59 pages • 1 hour read
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
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Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
At first, April does multiple TV interviews because it is weird and new—and for the money. After fumbling a few interviews, she learns that the trick is to focus on exactly one point and know when to stop talking. By the sixth interview, April is a professional, and she realizes that pundits don’t want to discuss what happened: they want to use it to talk about things they always discuss.
When someone impersonates April on Twitter and is mean to her audience, she realizes she has to make an account. April rapidly gains followers, and she screens her posts to make sure they are high quality. After a week of interviews, April stops showing up to work. Though she has made tens of thousands of dollars, her income stream is drying up.
April and Maya continue investigating the Wikipedia mystery known as the Freddie Mercury Sequence. Though April wants to tweet the sequence to ask her followers for help, Maya uses April’s newfound sense of self-importance to ask if she would rather be the person to reveal there is a mystery or the person who solves it.
On a flight to Los Angeles for a late-night talk show, April finds she has the same seat number as another person and is moved to first class. There, her TV is broken, showing a bunch of numbers and colors. She tweets a picture of it, since being a social media celebrity means she has to inform the entire world of any inconvenience she experiences. Though April enjoys what fame can do for her, Andy is invested in the spectacle of entertainment culture and how the parts come together to make content. Their different outlooks cause some friction, and April realizes that her lack of interest in the entertainment industry is what gives her power—the trick to looking cool is not caring. Though some people find her precocious and entitled, others find her refreshing and clever. April now likes that she is good on camera and that people are listening to her.
Both April and Andy are present for the interview on the late-night show. She goes off script and asks if anyone thinks Carl is beautiful, describing how remarkable he is and how easy it is to forget how much time goes into designing such things. When the interviewer asks how life has changed for them, April says she does it for the money. The interviewer jokes that maybe space aliens sent Carl, and April hints confidently that there is more to the story. After the interview, Andy confronts April for not doing what she is told and having no respect for the entertainment industry. April finally agrees to make a second video, where they discuss their lives before and after Carl. April doesn’t focus on Carl too much because she doesn’t think Carl will be news forever and wants to transfer their platform into something longer term.
Chapter 5 Summary
In the hotel room, April checks her email and finds a two-week-old reply from Miranda, who firmly believes that Carl’s properties aren’t just peculiar—they’re impossible because no known materials have these properties. She narrows the mystery down to three possibilities: She either forgot something basic about the topic, someone constructed a new material that behaves unlike anything that currently exists, or Carl is an alien. Miranda believes there is a chance that April has made first contact and is the first human to discover extraterrestrial technology. April immediately checks if Miranda is online and calls her on Skype.
Miranda discusses the possibility that Carl is a space alien. When April shares the Freddie Mercury sequence, Miranda exclaims that the letters are the elements iodine, americium, and uranium. They decide to operate under the assumption that Carl is indeed extraterrestrial and is asking them to bring the requested elements, none of which are in abundance. When Miranda plays around with the Wikipedia page, nine numbers disappear from the citations, confirming that Carl definitely means the elements—the numbers match up to common isotopes of each. April is baffled that Miranda solved in a matter of minutes a puzzle that had been devouring her for two weeks. April then asks Miranda to go with her to gather the elements from readily available materials.
That night, the mystery of Carl eclipses April’s obsession with her talk show performance. Though it is cliché to link any unexplainable phenomenon to aliens, it makes sense considering the lack of video footage, “Don’t Stop Me Now” playing, the fact that no one could move the Carls, and that no one has taken credit. April freaks out because she knows she needs to make an irreversible decision. The first, sane option is to stop doing TV and anything on the internet. The second, not-so-sane option is to keep doing TV, spice up her social media, have opinions, and use her platform to have a voice. After making the second choice, April calls Maya. When she doesn’t pick up, she heads over to Andy’s room.
She updates Andy, explaining that if she has made first contact, they now have the opportunity to become a part of the narrative. Though Andy believes that, if this is true, the president should be at the forefront, they spend the night planning Carl’s brand, her brand, and the role she will play—humanity’s representative to balance Carl. They write scripts to create April’s identity and prepare videos of them working out the sequence and presenting the elements to Carl. Present-day April reflects on how people accuse her of manipulating the situation to get rich and famous. But, she claims she just didn’t want to lose her importance; she also didn’t anticipate that by creating the April May brand, she was creating a new identity.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
As April begins doing TV interviews, she learns how to get people to like her. She eventually realizes the trick to being cool is to not care whether they look cool. When faced with the opportunity to become even more famous, April stops at no lengths to ensure that she holds onto her newfound fame. Her willingness to make herself into a brand in the face of a world-changing, historical discovery of alien life speaks to April’s addiction to fame. Not once does April consider the consequences of her actions or if she should defer to someone more knowledgeable and qualified. All she cares about is bigger, longer-lasting popularity.
The narrative’s two major themes—building personas and the consequences of fame—are heavily intertwined because it is April’s obsession with crafting her internet persona that maintains her fame. Just as April’s internet persona is composed of her not caring about internet personas, she carries this same sensibility to her interactions on television. In just a short period of time, April changes her entire persona for a narrative that can keep her famous. Though it is not her intention, she realizes that more often than not, a person becomes who they pretend to be.
The mystery of the Carls develops uniquely in relation to the rest of the narrative. Despite being the true center of the story, it is April’s interaction with the Carls and the narrative she creates alongside them that forms the story’s themes. Her fame is inextricably linked to the existence of the Carls. Rather than the fascination of the mystery of an alien’s purpose on Earth, April is obsessed with how she can maintain her connection to this story and stay as big a deal as Carl potentially will be.
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