Locust Lane(21)
It was in Boston that she met the man who changed everything. Geoff Holt had been a guest at a biotech hoedown she’d worked at as a server. To say he stood out in that crowd was an understatement of the first order. He seemed like that rarest of occurrences in her life—a nice guy who wasn’t a complete loser. His manners were impeccable; there was a nerd lurking beneath the perfectly stressed leather bomber jacket, but he made that work for him. He asked for her number, she let him have it. His wide-eyed, needy daughter was no trouble whatsoever. He derived a substantial income from the medical robotics company he’d founded with a half dozen other eggheads from MIT, where he’d earned his PhD in neurosomething. He never lost patience with her; he found her insanely sexy. He almost never talked about his ex-wife—in fact, Alice didn’t even know her name until two months into their relationship. They had fun. Grown-up fun. Money fun. He took her to see The Book of Mormon on Broadway. They drank very expensive champagne on their ten-week anniversary. He was able to get his hands on amazing drugs, stuff that wasn’t even illegal yet. They skied, they Jet Skied. They flew to Italy to get married at Lake Como, just the two of them and Hannah, who shared Alice’s Milanese stylist for her bridesmaid duties. For the first time in her life, Alice was happy in the way that happy people were supposed to be.
And then Geoff cashed out of his company and everything changed. He’d been complaining about his partners since she first met him. They were basically glorified gadget makers. The work was becoming rote. He’d had enough.
His passion returned when he met Siddhartha Chetty, a hot-shit BU professor who specialized in neuromuscular prostheses. Sid had a dream: creating prosthetic limbs that could actually feel. It sounded like borderline-creepy sci-fi stuff to Alice, but, as Geoff explained it, the technology wasn’t actually that much of a reach from what was currently out there. It was already possible to wire a prosthetic device to the recipient’s neural and muscular systems to perform basic manual functions. The next challenge was transmitting feeling back up to the brain. This would be particularly useful for prosthetic fingers, since the sensation of touch was needed for the user to judge how much pressure to apply when typing a sonnet or picking up crystal or playing Bach. Sid’s dream was to create a prosthetic hand so finely tuned that it could feel the caress of a loved one’s cheek. It all sounded nifty to Alice, especially the part where Geoff stood to make imponderable amounts of money. It got even better when he informed her that he’d extracted just under twenty million dollars from his old firm as his buyout.
Those first days of Tactilitics were heady, even though she started seeing a lot less of her husband. She coped by buying herself a vibrator—speaking of robots and neural pathways—and upping the cable to premium. But the promised breakthrough was proving tougher than anticipated. The body’s neural pathways were a lot easier to replicate for motion than feeling. Deadlines were missed. Prototypes failed. The venture capitalists at Bain got antsy. The stress started to take its toll on Geoff. He became snappy and brooding. The romantic gestures dried up. He stopped sharing his hopes and dreams, though he had no problem with unburdening himself of his frustrations. Sex was a distant memory. His quest for artificial feeling had significantly degraded his attention to the real stuff. Alice began to understand why Hannah’s mother had hit the bricks without looking back.
She put a brave face on it. She told him it wouldn’t be the end of the world if Tactilitics failed. There was still all that cash in the bank. He could write a novel or build craft furniture or snorkel. He could do anything his heart desired. As long as he was nice to her. As long as he loved her. Or even just fucked her every now and then. What she couldn’t accept was being ignored; being treated as if her need to achieve even a modicum of intimacy with him was some sort of intrusion on his mad-scientist act. But Geoff wasn’t listening. He was a man obsessed. Failure was not an option.
Alice became miserable. In the suburbs. Surrounded by women who divided their time between spin class and school pickup lines. So when the impossibly handsome, well-mannered, French-accented man who owned the only decent restaurant this side of Back Bay offered to cook her dinner, she accepted, sensing that it was her best means of escaping this ice-cold android universe in which she was trapped.
* * *
The afternoon dragged on. The lockdown ended. Geoff, still in a huff over her incursion into his lair, finally went into Tactilitics, rumbling away on his motorcycle, shattering the neighborhood’s calm with a great eructative parting blast. Hannah sent her a text from school saying she was fine. Celia called, but Alice didn’t pick up. She was still a little pissed off at her friend. It had been shitty of her to pull rank with that stepmother remark, especially since she knew how hard Alice tried to look after Hannah. She did, however, listen to the voice mail.
“Just me. Thanks again for lunch, that was nice. I’m sure you’ve seen they lifted the lockdown. Oh, I was wondering … is Jack there? If he is, have him give me a call. I was also wondering if you found out anything more about what the kids were up to last night? I’m still in the dark about that. Any light you could shed … okay, bye.”
Sorry. No Jack. No light. She started to surf on her phone. On Twitter, she read about the murder. There were photos of the house where it happened. It was on Locust, just a few blocks away. The victim had just been identified. Eden Angela Perry of Watertown. In the photo they’d dug up, she had a sweet face and an antic smile. There was something familiar about the girl she couldn’t put her finger on. Who was she? It was right on the tip of her tongue. Not school. She went on Facebook and looked at Eden Perry’s page. Friends only. She tried Instagram. That was restricted as well. Eden was a careful girl. Just not careful enough.