I read all of my sent and received messages and found no hint as to their origin. I did my best to imagine Carl’s hand curled over my phone or computer typing out emails, but I figured I couldn’t dust for fingerprints or anything. In the end (and until just now, actually), I just pretended I’d sent the messages. I was suddenly living a number of rather large lies, and this one seemed pretty inconsequential. I was numb to oddity. I emailed Andy telling him I wanted to do a shoot down in the street in the next few hours and told Robin to start scheduling for Skype-ins starting at noon and ending at four and that things would be weird but he had to just simply not ask any questions. Also, could he bring me something TV-worthy from Top Shop and an iPhone charger?

Having an assistant is awesome for when you are terrified to go into your own bedroom because of last night’s attempted murder!

Before showering I finally tweeted something:

@AprilMaybeNot: Sick with sadness. I have misplaced my hope. Let’s be together today, and remember our humanity not our brutality.

And then immediately after:

@AprilMaybeNot: 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.

I don’t think I actually felt any of those ways, but it seemed on-brand. Those seemed like the kinds of things April May would tweet. In reality, I felt numb and I wanted to work. I wanted to write and talk and figure out how the Defenders were responding and start up the counterarguments immediately, even if I was finally questioning my own faith that the Carls were only here to help us. It was easier to act than doubt.

The police and government, at that point, were still searching for information on several disconnected bombers, we had no real information, and so the vacuum was being filled by lies, guesses, and assumptions. At least I refused to give in to that impulse.

Humans are terrible at believing reality. The things I tweeted about July 13 were absolutely true. These attacks were the work of such a minuscule number of people, a number so small as to be inconsequential. And the number of people hurt and killed, on a global scale, wasn’t a huge deal either. More people died in car accidents on July 13 than in those bombings. But these are things you can’t really say in the face of tragedy.

We are irrational beings, easy to manipulate if you’re willing to do whatever it takes. That’s exactly how terrorists convince themselves that murder is worthwhile. And the wound it left, it was larger than those lives lost; it was a wound we would all have to live with forever. The purity of my feelings for Carl was gone and I would never get it back.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Here’s a weird thing. You remember July 13, and I sure hope you remember September 11, even if you weren’t alive. But we’ve pretty much all forgotten June 28. June 28, 1914, to be exact, probably the weirdest day in recorded history. Here’s what happened.

The guy who’s next in line to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was this huge politically important country (second largest in Europe by size, third by population), was visiting Sarajevo, which is now in Bosnia but was then part of that massive empire. A lot of folks living there didn’t like the Austro-Hungarians for complicated reasons that we don’t need to get into.

A group of young guys have decided they want to kill this prince, who has, in his wisdom and bravery, prepublished the route he’s going to be taking through Sarajevo in a literal open-topped car (note to world leaders: Stop doing this). These twenty men line up at various places along the published route with various devices and strategies for assassination. One of them jumps the gun a little bit and runs out of the crowd with a small bomb. He throws it at the prince, but the bomb doesn’t detonate for several seconds, so it ends up exploding near a different car and injuring several people but not killing anyone.

Everyone disperses, the heir to the throne gets swept to safety, and none of the other would-be assassins get to try their hand at assassination.

That’s a weird day already, right? Well, it gets much weirder.

The parade, of course, is called off and the prince is safe. But then he decides, in his wisdom and bravery, that he wants to go visit the people injured in the bombing at the hospital. The driver takes what is likely to be the worst wrong turn in history and then, realizing it, puts the car in reverse. It’s 1914 and cars are very new and glitchy, so the car stalls in front of a deli where one of the foiled assassins, Gavrilo Princip, just happens to be standing.

Princip steps forward, pulls out his gun, and fires two shots. One hits the prince, who by now I hope you’ve figured out is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the neck. The other hits his wife, Sophie, in the belly, killing her quickly.

An aide, trying to hold closed the hole in the neck of his prince, asks him if he’s in pain. The archduke says, “It is nothing.” He repeats this—“It is nothing . . . It is nothing . . .”—over and over until he falls unconscious and then dies.

It was not nothing. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand touched off a cascade of terrible decisions and reckless diplomacy that ended in the deaths of more than sixteen million people.

Keep that in mind if it seems like the following events are improbable. Sometimes, weird things happen that change the course of history . . . and apparently they happen to me.

* * *

—

Andy looked like he’d slept a good thirteen minutes. He was untidy and quiet, and I could definitely smell him as he adjusted my lapel mic.

“You OK, dude?”

He looked at me like he was just realizing I was there before moving his eyes back to his work. “Yeah, fine. I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you’re fine.”

He snapped out of it a bit then. “Fuck, April, of course I’m not fine. What the hell are we doing?” He didn’t sound agitated. He sounded tired.

“We’re going to go out there and try to make this a little better for everyone. I need to believe something myself.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re going to say?”

“I have a couple ideas.” I’m not sure I did, but I felt pretty sure that something good would come to me. “Is there anything you think I should say?”

“Aside from that the world is awful and how the hell did we come to this?” He sank down into the sofa. I hadn’t told Andy about the shot, I hadn’t told him about Carl Jr., and I hadn’t seen any sign that it was still in my apartment. If it hadn’t left, it was in one of the rooms I wasn’t going into.

I looked down at Andy, understanding for the first time that his eyes weren’t just puffy with lack of sleep. I realized I hadn’t cried yet. That was messed up. I thought about just crying right then—it would have been easy, just relaxing a mental muscle and I would have been gushing. But then I thought (for real), Nah, April, save it for the camera.

Gross.

Out loud, I said, “All those people out there, they’re defying the police and the terrorists to stand with Carl. To stand with us. To simply say, ‘The world is not awful,’ that’s what we need to go down there and do.”

“April, on the news, they’re saying there might be more attacks. Look at all those people down there! No one’s checking backpacks! I almost had a panic attack just getting into your building!”

“I spend all my time on the news, it’s their job to scare you. I watch it firsthand all day long.” I will say this for myself: I wasn’t giving Andy a pep talk because I needed him. I could’ve gotten someone else to hold the camera. Hell, I could’ve gone down there with a selfie stick and it would have been great footage. I wanted him to do it because we were in this together and I wanted him to feel that way. I felt as if I was telling him the truth. I was just giving him a dose of reality because I thought it would make him feel better to do something great on a terrible day. I was kinda right, I guess.

I guess.

“Remember when I called you in the middle of the night to go look at a weird sculpture? I did that because I thought you wanted something and I could help give it to you. But, Andy, you are so much more than I thought you were then, and I’m so much less. I don’t need you to help make me famous, I need you to help keep me sane. There’s nothing more dangerous outside that door than a Halsey concert.” He had his eyes closed, but I could see the concentration in his face. I don’t know if he was concentrating on keeping his mind in the present, on facing his fear, on not crying, or on not saying things that he wanted to say to me but knew he shouldn’t. In any case, it was clear that he was working hard. “Let’s go down there and make the world a little better, OK?”

* * *

—

Andy was shooting on a DSLR, about the size of a teakettle, with a big, heavy wide-angle lens on it to help him get good shots even in close quarters. With the mic receiver and preamp assembly, it was about a three-pound rig. Ten years ago, a setup to get similar-quality video and audio would have weighed at least thirty pounds.

Another nice thing about wide-angle lenses: They don’t show shaking as much. That’s good when you’re getting jostled around by a crowd . . . or just shaking in terror.

Jerry the doorman was worried as well. “April! I have to advise you not to go out there right now.”