An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  What eventually became known as the Freddie Mercury Sequence remained a total mystery. I ran through the sequence on Wikipedia dozens of times. Each time, the edits produced the same three additional typos before it reset. A single note had appeared on the Wikipedia page commenting that a persistent typo wasn’t allowing itself to be fixed, so at least one other person had noticed.

  As the days passed, the search for the artist / marketing firm / shadowy government agency responsible for the Carls got more intense. But knowing that there was more to it was leading me in different directions than the rest of the world.

  Googling “IAMU” certainly wasn’t helping. It seemed unlikely that this had anything to do with the International Association of Maritime Universities or the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities. It seemed most likely that it was a hint, just far too vague a hint for us to figure out.

  “What if we ask the internet?” This was us, again, on my living room bed. The sun had gone down while Maya and I had been engrossed in our various laptop-based activities, and we hadn’t stopped long enough to turn any lights on. Life with no job was wonderful. I could see her mostly by the light of her screen.

  “Huh?” Maya replied, hammering away at her computer on some work email. Maya didn’t seem to see Carl as a life-disrupting force so much as an event that would someday be a great anecdote to tell at a fancy cocktail party with a bunch of executives while wearing a cute outfit. She had always been as much into the business as the craft, which was extremely valuable and probably why she had the coolest job of any of us.

  “I-A-M-U. I could just tweet out the weird Wikipedia clue and let other people try to figure it out. As they say, ten thousand minds are better than three!”

  I had been building my Twitter following with posts about Carl and politics. I had also developed a new and voracious interest in growing my number of Twitter followers, which had become a fun game. My brain liked seeing the numbers go up.

  “I do not like this idea.” She didn’t even look up from her laptop.

  “Why, because you’d rather I stop obsessing?”

  I had been bugging her with a lot of dumb ideas, even though her one-word replies had given me the impression that she was just about done with all this hoopla.

  “No, April.” She turned to me. “Because it’s weird. It’s already weird and impossible, but this makes it more weird and impossible. Plus, what if the answer is something big? Do you want to give that up?”

  I got the distinct feeling that she added that last part because she thought it would convince me, not because she thought it was a good argument.

  “But someone else is going to find it, and they’ll talk about it first! It makes sense that the world should know about it, and I want to be the one to tell them.”

  “Would you rather be the first person to reveal that there is a mystery? Or the person who solves the mystery?” Maya continued to appeal to my newfound sense of self-importance to get me to do what she wanted.

  I noticed.

  “Ugh, OK, I get it, I’m fully psychoanalyzed. I want to be both, but I have a 100 percent chance of being one of those things if I tweet about it right now.”

  I tend to get obsessed with things when I’m first learning about them, which had happened with Twitter and was starting to happen with YouTube and even to some extent the news media. There was a part of me that just wanted to tweet about the Freddie Mercury Sequence so I could have more opportunity to use and understand the platform and just . . . see what happened. That’s a terrible reason to tweet something, but a pretty common one.

  “OK, maybe we need more than three minds, but I don’t think we should have ten thousand yet. Who else do we trust?”

  “Uhhh . . .” I was somewhat upset to find that no one was coming to mind. We had our three-person team, two people I trusted and me. Adding anyone to the inner circle felt wrong in a way that adding ten thousand did not. My parents? My brother? Some of my friends from college, some of my friends from high school? No one was popping out as a trained puzzle solver.

  “Well,” I said finally, “there are a few people I’ve seen over and over again online who seem cool and interested and supportive. It’s like they’re starting a little community around my video. They . . .” I stopped, not wanting to continue.

  “They . . . what?” she asked skeptically.

  “They call themselves Carlie’s Angels.”

  Maya’s smirk turned into a chuckle and then she just burst out laughing. And then I did too. The constant feeling that she would rather be talking about literally anything else finally washed away.

  “I know,” I continued. “They seem to be almost all women for some reason. And the guys don’t seem to mind the nickname.”

  “But ‘Carlie’?”

  “Anything for a pun, I guess?”

  She smirked. “Can’t argue with that. Do you feel like you know any of them?”

  “No, but I see a lot of the same names pop up over and over again. There’s a Carlie’s Angels Twitter account that they all follow and that I have interacted with. I’m surprised none of them have stumbled across the Wikipedia thing yet. I could DM their account, I guess.”

  Maya seemed concerned. “Are they fans of you, or of Carl?”

  “Both, I guess . . . It’s weird to think that I have fans. They get really excited when I tweet at them.”

  “Yup, that’s how Twitter works.”

  “Do I sound like a complete idiot when I talk about this stuff?” I asked.

  “It’s just a little surprising how fast you’ve gone from zero to sixty.” She did not seem enthusiastic.

  “Because of how slow I was in figuring out other stuff?” This was a not-so-subtle reference to the solid year of living together it took for us to hook up.

  I crawled over her laptop and kissed her.

  “You are a little manipulative, you know that?”

  “Uh-huh, but you? Never.”

  “Let’s make this decision later,” she said.

  The next morning, I had to get on a flight to LA for a late-night show that Mr. Skampt had booked us on. Even though we weren’t getting paid anymore, he thought it would lead to other things, and he wanted us to take some meetings in LA anyway. Maya couldn’t just skip out on work, so we had some saying good-bye to do.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night. Not because I can go All. Night. Long. or anything, but because our flight left at like six in the morning and that meant getting up at 4:30. This was awful because I’m terrible at sleeping on planes. At least, that’s what I thought.

  So Andy and I got on the plane and went to our seats. We weren’t together, and mine was almost all the way at the back. I got there and found someone else already in my seat and no open seats nearby. We did the comparing-tickets dance, and it was 5:45 A.M. and everyone was awake and not asleep the whole time, and we all wanted to die, but our boarding passes said the exact same seat. I showed the flight attendant, who was more awake than I have maybe ever been in my life, and with the biggest smile ever he informed me that I was now a first-class human!

  So they brought me back up to the front of the plane and I plopped myself down next to a middle-aged balding man, which is what first-class humans seem to mostly look like. I got a mimosa before we even took off, but the little TV built into the seat in front of me was broken and just showed a bunch of numbers and colors. I tweeted a picture of it:

  @AprilMaybeNot: On my way to LA and got bumped to business class. My little plane TV is broken though, so I want the money I didn’t spend back!

  I was virtually a social media celebrity now, and so I had to let the entire world know every time I experienced any inconvenience!

  Shortly after liftoff I discovered that I do not have a hard time sleeping on planes; I have a hard time sleepi
ng in uncomfortable chairs. This chair turned into a literal bed. Business class was all dreams, baby.

  We landed just a few hours before the shoot, so we had to rush through the airport, which became impossible when a group of students came up to Andy and me and every one of them wanted to get a separate photo.

  Andy’s dad finally dragged us out of the knot of kids and toward the baggage claim. One of those guys in suits was standing at the base of the escalator with a sign. The sign read “Marshall Skampt” (Andy’s dad), which was a little disappointing. Still, I definitely snapped a picture of him to Maya, realizing I hadn’t yet texted her in all the hubbub since we landed.

  The drive to the studio was overwhelmingly composed of Andy being extremely excited. He was just a lot more into this whole thing than I was.

  OK, that’s not entirely true.

  Andy was into the spectacle of it. He believed in entertainment culture in a way I never have. There’s an appreciation that stretches beyond enjoying content and into worshipping all the bits that come together to make the content. I still saw it mostly as a necessary chore. I wasn’t excited by any of it, but I was interested in what it could do for me. Our different outlooks started to cause some friction.

  Here’s a scene from the greenroom of that late-night talk show.

  “Y’know, you don’t have to hate everything, April.”

  “Have you ever seen the way I look at cheesecake?”

  “You know what I mean. Like, this is the only time in our lives anything this cool is ever going to happen, and you look mostly like you need to poop.”

  “Stop thinking about my poop.”

  “So many people would kill to be on TV . . . to get to do all the things you’re doing. Just look at it objectively, you’re getting treated like a VIP and flown around the country and we’re basically famous and you’re determined to hate it!”

  “Andy . . .” I paused to compose myself. “I don’t watch TV. I have never watched TV. I do not know anything about this man we are about to talk to. But more than that, I haven’t slept more than five hours at a time since Before Carl, I don’t like planes, luxuries make me uncomfortable, and my life is so upside down that I fucking forgot I was getting my period so I had to ask a stranger for a tampon just now.”

  “They didn’t have tampons in the bathroom?”

  “I didn’t even think to check because I’m NEW AT THIS.”

  And, like that, we were laughing again.

  “I’m sorry, Andy, I just don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m being asked to be something I’m not. Why, of all people, are they asking me about this stuff? I’m barely anything. But I also like it, sometimes. I like it that people think my opinion matters. It’s just . . . I don’t know if it does.”

  Andy thought about this for a long time before he said, “April, I think you’re doing a good job.”

  I looked him in the eyes and almost said something dumb and snarky but then instead just said, “Thanks, Andy.”

  * * *

  —

  This was the night it all changed for me. After that conversation, I realized something: I wasn’t ever going to love the entertainment industry the way that Andy did, but he was right that it was an amazing opportunity. And my lack of interest gave me a kind of power. I honestly didn’t know that there was a difference between being on cable news and being on network late night. To me, TV was TV. I had no idea that what I was about to do was a big deal. For all these reasons—the practice of the week before, my immunity to its power over me and the pull of the power it offered—I suddenly became pretty good at television.

  Here’s how things went that night. (It’s fun to be able to recount some of the conversations I had verbatim because of how there were, like, twelve cameras pointed at me while I had them.)

  “Everyone! April May and Andy Skampt, the discoverers of New York Carl!”

  We walk out to applause. We had mostly been doing more newsy stuff, so this is a bit different.

  “How’s life been for the last week?”

  I tended to do most of the talking, so I start out, “Pretty weird, Pat. Pretty freaking weird.”

  “My name is not Pat.” Pat laughs.

  “Honestly, I’ve just started calling all the newspeople Pat because I can’t keep you all straight.”

  Andy chimes in here, “April is new to the institution of television. She’s spent her entire life being entertained by novels from the 1860s.”

  Chuckles from the audience.

  “Not true, my friend! I have spent a fair amount of my life being entertained by cheesecake.” The callback to our previous conversation was intentional. There’s some more robust chuckling from the audience.

  The host gets back in the game here. “So the saga of New York Carl keeps getting weirder. Estimates are saying that, if it’s a marketing campaign, it had to have cost more than a hundred million dollars to pull off.”

  Andy answers, “Yeah, setting off an EMP to knock out security cameras isn’t just expensive, it’s illegal.”

  “There are reports that the Carls in China have been closed to the public. Do you think there’s anything for people to be worried about?”

  “When you’re faced with something you don’t understand, I think the most natural thing but also the least interesting thing you can be is afraid,” I say. And then I change the subject because I’m bored and pretentious. “Does anyone else think Carl is beautiful?”

  You actually do preinterviews with these people. They tell you the questions they’re going to ask—they even sometimes prewrite jokes for you so you don’t come off looking like a total doof. The hosts are great at improvising, but guests usually aren’t, so they want you to keep to the script.

  If you look at the tape, you can actually see Andy’s eyes get big when I ask that question. He’s panicking.

  Pat doesn’t bat an eye. “Maybe when the light hits him just right?”

  The audience laughs.

  “I just mean, even if it was done for marketing, they are remarkable sculptures. It’s easy to forget how much time goes into things like designing giant fighting robots for movies. It feels cookie-cutter, but thousands of person-hours go into their creation. We love them because they’re beautiful, and they’re beautiful because of hard work.”

  Pat nods approvingly before changing the subject: “Has life changed much for you two?”

  Andy is so relieved to be back on script and says, “Well, for me it’s very weird to be recognized on the street for this video that April and I just thought was a joke. It’s not like we’ve got a nighttime talk show.” More chuckles.

  “For me, it’s the money! The YouTube video has made like five thousand dollars already. Keep clicking on that link, you guys,” I say directly to the camera.

  Andy is freaking again.

  “You’ve made that much?” Pat asks.

  “Oh yeah,” I reply. “Also, a bunch of networks ran our video before we gave them permission, so Andy’s dad, who is a lawyer, basically got to extort the networks for a frankly embarrassing licensing fee. I paid off exactly 42 percent of my student loans this week.” And then I wink at the camera.

  We went on to talk, of course, about the mystery on everyone’s mind. Pat joked that maybe Carl was sent by space aliens, and because I knew about the Wikipedia sequence and no one else did, I got to confidently say that I knew there was more to the story. But of course I didn’t tell anyone what the more was. I looked cocky, but people either love that or they love to hate it, and in the attention game (which I was playing even if I didn’t know I was), those things are equally good.

  * * *

  —

  So here’s a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you
actually, completely don’t care. I didn’t care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power.

  Some people found me precocious and entitled, but that didn’t matter because those people would still watch, which was all the people doing the booking cared about. Other people thought I was refreshing and clever, and, honestly, I liked it. I liked that I was good on camera, and that people were talking about me, and that I was getting more followers on Twitter, and that people were listening to me.

  Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average.

  Power only does all its business of empowering when it’s perceived as a difference between the power of those nearby and, even more important, the power one previously had. And I’m not going to pretend that this weird new confidence combined with this weird new platform wasn’t more than a little bit intoxicating and already getting addictive. They tell you that power corrupts . . . They never tell you how quickly!

  In the squishy, leather, new-car-smelling back seat of the Escalade that was driving us to our hotel, I was obsessively checking Twitter and Facebook for Carl news and Andy was not quite amused and not quite annoyed with me.

  “Why can’t you just do what they tell you to do?”

  “Because that’s boring. You were right when you said a lot of people want to be in my shoes, so I might as well be doing something interesting.”

  “It’s like . . .” He was working it out in his head, and then he finally figured it out. “It’s like you don’t have any respect for any of this.”

  “Andy, that is exactly it. I don’t. I told you, I’ve never watched any of these shows. I watch almost exclusively 1990s comedies on Netflix. If Pauly Shore calls and asks me on his show, I will be suitably freaked-out, but I just value these things differently than you.”