The Fault in Our Stars

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

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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

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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

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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

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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?”
I said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t speak Swedish.”
“Well, of course you don’t. Neither do I. Who the hell speaks Swedish? The
important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are saying, but what the voices are
feeling. Surely you know that there are only two emotions, love and fear, and that Afasi
och Filthy navigate between them with the kind of facility that one simply does not find in
hip-hop music outside of Sweden. Shall I play it for you again?”
“Are you joking?” Gus said.
“Pardon?”
“Is this some kind of performance?” He looked up at Lidewij and asked, “Is it?”
“I’m afraid not,” Lidewij answered. “He’s not always—this is unusually—”
“Oh, shut up, Lidewij. Rudolf Otto said that if you had not encountered the
numinous, if you have not experienced a nonrational encounter with the mysterium