Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  From the tender look on his slightly sunburned face, he worshipped this hopeless Goth girl. His urgency and attention was met with an insufferable, teenage glare. She was a mess.

  Suddenly, the two of them looked up at Farfalla. They both took full, surprised notice of her. They were obviously brother and sister, because they had the same fatal blue eyes. Eyes that pierced her like ice picks.

  Farfalla’s spike-heeled feet were nailed to the stage.

  She found her willpower and ran to hide.

  1 “What are you doing, bloodsucker? Are you Albanian?”

  2 “What happened to all those old chests that were here?”

  3 “Where are the headphones to listen to the event’s translation?”

  4 “I’d like to know the answer. I’m still trying to get the projectors!”

  Chapter Three: Notre Grand Amour Est Mort

  It was two in the morning and Gavin was suffering the fiercest throes of his jet-lag. He rustled and kicked under his crisp hotel sheets.

  Gavin was a sleep-walker. He’d been walking in his sleep since the age of two, when he had first discovered walking.

  Once his sleepwalking ailment had been diagnosed, Gavin had been fully treated by his anxious parents. Their best efforts had made his problem permanent.

  As an adult, Gavin learned to anticipate his sleepwalking episodes. Armed with predictive insight, he took practical steps to avert his troubles. The symptoms were obvious. Gavin suffered sleepwalking episodes when he was too worried to relax. He would close his eyes, most of his body would go to sleep, but the distressed parts of his brain would fire up his hands and feet. He would tumble from his bed with a blind, unconscious need to take action.

  Sleeping pills didn’t help him. Sleep medication produced a fake sleep that empowered his inner sleepwalker.

  Gavin had to outguess the sleepwalker. He had to get ahead of the sleepwalker, anticipate his actions. This was a challenge but he could do it. The sleepwalker was not a disease. The sleepwalker was a part of himself. Self-knowledge was the key to the problem.

  Being a futurist, Gavin knew how to worry. Although he was only twenty-six, Gavin had already served as the financial officer for four high-tech companies in Seattle. Small start-ups needed forward-thinking, tech-savvy accountants, people like himself. This was Gavin’s chosen career niche. He was the realistic, responsible, bottom-line guy inside visionary high-tech companies.

  Three of Gavin’s start-up companies had quickly gone broke. That was acceptable, because going broke was a part of Seattle start-up culture. Unfortunately, Gavin’s family was also going broke. That part was not acceptable. Gavin’s family was not a Seattle start-up company. Gavin’s family was old Seattle gentry.

  The Tremaines were Seattle old money. They were the city’s conservative core, the city’s safest bet, because they had never been gamblers. The Tremaines were descended from Seattle pioneers, the builders, the people of substance, the pillars of the community.

  Generations of Tremaines had built Seattle, ever since the 1870’s, when their city was a village beach, full of clams. The modern Tremaines were “socially concerned community leaders with wealth-preservation strategies for a range of diversified investments.” As of today, in the historical year 2009, the Tremaines were probably worth...

  Well, at today’s fire sale prices, the Tremaines were worth less than nothing. The Tremaine family fortune was a financial black hole. Because the Tremaines were in debt: leveraged debt, toxic debt, horrible, inescapable debt. The Tremaine fortune was a ghost.

  The banks had not yet foreclosed on the Tremaines yet, but only because American banks were in even worse shape than the Tremaine family.

  Gavin had not gotten his family into this dire financial situation. He was too young to have done that. Instead, Gavin was the young, high-tech genius destined to save them. And so, Gavin worried.

  Gavin worried a lot, but not just about money. Money was like a baseball card for Gavin, the way accountants kept score. Gavin worried about the crucial things behind wealth: prudence, decency, integrity, and common sense.

  Because if his family didn’t have those qualities, then there was none left. Not anywhere. And if those values disappeared, then the world would be set adrift. It would mean that Seattle had set sail on the Sea of Weird.

  Knowledgeable, prudent, decent people were going broke. Hordes of them going broke, armies of them losing it all... and the future looked worse. Gavin heard his Futurist pals digging deep into scary, morbid concepts like “dollar hyperinflation”, “Euro collapse” and “national debt default.” These were abstract, brainy financial problems that terrified those who understood them. These were the ideas that made Treasury secretaries and Central bankers go gray overnight.

  You could read about it in Business Week, but Business Week was broke. You could read about it in the New York Times, but the New York Times was broke. Since all the smart money was stupid, no one was held to account. This was the stuff of horror movies — a screaming panic at the drive-in, a slasher movie for millionaires.

  Problems of this size and scope — these were what made Gavin sleepwalk. But Gavin had found a strategy to pre-empt his sleepwalking, to stop it before it started.

  His trick was to concentrate hard, before sleep overwhelmed him, on something that had nothing to do with his real worries. Then his sleepwalking self, who was sleepy and simple-minded, would think about that stuff instead of the future, and all would be well.

  The distraction had to be fun, or restfully boring, but restfully boring in a fun way. Some sleepy distractions worked quite well for Gavin, other things not quite so much. Old television movies were generally perfect. Gavin would study these boring, old movies with his full attention, until he passed out.

  Then, as a twist to the trick, Gavin left the television running as he slept. The sleepwalker might open his eyes. But the sleepwalker would just see the television. He’d naturally get very bored again, and he’d fall right back to sleep. Problem solved, crisis defeated.

  Gavin’s Capri hotel had a TV — a huge, flat-screen TV near the foot of Gavin’s bed. It offered Gavin hundreds of satellite channels and a remote control the size of a French baguette.

  Gavin sat up, restless, red-eyed and jet-lagged. He searched for something sure to lull him into slumber — perhaps, a 1950’s romantic comedy. A classic rom-com like Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Classic chick flicks bored Gavin silly, so they were perfect for his needs.

  The Capri television offered a cavalcade of global-tourist TV fare. Italian television was famously bad. Japanese flower arrangement shows. Indonesian cooking shows. American televangelists. Gay British comedians test-driving sports cars.

  Gavin’s shaking thumb clicked through the endless channels. Girlish Lebanese chat-shows. Weepy Turkish soap operas. Screaming Mexican telenovelas. Booming Brazilian soap operas.

  And for the lonely men in the audience, the hotel television offered some porn. Any well-seasoned, male business traveller knew that posh hotels would offer a selection of erotica. Nobody from socially-liberal Seattle would be remotely shocked about that.

  But this Capri porn was otherworldly. The island of romance was sucking male desire from satellite feeds orbiting the planet. Vast space-junk trash-heaps of pornography were defiling Gavin’s TV. There was something dry and remote and spooky about all this raw, commercialized, male libido. It felt empty and cold, like the broken peanut shells in an abandoned baseball stadium.

  Gavin shut off the haunted television. He needed a distraction of a different sort. He opened his laptop, and found his girlfriend on video Skype. Seattle and Capri had a nine-hour time difference, so Madeleine was at work.

  “Oh, things are just the same around here!” Madeleine told him cheerily. Her face filled his laptop screen. Madeleine had broad cheeks and bright eyes, rimless designer glasses and upswept hair. “I mean,” she said, “things are not great. But, they’re the new normal.”
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  “You’re at your office?”

  “Where else could I be? We’re all watching the health care debates. They’re such a train wreck. I know that you warned me this would happen — but what if the Congress passes this crazy legislation? My whole clinic could go broke!”

  “I’m not doing too well, either. I can’t sleep, over here.”

  “Put down the computer,” Madeleine told him. “Read a book.”

  “That’s a good idea,” nodded Gavin. His girlfriend was always full of healthy common sense. Madeleine knew him better than anyone else. “I’ll read a book.”

  “You’re flying back, when, Monday? Come over Wednesday night. I’ll cook us something.”

  “Great.”

  “Spaghetti Bolognese?”

  “No, no, no more Italian! I’ll see you next Wednesday. Dinner sounds great.”

  “I have to work now, Gav. You need anything else, just Skype me. You know I’ll be around.”

  Gavin shut his laptop and gently put it aside. Madeleine was right, as usual.

  He walked over to the bookcase. It held a small refrigerator and a steel safe. No books in the bookcase. No books anywhere in his room. No airport bestsellers, no romance, no science fiction, nothing.

  Gavin searched his entire suite for books, top to bottom. Two desks with Internet connections, a Jacuzzi, a bidet, and a flower-scented balcony, where the dark and distant sea surged in the moonlight. But no books.

  No printed paper of any kind at all. No stationery, not even a hotel postcard. Nothing in print. His handsome suite was one hundred percent paper-free.

  Gavin flopped on the high-tech foam bed, stared at the ceiling grainy-eyed, got back up, dressed himself, and took the mirrored elevator down to the deserted hotel lobby.

  The hotel’s ground floor had a host of coffee rooms, cozy niches, and funky designer lounges. One of these lounges was done up like an old-fashioned gentleman’s club, with huge leather chairs, little bronze statues, and ottomans. Naturally, this place had a bookcase.

  And this antique bookcase had antique books. They were old, dusty, leather-bound books. Books much older than the hotel itself. Gavin felt confident that nobody in the hotel had ever touched these books.

  The books were mostly in English, some Italian, some German. They were all books about travel.

  Gavin found a musty edition of The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. Perfect. He toted the ancient Mark Twain book upstairs to his room.

  Gavin clicked on the bedside lamp. He flipped Mark Twain’s book open and found a warm, restful position against the fancy headboard.

  The Innocents Abroad was a book about American tourists travelling in Europe. Written in 1867. Gavin was pleased to have found a book so relevant to his own situation. Gavin’s Futurist guru, Dr. Gustav Y. Svante, was always telling him that the keys to the future were found in the past. All serious Futurists were serious historians, Dr. Svante liked to say.

  If you truly wanted to know what was to happen next, then you had to fully grasp what had already happened. Tomorrow was about what had already happened, and why, and how, and to whom. The ghosts of the past united with the phantoms of the future. They belonged together, because they were one and the same. Both were visions of another time.

  Gavin flipped the Twain book open and chose a page at random, like a Tarot card.

  This was the last resting-place of a good man, a warm-hearted, unselfish man; a man whose whole life was given to succoring the poor, encouraging the faint-hearted, visiting the sick; in relieving distress, whenever and wherever he found it. His heart, his hand, and his purse were always open.

  With his story in one’s mind, we can almost see his benignant countenance moving calmly among the haggard faces of Milan in the days when the plague swept the city, brave where all others were cowards, full of compassion where pity had been crushed out of all other breasts by the instinct of self-preservation gone mad with terror, cheering all, praying with all, helping all, with hand and brain and purse, at a time when parents forsook their children, the friend deserted the friend, and the brother turned away from the sister while her pleadings were still wailing in his ears.

  Okay, maybe this was not the best place to start reading. A surprisingly stiff, disturbing, historical passage there. Mark Twain must have put the funny jokes in another chapter.

  Gavin riffled through the time-crisped, yellowed pages.

  I remember yet how I ran off from school once, when I was a boy, and then, pretty late at night, concluded to climb into the window of my father’s office and sleep on a lounge, because I had a delicacy about going home and getting thrashed.

  Now, this part was pretty good. Gavin, unable to sleep, was reading Mark Twain, talking about the very same problem of insomnia. Great literature was the news that stayed news.

  As I lay on the lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I fancied I could see a long, dusky, shapeless thing stretched upon the floor. A cold shiver went through me. I turned my face to the wall. That did not answer. I was afraid that that thing would creep over and seize me in the dark.

  I turned back and stared at it for minutes and minutes — they seemed hours. It appeared to me that the lagging moonlight never, never would get to it. I turned to the wall and counted twenty, to pass the feverish time away. I looked—the pale square was nearer. I turned again and counted fifty — it was almost touching it. With desperate will I turned again and counted one hundred, and faced about, all in a tremble. A white human hand lay in the moonlight! Such an awful sinking at the heart—such a sudden gasp for breath!

  Okay, wait. Wasn’t this book supposed to be about a nice, European holiday?

  I felt — I cannot tell what I felt. When I recovered strength enough, I faced the wall again. But no boy could have remained so with that mysterious hand behind him. I counted again and looked — the most of a naked arm was exposed. I put my hands over my eyes and counted till I could stand it no longer, and then — the pallid face of a man was there, with the corners of the mouth drawn down, and the eyes fixed and glassy in death! I raised to a sitting posture and glowered on that corpse till the light crept down the bare breastline by line — inch by inch — past the nipple — and then it disclosed a ghastly stab!

  Gavin closed Mark Twain’s book. He slid the book under the enormous bed. Books were not going to help him tonight.

  Sometimes, music did the trick.

  Eliza had left stacks of her CD’s scattered around the hotel room. Eliza was no longer staying here, in the Futurist conference hotel. Eliza had pleaded with him so touchingly that he’d checked her into the haunted hotel, where she could stay on her own.

  Gavin figured that acts of trust with adolescents commonly had good results. Besides, Eliza always had her iPhone, so he could call whenever he wanted. The existence of cell phones had destroyed all kinds of trouble that teenage girls had formerly enjoyed getting into.

  Overjoyed by the freedom he had kindly granted her, Eliza had thoughtlessly pranced off without most of her luggage. Eliza had brought stacks of CD’s to give away to her fellow music fans. She’d already snagged a heap of music demos to take back home, too.

  Gavin flipped his way through Eliza’s plastic jewel boxes. Ghostly Swim, read the first disk, quite ominously. Then The Blackened Rose. The Devouring Element. Ghostland Observatory. Sleepy Eyes of Death. Anomie Belle. Were these people real-life musicians? Yeah, they sure were. ‘Anomie Belle’ was from Seattle.

  Gavin sampled a second stack of Eliza’s music disks. These disks were all French music. Corpus Delicti. Rayon X. Da Crime Chantilly. Conjure One. Baroque Bordello. Real French bands making real French music in the year 2009? Oh yes.

  Finally, carelessly tossed aside, was one lonely album of a different kind. A pretty, long-haired French girl strolling past a peaceful lake in bright sunlight.

  Gavin rescued this pretty CD from its airtight wrapper. He tucked the gleaming disk into Eliza’s abandoned CD player. He put on the head
phones and crawled back in bed.

  Acoustic piano. Acoustic guitar. The French girl was singing in French. She sounded so close that Gavin felt she had snuggled right into his lap.

  Gavin understood a little French, nothing to brag about, but even he could tell that this classy chanson-singer had some tremendous, ladylike enunciation. She was breathing life into every French syllable.

  This French girl was all about warm, lively breathing. Gavin heard her long fingernails teasing the guitar strings. Obviously, she was singing straight from her heart. Not performing, not hamming it up like a corny pop-star. Just a woman, singing like a woman, about a woman’s feelings. She would have sung just the same, all alone, sitting in a rowboat in the middle of her lake.

  A drowsy sense of warmth and well-being stole over Gavin. Dainty little glockenspiels tripped along, a touch of harmonica. Breathy flutes, a refined string quartet. No American singer would have dreamed of putting this velvety glop onto a pop record, but this mademoiselle thought nothing of that. No glitzy showbiz, no phony presentation: she was a sincere French artist, gifted, poetic, just very there in her moment. She would have sung the same songs, fifty years ago or fifty years from now.

  Sprinkled with fairy dust, Gavin slept in peace.

  At length, the ring of his phone blasted him from sleep. Gavin pulled dead headphones from his head, flailed them wildly across the hotel room and grabbed his mobile.

  It was Eliza. “What, what?” he barked.

  “Are you awake?”

  Gavin lowered his voice. “What is it, Eliza?” He checked his watch. Five in the morning, central European time.

  “This weird old hotel has a ghost,” his sister told him.

  “Oh. I see. Right. What kind of ghost is it, exactly?”

  “There’s a cold spot in the corner by the drapes. I heard it moaning. And it’s all foggy over there. Like, with some spiderwebs.”