The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
think he must have fallen asleep. I did, eventually, and woke to the landing
gear coming down. My mouth tasted horrible, and I tried to keep it shut for fear
of poisoning the airplane.
I looked over at Augustus, who was staring out the window, and as we
dipped below the low-hung clouds, I straightened my back to see the
Netherlands. The land seemed sunk into the ocean, little rectangles of green
surrounded on all sides by canals. We landed, in fact, parallel to a canal, like
there were two runways: one for us and one for waterfowl.
After getting our bags and clearing customs, we all piled into a taxi driven
by this doughy bald guy who spoke perfect English—like better English than I
do. “The Hotel Filosoof?” I said.
And he said, “You are Americans?”
“Yes,” Mom said. “We’re from Indiana.”
“Indiana,” he said. “They steal the land from the Indians and leave the
name, yes?”
“Something like that,” Mom said. The cabbie pulled out into traffic and we
headed toward a highway with lots of blue signs featuring double vowels:
Oosthuizen, Haarlem. Beside the highway, flat empty land stretched for miles,
interrupted by the occasional huge corporate headquarters. In short, Holland
looked like Indianapolis, only with smaller cars. “This is Amsterdam?” I asked
the cabdriver.
“Yes and no,” he answered. “Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets
older as you get closer to the center.”
It happened all at once: We exited the highway and there were the row
houses of my imagination leaning precariously toward canals, ubiquitous
bicycles, and coffeeshops advertising LARGE SMOKING ROOM. We drove
over a canal and from atop the bridge I could see dozens of houseboats moored
along the water. It looked nothing like America. It looked like an old painting,
but real—everything achingly idyllic in the morning light—and I thought about
how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything
had been built by the dead.

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“Are these houses very old?” asked my mom.
“Many of the canal houses date from the Golden Age, the seventeenth
century,” he said. “Our city has a rich history, even though many tourists are
only wanting to see the Red Light District.” He paused. “Some tourists think
Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom,
most people find sin.”
All the rooms in the Hotel Filosoof were named after filosoofers: Mom and I
were staying on the ground floor in the Kierkegaard; Augustus was on the floor
above us, in the Heidegger. Our room was small: a double bed pressed against a
wall with my BiPAP machine, an oxygen concentrator, and a dozen refillable
oxygen tanks at the foot of the bed. Past the equipment, there was a dusty old
paisley chair with a sagging seat, a desk, and a bookshelf above the bed
containing the collected works of Søren Kierkegaard. On the desk we found a
wicker basket full of presents from the Genies: wooden shoes, an orange
Holland T-shirt, chocolates, and various other goodies.
The Filosoof was right next to the Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s most famous
park. Mom wanted to go on a walk, but I was supertired, so she got the BiPAP
working and placed its snout on me. I hated talking with that thing on, but I said,
“Just go to the park and I’ll call you when I wake up.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sleep tight, honey.”
But when I woke up some hours later, she was sitting in the ancient little chair in
the corner, reading a guidebook.
“Morning,” I said.
“Actually late afternoon,” she answered, pushing herself out of the chair
with a sigh. She came to the bed, placed a tank in the cart, and connected it to
the tube while I took off the BiPAP snout and placed the nubbins into my nose.
She set it for 2.5 liters a minute—six hours before I’d need a change—and then I
got up. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Good,” I said. “Great. How was the Vondelpark?”
“I skipped it,” she said. “Read all about it in the guidebook, though.”
“Mom,” I said, “you didn’t have to stay here.”
She shrugged. “I know. I wanted to. I like watching you sleep.”
“Said the creeper.” She laughed, but I still felt bad. “I just want you to have
fun or whatever, you know?”
“Okay. I’ll have fun tonight, okay? I’ll go do crazy mom stuff while you
and Augustus go to dinner.”
“Without you?” I asked.

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“Yes without me. In fact, you have reservations at a place called Oranjee,”
she said. “Mr. Van Houten’s assistant set it up. It’s in this neighborhood called
the Jordaan. Very fancy, according to the guidebook. There’s a tram station right
around the corner. Augustus has directions. You can eat outside, watch the boats
go by. It’ll be lovely. Very romantic.”
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying,” she said. “You should get dressed. The sundress,
maybe?”
One might marvel at the insanity of the situation: A mother sends her
sixteen-year-old daughter alone with a seventeen-year-old boy out into a foreign
city famous for its permissiveness. But this, too, was a side effect of dying: I
could not run or dance or eat foods rich in nitrogen, but in the city of freedom, I
was among the most liberated of its residents.
I did indeed wear the sundress—this blue print, flowey knee-length Forever
21 thing—with tights and Mary Janes because I liked being quite a lot shorter
than him. I went into the hilariously tiny bathroom and battled my bedhead for a
while until everything looked suitably mid-2000s Natalie Portman. At six
P.M.
on
the dot (noon back home), there was a knock.
“Hello?” I said through the door. There was no peephole at the Hotel
Filosoof.
“Okay,” Augustus answered. I could hear the cigarette in his mouth. I
looked down at myself. The sundress offered the most in the way of my rib cage
and collarbone that Augustus had seen. It wasn’t obscene or anything, but it was
as close as I ever got to showing some skin. (My mother had a motto on this
front that I agreed with: “Lancasters don’t bare midriffs.”)
I pulled the door open. Augustus wore a black suit, narrow lapels, perfectly
tailored, over a light blue dress shirt and a thin black tie. A cigarette dangled
from the unsmiling corner of his mouth. “Hazel Grace,” he said, “you look
gorgeous.”
“I,” I said. I kept thinking the rest of my sentence would emerge from the
air passing through my vocal cords, but nothing happened. Then finally, I said,
“I feel underdressed.”
“Ah, this old thing?” he said, smiling down at me.
“Augustus,” my mom said behind me, “you look extremely handsome.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. He offered me his arm. I took it, glancing
back to Mom.
“See you by eleven,” she said.
Waiting for the number one tram on a wide street busy with traffic, I said to

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Augustus, “The suit you wear to funerals, I assume?”
“Actually, no,” he said. “That suit isn’t nearly this nice.”
The blue-and-white tram arrived, and Augustus handed our cards to the
driver, who explained that we needed to wave them at this circular sensor. As we
walked through the crowded tram, an old man stood up to give us seats together,
and I tried to tell him to sit, but he gestured toward the seat insistently. We rode
the tram for three stops, me leaning over Gus so we could look out the window
together.
Augustus pointed up at the trees and asked, “Do you see that?”
I did. There were elm trees everywhere along the canals, and these seeds
were blowing out of them. But they didn’t look like seeds. They looked for all
the world like miniaturized rose petals drained of their color. These pale petals
were gathering in the wind like flocking birds—thousands of them, like a spring
snowstorm.
The old man who’d given up his seat saw us noticing and said, in English,
“Amsterdam’s spring snow. The iepen throw confetti to greet the spring.”
We switched trams, and after four more stops we arrived at a street split by
a beautiful canal, the reflections of the ancient bridge and picturesque canal
houses rippling in water.
Oranjee was just steps from the tram. The restaurant was on one side of the
street; the outdoor seating on the other, on a concrete outcropping right at the
edge of the canal. The hostess’s eyes lit up as Augustus and I walked toward her.
“Mr. and Mrs. Waters?”
“I guess?” I said.
“Your table,” she said, gesturing across the street to a narrow table inches
from the canal. “The champagne is our gift.”
Gus and I glanced at each other, smiling. Once we’d crossed the street, he
pulled out a seat for me and helped me scoot it back in. There were indeed two
flutes of champagne at our white-tableclothed table. The slight chill in the air
was balanced magnificently by the sunshine; on one side of us, cyclists pedaled
past—well-dressed men and women on their way home from work, improbably
attractive blond girls riding sidesaddle on the back of a friend’s bike, tiny
helmetless kids bouncing around in plastic seats behind their parents. And on our
other side, the canal water was choked with millions of the confetti seeds. Little
boats were moored at the brick banks, half full of rainwater, some of them near
sinking. A bit farther down the canal, I could see houseboats floating on
pontoons, and in the middle of the canal, an open-air, flat-bottomed boat decked
out with lawn chairs and a portable stereo idled toward us. Augustus took his
flute of champagne and raised it. I took mine, even though I’d never had a drink

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aside from sips of my dad’s beer.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, and we clinked glasses. I took a sip. The tiny bubbles
melted in my mouth and journeyed northward into my brain. Sweet. Crisp.
Delicious. “That is really good,” I said. “I’ve never drunk champagne.”
A sturdy young waiter with wavy blond hair appeared. He was maybe even
taller than Augustus. “Do you know,” he asked in a delicious accent, “what Dom
Pérignon said after inventing champagne?”
“No?” I said.
“He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.’
Welcome to Amsterdam. Would you like to see a menu, or will you have the
chef’s choice?”
I looked at Augustus and he at me. “The chef’s choice sounds lovely, but
Hazel is a vegetarian.” I’d mentioned this to Augustus precisely once, on the
first day we met.
“This is not a problem,” the waiter said.
“Awesome. And can we get more of this?” Gus asked, of the champagne.
“Of course,” said our waiter. “We have bottled all the stars this evening, my
young friends. Gah, the confetti!” he said, and lightly brushed a seed from my
bare shoulder. “It hasn’t been so bad in many years. It’s everywhere. Very
annoying.”
The waiter disappeared. We watched the confetti fall from the sky, skip
across the ground in the breeze, and tumble into the canal. “Kind of hard to
believe anyone could ever find that annoying,” Augustus said after a while.
“People always get used to beauty, though.”
“I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,” he answered, smiling. I felt myself
blushing. “Thank you for coming to Amsterdam,” he said.
“Thank you for letting me hijack your wish,” I said.
“Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa,” he said. I shook my
head, trying not to smile at him. I didn’t want to be a grenade. But then again, he
knew what he was doing, didn’t he? It was his choice, too. “Hey, how’s that
poem end?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The one you recited to me on the plane.”
“Oh, ‘Prufrock’? It ends, ‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By
sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and
we drown.’”
Augustus pulled out a cigarette and tapped the filter against the table.
“Stupid human voices always ruining everything.”

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The waiter arrived with two more glasses of champagne and what he called
“Belgian white asparagus with a lavender infusion.”
“I’ve never had champagne either,” Gus said after he left. “In case you
were wondering or whatever. Also, I’ve never had white asparagus.”
I was chewing my first bite. “It’s amazing,” I promised.
He took a bite, swallowed. “God. If asparagus tasted like that all the time,
I’d be a vegetarian, too.” Some people in a lacquered wooden boat approached
us on the canal below. One of them, a woman with curly blond hair, maybe
thirty, drank from a beer then raised her glass toward us and shouted something.
“We don’t speak Dutch,” Gus shouted back.
One of the others shouted a translation: “The beautiful couple is beautiful.”
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved
further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: “I want this dragon
carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.”
“Sweet-pea sorbet, you are so unexpectedly magnificent.” I wish I’d been
hungrier.
After green garlic gnocchi with red mustard leaves, the waiter said,
“Dessert next. More stars first?” I shook my head. Two glasses was enough for
me. Champagne was no exception to my high tolerance for depressants and pain
relievers; I felt warm but not intoxicated. But I didn’t want to get drunk. Nights
like this one didn’t come along often, and I wanted to remember it.
“Mmmm,” I said after the waiter left, and Augustus smiled crookedly as he
stared down the canal while I stared up it. We had plenty to look at, so the
silence didn’t feel awkward really, but I wanted everything to be perfect. It was
perfect, I guess, but it felt like someone had tried to stage the Amsterdam of my
imagination, which made it hard to forget that this dinner, like the trip itself, was
a cancer perk. I just wanted us to be talking and joking comfortably, like we
were on the couch together back home, but some tension underlay everything.
“It’s not my funeral suit,” he said after a while. “When I first found out I
was sick—I mean, they told me I had like an eighty-five percent chance of cure.
I know those are great odds, but I kept thinking it was a game of Russian
roulette. I mean, I was going to have to go through hell for six months or a year
and lose my leg and then at the end, it still might not work, you know?”
“I know,” I said, although I didn’t, not really. I’d never been anything but
terminal; all my treatment had been in pursuit of extending my life, not curing
my cancer. Phalanxifor had introduced a measure of ambiguity to my cancer
story, but I was different from Augustus: My final chapter was written upon
diagnosis. Gus, like most cancer survivors, lived with uncertainty.

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“Right,” he said. “So I went through this whole thing about wanting to be
ready. We bought a plot in Crown Hill, and I walked around with my dad one
day and picked out a spot. And I had my whole funeral planned out and
everything, and then right before the surgery, I asked my parents if I could buy a
suit, like a really nice suit, just in case I bit it. Anyway, I’ve never had occasion
to wear it. Until tonight.”
“So it’s your death suit.”
“Correct. Don’t you have a death outfit?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a dress I bought for my fifteenth birthday party. But I
don’t wear it on dates.”
His eyes lit up. “We’re on a date?” he asked.
I looked down, feeling bashful. “Don’t push it.”
We were both really full, but dessert—a succulently rich crémeux surrounded by
passion fruit—was too good not to at least nibble, so we lingered for a while
over dessert, trying to get hungry again. The sun was a toddler insistently
refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.
Out of nowhere, Augustus asked, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
“I think forever is an incorrect concept,” I answered.
He smirked. “You’re an incorrect concept.”
“I know. That’s why I’m being taken out of the rotation.”
“That’s not funny,” he said, looking at the street. Two girls passed on a
bike, one riding sidesaddle over the back wheel.
“Come on,” I said. “That was a joke.”
“The thought of you being removed from the rotation is not funny to me,”
he said. “Seriously, though: afterlife?”
“No,” I said, and then revised. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t go so far as no.
You?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice full of confidence. “Yes, absolutely. Not like a
heaven where you ride unicorns, play harps, and live in a mansion made of
clouds. But yes. I believe in Something with a capital S. Always have.”
“Really?” I asked. I was surprised. I’d always associated belief in heaven
with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn’t dumb.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I believe in that line from An Imperial Affliction.
‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.’ That’s God, I think, the rising sun,
and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren’t lost. I don’t
believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think
something becomes of us.”
“But you fear oblivion.”

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“Sure, I fear earthly oblivion. But, I mean, not to sound like my parents, but
I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The
oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in
exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve
gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I
won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.”
I just shook my head.
“What?” he asked.
“Your obsession with, like, dying for something or leaving behind some
great sign of your heroism or whatever. It’s just weird.”
“Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life.”
“Not everyone,” I said, unable to disguise my annoyance.
“Are you mad?”
“It’s just,” I said, and then couldn’t finish my sentence. “Just,” I said again.
Between us flickered the candle. “It’s really mean of you to say that the only
lives that matter are the ones that are lived for something or die for something.
That’s a really mean thing to say to me.”
I felt like a little kid for some reason, and I took a bite of dessert to make it
appear like it was not that big of a deal to me. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it
like that. I was just thinking about myself.”
“Yeah, you were,” I said. I was too full to finish. I worried I might puke,
actually, because I often puked after eating. (Not bulimia, just cancer.) I pushed
my dessert plate toward Gus, but he shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, reaching across the table for my hand. I let him
take it. “I could be worse, you know.”
“How?” I asked, teasing.
“I mean, I have a work of calligraphy over my toilet that reads, ‘Bathe
Yourself Daily in the Comfort of God’s Words,’ Hazel. I could be way worse.”
“Sounds unsanitary,” I said.
“I could be worse.”
“You could be worse.” I smiled. He really did like me. Maybe I was a
narcissist or something, but when I realized it there in that moment at Oranjee, it
made me like him even more.
When our waiter appeared to take dessert away, he said, “Your meal has
been paid for by Mr. Peter Van Houten.”
Augustus smiled. “This Peter Van Houten fellow ain’t half bad.”
We walked along the canal as it got dark. A block up from Oranjee, we stopped
at a park bench surrounded by old rusty bicycles locked to bike racks and to each

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other. We sat down hip to hip facing the canal, and he put his arm around me.
I could see the halo of light coming from the Red Light District. Even
though it was the Red Light District, the glow coming from up there was an eerie
sort of green. I imagined thousands of tourists getting drunk and stoned and
pinballing around the narrow streets.
“I can’t believe he’s going to tell us tomorrow,” I said. “Peter Van Houten
is going to tell us the famously unwritten end of the best book ever.”
“Plus he paid for our dinner,” Augustus said.
“I keep imagining that he is going to search us for recording devices before
he tells us. And then he will sit down between us on the couch in his living room
and whisper whether Anna’s mom married the Dutch Tulip Man.”
“Don’t forget Sisyphus the Hamster,” Augustus added.
“Right, and also of course what fate awaited Sisyphus the Hamster.” I
leaned forward, to see into the canal. There were so many of those pale elm
petals in the canals, it was ridiculous. “A sequel that will exist just for us,” I said.
“So what’s your guess?” he asked.
“I really don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth like a thousand times about it
all. Each time I reread it, I think something different, you know?” He nodded.
“You have a theory?”
“Yeah. I don’t think the Dutch Tulip Man is a con man, but he’s also not
rich like he leads them to believe. And I think after Anna dies, Anna’s mom goes
to Holland with him and thinks they will live there forever, but it doesn’t work
out, because she wants to be near where her daughter was.”
I hadn’t realized he’d thought about the book so much, that An Imperial