The Fault in Our Stars

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: “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 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.”