With david levithan dutton books

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, i
s 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 u
s 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, jus
t
—
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 somewhe
re. “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