Hey you guys! I'm sorry the updates are becoming less and less frequent :( it's been so busy with work. How is everyone doing? Did you hear they're making Looking For Alaska into a movie? I hope they keep to the story. Out of all of John Green's books Looking For Alaska and Fault in Out Stars were my favorite. What are your favorite John Green books?
And did you guys see the Paper Towns movie trailer? What are your thoughts? POST THEM! :D
Hope you all like this chapter. Please comment and review! Thanks!
~Wallflower95
12
I woke early the next morning. I'm not going to bother telling how early I woke up because it was just early. I looked around the room in a panic and then I remembered... duh. I'm in Amsterdam and today was the day I'd learn what happens at the end of that god damn book. I can't imagine how Hazel Grace has gone all these years not know what happens at the end of AIA. I can't even wait a few more hours. I throw the covers off my body and start getting dressed. Once that was done there was nothing to do but wait. I paced the room even though it hurt. I could feel my hip throbbing. My one good legs hurt... pain demands to be felt. But I ignored it.
Just a little bit longer.
I can't be in pain today. Today I had to be there for Hazel Grace. We were going to learn the answers. The answers we've been waiting for. I looked at the clock. It was close to ten. I put my shoes on and opened the door. I couldn't stop thinking about the other night. How amazing Hazel Grace had looked. I wish... I wish I could spend the rest of my time on earth staring at her. She is so beautiful and I wish I could be with her. I sighed. I was standing outside her door. I could hear voices. Mrs. Lancaster's... and Hazel's. I smiled. She sounded... peppy? No that's a stupid word to use. I knocked on the door and it was opened by Hazel Grace herself.
She was wearing her Chuck Taylors on her feet, dark jeans and a light blue t-shirt. On the shirt was a picture of a pipe and below the picture written in French were the words 'This is not a pipe'. I smiled while looking at the shirt. I realized that Hazel Grace dressed as much like Anna from 'An Imperial Affliction' as possible.
"Funny."
"Don't call my boobs funny." Hazel Grace answered.
"Right here." Mrs. Lancaster said from behind Hazel Grace. I could feel myself blush red.
"You're sure you don't want to come?" Hazel Grace asked her mom.
"I'm going to the Rujksmuseum and the Vondelpark today," she said. "Plus, I just don't get his book. No offense. Thank him and Lidewij for us, okay?"
"Okay." Mrs. Lancaster planted a kiss on Hazel Grace's head and away we were.
Peter Van Houten's home was just around the corner from our hotel, on the Vondelstraat facing the park. I took Hazel Grace's arm and I bent down to grab her oxygen tank. I could feel the cancerous pain in my hip as I bent down for the tank but I gritted my teeth and ignored it. Not today.
We walked up the three steps to his door. I could feel Hazel Grace nervously clutching my arm. I could feel my own heart pounding in my chest as we approached the door. Inside we could hear a bass beat that practically shook the house. Maybe he has a kid who's into awful music? Hazel Grace grabbed the lion's-head door knocker and knocked tentatively. There was no answer. The beat continued behind the closed door.
"Maybe he can't hear over the music?" I took the lion's-head and knocked louder. The music was cut off. Instead we could hear shuffling footsteps heading towards the door. A dead bolt slid. Another and then the door creaked open to reveal a potbellied man with thin hair, sagging jowls, a disgusting week old beard and sad looking eyes. He wore baby blue man pajamas and his stomach was protruding from under the shirt.
"Mr. Van Houten?"I felt my voice getting higher as I said it. This was not the way I imagined the genius author of AIA to look like. The door slammed shut. Behind the door we heard an awful sounding voice yell, "LEE-DUH-VIGH!" (To be honest I really didn't learn how to pronounce his assistant's name.)
"Are they hear, Peter?" A woman's voice asked.
"There are- Lidewij, there are two adolescent apparitions outside the door."
"Apparitions?" She asked in her Dutch accent. Van Houten spat out the rest.
"Phantasms specters ghouls visitants post terrestrials apparitions, Lidewij. How can someone pursuing postgraduate degree in American literature display such abominable English-language skills?"
"Peter, those are not post-terrestrials. They are Augustus and Hazel, the young fans with whom you have been corresponding."
"They are- what? They-I thought they were in America!"
"Yes, but you invited them here, you will remember."
"Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans."
"But you are American."
"Incurably so, it seems. But as to these Americans, you must tell them to leave at once, that there has been a terrible mistake, that the blessed Peter Van Houten was making a rhetorical offer to meet, not an actual one, that such offers must be read symbolically." I say Hazel's face out of the corner of my eyes. She looked like she was about to be sick and not the cancer kind of sick. Me? I could feel everything sink. All my hopes of ever learning the truth of what happened at the end of AIA before I die, all of that was gone.
"I will not do this, Peter." Lidewij answered. "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 and awful silence fell and then finally the door opened again. Van Houten turned his head from me to Hazel.
"Which of you is Augustus Waters?" You'd think that'd be self explanatory. Obviously no one in their right mind would name a girl Augustus. I usually have something smart to say to a guy like this but I couldn't open my mouth. I raised my hand to let him know that I was Augustus Waters.
"Did you close the deal with that chick yet?" He asked, referring to Hazel Grace. I thought I was going to die of embarrassment right there.
"I," I cleared my throat. "um, I, Hazel, um. Well."
"This boy appears to have some kind of developmental delay." Peter said.
"Peter." Lidewij scolded.
"Well," Peter Van Houten said. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." We both shook hands with him. What the hell does ontologically mean? After corresponding with Van Houten via email I believed him to be highly sophisticated, rich, polite and intelligent. Walking through his home I saw the past of a man who had so much but did nothing with it. It was so... empty and lonely. I saw two giant black garbage bags that looked as if they were about to burst.
"Trash?" Hazel Grace mumbled to me.
"Fan mail," Van Houten answered as he sat down rather ungracefully into a seat. "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." Every word that came out of his mouth made me want yell at him. I looked back at the forgotten mail of all his fans, remembering that Hazel Grace had written him some letters years ago. They were lost somewhere. Forgotten.
"Would you care for some breakfast?" Lidewij asked.
"It is far too early for breakfast, Lidewij." Peter said.
"Well, they are from America, 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 us.
"Do I- um, no, I'm fine." Hazel Grace said.
"Augustus Waters?"
"Uh, I'm good."
"Just me, then, Lidewij. Scotch and water, please." Peter turned his attention to me.
"You know how we make Scotch and water in this home?"
"No, sir."
"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." I realized then that all my hopes for a smart and sophisticated author to tell me what happens to everyone at the end of AIA was just wishful thinking. Peter Van Houten was not that. He was and is a drunk.
"Perhaps a bit of breakfast first, Peter." Lidewij said.
"She thinks I have a drinking problem." Gee, you think buddy?
"And I think that the sun has risen," Lidewij said. And without another word she turned to the bar and poured some Scotch into a glass. She handed him the glass and Van Houten sat up straight in his chair.
"A drink this good deserves one's best posture." He said. I noticed that Hazel Grace sat a little straight beside me. She rearranged her cannula.
"So you like my book." Peter Van Houten directed at me.
"Yeah," Hazel Grace spoke up. "And yes, we- well, Augustus, he made meeting you his Wish so that we could come here and , so that you could tell us what happens after the end of An Imperial Affliction." He said nothing, he just took another long sip from the glass in his hand.
"Your book is sort of the thing that brought us together." I said.
"But you aren't together." He said, looking at Hazel.
"The thing that brought us nearly together." Hazel Grace corrected. Van Houten then looked Hazel Grace up and down. Something changed in his eyes.
"Did you dress like her on purpose?"
"Anna?" He just kept staring at her.
"Kind of." He took another long sip.
"I do not have a drinking problem." He announced. "I have a Churchillian 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. I swear I saw Lidewij roll her eyes and then she took the glass and filled it with more Scotch.
"Just the idea of water, Lidewij."
"Yah, got it." She said. The second drink came and Van Houten sat up straight once again. He kicked off his slippers to reveal horrible looking feet.
"Well, um," Hazel Grace started again. "first, we do want to say thank you for dinner last night and-"
"We bought them dinner last night?" Van Houten interrupted.
"Yes, at Oranjee." Lidewij answered.
"Ah, 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." I could feel frustration building inside my chest.
"So here I am." Van Houten said. "What are your questions?"
"Um." Why can't I speak?
"He seemed so intelligent in print," Van Houten said. "Perhaps the cancer has established a beachhead in his brain."
"Peter."
What an asshole.
"We do have some questions, actually," Hazel Grace spoke up before I could spit something out. " I talked about them in my email. I don't know if you remember."
"I do not."
"His memory is compromised." Lidewij said.
No wonder.
"If only my memory would compromise." Van Houten responded in a sad and disappointed tone. What was so terrible that he wanted to forget?
"So, our questions." Hazel Grace repeated.
"She uses the royal we." He took another sip of Scotch. I've tried Scotch before. It was awful and it burned your throat. It made me gag. I didn't know how Van Houten could drink so much in such little time.
"Are you familiar with Zeno's tortoise paradox?" He asked Hazel. What...
"We have questions about what happens to the characters after the end of the book, specifically Anna's-" But Hazel was interrupted once again.
"You wrongly assume that I need to hear your question in order to answer it. You are familiar with the philosopher Zeno?" She shook her head. "Alas. 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 Hazel Grace nodded. "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 it is valuable to have an acquaintance who reliably picks the wrong horse each time and every time you take him to the racetrack. But Zeno's most important -wait, give me a sense of your familiarity of Swedish hip-hop."
Is this guy high? I see Hazel Grace from the corner of my eye. He as been talking a majority of the time and not once has he mentioned anything about the characters from An Imperial Affliction. He was talking about something I didn't even understand and now he's talking about Swedish hip-hop. But I can't lose it. Why? Because he holds all the answers. I know it and so does Hazel Grace.
"Limited." I said.
"Okay, but presumably you know Afasi och Filthy's seminal album Flacken."
"We do not." Hazel Grace said for the both of us.
"Lidewij, play 'Bomfalleralla' immediately." Lidewij hit a button on the MP3 player and from every direction the room boom an awful sounding Swedish rap song. Van Houten's head bobbed to the music as Hazel Grace and I sat awkwardly on the couch. After it was over, Peter Van Houten looked at us waiting our review of the song.
"Yeah?" He asked. "Yeah?"
"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't speak Swedish." Hazel Grace said.
"Well, of course you don't. Neither do I. Who the hell speaks Swedish? The important thing is not whatever the voices are saying, what the voices are feeling. Surely you know that there are only two emotions, love and fear, and that Afasi 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 okay it for you again?"
"Are you joking?" I blurted out loud. He must be joking. The image of Peter Van Houten I had in my head was disappearing before my eyes. He was nothing like the man I thought he was going to be. I came all this way for nothing. And then, I saw Hazel Grace beside me. She has waited for so long. She truly believes she will never hear the ending of this story. She came here for answers and damn well she was going to get them.
"Pardon?"
"Is this some kind of performance?" I looked over at Lidewij. "Is it?"
"I'm afraid not," she 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. And I say you, young friends, that if you cannot hear Afasi och Filthy's bravadic response to fear, then my work is not for you."
It's just like any other god damn rap song...
"Um," Hazel Grace started. "So about An Imperial Affliction. Anna's mom, when the book ends, is about to-" But he cut her off... again.
"So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us imagine 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. And 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 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 assume that answers your question." Van Houten said confidently as he leaned back and sipped from his Scotch.
"Not really," she said. "We were wondering, after the end of An Imperial Affliction-"
"I disavow everything in that putrid novel." I was about to spit out some rude comment but Hazel Grace beat me to it."
"No." Her tone completely changed.
"Excuse me?"
"No, that is not acceptable." She was staring right at him with her intense green eyes. "I understand that the story ends mid-narrative because Anna dies or becomes too sick to continue, but you said you would tell us what happens to everybody, and that's why we're here, and we, I need you to tell me." She finished.
Van Houten sighed.
"Very well. Whose story do you seek?" Finally.
"Anna's mom, the Dutch Tulip Man, Sisyphus the Hamster, I mean, just- what happens to everyone." Van Houten closed his eyes and puffed out his cheeks like a child. It like it pained him to even speak about his long last characters. The ones he first wrote about all those years ago. I leaned forwards in my seat.
"The hamster," he started. "The hamster gets adopted by Christine." That makes sense. Christine was one of Anna's best friends in the book. That's one down. "He is adopted by Christine and lives for a c"ouple years after the end of the novel and dies peacefully in his hamster sleep."
"Great," Hazel Grace said with a weak smile on her face. "Great. Okay, so the Dutch Tulip Man. Is he a con man? Do he and Anna's mom get married?" But we already lost Van Houten again. He was staring up at the ceiling with his nearly empty glass of Scotch.
"Lidewij, I can't do it. I can't. I can't." He looked back at Hazel Grace.
"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 Anna's mom get married? We are speaking of a novel, dear child, not 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." Hazel Grace was getting frustrated again and so was I.
"They're fictions," he said, tapping at his glass. "Nothing happens to them."
"You said you'd tell me." Hazel Grace insisted. I saw the plea in her eyes but I also saw anger. A thirst for answers she may never live to hear.
"Perhaps, but what 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."
My hands were balled up into fists. My heart was pounding. An author I came to admire while reading his book was crushing everything... everything I had read. Can you imagine how that feels? It's like he took An Imperial Affliction out of my own hands, tore it up in pieces, stomped on it and said it was all pointless and a waste of time.
"No," Hazel Grace said. She pushed herself off the couch and stood up, looking down at the sad old man. "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 Anna's mother. She either got married or didn't. She either moved to Holland with the Dutch Tulip Man or didn't. She either had more kids or didn't. I need to know what happens." Van Houten pursed his lips.
"I regret that I cannot indulge your childish whims, but I refuse to pity you in the manner to which you are well accustomed."
"I don't want your pity." She spat.
"Like all sick children," he answered. "you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends on it."
"Peter." Lidewij said, but he continued.
"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. And 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 exclaimed in horror.
"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, but Van Houten didn't seem to hear her words. He just stared at Hazel Grace and Hazel Grace stared back at him. I was furious. I was ready to knock the old man on his sorry lazy ass. How dare he tell us what we already know? I've been to the doctors enough to know I was a failed experiment all along. And now I know that I won't get long until I bite it. And to say all this to Hazel? To the person who has been poked and prodded by doctors. To be terminal since diagnosis? But she wasn't angry. She didn't like as angry as I felt. She stood up straight and glared down at Van Houten.
"Listen, douchepants," she said. "you're not going to tell me anything about a disease I don't already know. I need one and only one thing from you before I walk out of your life forever: WHAT HAPPENS TO ANNA'S MOTHER?!"
He 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's Finn after he lights out out for the territories."
"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."
Hazel Grace took a deep breath and knocked the glass of Scotch out of Van Houten's hand. What remained of the Scotch splashed onto his face.
"Lidewij," Van Houten said calmly. "I'll have a martini, if you please. Just a whisper of vermouth."
"I have resigned." Lidewij said.
"Don't be ridiculous."
Neither of us knew what to do. Hazel Grace was still standing glaring down at Van Houten. I was still sitting with my fists in my lap, speechless.
"Have you ever stopped to wonder," Van Houten started, his words starting to slurr. "why you care so much about your silly questions?"
"YOU PROMISED!" Hazel Grace screamed. And I remembered Isaac repeating that same word over and over again the night of the broken trophies. It wasn't because Van Houten promised. It's not even because I was dying and that I would never knowing what happens at the end of that damn book. I needed to know... for her. For Hazel Grace. Because Hazel Grace believes she is a grenade and she believes that explode one day and she's afraid of never knowing and of hurting people. If she's going to be a grenade then I will be her Max Mayhem. I will throw myself over the grenade and save her.
Hazel Grace still stood there waiting for Van Houten to spill all the answers she's been waiting for. I couldn't let Van Houten ruin this for her. I stood up and slipped my hand into hers and pulled her by her arm... away from the man who had the answers we would never learn. Lidewij started shouting at Van Houten in fast Dutch.
"You'll have to forgive my former assistant," he said. "Dutch is not so much a language as an ailment of the throat. I pulled Hazel Grace out of the room and we headed toward the door, out into the late spring morning and the falling confetti of the elms.
We were heading back to the hotel when Hazel Grace started crying. We stopped and I set her cart down to touch her waist.
"Hey. It's okay." I said softly. She nodded and wiped her face.
"He sucks." I said. She nodded again. I just held and she cried into my shoulder. I put on my famous crooked smile.
"I'll write you an epilogue," I said. She started crying harder. "I will," I 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. An Imperial Affliction meets The Price of Dawn. You'll love it." I held her close, never wanting to let her go.
"I spent your Wish on that doucheface." She cried.
"Hazel Grace. No. I will grant that you did spend my one and only Wish, but you did not spend it on him. You spent it on us." Wow that sounded like a line right of a teen romance movie. And then I hear a click clack plonk on the sidewalk. The sound of someone running in heels. It was Lidewij, her eyeliner running down her cheeks.
"Perhaps we should go to the Anne Frank Huis." She said.
"I'm not going anywhere with that monster." I spat out.
"He is not invited." Lidewij said. I looked down at Hazel whom I was still holding. Her eyes were slightly red from the crying.
"I don't think-"
"We should go." Hazel Grace spoke up. She looked at me. Her green fathomless eyes. She just had her day ruined by a guy she had admired for years. She would never learn what happens to any of the characters and yet... she still wants to keep going. She may not know it but she is the bravest and strongest person I know. I nodded.
"Okay?"
"Okay."