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“No, we couldn’t have,” he answered. “A nyway, it wasn’t working. I could tell it wasn’t working, you know?”
I nodded. “It’s just bullshit, the whole thing,” I said.
“They’ll try something else when I get home. They’ve always got a new idea.”
“Yeah,” I said, having been the experimental pincushion myself.
“I kind of co
I shrugged. “I’d have done the same to you.”
“No, you wouldn’t’ve, but we can’t all be as awesome as you.” He kissed me, then grimaced.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“No. Just.” He stared at the ceiling for a long time before saying, “I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like the sound of Dutch people speaking Dutch. A nd now . . . I don’t even get a battle. I don’t get a fight.”
“You get to battle cancer,” I said. “That is your battle. A nd you’ll keep fighting,” I told him. I hated it when people tried to build me up to prepare for battle, but I did it to him, anyway. “You’ll . . . you’ll . . . live your best life today. This is your war now.” I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?
“Some war,” he said dismissively. “What am I at war with? My cancer. A nd what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of
me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined wi
“Gus,” I said. I couldn’t say anything else. He was too smart for the kinds of solace I could offer.
“Okay,” he said. But it wasn’t. A fter a moment, he said, “If you go to the Rijksmuseum, which I really wanted to do—but who are we
kidding, neither of us can walk through a museum. But anyway, I looked at the collection online before we left. If you were to go, and
hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You’d see Jesus on the cross, and you’d see a dude getting
stabbed in the neck, and you’d see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody
biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”
A braham Maslow, I present to you A ugustus Waters, whose existential curiosity dwarfed that of his well-fed, well-loved, healthy brethren.
While the mass of men went on leading thoroughly unexamined lives of monstrous consumption, A ugustus Waters examined the collection of
the Rijksmuseum from afar.
“What?” A ugustus asked after a while.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t know how to. “I’m just very, very fond of you.”
He smiled with half his mouth, his nose inches from mine. “The feeling is mutual. I don’t suppose you can forget about it and treat me
like I’m not dying.”
“I don’t think you’re dying,” I said. “I think you’ve just got a touch of cancer.”
He smiled. Gallows humor. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up,” he said.
“A nd it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you,” I said.
“Would it be absolutely ludicrous to try to make out?”
“There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On the flight home, twenty thousand feet above clouds that were ten thousand feet above the ground, Gus said, “I used to think it would be fun to live on a cloud.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like it would be like one of those inflatable moonwalk machines, except for always.”
“But then in middle school science, Mr. Martinez asked who among us had ever fantasized about living in the clouds, and everyone raised
their hand. Then Mr. Martinez told us that up in the clouds the wind blew one hundred and fifty miles an hour and the temperature was thirty below zero and there was no oxygen and we’d all die within seconds.”
“Sounds like a nice guy.”
“He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace, let me tell you. You think volcanoes are awesome? Tell that to the ten thousand
screaming corpses at Pompeii. You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It’s all just soulless molecules
bouncing against each other randomly. Do you worry about who will take care of you if your parents die? A s well you should, because they
will be worm food in the fullness of time.”
“Ignorance is bliss,” I said.
A flight attendant walked through the aisle with a beverage cart, half whispering, “Drinks? Drinks? Drinks? Drinks?” Gus leaned over me,
raising his hand. “Could we have some champagne, please?”
“You’re twenty-one?” she asked dubiously. I conspicuously rearranged the nubbins in my nose. The stewardess smiled, then glanced
down at my sleeping mother. “She won’t mind?” she asked of Mom.
“Nah,” I said.
So she poured champagne into two plastic cups. Cancer Perks.
Gus and I toasted. “To you,” he said.
“To you,” I said, touching my cup to his.
We sipped. Dimmer stars than we’d had at Oranjee, but still good enough to drink.
“You know,” Gus said to me, “everything Van Houten said was true.”
“Maybe, but he didn’t have to be such a douche about it. I can’t believe he imagined a future for Sisyphus the Hamster but not for A
mom.”
A ugustus shrugged. He seemed to zone out all of a sudden. “Okay?” I asked.
He shook his head microscopically. “Hurts,” he said.
“Chest?”
He nodded. Fists clenched. Later, he would describe it as a one-legged fat man wearing a stiletto heel standing on the middle of his chest.
I returned my seat-back tray to its upright and locked position and bent forward to dig pills out of his backpack. He swallowed one with
champagne. “Okay?” I asked again.
Gus sat there, pumping his fist, waiting for the medicine to work, the medicine that did not kill the pain so much as distance him from it
(and from me).
“It was like it was personal,” Gus said quietly. “Like he was mad at us for some reason. Van Houten, I mean.” He drank the rest of his
champagne in a quick series of gulps and soon fell asleep.
My dad was waiting for us in baggage claim, standing amid all the limo drivers in suits holding signs printed with the last names of their
passengers: JOHNSON, BARRINGTON, CARMICHAEL. Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).
I hugged him, and he started crying (of course). A s we drove home, Gus and I told Dad stories of A msterdam, but it wasn’t until I was
home and hooked up to Philip watching good ol’ A merican television with Dad and eating A merican pizza off napkins on our laps that I told him about Gus.
“Gus had a recurrence,” I said.
“I know,” he said. He scooted over toward me, and then added, “His mom told us before the trip. I’m sorry he kept it from you. I’m . . .
I’m sorry, Hazel.” I didn’t say anything for a long time. The show we were watching was about people who are trying to pick which house
they are going to buy. “So I read A n Imperial A ffliction while you guys were gone,” Dad said.
I turned my head up to him. “Oh, cool. What’d you think?”
“It was good. A little over my head. I was a biochemistry major, remember, not a literature guy. I do wish it had ended.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Common complaint.”
“A lso, it was a bit hopeless,” he said. “A bit defeatist.”
“If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree.”
“I don’t think defeatism is honest,” Dad answered. “I refuse to accept that.”
“So everything happens for a reason and we’ll all go live in the clouds and play harps and live in mansions?”
Dad smiled. He put a big arm around me and pulled me to him, kissing the side of my head. “I don’t know what I believe, Hazel. I