Anyway, let’s take it from the point where I’m standing on 23rd, holding a golden earring onto New York Carl’s hip, talking to April and realizing rapidly that I am unnecessary because about fifty other people have rushed to the scene to add their jewelry. I step away to hear April a bit better. I am feeling a lot like I’m 100 percent responsible for what’s happening to her right now. Like, if I hadn’t walked out on her, she would not now be dying of smoke inhalation in a warehouse in Hoboken.
It is the worst feeling I’ve ever had, and April is telling me to stop having it. It’s emotional enough that I’m 100 percent uncomfortable relaying it to you.
So I’m walking away from Carl and the growing group of people around him, and April is talking to me. And then I hear a couple of people shouting exclamations of various sorts. I turn around, and I see Carl’s missing hand, as big as a trash-can lid, skipping down the street at full speed. I mean, I say full speed, but I don’t know how fast a full-speed hand is. It’s going fast.
People leap away from Carl as they see it. All of the dozen people who have gotten their hands in, holding their trinkets to his surface, scatter, shouting in alarm.
The hand weaves between the bodies, still moving at speed when it slams noiselessly into place right onto New York Carl’s right wrist. Everyone is either running away or just staring blankly. I realize that no one is holding any gold to his surface, so I run over with Miranda’s earring and push it as hard as I can into Carl’s belly.
Before I can even register that I’ve hit the surface of the robot, his right arm shoots up and the hand makes a fist like he’s grabbing onto a point in space above his head. This took a long time for my brain to understand, and it helped that there was plenty of footage of it happening released later. But once my brain latched onto it, it’s clear what happens: Carl grabs onto a point in the universe, and then yanks himself into the air. Fast. Fast enough that a vacuum is left behind and I’m sucked into (and through) the space where Carl was just standing. A massive CRACK sounds, and I fly into a bank of pay phones shoulder first. I’m later told that the crack I heard was a sonic boom. Carl left at faster than the speed of sound.
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.