“I will call you back momentarily.” He hung up before I did.
In that moment, I had a thought. Whoever or whatever had hit me had to still be in my apartment. It wasn’t in my bedroom, and I wasn’t going to check the second bedroom . . . That room had a window overlooking the street and I didn’t even know if the blinds were drawn. But it wasn’t a huge place, and I hadn’t actually looked very hard. So I looked under the couch and the chairs. Nothing. So I turned them all upside down. There was this weird black, meshy fabric covering the bottom of one of the chairs. It had been carefully and exactly cut along one side.
My phone rang. Robin. I muted it.
I slid my hand into the tear and ripped the fabric off the chair.
There, stretched out across the full width of my living room chair, wedged in place in the wooden frame, was Hollywood Carl’s right hand.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BANG BANG BANG!
“Ms. May, are you all right?” The voice was muffled through the door.
My heart, having stopped beating completely, exploded. I gasped and looked back toward the door, then immediately back at Carl’s hand, which had not moved.
“I’m fine!” I yelled, not sounding fine.
“May I please come in and have a look around?”
I was doing everything in my power not to look away from the hand. It was unmistakable. Three times the size of a man’s hand, made of that mix of silver shine and matte-black armor. It was beautiful. I wanted to touch it, but I was terrified.
“False alarm! I’m an idiot!” I screamed into the underside of my very nice living room chair.
“Still, it wouldn’t hurt for me to have a look around.” Through the door I heard no indication that he was going to give up.
“I’m not wearing pants!” I was wearing pants.
There was some quiet murmuring, and then I realized he was talking to Robin on his cell phone.
“Could you please call Robin back because he is not letting me take no for an answer, and I do have a key.”
Reluctantly I looked away from the hand in my chair for a moment to call Robin. When I looked back, it was still there, splayed out, holding its place in the base of the chair. Did it even know I had found it?
I interrupted Robin as soon as he started talking, “Everything is fine, call off the troops.”
“Not everything is fine, and my primary need right now is to see that you are safe. There is a reason why you are not letting me fulfill that need, and I need to know what it is.”
I looked at the hand, thinking that if Carl wanted to hurt me, then my entire life was a lie, so it couldn’t be possible. “I am safe, Robin, I promise.”
“Are you aware of the situations in São Paulo and St. Petersburg?” News from Lagos and Jakarta hadn’t reached the US yet.
“I am not.”
“There have been terrorist attacks on the Carls. Many people are dead. April, I’m afraid that you are a target as well.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, I thought.
“Fuck,” I said. “Oh god.” And then a lump rose in my throat but I didn’t make a sound. This was too big, and it sank in for real that someone had definitely, absolutely tried to kill me just now. Rather than blowing up New York Carl, they had thought maybe a scalpel would be better than a cleaver. I felt like I was going to throw up. What if I had died? I reached under my shirt to feel my own skin, warm and soft and as fragile as air.
I looked down at the hand again and noticed for the first time something gray and dull in among the silver and black. Wedged between two of the armor plates was a jagged piece of something. I reached in and pulled it out: a shard of metal, a fragment of a bullet. I held it in my hand, cold and innocuous as a penny.
“Are you OK, April?”
“Not particularly, no.” I tried to keep my tears out of my voice, but I failed.
“It’s a lot, I know. I can hardly believe it’s true. Please, I’m on my way to you now. Please let Steve in to check on you, I will be there soon.”
“No, Robin. I’m safe, I promise. I . . .” I couldn’t tell him about the hand. “I thought there was someone in my apartment, but I just saw it. It’s a giant rat, and now there’s a terrorist attack and I feel so silly. Please, I want to go back to bed, let’s talk in the morning, OK?”
“OK, I’ll let Steve know.” He sounded drastically unsatisfied, but he still hung up.
Carl’s hand had not moved, though it seemed unmistakably alive.
You know how when you’re trying to get some stuff out of your car and there’s, like, one too many things to bring them all in in one trip? You keep trying to figure out how to hold something slightly differently so you can save yourself the extra time. So you put some stuff down and consolidate some bags and you think you’ve got everything, but then you look down and realize that the cat food or the soda from lunch or the picture frames are still sitting there and you’ve got no way to pick them up.
There’s a moment when one extra thing just breaks the whole process. If only you didn’t have that thing, this would be a situation you could easily manage. Well, that’s the way my mind felt in that moment. Except instead of one too many world-shattering, life-altering unpleasantnesses, there were like five too many to hang on to. Every time I spent time concentrating on one, some part of my brain would notice another lying in the trunk of my brain car and flip out with frustration and impotence.
I know a lot of people were feeling that way that day, but I’d like to think I had a couple of extra worries, and that might explain my behavior over the next twenty-four hours.
So, like any good, barely adult human, I flipped out and threw all of my angst groceries back into the brain car and gave up on trying to figure anything out. Instead, I concentrated on what I knew. Carl’s hand hadn’t been seen in months, and there it was, right in front of me. I was April May, Documenter of Carl Activities, so it was time to document.
I flipped my phone around and turned on the camera. The hand spun around suddenly, got its fingers under itself, and shot out at me before I had the video started. I staggered backward with a yelp that I’m glad no one else heard. My heartbeat thudded in my ears.
“OK! OK,” I said as I put my phone back in my pocket. It peeked out from behind the couch, and then came out as slowly and carefully as a stray cat.
This was all excellent distraction from the fact that a real human person who existed in the world had tried to kill me. It was much more important that Carl, or at least some part of him, had saved me. And so:
Carl was alive.
Carl knew who I was.
Carl had at least two desires.
That I not die.
That I not take any pictures of his disembodied hand.
With my brain at 25 percent power, all I really wanted was to thank Carl, or Carl’s hand. I reached out to it, and it approached me. It walked on all fives, each finger thudding on the thin carpet covering the wooden floor.
“Thanks for”—I felt a little silly talking to it but kept going anyway—“uh, everything, I guess. But mostly, just now, for literally taking a bullet for me. I guess.”
The hand bowed. I mean, maybe. It flattened itself against the floor a bit and then stood back up.
“Uh, can you understand me?”
Nothing happened.
“One tap for yes, two taps for no. Can you understand me?”
Two taps.
“WHAT?!” I literally screamed. The hand stood there in front of me, looking rather smug. “Are you messing with me? Did you just make a fucking joke?!”
Nothing.
“OK, so you can see me and apparently hear me and possibly understand me and also apparently mock me. Correct?”
Nothing.
“Can I touch you?”
Nothing.
I know only “yes” means “yes,” but it was a robot hand in my apartment and it’s not like I had invited it over.
I reached out to it, to feel it, and it let me. I touched it. It felt different now. Not like touching Carl, that weird way it left all the heat in my hand. It just felt hard and very, very slightly warm. Carl also had always been completely immobile, but the hand was so clearly alive. Even when it wasn’t moving, it had movement in it. It had life to it. Compared to the immobile statue that was Carl, it felt so much more complex and carefully crafted. Every joint as supple and nimble as my own hands.
We don’t generally look down at a human hand sliding over a keyboard or stroking a pet or punching buttons on a remote control and think, What a marvel! but it truly is. Humans have yet to create something so delicate and intricate as our own hands. But Carl’s hand was every bit as careful and nimble as my own, and a great deal stronger, it would seem.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and Carl skittered away again.
“I’m just calling Andy,” I said. “You know Andy, right?”
So I punched him, number two on my speed dial after Robin these days. The phone rang once before noise exploded in my ears. I threw my phone across the room, screaming. Once it wasn’t right up against my ear, I could hear it clearly.