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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 A
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 A
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 ca
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. A nd 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: WHA T HA PPENS TO A NNA ’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 Fi
“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 spi
“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
A ugustus’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 A ugustus’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.”
A ugustus 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, A ugustus 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. A n Imperial A ffliction meets The Price of Dawn. You’ll love it.” I kept nodding, faking a smile, and then he hugged me, his strong arms pulling me into his muscular chest, and I sogged up his polo shirt a little but then recovered enough to speak.
“I spent your Wish on that doucheface,” I said into his chest.
“Hazel Grace. No. I will grant you that you did spend my one and only Wish, but you did not spend it on him. You spent it on us.”
Behind us, I heard the plonk plonk of high heels ru
horrified, chasing us up the sidewalk. “Perhaps we should go to the A
“I’m not going anywhere with that monster,” A ugustus said.
“He is not invited,” Lidewij said.
A ugustus kept holding me, protective, his hand on the side of my face. “I don’t think—” he started, but I cut him off.
“We should go.” I still wanted answers from Van Houten. But it wasn’t all I wanted. I only had two days left in A msterdam with A ugustus
Waters. I wouldn’t let a sad old man ruin them.
Lidewij drove a clunky gray Fiat with an engine that sounded like an excited four-year-old girl. A s we drove through the streets of
A msterdam, she repeatedly and profusely apologized. “I am very sorry. There is no excuse. He is very sick,” she said. “I thought meeting you would help him, if he would see that his work has shaped real lives, but . . . I’m very sorry. It is very, very embarrassing.” Neither A ugustus nor I said anything. I was in the backseat behind him. I snuck my hand between the side of the car and his seat, feeling for his hand, but I couldn’t find it. Lidewij continued, “I have continued this work because I believe he is a genius and because the pay is very good, but he has become a monster.”