An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(38)

So, could I afford a two-bedroom apartment in the Flatiron District with a twenty-four-hour doorman, free valet parking, and an on-site gym? Well . . . kinda . . .

Here’s a thing about sudden success: You know it’s happened, you see all the numbers on all the contracts, but you don’t actually have any money. The YouTube analytics page was very specific. The first video had netted Andy and me more than $50,000 each. The second video was already climbing to match that after only a couple of days. Appearances and licenses had netted us both another six figures. The numbers were going up every day that Carl stayed in the news, which, we were betting, would be for quite a while.

But none of the checks had actually been delivered or (more properly) direct-deposited. It had only been a couple of weeks, and apparently companies pay their bills on very weird schedules, and the contracts have phrases like “up to six to eight weeks after the first full moon and/or when Saturn is in Virgo but only if we feel like it.” So, another perk of having an agent, Jennifer Putnam just paid for the apartment with the understanding that the difference would be withheld from some future check. Somehow, the way she told me that it was no big deal and I absolutely shouldn’t even consider it a favor made it very clear to me that I owed her one. Another one.

I’m fairly sure that the night I moved in was the first night of my life that I slept by myself. Not, like, in a bed by myself but in a home by myself. Somehow, despite the doorman and the locks and the extremely nice neighborhood, I found myself frightened. I had gone from a tiny apartment packed with the detritus of two cohabitating young women to a bunch of boxes stacked up in the giant living/dining room and a big, empty, open bedroom.

The traffic on 23rd was blocked off and the windows were new and double-paned, so it was eerily silent as well. I’ve always loved the sounds of the city: honking, engines, jackhammers, raised voices. I wasn’t raised with it, but the first night I spent in a real city I knew I was going to love it. That clattering of humanity mixed in all its randomness was as relaxing to me as crickets chirping beside a rushing brook.

The emptiness and silence of this apartment compounded my knowledge that I was, for the first time in my life, the only person sleeping in my home. This forced me to realize that, while I wanted to be fiercely myself, I also wanted someone around to see me do it.

Well, I had my phone at least, and the literally hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to say something about me. I Instagrammed out my new window, letting everyone know I had moved in just above Carl. I figured it was OK for people to know where I lived—I had a doorman now. I thought maybe I should call my parents, or maybe my brother. He’d lived on his own for a while; maybe he had some advice. Then I lay down in my bed and started scrolling through Twitter. I hadn’t even washed my sheets. I’d just thrown them in a bag with the rest of my stuff and slapped them right back on the mattress when the movers got everything up here. I rolled onto my side, checking my mentions. A few famous internet creators had just started following me. Then my cheek hit a bit of my pillowcase that smelled like Maya’s grapefruity shampoo, and I cried into the silence until I fell asleep.



* * *



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I was in the dream lobby. Everything was the same. The music, the desk, the robot, the walls, the floor. Except this time I was wondering if maybe I could make it last. Every time I had had this dream so far, it ended when I talked to the robot at the desk. So, instead, I walked past the robot to the door behind it.

I was surprised to find the door open, and that no one moved to stop me. It was an office, fancy and modern. Not like an internet start-up, no weird art or drum sets, but nice cubicles taking up the bulk of the space and conference rooms with frosted glass stacked against the far wall. I looked out the windows and found the area surrounding the office building littered with buildings of all eras. Huts, cottages, and windmills joined colonial homes and brownstones, but no other skyscrapers like the one I was in. The land rolled in hills, and many of the buildings were in architectural styles I didn’t recognize.

I turned and walked up to one of the cubicles. A flat-screen monitor, keyboard, and mouse sat on the desk with no wires coming off it. I sat on the chair and moved the mouse. The screen blinked on. There was one single icon on the pure white desktop, labeled “Game.”

I clicked on it, and what appeared to be an image opened. It was a grid, six by four, and one of the blocks of the grid was red. I closed the image and opened it again.

I tried a number of keyboard shortcuts, but I couldn’t make the computer do anything else besides open that one image. I inspected the desk carefully, picking up the keyboard and the mouse and looking under the desk and the chair, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I went to another cubicle and repeated the same steps. The image, labeled “Game,” was on every computer I opened. This was officially the most boring dream ever. But I kept at it, and on the sixth computer I opened, the image was different. Same grid, but now another block was filled, this time in blue. I went to the next desk, and it was the same, two blocks on the grid filled. I went back to the first desk, and the image showed both the red and the blue block now.

I sat back in the chair. There was a pattern here, but I wasn’t seeing it. I did not think it odd that I was having what appeared to be conscious, lucid experiences while dreaming, and I never did feel that way while in the Dream. It seemed weird after I woke up, but never while I was there.