You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. . . Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Pete Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

Dutch is not so much a language as an ailment of the throat.

I do, Augustus. I do.

And then it was the kind of dark your eyes never adjust to.

Anyway, that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.

We were kissing. I thought: This is good. I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all. I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe. Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. "You slobbered on my nose," she said, and laughed

It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.