A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

by Hank Green

  1. You could only play Fish if you got the message, and there didn’t seem to be any pattern to who got the messages except they always came through WhatsApp.

  2. People who had completed the game were notoriously quiet about the later levels, and seemed bizarrely enthusiastic that the rewards for completing the game were worthwhile.

  I was pretty infected with their unquestioned enthusiasm about the whole thing when the Cowtown parking lot finally began emptying out.

  At around 4:30, I spotted Kurt Butler’s van as it pulled out of the lot. I followed. Kurt did not go home, nor did he go to someplace where he might acquire more of the rocks. I was surprised to find that he went to a service call at a hotel in Wolton. As nice hotels got nicer and cheap motels became aggressively cheaper, the Wolton Motor Inn had been stranded in the middle. New awnings and a fresh paint job couldn’t obscure the outdated facade, and it looked like an attached restaurant had been closed for renovations that were no longer happening. It was trying its best to be nice, but it just wasn’t.

  Kurt’s van pulled around the back to what I assumed was a service entrance. I thought about following him, but that seemed too obvious.

  But then a half hour passed and Kurt still hadn’t come back out. And then another half hour. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me.

  I pulled around the corner, and there was Kurt “PBS Is Fake News” Butler, in the quickly darkening evening, rummaging through a heap of detritus at the back of the hotel. As soon as I was all the way around the corner, he looked up at me, at first guilty and then confused as our eyes locked and, I assumed, he recognized me. I should have stayed calm. I should have pretended like I was just witnessing a weird cable guy rummaging through a trash pile. But instead I freaked out and hit the accelerator way too hard. I wasn’t familiar with the truck. It had more kick than expected, and I was looking more at Kurt than the road. I drove into a utility pole.

  Kurt, familiar with utility poles and my face, then needed to make a decision. Did he get in his van and ignore maybe the weirdest thing that had happened to him in his whole life (the Black girl he had messed with at Cowtown for overfondling his weird rocks snuck around the back of a sleazy hotel in a Nissan Frontier to witness him dumpster diving, only to then drive into a pole)? Or did he walk over to ask if I was OK and also what on earth I was doing there?

  I didn’t like my odds, so as Kurt began disentangling himself from the pile of old shelves, bar stools, and wiring, I threw the Nissan in reverse. Luckily, the truck had enough horsepower to get me off the curb. Kurt was running up to me, yelling, “Hey! What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?!” I fumbled with the shifter, and then I was off, Kurt running behind me.

  * * *

  —

  So, good news, Kurt “Very Probably Thinks the Deep State Is Out to Get Him” Butler and I did not have a physical, or even verbal, confrontation. Indeed, Kurt Butler still (thank god) knew nothing about me. I could only hope that he hadn’t gotten a look at my license plate, though I’m not sure what he’d be able to do if he did.

  I drove for half an hour, taking random turns, not paying attention to where I was going, before pulling into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts to check how jacked my truck was. It was jacked enough that I spent the next hour on the phone with the rental company and my insurance company, feeling deeply incapable. But I didn’t cry and I didn’t call my mom because I’d helped lead an international movement and, damn it, I could handle a fender bender.

  And then I went back to the hotel because now I knew that either:

  1. Kurt Butler was doing some kind of official business in a trash pile behind a gross hotel.

  Or:

  2. That is where he had found the rocks.

  I decided that I’d start inside because I wanted to ask a question. The check-in desk had been sprayed with stucco to make it look like stone. And yes, an Egyptian Eye of Horus had been pressed into the stucco, because it was Wolton, so of course it had.

  I walked up to the check-in desk to a gray-haired man in his fifties.

  “Hi, I’m sorry to trouble you about this, but have you been visited by Carson Communications recently?”

  “Goddamn it, this is the last time, we are not doing anything hinky here!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re in and out of here every week telling us that we’re up to whatever, I dunno, but we’re just a hotel. Our guests use the internet . . . when it works, which it doesn’t more often than not. I’m sick of this.”

  He had a North Jersey accent, which I had discovered was different from the more Philly-inspired accents I heard day to day in Wolton. I love the accent, and I don’t mind the lack of pretense that often comes with it. Still, I was caught off guard.

  “I’m sorry, I just have a friend who works for them and he said he might be here.” I thought of this lie on the fly, and I was pretty proud of it.

  “Well, tell him he better not be because we’re not doing anything, and they better start solving some problems instead of accusing us of being the problem!”

  “I’m sorry, this sounds really annoying. Can you tell me more about what they say is going on?”

  “They say that the whole neighborhood is down because we’re using too much internet. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t times, like evenings, when, y’know, people are watching a lot of pornos. But we’ve had high speed here for twenty years and nothing’s changed. They even made me go through each room to make sure no one had hooked up something to steal our internet. I did it, and like I said, there was nothing. But they keep coming in, telling us that we’re the reason the internet’s down. Well, it’s down for us too, and it’s costing me customers.”

  “I’ve got a good friend who runs the coffee shop in town, and they’re in the same boat. Hard to have a coffee shop with no Wi-Fi.” I said this mostly in the hopes that he’d keep talking.

  “Did they accuse him of being the problem?”

  “No.” I laughed. “I don’t think so anyway.”

  “Well, that sounds nice. They’re in here every week telling me I’m up to no good. I’m just trying to make a living here.”

  “When was the last time you saw them?”

  “A couple weeks ago now, I guess. And then I catch the guy sneaking around the back looking through our stuff!”

  “The cable guy?”

  “Yeah, he was back there looking for who knows what. I’ve seen homeless guys do that, trying to find something to sell. But this guy’s got a job. What is he doing going through our trash? You ask your friend about that, OK?”

  “That does sound like him, actually. He’s always looking for a way to make a quick buck.”

  “Tell him to do it some other place!”

  My heart was pounding with the lies and the unapologetic North Jersey flair for confrontation. I decided there wasn’t much more I was going to get.

  “Well, I’m really sorry this has been so rough. I’ll give Kurt a piece of my mind for you when I see him.”

  “You do that.”

  * * *

  —

  I got back in my truck, drove out of view of the front windows, and then pulled around the back of the hotel. It was time to dive into that pile of detritus that Kurt “Everything I Don’t Like Is a Conspiracy” Butler had been illicitly wading through earlier that evening.

  I wished I had gloves. It was cold out, and, under a dusting of snow that had just begun to fall, a lot of the stuff looked broken or dangerous. It was fully dark now, so everything I saw was under the harsh glare of my cell phone flashlight. What I found was what you would expect. Trash. Two soggy bar stools with split faux-leather tops, a printer and an old CRT monitor, an ancient mop and its broken bucket, some warped plywood, a bike frame, scraps of carpet, Pop-Tart boxes, and a ton of empty water bottles. Maybe this is where the nei
ghbors all brought their junk. But what there wasn’t was anything at all that you wouldn’t expect to find in a big pile of trash behind a crappy hotel.

  So then I decided to look deeper. It felt just the slightest bit like the Dream, a shadow of that sensation of knowing that, somewhere, something was waiting to be found. I lifted up a piece of splotched pink carpet and found, underneath, a couple hypodermic needles and a soggy old book.

  “Nope!” I said aloud, and then I tiptoed my way out of the mess as fast as felt safe. I couldn’t help but imagine what my dad would think if he saw me in that moment. Then I got mad at myself for caring. And then I got mad at myself for giving up.

  I mean, it was dumb. I was at a hotel, so it was probably a Bible. But it wasn’t really big enough to be a Bible. OK, this wasn’t actually like the Dream, it was colder and muddier and with a higher chance of contracting hepatitis. The weather was always so nice in the Dream, and you never got tired. And you never had to talk to other people. This mystery sucked.

  I shuffled back to the disgusting pink carpet, lifted it up again, and carefully picked up the book.

  “The Book of Good Times,” said the cover.

  I took it back to the truck and started reading.

  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.

  You’re safe, for now. I’ve made sure of that. Sorry about the nonsense at Cowtown, you don’t have to worry about Fish for a little while.

  Whenever I thought about the Cowtown nonsense for too long, it got too weird too fast. Someone who was running this RG must have known where I was and that I had gotten a bunch of money out of an ATM. Either that or they had been watching me. And then they mobilized a bunch of players to come for me? I only thought it was possible because it had happened. But this! This book was even more unsettling. I felt like stopping reading right there, but my eyes caught the next line, and it pulled me in like a fishing net.

  You’re on the right track. You got this far on your own, but now you need to do the hardest thing yet. You need to wait. You need to go back to your Airbnb and look after your potato. You need to have Derek and his family over for dinner. You need to stop looking at the ground and start looking at the sky.

  I know that stepping back from this search will be hard, and why would you take my word for it? I’m just a book that was under a soggy carpet. But that’s where I needed to be for you to find me right now. Maybe I could tell you a story that would make you listen to me. I don’t know that you’ll like hearing it, but I don’t know how else to make you listen.

  How about this:

  When you were a kid, you were afraid of wooden furniture. Not, like, furniture that had wood in it, but the ornate carved stuff that your parents had in just one room in your home. The rest of the house was modern, with stone countertops and metal-edged corners, one of which is how you got that scar above your lip. Weird then that the furniture that scared you was the rounded, curving, hand-carved hardwoods of that one fancy room. Was it because you knew that room was only for adults? Or because that room was where you found out your grandmother was dying? I don’t know.

  But when you were eleven or twelve, too old, really, for this, you found something out. You were at school and admitted to a friend that you never liked sitting in the school’s wood chairs, and she told you that was silly because wood is just trees.

  That’s when you found out that the wood from trees was what wood furniture was made out of. You knew that trees were made of wood and furniture was made of wood, but you thought they were just named after each other, not the same thing. And that’s when you stopped being afraid of wood.

  I knew what was coming next. Tears were building up. I had spent months pretending that hope and knowledge were the same thing, but they weren’t. I kept reading, despite my tears, pressing the book into my lap to keep my hands from shaking.

  You told that story to your girlfriend one night because she was scared. Do you even remember what it was that she was afraid of? The first day of an internship? An upcoming meeting with a professor? You probably don’t remember. But I bet you remember telling the story, because it was funny, and you laughed together, and there wasn’t any lesson. There was just the vulnerability of sharing something from your past. The story helped, like you knew it would.

  You used to be afraid of wooden furniture until you found out it was made of trees. I don’t know how many people know that, but I do know that only April knew about that conversation you had, and that even she wouldn’t share it unless she had to.

  I know that this is going to feel wrong to you, but you got here too soon. You need to go home, make some tea, leave the cable guy alone, and then, in three weeks, you need to come back here—back to the service area of the Wolton Motor Inn—and then the story will start up again.

  The rest of the book was blank. I was physically shaking. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t do anything. I just sat in the truck for an hour and cried. And then I drove back to my Airbnb and found, lifting a clump of dirt from out of the pot, the tiny sprout of a potato plant. I flicked the dirt off of it and touched the leaf with my finger, like I was afraid I might break it.

  GLOBAL RECESSION LOOMS

  Associated Press

  Economists have been left guessing at the root causes of the continued economic slump. Consumer spending, labor participation, and wages have all either decreased or stagnated over the past six months. “What the data are showing is that people are just less interested in spending money now. You could say it’s an economic phenomenon, but I think it is broader than that,” said David Sanderson, senior analyst at UBS. “There’s no way to stimulate an economy that people simply don’t seem interested in participating in.”

  ANDY

  Every day, I read news stories about people whose retirement accounts were dropping just as they needed the money the most. Meanwhile, the book had me dodging every drop and snagging every gain.

  I had a massive soapbox to speak from, sudden and dramatically increasing wealth, and apparently a girlfriend. But no matter what, our minds find reasons to be frustrated. My mind was no exception. Here’s what I couldn’t stop focusing on.

  Radicalization follows fear and insecurity, and as dissatisfaction grew, fewer and fewer people were interested in my nuanced, chill takes. I had to live up to my brand and to April’s legacy, but more and more I felt like I was just being told all of the things I couldn’t do or say.

  At the same time, I had to watch as people with more radical views got a bigger and bigger slice of the conversation. One day I watched two videos back-to-back, one about how wealthy societies inevitably fall to outsiders who have had to live through difficulty and thus value human lives less that was barely veiled xenophobia and the next about how wealth inequality only ever ended with violent revolution and that we needed to be ready for that revolution. Both videos had over ten million views and they were both only days old.

  Even with a magical book telling me how to get rich, I felt like I was on a fast path to irrelevancy.

  I was watching The Thread videos every day, which was something, considering that he only published one every week or two. All I could think was that I could never say half of what he was saying without needing to completely restructure my brand and let a ton of people down. I was supposed to be a voice of reason, but being reasonable was quickly going out of style.

  And so, one day, I just sent a tweet.

  @TheThread, I’d love to talk. andy.skampt@gmail.com.

  About twenty minutes later I received an email from hastilysanctionedfoul@gmail.com that said only “confirmation th
at this is me coming on Twitter in five minutes” and then, five minutes after that, The Thread’s Twitter account tweeted “hastily sanctioned foul.”

  After the tweet, I emailed The Thread.

  Subject: I Like Your Content

  Hi, I’ve been following your channel since launch, and I’ve loved watching it grow and succeed. Your ideas are excellent, your additions to this conversation are deeply necessary. I think this is only the beginning of your influence, and I am somewhat envious of your ability to reach an audience without tying your face or name to the content.

  If you ever want someone to talk to who is familiar with stuff like this, or just to bounce ideas off of, I wanted to make myself available.

  Andy

  A response came within the hour.

  Subject: Re: I Like Your Content

  Andy,

  I appreciate you reaching out. I am going to tell you a secret now, and I will be very disappointed if you share it.

  I do not work on The Thread alone. We are a consortium of anonymous experts. I think that your expertise would be extremely valuable to the conversation, but membership in The Thread is not taken lightly. We are a group of people dedicated to changing society fundamentally. The YouTube channel is only the beginning of that. We have a large endowment and the support of some of the most powerful individuals in the world. We are here to shape the stories that humanity will tell about itself in the future, and we would like you to join us.

  If you would be interested in that, there are a few things you need to know:

  1. Any attempt to uncover anyone’s identity—even asking simple personal questions about age, location, or marital status—will result in a permanent ban from the channel.

  2. All chats in The Thread, private or not, are viewable by me.