The Fault in Our Stars: Chapters 12–17

It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

I grabbed the lion’s-head door knocker and knocked tentatively.

A potbellied man with thin hair, sagging jowls, and a week-old beard squinted into the sunlight.

Behind it, I heard a stammering, reedy voice shout, “LEEE-DUH-VIGH!”

“There are—Lidewij, there are two adolescent apparitions outside the door.”

“Apparitions?” she asked with a pleasant Dutch lilt.

Phantasms specters ghouls visitants post-terrestrials apparitions, Lidewij.

How can someone pursuing a postgraduate degree in American literature display such abominable English-language skills?

But as to these Americans, 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.

“It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures.”

The important thing was that the door was open and I was crossing the threshold to learn what happens after the end of An Imperial Affliction.

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.

Yours are the first missives to which I have replied, and look where that got me.

“Perhaps the cancer has established a beachhead in his brain.”

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

“Are you familiar with Zeno’s tortoise paradox?” he asked me.

“Okay, but presumably you know Afasi och Filthy’s seminal album Fläcken."

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.

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.

I needed to keep his addled attention on my questions.

“I regret that I cannot indulge your childish whims, but I refuse to pity you in the manner to which you are well accustomed.”

“No, and I’ll thank you not to curse in my house. It isn’t becoming of a lady.”

“Dutch is not so much a language as an ailment of the throat.”

As we drove through the streets of Amsterdam, she repeatedly and profusely apologized.

The blackness encroached around my field of vision as I pulled myself up, eighteen steps, steep as hell.

“And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.”
“They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said.

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice: Augustus, slumped in the café chair, pretended to be the tongue-tied, word-slurring Van Houten who could not so much as push himself out of his chair; I stood up to play a me all full of bluster and machismo, shouting, “Get up, you fat ugly old man!”

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice: Augustus, slumped in the café chair, pretended to be the tongue-tied, word-slurring Van Houten who could not so much as push himself out of his chair; I stood up to play a me all full of bluster and machismo, shouting, “Get up, you fat ugly old man!”

I couldn’t be mad at him for even a moment, and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters.

I was crying. But even then he was strong, holding me tight so that I could see the sinewy muscles of his arms wrapped around me as he said, “I’m sorry. You’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. I promise,” and smiled his crooked smile.

After a while, I pulled him over to the bed and we lay there together as he told me they’d started palliative chemo, but he gave it up to go to Amsterdam, even though his parents were furious.

He was too smart for the kinds of solace I could offer.

Abraham Maslow, I present to you Augustus Waters, whose existential curiosity dwarfed that of his well-fed, well-loved, healthy brethren.

I conspicuously rearranged the nubbins in my nose.

The adults headed down to the basement to commiserate or whatever, leaving the three of us alone in the living room.

“She hasn’t even, like, texted you to ask how you’re doing?” I asked. This struck me as an unfathomable injustice.

Isaac threw the last three eggs in quick succession and Gus then guided him back toward the car.

We kissed for a while and then lay together listening to The Hectic Glow’s eponymous album, and eventually we fell asleep like that, a quantum entanglement of tubes and bodies.

It crossed my mind to fake a choking incident or something so that he might give me the Heimlich. Maybe then he could rid himself of this fear that his life had been lived and lost for no greater good. But then I imagined him being physically unable to Heimlich, and me having to reveal that it was all a ruse, and the ensuing mutual humiliation.

“With each passing minute, I’m developing a deeper appreciation of the word mortified,” he said finally.