Текст книги "The Fault in Our Stars "

Автор книги: John Green

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Iwoke up at four in the Dutch morning ready for the day. All attempts to go back to sleep failed, so I lay there with the BiPAP pumping the air in and urging it out, enjoying the dragon sounds but wishing I could choose my breaths.

I reread A n Imperial A ffliction until Mom woke up and rolled over toward me around six. She nuzzled her head against my shoulder,

which felt uncomfortable and vaguely A ugustinian.

The hotel brought a breakfast to our room that, much to my delight, featured deli meat among many other denials of A merican breakfast

constructions. The dress I’d planned to wear to meet Peter Van Houten had been moved up in the rotation for the Oranjee dinner, so after I

showered and got my hair to lie halfway flat, I spent like thirty minutes debating with Mom the various benefits and drawbacks of the

available outfits before deciding to dress as much like A nna in A IA as possible: Chuck Taylors and dark jeans like she always wore, and a light blue T-shirt.

The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by René Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive

Ceci n’est pas une pipe. (“This is not a pipe.”)

“I just don’t get that shirt,” Mom said.

“Peter Van Houten will get it, trust me. There are like seven thousand Magritte references in A n Imperial A ffliction.”

“But it is a pipe.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? A ll representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever.”

“How did you get so grown up that you understand things that confuse your ancient mother?” Mom asked. “It seems like just yesterday

that I was telling seven-year-old Hazel why the sky was blue. You thought I was a genius back then.”

“Why is the sky blue?” I asked.

“Cuz,” she answered. I laughed.

A s it got closer to ten, I grew more and more nervous: nervous to see A ugustus; nervous to meet Peter Van Houten; nervous that my

outfit was not a good outfit; nervous that we wouldn’t find the right house since all the houses in A msterdam looked pretty similar; nervous that we would get lost and never make it back to the Filosoof; nervous nervous nervous. Mom kept trying to talk to me, but I couldn’t really listen. I was about to ask her to go upstairs and make sure A ugustus was up when he knocked.

I opened the door. He looked down at the shirt and smiled. “Funny,” he said.

“Don’t call my boobs funny,” I answered.

“Right here,” Mom said behind us. But I’d made A ugustus blush and put him enough off his game that I could finally bear to look up at

him.

“You sure you don’t want to come?” I asked Mom.

“I’m going to the Rijksmuseum and the Vondelpark today,” she said. “Plus, I just don’t get his book. No offense. Thank him and Lidewij

for us, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I hugged Mom, and she kissed my head just above my ear.

Peter Van Houten’s white row house was just around the corner from the hotel, on the Vondelstraat, facing the park. Number 158. A ugustus

took me by one arm and grabbed the oxygen cart with the other, and we walked up the three steps to the lacquered blue-black front door. My

heart pounded. One closed door away from the answers I’d dreamed of ever since I first read that last unfinished page.

Inside, I could hear a bass beat thumping loud enough to rattle the windowsills. I wondered whether Peter Van Houten had a kid who

liked rap music.

I grabbed the lion’s-head door knocker and knocked tentatively. The beat continued. “Maybe he can’t hear over the music?” A ugustus

asked. He grabbed the lion’s head and knocked much louder.

The music disappeared, replaced by shuffled footsteps. A dead bolt slid. A nother. The door creaked open. A potbellied man with thin

hair, sagging jowls, and a week-old beard squinted into the sunlight. He wore baby-blue man pajamas like guys in old movies. His face and

belly were so round, and his arms so skinny, that he looked like a dough ball with four sticks stuck into it. “Mr. Van Houten?” A ugustus asked, his voice squeaking a bit.

The door slammed shut. Behind it, I heard a stammering, reedy voice shout, “LEEE-DUH-VIGH!” (Until then, I’d pronounced his

assistant’s name like lid-uh-widge.)

We could hear everything through the door. “A re they here, Peter?” a woman asked.

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

“A pparitions?” she asked with a pleasant Dutch lilt.

Van Houten answered in a rush. “Phantasms specters ghouls visitants post-terrestrials apparitions, Lidewij. How can someone pursuing a

postgraduate degree in A merican literature display such abominable English-language skills?”

“Peter, those are not post-terrestrials. They are A ugustus and Hazel, the young fans with whom you have been corresponding.”

“They are—what? They—I thought they were in A merica!”

“Yes, but you invited them here, you will remember.”

“Do you know why I left A merica, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter A mericans.”

“But you are an A merican.”

“Incurably so, it seems. But as to these A mericans, 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.”

I thought I might throw up. I looked over at A ugustus, who was staring intently at the door, and saw his shoulders slacken.

“I will not do this, Peter,” answered Lidewij. “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 silence ensued, and then finally the door opened again. He turned his head metronomically from A ugustus to me, still squinting.

“Which of you is A ugustus Waters?” he asked. A ugustus raised his hand tentatively. Van Houten nodded and said, “Did you close the deal with that chick yet?”

Whereupon I encountered for the first and only time a truly speechless A ugustus Waters. “I,” he started, “um, I, Hazel, um. Well.”

“This boy appears to have some kind of developmental delay,” Peter Van Houten said to Lidewij.

“Peter,” she scolded.

“Well,” Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. “It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures.” I

shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with A ugustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. A ugustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.

Of course, I had hoped that Peter Van Houten would be sane, but the world is not a wish-granting factory. The important thing was that

the door was open and I was crossing the threshold to learn what happens after the end of A n Imperial A ffliction. That was enough. 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. A side from one couch and one lounge chair, both a mix of steel and black

leather, the room seemed empty. Then I noticed two large black garbage bags, full and twist-tied, behind the couch.

“Trash?” I mumbled to A ugustus soft enough that I thought no one else would hear.

“Fan mail,” Van Houten answered as he sat down in the lounge chair. “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.”

That explained why he’d never replied to my letters: He’d never read them. I wondered why he kept them at all, let alone in an otherwise

empty formal living room. Van Houten kicked his feet up onto the ottoman and crossed his slippers. He motioned toward the couch. A ugustus

and I sat down next to each other, but not too next.

“Would you care for some breakfast?” asked Lidewij.

I started to say that we’d already eaten when Peter interrupted. “It is far too early for breakfast, Lidewij.”

“Well, they are from A merica, 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 me.

“Do I—um, no, I’m fine,” I said.

“A ugustus Waters?” Van Houten asked, nodding toward Gus.

“Uh, I’m good.”

“Just me, then, Lidewij. Scotch and water, please.” Peter turned his attention to Gus, asking, “You know how we make a Scotch and

water in this home?”

“No, sir,” Gus said.

“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.”

Lidewij said, “Perhaps a bit of breakfast first, Peter.”

He looked toward us and stage-whispered, “She thinks I have a drinking problem.”

“A nd I think that the sun has risen,” Lidewij responded. Nonetheless, she turned to the bar in the living room, reached up for a bottle of Scotch, and poured a glass half full. She carried it to him. Peter Van Houten took a sip, then sat up straight in his chair. “A drink this good deserves one’s best posture,” he said.

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 A ugustus after another sip.

“Yeah,” I said, speaking up on A ugustus’s behalf. “A nd yes, we—well, A ugustus, he made meeting you his Wish so that we could come

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 nna?” 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 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 dinner last night and—”

“We bought them dinner last night?” Van Houten asked Lidewij.

“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 annoyance in his voice.

“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 nna’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. “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 cannot hear A fasi 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 A n Imperial A ffliction.

A nna’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. 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 nna 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. A fter another drink, he said, “Very well. Whose story do you seek?”

“A nna’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 A nna’s presickness friends. That made sense.

Christine and A nna 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 A nna’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 A nna’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 A nna’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. 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 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

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 running. I turned around. It was Lidewij, her eyeliner running down her cheeks, duly

horrified, chasing us up the sidewalk. “Perhaps we should go to the A nne Frank Huis,” Lidewij said.

“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.”

“I guess he got pretty rich on that book,” I said after a while.

“Oh, no no, he is of the Van Houtens,” she said. “In the seventeenth century, his ancestor discovered how to mix cocoa into water. Some

Van Houtens moved to the United States long ago, and Peter is of those, but he moved to Holland after his novel. He is an embarrassment to

a great family.”

The engine screamed. Lidewij shifted and we shot up a canal bridge. “It is circumstance,” she said. “Circumstance has made him so cruel.

He is not an evil man. But this day, I did not think—when he said these terrible things, I could not believe it. I am very sorry. Very very sorry.”

We had to park a block away from the A nne Frank House, and then while Lidewij stood in line to get tickets for us, I sat with my back against a little tree, looking at all the moored houseboats in the Prinsengracht canal. A ugustus was standing above me, rolling my oxygen cart in lazy circles, just watching the wheels spin. I wanted him to sit next to me, but I knew it was hard for him to sit, and harder still to stand back up.

“Okay?” he asked, looking down at me. I shrugged and reached a hand for his calf. It was his fake calf, but I held on to it. He looked down at me.

“I wanted . . .” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I know. A pparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.” That made me smile a little.

Lidewij returned with tickets, but her thin lips were pursed with worry. “There is no elevator,” she said. “I am very very sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, there are many stairs,” she said. “Steep stairs.”

“It’s okay,” I said again. A ugustus started to say something, but I interrupted. “It’s okay. I can do it.”

We began in a room with a video about Jews in Holland and the Nazi invasion and the Frank family. Then we walked upstairs into the

canal house where Otto Frank’s business had been. The stairs were slow, for me and A ugustus both, but I felt strong. Soon I was staring at the famous bookcase that had hid A nne Frank, her family, and four others. The bookcase was half open, and behind it was an even steeper

set of stairs, only wide enough for one person. There were fellow visitors all around us, and I didn’t want to hold up the procession, but

Lidewij said, “If everyone could be patient, please,” and I began the walk up, Lidewij carrying the cart behind me, Gus behind her.

It was fourteen steps. I kept thinking about the people behind me—they were mostly adults speaking a variety of languages—and feeling

embarrassed or whatever, feeling like a ghost that both comforts and haunts, but finally I made it up, and then I was in an eerily empty room, leaning against the wall, my brain telling my lungs it’s okay it’s okay calm down it’s okay and my lungs telling my brain oh, God, we’re dying here. I didn’t even see A ugustus come upstairs, but he came over and wiped his brow with the back of his hand like whew and said, “You’re a champion.”

A fter a few minutes of wall-leaning, I made it to the next room, which A nne had shared with the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. It was tiny, empty of all furniture. You’d never know anyone had ever lived there except that the pictures A nne had pasted onto the wall from magazines and

newspapers were still there.

A nother staircase led up to the room where the van Pels family had lived, this one steeper than the last and eighteen steps, essentially a glorified ladder. I got to the threshold and looked up and figured I could not do it, but also knew the only way through was up.

“Let’s go back,” Gus said behind me.

“I’m okay,” I answered quietly. It’s stupid, but I kept thinking I owed it to her—to A nne Frank, I mean—because she was dead and I

wasn’t, because she had stayed quiet and kept the blinds drawn and done everything right and still died, and so I should go up the steps and see the rest of the world she’d lived in those years before the Gestapo came.

I began to climb the stairs, crawling up them like a little kid would, slow at first so I could breathe, but then faster because I knew I

couldn’t breathe and wanted to get to the top before everything gave out. The blackness encroached around my field of vision as I pulled

myself up, eighteen steps, steep as hell. I finally crested the staircase mostly blind and nauseated, the muscles in my arms and legs screaming for oxygen. I slumped seated against a wall, heaving watered-down coughs. There was an empty glass case bolted to the wall above me and I

stared up through it to the ceiling and tried not to pass out.

Lidewij crouched down next to me, saying, “You are at the top, that is it,” and I nodded. I had a vague awareness of the adults all around

glancing down at me worriedly; of Lidewij speaking quietly in one language and then another and then another to various visitors; of

A ugustus standing above me, his hand on the top of my head, stroking my hair along the part.

A fter a long time, Lidewij and A ugustus pulled me to my feet and I saw what was protected by the glass case: pencil marks on the

wallpaper measuring the growth of all the children in the annex during the period they lived there, inch after inch until they would grow no more.