That night, I crawled into bed and started reading An Imperial Affliction for the millionth time.
AIA is about this girl named Anna (who narrates) and her dad, who have a normal lower-middle-class life in a little Texas town until Anna gets a rare blood cancer.
But AIA is not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. In cancer books, the person with cancer always starts some cancer charity, and we’re supposed to feel good at the end of the book when the person dies because the person will leave a cancer-fighting legacy. Right? But AIA is different. In AIA, Anna doesn’t devote her life to fighting cancer. Instead, she devotes her life to promoting cancer. Anna gets a PhD in bioengineering and uses her expertise to develop new, highly lethal forms of cancer, with the hope of infecting and killing off the entire segment of the world’s population that had not previously had cancer.
Anna is also honest about cancer in a way no other cancer book protagonist is. Unlike typical cancer book characters, Anna sees no great purpose in people having cancer. People with cancer, she says, are side effects of fucking. No couple who fucks plans on having a kid with cancer. Sometimes it just happens. As Anna likes to say, “Cancer comes with the fucking territory.”
As the story progresses, Anna gets sicker and sicker, and is tragically unable to complete her project of killing off the entire non-cancer population. Meanwhile, her dad falls in love with a Young Adult novelist by the name of Veronica Roth. Veronica Roth has written several bestsellers and has become extremely wealthy, but Anna suspects she might be a con artist. Anna believes that Veronica Roth’s novels are actually written by a large roster of unemployed English PhDs who are barely paid enough to live on and who receive none of the credit for their work. Just as Anna is about to expose Veronica Roth for the talentless literary fraud she is, the book ends right in the middle of a
I get that it’s seen as a cool device to end a book in the middle, and I get that Anna probably got too sick to keep writing or died or whatever, and I get that Veronica Roth is a talentless literary fraud, but it just seemed too darn unfair that I would never find out what ultimately happened to all the characters. So I’d written fifteen letters to Peter Van Houten, care of the publisher, asking for some answers: whether Anna’s Dad ends up marrying Veronica Roth, what happens to Anna’s stupid (but very smart) hamster, whether one of Anna’s colleagues uses Anna’s research to fulfill Anna’s dream of infecting the entire world’s population with cancer – all that stuff. But Peter Van Houten had never responded to my letters.
AIA was the only book Van Houten had ever written, and no one knew anything about him except that after the book came out he moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands and became some kind of recluse. I liked to imagine he was working on a sequel set in the Netherlands, where Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and J.K. Rowling had teamed up to form a gigantic international talentless literary fraud conspiracy. But I had no idea what Van Houten was actually working on, or even if he was working on anything at all, because he had never published a blog post, or posted a Facebook status, or vined a Vine or whatever the fuck you call it when people post something on Vine.
As I reread AIA that night, I kept getting distracted imagining Augustus reading the same words I was reading. I wondered if he’d like it, or whether he was illiterate. Then I remembered I’d promised to call him after reading Looking for Alaska. I got out my phone and texted him.
Hi!
He replied a minute later:
Bj?
God, he was hot. Before I could reply, my oxygen tank beeped and I had to change it for a fresh one, which took a few minutes. As I was finishing changing it, I got another text:
Haaaaaa just kidding haaaaa. Um, you promised to CALL when you finished the book, not text.
So I called.
“Hazel Grace,” he said when he picked up.
“You were right,” I said. “Looking for Alaska is the best money I’ve ever spent. Now do you have a review for me?”
“An Imperial Affliction? You just gave it to me yesterday.”
“Fair enough. How much have you read?”
“Two-thirds done,” he said. “So, okay, does Veronica Roth not really write her own books? I’m getting a bad vibe from her.”
“No spoilers,” I said.
“When can I see you?”
“Certainly not until you finish the book,” I said. As a female, I enjoyed playing games instead of doing what I really wanted.
“Then I’d better hang up and keep reading.”
“Darn right you should,” I said. The line clicked dead without another word.
Developing a deep relationship with someone through mindless chatter about pop culture was new to me, but I liked it.
***
The next morning I had a class at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes without me listening to a single word of it.
When I got out of class, Mom’s car was waiting at its usual spot outside.
“Wanna go see a movie?” I asked. After-class movies were a Lancaster tradition.
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want to see?”
“Let’s just do the thing where we go and see whatever starts next,” I said. We drove to the theater and ended up seeing The Lego Movie. It was the fourth straight time we’d seen it using this method of choosing movies.
When we got out of the movie, I had twenty-three text messages from Augustus.
Tell me my copy is missing the last fifteen pages or something.
Hazel Grace, tell me this is not the end of the book.
OMIGOD DO THEY GET MARRIED AND DID SHE DIE WHAT IS THIS
I guess it ended because Anna died? Cruel. Call me. Hope all’s ok.
Everything ok?
Hey, not sure my phone’s been working, just wanted to make sure you got my texts.
You there?
Helllooooooo?
Wtf????
Hey are you fucking there?
I swear, if you’re with another dude I will fucking kill you.
When I got home I went out into the backyard and called Augustus. He picked up on the first ring. “Haaaa I was just joking in the last sixteen texts haaaa,” he said.
“Augustus,” I said, “Welcome to the sweet, sweet torture of reading An Imperial Afflict–” I stopped when I heard sobbing on the other end of the line. “Augustus, are you ok?”
“I’m grand,” he said. “But Isaac is definitely not. His girlfriend dumped him today.”
Sweet! I thought. Drama!
“I’ll be right over.”
***
As I walked down the stairs to Augustus’ basement, I could see Augustus and Isaac sitting in the two gaming chairs playing a shoot-’em-up video game. But when I got closer, I realized that Augustus was playing whereas Isaac was just crying. Augustus’ and Isaac’s characters were coming under massive gunfire, largely because Isaac’s character wasn’t actually doing anything.
Augustus nudged Isaac’s shoulder. “Dude, work with me here.”
Isaac let out a horrendous wail. “She said always! Always always always! How could she do this?”
“Isaac,” I said, “you do realize that ‘always’ no longer applies if the person you’re dating goes blind, or becomes deaf, or suffers some other significant physical deformity.”
Isaac looked confused. “What?” he said.
“Think about it: what fun is dating a blind person? What do you even do with them? ‘Hey, want to watch a movie?’ And who wants to listen to that infernal ‘Are you there? Are you there?’ over and over again? Yeah thanks but no thanks.”
“Hazel Grace is right,” said Augustus. “You know how on OkCupid they give you options for what qualities you want your match to have? And there’s no choice for sighted/not-sighted? That’s because it’s assumed.”
Isaac shook his head defiantly. “Well I believe in true love,” he said. “And she promised. She promised me always!” He stood up, got a look of rage, and kicked the gaming chair, which fell onto Augustus’ bed.
“Yes!” Augustus said. “Beat the shit out of that chair.” Isaac climbed up onto the bed and continued pounding the chair. “Get it out of your system, dude! Pain is painful.” It was a quote from An Imperial Affliction.
Augustus looked over at me and lifted an unlit cigarette to his mouth. “I cannot stop thinking about that book.”
“Totally, right?”
Isaac had moved on from the chair and was now beating up a pillow. “Hold on,” Augustus said. He went over to Isaac. “Dude, pillows don’t break. You need something that breaks.” Isaac looked around, and walked menacingly over to the TV.
“Dude, no, not that!” Augustus said. He handed Isaac a basketball trophy.
“You sure?” Isaac said.
“It’s fine,” Augustus said. “I could use the extra shelf space.” He turned back to me. “So Van Houten never said what happens to all the characters?”
“Nope,” I said. “He moved to Amsterdam, became a recluse, and never answered any of my letters.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Isaac wind up like a baseball pitcher and throw the trophy through the TV screen.
“Feel better?” Augustus asked.
“Not particularly,” Isaac mumbled.
“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, looking back at me. “It’s painful.”
