I went around the back and started trying to climb. I’m not super in shape, but at least I’m light. I wedged myself between the engine’s outer and inner levels and tried to shove myself up. I managed to wiggle my way up to the point that the engine was curving back toward the plane and was almost on top. Now I just had to get my hands spun around so I could get a grip on the engine’s outer casing.

As I tried to do this, my butt slipped, and suddenly I was toppling a full fifteen feet, out of control and panicking. I woke up before I hit the ground.

The next day, when I debriefed Maya, she had a couple of suggestions for me, the biggest of which was that I wasn’t going to solve this whole thing on my own and that I really needed to stop pretending that I was the only hero of this story. Her argument was that it wasn’t just slowing us down; it was dangerous. The more I made it look like I was the center of this story, the more people who hated me would hate me.

My argument in reply was that those people were unstable douchebags, so we shouldn’t listen to them. Maya’s argument was that they were cray . . . so we should.

July 8

@AprilMaybeNot: Today I met a literal billionaire and he gave me a prompt and thorough critique of the way I introduced myself to him, so . . . fuck that guy.

I just went to the fanciest party of my life. Miranda, Andy, Maya, and I had been interviewed in this documentary film a very famous guy made, and we got invited to the premiere. We got to buy extremely expensive clothes that made us feel (if not look) like movie stars. And then we walked down a literal red carpet while hundreds of professional photographers took pictures of us.

By luck, the movie premiere also fell on the day when the 4,096th (and, as far as we could tell, final) sequence in the Dream was solved, though we didn’t know that at that point.

We watched the movie in a historic theater and then went to a bar that the movie people had rented out. It was dark and all the lights were red-tinted and the bar was giving away free Carl-themed cocktails.

Of course, as with any party like this, the invite list was narrow but deep. Lots of people who weren’t involved in the movie but were nonetheless A-list celebrities had decided to come because it was a social event.

They all wanted to talk to me.

And that was great, except I really had to pee and there was a line for the bathroom that was about forty people long. You’d think they would have planned for this . . .

Robin and the rest of the gang had all set up shop at a booth, being significantly less in-demand for selfies than me. Miranda was wearing a dark green cotton affair. It was half knitted, half flat. The sleeves hugged her arms tightly all the way down to her wrists and the dress flared out above her waist and ended just above her knees.

Cute. Cute. Cute.

But Miranda’s cute isn’t my kind of cute, I reminded myself.

Anyway, I started to walk toward them before getting swept back into the glory and adoration, and the filmmaker introduced me to a literal billionaire.

The majority of my interactions that night were cool people telling me they thought I was cool, while I had three drinks, which put me very near to out-of-my-comfort-zone drunk, but not quite. There were a couple of other people at the party who mostly created for the internet—I could actually have conversations with them, and I did. The traditional Hollywood people just had absolutely nothing in common with me.

So, basically, it was extremely fun, but then time passed and eventually I was in my hotel room and it was over and I didn’t know what to do. I was still drunk. I didn’t want to go to sleep. The only thing that was waiting for me there was an unsolvable mystery plane that I’d been working on for almost a month. I’d explored every inch of the exterior of that plane. Maya’s efforts to help within my limitations had been fruitless, but I wouldn’t let her spread it any further than that. I didn’t want to watch hotel TV. I tweeted about the party a bit, but it didn’t give me anything. It all seemed deeply, deeply normal and that wasn’t supposed to be me anymore.

My feel-good brain goodies had been going all night and now it was over. You’d think I’d peacefully cuddle into my fancy hotel bed and drop off to a delicious sleep, but no. This is what rock stars feel like after their concerts . . . This is why they have after-parties with groupies and cocaine. You want to keep the high going, but you can’t rock forever, I guess.

I picked up the phone and dialed the operator.

“Can you connect me to Miranda Beckwith’s room?”

“One moment please.”

And then Miranda was on the phone.

I was well aware that hooking up with Miranda would make my life more complicated. I wasn’t even that attracted to Miranda, but (and I realize I was coming at this from a position of extreme privilege) I was terrified of the aching loneliness of this cold hotel bed.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s April, are you still up?”

“Yeah, I mean, why didn’t you just text me?”

“I thought this was more fun, I had the operator connect us!”

“Oooooo,” she mimicked my faux enthusiasm.

“So, I know you’ve been doing some research on what I’ve told you about the 767 Sequence.” I’d shared this with Maya, Andy, Robin, and Miranda and sworn them all to secrecy. I figured Miranda would have some ideas by now. “I thought maybe you could come by my room and we could go over it before I go to sleep.”

“Yeah! I’ve got a couple ideas!” She sounded absolutely oblivious to the fact that there might be an alternate interest in my asking her over, which worried me. She was obviously a little obsessed with me, but maybe that didn’t go beyond “April May, Discoverer of New York Carl.” Maybe I’d misread her. Maybe she was super straight or just not attracted to me!

This was the kind of fear-based excitement I was looking for.

“Cool, 606,” I said.

“Oh, that’s funny,” she replied.

“What?”

“Nothing, I’ll tell you when I get there.”

I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I had taken off my fancy dress, of course, but I freshened up my makeup just enough that hopefully she wouldn’t notice I’d done it. Then I put on a tank top that was a little too small and sleeping pants that were a little too big. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, I’d do me, and then she knocked. I swear I caught her checking me out for just a millisecond before her eyes hit mine.

She looked adorable as always in a gray T-shirt fabric skater dress. The waist of the dress was high, almost an empire waist. It was tight across her slight bust and then flowed out to only hint at the shape below.

This was the evening I needed.

We sat down next to each other on the bed and chatted a bit about the adventures of the evening before settling into Dream interpretation. “The hexagons? I have no idea, that could be encoding anything. It could be binary, it could be some numerical pattern, I don’t know, April, I’ve worked through it a dozen ways and nothing makes any sense. But I do have a couple leads on the airline logo thing.” Since the hotel room didn’t have much in the way of chairs, we sat together on the end of the bed, our laptops in our laps.

“It felt familiar to me in the Dream,” I said, “but nothing we’ve gone through has turned anything up.”

“Well”—she lifted her laptop and leaned it gently on my upper thigh—“it probably looks familiar because it has the vague look of a flag. If you filled in the top, it would be a rectangle with a circle in it with bars of color. That’s, like, flag design 101. But not only is this definitely not a flag of an existing country, it just seems more likely that it’s representing something else.”

“Why?” I tried to make as much eye contact with her huge brown eyes as I could.

“I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like the Dream to be referring to a specific country so blatantly. Usually it’s more abstract than that.”

She seemed both excited and nervous.

“I think it’s more likely that it’s either symbolic or representative. The symbolic feel is like the sun in front of the ocean, which might mean something to someone, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. But I’ve been thinking about it being representative. What if it’s not a single symbol, but two? It could be one dot and one dash of Morse code. If it’s just a dot and a dash, that would be just the letter A. But if it’s broken into two letters, that’s”—she checked her computer—“E . . . and T.”

I lifted up my finger to her. “E.T.?”

She lifted her finger up to mine. “Phoooone hoooome.”

We laughed and she blushed and I reached my hand out to grab hers as if that were a natural thing to do when sharing a laugh with a friend. Just a little extra physical touch. She tilted her head down and looked up at me, her smile gone, her face flushing red. I dropped her hand and put mine on her shoulder. As soon as my hand hit the fabric, she leaned into me with a kiss that was, ultimately, a bit of a mess.

I didn’t mind.

* * *

—

About an hour later (sorry for leaving out the fun bits—Miranda is a pretty private person) we were under the covers together, Miranda nestled in the crook of my arm. It was a little sweaty and sticky, but it was too nice to mind.