Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

I remember the day I sent the application in because I was also distracting myself from the other piece of stress that I definitely couldn’t do anything about. It was the one-year anniversary of the Carls and of me sending my first email to April. Everyone was using it as an opportunity to shout at each other. The Defenders didn’t exist anymore, but all of the people who were sympathetic to them still did, and the arguments were never really about Carl anyway. Even with them gone, pundits were getting powerful by arguing that we needed to be more afraid. It felt like the public was only getting angrier every day. A group of people had decided to have a Carl parade in New York, and it was cute, but then it was blocked by protesters and the whole thing fell apart. Twitter then got very angry on absolutely everyone’s behalf.

The whole thing made me feel sick. Maybe I even knew that the chances of something going more wrong were higher than usual. We were all a little on edge. So instead of looking at angry people calling out racism and xenophobia from citizens, pundits, and politicians alike, I guiltily scrubbed references to April and the Som from my social media profiles, spruced up my LinkedIn, and wrote up a cover letter.

As months passed after the Carls disappeared (that’s how everyone thought about it, though for us, of course, it was also the time since April died), I kept feeling more and more like my time with April, Andy, Maya, and Robin was some kind of other life that I hadn’t really belonged in. My brain did a fairly good job of convincing me that I wasn’t actually an important part of the group. This is just impostor syndrome, of course, and I know it is, but that didn’t stop me from believing it. I mean, I built the Som. I know I did that. I also know that very little of the code was mine, and there were way too many people working on that project for anyone to claim credit. And my brain also told me that being basically a high-level employee did not mean those people were actually my friends. They were obviously too cool for that, and if I looked back, there were plenty of examples of them (by which I mostly mean April) not treating me super well.

Yeah, I knew a lot about things that April and Maya and Andy didn’t know about, but they knew things about themselves and about culture . I can tell you all about how valence electrons affect conductivity, but I didn’t even know I was queer until I hooked up with April. I didn’t even know I was queer after I hooked up with April. I thought maybe it was just that she was famous and cool and I wasn’t really sexually attracted to her, just to who she was. April and Maya had known so much about themselves and about how to imagine the world. This is maybe going to sound gross, but I was envious of them, and mad at myself for not spending more time trying to figure out who I was. I’d just gone with what I looked like and what people expected, and assumed that since I was attracted to guys I was straight. How could a person unfamiliar with her own sexual orientation possibly be cool enough to be in April May’s inner circle?

I’m trying to show you how good my brain was at convincing me that I never belonged where I was. These are the lies our brains tell us to push happiness out of our reach. What is the evolutionary purpose of that? Is happiness stagnation? Maybe. Maybe life (all life, not just human life) is nothing more than wanting something and being able to go for it. What is life with no want? Satisfaction sounds lovely, but evolutionarily it was apparently selected against.

What I’m trying to say is that the more time that passed, the weirder I felt about initiating contact between me and any of the group. Maya’s text to me from a dressing room at Cowtown had felt like a gift, a mystery, and a cosmic mistake all at the same time.

I never stopped feeling like being the first to send a text would be intruding upon the real main characters of the story. Even right now as I write this I feel like they just invited me to tell my part of the story because they wanted to be nice to me. Which is ludicrous because the things that happened to me over these months were both intense and absurd. It’s a great story! It’s just the rut my mind gets stuck in.

God, I talk too much, I’m sorry.

The point is that, before I sent off my application, I felt like I needed to talk to someone, but I didn’t know who to call, and I felt really weird about it. Finally, after pacing in my apartment, I called Andy.

“Miranda,” he answered. He didn’t sound right. It was almost like he was resigned, definitely stressed. Like he had begrudgingly accepted the reality that I was calling him on the phone.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, yes. I’m sorry, I’m great. I just got offstage, so I’m a little amped. It’s good to hear your voice.” The weirdness was gone, or he was just hiding it better, but his voice still sounded echoey.

“Thanks, you too. Where are you?” He was always somewhere.

“Cannes. Just finished giving a talk at a fancy thing for rich people. Uh. Hey, I went on a date.”

“What?” This conversation wasn’t going how I’d planned.

“I like her, she’s really nice. I wanted to tell you that before it got weird. I don’t know why it would be weird. But I guess I just made it weird all by myself, didn’t I. It’s not serious or anything, she’s just someone I met …” He left that trailing off like he was maybe going to tell me more but then decided not to.

Andy and I had never done … stuff, but I had been interested at one point, and I think he had been as well. I don’t know if those points had ever overlapped, but if they did, or if they still were, I didn’t know how to tell.

“That’s great, what’s her name?”

“Becky, but she goes by Bex, like with an x .”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“She is much cooler than me,” he explained.

“That’s not that hard.” We chuckled together, and I felt like I was at least doing a good job of pretending like we were equals.

“So what’s up?” he asked.

“Well, this is going to sound weird after your report, but, like, I have not been on any dates. Instead I am seriously considering applying for a job at Peter Petrawicki’s new laboratory, which I believe is building brain-machine interfaces that are several generations beyond what has currently been built. I want to go work there so I can find out what they’re doing.”

“And what will you do once you find out what they’re doing?”

He seemed so confident. A lot of new responsibility came at him after April disappeared, and he seemed to be handling it really well. But that meant he was a little less fun now, and more earnest. I think a lot of times, people become who we need them to be. I wasn’t like that, but Andy was.

“I don’t know,” I said, a little flustered. “I guess that depends on what it is! It could be anything. I just want to have an eye on that dude. Also, it’s what I’m researching here … kinda … and it’s a really big deal. Part of me actually wants to be involved.”

Andy was quiet for a long time and then finally responded.

“You have to be very careful. This is almost certainly industrial espionage that you’re talking about here.”

“Why do you think I called instead of texting? Fewer records.”

“Fuck, Miranda, how long have you been thinking about this?”

“A while. I’m scared, though. I think I called you to talk me out of it.”

He laughed then.

“Well, maybe in spite of my better judgment, I’m not going to do that. You have to go.”

“Why?”

“I can’t—” he stammered. “I mean … I don’t know. It’s just a gut feeling. This isn’t over.”