The Fault in Our Stars (11 page)

“Right,” he said. “So I went through this whole thing about wanting to be ready. We bought a plot in Crown Hill, and I walked around with my dad one day and picked out a spot. And I had my whole funeral planned out and everything, and then right before the surgery, I asked my parents if I could buy a suit, like a really nice suit, just in case I bit it. Anyway, I’ve never had occasion to wear it. Until tonight.”

“So it’s your death suit.”                                           

“Correct. Don’t you have a death outfit?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a dress I bought for my fifteenth birthday party. But I don’t wear it on dates.”

His eyes lit up. “We’re on a date?” he asked.

I looked down, feeling bashful. “Don’t push it.”

We were both really full, but dessert—a succulently rich
crémeux
surrounded by passion fruit—was too good not to at least nibble, so we lingered for a while over dessert, trying to get hungry again. The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.

Out of nowhere, Augustus asked, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“I think forever is an incorrect concept,” I answered.

He smirked. “You’re an incorrect concept.”

“I know. That’s why I’m being taken out of the rotation.”

“That’s not funny,” he said, looking at the street. Two girls passed on a bike, one riding sidesaddle over the back wheel.

“Come on,” I said. “That was a joke.”

“The thought of you being removed from the rotation is not funny to me,” he said. “Seriously, though: afterlife?”

“No,” I said, and then revised. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t go so far as no. You?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice full of confidence. “Yes, absolutely. Not like a heaven where you ride unicorns, play harps, and live in a mansion made of clouds. But yes. I believe in Something with a capital
S
. Always have.”

“Really?” I asked. I was surprised. I’d always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn’t dumb.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I believe in that line from
An Imperial Affliction
. ‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.’ That’s God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren’t lost. I don’t believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us.”

“But you fear oblivion.”

“Sure, I fear earthly oblivion. But, I mean, not to sound like my parents, but I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.”

I just shook my head.

“What?” he asked.

“Your obsession with, like, dying for something or leaving behind some great sign of your heroism or whatever. It’s just weird.”

“Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life.”

“Not everyone,” I said, unable to disguise my annoyance.

“Are you mad?”

“It’s just,” I said, and then couldn’t finish my sentence. “Just,” I said again. Between us flickered the candle. “It’s really mean of you to say that the only lives that matter are the ones that are lived for something or die for something. That’s a really mean thing to say to me.”

I felt like a little kid for some reason, and I took a bite of dessert to make it appear like it was not that big of a deal to me. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just thinking about myself.”

“Yeah, you were,” I said. I was too full to finish. I worried I might puke, actually, because I often puked after eating. (Not bulimia, just cancer.) I pushed my dessert plate toward Gus, but he shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, reaching across the table for my hand. I let him take it. “I could be worse, you know.”

“How?” I asked, teasing.

“I mean, I have a work of calligraphy over my toilet that reads, ‘Bathe Yourself Daily in the Comfort of God’s Words,’ Hazel. I could be way worse.”

“Sounds unsanitary,” I said.

“I could be worse.”

“You could be worse.” I smiled. He really did like me. Maybe I was a narcissist or something, but when I realized it there in that moment at Oranjee, it made me like him even more.

When our waiter appeared to take dessert away, he said, “Your meal has been paid for by Mr. Peter Van Houten.”

Augustus smiled. “This Peter Van Houten fellow ain’t half bad.”

We walked along the canal as it got dark. A block up from Oranjee, we stopped at a park bench surrounded by old rusty bicycles locked to bike racks and to each other. We sat down hip to hip facing the canal, and he put his arm around me.

I could see the halo of light coming from the Red Light District. Even though it was the
Red
Light District, the glow coming from up there was an eerie sort of green. I imagined thousands of tourists getting drunk and stoned and pinballing around the narrow streets.

“I can’t believe he’s going to tell us tomorrow,” I said. “Peter Van Houten is going to tell us the famously unwritten end of the best book ever.”

“Plus he paid for our dinner,” Augustus said.

“I keep imagining that he is going to search us for recording devices before he tells us. And then he will sit down between us on the couch in his living room and whisper whether Anna’s mom married the Dutch Tulip Man.”

“Don’t forget Sisyphus the Hamster,” Augustus added.

“Right, and also of course what fate awaited Sisyphus the Hamster.” I leaned forward, to see into the canal. There were so many of those pale elm petals in the canals, it was ridiculous. “A sequel that will exist just for us,” I said.

“So what’s your guess?” he asked.

“I really don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth like a thousand times about it all. Each time I reread it, I think something different, you know?” He nodded. “You have a theory?”

“Yeah. I don’t think the Dutch Tulip Man is a con man, but he’s also not rich like he leads them to believe. And I think after Anna dies, Anna’s mom goes to Holland with him and thinks they will live there forever, but it doesn’t work out, because she wants to be near where her daughter was.”

I hadn’t realized he’d thought about the book so much, that
An Imperial Affliction
mattered to Gus independently of me mattering to him.

The water lapped quietly at the stone canal walls beneath us; a group of friends biked past in a clump, shouting over each other in rapid-fire, guttural Dutch; the tiny boats, not much longer than me, half drowned in the canal; the smell of water that had stood too still for too long; his arm pulling me in; his real leg against my real leg all the way from hip to foot. I leaned in to his body a little. He winced. “Sorry, you okay?”

He breathed out a
yeah
in obvious pain.

“Sorry,” I said. “Bony shoulder.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Nice, actually.”

We sat there for a long time. Eventually his hand abandoned my shoulder and rested against the back of the park bench. Mostly we just stared into the canal. I was thinking a lot about how they’d made this place exist even though it should’ve been underwater, and how I was for Dr. Maria a kind of Amsterdam, a half-drowned anomaly, and that made me think about dying. “Can I ask you about Caroline Mathers?”

“And you say there’s no afterlife,” he answered without looking at me. “But yeah, of course. What do you want to know?”

I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved. “Just, like, what happened.”

He sighed, exhaling for so long that to my crap lungs it seemed like he was bragging. He popped a fresh cigarette into his mouth. “You know how there is famously no place less played in than a hospital playground?” I nodded. “Well, I was at Memorial for a couple weeks when they took off the leg and everything. I was up on the fifth floor and I had a view of the playground, which was always of course utterly desolate. I was all awash in the metaphorical resonance of the empty playground in the hospital courtyard. But then this girl started showing up alone at the playground, every day, swinging on a swing completely alone, like you’d see in a movie or something. So I asked one of my nicer nurses to get the skinny on the girl, and the nurse brought her up to visit, and it was Caroline, and I used my immense charisma to win her over.” He paused, so I decided to say something.

“You’re not that charismatic,” I said. He scoffed, disbelieving. “You’re mostly just hot,” I explained.

He laughed it off. “The thing about dead people,” he said, and then stopped himself. “The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don’t romanticize them, but the truth is . . . complicated, I guess. Like, you are familiar with the trope of the stoic and determined cancer victim who heroically fights her cancer with inhuman strength and never complains or stops smiling even at the very end, etcetera?”

“Indeed,” I said. “They are kindhearted and generous souls whose every breath is an Inspiration to Us All. They’re so strong! We admire them so!”

“Right, but really, I mean aside from us obviously, cancer kids are not statistically more likely to be awesome or compassionate or perseverant or whatever. Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know? Ragging on the nurses and the other kids and our families and whatever else. But I don’t know if that was her or the tumor. I mean, one of her nurses told me once that the kind of tumor Caroline had is known among medical types as the Asshole Tumor, because it just turns you into a monster. So here’s this girl missing a fifth of her brain who’s just had a recurrence of the Asshole Tumor, and so she was not, you know, the paragon of stoic cancer-kid heroism. She was . . . I mean, to be honest, she was a bitch. But you can’t say that, because she had this tumor, and also she’s, I mean, she’s dead. And she had plenty of reason to be unpleasant, you know?”

I knew.

“You know that part in
An Imperial Affliction
when Anna’s walking across the football field to go to PE or whatever and she falls and goes face-first into the grass and that’s when she knows that the cancer is back and in her nervous system and she can’t get up and her face is like an inch from the football-field grass and she’s just stuck there looking at this grass up close, noticing the way the light hits it and . . . I don’t remember the line but it’s something like Anna having the Whitmanesque revelation that the definition of humanness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation or whatever. You know that part?”

“I know that part,” I said.

“So afterward, while I was getting eviscerated by chemo, for some reason I decided to feel really hopeful. Not about survival specifically, but I felt like Anna does in the book, that feeling of excitement and gratitude about just being able to marvel at it all.

“But meanwhile Caroline got worse every day. She went home after a while and there were moments where I thought we could have, like, a regular relationship, but we couldn’t, really, because she had no filter between her thoughts and her speech, which was sad and unpleasant and frequently hurtful. But, I mean, you can’t dump a girl with a brain tumor. And her parents liked me, and she has this little brother who is a really cool kid. I mean, how can you dump her? She’s
dying
.

“It took forever. It took almost a year, and it was a year of me hanging out with this girl who would, like, just start laughing out of nowhere and point at my prosthetic and call me Stumpy.”

“No,” I said.

“Yeah. I mean, it was the tumor. It ate her brain, you know? Or it wasn’t the tumor. I have no way of knowing, because they were inseparable, she and the tumor. But as she got sicker, I mean, she’d just repeat the same stories and laugh at her own comments even if she’d already said the same thing a hundred times that day. Like, she made the same joke over and over again for weeks: ‘Gus has great legs. I mean leg.’ And then she would just laugh like a maniac.”

“Oh, Gus,” I said. “That’s . . .” I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t looking at me, and it felt invasive of me to look at him. I felt him scoot forward. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared at it, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, then put it back.

“Well,” he said, “to be fair, I
do
have great leg.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s all good, Hazel Grace. But just to be clear, when I thought I saw Caroline Mathers’s ghost in Support Group, I was not entirely happy. I was staring, but I wasn’t yearning, if you know what I mean.” He pulled the pack out of his pocket and placed the cigarette back in it.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“Me too,” he said.

“I don’t ever want to do that to you,” I told him.

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
woke up at four in the Dutch morning ready for the day. All attempts to go back to sleep failed, so I lay there with the BiPAP pumping the air in and urging it out, enjoying the dragon sounds but wishing I could choose my breaths.

I reread
An Imperial Affliction
until Mom woke up and rolled over toward me around six. She nuzzled her head against my shoulder, which felt uncomfortable and vaguely Augustinian.

The hotel brought a breakfast to our room that, much to my delight, featured
deli meat
among many other denials of American breakfast constructions. The dress I’d planned to wear to meet Peter Van Houten had been moved up in the rotation for the Oranjee dinner, so after I showered and got my hair to lie halfway flat, I spent like thirty minutes debating with Mom the various benefits and drawbacks of the available outfits before deciding to dress as much like Anna in
AIA
as possible: Chuck Taylors and dark jeans like she always wore, and a light blue T-shirt.

The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by René Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
(“This is not a pipe.”)

“I just don’t get that shirt,” Mom said.

“Peter Van Houten will get it, trust me. There are like seven thousand Magritte references in
An Imperial Affliction
.”

“But it
is
a pipe.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a
drawing
of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever.”

“How did you get so grown up that you understand things that confuse your ancient mother?” Mom asked. “It seems like just yesterday that I was telling seven-year-old Hazel why the sky was blue. You thought I was a genius back then.”

“Why
is
the sky blue?” I asked.

“Cuz,” she answered. I laughed.

As it got closer to ten, I grew more and more nervous: nervous to see Augustus; nervous to meet Peter Van Houten; nervous that my outfit was not a good outfit; nervous that we wouldn’t find the right house since all the houses in Amsterdam looked pretty similar; nervous that we would get lost and never make it back to the Filosoof; nervous nervous nervous. Mom kept trying to talk to me, but I couldn’t really listen. I was about to ask her to go upstairs and make sure Augustus was up when he knocked.

I opened the door. He looked down at the shirt and smiled. “Funny,” he said.

“Don’t call my boobs funny,” I answered.

“Right here,” Mom said behind us. But I’d made Augustus blush and put him enough off his game that I could finally bear to look up at him.

“You sure you don’t want to come?” I asked Mom.

“I’m going to the Rijksmuseum and the Vondelpark today,” she said. “Plus, I just don’t get his book. No offense. Thank him and Lidewij for us, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I hugged Mom, and she kissed my head just above my ear.

Peter Van Houten’s white row house was just around the corner from the hotel, on the Vondelstraat, facing the park. Number 158. Augustus took me by one arm and grabbed the oxygen cart with the other, and we walked up the three steps to the lacquered blue-black front door. My heart pounded. One closed door away from the answers I’d dreamed of ever since I first read that last unfinished page.

Inside, I could hear a bass beat thumping loud enough to rattle the windowsills. I wondered whether Peter Van Houten had a kid who liked rap music.

I grabbed the lion’s-head door knocker and knocked tentatively. The beat continued. “Maybe he can’t hear over the music?” Augustus asked. He grabbed the lion’s head and knocked much louder.

The music disappeared, replaced by shuffled footsteps. A dead bolt slid. Another. The door creaked open. A potbellied man with thin hair, sagging jowls, and a week-old beard squinted into the sunlight. He wore baby-blue man pajamas like guys in old movies. His face and belly were so round, and his arms so skinny, that he looked like a dough ball with four sticks stuck into it. “Mr. Van Houten?” Augustus asked, his voice squeaking a bit.

The door slammed shut. Behind it, I heard a stammering, reedy voice shout, “LEEE-DUH-VIGH!” (Until then, I’d pronounced his assistant’s name like lid-uh-widge.)

We could hear everything through the door. “Are they here, Peter?” a woman asked.

“There are—Lidewij, there are two adolescent apparitions outside the door.”

“Apparitions?” she asked with a pleasant Dutch lilt.

Van Houten answered in a rush. “Phantasms specters ghouls visitants post-terrestrials
apparitions
, Lidewij. How can someone pursuing a postgraduate degree in American literature display such abominable English-language skills?”

“Peter, those are not post-terrestrials. They are Augustus and Hazel, the young fans with whom you have been corresponding.”

“They are—what? They—I thought they were in America!”

“Yes, but you invited them here, you will remember.”

“Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans.”

“But you are an American.”

“Incurably so, it seems. But as to
these
Americans, you must tell them to leave at once, that there has been a terrible mistake, that the blessed Van Houten was making a rhetorical offer to meet, not an
actual one, that such offers must be read symbolically.”

I thought I might throw up. I looked over at Augustus, who was staring intently at the door, and saw his shoulders slacken.

“I will not do this, Peter,” answered Lidewij. “You
must
meet them. You must. You need to see them. You need to see how your work matters.”

“Lidewij, did you knowingly deceive me to arrange this?”

A long silence ensued, and then finally the door opened again. He turned his head metronomically from Augustus to me, still squinting. “Which of you is Augustus Waters?” he asked. Augustus raised his hand tentatively. Van Houten nodded and said, “Did you close the deal with that chick yet?”

Whereupon I encountered for the first and only time a truly speechless Augustus Waters. “I,” he started, “um, I, Hazel, um. Well.”

“This boy appears to have some kind of developmental delay,” Peter Van Houten said to Lidewij.

“Peter,”
she scolded.

“Well,” Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. “It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures.” I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what
ontologically
meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.

Of course, I had hoped that Peter Van Houten would be sane, but the world is not a wish-granting factory. The important thing was that the door was open and I was crossing the threshold to learn what happens after the end of
An Imperial Affliction
. That was enough. We followed him and Lidewij inside, past a huge oak dining room table with only two chairs, into a creepily sterile living room. It looked like a museum, except there was no art on the empty white walls. Aside from one couch and one lounge chair, both a mix of steel and black leather, the room seemed empty. Then I noticed two large black garbage bags, full and twist-tied, behind the couch.

“Trash?” I mumbled to Augustus soft enough that I thought no one else would hear.

“Fan mail,” Van Houten answered as he sat down in the lounge chair. “Eighteen years’ worth of it. Can’t open it. Terrifying. Yours are the first missives to which I have replied, and look where that got me. I frankly find the reality of readers wholly unappetizing.”

That explained why he’d never replied to my letters: He’d never read them. I wondered why he kept them at all, let alone in an otherwise empty formal living room. Van Houten kicked his feet up onto the ottoman and crossed his slippers. He motioned toward the couch. Augustus and I sat down next to each other, but not
too
next.

“Would you care for some breakfast?” asked Lidewij.

I started to say that we’d already eaten when Peter interrupted. “It is far too early for breakfast, Lidewij.”

“Well, they are from America, Peter, so it is past noon in their bodies.”

“Then it’s too late for breakfast,” he said. “However, it being after noon in the body and whatnot, we should enjoy a cocktail. Do you drink Scotch?” he asked me.

“Do I—um, no, I’m fine,” I said.

“Augustus Waters?” Van Houten asked, nodding toward Gus.

“Uh, I’m good.”

“Just me, then, Lidewij. Scotch and water, please.” Peter turned his attention to Gus, asking, “You know how we make a Scotch and water in this home?”

“No, sir,” Gus said.

“We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of water.”

Lidewij said, “Perhaps a bit of breakfast first, Peter.”

He looked toward us and stage-whispered, “She thinks I have a drinking problem.”

“And I think that the sun has risen,” Lidewij responded. Nonetheless, she turned to the bar in the living room, reached up for a bottle of Scotch, and poured a glass half full. She carried it to him. Peter Van Houten took a sip, then sat up straight in his chair. “A drink this good deserves one’s best posture,” he said.

I became conscious of my own posture and sat up a little on the couch. I rearranged my cannula. Dad always told me that you can judge people by the way they treat waiters and assistants. By this measure, Peter Van Houten was possibly the world’s douchiest douche. “So you like my book,” he said to Augustus after another sip.

“Yeah,” I said, speaking up on Augustus’s behalf. “And yes, we—well, Augustus, he made meeting you his Wish so that we could come here, so that you could tell us what happens after the end of
An Imperial Affliction
.”

Van Houten said nothing, just took a long pull on his drink.

After a minute, Augustus said, “Your book is sort of the thing that brought us together.”

“But you aren’t together,” he observed without looking at me.

“The thing that brought us nearly together,” I said.

Now he turned to me. “Did you dress like her on purpose?”

“Anna?” I asked.

He just kept staring at me.

“Kind of,” I said.

He took a long drink, then grimaced. “I do not have a drinking problem,” he announced, his voice needlessly loud. “I have a Churchillian relationship with alcohol: I can crack jokes and govern England and do anything I want to do. Except not drink.” He glanced over at Lidewij and nodded toward his glass. She took it, then walked back to the bar. “Just the
idea
of water, Lidewij,” he instructed.

“Yah, got it,” she said, the accent almost American.

The second drink arrived. Van Houten’s spine stiffened again out of respect. He kicked off his slippers. He had really ugly feet. He was rather ruining the whole business of authorial genius for me. But he had the answers.

“Well, um,” I said, “first, we do want to say thank you for dinner last night and—”

“We bought them dinner last night?” Van Houten asked Lidewij.

“Yes, at Oranjee.”

“Ah, yes. Well, believe me when I say that you do not have me to thank but rather Lidewij, who is exceptionally talented in the field of spending my money.”

“It was our pleasure,” Lidewij said.

“Well, thanks, at any rate,” Augustus said. I could hear annoyance in his voice.

“So here I am,” Van Houten said after a moment. “What are your questions?”

“Um,” Augustus said.

“He seemed so intelligent in print,” Van Houten said to Lidewij regarding Augustus. “Perhaps the cancer has established a beachhead in his brain.”

“Peter,” Lidewij said, duly horrified.

I was horrified, too, but there was something pleasant about a guy so despicable that he wouldn’t treat us deferentially. “We do have some questions, actually,” I said. “I talked about them in my email. I don’t know if you remember.”

“I do not.”

“His memory is compromised,” Lidewij said.

“If only my memory would compromise,” Van Houten responded.

“So, our questions,” I repeated.

“She uses the royal we,” Peter said to no one in particular. Another sip. I didn’t know what Scotch tasted like, but if it tasted anything like champagne, I couldn’t imagine how he could drink so much, so quickly, so early in the morning. “Are you familiar with Zeno’s tortoise paradox?” he asked me.  

“We have questions about what happens to the characters after the end of the book, specifically Anna’s—”

“You wrongly assume that I need to hear your question in order to answer it. You are familiar with the philosopher Zeno?” I shook my head vaguely. “Alas. Zeno was a pre-Socratic philosopher who is said to have discovered forty paradoxes within the worldview put forth by Parmenides—surely you know Parmenides,” he said, and I nodded that I knew Parmenides, although I did not. “Thank God,” he said. “Zeno professionally specialized in revealing the inaccuracies and oversimplifications of Parmenides, which wasn’t difficult, since Parmenides was spectacularly wrong everywhere and always. Parmenides is valuable in precisely the way that it is valuable to have an acquaintance who reliably picks the wrong horse each and every time you take him to the racetrack. But Zeno’s most important—wait, give me a sense of your familiarity with Swedish hip-hop.”

I could not tell if Peter Van Houten was kidding. After a moment, Augustus answered for me. “Limited,” he said.

“Okay, but presumably you know Afasi och Filthy’s seminal album
Fläcken
.”

“We do not,” I said for the both of us.

“Lidewij, play ‘Bomfalleralla’ immediately.” Lidewij walked over to an MP3 player, spun the wheel a bit, then hit a button. A rap song boomed from every direction. It sounded like a fairly regular rap song, except the words were in Swedish.

After it was over, Peter Van Houten looked at us expectantly, his little eyes as wide as they could get. “Yeah?” he asked. “Yeah?”