by Hank Green
Or I tried to. A young man stopped me. “We’re not open for another half hour.”
“What is this?” I asked, truly perplexed.
“Cowtown,” he said. “It’s a flea market. Open Tuesdays and Saturdays.”
“So all the people currently inside are . . .” I asked.
“Vendors . . . just people setting up.”
“Oh, so this is like a farmers’ market.”
He laughed. “Yeah, it’s like a hundred farmers’ markets in one building. Come on back in a half hour, you’ll have your mind blown.”
* * *
—
So that’s how I learned that Carson Communications didn’t own its trucks. In fact, a lot of the technicians that worked for Carson didn’t actually work for them. They were independent contractors and had other gigs. Gigs like, apparently, selling stuff at a giant flea market. I did not come back in a half hour because April May was alive somewhere and searching a giant flea market would not help me find her. I’d already wasted my first morning in South Jersey.
The trouble was, even after I refined my system (only following trucks that went to the dispatch center for supplies first being the main change), there were no patterns.
Trucks went all over the place. Mostly Vineland, because that was the biggest city in the affected range. But also Bridgeton and Glassboro and Salem and Swedesboro and even occasionally back to Wolton. I was getting familiar with the area, which turned out to be equal parts too cute and too weird. I don’t think I’m cut out for small-town life.
At least I had my potato plant, which, yes, at this point still just looked like a big pot of dirt. But I kept it watered and warm. And I had the Dream Bean, which, over the weeks of me following cable repair vehicles, had quickly become a part of my morning routine.
The morning the nightmare came back was also the one-year anniversary of April’s first video. The one-year anniversary of me waking her up in the afternoon with coffee that I knew she was going to hate. The anniversary of my world—and the world—completely losing any anchor it once had. I didn’t want to be bored in a truck alone with my thoughts and radio broadcasts playing “Mr. Roboto” and “Starman,” with DJs loudly joking about the anniversary of the arrival of aliens. I understood why they had to make it a joke—what other choice did we have? I just didn’t want to be there while they did it.
But I also had made my decision, and I was sticking to it.
“Morning, Derek,” I said.
“Hiya, Maya!” He was a good guy, but, like Wolton, a little too cute. It almost seemed like me arriving each day was a dream come true for him. Maybe it was a sign that someday he would have lots of regulars, maybe even regulars who weren’t old people. Maybe his coffee shop could be hip! Even though I’m sure he knew deep down that nothing in Wolton would ever be hip.
“Want anything to eat?”
“Yeah, get me a bagel. Onion.”
“Feeling adventurous.”
“Derek, I don’t think I’m going to work today.”
Derek never asked me about my “job”—I think he felt like it would be rude—but I was glad because I didn’t really want to explain.
“Gonna go see the sights?”
“Are there any?” I smirked.
He laughed. “No, not really. Cowtown? It is Tuesday.”
“I mean, I’ve driven past it. I’ve never been, like, called to enter.”
“Oh my god. Big-city girl, you have no idea what you have been missing.”
“I don’t even really get what it is . . .”
“It’s a farmers’ market, but also a flea market, and also it has weird food. I have no idea why, but it’s kinda a big deal. It’s open on Tuesdays and Saturdays, so you’re in luck. Honestly, I’m sorry I can’t come with you, it’s pretty cool.”
I didn’t think that Derek’s idea of “pretty cool” was likely to be actually cool, but it was something to do at least.
He handed me my latte, and I said, “I guess I’m going to Cowtown.”
I ate my bagel and checked the Som. It was the only social media I used anymore. I privated my Twitter account after April died—I couldn’t handle the 99 percent of people who meant well, much less the 1 percent who didn’t. I mean, Jesus, I understand people didn’t like April, but how does it feel like a winning strategy to go after a recently deceased murder victim? Just a note to everyone: Don’t do that. Even if you’re right, it makes you look wrong. And I had figured out by this point that how things look is more or less the same as how they are. A story caught my eye, one that I’d been ignoring for a while. Not about New Jersey or Philly, but about Puerto Rico.
PETRAWICKI PROJECT NAMED
We’ve been following developments around the secret project Peter Petrawicki [PP] has been building and gathering funding for the last few months. Peter’s obsession with April and fear of the Dream brought him notoriety, and now he has somehow leveraged that into a project that has been hiring [EXT-WIRED-MAGAZINE] at a tremendous rate. This project has finally been named Altus meaning “High, deep, noble, or profound” in Latin. We are renaming the relevant thread [ALTUS].
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about Peter’s new gig, but I also wasn’t spending any energy on it. I figured the world was done with him, and I knew I was. His bro project having a new bro name didn’t change that. I ate my bagel and got up to leave the café in an even worse mood than I’d entered it in. But then Derek called after me as I left, “See you, Maya! Get a hot sausage sandwich for me!” And that cheered me up a bit.
Cowtown was from another universe. I pulled up to it just after it opened around eight. Empty picnic tables filled a giant parking lot, a few buildings, and a bunch of outdoor stalls. What I did not realize was that one of the buildings, which looked fairly normal from the front, was enormously long. And whoever owned that building rented out stalls inside to anyone who wanted one. It was like pop-up shops, except instead of high-end retail, it was literally anything else.
I had imagined a farmers’ market with mostly produce and maybe a couple of stands selling wood carvings, but this was not that. There was produce, sure. But as I moved deeper into the building, most tables seemed to have just dedicated themselves to a single product that I would not know how to find if I was looking for them. There was a used vacuum cleaner table. There was a hubcap table. There was a booth from a company that would install a new shower in your bathroom. There was a table that had just men’s rings, and 90 percent of those rings had skulls on them. I was not in the market for a skull ring, nor did I feel particularly welcome at this tiny skull-ring emporium, but I still spent a lot of time looking at them because I was fascinated. As I wandered deeper and the minutes and then, somehow, hours passed by, the market got more and more crowded, and I realized that while the customers might be economically similar (it seemed like mostly lower-class folk), it was otherwise very diverse.
I spent a bunch of time looking at a huge booth of vintage dresses. The lady running it was in her sixties with long naturally gray hair. She was beautiful, and also helpful.
“Sweetie,” she called to me at one point. But of course I had no idea she meant me, so I just kept browsing.
“Young lady,” she called again. I turned and she said, “I thought this would be exactly the thing. It looks precisely your size, and I think you’d look just like Judy Pace in it.”
I didn’t know who Judy Pace was, but the dress was heavy, flowing red cotton with a high neck. It was also short. I did her the favor and tried it on in her little changing room.
Look, I’m not April. I’m a normal human who looks in the mirror and does not love what they see. I want to love my body, and I know I’m supposed to. I just don’t. But the dress did make my legs look . . . good. I took out my phone and snapped a picture thinking I might send it to someone to hype me up into buying it. What I really wanted was to send
it to April, and I got so scared that I couldn’t think of anyone else in my life to message that I messaged Miranda.
MAYA: Does this dress look good?
The three little dots were there for a long time before a message finally came through.
MIRANDA: Yeah! Why?
MAYA: You’re such a dork. Peer-pressure me!
MIRANDA: Oh! Maya, you look like a literal goddess. You need that dress.
MAYA: That’s better.
Sometimes you need to buy a red dress because the alternative is the nightmare of loss.
By this time, the place was packed with people, and starting to smell like grilled meats. I was trying to sniff my way toward those meats when I spotted a familiar white cowboy hat. I’d all but forgotten that one of Carson’s contractors was a vendor, but the moment I saw the guy I knew it was him. The table in front of him sported a variety of rocks. Nice rocks—crystals and fossils and stuff.
Trying not to feel weird about the fact that I had followed this guy as he worked on several occasions, I inspected his table.
I picked up a perfectly smooth hunk of white rock, thinking it was going to be hefty in my hand, but it was light, and colder than I thought it should be. It was so light, it felt like it must be hollow. My mind flashed back to Carl, their parts that felt like they neither took nor gave heat. This wasn’t like that, in fact it felt cooler than it should, like metal, but without the weight. I looked at it more deeply and saw that it wasn’t the pure milky white I’d thought it was. Around the edges it clouded into a powdery blue, and when I turned it in my hands, tiny flecks of blue, green, and even pink appeared and disappeared. It was gorgeous.
“Is this a rock?” I asked.
“Couldn’t tell you,” the vendor replied, his eyes moving between my eyes and my hands.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I. Couldn’t. Tell. You,” he said, putting space between each word. Had I done something?
“Sorry, I’m just curious, where did you get these?”
“That’s enough curiosity for today.” He reached over and grabbed the thing out of my hand.
“What the—?” I said quietly in surprise.
He glared at me like I’d told him to go have sex with his mother. Then he put the rock down and said, “I think you’re done here.” For a blink, I thought maybe he recognized me somehow. The guy was giving off serious Defender vibes, so maybe he had seen a picture of me somewhere. But then, no, that’s not what this was. This wasn’t alien stuff, it was race stuff.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. I was mad about it then and I’m mad about it now, but I made my mind up a long time ago that it isn’t my job to get in a shouting match with every racist I meet. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t frustrated and angry and anxious and uncomfortable.
Fucking Carliversary. Fucking mysteries. Fucking racist rock guy. Fucking APRIL WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU! I went back to the vintage clothing place and rushed into the little curtained dressing room set up there and did my best to cry quietly.
I wanted to leave. I wanted to call my mom. I wanted to go home, not just to my Airbnb—I wanted to go home to Manhattan. I took out my phone and opened my contacts. My mom was at the top of my favorites, but next to Mom’s, April’s face smiled out at me and I let out a real sob.
It makes sense that I wasn’t able to remove her after she died, but I’d also left her there after she was just about as shitty as a person can be to someone who had done every goddamn thing they could think of to make their relationship work. Honestly, it’s embarrassing, and it isn’t even important to the story. I just felt like I needed to tell you because the moment I was losing faith in the world, I spent a solid five minutes just looking at that little face on my phone.
“Honey,” a soft voice came from outside.
“Yeah?” I said, louder than I’d intended.
“Are you all right in there?”
“Bad day,” I said.
“I’ve had some of those. You just let me know if you need anything, OK?”
I pulled my AirPods out and watched Andy’s video. It was good. He was a good guy. He was an idiot, and he was taking his responsibility too seriously, but that’s a lot better than the alternative. I felt better afterward. I wiped my nose and my eyes and realized that I did not have to lose this one. I had no idea if they mattered, but I was going to get those damn rocks.
ANDY
God was different post-Carl, and that was a big deal for a lot of people. But God had never been a part of my life, even when I was a little kid. I was raised in a secular household by a man and a woman who were both raised in secular households. There aren’t a lot of third-generation atheists in the world.
For a guy who was born an atheist, I had a lot of books by religious folks on my nightstand. I hated the whole “religion is the root of all evil” perspective that a lot of atheists (and, to be honest, myself not that long ago) professed. For me, it goes without saying that much of the dogma of many religions is harmful. Thinking other people will burn forever because they love the wrong person or worship the wrong god has done a whole lot of bad.
What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It’s pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don’t show up.
Then, on the other hand, I doubt anything short of the threat of eternal damnation would get me out of bed on a Sunday morning. The things I was doing, whether in real life or on the internet, I wanted to be a little bit like that. Thus, in addition to listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos from internet people, I’d started reading books by pastors and community organizers. This felt deeply weird, even a little like trespassing. But a lot of people were looking to me for guidance, so I wanted to get better at giving it. And now that April was gone, what I believed was that the same despair and frustration that was killing people had also been the root of what drove those guys to burn that warehouse down. My enemy wasn’t the people; it was the loss of identity and narrative people felt comfortable in.
There were also lots of people who were happy to help people indulge in that loss, and to give them meaning by giving them things to be afraid of. So I guess I did have some enemies. The people doing that didn’t seem to feel like phonies, so I figured, fuck your insecurities, as long as you’re better than them you’re doing fine.
* * *
—
Robin met me in the airport.
“How’s the book coming?” was his first question.
“It’s good to see you too,” I deadpanned. This had become a running joke. Robin had calculated that every time I gave a talk without a book for sale, I was losing between $5,000 and $20,000 of value. It was weird—I didn’t need more money, I didn’t even want more money, but I did feel bad not making money when I could. It’s not like someone else could come along and fill the niche of “books by Andy Skampt.” Only I could create that value, and I just wasn’t doing it.
You’d think that being on planes 150 days a year would free up a lot of time for writing, but instead it freed up time for listening to Reinhold Niebuhr audiobooks, watching leftist YouTube videos, and going through every single episode of Star Trek, from the original series to Discovery. Jason and I had been on a sci-fi kick on Slainspotting, and I had research to do.
“How was the flight?”
“Captain Picard stone-cold shot his own self.”
“Did that turn out OK?”
“It doesn’t seem like it would, but it did. It’s complicated.” I had taken out my phone to check on my IGRI stock. It hadn’t changed for hours, since, get this, the markets hadn’t opened in the US.
“Maybe you should write a Slainspotting book.” He seemed ser
ious.
We took a cab into the city. Robin was really good at making it seem like he was a part of the machinery of the earth. Like he was just a thing that happened and you were grateful for his presence, which was a great attribute for a personal assistant/manager/agent. He was always there, always taking care of me, but never taking any of my emotional energy. Robin worked very hard to be no work for me. He didn’t want me to wonder how he was doing, partially because that would be something I’d have to think about, partially because I don’t think he wanted to think about it either. The result was that one of the people closest to me in the whole world was often, to my subconscious, barely even a person. We had been through the best and worst moments of our lives together, and yet, in the months after things started to take on a new and somewhat stable structure, I very rarely wondered how he was doing.
I had recently decided I was going to remember he was a human more. But then there was a mysterious book and a new girl and a bizarre penny stock and I had forgotten. But not for the whole car ride!
“How are you doing?” I asked after ten minutes of checking Twitter.
“Good!” he said. “The people at Redstone have been really wonderful to work with. Very responsive. They’re pros. It’s always good to work with pros.”
Well, that didn’t work. How about “I went on a date yesterday”?
“Well, that’s been a long time coming. How did it go?”
“It was great, we went to see STOMP.”
He laughed a genuine, high laugh. “Are you serious?” And just like that, I was actually talking to Robin.
“I am, it’s worse than that. I met her at Subway.”
“AT SUBWAY?! Not on the subway?”
“No, at Subway, she’s a sandwich artist.”
“So you’re telling me you went into a Subway and asked an employee to go see STOMP with you?”
“I mean, yes?”