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heaven.
I imagined the A ugustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a
heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? A re there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a
celestial basketball factory so that I can play? Or did an omnipotent God create the basketballs out of the vacuum of space? Is this heaven in some kind of unobservable universe where the laws of physics don’t apply, and if so, why in the hell would I be playing basketball when I
could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It’s almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.
His parents called around noon to say the funeral would be in five days, on Saturday. I pictured a church packed with people who thought he liked basketball, and I wanted to puke, but I knew I had to go, since I was speaking and everything. When I hung up, I went back to reading his wall:
Just heard that Gus Waters died after a lengthy battle with cancer. Rest in peace, buddy.
I knew these people were genuinely sad, and that I wasn’t really mad at them. I was mad at the universe. Even so, it infuriated me: You get all these friends just when you don’t need friends anymore. I wrote a reply to his comment:
We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. A ugustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with
cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim—as you will be—of the universe’s need to make and unmake all
that is possible.
I posted it and waited for someone to reply, refreshing over and over again. Nothing. My comment got lost in the blizzard of new posts.
Everyone was going to miss him so much. Everyone was praying for his family. I remembered Van Houten’s letter: Writing does not resurrect.
It buries.
* * *
A fter a while, I went out into the living room to sit with my parents and watch TV. I couldn’t tell you what the show was, but at some point, my mom said, “Hazel, what can we do for you?”
A nd I just shook my head. I started crying again.
“What can we do?” Mom asked again.
I shrugged.
But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until finally I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom’s middle and they held on to me for hours while
the tide rolled in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When we first got there, I sat in the back of the visitation room, a little room of exposed stone walls off to the side of the sanctuary in the Literal Heart of Jesus church. There were maybe eighty chairs set up in the room, and it was two-thirds full but felt one-third empty.
For a while, I just watched people walk up to the coffin, which was on some kind of cart covered in a purple tablecloth. A ll these people
I’d never seen before would kneel down next to him or stand over him and look at him for a while, maybe crying, maybe saying something,
and then all of them would touch the coffin instead of touching him, because no one wants to touch the dead.
Gus’s mom and dad were standing next to the coffin, hugging everybody as they passed by, but when they noticed me, they smiled and
shuffled over. I got up and hugged first his dad and then his mom, who held on to me too tight, like Gus used to, squeezing my shoulder
blades. They both looked so old—their eye sockets hollowed, the skin sagging from their exhausted faces. They had reached the end of a
hurdling sprint, too.
“He loved you so much,” Gus’s mom said. “He really did. It wasn’t—it wasn’t puppy love or anything,” she added, as if I didn’t know that.
“He loved you so much, too,” I said quietly. It’s hard to explain, but talking to them felt like stabbing and being stabbed. “I’m sorry,” I said. A nd then his parents were talking to my parents—the conversation all nodding and tight lips. I looked up at the casket and saw it
unattended, so I decided to walk up there. I pulled the oxygen tube from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad.
I wanted it to be just me and just him. I grabbed my little clutch and walked up the makeshift aisle between the rows of chairs.
The walk felt long, but I kept telling my lungs to shut up, that they were strong, that they could do this. I could see him as I approached: His hair was parted neatly on the left side in a way that he would have found absolutely horrifying, and his face was plasticized. But he was still Gus. My lanky, beautiful Gus.
I wanted to wear the little black dress I’d bought for my fifteenth birthday party, my death dress, but I didn’t fit into it anymore, so I
wore a plain black dress, knee-length. A ugustus wore the same thin-lapeled suit he’d worn to Oranjee.
A s I knelt, I realized they’d closed his eyes—of course they had—and that I would never again see his blue eyes. “I love you present
tense,” I whispered, and then put my hand on the middle of his chest and said, “It’s okay, Gus. It’s okay. It is. It’s okay, you hear me?” I had
—and have—absolutely no confidence that he could hear me. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I suddenly felt conscious that there were all these people watching us, that the last time so many people saw us kiss we were in the A
Frank House. But there was, properly speaking, no us left to watch. Only a me.
I snapped open the clutch, reached in, and pulled out a hard pack of Camel Lights. In a quick motion I hoped no one behind would
notice, I snuck them into the space between his side and the coffin’s plush silver lining. “You can light these,” I whispered to him. “I won’t mind.”
While I was talking to him, Mom and Dad had moved up to the second row with my tank, so I didn’t have a long walk back. Dad handed me a
tissue as I sat down. I blew my nose, threaded the tubes around my ears, and put the nubbins back in.
I thought we’d go into the proper sanctuary for the real funeral, but it all happened in that little side room—the Literal Hand of Jesus, I guess, the part of the cross he’d been nailed to. A minister walked up and stood behind the coffin, almost like the coffin was a pulpit or something, and talked a little bit about how A ugustus had a courageous battle and how his heroism in the face of illness was an inspiration to us all, and I was already starting to get pissed off at the minister when he said, “In heaven, A ugustus will finally be healed and whole,”
implying that he had been less whole than other people due to his leglessness, and I kind of could not repress my sigh of disgust. My dad
grabbed me just above the knee and cut me a disapproving look, but from the row behind me, someone muttered almost inaudibly near my
ear, “What a load of horse crap, eh, kid?”
I spun around.
Peter Van Houten wore a white linen suit, tailored to account for his rotundity, a powder-blue dress shirt, and a green tie. He looked like he was dressed for a colonial occupation of Panama, not a funeral. The minister said, “Let us pray,” but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. A fter a moment, he whispered, “We gotta fake pray,” and bowed his head.
I tried to forget about him and just pray for A ugustus. I made a point of listening to the minister and not looking back.