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“A nd you say there’s no afterlife,” he answered without looking at me. “But yeah, of course. What do you want to know?”
I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I
loved. “Just, like, what happened.”
He sighed, exhaling for so long that to my crap lungs it seemed like he was bragging. He popped a fresh cigarette into his mouth. “You
know how there is famously no place less played in than a hospital playground?” I nodded. “Well, I was at Memorial for a couple weeks when
they took off the leg and everything. I was up on the fifth floor and I had a view of the playground, which was always of course utterly
desolate. I was all awash in the metaphorical resonance of the empty playground in the hospital courtyard. But then this girl started showing up alone at the playground, every day, swinging on a swing completely alone, like you’d see in a movie or something. So I asked one of my
nicer nurses to get the ski
“You’re not that charismatic,” I said. He scoffed, disbelieving. “You’re mostly just hot,” I explained.
He laughed it off. “The thing about dead people,” he said, and then stopped himself. “The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don’t
romanticize them, but the truth is . . . complicated, I guess. Like, you are familiar with the trope of the stoic and determined cancer victim who heroically fights her cancer with inhuman strength and never complains or stops smiling even at the very end, etcetera?”
“Indeed,” I said. “They are kindhearted and generous souls whose every breath is an Inspiration to Us A ll. They’re so strong! We admire
them so!”
“Right, but really, I mean aside from us obviously, cancer kids are not statistically more likely to be awesome or compassionate or
perseverant or whatever. Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know? Ragging on the nurses and the other
kids and our families and whatever else. But I don’t know if that was her or the tumor. I mean, one of her nurses told me once that the kind of tumor Caroline had is known among medical types as the A sshole Tumor, because it just turns you into a monster. So here’s this girl
missing a fifth of her brain who’s just had a recurrence of the A sshole Tumor, and so she was not, you know, the paragon of stoic cancer-kid heroism. She was . . . I mean, to be honest, she was a bitch. But you can’t say that, because she had this tumor, and also she’s, I mean, she’s dead. A nd she had plenty of reason to be unpleasant, you know?”
I knew.
“You know that part in A n Imperial A ffliction when A
marvel at the majesty of creation or whatever. You know that part?”
“I know that part,” I said.
“So afterward, while I was getting eviscerated by chemo, for some reason I decided to feel really hopeful. Not about survival specifically, but I felt like A
“But meanwhile Caroline got worse every day. She went home after a while and there were moments where I thought we could have,
like, a regular relationship, but we couldn’t, really, because she had no filter between her thoughts and her speech, which was sad and
unpleasant and frequently hurtful. But, I mean, you can’t dump a girl with a brain tumor. A nd her parents liked me, and she has this little brother who is a really cool kid. I mean, how can you dump her? She’s dying.
“It took forever. It took almost a year, and it was a year of me hanging out with this girl who would, like, just start laughing out of
nowhere and point at my prosthetic and call me Stumpy.”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah. I mean, it was the tumor. It ate her brain, you know? Or it wasn’t the tumor. I have no way of knowing, because they were
inseparable, she and the tumor. But as she got sicker, I mean, she’d just repeat the same stories and laugh at her own comments even if she’d already said the same thing a hundred times that day. Like, she made the same joke over and over again for weeks: ‘Gus has great legs. I
mean leg.’ A nd then she would just laugh like a maniac.”
“Oh, Gus,” I said. “That’s . . .” I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t looking at me, and it felt invasive of me to look at him. I felt him scoot forward. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared at it, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, then put it back.
“Well,” he said, “to be fair, I do have great leg.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s all good, Hazel Grace. But just to be clear, when I thought I saw Caroline Mathers’s ghost in Support Group, I was not entirely
happy. I was staring, but I wasn’t yearning, if you know what I mean.” He pulled the pack out of his pocket and placed the cigarette back in it.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Me too,” he said.
“I don’t ever want to do that to you,” I told him.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Iwoke up at four in the Dutch morning ready for the day. All attempts to go back to sleep failed, so I lay there with the BiPAP pumping the air in and urging it out, enjoying the dragon sounds but wishing I could choose my breaths.
I reread A n Imperial A ffliction until Mom woke up and rolled over toward me around six. She nuzzled her head against my shoulder,
which felt uncomfortable and vaguely A ugustinian.
The hotel brought a breakfast to our room that, much to my delight, featured deli meat among many other denials of A merican breakfast
constructions. The dress I’d pla
showered and got my hair to lie halfway flat, I spent like thirty minutes debating with Mom the various benefits and drawbacks of the
available outfits before deciding to dress as much like A
The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by René Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive
Ceci n’est pas une pipe. (“This is not a pipe.”)
“I just don’t get that shirt,” Mom said.
“Peter Van Houten will get it, trust me. There are like seven thousand Magritte references in A n Imperial A ffliction.”
“But it is a pipe.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? A ll representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever.”
“How did you get so grown up that you understand things that confuse your ancient mother?” Mom asked. “It seems like just yesterday
that I was telling seven-year-old Hazel why the sky was blue. You thought I was a genius back then.”
“Why is the sky blue?” I asked.
“Cuz,” she answered. I laughed.
A s it got closer to ten, I grew more and more nervous: nervous to see A ugustus; nervous to meet Peter Van Houten; nervous that my