A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  Well, what about it? It happened. It was terrible.

  Why did it happen? Was he a Defender? Was it ultimately about the Carls? No. Those are all the wrong questions. It’s so tempting, even now, to try to blame all of the politicians and pundits who were rising in power by feeding on people’s fear and confusion.

  We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder “means” is that we’ve made it too easy to kill. None of us are going to talk about it anymore in this book, because if we did, that man will get to keep having his power on us, and I’m sick of it.

  Moving on.

  ANDY

  I couldn’t stop feeling bad about telling Miranda she had to apply at Altus. My gut was all, Absolutely not! She should stay in Berkeley where it was normal and safe. Enough of my friends had done weird, risky things. If the book hadn’t told me to tell her to do it, I absolutely would not have. It was one thing putting my money on the line with this thing, but this was Miranda’s future. But The Book of Good Times was in charge now. Or maybe I just wanted it to be.

  And now, since I had completed the book’s two requests, I could turn the page.

  You waited! Excellent work! I knew you would. I mean, I literally knew it. Otherwise, how could I have known when I printed the book? You probably shouldn’t worry too much about all of this right now. So, you have another million dollars. It seems like you can trust me, right?

  As previously noted, this wasn’t true. I was doing everything I could to not trust the book. I knew it was powerful, but I did not know what it wanted.

  So now, I’d like you to move 100 percent of your portfolio into Posthiker, a distributed shipping company. They’ve only been publicly traded for about a year, and people are not optimistic about how their business has gone. But they’re about to have a very good quarter. Search for Posthiker on Twitter and you’ll see people talking about it. It’s functioning, it’s earning people money, and it’s saving others money. The stock is going to jump 32 percent in the exuberance immediately afterward. Yes, I realize that I’m asking you to go against your instincts here, but you’re going to need a lot of money. I know you think you already have a lot of money, but you’re going to need much more. After Posthiker, you’ll want to move everything into Alphabet, which will give you a further 6 percent bump after their earnings come in, and then after that into Emerson, which has been doing extremely good business in air conditioners in China.

  The book continued this way for more than a page, instructing me exactly how to move my money over the next two weeks. There was some action to take almost every day. It was hard not to enjoy this plan. Not knowing what to do with my money had been stressful, but now I knew exactly what to do. It was a good feeling to know that I might soon be very, very rich. At the same time, it was terrifying to know that I was going to need it for something.

  After this, you will be, by my best guess, at $125 million. You’re going to wonder what all of this money is for, but do your best not to worry about it. You might ask, “Why don’t I just go to Vegas and you can tell me how to bet in roulette, or which lottery numbers to pick, or which sports team to bet on?” Well, it turns out, those things are actually random. Nothing is as easy to guess as the success of companies. All of the data are already out there. The information is known by people and stored in computers, and the reactions of those buying the stocks are easy to predict in large part because many of those entities are deeply simplistic computer programs. The question you’re asking yourself now is, Is this illegal? Yes, it is super illegal. You are trading stocks based on tips from someone with insider information. I am stealing that information and giving it, in a distilled form, to you. So yes, this is illegal. But it is not, as far as I can tell, wrong to do it in this case. You do many things that are illegal, but I will not ask you to do anything that is wrong.

  Here’s the thing about having $125 million: If your portfolio increases by 1 percent in any given day, your net worth will increase by $1.25 million. You will make and lose more money in a single day than many people do in their whole lives. And you will make more than you lose.

  You will make more money by investing your money than you ever could working. Which is fine, because I don’t think you’re doing what you’re doing to make money. Except for the times when you are. I’d suggest stopping that. Though don’t lose that business card.

  I thought about this and realized the book probably meant the card the guy had given me in Cannes.

  In the next three weeks, you need to think more than you act, and listen more than you talk. There are big things happening, and you are uniquely positioned to see them. Call Bex, introduce her to Jason. Hang out. See where it goes!

  As I read, I could tell it was coming to an end, and without a single word about April.

  Give yourself time to think. Don’t fill it all up with podcasts and TV shows. Talk it out, think it out, be present. And maybe call Maya—she’s thinking a lot these days too. Actually, you should reach out to all the old friends. Just ask how they’re doing. You’ve got a few weeks before this story starts up again. You can move to the next page two weeks from today. But remember, tell no one about me. It will ruin the Good Times.

  The urge to turn to the next page was overwhelming. Where was April? What was going on?

  I turned the page.

  Andy, I told you not to turn the page. April will be OK. But sometimes you have to wait.

  I threw the book across the room, and it slammed into the wall, knocking a couple plastic cups off my shelf.

  “You OK in there?” Jason said, half laughing.

  “I’m fine, just trying to kill a roach.”

  I went over to grab the book and stuffed it between my bed and the box spring. Jason didn’t ever come in my room, so I wasn’t hiding it from him as much as I was hiding it from myself.

  And thus, in secret, I had to live all by myself in a world in which April was alive and books could predict the future. It took gargantuan strength for me not to tell Robin about it. It wasn’t just that I wanted to tell anyone, though I did; it’s more that it seemed so cruel to let him just suffer while I had this new hope. But then again maybe it was cruel to tell him when it could still all be a lie.

  It was one thing to let a supernatural garbage book give you hope that your dead friend was alive; it was another thing entirely to force that ambiguity on someone else.

  * * *

  —

  I tried to take the book’s advice, to give myself space to think, but I was nervous and skittish and addicted to content.

  Jason definitely noticed something was up.

  “Dude, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you have been weird since you met Subway Girl.”

  “Don’t call her Subway Girl,” I told him.

  “That’s what I’ve always called her, though.”

  “Yeah, but she’s going to come over tonight, and if you call her ‘Subway Girl’ in front of her, she is going to stab you, and then me. You can call her Becky or Rebecca or Bex.”

  “OK,” he said before repeating, “Dude, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you’ve been weird since you met Becky.”

  “It’s not her, it’s . . .” I decided to do a half lie: “It’s money. Money is so freaking weird, man.”

  “Like, the part where you’re filthy rich and never have to worry about it again?” Jason didn’t really have to worry about money either. The podcast was making tons of ad revenue now, and he still had a full-time job doing database design for an e-commerce company.

  “You totally have to worry about money when you have it, just in a different way.”

  This was, in fairness, something I never would have said to anyone but Jason, who I was sharing about $30,000 in podcast revenue with every month. Still, he rolled his eyes pretty hard.

  “You cou
ld buy a penthouse apartment in Midtown and not have a mortgage.”

  “Right, so should I do that? Or should I start a business? Or should I invest in the stock market or in bonds? Like, why do you think I still live here with you?”

  “Are you saying that you still live with me just because you don’t know how to make a decision?”

  “Jason, I still live here because I want to. I don’t want to live in a penthouse apartment in Midtown. I don’t want a boat. Robin keeps making me all this money, but what’s the point of it? I can’t even take a girl to a fancy restaurant because it just feels like bragging. So, like, why have money? Should I just give it away?”

  “Jesus, Andy. Not everything’s a crusade. Just make the money while you can, buy some cool sneakers, and then you can do good with it when you aren’t so busy making it. The trick is to not spend it all on dumb shit and, like, you’re clearly physically incapable of that. You can’t even find a girlfriend who wants you for your money.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.” I was being defensive because I was hoping maybe she would be someday.

  “I wasn’t talking about Bex, I was talking about your inability to find a girlfriend.”

  “Ah, well, I concede. But I’m still worried I’m not doing the right thing with the untapped energy in my savings account.”

  “Well, I’ll keep my eyes open for weird or good shit you can do with your money. But you’re fucking lucky I’m so understanding because most people would not sit here and listen to you complain about how hard it is to be so ludicrously rich.”

  “I am ludicrously rich,” I said, smiling.

  “Isn’t it nice?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is. Sometimes I feel like I must have earned it. Sometimes I feel like I must be worth it, like I won life. But that’s bullshit. April earned this money, I’m just making it.”

  “OH MY GOD YOU ARE THE WORST.”

  “OK, sorry, sometimes I feel like April earned this money and I’m just making it.”

  “Better, but still bad.”

  * * *

  —

  I think I’m good at looking like I have things together on the outside, but that’s only because I spend an immense amount of time worrying about it.

  The book seemed to know what I should do—well, isn’t that what we all want to know? Free will is stressful. I invited Bex over to play games, just like the book said I should, and it was actually fun. I was worried that she and Jason wouldn’t get along, but it turns out she was used to people who don’t share a lot of the same experiences as her.

  We played a game that my parents and I used to play when I was a kid. You pick a long word that you can divide into three different words and describe it using definitions of its three different parts.

  That was probably really confusing. Example: If you pick “dictionary,” you say, “At first I am a penis, then I ostracize, and finally I’m light and free.” The first person to guess “dick shun airy” wins.

  Bex had just bent the rules a little with “First I am an explanation, then a vocal performance, then I weep, and finally I am an abbreviated sibling,” but we all agreed that she was a genius when the answer was “how sing cry sis.” And that led us into talking about the reasons why housing had become so unaffordable, which devolved mostly into me and Jason repeating stuff we’d learned from one of The Thread’s videos.

  “I mean, you two sound really smart, but really you just watch The Thread,” Bex said after we’d gone on for five or six minutes.

  “Oh! You just got called out so hard!” Jason said to me.

  “So did you!”

  “Yeah, but Bex isn’t my friend! She knows nothing about me, so I am free from the deeper ramifications of this callout! Also, I told you not only white dudes watch The Thread.”

  “I didn’t say only white dudes,” I said, thankful that the subject was moving away from my intellectual plagiarism, but apprehensive that it was moving toward race. “I said mostly white dudes.”

  “I agree, his audience is definitely mostly white dudes,” Bex said. “But, I hate to say it, it’s beneficial in this country to keep an eye on what the white dudes are doing.”

  We all had a laugh.

  Jason thought up the next clue for our game; it was “eye dent titty.”

  It was a fun night, and as we were wrapping up, I couldn’t help but think back to The Book of Good Times, which seemed to think that maybe something might happen between me and Bex. I looked up and saw Jason looking at me.

  “Well, I’m gonna turn in!” he proclaimed. Then he marched over to his room and firmly closed the door.

  I turned to Bex, embarrassed, and gave a little smile that was meant to be both apologetic and charming. “So . . . that’s Jason!”

  “I love him,” she said.

  “I’m glad, I was worried. He isn’t the most sensitive guy.”

  She rolled her eyes at that, but then just said, “You guys have weird fun, but it was fun. Thank you for having me over.” She stood up, and I immediately stood as well, suddenly intensely nervous.

  “Can I walk you to the train?” I asked.

  “No.” She came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. “But I would like it if you kissed me good night.”

  Every nerve in my body sparkled like I was a damn high schooler as my fingers moved around her waist and we kissed.

  MIRANDA

  Miranda, thank you for taking the time for this.” I’d gotten an interview for the job. It was over some corporate videoconferencing software that I had to download for the interview. I’d dressed up, and pulled my most identifying feature, my bright red hair, back in a tight ponytail. I had stopped short of dyeing it—that seemed too obvious a ploy.

  “Of course, I am so fascinated by what you are up to,” I told them honestly.

  “I’m Dr. Everett Sealy, this is my colleague Tom. I work in the lab, he’s an HR manager.”

  Remember how all of the rats in my lab were named Tom? Tom did not remind me of them. He was handsome, in his mid-thirties, with wavy dark hair. Dr. Sealy, on the other hand, was shaved to his scalp everywhere his slightly elongated head wasn’t naturally bald.

  “We were excited to see your application,” Tom continued. “Your research looks right up our alley. Can you tell me a little about why you’re interested in working at Altus?”

  In my résumé, it just looked like my PhD had been taking a while, not like I’d taken a year off. That wasn’t technically a lie. I had gotten through my PhD program relatively quickly, so it wasn’t unusual that I would still be working on my thesis. I’d just left out the part about how I had quit temporarily to become the CEO of a start-up with famous people for a year. That was the kind of thing that would look really good on a résumé for pretty much any job except this one.

  “Well,” I started, sounding a little shaky, “if you’ll excuse the impertinence, I can tell by who you’re hiring what you’re working on. It is also what I’m working on, except it seems that you’ve gotten further down the path. I can only make guesses what the steps you’ve taken are, but they’ve left me both intensely curious and also less interested in my own work.”

  My cortisol response was kicking in hard—elevated heart rate, sweaty pits, sudden urge to pee, all of it. I know the secret to lying is telling the truth, and it was definitely helping, but it was still terrifying. These people were not to be messed with.

  “Simply, it seems to me that you’re where the cutting edge is.”

  Dr. Sealy picked up here: “You are, however, in the middle of your thesis project, correct?”

  “Yes, I’d be putting that on hold. I’ve already discussed it with my advisor.” This was a lie.

  “And how does he feel about that?” Tom asked.

  I decided not to correct him. “Dr. Lundgren sees the excitement of the opportunity a
nd understands. I know I’m taking a risk, but even if I’m not able to return to defend my thesis, it seems certain that this will be the better path for me.”

  “You know we tried to recruit Constance,” Dr. Sealy said, using Professor Lundgren’s first name. “She’s a magnificent scientist, but she . . .” He paused.

  Tom continued, more smoothly, “She turned us down.”

  She hadn’t just turned them down. She told me that she’d told them to go fuck themselves. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I should have known better than to bring up Dr. Lundgren. I took control back with an argument I’d prepared. “I don’t know the details of what you’re up to, but you do. So the question I have is what you would suggest I do knowing what you know. Would you tell a young scientist to finish her PhD, or would you tell her to go work at Altus?”

  “I’d tell her to go work at Altus,” Dr. Sealy replied.

  The business guy spoke up again then: “Just to be absolutely clear, the work we are doing is very secret and very sensitive. Do you have any potential ulterior motives for working here?”

  Was he outright asking me if I was signing up specifically for espionage? I was a terrible liar! What the hell was I doing?! I heard my own voice talking, and it sounded relaxed: “I just can’t not be there, I’m up all night thinking about it.” I had found a truth I could tell.

  The rest of the interview was standard. We talked about how we solved interpersonal problems at the lab, about my experience being managed and working with undergrads, and about my research at Berkeley. They seemed impressed by me, and to be honest I was impressed by them. They were experts, they were well paid, and they seemed like good, effective communicators. Tom seemed like a bit of a tech bro, but Dr. Sealy was exactly the kind of guy I’d get along with in a work setting. He was considerate, thoughtful, and none of his jokes were at the expense of other people. They weren’t scary at all.