The Fault in Our Stars

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 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.”
“Apparitions?” she asked with a pleasant Dutch lilt.
Van Houten answered in a rush. “Phantasms specters ghouls visitants post-terrestrials