. Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.”
“He’s kidding,” the nurse said.
“Yes,” I said. “I realize.”
I took a few steps toward the bed. I pulled a chair up and sat down, took his hand. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said back. Then nothing for a while.
“How you feeling?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?” I asked. I looked at his hand because I didn’t want to look at his face blindfolded by bandages. Isaac bit his nails, and I could see some blood on the corners of a couple of his cuticles.
“She hasn’t even visited,” he said. “I mean, we were together fourteen months. Fourteen months is a long time. God, that hurts.” Isaac let go of my hand to fumble for his pain pump, which you hit to give yourself a wave of narcotics.
The nurse, having finished the bandage change, stepped back. “It’s only been a day, Isaac,” she said, vaguely condescending. “You’ve gotta give yourself time to heal. And fourteen months isn’t that long, not in the scheme of things. You’re just getting started, buddy. You’ll see.”
