by Hank Green
She did not say this as something I should be proud of, more something that I had to live with. The dart hit its mark.
“This new history is one in which the alien technology that we’ve come to know as the Carls allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of people to die, and then, today, clearly and intentionally killed a man rather than allow harm to come to you.”
“Well,” I said, and then paused for a long time. “Wait, you think Carl killed that guy?”
“April, Martin Bellacourt’s bones and organs and blood—everything except his skin—are now, as far as our best people can tell at the moment, grape jelly.”
Long pause . . .
“Grape jelly?” I asked.
She did not respond. I thought back to the ambulance—to the grape-flavored lip gloss. My stomach turned, and then a wave of anxiety washed over me and sweat prickled out over my entire body.
“What are they?” I asked quietly, unable to stop myself.
“We don’t know, April.”
Her strength was so comforting, so calming, that I finally asked her the question I hadn’t even been able to ask myself: “Are they bad?”
“April, I don’t know.” I caught a tiny glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes before she went on as confident as before. “What I do know is that we don’t just have a space alien, dream-infecting robot visiting every city in the world, we have a space alien, dream-infecting robot killer. I want very much to frame this correctly and be a voice of reason. However, I feel strongly that you or one of your”—she searched for a word—“posse . . . are right now working on a video that, while probably very good, will not necessarily have all the nuance the US government is looking for right now. So, please, if you could, allow us to analyze your footage and do not release anything for at least twenty-four hours.”
“Certainly there are already other videos out?” I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone was livestreaming at the time.
“There are, but it’s blurry cell phone footage. No one on scene had a camera as nice as yours. Please, just do this for us.”
“And after twenty-four hours we can post our video and you won’t want to review it or stop us from posting it?”
“April, I’m not a fool. I’ve seen the internet, you can’t contain information anymore. Plus there’s the whole First Amendment. It’s one of the bigger rules.”
“I’ll get you the files right away,” I said. “Where should they be delivered?”
“Here,” she said.
“Right here?”
“I would rather not leave without them.”
I took out my phone and called Robin.
“Robin, I need you to make a copy of Andy’s footage from today and bring it to me in the hospital.”
“Are you sure?”
“The president is here. We made—” I looked her right in the eyes as I said it. “We made a deal.” She smiled at me.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.
I hung up.
“We have twenty minutes,” I said to the president of the United States of America.
“Well, we have some other things to discuss. I’ve talked to your doctors and they said you could go home, but I was wondering if you could stay an extra day so that I could come by with the press tomorrow? They’ll ask you a few questions, mostly they’ll take pictures and video of me walking in and talking to you. I have to be shown being active right now or everyone will say, ‘Where is the president at this Time of Need! Probably playing shuffleboard or having her period!’ It’s not my fault I like shuffleboard so much. I always say, add up all the time every other president has spent golfing and tell me that my shuffleboard habit is bad for America.”
I laughed.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You’re”—I felt dumb as I said it—“really a person, aren’t you.”
“Oh, April, of all people I thought you would know what this is like. But I understand. The charisma of office, they call it. It’s hard to see past it. Indeed, I work to cultivate it. It’s part of the job.”
It struck me then how very much she was indeed quite like me. As if, maybe, there was real kinship that I might have with this person who was more a symbol than a human.
“So what do you say?” she said.
“Yeah, so you’re coming by again tomorrow?”
“I’m doing a number of things in the city.” She meant New York. “Because it’s where you were attacked, it makes more sense for me to be doing events here.” Then, without even pausing for breath, she changed the subject. “April, I’m going to debrief you personally. This would normally be done by someone else, but since we have a little time and I used to be in intelligence, I’m happy to do it myself.
“Your attacker’s name was Martin Bellacourt. He was acting alone in the sense that he did not have financial or logistical support, but he was part of the coordinated attack and was in contact with the other terrorists. If you’re looking for a motive, which I applaud you if you aren’t but it will be hard not to, I don’t know that I can help you. He had criminal convictions for domestic violence and had been living alone for years. Initial reports are that his online rants weren’t very coherent, but he was clearly an angry person who felt he had no control over what he saw as a decaying world.
“We don’t know much about Carl, but we do know that he is able to do things that are far beyond human ability. The wholesale chemical conversion of Bellacourt’s body definitely falls into that category, and so legally this will be classified as a homicide by Carl. It does seem a very odd thing to do, but when a person is killed in our society, we have a process, even when that homicide is clearly justified. We will have to do that here. We have decided to act as if New York Carl is a person with free will, and the law will treat him as such.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that there will be a hearing and a judge will decide whether the state will bring charges against Carl. If he is indicted, that means that there will be a trial. Anytime a person is killed by another person, it is a homicide, but it is not murder unless it was intentional and inexcusable. This seems like a clear case of justified homicide and we expect any judge in America would rule that way.
“I want you to understand that this is simply the process, and not an attempt by us to make New York Carl some kind of scapegoat.”
“Is it just that?”
“It is mostly that”—she paused—“but also, April, I apologize but I have to ask, are you in communication with the Carls?”
“What?”
“Do you have a way to communicate with them? Or, less specifically, do you know anything about them that is not broadly known?”
“So you don’t know either,” I said.
“Know what?”
“Why he saved me and not all those other people.”
“No, I don’t, April. I’m sorry.”
“Neither do I,” I said, honestly, avoiding the earlier question that might lead to an awkward conversation about the giant robot hand /roommate I had recently acquired, and the slice of the Dream that I had but no one else did.
“Please, April, don’t hold anything back here, we need to know.”
So whom do you side with in a situation like this, your new best friend, the most powerful person in the world? Or the space alien who saved your life yesterday?
After a lengthy pause I decided to split the difference, “I have a different dream.”
She did the thing where she didn’t say anything so I would say more.
“In every other dream, no object ever moves unless it is moved by someone in the Dream. But in my dream, there’s an airplane, a 767, that lands in the city. We think it’s the final clue, the way to unlock the whole thing. I’m the only one, as far as we can tell, that has access to it. So
we’ve kept it a complete secret.”
She looked spellbound. “You did the right thing,” she finally said. “Are you actively working to solve this sequence?” I was almost surprised to hear her using the correct nomenclature.
“We are, but we haven’t gotten very far. Many of the sequences are very hard to solve if you don’t have very specific knowledge.”
“We have code breakers who may be able to help. But, April, when this sequence is solved—I have to say this very clearly—do not take action on what you discover without consulting us first.”
“I think I have learned that lesson by now.”
“I would also think that, but please promise.”
“I will not take action if we solve the sequence without first talking to you,” I said. That seemed like a safe promise to make. As much as I liked the idea of being an important piece of this, I recognized that I wasn’t trained to be the emissary of my species. “But,” I added, “can I come along in whatever journey this ends up being?”
“Yes, April, I would love to have you there. Now, is there anything else you know that you have not told us?”
“No.” And then quite surprisingly I started to cry. “I feel like I should know, but I don’t. How did I get in the middle of all this?”
“I’m sorry, this is going to be a difficult thing to live with. Whenever you’re blaming yourself for being alive, for being the only one who was saved, please remember how deeply, deeply thankful I am that you are alive. I have seen you as an ally from day one, and I honestly am upset that this had to be the circumstance of our first meeting. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
It felt like a neon sign spelling the word “LIAR” was glowing beneath my skin of my face.
“Thank you for your visit and for being so kind,” I said, my voice quivering.
“Well, if you think of anything, you have my number.”
Remarkably enough, that was true.
She continued. “You have a tremendous future in front of you, and it’s going to be a joy to watch it.”
Tremendous future, eh? Well, she wasn’t wrong.
Robin came in just after the president left. He had been held back by Secret Service, who had taken the flash drive he’d brought for them.
“Andy is on his way to pick this up.” He held up the memory card.
“Tell him to edit now, but that we can’t upload until tomorrow.”
“How are you?” Robin asked.
I thought about this for a second. With Robin, I felt like I owed more than just a casual assessment of my bodily integrity.
“I think I’m OK?” I said. “I mean, I can’t figure out if I’m fine or terrible. Someone tried to kill me, Robin.”
“I know.” He looked past my bed out the window, letting the silence hang.
“Thank you for not telling me what an idiot I am.”
“I figured you already knew.”
“I do.”
Robin started fishing around in his bag for his laptop.
“You want to hear some tweets?”
“Oh god, I don’t know, do I?”
He smiled a pained smile. In a moment, his laptop was open and he was reading me replies to the tweet I’d posted that morning. It now had more likes and retweets and replies than anything I’d ever posted.
Having Robin read you comments and tweets is the best possible way to read them. He has a great voice, amazing enunciation, and, of course, he skips the awful ones.
“Courtney Anderson says, ‘We’re all thinking of you, April. You have so much faith in humanity even on a dark day like this. Thanks for sharing that strength.’”
That felt good enough that my eyes got a bit misty.
“This person’s just sent you like twenty-five of some sort of hug emoji,” Robin continued. Then, after another moment, “Oh, you’ll like this one, SpidermanandSnape says, ‘I’ve been watching the news all day, but this tweet is the only thing that matters to me right now. BE OK APRIL MAY!’”
After a pause he continued. “This one is from the Som. CMDRSprocket says, ‘Everyone is just wedging arguments they were already having or babbling about things we don’t know. Thanks for just being a human.’”
“Yeah, that one . . . ,” I said, getting sleepier.
He kept reading to me until well after I was asleep.
Andy was there when I woke up. He seemed, as he had lately, burdened. But even more so now. He sagged into the chair next to my bed, still the skinniest kid I knew, but now somehow with a great weight in his posture.
“You’re OK?” he said when he saw I was awake, seeming legitimately concerned.
“I’m OK. They say I’ll be 100 percent in a few weeks.”
“But on the inside too?”
“I think so. For now.”
That question, asking how I was really doing, was not a nontrivial effort for Andy Skampt. He wasn’t the kind of guy who asked other people how they were feeling. But then again, it’s not every day that your best friend gets assaulted right in front of your eyes. As I was thinking these things, Andy broke a silence that I didn’t realize had formed.
“April, did I kill him?”
Suddenly I was back in the moment, looking down at the stained pile of clothing, oozing and seeping.
“No. No. The president told me, Andy, it wasn’t you.” And then something, for the first time, clicked in my brain.
“Andy, you were terrified.” He was shaking a bit, his head in his hands. Not crying, just quivering. I could picture him covered in the sticky goop that was Martin Bellacourt, standing in the middle of the street, a couple of yards away from Carl, looking absolutely alone.
Andy looked at me like I’d just put my own knife inside him. He whispered, “Jesus, April, of course I was terrified.” I realized that he’d thought it was an accusation, that I was questioning his bravery.
“No, I mean, just to go out there, you looked like you were gonna hurl. But when that guy dashed at me, you . . .” I started crying.
Not, like, polite tears running down my cheeks as I eloquently told Andy how touched and amazed I was that he had been the first and only person to actually rush to defend me. Ugly crying. Painful gasps and sobs. Wailing. Andy, the goof, the weedy little clown, had raised his prized camera rig over his head and torn a man’s head off his shoulders for me. Yeah, a structurally compromised man, but still.
I thought all those things, but instead of saying them, I made big, huge, horrible noises that doubled me over and pushed me into the fetal position, my back searing with pain, which made me cry out even more loudly. Andy stood to push back my hair and tell me it was going to be OK. The moment he touched me, I grabbed at him like I was drowning, I pulled him down into the hospital bed and covered his clean button-down shirt with my tears and snot.
“You fucking beautiful moron, that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. You saved me. You saved me. You saved me.” I knew it wasn’t technically true, but I think he understood what I meant. I think you do too.
* * *
—
The next morning everyone was in the hospital. My parents, Jennifer Putnam, Andy, Miranda, and Maya. For a very brief moment, Jessica the paramedic even popped in to say hi. And as much as they were all definitely there to see me, they were all there at the same time because the president was coming by to do her press thing. The president’s twenty-four-hour video moratorium meant that we had some free time to prepare and (dare I say it) relax in the few hours before she showed up.
I got to hang alone with just my parents for an hour or so, which was welcome. They were doing everything they could to hold it together and not show me how freaked-out they were (which they, of course, failed at). It didn’t really occur to me until then that I had been making decisions that would affect them so deeply.
They
babbled on about Tom’s honeymoon and their weirdo neighbors and did everything they could to make it feel like a normal parent-kid chat. You know what they didn’t do, though? They didn’t, not one single time, say, “What were you thinking?!” Not because they knew or because they understood—I really don’t think they did. They didn’t ask that because I sure as hell didn’t stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.
“But you got to hang out with the president, though!” my mom said, trying again to turn the conversation away from the part where her daughter almost died.
“Yeah, I mean, you also are going to get to hang out with the president,” I reminded her.
“But that’s not the same, she came to see you because of something you did!”
“More like something that was done to me.”
My dad continued Mom’s thought: “I think you know that’s not the whole story, hon. We’re very proud of you, April, for taking this opportunity to say kind and thoughtful things even when being kind and thoughtful isn’t easy right now.”
“It’s just the identity I built up, it’s not even really me.”
They both smiled at me like idiot puppies, and then my mom said, “April, you’re not building a brand, you’re building yourself.” Dad’s eyes were misty as he added, “It’s so easy to forget, with everything that’s happened this year, that you’re only twenty-three years old.”
“Ugghhh,” I said, because that was my line. They just both smiled like idiots.
A while later, Robin came in to introduce me to a stylist, Vi, who was going to make me look nice for my photo op. I am aware that I am an attractive person, but there was a time when I hated having power over people because of it. That’s one of the things I loved so much about Maya. Unlike anyone else I had ever dated, I think she had to get to know me before she started thinking I was hot. And that was really hot.