An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  Mr. Skampt didn’t look extremely pleased about this but conceded, “We don’t think it would be wise to involve anyone else at this point.”

  “So you officially have an employee. They make your life easier, but only if you use them. If you are not telling him to get you coffee at least once per day, he will literally feel offended. He is there for you, you need him, and he wants to help.”

  “Does Robin know any of this?” I asked.

  Jennifer Putnam picked up her phone and hit a button.

  “Robin, can you come in for a moment?

  Ten seconds later he was in the room.

  “Yes, Mrs. Putnam?”

  “How would you feel about working for Ms. May?”

  “I would be honored.” He even gave a little bow.

  “You would be what?!” I replied. People don’t talk like that!

  “Ms. May, I’ve known you for a very short period of time, but you appear to be strong, proud, and driven by good values. More than that, however, you are at the very center of history. If this is real, people will remember it for a very, very long time. I would not”—he paused—“mind being a part of that.”

  I would also not mind him being a part of it. He seemed really nice, significantly less skeezy than Putnam, and roughly my age, which made it less weird to think about him working for me. The only problem with this was that Robin was . . . attractive.

  He was cute enough that Maya would immediately know how attractive I found him. And he was going to be my assistant! This guy would be all up inside of my everything. Phrasing, April! He would be . . . very involved in my life. But you can’t not hire someone because they’re too cute. Can you? That definitely sounds illegal. So there it was. I had an assistant.

  “Well, thanks, Robin, it’s a pleasure to both meet and employ you. Please help me. I feel as if every page of unread emails removes a year from my life-span. With the following words I give you the power to save or destroy me: My password is ‘donkeyfart.’”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  We were finally free from the agency at around 7 P.M. The sane thing would have been to go to the hotel, get some sleep, and make a careful plan for the morning. But we were (or, rather, I was) high on caffeine and feeling invincible. I’d already set up evening plans to visit (and maybe experiment on) Hollywood Carl with Miranda the night before. Going to the hotel seemed ludicrous. Later, Andy would describe it to me this way: “Carl just had too much mass—we couldn’t stop falling into his gravity any more than we could jump to the moon.”

  So we fell.

  I assumed we were going to take a Lyft, but Robin seemed to think that would have been a personal insult to him, and also, it wasn’t precisely secure to make a video about secret space aliens in a stranger’s car, so with Robin driving, we got to film on the way.

  I sat in the front seat with the camera. The video starts with me recording myself.

  “Hello, and welcome to Robin’s car. This is Robin.” I turn the camera to Robin, who waves, teeth gleaming. “We have news. Several days ago, Andy and I”—I turn the camera to Andy, who waves—“discovered what we have come to call the Freddie Mercury Sequence. This is a cascade of changes that occur if you attempt to correct typos on the Wikipedia page for Queen’s hit song ‘Don’t Stop Me Now.’

  “The meaning of these changes remains something of a mystery. However, thanks to the help of a materials scientist from UC Berkeley, we now believe that we have decoded the sequence. We are headed to Hollywood Boulevard now to meet that scientist and to test a little theory.”

  Here in the final video, we cut to a screenshot of the Wikipedia page and some voice-over of me talking about the sequence, how we discovered it, and Miranda’s later discovery that the citation numbers also changed, and that those numbers corresponded to chemical elements.

  Miranda was sitting on the curb of the CVS on Hollywood Boulevard when Robin dropped us off. The moment she saw us, she popped to her feet and ran over to give me a hug.

  “This is so cool!”

  “It is not not cool!”

  She was a little taller than I expected her to be because of how she was not exactly average height. I’m short—I barely came up to her collarbone when she hugged me. It wasn’t one of those A-frame hugs either. She smushed our bodies together like I’d known her from kindergarten. Her bright eyes were glinting with excitement. Miranda is a bit older than me, but she looks a little younger. Seeing her was another flood of reality. This was happening. We were going to visit Carl, to give him materials to see what would happen. We were really doing it.

  “I’m sorry, was that too much hug?” She looked worried.

  “No, that was a perfect amount of hug.” She smiled at me, looking like she didn’t quite believe it and would later be chastising herself for her enthusiasm.

  “I got some smoke detectors this morning. They don’t make it easy to get the americium out, so I’m glad I did it back at the lab.” She pulled a box out of her purse and opened it to show a small vial with a couple of silvery metal strips inside.

  Andy came from around the other side of the car as Robin drove away to find parking. “Glad you got it out,” he told her, “but let’s go buy another one so we can show where we got it from.”

  “Oh!” Miranda’s excitement mingled a tiny bit with embarrassment. “I wasn’t thinking about the video! Oh, this is so cool! Am I going to be in it?”

  “If that’s OK with you,” Andy said.

  He took some establishing shots of the outside of the CVS and then we recorded a quick intro with Miranda.

  “We have arrived at the CVS just a block away from Hollywood Carl with Miranda Beckwith, the materials scientist who solved the Freddie Mercury Sequence. What are we doing here, Miranda?”

  “We’re buying smoke detectors.”

  “That seems like a really weird thing to be doing.”

  “This is not a normal day!” Her excitement was fantastic on film.

  “And why are we buying smoke detectors?”

  “To me, the sequence is pretty clear,” Miranda began. “Carl is asking for supplies. And one of those supplies is americium, which is a fairly rare element, but it is used in some commercial products as a source of alpha particles.” She had deftly avoided using the word “radioactive.”

  “Do I need to know what that means?”

  “Not really, no. It’s interesting, though. Maybe we’ll put an explanation in the description. All that’s important is that, inside of this smoke detector”—she held up the box—“is about one five-thousandth of a gram of americium.”

  “Is that going to be enough?”

  “Oh, I have no idea! It depends on what Carl wants it for. If he needs it for a catalytic reaction, any amount will probably do. If he needs it to actually construct something, no, this will probably not be enough.”

  “Do I need to know what that means?”

  Miranda looked into the lens. “More information in the video’s description. Also don’t forget to subscribe!”

  * * *

  —

  The placement of the Carls was, of course, a topic of considerable discussion. They were impossible to move, and they invariably showed up in urban areas where they wouldn’t go unnoticed. But in every city, their locations seemed nonrandom but also not consistent. For example, they all showed up on a sidewalk, but the part of town they were in was random. Oakland Carl was the only Carl in the San Francisco Bay Area, and San Franciscans were, frankly, offended. Manhattan is a city of somewhat uniform interestingness. New York Carl showed up on a well-trafficked street, but most streets in Manhattan have heavy pedestrian traffic. It’s not like he showed up on Fifth Avenue, Times Square, or Madison Avenue. There was nothing particularly special about New York Carl’s spot in front of a Chipotle.

  Hollywood Carl, on the other hand, showed up in front of Gr
auman’s Chinese Theatre on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the city’s major tourist spots and probably the most heavily trafficked pedestrian spot in LA. Not only that, but it’s a place frequented by street performers and phony costumed superheroes charging twenty dollars per photo.

  Knowing all this about Hollywood Boulevard and America’s obsession with fame, I should not have been so surprised when we walked down to the theater and found a line stretching from Carl off so deep into the distance that it might as well have been infinite.

  This was, after all, a real-life Carl! People come to the Walk of Fame to get their picture taken with a celebrity’s star or their handprints in the cement. These people are the most likely folks in the world to want something for the scrapbook. The theater had even set up some lights so the Carl was more visible for nighttime photographs. They shone harshly on his shiny bits. I don’t know why we hadn’t assumed that there would be a line, but there it was.

  “Oh lord,” Andy said.

  “Are we going to wait in that?” I replied.

  The three of us began to wander down the line, trying to see the end. Eventually, I caved and just walked up to a young woman who was twenty or so people back in the line and asked, “How long have you been waiting?”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth became a perfect circle. “OH. MY. GOD,” she said, with equal and emphatic weight on every syllable. And then she turned to a friend. “OHMIGAHD ALISON ALISON, IT’S APRIL MAY! APRIL! OHMIGAHD!”

  Miranda and Andy just stared.

  Every culture has its ways of turning strangers into acquaintances. We don’t really think about these procedures; they just exist. And this process almost always begins either by telling someone your name or by having some third party introduce you. Which is why I replied to someone who had just yelled my own name at me by telling them what my name was.

  “Hey, uhh, yeah, hi. It’s nice to meet you, I’m April,” I said.

  “OF COURSE YOU’RE APRIL!” the woman replied.

  It may be worth saying that usually the second party in the stranger-to-stranger introduction responds to your telling them your name by telling you theirs. And yet this had not happened, which made the conversation even more difficult to have.

  I would eventually get used to all this, but at the moment, as the cultural systems for stranger-to-stranger conversation had completely broken down, I had no idea what to say.

  Robin appeared out of nowhere, apparently having found a parking spot.

  “Do you want to get a picture with April?” He sounded calm and kind and like he really cared.

  And then there was much fumbling for cameras and, oh, actually that was a video, and can you take one with me and with Alison and then one with us both? And, oh, Alison’s phone is out of space, and don’t worry we’ll just take it on my phone and I’ll text it to you later, and then it was done.

  Suddenly there was a hubbub and everyone around us was aware that someone famous had showed up. I got the feeling that, even if they hadn’t known who I was, every person in that line would have wanted a picture. And Alison and her friends were not like the high school group at LAX; they were freaking out.

  The good news was that:

  Everyone else nearby in the line also wanted a picture. And . . .

  We had now effectively cut in line and were only twenty people back, but nobody was complaining.

  We were saved by the existing line. No one wanted to get out of the Carl line they’d been waiting in. Otherwise, I would have been completely encircled and someone may have needed to call the cops.

  Luckily, we were able to selfie our way to the front of the line and it only took about five minutes. Once we were up there, Andy (who had been filming much of my fan interaction) made an announcement to everyone within earshot.

  “We’ll now be making a quick video with Hollywood Carl here. It will only take a few minutes and April will be available to take pictures for a few minutes afterward. Thank you all for your patience!”

  Everyone seemed thrilled.

  And with that, we resumed the video with both Miranda and me on-screen. I look almost comically short beside her long, thin body, but Carl’s chest isn’t even in the frame since he’s ten feet tall. In the background, spectators are gathering around to watch us film, and behind them, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

  “The line of adoring Carl fans has graciously allowed us to cut”—a clip of the line showed over this—“so that we can get down to the business of giving Carl a little of what he asked for. Miranda, we believe that Carl asked for three chemical elements, right?”

  “Yes,” Miranda chimed in, confident and on cue. “Isotopes of iodine, americium, and uranium. We have iodine, which can be found in any number of products. I have secured lab-grade, purified iodine crystals and americium, which we carefully and properly extracted from a household smoke detector.”

  She had done this with pliers and wire cutters.

  “And is that americium safe?”

  “Not really, no. If you were to ingest it, you might die. Just to be safe, I’m wearing gloves. Definitely don’t eat this stuff, though.”

  “I will keep that in mind.”

  “We decided, however, that we would not attempt to secure any uranium for Carl. Though nonpurified uranium is safe and available for purchase, it seemed a bit much for this initial experiment.”

  “What do you think will happen, Miranda?” I asked.

  “Uh, I have no idea?” She seemed surprised that I was asking her nonscientific questions.

  “What do you hope will happen?”

  “That’s not really how I think about things. In science, you’re not supposed to hope, you experiment and observe. But if anything, I guess I just hope that something happens.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Let’s start with the iodine—put on your gloves.”

  I put my gloves on. I’ll be honest: The realization that we were actually doing this, and what it could result in, never really struck me. We just did it. Like Andy said, we were falling into Carl’s gravity. I was making decisions, pretty stupid ones, but it didn’t feel like that for me in the moment.

  “Is iodine dangerous?”

  “No, it’s actually used as a nutritional supplement—they put it in salt to prevent goiters. It’s also used as a catalyst in organic chemical reactions, which is, if I had to guess, why Carl wants it.”

  Miranda shook a tiny, silvery-looking flake out of a vial into my outstretched hand. I then held that hand out to Carl.

  Andy pulled out into a wide shot to show me, barely breaking five feet, holding my latex-gloved hand out to this ten-foot-tall Transformer. I look pretty much exactly like a confused monkey trying to make peace with a superior life-form.

  Nothing happened, of course.

  “Try direct contact,” Miranda said.

  “Cut,” Andy said, “I want to get in close on this.”

  Andy moved in to film me pinching the flake of iodine out of the palm of my left hand, and then, without any visible sign of the fear and anticipation that was shooting through my body, I reached out to press it onto the back of Carl’s right hand.

  Heat, I felt heat. And then suddenly I was light-headed and nauseated.

  “Ohhhnnnnn . . .” I said, staggering slightly.

  Suddenly, Robin appeared from nowhere at my side.

  “April, are you OK?” Andy said from behind the camera. Everyone suddenly looked quite scared, maybe realizing that we in fact had no idea what we were doing.

  But then the feeling passed.

  “Yes,” I said, shaking my head. “Yeah, I think . . . I think I felt my finger get warm. And then I felt light-headed for a moment.” I looked down at my hand. The flake of iodine was gone.

  Whether any of that had actually happened or I had just
imagined it was immediately unclear to me. There were a lot of reasons for me to be feeling light-headed right then, and the sensation of warmth through a latex glove isn’t exactly a precise, measurable phenomenon. And it was a tiny flake—I might have just dropped it.

  Miranda immediately attempted the same with her own flake of iodine and reported that nothing happened. Of course, we cut that from the video because . . . boring.

  We talked for a little bit about whether we should continue. I felt totally normal by this point, and the fact that Miranda hadn’t felt anything made me think maybe I hadn’t either.

  So the next line in the video is Miranda saying, “Well, I call those results inconclusive, April May. Would you like to try the americium?”

  “Seems like the thing to do!”

  “This little strip of metal”—Miranda held it up for the audience to see—“contains a tiny, tiny fraction of a gram of americium, a radioactive metal produced as part of the decay cycle of plutonium. April, would you like to see if Carl is interested in it?”

  Again, I took the strip in my latex-gloved hand and pressed it firmly to the back of Carl’s hand.

  “I think I feel a little warmth again, no dizziness.” I pulled my hand back, but the little strip of metal was still there.

  “The strip didn’t disappear like the iodine did,” I reported more to Miranda than to the camera.

  “The strip is not pure americium, so there was bound to be stuff left over.”

  “I should have had someone else do it so you could have felt the warmth to make sure I wasn’t imagining it,” I said.

  “That would have been a slightly better experimental design, yes,” Miranda replied. “But, honestly, this entire thing has been a travesty of science. Nothing about what we did today would even be considered for peer review.”