“We have a plan,” Andy said.
“Who is we?” Maya asked.
“Me, Jason, and Bex. You don’t know Bex.”
“And we trust all of these people?” Maya continued the cross-examination.
“If you can trust me, you can trust them. It’s a long story, but we think this will work.”
Andy explained about his money and the plan to scare Altus’s investors so much that they would sell enough of the company that we could control it.
“But we don’t know if it’s enough money,” Bex added. “We either need more, or we need something that convinces everyone that Altus is actually worthless.”
“More money, then,” Andy said, knowing the power of Altus too well.
“I don’t have anything like a billion dollars,” I said. “Do we know anyone who does?”
No one said anything, so Andy continued.
“You need to go to Val Verde and rescue Miranda, we’re staying here. We have a lot of phone calls to make. As soon as you can get access to the internet there, you need to send us every scrap of dirt you can find on Altus.”
“I love this, Andy,” Maya said, “except we have no idea how to infiltrate a secret Caribbean supervillain’s lair.”
Carl appeared, slinking out of the hallway and pulling a child’s backpack onto their back, and said, “I do.”
After we hung up with Andy, and as Maya and I were trying to figure out how exactly one dressed for this kind of thing, Carl again popped his head in.
“Maya,” Carl said, “I need to talk to you alone.”
That was weird, but the balance of power had shifted to Carl. They were the only thing keeping us safe. I waited in the living room while they talked, and when they emerged, I could tell Maya had been crying.
“Is everything OK?” I said, a little panicked.
“Yeah, they were good tears. But I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.” And then she grabbed my gaze with an unforgettable look and said, “We have to make this happen, April. We have to.”
—
Our pilots were waiting for us when we got to Teterboro.
“Ms. May,” one of them said, “we’ll be flying you straight to Val Verde. We’ve been briefed.”
“By who?” Maya asked incredulously.
The pilot winked at us and then said, “Technically, we cannot land at the private airstrip in Val Verde without notifying them of our flight plan. We are going to do that anyway.”
“Wait, this is weird. You need to tell us what’s going on,” Maya pushed.
“Let’s just say that we’re both very grateful to a little book.” He gestured to the copilot. “Both of us have had a string of luck. And it hasn’t led us wrong yet.”
We didn’t need to wait in any security lines, and we didn’t need to put a monkey through an X-ray machine. The pilots didn’t even seem to care that there was a monkey (maybe the book had told them that Carl was potty trained).
When we were alone in the cabin and getting ready to take off, I asked Maya, “How many people do you think have been getting these books?!”
“Only a few dozen,” Carl said, overhearing me. “It takes resources to know exactly where to place them and how they will affect people. Little nudges here and there can have large effects.”
I didn’t want to talk to Carl, so I ignored them.
Maya turned to me. “Is this definitely the best way to do this?”
“I have no idea. I kinda expected us to be sneaking in through the jungle or something. Landing a plane in the middle of their secret base doesn’t seem very stealthy, even if it is in the middle of the night.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Carl said.
“Is that honestly the best you can do, you shitty sentient monkey?” I said, not as a joke. I was trying to be mean.
“This is what has to happen. You are the only thing my brother cannot predict, and the Altus campus is the only thing I cannot predict. Only in bringing those two things together does the future become completely unpredictable.”
The plane began to surge forward, and it got loud in the cabin, making it hard to keep the discussion going.
—
I didn’t want to talk to Carl, and their hearing was too good for them to not be inside of every conversation. So mostly, Maya and I traveled in silence, each of us looking out our windows, wondering how in the world our lives had ended up this way.
I think that happiness is very important. But I will also say that the most effective people I know are not the happiest, and there is something to be said for effectiveness. Even if we were managing a team of nearly a hundred thousand volunteer social media users, living with my girlfriend and my monkey, watching Netflix, having breakfast, and taking care of a single lovingly spoiled potato plant was pretty fucking relaxing. But I think there’s something inside of us, something at the seed level, something that blooms in us in adolescence and never leaves . . . and it’s just . . . want. Some people have more of it than others, but I think we all have it. And the most amazing tool that I think anyone in the world can have is the ability to control and direct that want.
Some people work to minimize it with mindfulness and meditation; some people let it grow and run free and take over their lives. But some people, and I consider myself one of them, study their want, refine it, and build an engine that burns it. Even if their want pushes all in one direction, they can tack against it like a sailboat, getting somewhere better than where they wanted to be.
I know my want. I know that big well inside of me is never going to get filled. I know that life is not about actually satisfying the want; it’s about using it. In that
