by Hank Green
“Why did you give him that stupid name?” she asked, exasperated.
“You know about Carl.” It wasn’t a question anymore.
“I know about Carl—”
“Has Andy been bugging you?” I cut in before she could continue, annoyed that he couldn’t leave it until morning. Or, rather, late afternoon.
“Don’t interrupt, I let you sleep,” she demanded. “Andy has been calling all day and he is freaking out and he needs you to check your email. In there, you’ll find a number of important things to read, including several messages from local news stations and entertainment agents and managers. I don’t think this is the kind of thing you want to ignore, but I also don’t think it’s something to rush.”
Maya was the most effective talker I knew. It was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America.
“Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,” she told me one night after it was too late to still be talking, “and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.”
I never had any idea what to say when she talked about this stuff. I’m white and I was raised in a very white community. So I just said the thing that I’d heard you should say in situations like this: “That sounds really hard.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Everybody has their hard parts. Thanks.”
“God, I hope you don’t feel like you have to represent all black people with me,” I said. “I hope you’re not, like, careful all the time.”
“No, April.” And then it was a long time before she continued. “I’m careful with you for different reasons.”
I was too afraid to ask what that meant, so I kissed her and then we went to sleep.
In any case, Maya’s efficiency of speech was extremely helpful in the maintenance of a relationship that I was subconsciously keeping on the knife-edge between casual and serious. She was capable of talking with her eyes and her body, but she mostly chose to use her mouth. I didn’t mind this.
“Maya,” is as far as I got before she put her index finger softly on my lips.
I said, through her finger, “Uh . . . are we gonna make out now?”
“No, you’re going to drink your coffee and check your email and not talk again to me or anyone else until you’ve brushed your teeth because your mouth smells like trillions of microorganisms. I have taken away your phone, you can have it back when you’re done with your email.”
She stood up off the bed without so much as a kiss.
“But I—”
She drowned me out as she walked to the doorway: “Stop talking! Read!” She closed the door.
Ten minutes later I was freshened up a little bit, sitting on the bed with my laptop. Read messages were blue, unread messages were white—“Important and Unread” was white for five pages. I had no idea what to do so I just searched for “[email protected]” and that cleared things up pretty quickly. One of the fifteen messages he had sent me was titled “READ THIS ONE FIRST” and another was titled “READ THIS ONE SECOND” and a third, more recent email was titled “NO! THIS ONE! READ THIS ONE FIRST!”
Here they are, copied and pasted straight out of my inbox.
NO! THIS ONE! READ THIS ONE FIRST!
I’m sorry all of the emails I have sent today sound as if they were written in a demented frenzy. I value our friendship. Let’s try and keep that front of mind.
Andy
READ THIS ONE FIRST
OK, so, whoa. I’m going to give you a quick rundown of everything that has happened in the last six hours. This is everything that isn’t conjecture. Carl didn’t just show up in New York, there’s one in pretty much every city on Earth. There are at least sixty Carls, photos of Carls are popping up everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires. People just stumbled across them, like we did, and people around the world have posted photos and videos on social media, yet somehow ours is the one that’s taken off. It has to be some kind of international street art project and you (we?) basically got the scoop. All of them went up without anyone seeing the installers and no one can find any surveillance footage. I’m sure they will eventually but they don’t have anything yet.
Everyone is calling them “Carls” because they didn’t have anything else to call them. It’s not like there’s an artist statement on foamcore glued to the sidewalk next to them. They’re playing our video on the news (without permission, I’ll add). Several news outlets have contacted me to talk about it. The video has already had more than a MILLION VIEWS! People love you!
Don’t read the comments.
I’ve already been back to Carl with a nicer camera to take some daytime footage. I got there before the crowds did, but it’s wild out there now. He’s a freaking tourist attraction!
I haven’t slept since you called me. I feel like a small dog is eating my eyeballs from the inside!
Andy
READ THIS SECOND
Hey, so did you know that my dad is a lawyer? Um . . . this is weird but, like, “our” video has gotten a million views already and it’s actually made some money and we need to figure out how to split it.
However, since I don’t think there’s any way to figure out exactly who contributed what to this video, and it’s safe to say that neither of us would have made it if it weren’t for the other, I am proposing a 50/50 split on the ownership of the video. I would also like to propose a 50/50 split on the ownership of my YouTube channel “Skamper2001,” which I named when I was eleven and am going to regret for literally the rest of my life. Final proposal . . . we should collaborate on future videos about Carl(s), but we can talk about that later.
I had my dad draw up a contract that says that we each own 50% of the video and are entitled to 50% of the revenue from it. It basically also means that I can’t do anything with the content without your approval, and you can’t do anything without my approval. I know this is dumb, but he’s a lawyer, and this is what they do. He would also like for me to propose to you that he represent you as your lawyer when we sue all of the major networks for using our video without permission. I told him to cool his jets, so his jets are currently on ice.
Just so you know, the video has, thus far, earned about $2000. So, basically, we’re rich.
Andy
A quick read through the rest of my inbox made me kinda wish I hadn’t listed my email on my portfolio website. There indeed were a bunch from entertainment managers and agents. Some people wanted me to know how much they liked my video. Some wanted me to know that, if I was going to be in a YouTube video, there were a number of things I could have done to improve my physical appearance and, really, why hadn’t I done that?
There was one that was very clearly creepier than the rest of the normal creepiness. It is amazing how disconcerting a single vile, manipulative person can be even if you have never and (hopefully) will never see them. The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing. This was not the first time someone had made me feel this way, but it was the first time it had happened through the internet, and it was enough to make me want to withdraw from the whole thing for a moment. Just a moment, though.
There was a message from my dad. (Really, both my parents—they did this adorable tag team email thing. I swear they sat next to each other on the couch and wrote emails like it was a three-way call. They should make special tablets with two keyboards just for them.) It was sent like a long text message about how they thought the video was great and I sure looked tired an
d they couldn’t wait to see me at Tom’s wedding and was I getting enough sleep?
The only message that is long-term important in the story was one titled “You said it was warm?” I’ll just copy it directly for you.
You said it was warm?
Ms. May,
My name is Miranda Beckwith, I’m a graduate student in materials science at UC Berkeley. I watched your video this morning and found it both entertaining and fascinating. I was particularly interested when you referred to “Carl” as “slightly warm.” Of course, I’m sure your life is ridiculous right now, but knowing a bit about materials, and having seen Carl, it’s unusual for something that seems so heavy and shiny to not have a low thermal conductivity.
Basically, Carl looks like he’s made of a metal, but it’s January in New York, so my guess is it’s quite cold and metal at ambient temperature would have felt very cold. Initial reports are that these things are super heavy, so it doesn’t make sense that they would be made out of coated plastic. I have no idea what else would not feel very cold to the touch but also be heavy and shiny.
Unless he actually felt warm, in which case there is likely some kind of power source inside of him keeping him warm.
There’s a Carl here in the Bay Area, but it’s looking less and less likely that I’ll be getting my hands on him, so I was just wondering if you could satisfy my curiosity. Was Carl warm like touching Styrofoam would be warm? Or was he warm like touching a mug full of coffee would be warm?
Did you notice anything else about him that would help with this mystery?
Thank you for your time and I totally understand if you’re not able to get back to me.
Miranda
That was the only email I responded to that day.
RE: You said it was warm?
Miranda,
Thanks for your message! On the list of peculiar things about Carl, this didn’t really stand out, but now that you mention it, it was super weird. He didn’t feel warm, he just didn’t feel like a temperature. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it without the prompt, but it was very much like hard, smooth Styrofoam. Like he didn’t have heat, but all of my hand heat stayed in my hand when I touched him. I did actually give him a good whack with my knuckles and it was like a *thunk* followed by a faint low hum. It didn’t give at all. It was like knocking on a painted brick wall.
I imagine I’ll have a pretty hard time getting up close with NY Carl again too, so I probably won’t be able to be of much further help. Sounds like whoever did this is going above and beyond in the weirdness category.
April
With that, I considered myself done enough.
“MAYA! Phone, please!”
“This is super weird, right?!” she shouted back unseen, before coming into her room.
“So what’s the damage?” I asked, gesturing to the phone.
“Um . . . you are suddenly extremely popular. Andy would like to talk. He would like to talk a lot. He would like to talk for at least four years. Your parents also called.”
I called my parents—they were fine, if a little stressed. My slightly older, very successful, extremely normal brother, Tom, was getting married in Northern California in a few months and they were helping with a lot of the planning. Tom had studied math and worked at an investment bank in San Francisco. I kept expecting him to move to New York with all the other investment bankers, but he wasn’t doing it.
I want to be very clear that whatever hang-ups I have are 100 percent mine. I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child. My parents have always been supportive and without expectations, which is pretty much all a kid can ask for. So we talked about Carl and about Tom and about how much they loved Tom’s fiancée and how smooth the planning was going, even if it was still a lot of work. They wanted to know what I knew about Carl, so I told them a bunch of stuff they mostly already knew. They asked about work and hinted that they could give me some money if I needed it, which they always did and I always ignored. They loved the video, and they were proud of me. For what? Who knows. Parents, right?
I called Andy, who sounded . . . unstable.
“APRIL MAY THIS IS GETTING REALLY WEIRD!”
I winced away from the phone. “You’re going to need to be calm with me right now.”
“The video has had three million views now, people think you’re fantastic! You aren’t reading the comments, right?”
“I haven’t actually watched the video yet.”
“You’re, like, the only person who has not seen it. The story just keeps getting weirder. They still haven’t found any surveillance footage. There’s a camera that shows the spot pretty clearly, but at 2:43 A.M. it just cuts out . . . records nothing for five minutes, and when it comes back Carl is just standing there. Military analysts say it’s possible that an EMP knocked out all the local electricity for EVERY CARL while they were being installed and they were all installed at the exact same time. The thing that makes this weirder is that the static that the security cameras recorded wasn’t random. The cameras that were recording audio—every one that the news has gotten their hands on has an undertone of static that is very clearly, if you turn it up loud enough, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen.”
“I love that song.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, why?”
“No, I’d just never even heard of it. But, yeah, if you listen, it’s there. No one knows how it could have gotten there . . . some extremely high-energy radio pulse, maybe?”
“Yeah, this is super weird, but, Andy, it doesn’t really have much to do with us, does it? I mean, we made the video, I’m happy to say that we spotted the New York Carl—”
“Just ‘New York Carl,’” he interrupted.
“What?”
“New York Carl, that’s the one in New York’s name. Not ‘the New York Carl.’ Everyone is calling it New York Carl and the one in Mumbai is Mumbai Carl and there’s Hong Kong Carl and São Paulo Carl. Even people who don’t speak English are calling their Carls Carl.”
“You being picky about nomenclature is not changing my point . . . We didn’t make Carl, we just found him. Not even . . . we found like one-sixtieth of him.”
“I made this point to my dad, he babbled for like ten minutes about narrative and memetic diffusion and cultural mythology, and he totally convinced me with an argument that I am completely incapable of repeating. Which brings me to the most salient point . . . I just made ten thousand dollars.”
There was a long pause, and then I finally said, “Um . . . neat?”
“News stations would very much like to interview you, but they took me instead because I’m the best they could do at the moment. Pundits and experts are blabbing about Carl for about five minutes every hour, but there’s only so much they can say to keep it interesting. They can’t interview Carl, but they can interview you. My dad says he can get us a ten-thousand-dollar licensing deal with all the major networks if you agree to do interviews.”
“Wait . . . total? Or per network?”
“Per network! They’re totally fucked because they already ran the footage. Dad has them by the balls.”
My head wasn’t working super fast, but I did recognize that $10,000 multiplied by the number of news networks I could think of would eliminate a sizable portion of my student loans. I could quit my shit job. I could have time in the evenings to do things that were my idea.
“I would have to go on TV?”
“You would get to go on TV!”
“What am I supposed to say on TV?”
“You just answer their questions!”
“Do I have to do my hair?”
“April May, it’s gonna be like fifty thousand dollars.”
“OK, fine, I’m in.”
* * *
—
Within the next thirty minutes
, I had two network news interviews scheduled for that day, and, figuring that I should probably have something worth saying, Maya and I spent the hours I had free before I had to head downtown reading everything we could about Carl. It wasn’t much—Andy had caught me up pretty thoroughly. I was a little bit terrified about going on the news and honestly had no idea what I was supposed to say. “I saw this thing, it was cool, I don’t know what it is, my friend and I made a video”—that’s like nineteen seconds. Doesn’t seem worth precisely $10,000, but I didn’t know how TV worked. Turns out, they mostly just wanted to keep using the footage that they’d already stolen from us without getting sued.
I ended up on the Wikipedia page for “Don’t Stop Me Now,” the barely audible song that bizarrely showed up on all the static-filled security camera footage of areas where Carls had appeared.
“Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 album Jazz that was released as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in August 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.
Weird, I thought, typos like “wrtten” don’t usually make it into Wikipedia. But, being the good steward of the internet that I was, I edited the page, fixing the typo, then went back and reloaded the page.
“Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 album Jazz that was relesed as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in August 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.
“Hey, Maya, can you bring up the Wikipedia page for ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’?”
“Yah.”
“Do you see any typos?”
“Uhh . . . two in the first paragraph.”
“Two?”
“Yeah, ‘released’ and ‘written’ are both spelled wrong.”
“Fix them.”
“Um, yes, master?”
“Just do it, something is weird.”