Matt Richtel - The Cloud

I have no intention of following the directions. But I suspect someone else will.

I have ample reason at this point to believe someone is monitoring my phone or computer activity. Or multiple someones. It’s a reasonable assumption given the fact that I’m dealing with someone who managed to get my computer to post an obituary for the very-much-alive Sandy Vello.

I open the computer again. I need to give whoever is watching reason to believe I’m unaware of the surveillance. Into the browser, I type: “Faith Aver.” I get the usual thousands of hits. One seems relevant. The link connects me to a San Francisco agency booking “local talent” for TV commercials/billboards/print ads. The web site features a dozen head shots, including one of Faith. I click on it to get a brief bio: “Get Faith. This versatile brunette can play a vivacious girlfriend or alluring young wife or mother. Suggested for use in advertising restaurants and bars, home-care products, or in office settings. Quick on her feet, Faith has experience with improv and can flow on the set. Resume on request.”

Left out: scene-stealer, scene-fleer, can play vixen or victim.

I click to ask for her resume. It brings up an email box. “I’m interested in hiring Faith to do some commercial work,” I write. “Please send her resume.” I leave my email.

I close the computer. I can’t afford to sit too long, now that, thanks to Mapquest, I’ve given whoever is watching me “my present location.” Besides, maybe they already know my location from my phone, which I power off.

I open Bullseye’s computer, which I doubt anyone’s tracking or peering into. Into Google, I type “Sandy Vello” and hit return. The third link is for a page with cast bios for Last One Standing . I click the link and get brief biographies and photos of a dozen of the Season III “personalities.”

The first belongs to “Donovan,” a guy who evidently is too cool for a last name. Sandy mentioned him. He’s got long brown bangs but short-cropped hair on the sides, which taken together looks like the work of two competing stylists, one from the eighties and the other from the fifties. He’s sneering. His bio says: “Donovan graduated cum laude from Princeton, spent four years on Wall Street, earned enough to buy a mansion in Northern New Jersey, then moved west. In Season III, he was the runner-up, after pulling out of the dramatic finale with a leg injury.”

I click on “Where is Donovan now” to learn he’s founded Silver Spoon Investing. It’s an investment firm that promises to help families invest their fortunes while teaching their kids how to think about investing in one-to-one seminars.

I’m going down a digital rabbit hole. I click back two screens to get back to the main bio page-when I’m startled by a skidding sound coming from outside the car. A monster-sized SUV pulls into the diner’s gravel lot. It passes me, pulls around the left side of the building, skids on gravel as it stops outside my view. I turn on my own car’s ignition in case I’ve got to make a quick exit. I wait.

No one appears. The driver, I’m guessing-maybe a regular or employee-has disappeared through a side door. My head pulses. I dim the light on the computer monitor, thinking maybe my concussion has made me more sensitive to the crisp resolve of the backlit screen against the darkness of my surroundings.

Car still on, I study the bio page. At the bottom, alphabetically, I find Sandy Vello. I’m about to click on her bio when I’m struck by another of the show’s “performers.” Clyde Robichaux. I recognize the name from my conversations with Sandy. What did she say about him? I can’t quite retrieve the memory.

From his picture, Clyde seems out of place. He looks kind, almost apologetic, big dark eyes-soft and watery-with the thick jowls and puffy cheeks of someone with a large head. He wears a suit that his neck bulges through, like a tree puncturing sun-baked soil. He’s got light brown skin, an ethnic mix of white and something Asian or Latin American. Pock scars dot his upper cheeks, a residue of adolescent acne I always associate with creating humility-in a good way-in adults who once suffered it.

His bio describes a former Marine who saw action in the first gulf war and a “survivalist” who worked as a cameraman for another reality show called Wild Man , where the host and one-man crew visited remote areas and documented a month living off the land. In the third season of Last One Standing , it looked like “muscle-bound Clyde might hook up with fiery Sandy Vello until, in one of the show’s most dramatic moments, she was caught double-crossing her would-be beaux.”

I’m momentarily appreciative of the seductive nature of the language. It’s like the reality-TV producers have done for words what McDonald’s did for burgers and fries-made them irresistible at the expense of substance. Made them appealing and provocative on the most primitive level. And the competition for attention on the Internet has sharpened further the skills of these 21st-century chefs of pre-packaged sound bites. It’s fast-food for language.

I click to find out where Clyde is now. “Clyde joins adventure travel groups as a photographer and videographer through WildPhotos.com. When not hanging from cliffs with his camera, he lives the simple life in Northern California.”

I click on his web site. It features dozens of extraordinary pictures-a woman white-water rafting, a man with rifle leveled at a tiger, and a family of four standing on a rock outcropping so high up that I can see the clouds hundreds of feet below them. Beside the photo, there’s a smaller inset image of a man hanging by harness attached to a sheer cliff by rope and caribiners. A caption says: “Clyde goes all-out to shoot the Cohens in the Klamaths.”

I look for contact information but the only option is to send an email.

I open a new browser window. Into the address line, I type “whois.net.” The site lets you check who registered a particular web site, often giving contact information. Since most web site registrants don’t realize the information is public, they tend not to mask their contact info. So the site can be a bounty for the otherwise stumped journalist.

Indeed.

The registration for WildPhotos.com lists Clyde’s address in Redwood City. I put the address into Google Maps. As the location of his residence appears on the screen-in the hills above Silicon Valley-I hear another car approaching on the diner’s gravel driveway. Instinctively, I duck. I turn my head to see what’s approaching and find my gaze too low to see out the back. Instead, I’m looking dead into Isaac’s car seat. Somehow, a piece of Styrofoam peanut packaging has lodged in the side of the seat, maybe, remarkably, from when the seat was still new.

The peanut’s shape looks a bit like a single hippocampus-half of the hippocampi, which is the gateway to memory. It’s a region in the middle of the brain where neurons form when we have new experiences. The neurons are the seeds of new memories that, with passing time, spread out to the rest of the brain, encoding the new experiences as long-term memories and learning. I stare at the peanut until it becomes blurry. I feel something tugging at my own memory centers, more than tugging, pulling, demanding my attention. My head pulses in beats, arrhythmically, with the sound of the car skidding along the gravel.

It’s like I know something so important but I can’t remember what it is. It’s in that void inside my head, surrounded by strange colors.

I close my eyes. I picture a rat. It’s this pudgy gray fellow with a long rat tail and pink around the eyes. On its head, it wears electrodes. I saw it when doing a story about memory research at the University of California at San Francisco. The researchers measured electrical activity in the brains of rats. They were watching new neurons form and travel to different parts of the brain. The researchers discovered that when rats have new experiences, they can only encode long-term memories-the only way those new neurons travel to the rest of the brain-during substantial periods of downtime. It was both a revelation and a confirmation of the obvious: when a brain doesn’t rest, it doesn’t have time to record memories.