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streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / A nd sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . / Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” / Let us go and make our visit.’”
“I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.
“A ugustus,” I said.
“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
“A ugustus,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly
painful joy, but I couldn’t say it back. I couldn’t say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ithink 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 A ugustus, 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.
A fter 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.
A nd he said, “You are A mericans?”
“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 A msterdam?” I asked the cabdriver.
“Yes and no,” he answered. “A msterdam 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 LA RGE 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 A merica. 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.
“A re these houses very old?” asked my mom.
“Many of the canal houses date from the Golden A ge, 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 A msterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. A nd in freedom, most people find sin.”
A ll the rooms in the Hotel Filosoof were named after filosoofers: Mom and I were staying on the ground floor in the Kierkegaard; A ugustus was on the floor above us, in the Heidegger. Our room was small: a double bed pressed against a wall with my BiPA P 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, A msterdam’s most famous park. Mom wanted to go on a walk, but I was supertired, so
she got the BiPA P 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.
“A ctually 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 co
“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 A ugustus go to di
“Without you?” I asked.
“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. A ugustus 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. A t 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,” A ugustus 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 A ugustus 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. A ugustus 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.”