I became conscious of my own posture and sat up a little on the couch. I rearranged my cannula. Dad always told me that you can judge 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 Augustus after another sip.
“Yeah,” I said, speaking up on Augustus’s behalf. “And yes, we—well, Augustus, he made meeting you his Wish so that we could come here, so that you could tell us what happens after the end of An Imperial Affliction.”
Van Houten said nothing, just took a long pull on his drink.
After a minute, Augustus 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?”
“Anna?” I asked.
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 announced, his voice needlessly loud. “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. 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 American.
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 dinner last night and—”
“We bought them dinner last night?” Van Houten asked Lidewij.
“Yes, at Oranjee.”
“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,” Augustus said. I could hear annoyance in his voice.
“So here I am,” Van Houten said after a moment. “What are your questions?”
“Um,” Augustus said.
“He seemed so intelligent in print,” Van Houten said to Lidewij regarding Augustus. “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. Another 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. “Are 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 Anna’s—”
“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. “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 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. After a moment, Augustus answered for me. “Limited,” he said.
“Okay, but presumably you know Afasi 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.
After 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 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 play it for you again?”
“Are 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. And I say to you, young friends, that if you cannot hear Afasi och Filthy’s bravadic response to fear, then my work is not for you.”
I cannot emphasize this enough: It was a completely normal rap song, except in Swedish. “Um,” I said. “So about An Imperial Affliction. Anna’s mom, when the book ends, is about to—”
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. 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 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 An Imperial Affliction—”
“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 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.”
Van Houten sighed. After another drink, he said, “Very well. Whose story do you seek?”
“Anna’s mom, the Dutch Tulip Man, Sisyphus the Hamster, I mean, just—what happens to everyone.”
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 Anna’s presickness friends. That made sense. Christine and Anna played with Sisyphus in a few scenes. “He is adopted by Christine and lives for a couple years after the end of the novel and dies peacefully in his hamster sleep.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Great,” I said. “Great. Okay, so the Dutch Tulip Man. Is he a con man? Do he and Anna’s mom get 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 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 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.”
“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 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 to her.”
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,” 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. 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 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: WHAT HAPPENS TO ANNA’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 Finn after he lights 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.”
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 spinning balletically through the air, landing with a shattering crash on the ancient hardwood floors.
“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 Augustus’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 Augustus’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.