“Andy . . .” I paused to compose myself. “I don’t watch TV. I have never watched TV. I do not know anything about this man we are about to talk to. But more than that, I haven’t slept more than five hours at a time since Before Carl, I don’t like planes, luxuries make me uncomfortable, and my life is so upside down that I fucking forgot I was getting my period so I had to ask a stranger for a tampon just now.”

“They didn’t have tampons in the bathroom?”

“I didn’t even think to check because I’m NEW AT THIS.”

And, like that, we were laughing again.

“I’m sorry, Andy, I just don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m being asked to be something I’m not. Why, of all people, are they asking me about this stuff? I’m barely anything. But I also like it, sometimes. I like it that people think my opinion matters. It’s just . . . I don’t know if it does.”

Andy thought about this for a long time before he said, “April, I think you’re doing a good job.”

I looked him in the eyes and almost said something dumb and snarky but then instead just said, “Thanks, Andy.”

* * *

—

This was the night it all changed for me. After that conversation, I realized something: I wasn’t ever going to love the entertainment industry the way that Andy did, but he was right that it was an amazing opportunity. And my lack of interest gave me a kind of power. I honestly didn’t know that there was a difference between being on cable news and being on network late night. To me, TV was TV. I had no idea that what I was about to do was a big deal. For all these reasons—the practice of the week before, my immunity to its power over me and the pull of the power it offered—I suddenly became pretty good at television.

Here’s how things went that night. (It’s fun to be able to recount some of the conversations I had verbatim because of how there were, like, twelve cameras pointed at me while I had them.)

“Everyone! April May and Andy Skampt, the discoverers of New York Carl!”

We walk out to applause. We had mostly been doing more newsy stuff, so this is a bit different.

“How’s life been for the last week?”

I tended to do most of the talking, so I start out, “Pretty weird, Pat. Pretty freaking weird.”

“My name is not Pat.” Pat laughs.

“Honestly, I’ve just started calling all the newspeople Pat because I can’t keep you all straight.”

Andy chimes in here, “April is new to the institution of television. She’s spent her entire life being entertained by novels from the 1860s.”

Chuckles from the audience.

“Not true, my friend! I have spent a fair amount of my life being entertained by cheesecake.” The callback to our previous conversation was intentional. There’s some more robust chuckling from the audience.

The host gets back in the game here. “So the saga of New York Carl keeps getting weirder. Estimates are saying that, if it’s a marketing campaign, it had to have cost more than a hundred million dollars to pull off.”

Andy answers, “Yeah, setting off an EMP to knock out security cameras isn’t just expensive, it’s illegal.”

“There are reports that the Carls in China have been closed to the public. Do you think there’s anything for people to be worried about?”

“When you’re faced with something you don’t understand, I think the most natural thing but also the least interesting thing you can be is afraid,” I say. And then I change the subject because I’m bored and pretentious. “Does anyone else think Carl is beautiful?”

You actually do preinterviews with these people. They tell you the questions they’re going to ask—they even sometimes prewrite jokes for you so you don’t come off looking like a total doof. The hosts are great at improvising, but guests usually aren’t, so they want you to keep to the script.

If you look at the tape, you can actually see Andy’s eyes get big when I ask that question. He’s panicking.

Pat doesn’t bat an eye. “Maybe when the light hits him just right?”

The audience laughs.

“I just mean, even if it was done for marketing, they are remarkable sculptures. It’s easy to forget how much time goes into things like designing giant fighting robots for movies. It feels cookie-cutter, but thousands of person-hours go into their creation. We love them because they’re beautiful, and they’re beautiful because of hard work.”

Pat nods approvingly before changing the subject: “Has life changed much for you two?”

Andy is so relieved to be back on script and says, “Well, for me it’s very weird to be recognized on the street for this video that April and I just thought was a joke. It’s not like we’ve got a nighttime talk show.” More chuckles.

“For me, it’s the money! The YouTube video has made like five thousand dollars already. Keep clicking on that link, you guys,” I say directly to the camera.

Andy is freaking again.

“You’ve made that much?” Pat asks.

“Oh yeah,” I reply. “Also, a bunch of networks ran our video before we gave them permission, so Andy’s dad, who is a lawyer, basically got to extort the networks for a frankly embarrassing licensing fee. I paid off exactly 42 percent of my student loans this week.” And then I wink at the camera.

We went on to talk, of course, about the mystery on everyone’s mind. Pat joked that maybe Carl was sent by space aliens, and because I knew about the Wikipedia sequence and no one else did, I got to confidently say that I knew there was more to the story. But of course I didn’t tell anyone what the more was. I looked cocky, but people either love that or they love to hate it, and in the attention game (which I was playing even if I didn’t know I was), those things are equally good.

* * *

—

So here’s a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you actually, completely don’t care. I didn’t care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power.

Some people found me precocious and entitled, but that didn’t matter because those people would still watch, which was all the people doing the booking cared about. Other people thought I was refreshing and clever, and, honestly, I liked it. I liked that I was good on camera, and that people were talking about me, and that I was getting more followers on Twitter, and that people were listening to me.

Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average.

Power only does all its business of empowering when it’s perceived as a difference between the power of those nearby and, even more important, the power one previously had. And I’m not going to pretend that this weird new confidence combined with this weird new platform wasn’t more than a little bit intoxicating and already getting addictive. They tell you that power corrupts . . . They never tell you how quickly!

In the squishy, leather, new-car-smelling back seat of the Escalade that was driving us to our hotel, I was obsessively checking Twitter and Facebook for Carl news and Andy was not quite amused and not quite annoyed with me.

“Why can’t you just do what they tell you to do?”

“Because that’s boring. You were right when you said a lot of people want to be in my shoes, so I might as well be doing something interesting.”

“It’s like . . .” He was working it out in his head, and then he finally figured it out. “It’s like you don’t have any respect for any of this.”

“Andy, that is exactly it. I don’t. I told you, I’ve never watched any of these shows. I watch almost exclusively 1990s comedies on Netflix. If Pauly Shore calls and asks me on his show, I will be suitably freaked-out, but I just value these things differently than you.”

“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.”