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“No?” I said.
“He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting the stars. ’ Welcome to Amsterdam. Would you like to see a menu, or will you have the chef’s choice?”
I looked at Augustus and he at me. “The chef’s choice sounds lovely, but Hazel is a vegetarian. ” I’d mentioned this to Augustus precisely once, on the first day we met.
“This is not a problem,” the waiter said.
“Awesome. And can we get more of this?” Gus asked, of the champagne.
“Of course,” said our waiter. “We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friends. Gah, the confetti!” he said, and lightly brushed a seed from my bare shoulder. “It hasn’t been so bad in many years. It’s everywhere. Very annoying. ”
The waiter disappeared. We watched the confetti fall from the sky, skip across the ground in the breeze, and tumble into the canal. “Kind of hard to believe anyone could ever find that annoying,” Augustus said after a while.
“People always get used to beauty, though. ”
“I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,” he answered, smiling. I felt myself blushing. “Thank you for coming to Amsterdam,” he said.
“Thank you for letting me hijack your wish,” I said.
“Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa,” he said. I shook my head, trying not to smile at him. I didn’t want to be a grenade. But then again, he knew what he was doing, didn’t he? It was his choice, too. “Hey, how’s that poem end?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The one you recited to me on the plane. ”
“Oh, ‘Prufrock’? It ends, ‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown. ’”
Augustus pulled out a cigarette and tapped the filter against the table. “Stupid human voices always ruining everything. ”
The waiter arrived with two more glasses of champagne and what he called “Belgian white asparagus with a lavender infusion. ”
“I’ve never had champagne either,” Gus said after he left. “In case you were wondering or whatever. Also, I’ve never had white asparagus. ”
I was chewing my first bite. “It’s amazing,” I promised.
He took a bite, swallowed. “God. If asparagus tasted like that all the time, I’d be a vegetarian, too. ” Some people in a lacquered wooden boat approached us on the canal below. One of them, a woman with curly blond hair, maybe thirty, drank from a beer then raised her glass toward us and shouted something.
“We don’t speak Dutch,” Gus shouted back.
One of the others shouted a translation: “The beautiful couple is beautiful. ”
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: “I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it. ” “Sweet-pea sorbet, you are so unexpectedly magnificent. ” I wish I’d been hungrier.
After green garlic gnocchi with red mustard leaves, the waiter said, “Dessert next. More stars first?” I shook my head. Two glasses was enough for me. Champagne was no exception to my high tolerance for depressants and pain relievers; I felt warm but not intoxicated. But I didn’t want to get drunk. Nights like this one didn’t come along often, and I wanted to remember it.
“Mmmm,” I said after the waiter left, and Augustus smiled crookedly as he stared down the canal while I stared up it. We had plenty to look at, so the silence didn’t feel awkward really, but I wanted everything to be perfect. It was perfect, I guess, but it felt like someone had tried to stage the Amsterdam of my imagination, which made it hard to forget that this dinner, like the trip itself, was a cancer perk. I just wanted us to be talking and joking comfortably, like we were on the couch together back home, but some tension underlay everything.
“It’s not my funeral suit,” he said after a while. “When I first found out I was sick—I mean, they told me I had like an eighty-five percent chance of cure. I know those are great odds, but I kept thinking it was a game of Russian roulette. I mean, I was going to have to go through hell for six months or a year and lose my leg and then at the end, it still might not work, you know?”
“I know,” I said, although I didn’t, not really. I’d never been anything but terminal; all my treatment had been in pursuit of extending my life, not curing my cancer. Phalanxifor had introduced a measure of ambiguity to my cancer story, but I was different from Augustus: My final chapter was written upon diagnosis. Gus, like most cancer survivors, lived with uncertainty.
“Right,” he said. “So I went through this whole thing about wanting to be ready. We bought a plot in Crown Hill, and I walked around with my dad one day and picked out a spot. And I had my whole funeral planned out and everything, and then right before the surgery, I asked my parents if I could buy a suit, like a really nice suit, just in case I bit it. Anyway, I’ve never had occasion to wear it. Until tonight. ”
“So it’s your death suit. ”
“Correct. Don’t you have a death outfit?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a dress I bought for my fifteenth birthday party. But I don’t wear it on dates. ”
His eyes lit up. “We’re on a date?” he asked.
I looked down, feeling bashful. “Don’t push it. ”
We were both really full, but dessert—a succulently rich crémeux surrounded by passion fruit—was too good not to at least nibble, so we lingered for a while over dessert, trying to get hungry again. The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.
Out of nowhere, Augustus asked, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
“I think forever is an incorrect concept,” I answered.
He smirked. “You’re an incorrect concept. ”
“I know. That’s why I’m being taken out of the rotation. ”
“That’s not funny,” he said, looking at the street. Two girls passed on a bike, one riding sidesaddle over the back wheel.
“Come on,” I said. “That was a joke. ”
“The thought of you being removed from the rotation is not funny to me,” he said. “Seriously, though: afterlife?”
“No,” I said, and then revised. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t go so far as no. You?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice full of confidence. “Yes, absolutely. Not like a heaven where you ride unicorns, play harps, and live in a mansion made of clouds. But yes. I believe in Something with a capital S. Always have. ”
“Really?” I asked. I was surprised. I’d always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn’t dumb.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I believe in that line from An Imperial Affliction. ‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes. ’ That’s God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren’t lost. I don’t believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us. ”
“But you fear oblivion. ”
“Sure, I fear earthly oblivion. But, I mean, not to sound like my parents, but I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything. ”
I just shook my head.
“What?” he asked.
“Your obsession with, like, dying for something or leaving behind some great sign of your heroism or whatever. It’s just weird. ”
“Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life. ”
“Not everyone,” I said, unable to disguise my annoyance.
“Are you mad?”
“It’s just,” I said, and then couldn’t finish my sentence. “Just,” I said again. Between us flickered the candle. “It’s really mean of you to say that the only lives that matter are the ones that are lived for something or die for something. That’s a really mean thing to say to me. ”
I felt like a little kid for some reason, and I took a bite of dessert to make it appear like it was not that big of a deal to me. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just thinking about myself. ”
“Yeah, you were,” I said. I was too full to finish. I worried I might puke, actually, because I often puked after eating. (Not bulimia, just cancer. ) I pushed my dessert plate toward Gus, but he shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, reaching across the table for my hand. I let him take it. “I could be worse, you know. ”
“How?” I asked, teasing.
“I mean, I have a work of calligraphy over my toilet that reads, ‘Bathe Yourself Daily in the Comfort of God’s Words,’ Hazel. I could be way worse. ”
“Sounds unsanitary,” I said.
“I could be worse. ”
“You could be worse. ” I smiled. He really did like me. Maybe I was a narcissist or something, but when I realized it there in that moment at Oranjee, it made me like him even more.
When our waiter appeared to take dessert away, he said, “Your meal has been paid for by Mr. Peter Van Houten. ”
Augustus smiled. “This Peter Van Houten fellow ain’t half bad. ”
We walked along the canal as it got dark. A block up from Oranjee, we stopped at a park bench surrounded by old rusty bicycles locked to bike racks and to each other. We sat down hip to hip facing the canal, and he put his arm around me.
I could see the halo of light coming from the Red Light District. Even though it was the Red Light District, the glow coming from up there was an eerie sort of green. I imagined thousands of tourists getting drunk and stoned and pinballing around the narrow streets.
“I can’t believe he’s going to tell us tomorrow,” I said. “Peter Van Houten is going to tell us the famously unwritten end of the best book ever. ”
“Plus he paid for our dinner,” Augustus said.
“I keep imagining that he is going to search us for recording devices before he tells us. And then he will sit down between us on the couch in his living room and whisper whether Anna’s mom married the Dutch Tulip Man. ”
“Don’t forget Sisyphus the Hamster,” Augustus added.
“Right, and also of course what fate awaited Sisyphus the Hamster. ” I leaned forward, to see into the canal. There were so many of those pale elm petals in the canals, it was ridiculous. “A sequel that will exist just for us,” I said.
“So what’s your guess?” he asked.
“I really don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth like a thousand times about it all. Each time I reread it, I think something different, you know?” He nodded. “You have a theory?”
“Yeah. I don’t think the Dutch Tulip Man is a con man, but he’s also not rich like he leads them to believe. And I think after Anna dies, Anna’s mom goes to Holland with him and thinks they will live there forever, but it doesn’t work out, because she wants to be near where her daughter was. ”
I hadn’t realized he’d thought about the book so much, that An Imperial Affliction mattered to Gus independently of me mattering to him.
The water lapped quietly at the stone canal walls beneath us; a group of friends biked past in a clump, shouting over each other in rapid-fire, guttural Dutch; the tiny boats, not much longer than me, half drowned in the canal; the smell of water that had stood too still for too long; his arm pulling me in; his real leg against my real leg all the way from hip to foot. I leaned in to his body a little. He winced. “Sorry, you okay?”
He breathed out a yeah in obvious pain.
“Sorry,” I said. “Bony shoulder. ”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Nice, actually. ”
We sat there for a long time. Eventually his hand abandoned my shoulder and rested against the back of the park bench. Mostly we just stared into the canal. I was thinking a lot about how they’d made this place exist even though it should’ve been underwater, and how I was for Dr. Maria a kind of Amsterdam, a half-drowned anomaly, and that made me think about dying. “Can I ask you about Caroline Mathers?”
“And you say there’s no afterlife,” he answered without looking at me. “But yeah, of course. What do you want to know?”
I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved. “Just, like, what happened. ”
He sighed, exhaling for so long that to my crap lungs it seemed like he was bragging. He popped a fresh cigarette into his mouth. “You know how there is famously no place less played in than a hospital playground?” I nodded. “Well, I was at Memorial for a couple weeks when they took off the leg and everything. I was up on the fifth floor and I had a view of the playground, which was always of course utterly desolate. I was all awash in the metaphorical resonance of the empty playground in the hospital courtyard. But then this girl started showing up alone at the playground, every day, swinging on a swing completely alone, like you’d see in a movie or something. So I asked one of my nicer nurses to get the skinny on the girl, and the nurse brought her up to visit, and it was Caroline, and I used my immense charisma to win her over. ” He paused, so I decided to say something.
“You’re not that charismatic,” I said. He scoffed, disbelieving. “You’re mostly just hot,” I explained.