The traffic on 23rd was blocked off and the windows were new and double-paned, so it was eerily silent as well. I’ve always loved the sounds of the city: honking, engines, jackhammers, raised voices. I wasn’t raised with it, but the first night I spent in a real city I knew I was going to love it. That clattering of humanity mixed in all its randomness was as relaxing to me as crickets chirping beside a rushing brook.
The emptiness and silence of this apartment compounded my knowledge that I was, for the first time in my life, the only person sleeping in my home. This forced me to realize that, while I wanted to be fiercely myself, I also wanted someone around to see me do it.
Well, I had my phone at least, and the literally hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to say something about me. I Instagrammed out my new window, letting everyone know I had moved in just above Carl. I figured it was OK for people to know where I lived—I had a doorman now. I thought maybe I should call my parents, or maybe my brother. He’d lived on his own for a while; maybe he had some advice. Then I lay down in my bed and started scrolling through Twitter. I hadn’t even washed my sheets. I’d just thrown them in a bag with the rest of my stuff and slapped them right back on the mattress when the movers got everything up here. I rolled onto my side, checking my mentions. A few famous internet creators had just started following me. Then my cheek hit a bit of my pillowcase that smelled like Maya’s grapefruity shampoo, and I cried into the silence until I fell asleep.
* * *
—
I was in the dream lobby. Everything was the same. The music, the desk, the robot, the walls, the floor. Except this time I was wondering if maybe I could make it last. Every time I had had this dream so far, it ended when I talked to the robot at the desk. So, instead, I walked past the robot to the door behind it.
I was surprised to find the door open, and that no one moved to stop me. It was an office, fancy and modern. Not like an internet start-up, no weird art or drum sets, but nice cubicles taking up the bulk of the space and conference rooms with frosted glass stacked against the far wall. I looked out the windows and found the area surrounding the office building littered with buildings of all eras. Huts, cottages, and windmills joined colonial homes and brownstones, but no other skyscrapers like the one I was in. The land rolled in hills, and many of the buildings were in architectural styles I didn’t recognize.
I turned and walked up to one of the cubicles. A flat-screen monitor, keyboard, and mouse sat on the desk with no wires coming off it. I sat on the chair and moved the mouse. The screen blinked on. There was one single icon on the pure white desktop, labeled “Game.”
I clicked on it, and what appeared to be an image opened. It was a grid, six by four, and one of the blocks of the grid was red. I closed the image and opened it again.
I tried a number of keyboard shortcuts, but I couldn’t make the computer do anything else besides open that one image. I inspected the desk carefully, picking up the keyboard and the mouse and looking under the desk and the chair, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
I went to another cubicle and repeated the same steps. The image, labeled “Game,” was on every computer I opened. This was officially the most boring dream ever. But I kept at it, and on the sixth computer I opened, the image was different. Same grid, but now another block was filled, this time in blue. I went to the next desk, and it was the same, two blocks on the grid filled. I went back to the first desk, and the image showed both the red and the blue block now.
I sat back in the chair. There was a pattern here, but I wasn’t seeing it. I did not think it odd that I was having what appeared to be conscious, lucid experiences while dreaming, and I never did feel that way while in the Dream. It seemed weird after I woke up, but never while I was there.
Anyway, I gave up. I decided that this dream was dumb and I was going to wake up and end it. The way I’d done that in the past was to talk to the robot in the lobby, so I headed back. Just as I approached the door, I turned around to give the room one last look, which was when I saw it.
The cubicles were laid out in a six-by-four grid.
From there, it was pretty simple. The grid showed the location of the next desk it wanted me to go to. The orientation was clear from the red-block desk, so I just went to the one represented by the blue block. Voilà, an orange block appeared, I went to the orange-block desk, then purple, then green, then pink, then red, and soon I had visited every desk but one.
So I sat down at it, thinking maybe something fantastic would happen. But it didn’t. I just opened up the file, and instead of the grid was a phrase: “Fancy tulip man.”
I pretty much ran to the front desk. Was I going to meet Carl? Was the robot at the desk going to give me some grand reward? Had I moved past the first test of the Freddie Mercury Sequence only to solve another test so quickly?
“Hello,” it said as I approached.
“Hello, yes,” I blurted. “I’m here to see Carl.”
“Do you have a passcode?”
“Fancy tulip man.”
And I woke up. Pretty furious. Of course it had been nothing—why would it be anything else? It was a dream. I was exhausted both physically and emotionally. My life had been turned inside out and upside down and then blended, spiced, spliced, and rebranded. Of course I was going to have weird dreams. And on top of all that, I was singing that damn song. Except now it had words: “Six, seven, six, four, five, F, zero, zero, four, D, six, one, seven, four.”
I went to sleep singing the song, knowing it was absurd, but too tired and disappointed to care.
* * *
—
The next morning the federal government announced that they would be restricting the area around all the Carls in the US, citing a very vague, low-level public health concern. The entire block was to be restricted. The federal government was going to be paying all the businesses there in the meantime to compensate for their losses. Only people who lived on that block would be allowed in (which, hooray, included me).
They did not, however, confirm that Carl was an alien.
Nonetheless, this set off a huge round of speculation, and as I was the closest thing to a Carl expert, my following exploded every time I posted something even semi-sensical about the situation. I was calm and carefully laid hints that I knew more than everyone else, even though, at that point, I had pretty much spilled all the beans . . . all of my beloved and terrifying beans. A piece of advice: When you have beans like the ones I had, you should probably be more careful with them than I was.
But then, suddenly I got some more beans.
Robin came over that morning to try to help me understand why I needed to form a corporation. It was all taxes and liability and insurance and mortgages, and I hated it all so much. I was humming under my breath while trying to not think about literally anything else when Robin stopped talking and started staring at me like my skin had turned purple.
“Where did you hear that song?” Robin asked. This was unusual for him. He seemed pretty driven to keep our relationship professional, so I was a little taken aback that he’d ask a question that wasn’t relevant to work.
“Honestly? I think I made it up during a dream. It’s weird, right?”
If my skin was purple before, Robin was now looking at me like it was made of molten lava.
“Are you OK?”
“Can you tell me more about this dream?”
“I mean, yeah, it’s weird. I’ve had a similar one four different times. I’m in the lobby of a weird fancy office building . . .”
And then he finished for me: “. . . and there’s a robot receptionist, and there’s a weird catchy song playing, the song you were just singing.”
“How did you do that?”
“I’ve been having that dream for days, April. Every time I try to talk to the robot . . .”
And then I finished for him: “. . . it asks for a passcode, and if you don’t have one, you wake up.”
“If you don’t have one?”
“Yeah!” I got excited. I knew more than Robin. “I solved a puzzle in the dream, and it gave me a passcode. I went to the receptionist, and I came away singing, ‘Six, seven, six, four, five, F, zero, zero, four, D, six, one, seven, four.’”
“That is . . .” He didn’t need to finish.
“Andy and Miranda!!” I shouted.
“What?”
“Andy was humming the song when we were in LA,” I said as I was getting out my phone to call. It rang twice before he picked up.
“April,” Andy answered.
“Hold on, I’m going to add Miranda to the call.” I did.
“Hello?” Miranda asked.
“Hey, guys, have you ever had a dream where you’re in the lobby of a fancy office building and there’s a robot receptionist and it asks you for a passcode and there’s catchy lounge music playing?”
It was very quiet.
“That’s . . . ,” Miranda said.
And then another few seconds passed before Andy said, “April . . .”
I kept not talking while they processed.
“What the fuck,” Andy finally concluded.
“Both of you have had this dream.”
“Yes,” they simultaneously concluded.
There was a long silence while I waffled between giddy excitement and fear.