An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(48)

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.”

He blushed a bit there, which I didn’t get at the time. “It’s how you talk about yourself, it’s hard not to pick up the habit.” He smiled.

I was still April May, the snarky BFA grad, but that’s not who I wanted the world to see. That wasn’t the person who would establish First Contact with an alien race. So I was also April May, the surprising, quirky, unassuming, but passionately intelligent speaker for the Carls.

“So you don’t think I should have it ghostwritten.”

“It does not seem like the sort of thing April May would do,” he repeated.

“UGH! I completely agree with you and it is so annoying. How long are books? How much do the NaNoWriMo people write?”

“I’ll look it up.” He started to get out his laptop.

“Fifty thousand,” Andy shouted from the living room without missing a beat.