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outfit was not a good outfit; nervous that we wouldn’t find the right house since all the houses in A msterdam 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 A ugustus was up when he knocked.
I opened the door. He looked down at the shirt and smiled. “Fu
“Don’t call my boobs fu
“Right here,” Mom said behind us. But I’d made A ugustus 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. A ugustus
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?” A ugustus
asked. He grabbed the lion’s head and knocked much louder.
The music disappeared, replaced by shuffled footsteps. A dead bolt slid. A nother. 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 ski
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. “A re they here, Peter?” a woman asked.
“There are—Lidewij, there are two adolescent apparitions outside the door.”
“A pparitions?” she asked with a pleasant Dutch lilt.
Van Houten answered in a rush. “Phantasms specters ghouls visitants post-terrestrials apparitions, Lidewij. How can someone pursuing a
postgraduate degree in A merican literature display such abominable English-language skills?”
“Peter, those are not post-terrestrials. They are A ugustus and Hazel, the young fans with whom you have been corresponding.”
“They are—what? They—I thought they were in A merica!”
“Yes, but you invited them here, you will remember.”
“Do you know why I left A merica, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter A mericans.”
“But you are an A merican.”
“Incurably so, it seems. But as to these A mericans, you must tell them to leave at once, that there has been a terrible mistake, that the
blessed Van Houten was making a rhetorical offer to meet, not an actual one, that such offers must be read symbolically.”
I thought I might throw up. I looked over at A ugustus, who was staring intently at the door, and saw his shoulders slacken.
“I will not do this, Peter,” answered Lidewij. “You must meet them. You must. You need to see them. You need to see how your work
matters.”
“Lidewij, did you knowingly deceive me to arrange this?”
A long silence ensued, and then finally the door opened again. He turned his head metronomically from A ugustus to me, still squinting.
“Which of you is A ugustus Waters?” he asked. A ugustus raised his hand tentatively. Van Houten nodded and said, “Did you close the deal with that chick yet?”
Whereupon I encountered for the first and only time a truly speechless A ugustus Waters. “I,” he started, “um, I, Hazel, um. Well.”
“This boy appears to have some kind of developmental delay,” Peter Van Houten said to Lidewij.
“Peter,” she scolded.
“Well,” Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. “It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures.” I
shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with A ugustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. A ugustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.
Of course, I had hoped that Peter Van Houten would be sane, but the world is not a wish-granting factory. The important thing was that
the door was open and I was crossing the threshold to learn what happens after the end of A n Imperial A ffliction. That was enough. We
followed him and Lidewij inside, past a huge oak dining room table with only two chairs, into a creepily sterile living room. It looked like a museum, except there was no art on the empty white walls. A side from one couch and one lounge chair, both a mix of steel and black
leather, the room seemed empty. Then I noticed two large black garbage bags, full and twist-tied, behind the couch.
“Trash?” I mumbled to A ugustus soft enough that I thought no one else would hear.
“Fan mail,” Van Houten answered as he sat down in the lounge chair. “Eighteen years’ worth of it. Can’t open it. Terrifying. Yours are the
first missives to which I have replied, and look where that got me. I frankly find the reality of readers wholly unappetizing.”
That explained why he’d never replied to my letters: He’d never read them. I wondered why he kept them at all, let alone in an otherwise
empty formal living room. Van Houten kicked his feet up onto the ottoman and crossed his slippers. He motioned toward the couch. A ugustus
and I sat down next to each other, but not too next.
“Would you care for some breakfast?” asked Lidewij.
I started to say that we’d already eaten when Peter interrupted. “It is far too early for breakfast, Lidewij.”
“Well, they are from A merica, Peter, so it is past noon in their bodies.”
“Then it’s too late for breakfast,” he said. “However, it being after noon in the body and whatnot, we should enjoy a cocktail. Do you
drink Scotch?” he asked me.
“Do I—um, no, I’m fine,” I said.
“A ugustus Waters?” Van Houten asked, nodding toward Gus.
“Uh, I’m good.”
“Just me, then, Lidewij. Scotch and water, please.” Peter turned his attention to Gus, asking, “You know how we make a Scotch and
water in this home?”
“No, sir,” Gus said.
“We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of
water.”
Lidewij said, “Perhaps a bit of breakfast first, Peter.”
He looked toward us and stage-whispered, “She thinks I have a drinking problem.”
“A nd I think that the sun has risen,” Lidewij responded. Nonetheless, she turned to the bar in the living room, reached up for a bottle of Scotch, and poured a glass half full. She carried it to him. Peter Van Houten took a sip, then sat up straight in his chair. “A drink this good deserves one’s best posture,” he said.
I became conscious of my own posture and sat up a little on the couch. I rearranged my ca
people by the way they treat waiters and assistants. By this measure, Peter Van Houten was possibly the world’s douchiest douche. “So you
like my book,” he said to A ugustus after another sip.
“Yeah,” I said, speaking up on A ugustus’s behalf. “A nd yes, we—well, A ugustus, he made meeting you his Wish so that we could come