A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  “What?”

  “Take them with you.” She gestured to the pot. “Take care of them. Just to have something that needs you.” She lightly touched my face and said, “Like I do.”

  * * *

  —

  My mom and I made dinner together that night, and before I even brought up Trenton, while I was putting the pasta on the table and sitting down, my dad hit me with “So, you know they’re treating people who have Dream addiction now, there’s a long piece on it in The New Yorker.”

  “Mmm?” my mom said, loading that tiny noise with far more nuance than should be possible. It said, “I know what you’re doing, and so does Maya, and please don’t do it.”

  He received the warning but blew right past it anyway. “People who were deeply involved with sequence solving, their minds rely on it very much like a drug. And when it’s not there anymore, at least according to a lot of smart people, the mind keeps looking for it, and it can be a really difficult withdrawal.”

  “Dad, I’m fine.”

  “None of us expect you to be fine, Maya,” he said, his voice a physical thing, strong enough to lean on. “But, listen, it’s also fine for me to worry. What the Carls did to our minds, no one understands it, and it seems like a lot of people are finding patterns where they don’t exist now. You need to have something else to focus on. When are you going back to work?”

  “Gill,” my mom started, but I raised my hand to quiet her.

  My dad knew how the world worked, and he’d worked very hard to get that knowledge. There aren’t a lot of Black investment bankers, and that’s not because they’re uninterested in the profession. He fought his whole life to succeed in a hostile system. As far back as I can remember, he told me the world didn’t want people who looked like us to be rich, but that it was our job to get rich anyway.

  My mom has usually been happy to push me in whatever direction I was facing. My dad, on the other hand, thought that my best chances for happiness were more specific. He wanted a clear career track. He wanted me, his only child, to care about the money that he’d made for me. He wanted me to pass it to my kids, which is the only reason me coming out was ever weird in the house. Dad wanted to know what my sexuality meant for the next generation. He was at least cool enough to not say it out loud, but we could all tell, and eventually we had to have a conversation about all of the various options I had if I ever chose to have kids. When I was seventeen. Dad had been fine with me leaving my work to be part of April’s projects, and help Miranda build the Som, but now I was his worst nightmare: another rich kid with an art school degree and no direction.

  “I understand, Dad, I know I’ve not been great these past few months. But April isn’t dead and I’m not going to keep pretending that she is. I’ve got to do this.”

  My dad looked at my mom with hard eyes. She looked down at the table. They thought she was dead. Of course they did—everyone thought she was dead.

  “You know what?” I said quietly. And then I pushed my bottom lip onto my teeth to start making a f sound, but then I stopped myself. I didn’t say it, but they both heard that “fuck you” hanging there in our dining room. We do not curse in my house.

  “Maya . . .” my mom said as my dad’s eyes widened. I don’t yell, not at people. I yell at the TV when some senator is being racist. I yell at Photoshop when it crashes. I don’t yell at people. I least of all yell at my parents.

  I yelled at them. “She’s Not Dead!” My hand, unbidden, slammed on the table as I stood up . . . all of the silverware clinking in the dishes.

  “Maya! Don’t you speak to your mother like that,” my dad said, firm and cold from his chair on the other side of the table.

  I leaned over the table toward him. “I’m going to go find April,” I said. I almost whispered it. And then I turned around and walked out of the dining room.

  And then, because I will never not be completely horrified by myself losing control, I turned around and said, “Call me tomorrow when we’re all less mad. I’ll be in New Jersey.”

  On the way out, I noticed the pot of soil with those newly buried, dirty, cut-up potatoes hiding in it. I let out a sigh and grabbed it as I went out the door.

  Andy Skampt

  @AndySkampt

  Peak Post-Carl Mood: Completely unsure of what humanity even is anymore but absolutely positive that dogs are very very good.

  280 replies 1.3K retweets 7K likes

  ANDY

  It seems unlikely that my best friend becoming an international superstar for being the discoverer and chief human advocate for an extraterrestrial life-form isn’t the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me. But the actual weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me started like this:

  Five months after my best friend was murdered by terrorists just after solving a riddle that resulted in the apparent disappearance of aliens from our planet, someone knocked twice on my door, and then I got a text message from my dead friend.

  Knock Knock, it said.

  This isn’t even the weird part. After staring at that text message for way too long, I dashed to my door and flung it open to find a brown clothbound book sitting in the hall of my building. Words were pressed into the hard cover in a simple serif font, filled with gold leaf: “The Book of Good Times.”

  OK, actually, I need to go further back.

  It’s easy to forget how quiet the world was in the months after Carl (or the Carls, depending on who you believed) vanished. Each of the sixty-four Carls that had appeared in cities across the world blinked out of existence at the exact same moment except for one. The Carl in Manhattan did not simply vanish; it yanked itself into the air at (a peer-reviewed paper estimated) around Mach 3. This added weight to the theory that there was only ever one Carl; they just somehow projected one statue into sixty-four different locations simultaneously. Look, I don’t pretend to understand any of this, which sets me blissfully apart from all of the bloviation that occurred on cable news in the aftermath.

  But bloviation though there was, the world actually chilled way down for a bit after the Carls vanished. This tremendous force that had thrown a wrench into our collective understanding of the universe and slapped every person on a spectrum somewhere between “We welcome our robot overlords” and “If we do not fight, we will die” just . . . disappeared.

  Like, imagine what would happen to the gun control debate if every gun just fwipped out of existence along with the knowledge of . . . what guns are or how to make them. The thing we were all so mad at each other over was just gone.

  That’s not to say that people were OK. The economy kept contracting, and no one was really sure why. People were just working less, or dropping out of the labor force entirely. There was a lot of going through the motions, but the reality was, everything felt a little empty. The Carl debate was an identity-defining conversation for hundreds of millions of people, and that identity was now gone.

  Before Carl, the world was changing fast, and many people had already lost their solid grip on how they fit into the world, but most folks were still in a story that made some sense. But when Carl came and we were all suddenly in a new story, that was jarring. And then we hit another twist to the roller coaster: They were gone, and now it seemed like no one knew which way was up. What story did we have now? Who were we? What was the point of anything?

  And if the time after Carl felt calm, it’s largely because no one knew what to say. You can only talk about something not existing for a few weeks before it’s just not news anymore. But at the same time, it was hard to argue about tax policy and health care or even get up and go to work when nothing felt important the way Carl had. People’s identities, their sources of meaning, had been banged up even before Carl, but now a lot of folks were just lost.

  One of the more minor changes was of course the reality games. Humans have always loved a hunt, but then the Dream put every
single person into a species-wide escape room, so on the whole we got more into puzzles. Reality games were like escape rooms or scavenger hunts, but they were ongoing and took place everywhere, and the best ones went to extravagant lengths to re-create the feeling that the Dreamers had lost. Puzzle masters distribute the game through the internet, physical spaces, and sometimes people. You pay a monthly fee to always be on the lookout for your next clue, whether it comes through the mail, through a chance encounter with a stranger, or on your doorstep accompanied by a cryptic text message from your dead best friend.

  I wasn’t signed up for any reality games, but when I saw that book, my mind immediately started treating it like a puzzle.

  I left the book exactly where it was and ran up and down the hall, checking the staircase and the elevator, my heart pounding the whole time. I nearly went downstairs and ran outside but decided it was more important to investigate the book itself. I took pictures of it from every angle before I finally picked it up, took it inside, and then started texting April.

  April? is how I started, but about five texts and fifteen minutes of agonized waiting later, they were full-on APRIL MAY DO NOT TELL ME YOU HAVE BEEN NOT DEAD FOR THE LAST FIVE MONTHS AND DID NOT TELL ME BUT ALSO PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME WHETHER OR NOT YOU ARE NOT DEAD AND IF THIS IS SOME FUCK MESSING WITH ME I LOOK FORWARD TO WEARING YOUR FINGER BONES AS A NECKLACE.

  I did not get another text.

  I also didn’t call or text anyone else. I didn’t want to create any false hope in Maya or Miranda or Robin. So I just sat there in my own panicky misery.

  Before I even picked up the book, I was angry at it. It wasn’t just a big scary question mark. I also could feel a very particular future pulling at me. I’m not going to rag on April too much here, but she was the river we were all swept up in for so long. In the months since she disappeared, I’d found some direction of my own. I felt like I was actually in charge of my life, maybe for the first time.

  I picked up the book and squeezed its width in my fingers. This book wanted to be in charge.

  I opened it.

  It wasn’t big—it looked like it was between one and two hundred pages. And unlike every book ever, it began on the first page, which was disconcerting, in a way. I don’t read a ton, but I know that you usually have to flip through publisher information and title pages and “This one’s for my patient and loving wife, Katherine” before you hit the actual book. But no, here the book just started.

  Do not tell anyone about this. Do not post an Instagram story of this or tweet it or call a friend and share it. This is a magic book, but its magic only works for you, and it only works if no one else knows. It won’t always make sense, but it knows more than you. So unless I tell you differently, clam up, buttercup. Let’s get straight to what you want to know.

  There’s a young woman lying still and quiet in a room with a robot somewhere. And she’s safe. She’s not well, but she is better than she was. And she will be better than she is. She is being cared for. When she is awake, it is bad, so she is asleep. Only for now.

  She would like to see her friends. Maybe she needs to see her friends. But she cannot see her friends right now. She still needs work. Her body and her mind. Oh lord, minds are a whole thing, aren’t they?

  A young man in his apartment feels sick in his stomach. Partially because he hasn’t eaten all day, but also because he is frightened for his friend and just broadly anxious about all of these words that are suddenly coming at him. He’s afraid that what he’s reading might not be true, but also that it might be true. The young man is also afraid that the book is talking about him because he’s being stubborn. He is thinking about what might be wrong with his friend’s mind. But minds are complex and there are many things wrong with every mind.

  I put the book down, my armpits slick with sweat. I realized I hadn’t been breathing as I pulled in a sharp gulp of air. I picked the book back up.

  The man picks the book back up.

  I put the book back down. What the fuck?

  And then he picks it back up again. He’s been doing a very good job. Fantastic. The world needs calm voices right now. He’s been one of those voices. He’s not chasing the most attention, he’s not trying to turn every scrap of social capital he has into more social capital, and that’s hard, so I want to let him know that that’s appreciated. He’s doing the right things. I’ve been reading his Twitter, and I really liked Pose too. What a great show. The world needs more content about people just loving each other. I also really liked this tweet:

  Andy Skampt

  @AndySkampt

  None of us have forgotten that the Carls changed our minds, but it’s important to remember that we all change each other’s minds all the time. Any good story is a mind-altering substance.

  I don’t think that’s really an accurate portrayal of what was done to your mind, but it is good to pull tensions down and also to call attention to the power you each have over each other. “Mind-altering substance” . . . very clever. You always were a clever one. Do you remember when you pulled the mic up your own shirt and clipped it onto your collar and then decided that April should be the star? You didn’t know what choice you were making, but you knew you were making a choice. You didn’t just chase the flame, and the magnitude of that choice . . . well, here we are. You always wanted to be famous, but you gave that away. But then it came for you anyway, just in time for you to not really want it. Of course you feel guilty about it. That’s fine. You shouldn’t of course. You’re doing the best you can with what you have, but of course you feel guilty. That’s fine.

  The money in your bank account, the follows on your Twitter, you think they’re all hers and that you just inherited them. But almost everything is inherited. It’s not about deserving. It’s about what you do with what you have. And, so far, you are doing well.

  Anyway, you should go get a sandwich.

  The man stands up from the table and takes the stairs to the ground floor so he has some time to think. He walks to Subway, where he orders a six-inch sweet onion chicken teriyaki sub with provolone, bell peppers, onions, tomato, and lettuce.

  He gets a Coke to help settle his stomach, but he only drinks half of it because he doesn’t need all that caffeine right now. And he doesn’t get the meal, even though the chips would only be an extra 75 cents.

  Then he’ll take his sandwich to Tompkins Square Park, which is a nice park, even though it’s a bit of a walk, and he’ll eat his sandwich.

  Rebecca at Subway is waiting to make his sandwich.

  Go get a sandwich.

  And that’s where that page ended. I turned the page, and there (and on every other page in The Book of Good Times) was a single sentence, “Go get a sandwich,” repeated over and over again.

  So, I mean, what do you do? At the very least you want to go see if the person who will make your sandwich is named Rebecca.

  * * *

  —

  The sweet onion chicken teriyaki had been my sub since high school, which was something April knew about me . . . probably. Which made me think that maybe it was April who had written the book. Or maybe it was just someone who had watched me order a sandwich once. It felt like April, though. The words definitely felt like April.

  I was understandably distracted on my walk to Subway, which is probably the only reason I ended up walking past the plaque that had been placed in the ground where New York Carl once stood. I hadn’t admitted it to myself, but I must have been avoiding this area.

  The plaque was a simple bronze square laid into the concrete that said only “This was the location of New York Carl.” A fresh rose had been placed on it, and no one had accidentally kicked it away yet. Part of me thought the rose was a nice gesture; part of me thought that strangers didn’t have the right to mourn April. She was my friend, not theirs. That was the whole fucking problem, that every
one in the world thought that April May was theirs. All they knew of her was the caricature she created for them. I looked up and saw someone had lifted their phone to take a photo of me.

  “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.