The Fault In Our Stars Part 4

I was kind of scared to go down there. Listening to people howl in misery is not among my favorite pastimes. But I went.

"Hazel Grace," Augustus said as he heard my footsteps. "Isaac, Hazel from Support Group is coming downstairs. Hazel, a gentle reminder: Isaac is in the midst of a psychotic episode."

Augustus and Isaac were sitting on the floor in gaming chairs shaped like lazy Ls, staring up at a gargantuan television. The screen was split between Isaac's point of view on the left, and Augustus's on the right. They were soldiers fighting in a bombed-out modern city. I recognized the place from The Price of Dawn. As I approached, I saw nothing unusual: just two guys sitting in the lightwash of a huge television pretending to kill people.

Only when I got parallel to them did I see Isaac's face. Tears streamed down his reddened cheeks in a continual flow, his face a taut mask of pain. He stared at the screen, not even glancing at me, and howled, all the while pounding away at his controller. "How are you, Hazel?" asked Augustus.

"I'm okay," I said. "Isaac?" No response. Not even the slightest hint that he was aware of my existence. Just the tears flowing down his face onto his black T-s.h.i.+rt.

Augustus glanced away from the screen ever so briefly. "You look nice," he said. I was wearing this just-past-the-knees dress I'd had forever. "Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him."

"And yet," I said, "Isaac won't so much as glance over at me. Too in love with Monica, I suppose," which resulted in a catastrophic sob.

"Bit of a touchy subject," Augustus explained. "Isaac, I don't know about you, but I have the vague sense that we are being outflanked." And then back to me, "Isaac and Monica are no longer a going concern, but he doesn't want to talk about it. He just wants to cry and play Counterinsurgence 2: The Price of Dawn."

"Fair enough," I said.

"Isaac, I feel a growing concern about our position. If you agree, head over to that power station, and I'll cover you." Isaac ran toward a nondescript building while Augustus fired a machine gun wildly in a series of quick bursts, running behind him.

"Anyway," Augustus said to me, "it doesn't hurt to talk to him. If you have any sage words of feminine advice."

"I actually think his response is probably appropriate," I said as a burst of gunfire from Isaac killed an enemy who'd peeked his head out from behind the burned-out husk of a pickup truck.

Augustus nodded at the screen. "Pain demands to be felt," he said, which was a line from An Imperial Affliction. "You're sure there's no one behind us?" he asked Isaac. Moments later, tracer bullets started whizzing over their heads. "Oh, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Isaac," Augustus said. "I don't mean to criticize you in your moment of great weakness, but you've allowed us to be outflanked, and now there's nothing between the terrorists and the school." Isaac's character took off running toward the fire, zigging and zagging down a narrow alleyway.

"You could go over the bridge and circle back," I said, a tactic I knew about thanks to The Price of Dawn.

Augustus sighed. "Sadly, the bridge is already under insurgent control due to questionable strategizing by my bereft cohort."

"Me?" Isaac said, his voice breathy. "Me?! You're the one who suggested we hole up in the freaking power station."

Gus turned away from the screen for a second and flashed his crooked smile at Isaac. "I knew you could talk, buddy," he said. "Now let's go save some fictional schoolchildren."

Together, they ran down the alleyway, firing and hiding at the right moments, until they reached this one-story, single-room schoolhouse. They crouched behind a wall across the street and picked off the enemy one by one.

"Why do they want to get into the school?" I asked.

"They want the kids as hostages," Augustus answered. His shoulders rounded over his controller, slamming b.u.t.tons, his forearms taut, veins visible. Isaac leaned toward the screen, the controller dancing in his thin-fingered hands. "Get it get it get it," Augustus said. The waves of terrorists continued, and they mowed down every one, their shooting astonis.h.i.+ngly precise, as it had to be, lest they fire into the school.

"Grenade! Grenade!" Augustus shouted as something arced across the screen, bounced in the doorway of the school, and then rolled against the door.

Isaac dropped his controller in disappointment. "If the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds can't take hostages, they just kill them and claim we did it."

"Cover me!" Augustus said as he jumped out from behind the wall and raced toward the school. Isaac fumbled for his controller and then started firing while the bullets rained down on Augustus, who was shot once and then twice but still ran, Augustus shouting, "YOU CAN'T KILL MAX MAYHEM!" and with a final flurry of b.u.t.ton combinations, he dove onto the grenade, which detonated beneath him. His dismembered body exploded like a geyser and the screen went red. A throaty voice said, "MISSION FAILURE," but Augustus seemed to think otherwise as he smiled at his remnants on the screen. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and shoved it between his teeth. "Saved the kids," he said.

"Temporarily," I pointed out.

"All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."

"Whoa, okay," I said. "We're just talking about pixels."

He shrugged, as if he believed the game might be really real. Isaac was wailing again. Augustus snapped his head back to him. "Another go at the mission, corporal?"

Isaac shook his head no. He leaned over Augustus to look at me and through tightly strung vocal cords said, "She didn't want to do it after."

"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 gla.s.ses, 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 gla.s.s. "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 c.r.a.p 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 s.h.i.+t 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 cla.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sume 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-G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l?"

"He has an a.s.sistant," 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 baccha.n.a.lia 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 pa.s.sing 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-enc.u.mbered 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.