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bathroom to brush my teeth.
A ppraising myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were Peter Van Houtens—
miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. A nd then there were people like my parents, who walked around
zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.
Neither of these futures struck me as particularly desirable. It seemed to me that I had already seen everything pure and good in the
world, and I was begi
Someone knocked on the bathroom door.
“Occupada,” I said.
“Hazel,” my dad said. “Can I come in?” I didn’t answer, but after a while I unlocked the door. I sat down on the closed toilet seat. Why
did breathing have to be such work? Dad knelt down next to me. He grabbed my head and pulled it into his collarbone, and he said, “I’m
sorry Gus died.” I felt kind of suffocated by his T-shirt, but it felt good to be held so hard, pressed into the comfortable smell of my dad. It was almost like he was angry or something, and I liked that, because I was angry, too. “It’s total bullshit,” he said. “The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he’s in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It’s bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?”
I nodded into his shirt.
“Gives you an idea how I feel about you,” he said.
My old man. He always knew just what to say.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Acouple days later, I got up around noon and drove over to Isaac’s house. He answered the door himself. “My mom took Graham to a
movie,” he said.
“We should go do something,” I said.
“Can the something be play blind-guy video games while sitting on the couch?”
“Yeah, that’s just the kind of something I had in mind.”
So we sat there for a couple hours talking to the screen together, navigating this invisible labyrinthine cave without a single lumen of
light. The most entertaining part of the game by far was trying to get the computer to engage us in humorous conversation:
Me: “Touch the cave wall.”
Computer: “You touch the cave wall. It is moist.”
Isaac: “Lick the cave wall.”
Computer: “I do not understand. Repeat?”
Me: “Hump the moist cave wall.”
Computer: “You attempt to jump. You hit your head.”
Isaac: “Not jump. HUMP.”
Computer: “I don’t understand.”
Isaac: “Dude, I’ve been alone in the dark in this cave for weeks and I need some relief. HUMP THE CA VE WA LL.”
Computer: “You attempt to ju—”
Me: “Thrust pelvis against the cave wall.”
Computer: “I do not—”
Isaac: “Make sweet love to the cave.”
Computer: “I do not—”
Me: “FINE. Follow left branch.”
Computer: “You follow the left branch. The passage narrows.”
Me: “Crawl.”
Computer: “You crawl for one hundred yards. The passage narrows.”
Me: “Snake crawl.”
Computer: “You snake crawl for thirty yards. A trickle of water runs down your body. You reach a mound of small rocks blocking the
passageway.”
Me: “Can I hump the cave now?”
Computer: “You ca
Isaac: “I dislike living in a world without A ugustus Waters.”
Computer: “I don’t understand—”
Isaac: “Me neither. Pause.”
He dropped the remote onto the couch between us and asked, “Do you know if it hurt or whatever?”
“He was really fighting for breath, I guess,” I said. “He eventually went unconscious, but it sounds like, yeah, it wasn’t great or anything.
Dying sucks.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. A nd then after a long time, “It just seems so impossible.”
“Happens all the time,” I said.
“You seem angry,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very begi
Literal Heart of Jesus when Gus told us that he feared oblivion, and I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering. I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us—not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals.
“Gus really loved you, you know,” he said.
“I know.”
“He wouldn’t shut up about it.”
“I know,” I said.
“It was a
“I didn’t find it that a
“Did he ever give you that thing he was writing?”
“What thing?”
“That sequel or whatever to that book you liked.”
I turned to Isaac. “What?”
“He said he was working on something for you but he wasn’t that good of a writer.”
“When did he say this?”
“I don’t know. Like, after he got back from A msterdam at some point.”
“A t which point?” I pressed. Had he not had a chance to finish it? Had he finished it and left it on his computer or something?
“Um,” Isaac sighed. “Um, I don’t know. We talked about it over here once. He was over here, like—uh, we played with my email machine
and I’d just gotten an email from my grandmother. I can check on the machine if you—”
“Yeah, yeah, where is it?”
He’d mentioned it a month before. A month. Not a good month, admittedly, but still—a month. That was enough time for him to have written
something, at least. There was still something of him, or by him at least, floating around out there. I needed it.
“I’m go
I hurried out to the minivan and hauled the oxygen cart up and into the passenger seat. I started the car. A hip-hop beat blared from the
stereo, and as I reached to change the radio station, someone started rapping. In Swedish.
I swiveled around and screamed when I saw Peter Van Houten sitting in the backseat.
“I apologize for alarming you,” Peter Van Houten said over the rapping. He was still wearing the funeral suit, almost a week later. He
smelled like he was sweating alcohol. “You’re welcome to keep the CD,” he said. “It’s Snook, one of the major Swedish—”
“A h ah ah ah GET OUT OF MY CA R.” I turned off the stereo.
“It’s your mother’s car, as I understand it,” he said. “A lso, it wasn’t locked.”
“Oh, my God! Get out of the car or I’ll call nine-one-one. Dude, what is your problem?”
“If only there were just one,” he mused. “I am here simply to apologize. You were correct in noting earlier that I am a pathetic little man, dependent upon alcohol. I had one acquaintance who only spent time with me because I paid her to do so—worse, still, she has since quit,
leaving me the rare soul who ca
“Okay,” I said. It would have been a more moving speech had he not slurred his words.
“You remind me of A
“I remind a lot of people of a lot of people,” I answered. “I really have to go.”
“So drive,” he said.
“Get out.”
“No. You remind me of A
didn’t have to. I’d drive to Gus’s house, and Gus’s parents would make him leave.
“You are, of course, familiar,” Van Houten said, “with A ntonietta Meo.”
“Yeah, no,” I said. I turned on the stereo, and the Swedish hip-hop blared, but Van Houten yelled over it.