I still hadn’t texted Maya. I couldn’t figure out how. There was so much to say and so much to do and, honestly, I was afraid of how she’d respond to the day’s events. In my mind, I could only hear her on the spectrum from disappointed to livid. I didn’t feel like there would be excitement or support on the other side of that conversation, so I just kept not having it.
“Hey, April.” Andy had been looking at his phone. “More Carl weirdness. Nobody’s saying he’s a space alien, but they tried to move the one in Oakland to a slightly more convenient spot because he was causing traffic problems and they couldn’t. He broke their crane. The story reads like it was inept city management or crane operators or something. I’m guessing it’s more than that.”
I stared into my coffee as the magnitude of it all crashed down on me once again. This just kept happening. I’d be living my normal life, being me inside of me the way I’d always been, and then I’d remember. It was a little like how I felt a couple of years before when our cat Spotlight died. You keep forgetting that life is never going to be the same again. But you can only go so long without thinking, “Where’s Spotlight? I haven’t seen him all . . . oh . . . fuck.”
“Oh god, Andy, this is really happening, isn’t it?”
“Jennifer Putnam sure seems to think so,” he said as I dosed myself with another sip of coffee.
Now, with a better understanding of her business (and of her), I realize that Jennifer Putnam didn’t need to be sure Carl was a space alien to go full war room; she only needed there to be a chance. She needed to look like she was all in even if she believed there was only a 5 percent chance we were right, because even a 5 percent chance of making tens of millions of dollars was more than worth her while. In the end, if Carl wasn’t an alien, we would still be her client, and she could point to her faith and belief in us. It was a win-win for her.
When we walked back into her office after our coffee break, she said, quickly and carefully, “April, I’m giving you Robin. You need a full-time assistant right now and it’s much easier for me to get a replacement than for you to find someone trustworthy. He’s fantastic, a little soft-spoken but ridiculously effective. We’ll continue paying him, but he’ll work for you. He’ll be in your email, if that’s all right, and possibly doing some social media. We’re going to make it clear to him that he works for you, not me.”
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.”