“Stop.”
“What?”
“Thank you. Thank you.” She starts to applaud. It’s a condescending act, followed by, “I’ve been waiting for you to reveal yourself.”
I put my hands up.
“I will tell you why I volunteer at the youth center but it’s off the record. You cannot use it-not under any circumstances. I will sue you. That record is sealed.”
I’m trying to make sense of this gamble. She’s so dramatic about her purported criminal record that, I’m thinking, it can’t possibly be that interesting. But if it is central to some conspiracy, I’ll find a way to write about it.
“Off the record.” I want to tell her that muckraking is an honorable tradition of exposing truth but why bother.
She eyeballs me. “I came from upper-middle-class money, and neither of my parents drank-alcohol-so who knows why? But I took my first drink of whiskey from my uncle’s bar when I was nine. I never felt so great. I was a closet drunk by twelve. When I was sixteen, I stole my dad’s Buick and drove it into the plate-glass window of a Gap.”
She pauses. This is the truth.
“You crashed because you wanted to get caught.”
“Some people have addictive personalities. I’ve wrangled mine to the ground. Discipline. Fitness. Inner truth. I don’t crave.”
This part is neither true, nor, I think, material. She’s, in fact, an addict-of attention. “Lots of people make mistakes,” I say.
“My mysteries belong to me. I disclosed it all to the producers. And they agreed they could reference the fact I had a dangerous background but leave the details to me. Actually, it was their idea, and I felt it was a fine compromise.”
A few things fall into place: she loves appearing more dangerous than she is. She loves her aura. Her volunteer work could well be ancillary to the reason I’m here. I need to get back to whatever mystery this egoist is involved in and away from rambling preamble.
“Back on the record?” I ask.
“That’ll be my call.”
“What’s the message? How did you parlay the reality-TV stuff into a new great gig?”
“I eat the bugs that scare other people.”
“Bugs?”
She says that one of the benefits of doing a reality-TV show is that they agree to plug your skill set, in her case: nurturing kids. When the show ended, she got contacted by a company looking for help pushing innovative products to young people to help them better themselves.
“What kinds of products?”
She smiles. “That’s stealth. Stay tuned.”
“Oh, give me a break,” I gag out feigned desperation. “This is so fascinating.”
“Stealth,” she repeats.
“You can’t even say what kind of work, generally?”
She shakes her head. She takes off her glasses and eyeballs me, a practiced look of quasi-interrogation or challenge I can picture her using effectively on camera.
I pause. “What do you mean ‘bugs’? You said you’ll eat bugs other people won’t. What does that have to do with your new gig?”
“I see what you’re doing.”
I don’t say anything, hoping she’ll explain. She doesn’t. Her light blue eyes wander aimlessly at the sky behind me. A blast of wind hits the patio. Sandy locks eyes with me and seems to have transformed into a worthier adversary. She reminds me of addicts and alcoholics I’ve known, drug seekers who come to a hospital under the auspices of needing a prescription for severe back pain. They are plain in their needs but savvier and more manipulative than they get credit for.
“I need a full picture, Sandy. Your life didn’t end when you left the show. That’s the whole point I’m getting at. You’re the ultimate survivor, right?”
“What are you asking me?”
“Nothing intrusive. I just want to paint a picture of what you’re doing now.”
No response.
“Sandy, you mentioned when we met at the jail that this might be a good time for an article about you. What did you mean?”
“Off the record.”
Jesus. I nod.
“All cards on the table. I might be looking for a new gig soon and it’s good to have the clip. You make your own luck, see.”
“You’re leaving your job?”
“Project coming to an end. May lead to something else, may not.”
“What kind of project?”
She considers this. “Marketing.” The word comes out flat, hard to read.
“Of? I mean, in general terms.”
“Not for print.”
“Absolutely not for this article, not until I get the go-ahead. We’ll find language you’re okay with. I just want a sense.”
She pauses. I’m about to confess that I did a little digging and tell her that I know she works for PRISM, up the stakes, when she smiles.
“Tiny jugglers.”
I shake my head, hopefully expressing my lack of comprehension.
“That’s an awesome image, right?”
“Well, yeah, but I. .”
“I work for some of the smartest people in the world. They’ve figured out how to use computers to make people smarter. Kids. Way smarter.”
“By teaching them to juggle?”
“To juggle data.”
“Sorry, Sandy. I’m just a journalist, I’m not a technical person, so I. .”
“Let me see your phone.”
“Why?”
“You’re so defensive. You’re like Deacon, on Season Two. Just let me see your phone and I’ll show you.”
I hand her my phone. She holds it so I can see the screen.
“Texting, emailing, calls, Skype, a million apps, and so on. There’s so much information coming at you. And the biggest consumers are kids.”
She launches into a presentation I sense she’s given before. She tells me that one recent study found that adolescents consume 7.5 hours of media a day. With rampant multitasking, she says, young people will soon be consuming media for more hours than they sleep or are in school.
I get the point and wave her on to continue.
“Their brains can’t handle it all.” She meets my gaze, wanting me to clearly understand this point.
But it’s not a revelation. Since the 1950s, it’s been clear to researchers that the human mind can’t simultaneously process two streams of information, let alone make decisions about them. Our brains can’t do two things at once; rather, they try to rapidly switch between the tasks, often at the expense of harming the performance of the individual tasks.
I picture newborn Isaac with ones and zeroes flying around his head. He swats them away with his tiny hand.
“Hello,” Sandy interrupts my conversational vacation.
