An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  So now I’m standing there, nursing a sore shoulder, wondering what’s happened. We’ve obeyed the final clue in the Dream. It appears that everywhere across the world, people held a piece of gold to every Carl simultaneously. And now he’s gone. But April is still trapped in the building. I call Robin.

  “Andy . . .” He’s frantic, crying.

  “Carl is gone, maybe he’s coming to help.”

  He has a really hard time saying this next part. “The roof. It’s caving in.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I just say, “Carl is coming. Maybe he’s already there.”

  “OK, Andy,” he says, and I know exactly what he means . . . which is that I’m deluded and he knows what’s actually going on, which is that April is dead.

  God, this is hard to write.

  * * *

  —

  After April made her plea, citizens all over the world rushed their Carls. The Carls in China and Russia that had military guards were each the scene of a mini riot. Only one person was killed, when a soldier in Chengdu opened fire on a growing crowd. Somehow, instead of scattering, the crowd closed in and the soldier stopped shooting. It had all happened in minutes. I maintain that it would have been impossible to pull off at any future moment.

  The instant New York Carl took off, every other Carl in the world just disappeared. Physicists bent over backward trying to explain how every Carl was, in fact, just one Carl. They had already been through this once with Hollywood Carl’s hand. Now it seemed 100 percent confirmed.

  Everyone stopped having the Dream the moment Carl came to life. People who were having it at that moment just stopped having it. Most of them didn’t even wake up. Sometimes people dream about the Dream, of course, but it seems to be over.

  * * *

  —

  And then, we waited for them to find her body.

  Weeks passed, and they didn’t find anything. April’s family came to see us all. I don’t know if it made it better for them, but it made it worse for me. It was bad enough blaming myself for my best friend’s death; I didn’t want to think about how I’d destroyed these people’s lives too. The experts on the news, because of course this was international news, said that a body can’t burn up completely in a fire like the one at the warehouse, it wouldn’t get hot enough, so that’s very good.

  They wanted to get me on the news to talk. Me or Maya or Miranda or Robin—none of us would do it. For the first week, the press was outside my building, so I just stopped leaving. Jason would go downstairs and pick up my Postmates orders. I just sat in my room reading Twitter and waiting for news.

  There wasn’t news, just people talking about all the things we already knew. Eventually, we each got our own separate letter of condolence from the president, and that somehow made it feel OK to mourn, even if we weren’t sure what we were mourning.

  A few weeks had passed the first time I got a call from Robin.

  “They found the guys,” he told me after we exchanged bland pleasantries.

  “I didn’t see anything online.”

  “It’s not out yet. I’ve been keeping in touch with the NYPD, and they let me know they’re going to be making arrests today.” He didn’t sound happy or sad or triumphant. He sounded like he was telling me about new shoes he bought at Dillard’s.

  “Who are they?” Somehow I thought maybe this would help me understand.

  “There’s three of them. They met in an anonymous chat room. One was a coder, one was a dope, and one was smart, committed, and really wanted to kill April or stop her or just make his mark on the world. The coder was bragging about how he could modify the code to spit out anything if the key was entered. Once the Defenders found the key, it became an open secret in their chats, and the lead guy told the hacker to go ahead and do the thing he was bragging about. He scouted the warehouse and gave him the address. Once the modified code was up, he and his follower friend just waited at the warehouse, and honestly, I think they were surprised when April showed up. The leader started the fire and ran. He bragged about it once in one of the chats, and another Defender from the chat called in a tip. That’s all it took for the FBI to track them down. They don’t know if they can charge them for murder because they haven’t found a body.”

  The two guys who were there ended up getting maximum sentences for kidnapping, false imprisonment, arson, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and a bunch of other charges. Not murder, though.

  I stayed quiet while he made the bland report.

  “I’m glad they caught them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “One of the last things April said to me was that she was OK with me being mad at her, but she didn’t want me to be mad at myself,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  Peter Petrawicki came away scot-free because he didn’t actually have anything to do with the kidnapping. But the attack on April and the disappearance of Carl was pretty much the end of the Defenders movement. It pushed it over the edge in a way that July 13 somehow didn’t. Maybe it was the removal of Carl as a visible threat, or the end of the Dream; maybe it was the dirty, duplicitous way they conspired to kill April; maybe it was April’s livestream, which peaked at more than a billion simultaneous viewers.

  Whatever it was, within a month of Carl’s disappearance, even Peter Petrawicki was distancing himself from the Defenders movement, saying it had grown into something he could no longer respect. A worm is a worm is a worm. He moved to the Caribbean and is now apparently working on some skeezy-sounding cryptocurrency start-up.

  The scariest of the bunch didn’t go away, of course. And the conspiracy theories abounded. No one could explain what had happened to our minds to make the Dream possible, and if people could find a reason to be scared, they would be.

  In only a month, our group had shattered. I don’t know if it was because nothing was holding us together, or because we repelled each other with our guilt and grief (or both of those things), but suddenly Miranda was back at Berkeley, Robin was back in LA, and Maya was on some kind of pilgrimage, avoiding sleeping in the same place for more than a few days. Only I stayed in New York. I had the dumbest feeling that I wanted April to be able to find me. I wanted her to know where I was. Also, I knew the best thing for my mental health was keeping some semblance of stability in my life. It worked well enough and this way I wouldn’t have to cry in front of Maya or Miranda all the time, which is mostly what I did when I saw them.

  But not many days went by without Robin, Miranda, Maya, and me corresponding via a group text that we had never let die and that, yes, still contained April’s number.

  People keep asking me to speak at things, I sent one day.

  Do you want to? Maya replied.

  Good god, no. They never tell me what I’m supposed to say. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to talk about.

  You have a lot to talk about, Andy, Miranda wrote.

  They don’t actually want me, they just can’t get April.

  It was a long time before Maya replied, I’ve been reading April’s books. She’s got a biography of Rodin that starts out with this line: ‘Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name.’ I think she read that line a lot of times. Carl was always a canvas on which people would project their values and their hopes and their fears. April is going to become that now.

  Am I supposed to do something about that? I replied.

  No, I just think we should be aware that, now that she isn’t around to say things, people are going to be putting words into her mouth. I know you’re keeping your eye on Twitter already.

  It was true. I would occasionally put people in their place when they misquoted April or said she believed or would have done something that she didn’t believe or wouldn’t have done. Maya was right about this one and I knew it.

 
This isn’t over, huh.

  No, it’s going to be who we are to the world forever.

  So should I go talk to the University of Wisconsin?

  Can you tell them something that will make them feel better?

  It took a really long time for me to settle on, Not yet.

  That’s OK, her reply came quickly.

  But then I started thinking about what I would say if I did say something. I wasn’t ever going to go get grilled on cable news, but maybe I could sit down with someone for a public conversation or give a short talk. I couldn’t put it on our YouTube channel—I felt an odd sense that that was a sacred space that had to freeze in time the moment April died.

  Once I started thinking about what I would say, it was a very short step to actually writing it down. So that’s what I did. I gave a lot of different talks that year, but I always ended with what I wrote that night:

  A year ago, I watched the world fall in love with my best friend. We thought it would be fun, we thought it would be silly, but then that love tore her apart and put her back together different. April and I, alone in a hotel room, plotted to change her from a person into a story. It worked. It worked because it was a great story, and one that fit her. We did not know that she would actually become it. The most insidious part of fame for April wasn’t that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself. She came to see herself not as a person but as a tool. And if that tool wasn’t being used, sharpened, refined, or strengthened at every opportunity, then she was letting the world down. April was a person, but we all convinced her that she was both more and less than that. Maybe she did that to herself, maybe Carl did it to her, maybe it was me or Peter Petrawicki or cable news. But near the end, even I forgot, most days, that April May was a human being. As she said to me once, she was, like all of us, as fragile as air.

  I don’t know what happened to April. But I do know that she was a person. She just wanted to tell a story that would bring people together. Maybe she didn’t do it perfectly every day, and she made so many mistakes, but I don’t think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture but as weapons in a war.

  Her message is clear to me—it will never leave me now. We are each individuals, but the far greater thing is what we are together, and if that isn’t protected and cherished, we are headed to a bad place.

  I was still miserable after I wrote it, I was crying and wrecked, but I felt like it was something. I wrote back to the University of Wisconsin, saying I would like to give a thirty-minute talk, and they worked with my schedule. I called Robin to ask if he wanted to be my booking agent. He said, “OK.”

  I’m tempted to say that Robin took it the hardest, but I don’t want to start a grief competition. He had quit his job and isolated himself, so I was happy to give him something to do, some way to bring him back to something. He blamed himself more than any of the rest of us. Of course, we all blamed ourselves. If we had just been a little smarter, a little faster, a little more convincing . . . But Robin knew that it was his news—and also his betrayal, however slight—that pushed April to that building.

  I don’t want to say, “The worst thing was not knowing,” because it definitely would have been worse if they had dug April’s broken, burned body out of that building, but we all felt useless. In a way, the whole world was in this weird limbo. April was a superstar, and now either she was dead or she wasn’t and no one knew. Her Twitter became a monument. The last tweet she sent—Come watch me on Facebook Live. Big things happening.—had become the most-liked tweet in history. I thought more than once about how petrified April would have been to have such a shitty last tweet.

  As the time passed, no one really knew how to move on. I traveled around, eulogizing her over and over again in different places. Speaking to humans was so vastly different from tweeting or even making videos. Even if it was a five-thousand-person room, it was a minuscule audience compared to the viewership of anything I might put online. But this way we all had to sit in the same set of thoughts for over an hour. The connection felt very good. And I found out that I was good at it. Her parents came to a few of my talks.

  As the weeks ticked by, it seemed increasingly possible that we would never know what happened to April, and that the Carls were done with us.

  I remember the first day when none of the major news stories were about April May or the Dream or the Carls or the trial of her killers. The Chinese economy was collapsing because people had taken on debt to bet on the stock market; Apple was releasing its new VR rig; there’d been a rash of robberies at research laboratories, and during one a bunch of monkeys escaped and ran all over Baltimore. Someday, April May would be something that happened once. That’s what she was so afraid of, and when it finally started happening, I was surprised to feel relief.

  A couple of months after that, I was sitting at my desk writing some emails about financial management of my now ludicrous fortune when there was a knock at my door. That was actually pretty weird because no one could get into the building without being buzzed in. Maybe it was a neighbor’s package.

  Then my phone pinged. I grabbed it on the way to the door and then froze when I saw the lock screen.

  April May

  Slide to Reply

  I have no idea how long I stared at it, but I do remember finally opening it with my heart in my throat.

  Just two words.

  Knock Knock

  Acknowledgments

  I have never done this before, so even finding out that it was possible was a bit of a journey for me. For that I have several hundred thousand people to thank. First, John Green, who is my brother and who kept saying that being an author is not some impossible job and it’s a real thing that real people do to enough people who weren’t me that eventually I believed him. My wife, Katherine, who just kept loving the things I wrote in ways that I believed and that made sense to me. Phil Condon, who helped me realize that writing was a thing I was good at in large part by helping me understand the parts of my writing that were bad. Guy Bradley, who once told me that, if chemistry didn’t end up being my job, writing might. And a number of people who, over the last four years, said something like, “Send me what you have and I swear I will be honest about whether it sucks.” Those people included: Patrick Rothfuss, Hugh Howey, Amanda Hoerter, and Jodi Reamer at Writers House.

  But, maybe more important than any of that, I could not have written this book if I had not been taken on a weirdly remarkable journey into Tier 3 fame by a bunch of very cool and very supportive people who like my videos, tweets, re-blogs, posts, and podcasts. In a very real way, Nerdfighteria created this.

  I had to do a lot of really interesting research for this book, so thanks to Sarah Haege, Megan Rojek, and Lauren McCall, who attended the same school as April, Maya, and Andy and let me hang with them for a day to understand what their lives were like. Thanks to Phil Derner Jr. of NYCAviation.com for talking to me for a solid hour about the bowels of the Boeing 767. Thanks to Jessica and Mitty for DM-ing with me about ambulances and first-responder protocols. Thanks to Kevin Gisi, who helped me figure out what’s possible, impossible, and really impossible to do to Wikipedia. Brent Weinstein and Natalie Novak are longtime friends who are also Hollywood agents, so I guess I should both thank them for the insights they provided me and apologize for all the things I said. Also thanks to @cmdrSprocket for naming Slainspotting when I asked on Twitter for a good podcast name about TV deaths.

  I also set out to do something difficult and scary in writing about a lot of characters who have very different life experiences than I do, so I want to particularly thank the people who read through this manuscript to help me avoid my own biases and to more accurately represent people who aren’t like me. For that, I am extremely grateful to Ashley C. Ford, Amanda Hoerter, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Gaby Dunn.

  Thanks also to my paren
ts, who are just like April’s parents in that all they want to do is help me feel happy and valuable and are great at biting their tongues when they think I’m doing something ridiculous. And to my wonderful friends and coworkers in Montana and elsewhere for being so supportive and comforting and comfortable.

  Before I started this I also didn’t really know what editors do, so I’m so grateful to Maya Ziv for holding my hand every step of the way and helping me not freak out over problems big and small. Maya’s advice and ideas were so deeply valuable to this project. Also, thanks to the valedictorian of my high school graduating class, Mary Beth Constant, who by some marvelous fluke of the universe was also the copy editor for this book. You saved my butt so many times. And of course, thanks to all the people at Dutton who helped make this book a thing and helped get it into the hands of readers.

  I also want to thank every single person who ever says, “You have to read this book!” to a friend. I don’t care if it’s this book; I just want people to remind each other how wonderful books are. Particularly, thanks to the people who work at bookstores who do that every day—professionals who can help you find books you will love and are, get this, even better at that than computer programs.

  About the Author

  Hank Green is a vlogger, entrepreneur, science communicator, and probably some other things. His company, Complexly, has produced videos that have been viewed more than two billion times on channels like SciShow, Crash Course, and Vlogbrothers. He lives in Montana with his wife and son.

  You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook @HankGreen.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next