An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(16)
“But can’t you just see that everyone else is valuing it and respect it for that reason?”
“No, Andy. I’ve honestly worked my whole life to not think that way. I think that’s how a lot of people end up respecting bad things, actually. Not that I think that show we just taped was bad—I’m sure people love it and it makes them happy. I just don’t know enough about it to care.”
I was starting to feel a little bad, but I also wasn’t going to give up on the freedom and the power I’d felt.
“I don’t know if I’m necessary . . . Why am I even here?” he said quietly.
I grabbed him by the face, and he blushed slightly. “Andy, don’t be dumb. You’re here because you’re part of this. And also you’re here to make the videos.”
“Huh?”
“Like you were saying yesterday”—he had been saying it yesterday—“we have a YouTube channel with fifty thousand subscribers. We should make more videos. We should be controlling this story.”
“You want that?”
“I think I do.”
“But . . .” He didn’t have to say all the reasons I had already given him for not wanting to make more videos.
“Don’t start arguing my case back to me . . . You won.”
“A hundred thousand,” he said. “We doubled in the last two days.”
I leaned forward and said to the driver, “Can you take us to someplace that sells cameras?”
That night we made and uploaded the second April-and-Andy video. It was about what our lives had been like After Carl. I made sure everyone knew that Andy was a partner in the channel. (Every time we did a TV thing, there was some confusion because I had faked that he was a stranger on the street in the first video.) I made some jokes about television sucking, but at least there was free food. I only made very peripheral mentions of Carl and I certainly didn’t mention the Freddie Mercury Sequence. Carl wasn’t going to be news forever, I figured, so if we were going to transfer this into something that would last longer than that, we’d have to start differentiating ourselves.
I figured we could maybe turn it into a show about art and design. I could do all the talking; Andy could make the camera work and do the editing. We could even bring in Maya to help us write episodes and do illustration. It’s weird to look back on how we imagined ourselves back then and feel equal parts “Aww, we were so useless and adorable” and “I miss that life so much I would end every panda to get it back.”
Sometime while we were shooting that video, the show aired on the East Coast and I got like five thousand text messages. I didn’t bother to respond to any of them, not even Maya’s. I figured we’d talk soon enough. I was giddy with the attention, with lack of sleep, and with excitement about what Andy and I were doing. I had understood the magnitude of the lightning strike, and we were catching it. Or at least part of it.
But maybe the most energizing thing was that we didn’t have anything to do the next morning. Andy’s dad wanted to get us into an agency to talk about whatever agencies do, but that wasn’t until like three in the afternoon. We were going to get to SLEEP! Really, truly, wonderfully, covered-in-drool, all-by-yourself-in-a-king-sized-bed sleep!
I didn’t even bother to stay up and watch the West Coast airing with Andy. I shuffled to my hotel room to take off my goddamned shoes and my goddamned bra and my goddamned pants and drown myself in fancy high-thread-count hotel sheets.
CHAPTER FIVE
Of course it didn’t work out that way. I looked at my phone, and instead of texting some of the many people who had texted me, I went through Twitter and saw all the things, good and bad, that people were saying about me. And then I opened my inbox . . . like an idiot.
I read and answered an email from Maya and one from my brother, who was proud of me and so excited to see me at his wedding, and one from my parents, who really hoped I was taking care of myself. Then I remembered that email I’d sent to the woman at UC Berkeley. I checked to see if she’d replied. She had, actually, like twelve days ago. I hadn’t seen it—her reply had been buried by everything else and I’d totally forgotten about our conversation.
This turned out to be extremely fortuitous because it allowed me nearly two full weeks of blissful freedom from crushing anxiety. I almost went to sleep one last time like that. One more night of normal. Well, not normal, of course, but not this. I’ve pasted it here completely unchanged (though I did fix some typos because Miranda would have a total meltdown if I didn’t).
RE: You said it was warm?
April,
The properties you describe . . . hard, resonant, shiny, heavy, extremely low thermal conductivity, do not sound peculiar, they sound impossible. There are no known materials that have these properties. It is difficult to imagine a material that could have these properties. I managed to access the Carl in Oakland and did my own inspection. His thermal properties make no sense. He’s showing 0% thermal conductivity. Nothing. All energy that hits him just bounces right back. It’s basically impossible, so it must just be that my instruments aren’t sensitive enough. I was also in line with a bunch of tourists getting selfies, so I couldn’t stay too long without attracting a lot of attention. My research is mostly nonstandard semiconductors, so this is a little outside of my expertise, but I’ve asked around and no one I talk to thinks this is possible. How energy moves around is what we do in this lab, and we have studied a lot of materials. He’s like an aerogel but more dense than uranium. It doesn’t make sense.