In the days after Maya and I had broken up, I realized, I was just reacting to what was happening. I was trying to keep the jolt of constant attention alive, and who could blame me? There was a lot happening and I was overwhelmed. But I was also running out of fuel and I could feel it. I had solved my mystery, and the new one was far too big for any one person to tackle on their own. I thought maybe I was done. That maybe I could coast forever on what we’d done in two weeks. I was running out of that good ambition fuel, and maybe we had done all we could do.
Talking to the president was temporary fuel. The importance of the Hollywood Carl video was as well. Even knowing that I would go down in history as the person who made First Contact with an alien, that was somehow fleeting. Those things felt good, but they couldn’t keep feeling as good as they had felt when they first happened. And as they receded, even in the moments immediately after they happened, I felt the hole they left behind growing inside of me.
But this was different. My annoyance became frustration, which became anger, which became hate, and hate is a long-burning fuel. Peter Petrawicki refilled my tank.
This was excellent for my short-term mental health and productivity but terrible for absolutely everything else.
* * *
—
Peter Petrawicki also gave me a bunch of strategies. I took his playbook and turned it right around on him, except I had a bigger audience and a better message.
As soon as I was home from the satellite studio, I had Andy come over to make a video pulling Peter Petrawicki apart at the seams. I read and watched everything of his that I could get my hands on. (I even shelled out the three bucks for his book.) Then I took his arguments one by one and shoved them right back down his throat to rejoin the fetid lump that spawned them. Another thing I learned from him was to take what his supporters were saying as if it was what he was saying. He was fanning flames that ought not be fanned, and highlighting the worst of his audience was an easy way to show it.
And, of course, I had no idea of this then, but by engaging with him, I was affirming him and his wackos. Their ideas were getting more exposure through my larger audience, and I (and, of course, every news channel out there) was confirming the idea that there were two sides you could be on. It was a huge mistake, and also great for views.
It was a pretty dramatic shift for my channels. We had been informative, sure, but mostly wholesome, endearing, witty, and pretty lovey-dovey with the whole thing. The brand was happy, excited, interested. Now, suddenly, we were adding snark and bite and, yeah, politics. We went from being a thing that everyone knew about to a thing that everyone could have an opinion on.
If Peter had opinions about why the Carls were here, then I had to have opinions as well. I started being more overt with my suspicions that they were watchers, sent to observe how humanity reacts to the knowledge that they are not alone. This fit in well with the Dream: They were giving us a task that none of us could accomplish on our own. If we could accomplish it, that would show that we were a global, cooperative species.
The consequences for failing the test that Carl had put to us could be dire or they could be nothing at all. The consequences for passing, though, might be the end of poverty and disease. Whoever made the Carls obviously had technology far superior to ours, and if they wanted to, they might offer us everything from interstellar travel to immortality.
Of course, I was pulling this all straight out of my ass. I didn’t know if the Carls were dangerous or if my mind was being controlled. Who cared as long as my made-up shit wasn’t as poisonous as Peter Petrawicki’s made-up shit.
In the end, my brand was me, so whatever I said became something I believed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
And that’s how I came to spend months of my life being exactly the thing I hated most in the world: a professional arguer, a pundit. Not because I was good at it or because I needed the money but because I was mad and scared and I didn’t know what else to do. The Carls had become more than my life; they were my identity. I used to be good at TV because I didn’t care and that irreverence was something people enjoyed. Now I had to be good because I did care.
And that’s what I try to take away from this period. Whatever I did, I did it because I cared. I believed Carl was a force for good in the world, and humanity’s opinion of Carl mattered because I came to honestly believe that the Carls were here to judge us. It didn’t even matter if I was right, because that was the world I wanted to live in; that was the world that made sense to me. And even if I was wrong, I believed the world would be better off if we just acted as if I was right.
Every person who joined the loosely defined international (and mostly online) movement that Peter was part of (which of course became known as the Defenders) was a vote against humanity.
We just went through about three weeks of my life and it took almost half of this book. Now things are going to get a lot more spaced out. I hope you don’t mind. I am not proud of these months, but more importantly, they were mostly boring and you know that we’re still a ways away from July 13 and you’re wondering when the heck we’re going to get there. So I think I can give you a pretty good idea of what went down during those months with some vignettes and I’m going to start each one with a tweet I posted that day. Like this:
February 12
@AprilMaybeNot: Pauly Shore is the hero we deserve.
I’m sitting in the studio/office that Andy and I built in my apartment’s second bedroom. It’s a complete mess except for the area behind my desk that Andy and I have made look respectable so that I can make videos easily. There’s a semi-impressionist portrait of Carl on the wall behind me that we commissioned from a friend at SVA. One of the best things about having money is paying people to do good work.
Another good thing about money is that it makes problems go away. For example, Robin has brought us not only pizza but also a second phone for me, dedicated entirely to April May, the internet persona. We can pass it around so that Miranda or Andy or Robin can all tweet as me, while I can keep my personal phone dedicated to actually being a normal human.
The camera and lights are all facing me, but they’re off. Robin is sitting in the swivel chair Andy usually sits in while we make videos.
We’re both eating the pizza he’s just brought up from Frank’s downstairs. I’ve been trying to write the thing that would become My Life with Carl for about a week. So far it’s terrible, but I need to get something out. Putnam said we were losing a lot more than money. She feared we were losing a stake in the world. “Every time someone says ‘bestselling author Peter Petrawicki’ without being able to say ‘bestselling author April May’ is a day that we lose credibility” were, I think, her exact words.
“Robin, is ghostwriting really OK?” I asked with a mouthful of pizza. I had gotten extremely comfortable with Robin.
Andy was in the living room, which we had set up as his in-apartment office, probably editing an episode of Slainspotting (yes, even after all this he was still making his dumb podcast with his teammate Jason).
“It’s standard industry practice,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable.
“Look, Robin,” I said, turning to him, “I like you. I think you’re smart. I need you to be helpful and useful to me and that is going to require you to be honest. I appreciate you not outright lying like Putnam does, but I need you to be totally straight with me whenever possible.”
He looked even more uncomfortable. “Jennifer has not been lying to you.”
“Oh, really, what about when she told me that no one thinks ghostwriting is skeezy anymore. I didn’t even know what ghostwriting was, but when she explained it to me, I thought it was skeezy, so obviously someone does.”
“She’s trying to make you feel better about the easiest and best path forward.”
“Do you think having someone else write a book and then putting my name on it is the best path forward?” Traffic was still closed on 23rd, so it was eerily quiet.
“It is certainly a path, but to me it does not seem like the kind of thing April May would do.”
“Oh god, even my friends think of me as two different people.”