Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [9]
The dead one is Annie. She was my first true love. I fell for her just out of medical school. When I first heard her laugh, the sound was like music. Our connection was immediate and felt transcendent. Within moments of meeting her, I was hooked.
Annie ultimately betrayed me, or I betrayed myself. Our love was a figment. Annie drowned a few years ago in a lake in Nevada, leaving me disillusioned about the difference between true love and its hot pursuit. So I tell myself.
Spicy foods, like jalapenos, produce capsaicin. It’s the chemical that challenges and thrills taste buds. There’s a theory that we crave spicier foods when we age because the capsaicin desensitizes us little by little, burrito by burrito, eventually killing our taste buds. Annie was my capsaicin overdose, my flavor destroyer. Since she died, no emotional connection has tasted strong enough.
But I have had true friendship. The second woman in my life is a witch. Her real name is Samantha Leary. She’s a spiritual healer, masseuse, Earth Mother, New Age nut. She’s like a sister to me, a really strange older sister who keeps pushing the tofu. She and her baseball-loving, technology-obsessed, socially awkward and mildly autistic husband, Dennis—everyone knows him as Bullseye—are the grounding forces in my life, fellow regulars at the local pub, bar-seat therapists.
Lately, they’ve gotten an earful about Pauline, the woman behind door number three.
A serial entrepreneur, she started Medblog two years earlier to become, as she put it, “the medical news-centric love child of CNN and the New York Times subsequently orphaned and raised by Twitter.” Now she’s my editor and source of rent money. Pauline aims high. She succeeds. She’s the Internet anthropomorphized; always moving, and ever faster.
She’s lithe in a way that makes her 5 feet, 10 inches look taller. Her shoulder-length, light brown hair bounces when she walks, like in a shampoo commercial. In grad school, she’d appeared on the cover of Wharton’s catalogue, holding a chalice from a triathlon she’d won, and smiling sheepishly as if to say: yes, it’s that easy.
Friends introduced us a year ago. I immediately wondered if my romantic taste buds had at last been revived. Then, a month ago, Pauline and I had a “carnal run-in.” That’s what I’ve deemed the feverish sex in her office. Afterwards, I promptly withdrew my emotions and (briefly) telecommunications access, uncertain what our tryst meant—particularly to my essential source of income.
Seemingly bemused, she sent me a list of “100 great excuses for not getting entangled,” including: (#17) Kissing involves germs, and (#44) Stability leads to boredom and death and (#100) You’re a class-AAA commitment phobe.
For now, I’m just Pauline’s employee, one who is deeply conflicted about my feelings for the boss.
But I realize something more concrete about her when I arrive at the Medblog office to check out the mysterious package: Pauline is missing.
The office is located in the South Park neighborhood, near the San Francisco Giants ballpark. This is a dot-com ghetto and gold rush territory. Founded as a housing development 150 years ago, its upgraded townhouses now serve as home to the wide-eyed frontierspeople of the Internet. Backed by venture capitalists, they operate a new generation of publishing, technical, and software companies. They also consume their weight daily in quadruple nonfat caramel lattes. The area oozes with an old-West optimism fueled by recent MBAs who think the only problem with Google is that its founders didn’t think big enough.
Medblog resides in two small rooms in the back of a Victorian turned four-company office. I walk down a tiled hallway, and through a small window inset in Medblog’s door, I see the lights are off.
I knock. No answer. I try the handle. The door is open. I poke my head inside.
“Pauline?” I ask.
No answer.
I run my hand along the inside of the cool, smooth wall to my right. I find the light switch, and I flip it on.
Along the wall opposite me is a doorway to back rooms