“Oh, come on!” I half shouted, immediately regretting it, before marching over to Lexington thinking that maybe I had mentioned my affinity for sweet onion chicken teriyaki subs on Twitter at some point and someone had stored that fact away for their elaborate prank.
“Six-inch sweet onion chicken teriyaki on Italian, please,” I said to the woman at Subway. I’d ordered a similar sub from her probably a dozen times since I’d moved to the neighborhood. She was in her early twenties, and I couldn’t help myself from guessing at her ethnicity. She looked Asian, but with dark skin and an accent that I didn’t immediately recognize.
Her name tag read “Becky.”
“Short for Rebecca?” I asked after I had ordered my veggies and she was ringing me up. She started at the question, her mind gears shifting out of transaction mode and into pleasant-customer-conversation mode.
“OH!” She laughed. “I thought you were saying I was short for a Rebecca. I was like, ‘Well, I think I’m a perfectly normal height for a Rebecca.’ ” She laughed again. “Yes, I mean, yeah, my parents named me Rebecca because they knew Becky was a normal name for an American girl.”
Her words came fast and lyrical. The accent wasn’t thick, but it was there. British, maybe?
“Well, Becky, I think you are an average-heighted Rebecca.”
“Thanks very much, have a great day, Andy, nice to see you again.”
At this point, it wasn’t weird for me for people to know my name, but I felt like that was an opportunity to ask a couple more questions.
“Hey, Becky, can I ask you a weird question? Has anyone ever come in here asking about me?” My cheeks flushed a bit—in my ears I sounded like a person who thought they were way more famous than they were.
“No, but I wouldn’t say anything if they did.”
“Have you ever seen a book like this?” I asked, right before realizing the book had specifically told me not to tell anyone about the book. Did this count?
She regarded the book skeptically, and then carefully said, “It looks like a book to me, can I take a closer look?”
“No,” I stammered. “I mean, if it doesn’t look familiar, it doesn’t look familiar. That’s OK. Thanks a lot.”
The walk to Tompkins Square Park was pretty long. My sub was sure to get cold along the way, but I was just happy to be outside.
Life was different now, but New York was still New York. No switch had been flipped when aliens came to visit us. It still looked and sounded and smelled the same. Think pieces were happily guessing about the generation of kids who would be raised in a post-Carl world and how their perspectives on everything from employment to brand-name toothpaste would be different. And who knows, maybe they would be, but New York would still be there for them to project their dreams onto.
I thought about how maybe the constancy of our surroundings makes us believe in a constancy of reality and of self.
I made a mental note that maybe that would be a good topic for a video, or at least an Instagram caption.
When I got to the park, I did what pretty much everyone else was doing: I watched the people. The East Village is still a little weird, even after all these decades of gentrification. So while the nannies outnumber the weirdos, it still makes for good people watching. I wiped the sweet onion sauce off my hand and crumpled up the wrapper, walking over to a trash can. And as I was about to stuff it in and then check my email, I saw the corner of a thin brown clothbound book sticking out of the trash.
I pulled it out.
“The Book of Good Times: Part 2,” its cover proclaimed.
8.6K upvotes—reddit.com/r/pics—posted by u/cantdecideaname
“I Went to See the Place Where New York Carl Was and Found Andy Skampt”
MIRANDA
How anyone decides what to put in a book is a mystery to me.
You don’t leave out details in scientific writing, as that’s a fantastic way to get your paper rejected. You need to explain exactly what happened in precise language with as little subjectivity as possible. That’s how I’m used to communicating, but I’ve been consistently if subtly informed that that will not do in this situation, and I know how important it is to trust expertise. I’m just supposed to decide what is interesting and/or important, which mostly means that every word I write makes me more and more anxious. This should be fun.
Luckily, Maya and Andy have gone first, so I’ll start where Andy left off, which is roughly when I sent a text into our group text with Maya, Robin, and (yes, still) April. It just felt wrong to start a new one without her.
Miranda: Andy’s on the front page of Reddit right now.
Andy: God fucking damn it, what did I do?
Miranda: You went to the Carl plaque … you looked sad. Someone took a picture.
The photo was of Andy looking sad and pensive, surrounded by the activity of the city. It was a good picture.
Andy: Jesus, I was going to fucking Subway and stopped for like five seconds.
Robin: No one is being mean about it, it just looks sad.
Maya: Well, it is sad.
I was definitely not going to be the one to respond after Maya’s text. One, I will never stop feeling weird about hooking up with April. Two, Maya had handled April’s disappearance differently from the rest of us. I went back to Berkeley to distract myself by finishing my PhD. Andy was a professional famous person, and Robin was managing him. We were doing our lives again; Maya was not. She hadn’t given up on somehow finding April, and while she didn’t actively try to make us feel guilty, her disappointment was clear.
Andy: That was the first time I’ve gone there. I think I’ve been avoiding it this whole time. I also told that guy off and he still posted the photo. Good lord.
Maya: Well, I guess you’re the new sad Keanu … there are worse fates.
Robin: We all must aspire to our inner Keanuness.
This is going to sound stupid, but I still felt like a bit of a fake hanging around with these people. I don’t know if this was a me problem or a signal I was actually getting from them, but I felt like an honorary member of the crew rather than a real one. I just wasn’t as cool as any of them were.
Maya: Have you guys read the profile of PP? It’s a full-on nightmare.
Robin: Yes, somehow I was hoping no one else in the whole world would find out about it.
Andy: People are still thinking about that shitstick?
Miranda: I haven’t seen it? Link?
So that’s how I found myself hunched over the lab bench by the GC/mass spec staring into my phone with acid churning in my stomach.
Peter Petrawicki Is Sorry and He’s Got a Pitch for You
Peter Petrawicki still sees himself as both a hero and a villain. But now he’s traded in his suits and television appearances for life on the beach in Puerto Rico. He’s thriving in a society where he’s a little less recognizable, and a lot less in demand. He’s literally sipping a daiquiri in a short-sleeve button-down the first time we sit down to talk, but it isn’t long before the conversation turns from his Spanish lessons and his new beachfront property to his mixed feelings about the culture war he wasn’t just a part of, but helped create.
“I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t realize how much pent-up hatred there was in the country. I deeply regret a lot of what happened, obviously. I even regret a lot of what I said.”