Страница 41 из 49
was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness.
“But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.”
I was kind of crying by then.
“A nd then, having made my rhetorical point, I will put my robot eyes on, because I mean, with robot eyes you can probably see through
girls’ shirts and stuff. A ugustus, my friend, Godspeed.”
A ugustus nodded for a while, his lips pursed, and then gave Isaac a thumbs-up. A fter he’d recovered his composure, he added, “I would
cut the bit about seeing through girls’ shirts.”
Isaac was still clinging to the lectern. He started to cry. He pressed his forehead down to the podium and I watched his shoulders shake,
and then finally, he said, “Goddamn it, A ugustus, editing your own eulogy.”
“Don’t swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus,” Gus said.
“Goddamn it,” Isaac said again. He raised his head and swallowed. “Hazel, can I get a hand here?”
I’d forgotten he couldn’t make his own way back to the circle. I got up, placed his hand on my arm, and walked him slowly back to the
chair next to Gus where I’d been sitting. Then I walked up to the podium and unfolded the piece of paper on which I’d printed my eulogy.
“My name is Hazel. A ugustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get
more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—
like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I’d hoped that he’d be eulogizing me, because there’s no one I’d rather have . . .” I started crying. “Okay, how not to cry. How am I—okay. Okay.”
I took a few breaths and went back to the page. “I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician,
but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely
to get, and God, I want more numbers for A ugustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I ca
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him.
He was with his mom and dad and sisters. His mom called me at three thirty in the morning. I’d known, of course, that he was going. I’d
talked to his dad before going to bed, and he told me, “It could be tonight,” but still, when I grabbed the phone from the bedside table and saw Gus’s Mom on the caller ID, everything inside of me collapsed. She was just crying on the other end of the line, and she told me she was sorry, and I said I was sorry, too, and she told me that he was unconscious for a couple hours before he died.
My parents came in then, looking expectant, and I just nodded and they fell into each other, feeling, I’m sure, the harmonic terror that
would in time come for them directly.
I called Isaac, who cursed life and the universe and God Himself and who said where are the goddamned trophies to break when you
need them, and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about A ugustus Waters’s death was A ugustus Waters.
My parents stayed in my room forever until it was morning and finally Dad said, “Do you want to be alone?” and I nodded and Mom said,
“We’ll be right outside the door,” me thinking, I don’t doubt it.
It was unbearable. The whole thing. Every second worse than the last. I just kept thinking about calling him, wondering what would happen,
if anyone would answer. In the last weeks, we’d been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The
pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-
rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
* * *
When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide
which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I’d been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early
on when I couldn’t get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. A nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn’t even speak, so I held up nine fingers.
Later, after they’d given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my hand while she took my blood pressure and
she said, “You know how I know you’re a fighter? You called a ten a nine.”
But that wasn’t quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. A nd here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.
Finally I did call him. His phone rang five times and then went to voice mail. “You’ve reached the voice mail of A ugustus Waters,” he said, the clarion voice I’d fallen for. “Leave a message.” It beeped. The dead air on the line was so eerie. I just wanted to go back to that secret post-terrestrial third space with him that we visited when we talked on the phone. I waited for that feeling, but it never came: The dead air on the line was no comfort, and finally I hung up.
I got my laptop out from under the bed and fired it up and went onto his wall page, where already the condolences were flooding in. The
most recent one said:
I love you, bro. See you on the other side.
. . . Written by someone I’d never heard of. In fact, almost all the wall posts, which arrived nearly as fast as I could read them, were written by people I’d never met and whom he’d never spoken about, people who were extolling his various virtues now that he was dead, even
though I knew for a fact they hadn’t seen him in months and had made no effort to visit him. I wondered if my wall would look like this if I died, or if I’d been out of school and life long enough to escape widespread memorialization.
I kept reading.
I miss you already, bro.
I love you, A ugustus. God bless and keep you.
You’ll live forever in our hearts, big man.
(That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I A M YOUR GOD NOW, DEA D BOY! I OWN YOU! Thinking you won’t die is yet another side effect of dying.)
You were always such a great friend I’m sorry I didn’t see more of you after you left school, bro. I bet you’re already playing ball in