An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(28)

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?”