An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

The doorman bangs on the door, requesting to come inside to have a look around. April wants to touch the hand but is terrified. She yells to the doorman that it was a false alarm, then calls Robin and tells him everything is fine. Robin then tells her about the attacks and that she may have also been a target. She looks down at the hand and sees the fragment of a bullet wedged between two armor plates. As she pulls it out, Robin again asks if she is okay. Almost in tears, she admits that she isn’t. Robin understands that it is a lot and begs her to let the doorman check on her. April promises him again that she is safe and says she wants to go to bed. Robin reluctantly agrees and hangs up.

Though Carl’s hand hasn’t moved, it seems unmistakably alive. When April turns on her camera, the hand spins around and shoots out at her. She yelps and puts her phone away. April realizes three things: that Carl is alive, knows who she is, and does not want her to die or take pictures of him. When she reaches out to the hand, it approaches her. Feeling silly, she thanks Carl for everything. When nothing happens, she asks Carl to tap once if he understands her and twice if he doesn’t. When he taps twice, April screams, demanding to know if he is messing with her and just made a joke. When he doesn’t respond, she asks if he can see, hear, understand, and apparently mock her. She also asks if she can touch him. Though Carl doesn’t respond, he lets her touch him. Carl’s hand feels different—it feels hard, slightly warm, and is complex and carefully crafted.

April tries to call Andy, but Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” explodes in her ears. When she tries to access the internet, every website is timed out. She accuses Carl of blocking her, who is silent. April asks thousands of questions, but the only information she gets is that she is not, under any circumstances, allowed to share that he visited her. Though she feels obliged to keep this promise, it also means she can’t tell anyone she was shot at. Exhausted, April wraps her hand around Carl’s index finger and asks why he saved her and promises she won’t tell anyone. Without thinking, she scooches towards the hand, curls herself around it, and falls asleep.

To avoid real dreams, April wanders the city all night. As the whole world waits for the key that only she can get, she hasn’t let anyone announce the existence of the 767 sequence. April walks into the bathroom stall in an eighties arcade, sits on the toilet, and cries until she wakes up. 

April wakes up the next morning to distant shouts. Reality hits her: someone bombed Carls around the world, someone tried to kill her, and Carl’s hand saved her. She searches every inch of her living room and kitchen. She can’t go inside her bedroom, but she knows that the hand departed. Though people are shouting on the street, she can’t make herself look out the window. Instead, she turns on the news. Occasionally, they show images of 23rd Street packed with people that police are incapable of controlling. Some of the crowd stands in solidarity with the countries where the attacks took place, while others are protesting Carl’s continued threat.

April thinks about how the world is tearing itself apart and people are dying. Though it is easy to blame it on Peter and his Defenders, Carl is ultimately the source of it all. Those people would still be alive if Carl hadn’t shown up, and she is being just as irrational and biased as the Defenders. April panics when she realizes that she is watching news about Carls instead of being on the news about Carls. Her phone battery is dead, and since her chargers and backup batteries are in the bedroom, she grabs her computer and finds hundreds of new emails from TV producers, the Som, and from everyone she knows. What surprises her is that she replied to many emails. She tries to figure out who could have sent them, though they sound fairly like her. Her first thought is that Robin impersonated her in a panic until she sees a conversation with him about how she needs time to process and will be in touch soon. April wonders if it is possible that she woke up several times and answered those emails and is experiencing post-traumatic amnesia. After reading all the messages and finding no hint to their origin, she tries to imagine Carl’s hand curled over the computer. In the end, she pretends she sent the messages herself.

April emails Andy to make a video in front of Carl and Robin to schedule Skype interviews. April tweets twice before showering—“Sick with sadness. I have misplaced my hope. Let’s be together today, and remember our humanity and not our brutality” and “Just a few people did this. In a world of eight billion. I am trying so hard to remember how few of us are truly evil”. (234). Though she actually feels numb, it seems like the kinds of things April May would say. April wants to write, talk, and figure out how the Defenders were responding and start counterarguments immediately, even if she was finally questioning her own faith in the Carls. The police have not yet found information to link any bombers, but April refuses to give into the impulse to rely on assumptions. The purity of April’s feelings for Carl are now gone forever. 

April explains that weird things sometimes change the course of history, citing how Franz Ferdinand’s assassination lead to the start of a world war.

When April meets Andy, he is tired and quiet, his eyes puffy from tears. Andy wonders what she can say aside from the fact that the world is awful. April reassures him that the people are out there, defying the police and terrorists to stand with Carl. Andy is freaking out that there might be more attacks, and he almost had a panic attack coming to her. She tells him that she doesn’t need him for fame but to keep her sane. Andy seems to be convinced before April asks him to go down with her to make the world a little better. Andy records April walking backward into the crowd. In the video, April says that the world mourns on this terrible day and that this was not done by an evil world or species, but by a few individuals. She admits that she is afraid, but more of their fear than of them. She points to the demonstration around her, asserting that humanity is solidarity in the face of fear, and that the Carls might be here to teach us about ourselves.

As she speaks, April is distracted by shouts of alarm and warning. Behind her, a man pushes out of the crowd and springs for her back with a knife. April screams loudly when the knife hits her, the pain shooting up and down her back before she is knocked down. Andy lifts the camera above his head and throws it at the attacker. The footage shows the man pushing the knife into her back before losing all structure. His skin goes two shades darker before the camera slams into his bizarrely distorted face, which splits under the camera like a soap bubble popping. From other footage, it is clear that the man becomes a sack of liquid.

April’s attacker, Martin Bellacourt, is dead and barely recognizable as a human. As April turns around to show Andy the knife in her back, the knife drops to the ground and blood pours down her back. After demanding the camera to finish the video, April falls unconscious. News channels broadcast Andy crying and holding April’s body, calling for help while trying to wake her up. When April wakes up, Andy answers the cops’ questions, trying to explain that the stained pile of clothes used to be Martin Bellacourt. The paramedics arrive and ask April questions, to which she responds light-heartedly. April asks Andy to finish the video—if they aren’t the bigger voice, people will blame Carl. When she tells Andy to give her the camera’s memory card before the cops take it, Andy is shocked at how lucid she is despite having been stabbed. In the shot, April is lying on a gurney with a blanket covering her upper body, the ambulance and paramedics in the background. In her presenting voice, April says her finishing line—“As I was saying, even on this most terrible of days, even when the worst of us are all we can think of, I am proud to be a human” (247). 

On the ambulance, April converses with one of the paramedics, Jessica. Jessica explains that she is not supposed to be curious about what happened, even if the person in the ambulance is recognizable. April introduces herself and her YouTube videos, and Jessica says that she figured as much. April asks if she would be concerned about a person’s future ability to live if they were in the ambulance with her symptoms. Smiling, Jessica says she would not be.

When April asks for her phone, Jessica tells her she has many texts. April jokingly asks if paramedics are allowed to check patient’s phones but tells Jessica not to worry when she looks embarrassed. April asks her to text Robin her situation, where she is going, to spread the word, and bring a laptop. Jessica tells her that she has quite a few texts from an extremely concerned Maya. April groans and tells Jessica to respond that she is fine, and it looked worse than it was.

April tells Jessica that she feels dizzy, like she might puke, and is suddenly very sweaty. She jokes that it might be because she’s half naked in the back of a truck with a cute paramedic girl. Jessica says they will probably put her on morphine just to keep her quiet. April asks Jessica to take the memory card to the check-in desk and tell them to hold it for Robin Vree, and that it is extremely important. After a long pause, Jessica tucks it into her uniform and launches into her monologue, explaining her condition to the doctors. April is swooped into the system for her treatment.