The Fault in Our Stars

here, so that you could tell us what happens after the end of A n Imperial A ffliction.”

Van Houten said nothing, just took a long pull on his drink.

A fter a minute, A ugustus said, “Your book is sort of the thing that brought us together.”

“But you aren’t together,” he observed without looking at me.

“The thing that brought us nearly together,” I said.

Now he turned to me. “Did you dress like her on purpose?”

“A

He just kept staring at me.

“Kind of,” I said.

He took a long drink, then grimaced. “I do not have a drinking problem,” he a

relationship with alcohol: I can crack jokes and govern England and do anything I want to do. Except not drink.” He glanced over at Lidewij and nodded toward his glass. She took it, then walked back to the bar. “Just the idea of water, Lidewij,” he instructed.

“Yah, got it,” she said, the accent almost A merican.

The second drink arrived. Van Houten’s spine stiffened again out of respect. He kicked off his slippers. He had really ugly feet. He was

rather ruining the whole business of authorial genius for me. But he had the answers.

“Well, um,” I said, “first, we do want to say thank you for di

“We bought them di

“Yes, at Oranjee.”

“A h, yes. Well, believe me when I say that you do not have me to thank but rather Lidewij, who is exceptionally talented in the field of

spending my money.”

“It was our pleasure,” Lidewij said.

“Well, thanks, at any rate,” A ugustus said. I could hear a

“So here I am,” Van Houten said after a moment. “What are your questions?”

“Um,” A ugustus said.

“He seemed so intelligent in print,” Van Houten said to Lidewij regarding A ugustus. “Perhaps the cancer has established a beachhead in

his brain.”

“Peter,” Lidewij said, duly horrified.

I was horrified, too, but there was something pleasant about a guy so despicable that he wouldn’t treat us deferentially. “We do have

some questions, actually,” I said. “I talked about them in my email. I don’t know if you remember.”

“I do not.”

“His memory is compromised,” Lidewij said.

“If only my memory would compromise,” Van Houten responded.

“So, our questions,” I repeated.

“She uses the royal we,” Peter said to no one in particular. A nother sip. I didn’t know what Scotch tasted like, but if it tasted anything like champagne, I couldn’t imagine how he could drink so much, so quickly, so early in the morning. “A re you familiar with Zeno’s tortoise

paradox?” he asked me.

“We have questions about what happens to the characters after the end of the book, specifically A

“You wrongly assume that I need to hear your question in order to answer it. You are familiar with the philosopher Zeno?” I shook my

head vaguely. “A las. Zeno was a pre-Socratic philosopher who is said to have discovered forty paradoxes within the worldview put forth by

Parmenides—surely you know Parmenides,” he said, and I nodded that I knew Parmenides, although I did not. “Thank God,” he said. “Zeno

professionally specialized in revealing the inaccuracies and oversimplifications of Parmenides, which wasn’t difficult, since Parmenides was spectacularly wrong everywhere and always. Parmenides is valuable in precisely the way that it is valuable to have an acquaintance who

reliably picks the wrong horse each and every time you take him to the racetrack. But Zeno’s most important—wait, give me a sense of your

familiarity with Swedish hip-hop.”

I could not tell if Peter Van Houten was kidding. A fter a moment, A ugustus answered for me. “Limited,” he said.

“Okay, but presumably you know A fasi och Filthy’s seminal album Fläcken.”

“We do not,” I said for the both of us.

“Lidewij, play ‘Bomfalleralla’ immediately.” Lidewij walked over to an MP3 player, spun the wheel a bit, then hit a button. A rap song

boomed from every direction. It sounded like a fairly regular rap song, except the words were in Swedish.

A fter it was over, Peter Van Houten looked at us expectantly, his little eyes as wide as they could get. “Yeah?” he asked. “Yeah?”

I said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t speak Swedish.”

“Well, of course you don’t. Neither do I. Who the hell speaks Swedish? The important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are

saying, but what the voices are feeling. Surely you know that there are only two emotions, love and fear, and that A fasi och Filthy navigate between them with the kind of facility that one simply does not find in hip-hop music outside of Sweden. Shall I play it for you again?”

“A re you joking?” Gus said.

“Pardon?”

“Is this some kind of performance?” He looked up at Lidewij and asked, “Is it?”

“I’m afraid not,” Lidewij answered. “He’s not always—this is unusually—”

“Oh, shut up, Lidewij. Rudolf Otto said that if you had not encountered the numinous, if you have not experienced a nonrational

encounter with the mysterium tremendum, then his work was not for you. A nd I say to you, young friends, that if you ca

I ca

A

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. A nd 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 A n Imperial A ffliction—”

“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 A

Van Houten sighed. A fter another drink, he said, “Very well. Whose story do you seek?”

“A

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 A

Christine and A

Now we were getting somewhere. “Great,” I said. “Great. Okay, so the Dutch Tulip Man. Is he a con man? Do he and A

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