by Hank Green
I read and reread the section that described the kinds of people they had been hiring, trying to decide whether it was just anchoring bias convincing me I knew more than I did, but no. My heart pounded and my armpits prickled because I knew what Peter Petrawicki’s “service” was.
ANDY
As I pulled the book out of the trash and read the cover, all of the usual clichés—“my heart leapt into my throat” or “my stomach dropped” or whatever—were inaccurate. I had to poop. While I started moving toward where I thought the closest Starbucks might be, I opened the book and began to read.
The first line was:
There is a bathroom in the park. By the basketball courts, in the brick building.
I was freaking out even more now, but so was my colon. I closed the book and half jogged to the brick building, which, indeed, had a public bathroom in it. I was wishing I had taken the risk on a Starbucks as I walked into the gray-tiled, booze-soaked mess. I slid into a stall and, as soon as I was safe, opened the book back up.
I’m just here to help, I promise. I know this is a lot. But the point of this is just to give you a little of what you need, whether that’s a walk or a sandwich or directions to the nearest bathroom. I know that doesn’t seem super important right now, but no mission gets done without people, and no people survive without taking bathroom breaks. I understand that you don’t really trust me yet. That’s fine. But it’s also why I, right now, have to deliver information in such small packets. You’ll read ahead, even if I tell you not to, which would break the process. Just give me a chance and I’ll prove myself to you.
And don’t you feel better now that you’ve had a walk? Sorry I scared you with the trash can thing.
My brain kept trying to make this some kind of street-magician/prank-video/mind-freak thing. This seemed impossible, but it obviously wasn’t because it just kept happening. Unless it wasn’t. Unless I had a brain tumor or it was all a dream. But the smell of the bathroom didn’t seem like the kind of thing my dream mind would subject me to. I looked back down at the book.
Now that we’ve gotten you out of the house and proven that this is something you should take seriously, I’m going to ask you to do something weird. I got you two tickets to STOMP. I know it’s silly, but go, and find someone to go with you. After you’re done watching the show that David from Denver, Colorado, called “one of the best things I have ever seen!” you can start reading this book again. But until then, do not. Go see STOMP and take someone with you, because sometimes you have to be a tourist in your own town.
That’s where the text on that page ended. The temptation to turn the page and see what was next was intense. I mean, either it was just the same line repeated over and over like last time, or it really would give me a look at what was coming next. But then I noticed another thought biting at my brain. If I was going to invite someone to go see STOMP with me, who would that be?
The list of people I wanted to go see a dumb show with who were also in New York City was . . . zero people long. That actually hurt. I could ask Jason, my roommate and podcast cohost and literally my only close friend left in the city. But, also, Jason would laugh loudly and unkindly if I told him I had two tickets to STOMP and wanted him to come see it with me.
So I sat in Tompkins Square Park and I tried to think of someone . . . anyone who I knew.
When I first started getting requests to speak at universities, I asked our little crew whether they thought I should do it, and Maya said something I might as well have tattooed on the back of my hand: “Can you tell them something that will make them feel better?”
I’d like to say that it became my mantra solely because I just wanted to make people feel better, but also it felt like the only thing that would work. I wasn’t really me—famous people never are. I had to be what people expected, the sad, smart, nerdy guy who had lost his famous and charismatic best friend. I needed a brand that aligned with that.
And, to some extent, it was working. It wasn’t the way to get the most Twitter followers, but universities wanted people to give talks that were constructive. People were searching for some authority to tell them anything that made even a little bit of sense. As the grieving best friend of the missing emissary to the aliens, I guess I was an authority, and Maya’s advice gave me the angle I needed.
But being a professional grieving friend didn’t lend itself to new friendships. I also didn’t need much outside validation. A lot of the reason we look to friends is because they’re a source of meaning. If you’re getting meaning in other ways, it’s easy to let your friendships wither. That’s one reason success can be isolating. I learned that from an expert.
At least I was smart enough to not go get a fancy apartment by myself. I kept my roommate because I wanted to keep some ties to my former life. That was a tremendously good decision. Jason is irreverent, hilarious, deeply nerdy, and surprisingly unambitious. He is delighted that my fame has made our dumb podcast more successful, but I don’t think the thought has ever crossed his mind that I might be doing him a favor by not abandoning it. Slainspotting (our podcast about TV and movie deaths) is a thing I signed up to do that I like doing and that keeps me connected to something that existed before April died, before I was famous, and before there were aliens.
* * *
—
Basically, thank God for Jason, but I was not going to go see STOMP with him.
And that was where I was at, feeling like I had been barely saved from complete isolation by the nerdiest guy in New York, when I walked into Subway and asked Becky if she would like to go see STOMP with me.
* * *
—
“That was very weird and fun, Andy,” she said afterward as we were walking to the train.
“Is it Rebecca or Becky? I’m sorry I didn’t ask that sooner.”
She laughed lightly. “Either, honestly, but almost everyone except my parents and my manager calls me Bex.” The name popped out of her mouth in a way that seemed natural. It seemed like her.
“I like that. Bex, like with an x?”
“Like with an x,” she confirmed, before adding, “Are you ever going to tell me why you invited me to go see STOMP?”
“Are you going to tell me why you said yes?”
She laughed again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I felt like a total douche asking out someone who is literally paid to be nice to me, and I honestly can’t believe I did it.”
“Fair, but I’m not going to tell you why I said yes.” I couldn’t decide whether that sounded flirtatious or menacing. “So why did you ask me?”
“I told you, my friend bought tickets and couldn’t get a refund. There were two tickets and I didn’t want to go alone.”
“But it’s a big city, Andy, and you’re a famous rich guy. There are other people besides Rebecca from Subway.”
“I don’t know many people,” I replied.
“That cannot possibly be true.” There was some formality to her speech that I assumed was part of her accent or dialect but may have been her signaling to me that she was being respectful toward me as a public figure, and not knowing for sure made me worry that she wasn’t seeing me as an equal.
“I . . .”
“You don’t have to explain,” she said seriously.
“No.” I stopped walking. The sun was down, but the sidewalks were still full, so we pulled off to stand under the awning of a bodega. “I don’t know anyone anymore. I have a roommate, he’s my only friend. All of April’s friends left the city after she . . . Afterward. I haven’t spent much time in the same place since I started doing speaking gigs. Lots of people want to talk to me, but I always feel like they want something. You seemed like . . . like a person, a funny and nice person.” I didn’t say, “And cute,” because that seemed like way too much.
“This is a shitty thing to w
hine about, but, like, every time I walk up to someone, I know that they’re probably going to remember that interaction for the rest of their life. It’s too much fucking pressure. I go to these fancy places and meet fancy people, and we work very hard to impress each other, and then I go to a hotel room by myself and try not to feel as alone as I am. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun. The food is amazing. The drinks are free. It’s fucking cool. But still, you’re the first person besides my roommate who I’ve spent more than an hour with in months.”
She rolled her eyes just a little, like she was accepting something but not totally happy about it, and asked, “Do you want to get a drink?”
Like a complete dork I came back with “I’m not trying to hook up with anyone right now.”
Now she really rolled her eyes.
“Look, boy,” she said, but it didn’t feel diminishing when she said it, “it sounds like you have a lot of stuff you’d like to talk about, and I think your life sounds interesting. You took me to see that dumb show, so let me buy you a drink. I need to be home in an hour anyway, so I can’t stay out. You can tell me about your week and I’ll tell you about mine, and then we’ll probably both feel better about our lives.”
I had a seemingly sentient book in my bag that I wanted very much to take back to my apartment and read. A book that could predict the future and knew things about my maybe-not-dead best friend. But instead, I let Bex buy me a drink.
We talked for an hour, and I learned that she was born in America but her parents were from Trinidad and Tobago. Turns out that there is a small but significant Chinese population there, which she told me all about. Then somehow we got on the subject of student loans and she whipped out a pen and calculated, by hand, the total cost of her education with her working at Subway and without. I was shocked at the difference, and also at her math skills. She told me about her brothers and I told her about my constant sawing anxiety—the ever-present feeling that I was doing both too much and not enough. I explained that I felt like I never had independent thoughts of my own, I just took what other people said and applied it to new situations or meshed it with other ideas I’d heard. And then I told her that I felt like most other people weren’t really having unique thoughts either, they were all doing the same thing as me . . . but then somehow new ideas did keep happening, which made me feel like I wasn’t an individual, just a brain cell in a massive species-wide consciousness. I’d never even thought about any of those things before I started talking to her, and I felt like I was being a little self-indulgent by talking about myself so much, but it really did help.
The hour went by like it was five minutes. I walked her to her subway station, and then, in the everywhere light of the city, I read the next page in The Book of Good Times.
I’m really glad you had a good time. Two things before you can turn the next page.
1. Buy $100,000 of stock in IGRI, sell it in four days.
2. Expect a call from Miranda. Tell her she has to do it.
That was all. I closed the book without even considering flipping to the next page.
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT: CLOSED-DOOR FUNDRAISER IN DECATUR, GEORGIA
Senator William Casey: There is no secular institution or system of values that has shown any sign of being able to sustain the social order. We are being told that the Carls killed God. I am here to tell you that God killed the Carls! God put an end to that time of tumult, and we made it through not in spite of our faith but because of it. They were a test, and we have seen how many people failed that test. Did it test my faith? Absolutely. Did it break it? Never!
Those who have lost their way in the wake of that invasion have a weakness that I try not to judge. You are not forgotten. But those who say that Carl killed God, or that—and I shudder to even say it—that the Carls were God . . . those people are lost. They are just another step in the decades-long war that militant secularists, under the guise of progressivism, have waged through the mainstream media, through their movies, through academia, and now through these idols.
The only thing they want is to destroy the beauty of what we have built.
MAYA
There are a lot of self-help bros who will tell you that you need to dangle over the edge without a net to really drive achievement. I used to believe this because it has a little piece of the truth. The larger picture, of course, is that being deprived of safety tends to make people anxious, reactive, and unproductive. But it is true that having money can enable you to indulge in your worst instincts.
Ultimately, my parents were right that I was lost. Their little chat with me at dinner was supposed to start a conversation about whether I might move back home. But it served a different purpose: It convinced me that I needed to prove them wrong. I needed to prove everyone wrong, and I wasn’t going to lie in my bed waiting for clues to pop up on the Som anymore. I needed to get into the world and start doing my own investigation. So I put my newly acquired pot of dirt in the passenger seat of my rented Nissan Frontier, buckled it in, and drove to Trenton. There were three main New Jersey–based weird things that seemed worthy of investigation:
1. A bunch of dolphins swam up the Delaware River and died just outside of Trenton.
2. There were the lab break-ins, one of which was in Trenton (all of the others were fairly nearby).
3. There was an area in South Jersey where the internet service provider couldn’t seem to make the internet work for more than a couple days at a time.
All of these things were tiny news stories, and the theories on the Som roamed across the whole world, but they were the mysteries that felt most real to me.
I hate writing this because my dad is going to read it, but having a parent who is always a little bit disappointed in you isn’t ever going to be healthy. The question is whether it is an unhealthy weight that I have to struggle with or an unhealthy fuel that can actually propel me. It’s been both of those things in my life, and right now, it was fuel.
I did some wild stuff in those weeks. I literally infiltrated the New Jersey Animal Health Diagnostic Lab and got a source to tell me a bunch of stuff about dolphins. How? I mean, it sounds cooler than it is. I just pretended I was researching a book. It turns out that dolphin autopsies aren’t actually super confidential, and the people who do them don’t get a ton of opportunity to talk about their work.
But the only pertinent information I actually got from those conversations was that they had no idea why a bunch of dolphins swam up the Delaware River and died. They all starved, like maybe they were afraid to go back downstream.
For those of you not intimately familiar with the Delaware River, it forms the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey and then the border between Delaware and New Jersey before dumping into Delaware Bay. My theory was that something had happened in the bay or the river that forced the dolphins north and either prevented them from traveling south or convinced them that it was better to starve than face it again.
And if there was something downstream that they were afraid of, well, I wanted to find it. And, by chance or not, downstream of Trenton, where the dolphins had died, was a little town called Wolton. A town where the internet had stopped.
Oh, Wolton. Going to Trenton I could get my mind around, but I am a rich girl from the Upper East Side and I was not accustomed to small-town life. I’d gotten an Airbnb on short notice, which I considered a blessing both because there weren’t many and because I wouldn’t have been shocked to get profiled out. The cabin fronted a winding little road, and across that street was a tangle of trees and bushes and vines. That same tangle was out back and on either side of the house. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the US, and still, the first week I was there, I walked into the woods just to see what it was like, and within twenty minutes I was panicking that I wouldn’t be able to find my way out.
Wolton was a ten-minute drive from the cabin, but there wasn’t
much to see there unless you were into quilts or antiques or golf. I was following a lead that seemed increasingly flimsy. The internet in South Jersey was spotty. Some days customers’ internet would be unusably slow, other days it would be back to normal, and the next day there would be no connection at all. This had been going on long enough that it was news, and that news had been picked up by the Som as another example of something weird going on near Philly.
* * *
—
I arrived in town before my Airbnb check-in, so my first stop was the Dream Bean. It was a very normal coffee shop except that, on every flat surface, there was ancient-Egypt kitsch. There was even an area in the corner that sold . . . antiques? They were antiques from a time when America was super into King Tut and the Sphinx. They weren’t from Egypt; they were some designed-in-Jersey, made-in-Ohio anglicized approximations of the ancient-Egypt aesthetic.
It wasn’t like the chairs were painted with Cleopatra and mummies. The coffee shop just looked like a coffee shop with lots of Egypt-inspired knickknacks.
Ultimately, I wanted two things out of this visit: intel on the internet outages and coffee. I was greeted by a sleepy-looking thirty-something guy who was about a month overdue for a haircut. His smile shone through his grogginess as he asked how I was doing.
“Good. How’s business?” It didn’t look great, but there were a couple customers sipping lattes with plates that had once sported bagels or croissants but now sported crumbs. I couldn’t imagine rent in the tiny building was that much.
“What’s life without coffee?” he asked in response.
“I hear that.” And then I spotted a spinning stand of reading glasses on the counter. “Oh, and can I also get . . . reading glasses? At a coffee shop?”