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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

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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.”

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“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.