"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 gra.s.s 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 uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the cap. "It was fifteen thousand for a first-cla.s.s 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 bulls.h.i.t," he said. "The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he's in the twenty percent? Bulls.h.i.t. He was such a bright kid. It's bulls.h.i.t. 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: "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 pa.s.sage narrows."

Me: "Crawl."

Computer: "You crawl for one hundred yards. The pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sageway."

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 s.h.i.t 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 pa.s.senger 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 G.o.d! 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."