“What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you in the Dream?” This was asked by a twelve-year-old-girl.
“Well, of course, it is all very strange,” I said, stalling, “but it’s such a silent and still place, the plane always catches me off guard.”
“The what?” Miranda asked from the chair next to me.
“The plane. When you get to the edge of the city, it comes in to land somewhere. I’ve never found where it lands.”
There was a shuffling in the room.
“Have you never been to the edge of the city?” I asked.
“No, I’ve been,” Miranda said, “but there’s no plane. Nothing in the city moves. Ever.”
“Raise your hand”—Andy took charge—“if you’ve ever seen a plane flying in the Dream.”
No hands went up.
“Oh,” I said.
There was a fairly long silence and then I said, “Well, I guess that really is the weirdest thing that’s happened to me in the Dream then!” There was some laughter and we moved on to the next question.
It was a guy in his thirties. He was wearing a sport coat and had neat, well-styled dark hair. His voice shook a little as he asked his question.
“Yes, this question is for April. How does it feel to be a traitor to your species?” Now there was some loud grumbling in the audience, and the guy spoke louder into the microphone because he was worried we couldn’t hear him over other, nonamplified people talking. “How does it feel to know all the things you know and to go on pretending that there is no threat here? How does it feel to sell your planet and your country short for a few dollars”—here he held up my book—“and some notoriety?” His voice was trembling a bit and he sounded nervous. A few of his friends (whether they actually knew him or were just sympathetic Defenders who had come to cause a ruckus) whooped and shouted “Yeah” back in the audience.
“Look, we disagree.” This kind of confrontation had happened before, and I’d gotten OK at dealing with it. “I am willing to accept that you have the best interests of the planet at heart, and it hurts me that you cannot accept the same thing about me. I have no evidence indicating that the Carls want anything other than to bring humanity close—”
“FUCK YOU, TRAITOR BITCH!” someone, not the guy at the mic, shouted from the back.
Suddenly the entire auditorium was involved. I looked to Andy and Miranda, who seemed startled and scared. People were standing up to look for the guy who had shouted. Things were officially out of hand. I was shouting into the mic, but no one could hear me—either that or they weren’t paying attention. People were in the aisles now. I looked up from my chair and saw Andy in front of me. He grabbed my hand and pulled me up. I didn’t want to leave the stage. If we couldn’t calm the room down, this would be all over the news tomorrow: APRIL MAY BOOK TOUR CANCELED BY PROTESTERS or some such. Things were not calming down in the room, though. Andy and Miranda physically removed me from the stage.
June 6
@AprilMaybeNot: You’d think that if space aliens built me from scratch to help them conquer a planet I would be coordinated enough not to close my boob in a door. And yet . . .
I’m back at my apartment on 23rd sitting in front of my computer. I know what I have to do, but I can’t do it.
The book tour was canceled after the Ann Arbor debacle. Since they’ve existed, the Defenders have been harassing me online. Their conspiracy theories just kept piling up on each other until I was literally nonhuman. Maybe I was the anti-Christ, maybe I was a demon, maybe I was an alien. Dehumanization is usually a metaphor, but for a certain segment of folks, it had become reality. I was not human.
I’m going to be honest with you: It was horrifying. That moment in the hotel, when things got out of control, that was scary. But worse was diving down the rabbit hole of people’s delusions and knowing that I was at the center of it, knowing that there were thousands of people in the world who would be happier if I died—they told me so all the time. I was constantly anxious, which in turn made me moody and distractible, and led to me catastrophizing. Publicly, I played it cooler than James Dean.
My address wasn’t a secret. The NYPD had been called a dozen times by people claiming to be held hostage in my apartment, an online harassment strategy called “swatting.” The hope was that the police would take the threat seriously and send the SWAT team to literally bust down my door. Lucky for me, Robin had, in his first week, called the NYPD to add me to a list of potential targets so I would never actually meet the SWAT team face-to-face. I did, of course, watch videos of it happening to people. It often happens to people who are livestreaming gameplay. It’s terrifying. The door crashes down, everyone is yelling, these huge guys in body armor point assault rifles at everyone. One plus of the Dream was that if I stayed in it all night and didn’t wake up, I’d stay out of my nightmares.
There were ten thousand moments in a hundred days when I wanted to hang it all up and hide. The Som had become mostly self-sustaining when Miranda added a premium subscription tier that cost five dollars per month. My Life with Carl had sold more than a million copies, and I made a ludicrous seven dollars for every one that sold, so, like, you do the math. I could retire now, and it would have been safer and nicer if I had. The only things that kept me in the game were:
I hated Peter Petrawicki and the Defenders, and I was going to do everything in my power to defeat their message with the truth, which I believed we were close to figuring out.
Giving up because people were harassing me would have been letting them win.
I was really, deeply, honestly, and truly infatuated with having people pay attention to me.
I did promise you honesty.
I’ve gotten off topic. I was sitting at my computer in the second bedroom in my apartment. No one was there. It was 8:03 P.M. I had, earlier that day, texted Maya to ask if we could Skype. She said sure, 8 P.M. would work for her. I had now been just sitting there with my mouse hovering over the button for three minutes.
Of course, she just went ahead and called me. I answered.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound normal.
“Hi, April. How are you?” It was so good to see her.
“I don’t know, honestly it’s very hard to check in with myself these days,” I answered, way too truthfully.
She nodded with a mix of concern and frustration. “Yeah, that’s . . . Yeah, that’s not surprising. I’m really sorry about what happened in Ann Arbor, that sounds terrible.”
“I’m getting used to it,” I lied. The only thing I was getting used to was pretending like I was getting used to it. Since I knew Maya knew I was lying, and she knew I knew she knew, we just gave it a pass.
“Look,” I continued, “something else weird happened in Ann Arbor and it’s stuck with me. You know more than anyone else about the Dream, so I wanted to run it by you.”
“Shoot.”
“Every time I walk out of the city and into the grass, I can hear and see an airplane landing somewhere nearby. I can only track it until it goes below the buildings, but it’s definitely landing. I mentioned that and everyone in the audience seemed to think I was making stuff up.”
Maya sat there still as a stone, head crooked very, very slightly to the side, lips open, eyebrows just a little bit furrowed. There was something in her face that made me think that maybe she felt just a tiny bit like throwing up.
“Maya?”
“Nothing in the Dream moves unless you move it,” she said.
“The receptionist moves,” I said.
“Yes, OK, aside from that.” She brushed it aside. “This is a well-known thing. There’s fabric in the Dream . . . flags hanging on flagpoles, but the wind never stirs them. There are plants, but they never get bigger or lose their blossoms. This is a well-accepted and known thing. Nothing moves in the Dream.”
“Well, it’s happened to me every time I’ve been to the edge of the city. The airplane comes in and lands somewhere.”