An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

by Hank Green

  God, I was an idiot.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Most attributes a person has are, at least in some way, defined by them. They are good at soccer, they are funny, they know a lot about the history of Rome, they have blond hair. Some of these things are things that person worked for, some are just things that they just happen to have, but they are all characteristics of the person.

  Fame is not this way.

  Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you’re a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you.

  That’s what fame is like.

  You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes say that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don’t get to decide if we are beautiful. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I’m attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can see my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like.

  Fame is not this way.

  A person’s fame is in everyone’s head except their own. You could be checking into your flight at the airport and 999 people will see you as just another face in the crowd. The thousandth might think you’re more famous than Jesus.

  As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because they think you’re attractive or because you went to college with them or because they’ve been watching your videos or listening to your music or reading about you in magazines for years. You never know if they know you and love you. Worse, you never know if they know you and hate you.

  And while I can look in the mirror and know that I’m good-looking, you can never really know that you are famous because fame is not applied equally by all. You fall somewhere different on a broad spectrum with every person you encounter.

  Though, weirdly, there comes a point at which you are famous enough that it will no longer matter whether someone has ever heard of you for them to think you’re famous. Just learning that you are famous is enough for them to care, to be interested, to want a photo, an autograph, a piece of who you are.

  I remember when I was in middle school, I was at the airport and I saw people taking pictures with a guy who definitely looked famous. He had big sunglasses and a ton of sparkly rings and two watches. I went and got a photo with him as well. I later learned that he was a music producer and had rapped on a couple of Lil Wayne tracks. I didn’t even really know who Lil Wayne was.

  I’ve had the opportunity to do more thinking about fame than most people, but fame isn’t some monolithic thing; it isn’t the same for the local weatherman as it is for Angelina Jolie. So let’s talk a little about April May’s theory of tiered fame.

  Tier 1: Popularity

  You are a big deal in your high school or neighborhood. You have a peculiar vehicle that people around town recognize, you are a pastor at a medium-to-large church, you were once the star of the high school football team.

  Tier 2: Notoriety

  You are recognized and/or well-known within certain circles. Maybe you’re a preeminent lepidopterist whom all the other lepidopterists idolize. Or you could be the mayor or meteorologist in a medium-sized city. You might be one of the 1.1 million living people who has a Wikipedia page.

  Tier 3: Working-Class Fame

  A lot of people know who you are and they are distributed around the world. There’s a good chance that a stranger will approach you to say hi at the grocery store. You are a professional sports player, musician, author, actor, television host, or internet personality. You might still have to hustle to make a living, but your fame is your job. You’ll probably trend on Twitter if you die.

  Tier 4: True Fame

  You get recognized by fans enough that it is a legitimate burden. People take pictures of you without your permission, and no one would scoff if you called yourself a celebrity. When you start dating someone, you wouldn’t be surprised to read about it in magazines. You are a performer, politician, host, or actor whom the majority of people in your country would recognize. Your humanity is so degraded that people are legitimately surprised when they find out that you’re “just like them” because, sometimes, you buy food. You never have to worry about money again, but you do need a gate with an intercom on your driveway.

  Tier 5: Divinity

  You are known by every person in your world, and you are such a big deal that they no longer consider you a person. Your story is much larger than can be contained within any human lifetime, and your memory will continue long after your earthly form wastes away. You are a founding father of a nation, a creator of a religion, an emperor, or an idea. You are not currently alive.

  If you look closely at this scale, you might notice that there are two different qualities built into every level of fame: First, the number of people who know who you are. Second, the average level of devotion those people have to you. Cult leaders have Tier 5 levels of devotion but Tier 1 audience size. Thinking of fame in this way has really helped me come to grips with what being famous means, understand where I am at on the scale, and decide what to do about it.

  * * *

  —

  In the weeks after Andy and I uploaded the first New York Carl video, I had squeaked my way into Tier 3 fame. New Yorkers mostly ignored me still, but I’d do selfies if I was close to touristy spots. I had a woman walk up to me and start talking to me like we were friends. After about five minutes I was like, “Do we know each other?” Turns out she just assumed we did because she recognized me and was trying to keep things from getting awkward by telling me about her kids’ new school.

  Wrong strategy, by the way.

  I was making more money than I knew what to do with, but not enough to, like, buy a nice home in New York or LA. And my placement was precarious. Due to the enormity of the Carl story, I would probably always have some revenue from that first video to live off of, but in the time before we visited Hollywood Carl, I could already feel myself dropping quickly to notoriety. Soon, only die-hard fans or, worse, historians would care, while everyone else would vaguely remember that I was once . . . something?

  The Hollywood Carl video changed this, bumping me solidly into Tier 4. And there is a big difference between Tier 3 and Tier 4. If I had to guess, including bands, artists, authors, politicians, hosts, actors, etc., there are probably thirty thousand Tier 3 famous people in America. At any given time, there are probably fewer than five hundred Tier 4 celebrities.

  This was when things started moving fast.

  I stopped being some weird anomaly, and I became a part of the story in a very different way. From then on, if I wanted to be on a TV show, Jennifer Putnam could make it happen. I was expected to have opinions, and I had plenty. The Magic Castle became an epicenter of Carl conspiracies, but I was a bigger epicenter. The castle had to drop the illusion for a while and let investigators in, but no one ever found the hand (rather, no one told people when they found it). But I was a person; the FBI couldn’t come search me unless there was a crime, and there weren’t a lot of laws about this kind of thing. We kept expecting to hear from someone official, but we didn’t.

  Instead, Robin was in my email getting requests from news agencies all over the world to repost the video. They knew not to do it without asking now. He was pulling in $5K, $10K, $25K per license. He was putting together a media tour, but he didn’t want me to do it until there was something we
could be promoting, ideally preorders for a book that I would someday have time to write.

  The comments on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter instantly switched from a small, friendly, supportive community to a selection of the loudest, most over-the-top opinions one could imagine. I was a traitor to my species. I was ultra-fuckable. I was a space alien. I was an ultra-fuckable space alien. And so on.

  This is going to sound awful, but the breakup with Maya was great timing. That night I went with Andy to visit New York Carl. Everyone there recognized us, so we again got to skip the line and take selfies with people. But now, people were taking photographs of me even when they weren’t in them. I felt a bit self-conscious, like I should have been more careful with my makeup that morning (I was a person who never left the house without makeup). But Andy didn’t have any problem setting up and filming a bunch of close-ups of the crowd and of Carl for the archive while I kept the crowd distracted.

  I had an inkling that we weren’t going to have unencumbered access to the Carls for much longer, so I wanted to get as much footage in the can as we could get.

  “Are you OK?” Andy asked when we got back to his place to import the footage.

  “Huh?”

  “Well, I can’t help but notice that you didn’t go home, and also that you don’t seem to be talking to Maya?”

  “Oh, yeah, we broke up.” These words came out like old, warm soda. “I’m getting a new place on 23rd.”

  He looked at me like he was surprised, and then like he wasn’t.

  “And then you just went out with me to film Carl and take like a thousand selfies with strangers and you were just fine?”

  “I mean, I guess?” I was keeping my brain from going to the bad place.

  “Does it get exhausting?”

  For a second I thought maybe he meant “Does being a terrible person get exhausting?” so I was scared to answer.

  But he continued. “It just looks like a lot, I don’t think I could do it. Person after person, saying the same things, doing the same things. Making jokes, always on, always playing the part.”

  “Huh, no, honestly it doesn’t. It feels natural, fun, like playing a sport you’re good at.”

  “Well, you’re very good at it. And you’re getting better.”

  He did something with his computer for a little while and then said, “I’m sorry about you and Maya. Let me know when you want to talk about it.”

  I remembered again why I liked Andy.

  “Thanks, Andy. I don’t know. Once life gets a certain amount of weird, more weird just doesn’t really matter.”

  He chuckled and we started watching ourselves on his screen.

  * * *

  —

  I slept at Andy’s that night, but that wasn’t going to last. I could tell he knew that we weren’t going to hook up, and he didn’t make any sign that he wanted to, but eventually things would get weird, and then I’d lose my best friend. Weird. Andy Skampt, my best friend.

  I needed to get my stuff out of Maya’s place. She still worked the nine-to-five, so Robin and I supervised the movers who took my stuff from the old place to the new one on 23rd and I didn’t have to see her. Robin and Jennifer Putnam had both strongly advised me not to do any extra media. They wanted people to come to the places I controlled, my Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. Those things I could do without traveling around to satellite studios or setting up Skype. They assured me constant posting would help build my following, and also that it would make media outlets even hungrier to talk to me. They were setting stuff up but wanted to wait until it was full-length feature articles in fancy magazines, not just quick interviews focusing on Carl.

  My new apartment was not all that impressive unless you live in the bizarro world of Manhattan real estate. You can basically summarize Manhattan living by the number of doors you have. If you only have one door, the one that leads into your apartment, that’s not ideal, but at least you’re not living in Jersey. Two doors, though—the front door and the bathroom door—that’s luxury!

  The apartment Robin got for me had six doors. And that’s if you don’t count closets, which brought the total up to eight! There was the front door, one for each of the two bedrooms, one for each of the two bathrooms, and one to the balcony off the master bedroom. The master had two separate walk-in closets that, together, were about the same size as Maya’s bedroom. If Robin had showed it to me, I never would have allowed him to get it for me, which is why he didn’t show me. He just signed the lease for whatever ungodly sum they charged and sent me the address. It was way too much space, but the real reason I couldn’t say no was the balcony. If I leaned out over the railing, I could look directly down onto Carl across the street. That gave us an amazing opportunity to keep tabs on pretty much everyone who walked by.

  So, could I afford a two-bedroom apartment in the Flatiron District with a twenty-four-hour doorman, free valet parking, and an on-site gym? Well . . . kinda . . .

  Here’s a thing about sudden success: You know it’s happened, you see all the numbers on all the contracts, but you don’t actually have any money. The YouTube analytics page was very specific. The first video had netted Andy and me more than $50,000 each. The second video was already climbing to match that after only a couple of days. Appearances and licenses had netted us both another six figures. The numbers were going up every day that Carl stayed in the news, which, we were betting, would be for quite a while.

  But none of the checks had actually been delivered or (more properly) direct-deposited. It had only been a couple of weeks, and apparently companies pay their bills on very weird schedules, and the contracts have phrases like “up to six to eight weeks after the first full moon and/or when Saturn is in Virgo but only if we feel like it.” So, another perk of having an agent, Jennifer Putnam just paid for the apartment with the understanding that the difference would be withheld from some future check. Somehow, the way she told me that it was no big deal and I absolutely shouldn’t even consider it a favor made it very clear to me that I owed her one. Another one.

  I’m fairly sure that the night I moved in was the first night of my life that I slept by myself. Not, like, in a bed by myself but in a home by myself. Somehow, despite the doorman and the locks and the extremely nice neighborhood, I found myself frightened. I had gone from a tiny apartment packed with the detritus of two cohabitating young women to a bunch of boxes stacked up in the giant living/dining room and a big, empty, open bedroom.

  The traffic on 23rd was blocked off and the windows were new and double-paned, so it was eerily silent as well. I’ve always loved the sounds of the city: honking, engines, jackhammers, raised voices. I wasn’t raised with it, but the first night I spent in a real city I knew I was going to love it. That clattering of humanity mixed in all its randomness was as relaxing to me as crickets chirping beside a rushing brook.

  The emptiness and silence of this apartment compounded my knowledge that I was, for the first time in my life, the only person sleeping in my home. This forced me to realize that, while I wanted to be fiercely myself, I also wanted someone around to see me do it.

  Well, I had my phone at least, and the literally hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to say something about me. I Instagrammed out my new window, letting everyone know I had moved in just above Carl. I figured it was OK for people to know where I lived—I had a doorman now. I thought maybe I should call my parents, or maybe my brother. He’d lived on his own for a while; maybe he had some advice. Then I lay down in my bed and started scrolling through Twitter. I hadn’t even washed my sheets. I’d just thrown them in a bag with the rest of my stuff and slapped them right back on the mattress when the movers got everything up here. I rolled onto my side, checking my mentions. A few famous internet creators had just started following me. Then my cheek hit a bit of my pillowcase that smelled like Maya’s grapefruity shampoo, and I cried into the s
ilence until I fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  I was in the dream lobby. Everything was the same. The music, the desk, the robot, the walls, the floor. Except this time I was wondering if maybe I could make it last. Every time I had had this dream so far, it ended when I talked to the robot at the desk. So, instead, I walked past the robot to the door behind it.

  I was surprised to find the door open, and that no one moved to stop me. It was an office, fancy and modern. Not like an internet start-up, no weird art or drum sets, but nice cubicles taking up the bulk of the space and conference rooms with frosted glass stacked against the far wall. I looked out the windows and found the area surrounding the office building littered with buildings of all eras. Huts, cottages, and windmills joined colonial homes and brownstones, but no other skyscrapers like the one I was in. The land rolled in hills, and many of the buildings were in architectural styles I didn’t recognize.

  I turned and walked up to one of the cubicles. A flat-screen monitor, keyboard, and mouse sat on the desk with no wires coming off it. I sat on the chair and moved the mouse. The screen blinked on. There was one single icon on the pure white desktop, labeled “Game.”

  I clicked on it, and what appeared to be an image opened. It was a grid, six by four, and one of the blocks of the grid was red. I closed the image and opened it again.

  I tried a number of keyboard shortcuts, but I couldn’t make the computer do anything else besides open that one image. I inspected the desk carefully, picking up the keyboard and the mouse and looking under the desk and the chair, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  I went to another cubicle and repeated the same steps. The image, labeled “Game,” was on every computer I opened. This was officially the most boring dream ever. But I kept at it, and on the sixth computer I opened, the image was different. Same grid, but now another block was filled, this time in blue. I went to the next desk, and it was the same, two blocks on the grid filled. I went back to the first desk, and the image showed both the red and the blue block now.