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But when I woke up some hours later, she was sitting in the ancient little chair in the corner, reading a guidebook.<br />
“Morning,” I said.<br />
“Actually late afternoon,” she answered, pushing herself out of the chair with a sigh. She came to the bed, placed a tank in the cart, and<br />
connected it to the tube while I took off the BiPAP snout and placed the nubbins into my nose. She set it for 2.5 liters a minute—six hours<br />
before I’d need a change—and then I got up. “How are you feeling?” she asked.<br />
“Good,” I said. “Great. How was the Vondelpark?”<br />
“I skipped it,” she said. “Read all about it in the guidebook, though.”<br />
“Mom,” I said, “you didn’t have to stay here.”<br />
She shrugged. “I know. I wanted to. I like watching you sleep.”<br />
“Said the creeper.” She laughed, but I still felt bad. “I just want you to have fun or whatever, you know?”<br />
“Okay. I’ll have fun tonight, okay? I’ll go do crazy mom stuff while you and Augustus go to dinner.”<br />
“Without you?” I asked.<br />
“Yes without me. In fact, you have reservations at a place called Oranjee,” she said. “Mr. Van Houten’s assistant set it up. It’s in this<br />
neighborhood called the Jordaan. Very fancy, according to the guidebook. There’s a tram station right around the corner. Augustus has<br />
directions. You can eat outside, watch the boats go by. It’ll be lovely. Very romantic.”<br />
“Mom.”<br />
“I’m just saying,” she said. “You should get dressed. The sundress, maybe?”<br />
One might marvel at the insanity of the situation: A mother sends her sixteen-year-old daughter alone with a seventeen-year-old boy out<br />
into a foreign city famous for its permissiveness. But this, too, was a side effect of dying: I could not run or dance or eat foods rich in<br />
nitrogen, but in the city of freedom, I was among the most liberated of its residents.<br />
I did indeed wear the sundress—this blue print, flowey knee-length Forever 21 thing—with tights and Mary Janes because I liked being<br />
quite a lot shorter than him. I went into the hilariously tiny bathroom and battled my bedhead for a while until everything looked suitably<br />
mid-2000s Natalie Portman. At six P.M. on the dot (noon back home), there was a knock.<br />
“Hello?” I said through the door. There was no peephole at the Hotel Filosoof.<br />
“Okay,” Augustus answered. I could hear the cigarette in his mouth. I looked down at myself. The sundress offered the most in the way<br />
CHAPTER ELEVEN<br />
I think he must have fallen asleep. I did, eventually, and woke to the landing gear coming down. My mouth tasted horrible, and I tried to<br />
keep it shut for fear of poisoning the airplane.<br />
I looked over at Augustus, who was staring out the window, and as we dipped below the low-hung clouds, I straightened my back to see<br />
the Netherlands. The land seemed sunk into the ocean, little rectangles of green surrounded on all sides by canals. We landed, in fact, parallel<br />
to a canal, like there were two runways: one for us and one for waterfowl.<br />
After getting our bags and clearing customs, we all piled into a taxi driven by this doughy bald guy who spoke perfect English—like better<br />
English than I do. “The Hotel Filosoof?” I said.<br />
And he said, “You are Americans?”<br />
“Yes,” Mom said. “We’re from Indiana.”<br />
“Indiana,” he said. “They steal the land from the Indians and leave the name, yes?”<br />
“Something like that,” Mom said. The cabbie pulled out into traffic and we headed toward a highway with lots of blue signs featuring<br />
double vowels: Oosthuizen, Haarlem. Beside the highway, flat empty land stretched for miles, interrupted by the occasional huge corporate<br />
headquarters. In short, Holland looked like Indianapolis, only with smaller cars. “This is Amsterdam?” I asked the cabdriver.<br />
“Yes and no,” he answered. “Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.”<br />
It happened all at once: We exited the highway and there were the row houses of my imagination leaning precariously toward canals,<br />
ubiquitous bicycles, and coffeeshops advertising LARGE SMOKING ROOM. We drove over a canal and from atop the bridge I could see dozens<br />
of houseboats moored along the water. It looked nothing like America. It looked like an old painting, but real—everything achingly idyllic in<br />
the morning light—and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the<br />
dead.<br />
“Are these houses very old?” asked my mom.<br />
“Many of the canal houses date from the Golden Age, the seventeenth century,” he said. “Our city has a rich history, even though many<br />
tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District.” He paused. “Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of<br />
freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”<br />
All the rooms in the Hotel Filosoof were named after filosoofers: Mom and I were staying on the ground floor in the Kierkegaard; Augustus<br />
was on the floor above us, in the Heidegger. Our room was small: a double bed pressed against a wall with my BiPAP machine, an oxygen<br />
concentrator, and a dozen refillable oxygen tanks at the foot of the bed. Past the equipment, there was a dusty old paisley chair with a<br />
sagging seat, a desk, and a bookshelf above the bed containing the collected works of Søren Kierkegaard. On the desk we found a wicker<br />
basket full of presents from the Genies: wooden shoes, an orange Holland T-shirt, chocolates, and various other goodies.<br />
The Filosoof was right next to the Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s most famous park. Mom wanted to go on a walk, but I was supertired, so<br />
she got the BiPAP working and placed its snout on me. I hated talking with that thing on, but I said, “Just go to the park and I’ll call you when<br />
I wake up.”<br />
“Okay,” she said. “Sleep tight, honey.”