As previously mentioned, Maya is an amazing illustrator. She does fantastic hand lettering, but she’s also great at character design and her specialty is cats. Maya can draw thirty individual adorable cats in like fifteen minutes. The first time I saw one, I had no idea that the character design of the little fluff balls had been an ongoing process since she was in middle school. The final product was both elegant and adorable. It was unclear where their heads ended and their bodies began, and each managed to look distinct while clearly using the same visual language.
Sometime during college, before I knew her well, she meshed two of her hobbies (drawing adorable cats and criticizing late-capitalist financialization) into The Purrletariat, a web comic about anti-capitalist cats. It had gained a substantial following, and remarkably, through a combination of crowdfunding and T-shirt sales, it was generating enough revenue that she couldn’t just stop doing it. But she also, for both professional and personal reasons, liked having The Purrletariat be a secret project. Creating content and not taking credit for it, or leveraging it to promote your other socials, is so anti-now, but it was how I used to be, and it was a quality I really loved (and love) about Maya.
Anyway, that’s why I freaked out a bit when I heard the screen name ThePurrletarian. It probably wasn’t Maya, but also maybe it was.
After Andy and I finished debriefing post-speech, I took out my phone to think about texting Maya. Of course, I didn’t. I had tweet storms to outline and Facebook posts to write. Andy was working on a script, but I was sure I’d want to make a bunch of changes. Robin was texting me for yes/nos on interview requests, and while I managed all that, another call from my parents came in.
“Hey, guys.” I knew from experience it would be both of them.
“Hi, April.” My mom sounded worried on the speakerphone. “Based on when you’re posting on Facebook, we are assuming that you never sleep. How are you holding up?”
“Um . . .” This was not something I had checked. “Fine, I guess. I . . . I just talked to the president.”
“What?!” they both said, and then my dad added, “Honey, that’s amazing. After her speech?”
“Before, actually, I was talking to her when you called me the first time.”
“Well, usually we’re frustrated when you don’t pick up, but this was a good reason!” my mom said, right on the edge of a guilt trip. “What did you talk about?”
“We talked about the Dream, and about how maybe I should have acted a little less . . . carelessly, and she, I think, basically gave me her phone number.”
“Wow!” my dad said.
“April, honey, do you think that maybe she was right about you—”
I didn’t let her finish. “Yes, Mom, I do. I really do.” I was feeling properly chastised. I had crossed a line and I was finally starting to understand that. “I’m sorry, it was a dumb risk. I wasn’t thinking. We all got ourselves worked up and excited by the mystery of it all. I’m sorry if I freaked you guys out.”
“We’re just glad you’re safe, April,” my dad said.
“Yeah, I know, Dad. You guys are great. It’s just all really exciting. I mean, the president! This is pretty weird!”
“April . . .” My mom’s tone did not reflect my excitement. “Do you think maybe there are . . . good reasons to be worried about this Dream?”
That slowed me down. I mean, I am not a neuroscientist or whatever, but I was aware that a dream shouldn’t be able to be passed from person to person. And people on the news were already talking about how the Carls had clearly altered the brains of humans, which was not a simple intrusion. It was significant. It was scary.
“Have you guys had it yet?” I said.
“No, not yet.” There was a little apprehension in my dad’s voice.
“It’s not scary. If anything, it’s fun. I think Carl is trying to give humanity a project to work on together. Maybe they’re testing us to see if we can cooperate.”
“How long until it’s everyone?”
“I don’t know, Mom, but it’s not something you should be scared of.”
“But they’re changing our brains. They changed your brain already, right? Like, this Dream doesn’t act like normal dreams. What if it changed you more than you think it did?”
That was indeed a scary thought, and hearing it from my mom rather than some internet troll made it seem a lot more real and a lot more worrying.
“I don’t know, Mom. I know that if the Carls wanted to hurt us, they probably would have just hurt us. I honestly don’t know more than you, but I . . .” I didn’t want to say the thing I was about to say, but I had started, so I said it anyway: “I guess I just have faith.”
“April,” my dad said, “I know you have an awful lot of work to do. And I know that you never stop when something isn’t done. That’s something I’ve always respected about you. But take some breaks, honey. Call us. Spend time with Maya, just take a walk sometimes.”
“Oh, Dad, Mom . . . Maya and I, we broke up.”
And here it was all again, confronting the reality of my idiocy and uselessness. Just in that moment when my dad was being very kind, I had to remind him how screwed up I was.
“Oh, honey.” My mom now. “We’re so sorry. You don’t have to talk about it now.”
They knew me well enough that they wouldn’t push for the story. They knew what had happened. Not the details, but that I’d cut a string if I ever felt it holding me back. They didn’t like it, but they weren’t going to fix it.
Eventually my dad said, “Tom’s wedding is coming up, we’ll have a nice long chat about all of this there. We’ll make some time. It doesn’t have to all be about him. We love you, April.”
And then my mom added, “Call us!”
* * *
—
After that, I lowered myself into the news storm. The president hadn’t mentioned me by name in her speech, but there was reference to my work. I was now inextricably linked to this story. Not because I discovered Carl, and not because I was the first person with a following to come out and say he was an alien, and not because I seemed to be the reason his hand fell off and ran across Hollywood, but because I was all three of those things.
Robin sent a car for me and I went to a satellite studio. From there, video of me sitting in front of the Manhattan skyline could be beamed to any show anywhere. A producer guy told me whom I’d be talking to and where, and a little earpiece was my only connection to those people. It was a step up in quality from Skyping in, and a step down from being there in the studio. This way, though, I could be on every news program that mattered on both coasts without leaving the room.
As this was the biggest story of all time, absolutely everyone was available to talk, and I got put on panels with them all, whether we had anything to do with each other or not. I talked to retired generals, physicists, sleep psychologists, neurologists, actors who had played aliens in movies, famous science communicators . . . Everyone wanted a piece of this story, and the news shows were building panels out of the biggest names, trying to one-up each other.
So yes, I talked to a lot of fancy and famous people that day and I felt surprisingly comfortable doing it. There was only one interview that was decidedly unpleasant.
News anchor lady: “Joining us today to talk about this remarkable news, April May, discoverer of New York Carl”—I waved—“and Peter Petrawicki, author of Amazon number one ranked Invaded”—he nodded.
“Peter, let’s start with you. The news about Carl has been out for only a few hours, but you already have a book climbing the charts on Amazon. How did that happen?”
Petrawicki was beamed in from somewhere else via satellite, so he appeared in the little on-screen box next to mine. He looked exactly like every guy I had ever seen walking down Wall Street at lunch: midforties, dark hair, tan, white teeth, gray suit, light blue shirt open a couple of buttons, no tie. If he was going for any particular look, it was “exactly average.” Of course, I couldn’t see him then. The entire show was just voices in my ear.