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A ugustus 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 A msterdam, 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 A ugustus 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,”
A ugustus 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!” A ugustus said. “Get it!”
A nd 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 A ugustus 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.
A ugustus stepped toward him and looked down. “Feel better?” he asked.
“No,” Isaac mumbled, his chest heaving.
“That’s the thing about pain,” A ugustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Idid 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
A ugustinian) 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 di
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-di
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.
A nd 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. A ugustus 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 A n Imperial A ffliction.” (He said “in re.” He really did. That boy.)
“A nd?” 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.
“A nd 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,” A ugustus 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 A pril, from the United States of A merica, insofar as geography can be said to exist in our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity.’”
“A ugustus, what the hell?”
“He has an assistant,” A ugustus 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 A n
Imperial A ffliction 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, A ugustus? 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.