You are known by every person in your world, and you are such a big deal that they no longer consider you a person. Your story is much larger than can be contained within any human lifetime, and your memory will continue long after your earthly form wastes away. You are a founding father of a nation, a creator of a religion, an emperor, or an idea. You are not currently alive.

If you look closely at this scale, you might notice that there are two different qualities built into every level of fame: First, the number of people who know who you are. Second, the average level of devotion those people have to you. Cult leaders have Tier 5 levels of devotion but Tier 1 audience size. Thinking of fame in this way has really helped me come to grips with what being famous means, understand where I am at on the scale, and decide what to do about it.

* * *

—

In the weeks after Andy and I uploaded the first New York Carl video, I had squeaked my way into Tier 3 fame. New Yorkers mostly ignored me still, but I’d do selfies if I was close to touristy spots. I had a woman walk up to me and start talking to me like we were friends. After about five minutes I was like, “Do we know each other?” Turns out she just assumed we did because she recognized me and was trying to keep things from getting awkward by telling me about her kids’ new school.

Wrong strategy, by the way.

I was making more money than I knew what to do with, but not enough to, like, buy a nice home in New York or LA. And my placement was precarious. Due to the enormity of the Carl story, I would probably always have some revenue from that first video to live off of, but in the time before we visited Hollywood Carl, I could already feel myself dropping quickly to notoriety. Soon, only die-hard fans or, worse, historians would care, while everyone else would vaguely remember that I was once . . . something?

The Hollywood Carl video changed this, bumping me solidly into Tier 4. And there is a big difference between Tier 3 and Tier 4. If I had to guess, including bands, artists, authors, politicians, hosts, actors, etc., there are probably thirty thousand Tier 3 famous people in America. At any given time, there are probably fewer than five hundred Tier 4 celebrities.

This was when things started moving fast.

I stopped being some weird anomaly, and I became a part of the story in a very different way. From then on, if I wanted to be on a TV show, Jennifer Putnam could make it happen. I was expected to have opinions, and I had plenty. The Magic Castle became an epicenter of Carl conspiracies, but I was a bigger epicenter. The castle had to drop the illusion for a while and let investigators in, but no one ever found the hand (rather, no one told people when they found it). But I was a person; the FBI couldn’t come search me unless there was a crime, and there weren’t a lot of laws about this kind of thing. We kept expecting to hear from someone official, but we didn’t.

Instead, Robin was in my email getting requests from news agencies all over the world to repost the video. They knew not to do it without asking now. He was pulling in $5K, $10K, $25K per license. He was putting together a media tour, but he didn’t want me to do it until there was something we could be promoting, ideally preorders for a book that I would someday have time to write.

The comments on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter instantly switched from a small, friendly, supportive community to a selection of the loudest, most over-the-top opinions one could imagine. I was a traitor to my species. I was ultra-fuckable. I was a space alien. I was an ultra-fuckable space alien. And so on.

This is going to sound awful, but the breakup with Maya was great timing. That night I went with Andy to visit New York Carl. Everyone there recognized us, so we again got to skip the line and take selfies with people. But now, people were taking photographs of me even when they weren’t in them. I felt a bit self-conscious, like I should have been more careful with my makeup that morning (I was a person who never left the house without makeup). But Andy didn’t have any problem setting up and filming a bunch of close-ups of the crowd and of Carl for the archive while I kept the crowd distracted.

I had an inkling that we weren’t going to have unencumbered access to the Carls for much longer, so I wanted to get as much footage in the can as we could get.

“Are you OK?” Andy asked when we got back to his place to import the footage.

“Huh?”

“Well, I can’t help but notice that you didn’t go home, and also that you don’t seem to be talking to Maya?”

“Oh, yeah, we broke up.” These words came out like old, warm soda. “I’m getting a new place on 23rd.”

He looked at me like he was surprised, and then like he wasn’t.

“And then you just went out with me to film Carl and take like a thousand selfies with strangers and you were just fine?”

“I mean, I guess?” I was keeping my brain from going to the bad place.

“Does it get exhausting?”

For a second I thought maybe he meant “Does being a terrible person get exhausting?” so I was scared to answer.

But he continued. “It just looks like a lot, I don’t think I could do it. Person after person, saying the same things, doing the same things. Making jokes, always on, always playing the part.”

“Huh, no, honestly it doesn’t. It feels natural, fun, like playing a sport you’re good at.”

“Well, you’re very good at it. And you’re getting better.”

He did something with his computer for a little while and then said, “I’m sorry about you and Maya. Let me know when you want to talk about it.”

I remembered again why I liked Andy.

“Thanks, Andy. I don’t know. Once life gets a certain amount of weird, more weird just doesn’t really matter.”

He chuckled and we started watching ourselves on his screen.

* * *

—

I slept at Andy’s that night, but that wasn’t going to last. I could tell he knew that we weren’t going to hook up, and he didn’t make any sign that he wanted to, but eventually things would get weird, and then I’d lose my best friend. Weird. Andy Skampt, my best friend.

I needed to get my stuff out of Maya’s place. She still worked the nine-to-five, so Robin and I supervised the movers who took my stuff from the old place to the new one on 23rd and I didn’t have to see her. Robin and Jennifer Putnam had both strongly advised me not to do any extra media. They wanted people to come to the places I controlled, my Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. Those things I could do without traveling around to satellite studios or setting up Skype. They assured me constant posting would help build my following, and also that it would make media outlets even hungrier to talk to me. They were setting stuff up but wanted to wait until it was full-length feature articles in fancy magazines, not just quick interviews focusing on Carl.

My new apartment was not all that impressive unless you live in the bizarro world of Manhattan real estate. You can basically summarize Manhattan living by the number of doors you have. If you only have one door, the one that leads into your apartment, that’s not ideal, but at least you’re not living in Jersey. Two doors, though—the front door and the bathroom door—that’s luxury!

The apartment Robin got for me had six doors. And that’s if you don’t count closets, which brought the total up to eight! There was the front door, one for each of the two bedrooms, one for each of the two bathrooms, and one to the balcony off the master bedroom. The master had two separate walk-in closets that, together, were about the same size as Maya’s bedroom. If Robin had showed it to me, I never would have allowed him to get it for me, which is why he didn’t show me. He just signed the lease for whatever ungodly sum they charged and sent me the address. It was way too much space, but the real reason I couldn’t say no was the balcony. If I leaned out over the railing, I could look directly down onto Carl across the street. That gave us an amazing opportunity to keep tabs on pretty much everyone who walked by.

So, could I afford a two-bedroom apartment in the Flatiron District with a twenty-four-hour doorman, free valet parking, and an on-site gym? Well . . . kinda . . .

Here’s a thing about sudden success: You know it’s happened, you see all the numbers on all the contracts, but you don’t actually have any money. The YouTube analytics page was very specific. The first video had netted Andy and me more than $50,000 each. The second video was already climbing to match that after only a couple of days. Appearances and licenses had netted us both another six figures. The numbers were going up every day that Carl stayed in the news, which, we were betting, would be for quite a while.

But none of the checks had actually been delivered or (more properly) direct-deposited. It had only been a couple of weeks, and apparently companies pay their bills on very weird schedules, and the contracts have phrases like “up to six to eight weeks after the first full moon and/or when Saturn is in Virgo but only if we feel like it.” So, another perk of having an agent, Jennifer Putnam just paid for the apartment with the understanding that the difference would be withheld from some future check. Somehow, the way she told me that it was no big deal and I absolutely shouldn’t even consider it a favor made it very clear to me that I owed her one. Another one.

I’m fairly sure that the night I moved in was the first night of my life that I slept by myself. Not, like, in a bed by myself but in a home by myself. Somehow, despite the doorman and the locks and the extremely nice neighborhood, I found myself frightened. I had gone from a tiny apartment packed with the detritus of two cohabitating young women to a bunch of boxes stacked up in the giant living/dining room and a big, empty, open bedroom.