"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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s and she's just stuck there looking at this gra.s.s 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 grat.i.tude 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 Rene 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 b.o.o.bs 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 ba.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced his a.s.sistant'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 c.o.c.ktail. 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sistants. 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 gla.s.s. 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."