Cut.
“What do they think he is? An art installation? A pet project evicted from his apartment along with a deadbeat tenant? A forgotten prop from a nearby film shoot? Has the city that never sleeps become the city that’s too cool to notice even the most peculiar and astounding occurrences? No, wait! One young man has stopped to see, let’s ask him what he thinks.”
Cut.
Now Andy shares the fake mic with me.
“And you are?”
“Andy Skampt.” Somehow Andy is more nervous than me.
“And you can confirm that there is a ten-foot-tall robot standing outside of Chipotle?”
“I can.”
“And can you confirm that this is in fact not fucking normal?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know, actually. Now that I’m thinking about it, Carl kinda terrifies me.”
“Thank you, Andy.”
Cut.
“And there you have it, citizens of the world. A giant, stately, terrifying, slightly warm robot man has arrived in New York City and, through his inaction, has somehow become only interesting enough for a one-minute-long video.” All of this is said over close shots of the robot, his immobility teeming with movement, energy glistening just below the surface.
The whole time I was in front of the camera, I was thinking of the artist. A fellow creator who had poured her soul into something truly remarkable that might simply be ignored by the whole world. I was trying to get in her head. I was trying to figure out why she had created this thing and, in the same breath, calling out the world for its callous ignorance of beauty and form. CALLING ALL NEW YORKERS! APPRECIATE HOW COOL SHIT CAN BE! I wanted people to wake up and spend a few moments looking at the exceptional amazement of human creation. Hilarious in hindsight.
* * *
—
“Is that good?”
“Yeah, great, fantastic, you’re adorable and smart and the internet is going to love you.”
“Oh, just what I’ve always wanted,” I deadpanned. “I am suddenly extremely tired.”
“Yeah, well, that makes sense. Why are you even awake right now?”
“Aside from the giant robot? You know, another day, another ‘all hands on deck’ crisis.”
“At least you have a job.”
Andy was trying his hand at freelance, which is what you do when you don’t have to worry about paying student loans because your dad is a filthy-rich Hollywood lawyer.
And just like that Carl was out of the conversation. Andy grabbed a few close-up shots while I whined about work and he told me about a new client who wanted their logo to look more “computery.” I even got on Andy’s shoulders to get as close to the robot’s face as I could, trying to hold the camera steady for B-roll. But we were just talking about work and life and then it was almost 4 A.M.
“Well, this has been super fucking weird, April May, thank you for calling me out into the chill of the night to make a robot video with you.”
“And thank you for coming, and no, I’m not coming over to watch you edit a video. I’m going to bed. If you call me before noon, I’m going to impale you on that spiky thing Carl’s got on his head.”
“Always a pleasure.”
“See you tomorrow.”
On the subway ride home I set my phone to Do Not Disturb mode. That night was probably the best night’s sleep I had until after I died.
CHAPTER THREE
I woke up at 2 P.M. I hadn’t even woken up when Maya got out of bed. She came into the room doing that “knock softly while you open the door” thing, which was somehow both annoying and endearing. She was carrying a cup of coffee. The room was, for my tastes, pleasantly cluttered. A couple items of clothes on the floor, one too many cups on the desk, way too many books on the nightstands.
I don’t really understand people who keep everything around them constantly neat. It’s way more efficient to do occasional dedicated cleanups than constant maintenance. Plus, my mind likes clutter. It’s almost like I need to make the world around me messy to make my art and ideas neat. Simplicity in design, complete disaster in everything else. It was an entire ethos I was working on. Of course, Maya kept me from going completely off the rails.
Maya was far more personally put together than I was, but neither of us were neat freaks, which helped make the roommate thing work. She had clearly been up for hours; her locks were in some fancy updo that remained mostly magical to me. That meant she was probably doing something important later. She’d probably told me about it, but I couldn’t remember what it was if she had. Meeting a client for work, maybe? She was the only one of us who had gotten work at a real design firm. It didn’t pay great, but it was a foot in the door. Her makeup was already done.
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.