The Fault in Our Stars

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 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 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 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