Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

What happens thirty or fifty years from now when the people who were inspired by the promise of the internet are all washed up or retired or dead? What happens when the stock prices stagnate and those companies need to demonstrate their worth to investors? What does a single CEO with the power to remake the world do?

Do they help us overcome climate change? Do they help us progress toward a more just and stable society? Or do they just make money?

Of course, I don’t know if we’ll be saved. I don’t know if we’ll get to keep going on our own path. And that’s the kinda sickening thing—we’ll never know. We didn’t kill Carl’s brother; we just convinced him he wasn’t needed. He’s still here, watching, calculating, learning, and ready, at any moment, to lead us carefully, subtly, secretly, and brutally into submission.

And how do we avoid it? It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another. But I don’t know. Of course I don’t know. When it comes down to it, when has humanity ever known what it was doing?

I was asked to become more than human, and I welcomed it. I wanted to be important. I wanted to be exceptional. But now my exceptionality is written on my face, and I cannot leave it behind.

The fucked-up thing is, when I look back at this, I may not have gotten what I deserved, but I got exactly what I wanted.

Almost six months after Altus went down, when the world had mostly recovered from the anger and division that the loss had caused, and the economy finally seemed interested in some kind of positive movement, I woke up in my bed after having fallen asleep in Maya’s arms the same way I had dozens of times in those months.

“April,” Maya said softly in my ear, “this is going to be scary. But it’s not something to be scared about.”

I was, of course, instantly anxious, but maybe out of a subconscious understanding of the situation, I didn’t stir.

“Carl told me this would happen months ago. Just before we left for Val Verde, he said that, if we made it through, eventually …” And then she trailed off.

I tried to shift, but my body felt wrong.

“Your arm and your legs, they are not actually permanently fused to you. You can take them off and put them back on. Last night, while you were sleeping, they came off.”

I did panic a little bit then. I tried to lift my left arm, but it was not there. Instead, from my shoulder, a scarred and rippling stump stood out. I took my right arm to feel around my body, foreign and empty and small.

“Oh my god,” I said. I drew back the sheet to look down at my body, soft and broken and made only of human stuff.

“My face …” I said, feeling it with my right hand.

“Carl said it can’t come off, it’s connected to your brain.”

“So.” I paused. “It will always be in me.”

She crawled into the bed, and her arms and legs wrapped around me. I felt the prickle of her leg hairs on my skin. “Yeah, it will always be in you,” she said, but she didn’t sound upset about it, just informative.

I didn’t cry because I was angry or scared or sad, though I was all of those things. I cried because it was just a lot. I might have also even been, in that moment, happy.

For so long I had believed what I had been told, that I was a tool, formed and sharpened and wielded for the world. Not a person, but an agent of change, a cultural mutagen, a weapon. I heard my breathing, coming fast and shallow.

“It’s real,” I said, because, somehow, what we had done hadn’t felt real until then. I hadn’t felt real. I had lost myself, not when I woke up in that bar, but two years ago when I woke up to a cup of coffee and a dozen text messages and this same face looking down at me. I felt my story finally slide into place. “It’s real,” I said again.

“It is,” she said, and she pulled me into her. “Your life is written on this body, and I love every piece of it.”

Somehow she made me feel human, and that is, I’ve learned, one of the very best things to be.

Acknowledgments

Oh gosh, I don’t even know how to start. This book felt, at times, entirely impossible, but a lot of people made it possible. I’ll start with my son, Orin, who reminded me to take frequent breaks by pointing to my computer and saying, “Close it.” But, also, I’m extremely grateful to my wife, Katherine, who (through a combination of love and also a desire for the sequel to come out) dealt with me while I was having … dramatic moments with this project.

Maya Ziv is my editor, and she is very good at communicating that something can be great while also needing a great deal of work. She is responsible for many good things that are in this book, but even more bad things that aren’t. And both Maya and I are in awe of Mary Beth Constant, our tremendous copy editor who saved our butts dozens of times. Jodi Reamer, my literary agent, has also been there every step of the way and seems incapable of not being a tremendous voice of support. Maja Nikolc and the foreign rights team at Writers House have also done an amazing job of helping my work reach new countries and be published in more than a dozen languages, which is a dream come true. So many people at Dutton helped this come together. Kaitlin Kall’s cover design, Tiffany Estreicher’s book design, proofreading from Eileen Chetti, Alice Dalrymple, and Rob Sternitzky, the marketing and publicity teams, especially Amanda Walker and Emily Canders, and so many others. It is really wonderful to know how many people it takes to bring a book into the world. Thank you to everyone at Dutton for getting books into the hands of readers.

I had so many early readers helping me understand the nuances of writing characters who are very different from me. I consider those people my editors as well and I learned a tremendous amount from them. Those people include Gaby Dunn, Ashley Ford, Taylor Behnke, and Phyllida Swift. Also, I have to say, it seems so unlikely that I would find a trained editor who is Chinese Trinidadian, but Danielle Goodman is exactly that!

Thank you to Lindsay Ellis, who gave me so many amazing ideas and perspectives on an early draft of this book.

Gabriela Elena and Ketie Saner created a timeline of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing , which came in handy a dozen times while writing this book, so much so that I hired them to help me construct the timeline of this book, and their help was invaluable.

There are also people who had no idea they were helping, like Harvey Sugiuchi, who was a student of a friend of mine and, when she asked her class what magical item they wish they had, he said, “I want a book of good times that can take me to the best place to relax and have fun at any given moment. It also has stuff like recipes in it.”

Thank you also to every person who advocates for a book … who gets on that book’s team and pushes for it. There is so much great work out there, and for some reason, sometimes we need our arms twisted to indulge in it. So, whether you’re a bookseller, a librarian, or just that pesky friend, thank you for twisting those arms!

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably aware, but if you’re not, my life has been bizarre and extremely fortunate. A huge part of that is the community of people who find entertainment and identity and connection in the content my brother and I make on YouTube. Those people have enabled so many good and cool things to happen, and this book is one more of those things. I never stop being grateful for the insight and opportunity that community has given me.

And lastly, let’s go with my brother, John, who is a near-perfect collaborator and advisor. Yes, he gave me notes on this book, but more than that, we have given each other notes on just about every decision either of us has made in the past fifteen years, and we are both way better off because of it. He and my parents and my wife and my son and, honestly, my whole family were the greatest stroke of luck I have ever received, and I’ve gotten some doozies.