The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

“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?”
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