by Green, John
And then one of Gus’s brothers-in-law brought up a boom box and they played this song Gus had picked out—a sad and quiet song by The Hectic Glow called “The New Partner.” I just wanted to go home, honestly. I didn’t know hardly any of these people, and I felt Peter Van Houten’s little eyes boring into my exposed shoulder blades, but after the song was over, everyone had to come up to me and tell me that I’d spoken beautifully, and that it was a lovely service, which was a lie: It was a funeral. It looked like any other funeral.
His pallbearers—cousins, his dad, an uncle, friends I’d never seen—came and got him, and they all started walking toward the hearse.
When Mom and Dad and I got in the car, I said, “I don’t want to go. I’m tired.”
“Hazel,” Mom said.
“Mom, there won’t be a place to sit and it’ll last forever and I’m exhausted.”
“Hazel, we have to go for Mr. and Mrs. Waters,” Mom said.
“Just…” I said. I felt so little in the backseat for some reason. I kind of wanted to be little. I wanted to be like six years old or something. “Fine,” I said.
I just stared out the window awhile. I really didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see them lower him into the ground in the spot he’d picked out with his dad, and I didn’t want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain, and I didn’t want to see Peter Van Houten’s alcoholic belly stretched against his linen jacket, and I didn’t want to cry in front of a bunch of people, and I didn’t want to toss a handful of dirt onto his grave, and I didn’t want my parents to have to stand there beneath the clear blue sky with its certain slant of afternoon light, thinking about their day and their kid and my plot and my casket and my dirt.
But I did these things. I did all of them and worse, because Mom and Dad felt we should.
•••
After it was over, Van Houten walked up to me and put a fat hand on my shoulder and said, “Could I hitch a ride? Left my rental at the bottom of the hill.” I shrugged, and he opened the door to the backseat right as my dad unlocked the car.
Inside, he leaned between the front seats and said, “Peter Van Houten: Novelist Emeritus and Semiprofessional Disappointer.”
My parents introduced themselves. He shook their hands. I was pretty surprised that Peter Van Houten had flown halfway across the world to attend a funeral. “How did you even—” I started, but he cut me off.
“I used the infernal Internet of yours to follow the Indianapolis obituary notices.” He reached into his linen suit and produced a fifth of whiskey.
“And you just like bought a ticket and—”
He interrupted again while unscrewing the cap. “It was fifteen thousand for a first-class ticket, but I’m sufficiently capitalized to indulge such whims. And the drinks are free on the flight. If you’re ambitious, you can almost break even.”
Van Houten took a swig of the whiskey and then leaned forward to offer it to my dad, who said, “Um, no thanks.” Then Van Houten nodded the bottle toward me. I grabbed it.
“Hazel,” my mom said, but I unscrewed the cap and sipped. It made my stomach feel like my lungs. I handed the bottle back to Van Houten, who took a long slug from it and then said, “So. Omnis cellula e cellula.”
“Huh?”
“Your boy Waters and I corresponded a bit, and in his last—”
“Wait, you read your fan mail now?”
“No, he sent it to my house, not through my publisher. And I’d hardly call him a fan. He despised me. But at any rate he was quite insistent that I’d be absolved for my misbehavior if I attended his funeral and told you what became of Anna’s mother. So here I am, and there’s your answer: Omnis cellula e cellula.”
“What?” I asked again.
“Omnis cellula e cellula,” he said again. “All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.”
We reached the bottom of the hill. “Okay, yeah,” I said. I was in no mood for this. Peter Van Houten would not hijack Gus’s funeral. I wouldn’t allow it. “Thanks,” I said. “Well, I guess we’re at the bottom of the hill.”
“You don’t want an explanation?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m good. I think you’re a pathetic alcoholic who says fancy things to get attention like a really precocious eleven-year-old and I feel super bad for you. But yeah, no, you’re not the guy who wrote An Imperial Affliction anymore, so you couldn’t sequel it even if you wanted to. Thanks, though. Have an excellent life.”
“But—”
“Thanks for the booze,” I said. “Now get out of the car.” He looked scolded. Dad had stopped the car and we just idled there below Gus’s grave for a minute until Van Houten opened the door and, finally silent, left.
As we drove away, I watched through the back window as he took a drink and raised the bottle in my direction, as if toasting me. His eyes looked so sad. I felt kinda bad for him, to be honest.
•••
We finally got home around six, and I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep, but Mom made me eat some cheesy pasta, although she at least allowed me to eat in bed. I slept with the BiPAP for a couple hours. Waking up was horrible, because for a disoriented moment I felt like everything was fine, and then it crushed me anew. Mom took me off the BiPAP, I tethered myself to a portable tank, and stumbled into my bathroom to brush my teeth.
Appraising 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. And 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 beginning to suspect that even if death didn’t get in the way, the kind of love that Augustus and I share could never last. So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.
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
A couple 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: “Y
ou 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 CAVE WALL.”
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 cannot jump without standing.”
Isaac: “I dislike living in a world without Augustus 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. And 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 beginning in the 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 annoying.”
“I didn’t find it that annoying,” I said.
“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 Amsterdam at some point.”
“At 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 gonna go to his house,” I told Isaac.
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—”
“Ah ah ah ah GET OUT OF MY CAR.” I turned off the stereo.
“It’s your mother’s car, as I understand it,” he said. “Also, 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 cannot acquire companionship even through bribery. It is all true, Hazel. All that and more.”
“Okay,” I said. It would have been a more moving speech had he not slurred his words.
“You remind me of Anna.”
“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 Anna,” he said again. After a second, I put the car in reverse and backed out. I couldn’t make him leave, and I 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 Antonietta Meo.”
“Yeah, no,” I said. I turned on the stereo, and the Swedish hip-hop blared, but Van Houten yelled over it.
“She may soon be the youngest nonmartyr saint ever beatified by the Catholic Church. She had the same cancer that Mr. Waters had, osteosarcoma. They removed her right leg. The pain was excruciating. As Antonietta Meo lay dying at the ripened age of six from this agonizing cancer, she told her father, ‘Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.’ Is that true, Hazel?”
I wasn’t looking at him directly but at his reflection in the mirror. “No,” I shouted over the music. “That’s bullshit.”
“But don’t you wish it were true!” he cried back. I cut the music. “I’m sorry I ruined your trip. You were too young. You were—” He broke down. As if he had a right to cry over Gus. Van Houten was just another of the endless mourners who did not know him, another too-late lamentation on his wall.
“You didn’t ruin our trip, you self-important bastard. We had an awesome trip.”
“I am trying,” he said. “I am trying, I swear.” It was around then that I realized Peter Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I considered the honesty with which he had written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn’t speak to me in Amsterdam except to ask if I’d dressed like her on purpose; his shittiness around me and Augustus; his aching question about the relationship between pain’s extremity and its value. He sat back there drinking, an old man who’d been drunk for years. I thought of a statistic I wish I didn’t know: Half of marriages end in the year after a child’s death. I looked back at Van Houten. I was driving down College and I pulled over behind a line of parked cars and asked, “You had a kid who died?”
“My daughter,” he said. “She was eight. Suffered beautifully. Will never be beatified.”
“She had leukemia?” I asked. He nodded. “Like Anna,” I said.
“Very much like her, yes.”
“You were married?”
“No. Well, not at the time of her death. I was insufferable long before we lost her. Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
“Did you live with her?”
“No, not primarily, although at the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.”
After a second, I said, “So it’s like
you gave her this second life where she got to be a teenager.”
“I suppose that would be a fair assessment,” he said, and then quickly added, “I assume you are familiar with Philippa Foot’s Trolley Problem thought experiment?”
“And then I show up at your house and I’m dressed like the girl you hoped she would live to become and you’re, like, all taken aback by it.”
“There’s a trolley running out of control down a track,” he said.
“I don’t care about your stupid thought experiment,” I said.
“It’s Philippa Foot’s, actually.”
“Well, hers either,” I said.
“She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
After a while, I asked, “What happened to her mom?”
He smiled. “You’re still looking for your sequel, you little rat.”
I smiled back. “You should go home,” I told him. “Sober up. Write another novel. Do the thing you’re good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.”
He stared at me through the mirror for a long time. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. You’re right. You’re right.” But even as he said it, he pulled out his mostly empty fifth of whiskey. He drank, recapped the bottle, and opened the door. “Good-bye, Hazel.”
“Take it easy, Van Houten.”
He sat down on the curb behind the car. As I watched him shrink in the rearview mirror, he pulled out the bottle and for a second it looked like he would leave it on the curb. And then he took a swig.