An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(6)
In addition to being a better apartment steward than I, she was also a much better relationship steward. All the weirdness in the relationship stemmed from me. I actively stopped her from talking about serious stuff. If it weren’t for my issues, we would have “moved in together” a long time ago.
“I brought you a cup of coffee,” she said softly, in case I wasn’t already awake.
“And after years of living together, you haven’t noticed that I never drink coffee?”
“This is not true.” She put the coffee on my nightstand. “You only drink coffee on very, very bad days.”
She sat down on the side of the bed. I turned to her with a big ol’ question mark on my face.
“April, this robot thing has gotten a little weird.”
“You know about Carl?”
“Why did you give him that stupid name?” she asked, exasperated.
“You know about Carl.” It wasn’t a question anymore.
“I know about Carl—”
“Has Andy been bugging you?” I cut in before she could continue, annoyed that he couldn’t leave it until morning. Or, rather, late afternoon.
“Don’t interrupt, I let you sleep,” she demanded. “Andy has been calling all day and he is freaking out and he needs you to check your email. In there, you’ll find a number of important things to read, including several messages from local news stations and entertainment agents and managers. I don’t think this is the kind of thing you want to ignore, but I also don’t think it’s something to rush.”
Maya was the most effective talker I knew. It was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America.
“Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,” she told me one night after it was too late to still be talking, “and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.”
I never had any idea what to say when she talked about this stuff. I’m white and I was raised in a very white community. So I just said the thing that I’d heard you should say in situations like this: “That sounds really hard.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Everybody has their hard parts. Thanks.”
“God, I hope you don’t feel like you have to represent all black people with me,” I said. “I hope you’re not, like, careful all the time.”
“No, April.” And then it was a long time before she continued. “I’m careful with you for different reasons.”
I was too afraid to ask what that meant, so I kissed her and then we went to sleep.
In any case, Maya’s efficiency of speech was extremely helpful in the maintenance of a relationship that I was subconsciously keeping on the knife-edge between casual and serious. She was capable of talking with her eyes and her body, but she mostly chose to use her mouth. I didn’t mind this.
“Maya,” is as far as I got before she put her index finger softly on my lips.
I said, through her finger, “Uh . . . are we gonna make out now?”
“No, you’re going to drink your coffee and check your email and not talk again to me or anyone else until you’ve brushed your teeth because your mouth smells like trillions of microorganisms. I have taken away your phone, you can have it back when you’re done with your email.”
She stood up off the bed without so much as a kiss.
“But I—”
She drowned me out as she walked to the doorway: “Stop talking! Read!” She closed the door.
Ten minutes later I was freshened up a little bit, sitting on the bed with my laptop. Read messages were blue, unread messages were white—“Important and Unread” was white for five pages. I had no idea what to do so I just searched for “[email protected]” and that cleared things up pretty quickly. One of the fifteen messages he had sent me was titled “READ THIS ONE FIRST” and another was titled “READ THIS ONE SECOND” and a third, more recent email was titled “NO! THIS ONE! READ THIS ONE FIRST!”
Here they are, copied and pasted straight out of my inbox.
NO! THIS ONE! READ THIS ONE FIRST!
I’m sorry all of the emails I have sent today sound as if they were written in a demented frenzy. I value our friendship. Let’s try and keep that front of mind.
Andy
READ THIS ONE FIRST
OK, so, whoa. I’m going to give you a quick rundown of everything that has happened in the last six hours. This is everything that isn’t conjecture. Carl didn’t just show up in New York, there’s one in pretty much every city on Earth. There are at least sixty Carls, photos of Carls are popping up everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires. People just stumbled across them, like we did, and people around the world have posted photos and videos on social media, yet somehow ours is the one that’s taken off. It has to be some kind of international street art project and you (we?) basically got the scoop. All of them went up without anyone seeing the installers and no one can find any surveillance footage. I’m sure they will eventually but they don’t have anything yet.