by Hank Green
It’s so much easier for people to get excited about disliking something than agreeing to like it. The circle jerk of mockery and self-congratulation was so intense I didn’t even notice I was at its center. It was so easy to get people to follow me, and in the end, that’s what I wanted. It took no time at all for me to be just as bad as Peter Petrawicki.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised when things started escalating. I mean, I knew people hated me. It was a real thing. Being recognized by fans is very different from checking out at the corner store and not knowing if the clerk is a Defender thinking about what a dirty traitor you are. I thought that I could only either run away from that or fight it, so I fought it. Fear is an even better fuel than anger. Also, it is even more destructive. Their constant attacks meant I never had to doubt my message. It must be right, because the people who disagreed with me were sooooo awful. The Carls were the perfect vector for disagreement because, through all of this, we still knew practically nothing about them. Governments were accused of hiding things because people just couldn’t accept that those in power were exactly as lost as the rest of us. Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.
Here’s a quick overview of what happens when groups of passionate believers start to define themselves in opposition to others:
A simple message seems obvious to a large population, and those people can’t understand what the opposition could possibly be thinking. They never or almost never engage with someone who holds those different beliefs, and if they do, it’s in the context of the discussion, not in the context of, like, also being a human.
The vast majority of those people nod appreciatively and then change the channel and watch NCIS and eat the tacos that they made. It’s their own recipe. They’ve developed it over years, and they like it better than any taco you could get at even a super fancy restaurant. They go to bed at 10:30 and worry a bit about whether their son is adjusting well to college.
A very small percentage get really riled up. They’re angry, but they’re mostly worried or even scared and want to cause some kind of action. They call their representatives and do a little organizing. They’re usually motivated not just by agreement in the message but by a hatred of the people trying to fight the message.
A tiny percentage of that percentage just go way the fuck overboard. They get so frightened and angry that they need to make something happen. How? Well, that’s simple, right? You eliminate the people who are actively trying to destroy the world. If we’re all really unlucky, and if there are enough of them, those people find each other and they confirm and exacerbate their own extremism.
The bigger the Defender movement got, the larger that fourth group became. Some of them were religious extremists who believed the Carls were a symbol of the coming apocalypse or rapture or whatever. Some of them were purely secular, deeply believing that America and possibly the world was going to be destroyed if nothing was done (no one was really clear on what that thing was, but NO ONE WAS DOING IT!), and eventually they came to believe that I was an active and informed participant in the government’s (or the Carls’) plans to make humanity submit.
This is the first time a truly international issue had hit our newly borderless world this hard, and no one knew how that might play out. The conversation was international—we all knew that. The comments on my videos were in Hindi and Japanese and Arabic and Spanish. We had a team of translators who would subtitle the videos within a day or two of them going live, and the Som was now operational in more than twenty different languages. I saw this as an unambiguously good thing. I felt very strongly that the Carls were a globally unifying force. For the first time ever, humanity was literally sharing a dream. It felt more like we were sharing a planet than ever before, and to me that felt like a gift given to us by the Carls.
I still believe the Carls were very good for the world, but obviously July 13 made that a lot more ambiguous.
The coordinated attacks in São Paulo, Lagos, Jakarta, and St. Petersburg killed more than eight hundred people and injured thousands. That the responsible group had managed to plan an attack in four different continents boggled the mind. This wasn’t radicals making plans in back alleys; it was a growing, worldwide, borderless movement. In the US, it was the Defenders, but every culture had their own name for it, and they found commonality and connection in pop-up forums and anonymous chat rooms. They had convinced themselves that the Carls would be easy to destroy and that world governments were lying about their invulnerability. They also convinced themselves that tourists visiting Carls were not worth saving or protecting or whatever. Whether they saw it as a pilgrimage to a false deity or an act of submission to alien domination, it didn’t matter; any positive connection to the Carls was a threat to the ideology they wanted to push forward. The Carls could not be seen as safe, even if they were the ones making the Carls dangerous.
The Carls, of course, were completely unhurt.
The attacks were synchronized at roughly 4 A.M. eastern time. That maximized crowds in Jakarta, Lagos, and St. Petersburg. It was still early morning in São Paulo, but they coordinated the time with the other attacks nonetheless.
At that exact moment, 4 A.M., when those bombs went off across the world, I awoke from the Dream, where I had been staring blankly at a 767, and shot out of my bed in fear and terror.
Was I somehow psychically roused? Had I sensed a great disturbance in the Force? Did Carl reach out to me through the Dream to tell me of the attacks? No. I had heard a loud CRACK from the direction of the sliding glass door that led to my little balcony. My blinds were closed, of course, so I couldn’t see what had caused the noise.
My first thought was that someone had thrown a rock at it, but from eight stories below that would have to be some arm. Things had been getting heated with the Defenders; the messages were sometimes mean, sometimes threatening, and sometimes deeply fucking disturbing. I grabbed my phone as I got out of bed and slid it into my pajama bottoms. I flipped on the light, and as my heart rate slowly returned to normal, I went to look out the window.
At the base of the drapes, which hung all the way to the floor, if I had looked, I would have seen some little specks of glass mixed in with the Pop-Tart crumbs and dust. But I didn’t look. I just drew back the drapes to see what may have made the noise.
Looking back on this behavior, it’s depressingly dumb. Something has hit my window, and what’s my plan of action? I’ve got it! I’ll turn on the light and pull back the drapes in front of a glass door! SLOWLY!
Even with all the threats, it was still somehow inconceivable to me that someone would actually try to kill me. Harass me? Sure. Threaten me? Yeah. Sue me? If they could find a reason! But murder? That shit’s for the movies. People don’t kill people! I mean, they do, obviously, I’ve seen a newspaper. It says something, maybe, about how my mind works that I had received literal death threats but never considered that someone would try to kill me.
But now I was thinking about it, and two things happened simultaneously.
Something big (at the time, I thought it must have been a person) slammed painfully into my shoulder, knocking me away from the door.
The glass in my double-paned sliding glass door erupted out, spraying into the room and leaving a two-inch-wide hole.
I hit the floor hard, and the thing that had shoved me was gone before I could regain my wits. Little shards of glass lay all around the room. Having, by this point, figured out at least half of what was going on, I crumpled myself against the wall of my bedroom, too scared to cry. Someone had just tried to shoot me. Not, like, scare me, but actually put a bullet in my chest so that I could lie on the floor of my lonely apartment to die all by myself. And who t
he hell had shoved me? They had saved me, but they were also in my apartment!
And then I was no longer too scared to cry, and I cried. My blinds were still open a crack, and I was afraid that, at any moment, bullets would come flying through my window like a true war zone and if I was not backed against a brick wall I would be torn apart. But after about ten minutes of gasping for air between sobs, I convinced myself that I could sneak out of my bedroom and into the living room, where the windows faced a narrow alley, not the street.
So I half crawled, half ran out of the room. Once in my living room, I had access to a bathroom, a carpet, and the kitchen. Everything a girl needs! I did a cursory search, which uncovered nothing out of the ordinary. Clothes, carry-out containers, dirty napkins, maybe a damp towel or two. No sign of an intruder.
Should I call the cops? I thought. I mean, I definitely should call the cops. Someone was very probably trying to hurt me and maybe also there was literally a stranger hiding in my apartment right now?
But for some reason I really, really, really didn’t want to tell anyone. Maybe I was being silly. There is probably some reason for all of this that isn’t attempted murder, my mind was telling me. So far attempted murder has never happened to me, so it seems like there must be some other explanation.
And if it was real, other things were real too. Dealing with a police investigation and the reality that I could never sleep safely in this apartment again. And, oh god, my parents would have to know. And Maya. I knew she’d never say it, but inside there would be that part of her thinking, If only April had listened to me, this wouldn’t have happened. And I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t live with any of those scenarios.
So, instead of the police, I called Robin.
“April,” he said after one ring. Now . . . he never sounded put out (though I’d never before called him at 4 A.M.), but he seemed to positively have been expecting my call, which threw me.
“Were you expecting me to call?”
“Not expecting, but it is not surprising given the reports.” Remember I had been dealing with my own crisis. By this point the São Paulo and St. Petersburg attacks were already being reported on American news. Someone must have called Robin from a less ridiculous time zone.
“What reports?”
“Oh, my.”
“Oh, your what?” This was not how I was expecting the phone call to go.
“You should tell me why you are calling. I think that would simplify this conversation.”
“I think someone’s maybe just tried to hurt me. There is something very strange going on.”
“Have you called the police?” His voice was at a pitch I had never heard before.
“That doesn’t seem necessary,” I half complained, half ordered.
“It does, though.”
“Let’s just . . . not have them involved yet.”
“Would you be all right with me sending up the doorman?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s fine.”
“I will call you back momentarily.” He hung up before I did.
In that moment, I had a thought. Whoever or whatever had hit me had to still be in my apartment. It wasn’t in my bedroom, and I wasn’t going to check the second bedroom . . . That room had a window overlooking the street and I didn’t even know if the blinds were drawn. But it wasn’t a huge place, and I hadn’t actually looked very hard. So I looked under the couch and the chairs. Nothing. So I turned them all upside down. There was this weird black, meshy fabric covering the bottom of one of the chairs. It had been carefully and exactly cut along one side.
My phone rang. Robin. I muted it.
I slid my hand into the tear and ripped the fabric off the chair.
There, stretched out across the full width of my living room chair, wedged in place in the wooden frame, was Hollywood Carl’s right hand.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BANG BANG BANG!
“Ms. May, are you all right?” The voice was muffled through the door.
My heart, having stopped beating completely, exploded. I gasped and looked back toward the door, then immediately back at Carl’s hand, which had not moved.
“I’m fine!” I yelled, not sounding fine.
“May I please come in and have a look around?”
I was doing everything in my power not to look away from the hand. It was unmistakable. Three times the size of a man’s hand, made of that mix of silver shine and matte-black armor. It was beautiful. I wanted to touch it, but I was terrified.
“False alarm! I’m an idiot!” I screamed into the underside of my very nice living room chair.
“Still, it wouldn’t hurt for me to have a look around.” Through the door I heard no indication that he was going to give up.
“I’m not wearing pants!” I was wearing pants.
There was some quiet murmuring, and then I realized he was talking to Robin on his cell phone.
“Could you please call Robin back because he is not letting me take no for an answer, and I do have a key.”
Reluctantly I looked away from the hand in my chair for a moment to call Robin. When I looked back, it was still there, splayed out, holding its place in the base of the chair. Did it even know I had found it?
I interrupted Robin as soon as he started talking, “Everything is fine, call off the troops.”
“Not everything is fine, and my primary need right now is to see that you are safe. There is a reason why you are not letting me fulfill that need, and I need to know what it is.”
I looked at the hand, thinking that if Carl wanted to hurt me, then my entire life was a lie, so it couldn’t be possible. “I am safe, Robin, I promise.”
“Are you aware of the situations in São Paulo and St. Petersburg?” News from Lagos and Jakarta hadn’t reached the US yet.
“I am not.”
“There have been terrorist attacks on the Carls. Many people are dead. April, I’m afraid that you are a target as well.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, I thought.
“Fuck,” I said. “Oh god.” And then a lump rose in my throat but I didn’t make a sound. This was too big, and it sank in for real that someone had definitely, absolutely tried to kill me just now. Rather than blowing up New York Carl, they had thought maybe a scalpel would be better than a cleaver. I felt like I was going to throw up. What if I had died? I reached under my shirt to feel my own skin, warm and soft and as fragile as air.
I looked down at the hand again and noticed for the first time something gray and dull in among the silver and black. Wedged between two of the armor plates was a jagged piece of something. I reached in and pulled it out: a shard of metal, a fragment of a bullet. I held it in my hand, cold and innocuous as a penny.
“Are you OK, April?”
“Not particularly, no.” I tried to keep my tears out of my voice, but I failed.
“It’s a lot, I know. I can hardly believe it’s true. Please, I’m on my way to you now. Please let Steve in to check on you, I will be there soon.”
“No, Robin. I’m safe, I promise. I . . .” I couldn’t tell him about the hand. “I thought there was someone in my apartment, but I just saw it. It’s a giant rat, and now there’s a terrorist attack and I feel so silly. Please, I want to go back to bed, let’s talk in the morning, OK?”
“OK, I’ll let Steve know.” He sounded drastically unsatisfied, but he still hung up.
Carl’s hand had not moved, though it seemed unmistakably alive.
You know how when you’re trying to get some stuff out of your car and there’s, like, one too many things to bring them all in in one trip? You keep trying to figure out how to hold something slightly differently so you can save yourself the extra time. So you put some stuff down and consolidate some bags and you think you’ve got everything, but then you look down and realize that the cat food or the
soda from lunch or the picture frames are still sitting there and you’ve got no way to pick them up.
There’s a moment when one extra thing just breaks the whole process. If only you didn’t have that thing, this would be a situation you could easily manage. Well, that’s the way my mind felt in that moment. Except instead of one too many world-shattering, life-altering unpleasantnesses, there were like five too many to hang on to. Every time I spent time concentrating on one, some part of my brain would notice another lying in the trunk of my brain car and flip out with frustration and impotence.
I know a lot of people were feeling that way that day, but I’d like to think I had a couple of extra worries, and that might explain my behavior over the next twenty-four hours.
So, like any good, barely adult human, I flipped out and threw all of my angst groceries back into the brain car and gave up on trying to figure anything out. Instead, I concentrated on what I knew. Carl’s hand hadn’t been seen in months, and there it was, right in front of me. I was April May, Documenter of Carl Activities, so it was time to document.
I flipped my phone around and turned on the camera. The hand spun around suddenly, got its fingers under itself, and shot out at me before I had the video started. I staggered backward with a yelp that I’m glad no one else heard. My heartbeat thudded in my ears.
“OK! OK,” I said as I put my phone back in my pocket. It peeked out from behind the couch, and then came out as slowly and carefully as a stray cat.
This was all excellent distraction from the fact that a real human person who existed in the world had tried to kill me. It was much more important that Carl, or at least some part of him, had saved me. And so:
Carl was alive.
Carl knew who I was.
Carl had at least two desires.
