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mysterium tremendum, then his work was not for you. And I say to you, young
friends, that if you cannot hear Afasi och Filthy’s bravadic response to fear, then
my work is not for you.”
I cannot emphasize this enough: It was a completely normal rap song,
except in Swedish. “Um,” I said. “So about An Imperial Affliction. Anna’s mom,
when the book ends, is about to—”
Van Houten interrupted me, tapping his glass as he talked until Lidewij
refilled it again. “So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us
imagine that you are in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise has a ten-yard head
start. In the time it takes you to run that ten yards, the tortoise has maybe moved
one yard. And then in the time it takes you to make up that distance, the tortoise
goes a bit farther, and so on forever. You are faster than the tortoise but you can
never catch him; you can only decrease his lead.
“Of course, you just run past the tortoise without contemplating the
mechanics involved, but the question of how you are able to do this turns out to
be incredibly complicated, and no one really solved it until Cantor showed us
that some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
“Um,” I said.
“I assume that answers your question,” he said confidently, then sipped
generously from his glass.
“Not really,” I said. “We were wondering, after the end of An Imperial
Affliction—”
“I disavow everything in that putrid novel,” Van Houten said, cutting me

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off.
“No,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“No, that is not acceptable,” I said. “I understand that the story ends
midnarrative because Anna dies or becomes too sick to continue, but you said
you would tell us what happens to everybody, and that’s why we’re here, and
we, I need you to tell me.”
Van Houten sighed. After another drink, he said, “Very well. Whose story
do you seek?”
“Anna’s mom, the Dutch Tulip Man, Sisyphus the Hamster, I mean, just—
what happens to everyone.”
Van Houten closed his eyes and puffed his cheeks as he exhaled, then
looked up at the exposed wooden beams crisscrossing the ceiling. “The
hamster,” he said after a while. “The hamster gets adopted by Christine”—who
was one of Anna’s presickness friends. That made sense. Christine and Anna
played with Sisyphus in a few scenes. “He is adopted by Christine and lives for a
couple years after the end of the novel and dies peacefully in his hamster sleep.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Great,” I said. “Great. Okay, so the
Dutch Tulip Man. Is he a con man? Do he and Anna’s mom get married?”
Van Houten was still staring at the ceiling beams. He took a drink. The
glass was almost empty again. “Lidewij, I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t.” He
leveled his gaze to me. “Nothing happens to the Dutch Tulip Man. He isn’t a con
man or not a con man; he’s God. He’s an obvious and unambiguous
metaphorical representation of God, and asking what becomes of him is the
intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.
J. Eckleburg in Gatsby. Do he and Anna’s mom get married? We are speaking of
a novel, dear child, not some historical enterprise.”
“Right, but surely you must have thought about what happens to them, I
mean as characters, I mean independent of their metaphorical meanings or
whatever.”
“They’re fictions,” he said, tapping his glass again. “Nothing happens to
them.”
“You said you’d tell me,” I insisted. I reminded myself to be assertive. I
needed to keep his addled attention on my questions.
“Perhaps, but I was under the misguided impression that you were
incapable of transatlantic travel. I was trying . . . to provide you some comfort, I
suppose, which I should know better than to attempt. But to be perfectly frank,
this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the
characters in the novel . . . it’s ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches

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on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those
scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the
novel ended.”
“No,” I said. I pushed myself up off the couch. “No, I understand that, but
it’s impossible not to imagine a future for them. You are the most qualified
person to imagine that future. Something happened to Anna’s mother. She either
got married or didn’t. She either moved to Holland with the Dutch Tulip Man or
didn’t. She either had more kids or didn’t. I need to know what happens to her.”
Van Houten pursed his lips. “I regret that I cannot indulge your childish
whims, but I refuse to pity you in the manner to which you are well
accustomed.”
“I don’t want your pity,” I said.
“Like all sick children,” he answered dispassionately, “you say you don’t
want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.”
“Peter,” Lidewij said, but he continued as he reclined there, his words
getting rounder in his drunken mouth. “Sick children inevitably become arrested:
You are fated to live out your days as the child you were when diagnosed, the
child who believes there is life after a novel ends. And we, as adults, we pity
this, so we pay for your treatments, for your oxygen machines. We give you
food and water though you are unlikely to live long enough—”
“PETER!” Lidewij shouted.
“You are a side effect,” Van Houten continued, “of an evolutionary process
that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.”
“I RESIGN!” Lidewij shouted. There were tears in her eyes. But I wasn’t
angry. He was looking for the most hurtful way to tell the truth, but of course I
already knew the truth. I’d had years of staring at ceilings from my bedroom to
the ICU, and so I’d long ago found the most hurtful ways to imagine my own
illness. I stepped toward him. “Listen, douchepants,” I said, “you’re not going to
tell me anything about disease I don’t already know. I need one and only one
thing from you before I walk out of your life forever: WHAT HAPPENS TO
ANNA’S MOTHER?”
He raised his flabby chins vaguely toward me and shrugged his shoulders.
“I can no more tell you what happens to her than I can tell you what becomes of
Proust’s Narrator or Holden Caulfield’s sister or Huckleberry Finn after he lights
out for the territories.”
“BULLSHIT! That’s bullshit. Just tell me! Make something up!”
“No, and I’ll thank you not to curse in my house. It isn’t becoming of a
lady.”
I still wasn’t angry, exactly, but I was very focused on getting the thing I’d

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been promised. Something inside me welled up and I reached down and
smacked the swollen hand that held the glass of Scotch. What remained of the
Scotch splashed across the vast expanse of his face, the glass bouncing off his
nose and then spinning balletically through the air, landing with a shattering
crash on the ancient hardwood floors.
“Lidewij,” Van Houten said calmly, “I’ll have a martini, if you please. Just
a whisper of vermouth.”
“I have resigned,” Lidewij said after a moment.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
I didn’t know what to do. Being nice hadn’t worked. Being mean hadn’t
worked. I needed an answer. I’d come all this way, hijacked Augustus’s Wish. I
needed to know.
“Have you ever stopped to wonder,” he said, his words slurring now, “why
you care so much about your silly questions?”
“YOU PROMISED!” I shouted, hearing Isaac’s impotent wailing echoing
from the night of the broken trophies. Van Houten didn’t reply.
I was still standing over him, waiting for him to say something to me when
I felt Augustus’s hand on my arm. He pulled me away toward the door, and I
followed him while Van Houten ranted to Lidewij about the ingratitude of
contemporary teenagers and the death of polite society, and Lidewij, somewhat
hysterical, shouted back at him in rapid-fire Dutch.
“You’ll have to forgive my former assistant,” he said. “Dutch is not so
much a language as an ailment of the throat.”
Augustus pulled me out of the room and through the door to the late spring
morning and the falling confetti of the elms.
*
For me there was no such thing as a quick getaway, but we made our way down
the stairs, Augustus holding my cart, and then started to walk back toward the
Filosoof on a bumpy sidewalk of interwoven rectangular bricks. For the first
time since the swing set, I started crying.
“Hey,” he said, touching my waist. “Hey. It’s okay.” I nodded and wiped
my face with the back of my hand. “He sucks.” I nodded again. “I’ll write you
an epilogue,” Gus said. That made me cry harder. “I will,” he said. “I will. Better
than any shit that drunk could write. His brain is Swiss cheese. He doesn’t even
remember writing the book. I can write ten times the story that guy can. There
will be blood and guts and sacrifice. An Imperial Affliction meets The Price of
Dawn. You’ll love it.” I kept nodding, faking a smile, and then he hugged me,

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his strong arms pulling me into his muscular chest, and I sogged up his polo shirt
a little but then recovered enough to speak.
“I spent your Wish on that doucheface,” I said into his chest.
“Hazel Grace. No. I will grant you that you did spend my one and only
Wish, but you did not spend it on him. You spent it on us.”
Behind us, I heard the plonk plonk of high heels running. I turned around. It
was Lidewij, her eyeliner running down her cheeks, duly horrified, chasing us up
the sidewalk. “Perhaps we should go to the Anne Frank Huis,” Lidewij said.
“I’m not going anywhere with that monster,” Augustus said.
“He is not invited,” Lidewij said.
Augustus kept holding me, protective, his hand on the side of my face. “I
don’t think—” he started, but I cut him off.
“We should go.” I still wanted answers from Van Houten. But it wasn’t all I
wanted. I only had two days left in Amsterdam with Augustus Waters. I
wouldn’t let a sad old man ruin them.
Lidewij drove a clunky gray Fiat with an engine that sounded like an excited
four-year-old girl. As we drove through the streets of Amsterdam, she repeatedly
and profusely apologized. “I am very sorry. There is no excuse. He is very sick,”
she said. “I thought meeting you would help him, if he would see that his work
has shaped real lives, but . . . I’m very sorry. It is very, very embarrassing.”
Neither Augustus nor I said anything. I was in the backseat behind him. I snuck
my hand between the side of the car and his seat, feeling for his hand, but I
couldn’t find it. Lidewij continued, “I have continued this work because I
believe he is a genius and because the pay is very good, but he has become a
monster.”
“I guess he got pretty rich on that book,” I said after a while.
“Oh, no no, he is of the Van Houtens,” she said. “In the seventeenth
century, his ancestor discovered how to mix cocoa into water. Some Van
Houtens moved to the United States long ago, and Peter is of those, but he
moved to Holland after his novel. He is an embarrassment to a great family.”
The engine screamed. Lidewij shifted and we shot up a canal bridge. “It is
circumstance,” she said. “Circumstance has made him so cruel. He is not an evil
man. But this day, I did not think—when he said these terrible things, I could not
believe it. I am very sorry. Very very sorry.”
We had to park a block away from the Anne Frank House, and then while
Lidewij stood in line to get tickets for us, I sat with my back against a little tree,
looking at all the moored houseboats in the Prinsengracht canal. Augustus was

---

standing above me, rolling my oxygen cart in lazy circles, just watching the
wheels spin. I wanted him to sit next to me, but I knew it was hard for him to sit,
and harder still to stand back up. “Okay?” he asked, looking down at me. I
shrugged and reached a hand for his calf. It was his fake calf, but I held on to it.
He looked down at me.
“I wanted . . .” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I know. Apparently the world is not a wish-granting
factory.” That made me smile a little.
Lidewij returned with tickets, but her thin lips were pursed with worry.
“There is no elevator,” she said. “I am very very sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“No, there are many stairs,” she said. “Steep stairs.”
“It’s okay,” I said again. Augustus started to say something, but I
interrupted. “It’s okay. I can do it.”
We began in a room with a video about Jews in Holland and the Nazi
invasion and the Frank family. Then we walked upstairs into the canal house
where Otto Frank’s business had been. The stairs were slow, for me and
Augustus both, but I felt strong. Soon I was staring at the famous bookcase that
had hid Anne Frank, her family, and four others. The bookcase was half open,
and behind it was an even steeper set of stairs, only wide enough for one person.
There were fellow visitors all around us, and I didn’t want to hold up the
procession, but Lidewij said, “If everyone could be patient, please,” and I began
the walk up, Lidewij carrying the cart behind me, Gus behind her.
It was fourteen steps. I kept thinking about the people behind me—they
were mostly adults speaking a variety of languages—and feeling embarrassed or
whatever, feeling like a ghost that both comforts and haunts, but finally I made it
up, and then I was in an eerily empty room, leaning against the wall, my brain
telling my lungs it’s okay it’s okay calm down it’s okay and my lungs telling my
brain oh, God, we’re dying here. I didn’t even see Augustus come upstairs, but
he came over and wiped his brow with the back of his hand like whew and said,
“You’re a champion.”
After a few minutes of wall-leaning, I made it to the next room, which
Anne had shared with the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. It was tiny, empty of all furniture.
You’d never know anyone had ever lived there except that the pictures Anne had
pasted onto the wall from magazines and newspapers were still there.
Another staircase led up to the room where the van Pels family had lived,
this one steeper than the last and eighteen steps, essentially a glorified ladder. I
got to the threshold and looked up and figured I could not do it, but also knew
the only way through was up.

---

“Let’s go back,” Gus said behind me.
“I’m okay,” I answered quietly. It’s stupid, but I kept thinking I owed it to
her—to Anne Frank, I mean—because she was dead and I wasn’t, because she
had stayed quiet and kept the blinds drawn and done everything right and still
died, and so I should go up the steps and see the rest of the world she’d lived in
those years before the Gestapo came.
I began to climb the stairs, crawling up them like a little kid would, slow at
first so I could breathe, but then faster because I knew I couldn’t breathe and
wanted to get to the top before everything gave out. The blackness encroached
around my field of vision as I pulled myself up, eighteen steps, steep as hell. I
finally crested the staircase mostly blind and nauseated, the muscles in my arms
and legs screaming for oxygen. I slumped seated against a wall, heaving
watered-down coughs. There was an empty glass case bolted to the wall above
me and I stared up through it to the ceiling and tried not to pass out.
Lidewij crouched down next to me, saying, “You are at the top, that is it,”
and I nodded. I had a vague awareness of the adults all around glancing down at
me worriedly; of Lidewij speaking quietly in one language and then another and
then another to various visitors; of Augustus standing above me, his hand on the
top of my head, stroking my hair along the part.
After a long time, Lidewij and Augustus pulled me to my feet and I saw
what was protected by the glass case: pencil marks on the wallpaper measuring
the growth of all the children in the annex during the period they lived there,
inch after inch until they would grow no more.
From there, we left the Franks’ living area, but we were still in the museum:
A long narrow hallway showed pictures of each of the annex’s eight residents
and described how and where and when they died.
“The only member of his whole family who survived the war,” Lidewij told
us, referring to Anne’s father, Otto. Her voice was hushed like we were in
church.
“But he didn’t survive a war, not really,” Augustus said. “He survived a
genocide.”
“True,” Lidewij said. “I do not know how you go on, without your family. I
do not know.” As I read about each of the seven who died, I thought of Otto
Frank not being a father anymore, left with a diary instead of a wife and two
daughters. At the end of the hallway, a huge book, bigger than a dictionary,
contained the names of the 103,000 dead from the Netherlands in the Holocaust.
(Only 5,000 of the deported Dutch Jews, a wall label explained, had survived.
5,000 Otto Franks.) The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank’s name,
but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four

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Aron Franks. Four. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical
markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and
pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around. (Maybe some people need
to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don’t.)
As we got to the end of the room, Gus stopped and said, “You okay?” I
nodded.
He gestured back toward Anne’s picture. “The worst part is that she almost
lived, you know? She died weeks away from liberation.”
Lidewij took a few steps away to watch a video, and I grabbed Augustus’s
hand as we walked into the next room. It was an A-frame room with some letters
Otto Frank had written to people during his months-long search for his
daughters. On the wall in the middle of the room, a video of Otto Frank played.
He was speaking in English.
“Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?”
Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s letters and the
gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation.
“I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on
evil.”
“True,” he said. “That’s what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team
up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs,
defending the weak, protecting the endangered.”
Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged mine,
after all. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon,” I said.
“The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,” he
said.
“And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of
sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.”
“They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something in
their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s
errand.”
“Augustus Waters,” I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss
anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all,
kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like
nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and
irreparably broken sink into love.
“I must say,” Otto Frank said on the video in his accented English, “I was
very much surprised by the deep thoughts Anne had.”
And then we were kissing. My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached
up for his neck, and he pulled me up by my waist onto my tiptoes. As his parted

---

lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The
space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this
cancer-ruined thing I’d spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the
struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily
betrayal of the tumors.
“It was quite a different Anne I had known as my daughter. She never
really showed this kind of inner feeling,” Otto Frank continued.
The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me. “And
my conclusion is,” he said, “since I had been in very good terms with Anne, that
most parents don’t know really their children.”
I realized that my eyes were closed and opened them. Augustus was staring
at me, his blue eyes closer to me than they’d ever been, and behind him, a crowd
of people three deep had sort of circled around us. They were angry, I thought.
Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video
broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.
I pulled away from Augustus, and he snuck a peck onto my forehead as I
stared down at my Chuck Taylors. And then they started clapping. All the
people, all these adults, just started clapping, and one shouted “Bravo!” in a
European accent. Augustus, smiling, bowed. Laughing, I curtsied ever so
slightly, which was met with another round of applause.
We made our way downstairs, letting all the adults go down first, and right
before we got to the café (where blessedly an elevator took us back down to
ground level and the gift shop) we saw pages of Anne’s diary, and also her
unpublished book of quotations. The quote book happened to be turned to a page
of Shakespeare quotations. For who so firm that cannot be seduced? she’d
written.
Lidewij drove us back to the Filosoof. Outside the hotel, it was drizzling and
Augustus and I stood on the brick sidewalk slowly getting wet.
Augustus: “You probably need some rest.”
Me: “I’m okay.”
Augustus: “Okay.” (Pause.) “What are you thinking about?”
Me: “You.”
Augustus: “What about me?”
Me: “‘I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the
beauty of innuendos, The blackbird whistling Or just after.’”
Augustus: “God, you are sexy.”
Me: “We could go to your room.”
Augustus: “I’ve heard worse ideas.”

---

We squeezed into the tiny elevator together. Every surface, including the floor,
was mirrored. We had to pull the door to shut ourselves in and then the old thing
creaked slowly up to the second floor. I was tired and sweaty and worried that I
generally looked and smelled gross, but even so I kissed him in that elevator, and
then he pulled away and pointed at the mirror and said, “Look, infinite Hazels.”
“Some infinities are larger than other infinities,” I drawled, mimicking Van
Houten.
“What an assclown,” Augustus said, and it took all that time and more just
to get us to the second floor. Finally the elevator lurched to a halt, and he pushed
the mirrored door open. When it was half open, he winced in pain and lost his
grip on the door for a second.
“You okay?” I asked.
After a second, he said, “Yeah, yeah, door’s just heavy, I guess.” He pushed
again and got it open. He let me walk out first, of course, but then I didn’t know
which direction to walk down the hallway, and so I just stood there outside the
elevator and he stood there, too, his face still contorted, and I said again,
“Okay?”
“Just out of shape, Hazel Grace. All is well.”
We were just standing there in the hallway, and he wasn’t leading the way
to his room or anything, and I didn’t know where his room was, and as the
stalemate continued, I became convinced he was trying to figure out a way not to
hook up with me, that I never should have suggested the idea in the first place,
that it was unladylike and therefore had disgusted Augustus Waters, who was
standing there looking at me unblinking, trying to think of a way to extricate
himself from the situation politely. And then, after forever, he said, “It’s above
my knee and it just tapers a little and then it’s just skin. There’s a nasty scar, but
it just looks like—”
“What?” I asked.
“My leg,” he said. “Just so you’re prepared in case, I mean, in case you see
it or what—”
“Oh, get over yourself,” I said, and took the two steps I needed to get to
him. I kissed him, hard, pressing him against the wall, and I kept kissing him as
he fumbled for the room key.
We crawled into the bed, my freedom circumscribed some by the oxygen, but
even so I could get on top of him and take his shirt off and taste the sweat on the
skin below his collarbone as I whispered into his skin, “I love you, Augustus
Waters,” his body relaxing beneath mine as he heard me say it. He reached down

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and tried to pull my shirt off, but it got tangled in the tube. I laughed.
*
“How do you do this every day?” he asked as I disentangled my shirt from the
tubes. Idiotically, it occurred to me that my pink underwear didn’t match my
purple bra, as if boys even notice such things. I crawled under the covers and
kicked out of my jeans and socks and then watched the comforter dance as
beneath it, Augustus removed first his jeans and then his leg.
*
We were lying on our backs next to each other, everything hidden by the covers,
and after a second I reached over for his thigh and let my hand trail downward to
the stump, the thick scarred skin. I held the stump for a second. He flinched. “It
hurts?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. “You’re so hot,” I said, my
hand still on his leg.
“I’m starting to think you have an amputee fetish,” he answered, still
kissing me. I laughed.
“I have an Augustus Waters fetish,” I explained.
The whole affair was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow
and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic.
There were a lot of condomy problems that I did not get a particularly good look
at. No headboards were broken. No screaming. Honestly, it was probably the
longest time we’d ever spent together without talking.
Only one thing followed type: Afterward, when I had my face resting
against Augustus’s chest, listening to his heart pound, Augustus said, “Hazel
Grace, I literally cannot keep my eyes open.”
“Misuse of literality,” I said.
“No,” he said. “So. Tired.”
His face turned away from me, my ear pressed to his chest, listening to his
lungs settle into the rhythm of sleep. After a while, I got up, dressed, found the
Hotel Filosoof stationery, and wrote him a love letter:
Dearest Augustus,

---

yrs,
Hazel Grace

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