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
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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