An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(97)

“I don’t understand,” Carl said again.

I struggled to rephrase the question. “Humanity, what do you think of us?”

“Beautiful,” Carl replied.

We sat inside of that moment for a very long time. I thought maybe he would say more, but he didn’t.

“I suppose that’s something.”

I figured any questions about where Carl was from or how he got here would be more or less useless without a lot of context and also probably advanced degrees in physics. So I caved and again, one final time, made it all about me.

“Did you choose me for this?” I asked.

And then I am at the 23rd Street subway station. My MetroCard is in my hand. The station is empty, it’s late—I know when this is. It’s the night I met Carl. I walk up to the turnstile and swipe the card. It flashes red. But I used this MetroCard dozens of times after this night. I’d never even thought about that. But my dream body turns and leaves the station even though my mind is already freaking out. The walk sign is on, so I cross 23rd. A taxi’s horn blares at me as if I shouldn’t be crossing the street. I look up. The taxi has a green light. I have the walk light, but the stoplight across 23rd is red. The walk light shouldn’t be on . . . If the stoplight is red . . .

I came back to the dream lobby. The truth slammed into me hard. Carl, or the Carls, or some related intelligence had stopped me from getting on that train. They had turned me around and sent me back, even going so far as to make sure I didn’t walk down the wrong side of 23rd.

“Since then? You . . . you chose me before I even made the first video?”

“We did.”

There was a long pause. I stared up at Carl, realizing I was crying with the weight of it. There are billions of people on this planet. Literally nothing made me special.

“Why?”

“Your story just started, April May,” Carl replied. And then the dream ended.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


Hello, everyone. I’m Andy Skampt. April asked me to take over and finish, because, well, she wasn’t around during this part of the story. I don’t love doing this, but I understand why she wants me to do it, so here I am.

I’ve read this whole book and signed off on it. I think April has done a pretty great thing here. I think the book helped her, and I think it will help the rest of us too. Though, to be honest, it seems like this kind of stuff is easier for her now.

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.