An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  Ever since Carl, I had been doing more with my face, but mostly I was styling for legitimacy, making myself look older and more professional. I had become very intentional about the way I looked, and I did not just want to look beautiful; I wanted to look serious and important. Beautiful was good too, though, because if people like looking at you, they will end up listening to you almost by accident. This is fucked up, but it’s true. Like, it isn’t just a coincidence that Anderson Cooper can knock a hole in your heart with his steely blue eyes. I decided early on in this process that there wasn’t any reason to not play the advantages I had to play.

  But as the stylist set up her little trifolding mirror and huge toolbox full of magnificently expensive beauty products, she asked me how I wanted to look, and I honestly couldn’t think of anything. I didn’t feel like that woman I’d seen on the news clips. And I couldn’t go elegant or glamorous—I was in a hospital gown. I was starting to feel intensely self-conscious because this was going to be my first appearance since the attack. My first anything, really. It was going to be everywhere and this was an extremely vulnerable position. Was I going to be in the bed? Was that what the president wanted? Was the goal to make me look weak? I think Robin saw my distress.

  “April,” he said, “what do you want people to feel when they see you?”

  “That the Defenders are creating a climate that encourages extremism and that the stuff I’ve been saying is the only thing that makes sense?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I mean, that’s been the goal so far, right?”

  “Um”—he turned to the stylist—“Vi, could you excuse us for a second?”

  Her eyes got a little big, but then she said, “Yeah, sure,” and left the hospital room.

  “April,” Robin continued seriously, “this is a whole new narrative. What do you think the main question people are going to be asking themselves is?”

  “Why did the attacks happen? Why did someone want to kill me?”

  “No, those are certainly on the list. But after this news comes out, the first thing the world will think when they look at you is why did Carl save you and not the hundreds of other people who died yesterday.”

  “Oh.” I looked away from him. “Oh,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  “What is the obvious answer to that question?”

  I felt too weak to believe my answer, but it was the only one I could come up with, “Because I’m important.”

  “There are two reasons why you might be so important, and neither of them are good.”

  I thought about it for a second. What would I think if I found out this mysterious force had taken its first-ever clear action and it was to kill to protect one girl in New York?

  Either:

  I was important to their plan, and their plan was to help humanity, in which case some people would start seeing me as a messiah. Or . . .

  I was important to their plan, and their plan was to hurt humanity, in which case I was the worst kind of traitor that had ever existed.

  He left it unsaid but continued. “You need very much to be neither of those things right now. You need to be what you really are, a hurt human being in the hospital.”

  “But, I don’t mean to be a dick about this, but is that going to put me in the strongest position?”

  “It might or it might not, but it’s definitely the safer choice, and I think you owe it to a lot of people right now to make some less risky decisions.” He said this very confidently and without the castigation that he could easily have put there.

  He let his words hang in the air as he walked to the door and opened it, apologizing to Vi the stylist as he let her back into the room.

  “Just freshen me up a little bit,” I told her. “If you can make me look young, that might also be good. Basically, I’m feeling terrified and vulnerable and weak”—I turned to Robin—“and I think the right thing to do is be honest about that.”

  Fifteen minutes later Putnam walked in. “She’ll be here in less than half an hour,” she said, obviously referring to the president. “And what the HELL was the stylist thinking?! Is she still here? You look like a fourteen-year-old orphan.”

  “It’s all right, Jennifer,” I said.

  “No, it’s fine, there’s plenty of time to fix it.”

  “No,” I said, getting annoyed, “that’s not what I’m saying. This is what I asked for.”

  “To look weak?”

  “No, to look how I feel. To look like a human when everyone is going to want to make me a symbol.”

  “But, April, you need to be a symbol. That’s what you’ve always wanted to be. This is a huge opportunity, maybe the biggest one you’ll ever have. You need to make an impression. It’s the president! You need to look good!”

  “What do you want me to look like, a movie star in a hospital bed? A hero?” And then I was suddenly, actually angry, but I kept my voice low. “Like the Messiah or like Judas? Which one will sell more books, Jen?” I had never called her Jen before. I don’t know that anyone had.

  Her face was unreadable for a fraction of a second before she spoke.

  “Oh god, April, I’m so sorry, I honestly do forget sometimes how extremely savvy you can be. It’s not often that someone is a step ahead of me, but you’re absolutely right. You have every right to be angry with me, I hadn’t thought about it fully. I just wanted you to look good.”

  Textbook Putnam. As soon as she’d understood she wasn’t going to win, she agreed with all the vigor and flattery she could muster.

  “No, it’s all right,” I snapped. “It’s just been a stressful day.”

  “Is there anyone you want to talk to before we get this show on the road?”

  “Um, I actually have no idea what this show is going to be, so maybe someone to explain that to me?”

  “Ah, yes, there will be a representative from the White House to go over all of that with you soon.”

  And there was. Five minutes later a young woman in an extremely well-tailored suit told us all what to expect, how to behave properly and not make fools of ourselves and avoid having the Secret Service tackle anyone.

  For ten terrifying, mostly silent, awful minutes after that, my parents, Andy, Jennifer, Maya, Miranda, Robin, and I twiddled our thumbs in my hospital room, waiting for word. A soft “ting” from Jennifer’s wrist signaled an incoming message. She looked at her watch and said, “She’s arrived.”

  “Oh holy fuckballs,” my mom said. Everyone laughed. It was cute watching them all freak out. I was nervous, though, not about the president but about the cameras. I would have to be clever and also respectful and also somehow find a way to humanize myself. It was going to be a delicate balance and my brain was turning to mush.

  I definitely had to pee, but it was too late for that.

  Two guys with that “I am obviously a Secret Service agent” look about them came in and analyzed the room, not seeing people as people but as potential threats to be categorized and monitored. One of them left; the other stayed by the door.

  Then came a small camera crew: one photographer, one videographer, and one sound guy with a boom mic. They crammed themselves into the far side of the room. Then the president walked in. I heard the shutter on Andy’s camera open. Good ol’ Andy.

  She spent a bit of time schmoozing with my parents, with Andy and Robin and Miranda and Maya. They were all beaming. Then she came over to my bed.

  “April, how are you feeling?”

  “They say I should be able to go home shortly,” I replied, not sure if we were just going to replay our conversation from yesterday.

  “You had a pretty close call there.”

  I thought of several cute, clever things to say and discarded them all immediately in favor of, “Very. It’s so unreal, that someone would do something
like this.” I was directing the conversation, a habit that was hugely difficult to break. But also one that the most powerful person in the world is used to dealing with.

  “It’s nice that you have friends and family with you.” She gestured to the quiet line of bystanders. I felt immediately guilty and did my best to pretend I didn’t know why. “And know that the thoughts of the American people are with you as well.”

  “Thank you, Madam President.” We shook hands again, and then the cameras were off.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “That’s all they’ll need. Pretty ballsy trying to direct the conversation.”

  “Habit! I’m sorry.”

  She laughed. “Sorry to run so quickly, but it is a busy day, as you might imagine.”

  “Of course,” I said, and then she began her good-byes, and in less than a minute she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  There was a general buzz in the room after she left. Everyone was already putting together the stories they’d be telling about this moment for the rest of their lives. But also, the twenty-four hours was up, so Andy was busy poking the video live on his phone. It was public in seconds. The whole thing, my speech as I walked in the crowd, the one or two screams as Martin pushed through to get at me. The moment he smacked into me, his skin going a few shades darker as he turned into a glob. The camera crashing into him. Then there was about fifteen seconds of audio with no video footage, before the sounds of scuffling, yelling, and running all faded. And then me, on a stretcher saying, “Even on this most terrible of days, even when the worst of us are all we can think of, I am proud to be a human.”

  It was the best video we’d ever made by a pretty long stretch. And as federal agencies had already begun to indicate that Carl was responsible for Bellacourt’s death, it came at a good moment for me. The pictures of a concerned president bending over my hospital bed did good for me as well. We were right, more than right. This was the moment the Defenders lost the war. They couldn’t be perceived broadly as a legitimate movement when a little girl was lying in a hospital bed after someone tried to stab her in the back. It was all out there now.

  Of course, that made them all the more desperate. Those who truly believed I was a traitor to my species weren’t going to stop believing it, and if the only way to take me down was a direct attack, that was their new tool.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Everything was pretty grand in the days after the attack. Which is an absolutely awful thing to say, but I had no responsibilities. Indeed, the less I did, the more I (and my ideas) were talked about. I had my own surrogates now, and they were out there preaching my message. I got to convalesce (though I wasn’t even that badly injured) while the Defenders lost every important argument they managed to get themselves into. Also, things were bound to get weird between Miranda and me even if I hadn’t almost been assassinated a few nights after we hooked up. But at least this way I could pretend like any weirdness was due to the tremendous weight of the knowledge that real people wanted me dead badly enough that they would actually try to get it done themselves.

  There were a couple of sour points, of course. I couldn’t go back to my apartment and I had no idea what had happened to Carl’s hand. I’m sure there was a safe way to go back but I couldn’t. And a nice thing about being almost murdered is that people let you get away with irrationally refusing to ever return to your apartment. So I didn’t let anyone go there, and I didn’t go there myself. This way, no one would need to know that my bedroom windows had been shot out. At least, no one except the US government, which seemed to be letting me keep that secret for, I’m sure, their own reasons.

  Andy had long since gotten a nice place in Rose Hill, bringing Jason along with him, I guess that made it easier to keep doing their podcast. After the hospital, I went to temporarily live in their guest bedroom. After about a week, when Robin found me a new place, I realized I had absolutely no desire to live on my own, so I just stayed at Andy’s. Moving in with my dorky best friend and his dorkier roommate wasn’t how I had planned to use my newfound, ludicrous wealth, but it worked.

  The other big rough patch was that I had continued to utterly fail at solving the 767 Sequence. I was so frustrated that I resented falling asleep. But still, every night I circled the plane, I climbed the engines, I walked on the wings and tried to break the windows. I read everything I could find about airplanes. Ultimately, I knew the hexagons, which I’d painstakingly memorized and copied down to show Maya, were the code we needed to solve, and we just couldn’t crack it.

  Maya handled me like the delicate flower I was. Even though I’d fucked up tremendously and done the exact thing she’d told me not to do (and hooked up with Miranda, which she still didn’t know about), she was nothing but nice. Basically, I knew the warning signs and was aware that, while things were going OK in this fight, I was headed into a bad brain place, seeing the catastrophe that was me through what I imagined as Maya’s perspective.

  I felt like the only way to escape that was to make some kind of overture, like sending her flowers or writing a big long apology letter. Of course, all those things seemed deeply inadequate, so instead, I made a decision.

  I went to Club Monaco and dropped $1,200 on a new jacket, shirt, and jeans and then back to Andy’s apartment to make a video. Here is the transcript:

  Hello, everyone. I’ll be honest with you, I’m pretty messed up right now. I was not badly injured physically, but I, and I think many of us, are feeling psychologically injured right now. I have a couple of broken ribs and a dozen stitches. But dealing with the reality that someone would want . . . [Here I have to work through the emotions, and I’m not acting] . . . to kill me . . . and to succeed in killing so many others who did nothing besides show excitement and interest in our visitors . . . that is a far deeper wound.

  Of course, right now, the Defenders are disavowing these attacks. That is proper, and I honestly think that the vast majority of them would never condone this kind of action. But when the rhetoric is so inflammatory, so enraged, it is not surprising that some people would work together to take matters into their own misguided hands.

  In my own less intense way, I have indeed done that very thing.

  Since early July it has been fairly clear that all the puzzle sequences in the Dream except one have been uncovered and solved. The code has been compiled and seems complete except that it is asking for a password of some kind and no one knows where to look for it. Well, since before that was the case, I have known that there is a puzzle sequence in the Dream that only I have access to. I have been working on this sequence, which we’ve been calling the 767 Sequence, for over a month now, and frankly, I’ve gotten nowhere. The reason I’ve failed is that I wanted to solve this mystery alone. I wanted to be the hero that you all remember. I wanted to hold on to my fame and my exceptionality. And, because of that, I slowed down the process of us solving the Dream. If I hadn’t locked away the information I had, maybe we would have solved the Dream a month ago. Maybe we would have come through this faster and safer. Maybe . . . [And then the video cuts to the next line because I didn’t want to finish that sentence.]

  I am also fully aware that Carl saved my life. The government has released a preliminary report that my attacker, Martin Bellacourt, died instantly when the inside of his body was apparently turned into grape jelly. And though this sounds like joke, we’ve all had to come to terms with it as a reality. As this was clearly the action of New York Carl, the New York grand jury will be deciding whether to indict Carl. I fully support these legal proceedings and have faith that Carl will be cleared of charges.

  For those of you who have been active Dreamers, we now have one final puzzle to solve. I have put everything we know about the 767 Sequence in the Som—my posts are linked in the description. The Carls obviously intended for us to solve these mysteries together. I am sorry I spent so much time selfishly
sitting on this information. I know not all of you will forgive me, and I don’t have any reason to expect you to. But I hope you will believe that I deeply, deeply regret hiding this.

  * * *

  —

  And that was that. Within an hour of that video going live, I read this thread in the Som:

  I don’t know if this is anything, but you know what that hexagon layout reminds me of is my grand-dad’s accordion. I don’t know how many buttons an accordion has on it, but I think they were laid out like that.

  Bump for interest . . . anyone play an instrument like this?

  Hey! Yes, I’ve got my dad here, he plays concertina and accordion and he says (and I’m quoting because I don’t understand any of this): “It’s called the Wicki-Hayden note layout. No matter what button you’re on, if you go to the right, that’s a whole step up, if you go up and to the left that’s a fourth up, and down and to the right is a fourth down. The closest button directly above is a full octave jump.”

  By the time that third reply happened, this comment had floated its way to the top of the thread and accordion and concertina players all over the world were chiming in. They were quickly deciphering what it would sound like if the honeycomb bits I had brought out of the Dream were played with the red hexagons representing pushed buttons. Within a half hour after that, it was clear that, though no one could say for sure what key it was meant to be played in, the hexagon patterns on the side of the 767 were a representation of “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. Carl has amazing taste in music.

  Andy and I went on a research blitz, learning everything we could about the song and about CRJ, master of pop music.

  Once I had all the words to “Call Me Maybe” memorized (I already knew most of them), I pulled the curtains of Andy’s guest room and got in bed. It was only early afternoon, but I was exhausted (as usual) and needed to see what I could do with this new information. Getting to sleep was not easy—I wanted so badly to make it happen. I knew that literally the whole world was waiting to see what would come of this, and I was the only person in the world who could tell them.