Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  “I am angry. I am angry with you! How can you say that to me? You make me feel like dirt! I hate you! I hate you forever now. I never want to see you again.”

  “Sorry. Sorry, Farfalla. Maybe I kind of put my foot in my mouth.”

  “I don’t want your stupid foot! Get your foot away from me! Just give me my kiss , tell me my special words, and then, go away forever.”

  “What are you on about now? You need me to kiss your foot? I don’t get that.”

  “No, no, no! It’s just — the One that I love, he has to kiss me, and he has to say my words! When the words are said to me, then my future Love Story comes true!”

  After thinking this over, at some length, Gavin nodded. “Special words, huh? Like a declaration of some kind, like a spell, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Just tell me my words, and stop arguing. You are my One, so I know you must know the words.”

  “So, is this the traumatic thing that happened to you when you were twelve? This is some sort of Brazilian voodoo prophecy.”

  “That was always my future story. Except now, it should be now. Not the future any more, now. Except, now, it isn’t happening. Because you aren’t doing it. I hate you.”

  “You realize that sounds completely freaked-out and bizarre to me, right? I mean, I don’t do occult stuff like that.”

  “It’s not ‘occult!” It’s only ‘occult’ to you. Because you are stupid!”

  “Okay! Fine! I’m stupid! I’m not going to argue with you! Obviously, that’s fruitless. Farfalla, I really want to help you. Seriously, I want to help you live your dream. So, what do I say to you? ‘I love you.’” Gavin looked up expectantly and then, his face fell. “’Yes, you are mine, I am yours.’ ‘I have never loved any woman like this before.’ “Gavin loves Farfalla.’ ‘Gavin Tremaine loves Farfalla Corrado.’”

  She said nothing.

  “Am I supposed to say it to you in Italian? Ti amo! Il mio cuore è tuo! Fa caldo qui o è la tua presenza?”11

  “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have such a bad accent.”

  “Look, this is not fair at all. Tell me what it is, what you need me to say. Just tell me the mystery. Say it, so I can say it to you. Why is this such a big puzzle? Are you trying to torture me and force me to solve your weird riddle? Are you the Sphinx, sitting there? Just tell me whatever it is! I’ll say it for you, I swear I will! Write it down on a napkin, I’ll recite it aloud.”

  Farfalla crossed her arms.

  “How can I know what to say, if you don’t tell me what it is? Look, don’t get that sour look on your face! I know I’m not doing it right — whatever it is you expect.”

  A falling-star scratched the twilight sky overhead.

  Gavin was struggling. “Look, we’re at an impasse here. Give me a break! Don’t get sulky! I am not judging you, I’m not complaining. If we were married, I’m sure you could make me as miserable as any other woman in the world.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Okay, now I get it. Now, I’m finally catching on. It’s not about the ‘words,’ or the ‘kisses’ — you’re unhappy about the sex thing. Isn’t that it? Okay! If we don’t have a wild affair in some Capri hotel, that’s not the end of our story! We are being two decent people, instead of being two sleazy people! Farfalla, I truly love you. Not some temporary Roman orgy kind, but the kind of love that lasts a lifetime! Am I getting closer yet?”

  “You are getting closer to the ancient Romans.”

  “That’s a start! The Italian language is built on top of Latin structures. All the roads, all the names of the towns... Am I supposed to speak to you in Latin, Farfalla? I know that you can speak Latin. Because I heard you do that.”

  “What is wrong with you? I don’t speak any Latin!”

  “You do speak Latin! I heard you quoting Latin poetry. It was Latin something. I heard that clear as day.”

  “I don’t know one word of Latin!”

  “You haven’t been listening to yourself. Look, you are defeating me here. How can I say what you want, if you don’t even know what you’re saying? I know it is very important that I tell, or declare, or admit, or demonstrate, whatever, the hell it is... this thing that I am supposed to say to you. I tried hard. I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I’m an ape, I’m a bear, I’m a brute, I’m a man and we never get it... Whisper it, okay? Whisper one hint in my ear.”

  “You have to feel what you say to me. And mean it! Then you can say it, and mean it, and I will believe it. Then it won’t matter how sad we are.”

  “All right. Now I see what you want,” he said at last. “I really have to abase myself for you. Is that it? That is it. I can’t bargain with you, or argue with you, or set any reasonable terms for our relationship. I’m not allowed to have one scrap of decency, or pride, or common sense. I have to be completely desperate with love for you. Just naked. Broken. I have to be abject.”

  “Why are you doing this to me? You are making me crazy! Love is love!”

  “Look, men have feelings too, okay? If I am desperately in love with you, we won’t survive! Not you, and not me either! Desperate love isn’t warm cuddles and sweet, girly pillow whispers! That kind of love is the gruesome situation of a man obsessed! I will get obsessed! I will stalk you! I’ll spy on you in fits of rage! I will come to your house! I will murder your boyfriend. I’ll set fire to your town. I will carry you off in the trunk of a car.”

  “Oh, stop that! Stop lying about the future! You won’t do any of that. You’re too nice.”

  “How do you know that? What if you are my curse? God only knows what’s becoming of me! I never felt like this before! I am on the brink of ruin! I could throw away everything I have, everything I own — and all because of you? Why? What am I supposed to get out of this? I do you this magic service you demand from me... I recite this magic spell, you go off happy as a queen... you have exactly what you want! What about me? I’m left with nothing!”

  “Then leave with nothing! Go away from me! I won’t stop you.”

  “Am I ‘the One’? Nobody ever told me that! Are you my ‘One’? Maybe you are, maybe you’re not! All I can see right now is some ticked-off Italian chick, who’s like a live hand grenade.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  “But I do love you! That’s the truth! I never talked to anybody like this in my whole life. I’m a quiet, calm, sensible guy! I don’t babble and rave like a lunatic! If I didn’t love you, you wouldn’t be my hand grenade! You’d just be, you know, some cute, pint-sized foreign chick at a tech conference. So what!”

  “I hate you forever now. I never have any luck with men! This is the worst! Maledetta, why am I a woman? Why am I cursed like this? I hate Capri! I want to go back to Brazil! I want the deepest, darkest jungle on earth... A place where I will never see a man again! I should go to the Amazon and turn into a lesbian like the Amazons.”

  Gavin put both his hands over his face. Then, he looked up between his fingers. “Farfalla, we are never gonna work this out, if you keep cracking me up like that. That is just the funniest thing I ever heard anyone say. You are so adorable. I swear that I would kill myself to see you happy! Please, have some pity on me! Take anything from me! You can have anything you want!”

  “I already promised that to you... and that didn’t work! Why is life like this, for us? We must be crazy.”

  “Look, we can’t possibly be trapped like this. There must be some way out for us. Look, we both know the future! Maybe we know it in two very different ways, but obviously, we both know the future. I mean, I know you know, and you know I know. We are in complete agreement about that, right? We can’t just stare at each other like a snake and a chicken.”

  “You go your snake way, and I’ll go my chicken way.”

  “You’re the snake. I’m the chicken!”

  “What kind of man are you? You’re a chicken, you’re not a man! We should be lighting candles in the Jacuzzi now! You should be rubbing my feet.” Farfalla began to s
ob. “All I get all this cold, ugly, future talk, when all I wanted to do was make a fool of myself over you! You have broken my heart! I hate you! My life is horrible! My life is a long, cold, gloomy winter.”

  “I’m from Seattle! We live for that kind of weather.”

  “Go home.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Well, I expected that from you. I knew it would come to this moment. Because it had to come to this. Sooner or later. Better now, before we make a big mistake.”

  “Go home, Gavin. Don’t look at me at me anymore. Go, go now. Go away and never come back here. Save yourself. I love you, but I am poison to you... Get up, leave me, save your life. Please go.”

  He did it. He nodded and obeyed her. He clambered to his feet, slung his bag over his shoulder. He left without looking back. He just marched off, steady as a martyred hero, downhill, toward the chairlift and down to the little town, waiting below.

  He vanished from her world.

  An hour later, very drunk, Farfalla also left the mountaintop. She had to stagger down the hill, down the long, tottering slopes, in the menacing darkness, because of her stark terror about the chairlift.

  The wobbling heel snapped from her shoe. Her injured ankle was swollen and blue. She limped and reeled.

  Her borrowed car was littered with yellow traffic tickets.

  10 “This is ridicolous! I want Lega Nord here, and kill the major of this ugly place!”

  11 “I love you! My heart is yours! Is hot in here or is the nearness of you?”

  Chapter Fifteen: Consequences Ever After

  Gavin caught a cab in the plaza near the base of the chairlift. There would be no sleep for him on this starry, jet-lagged night.

  It would take everything he had just to hold himself together, tonight.

  Just a few hours until he left the island. He knew those hours already. He could see them in their stark ugliness. They would be bitter, wakeful, grainy-eyed hours of second-guessing, of bitter recrimination... Why didn’t I do this for her? Why didn’t I try for her? Bitter, soul-piercing moments.

  Gavin leaned his dizzy head against the taxi window. The hours of anguish would pass. The hours were already passing. The terrible urgency of his crisis was becoming one with the past.

  A failed love affair was like almost being hit by a car. At first, you can’t believe it’s happening at all. It’s startling, it’s jolting, it destroys your sense of security. The heart pounding, the hands sweating, the hair standing up on the back of your neck.

  Then, it dawns on you that the car did not crush you. Maybe skill, maybe dumb luck, but you remain untouched. The long chain of terrible events that follows being smashed by a car is not happening. It is now trouble that you dodged in your past. It is not your future.

  Gavin avoided the gabbling, jostling convention crowd in the hotel lobby. He hustled up the empty stairs to his hotel room. He methodically packed his bags.

  Then, he had to venture over to Eliza’s hotel, in the deepest, darkest middle of the night, to assemble and pack her scattered, teenage possessions. Eliza had simply run off, scampered off to her discos, abandoning all of it.

  “If you don’t get that stuff, I’m leaving it all behind.” That was her text message. He couldn’t blame her for being so stubborn because, as her brother, he knew where that family trait came from.

  Such a cute, funky little place, Eliza’s cool hotel. So full of off-the-wall Old World charm. She had scattered her striped Gothic socks everywhere, thrown a big ugly towel onto the floor by the window... Eliza’s bathroom was cluttered with her leaky cosmetic toys, with unlikely names like “Hard Candy” and “Urban Decay.”

  Gavin could have stayed in this hotel room, so happily... Rolled around in the linen sheets on that very bed there, maybe, even — but no. Don’t think about that prospect. That didn’t happen. Thank God.

  He was never coming back to Capri. Not ever. That lesson had been burned into him like a branding iron. It was still smarting, and it was still painful, but he could see the future shape of that scar now. It was a spiritual tattoo.

  After clearing things with the concierge on the graveyard shift, Gavin called another cab. He could have easily walked the small distance to his own hotel, but he felt a superstitious certainty that he would somehow run into Farfalla Corrado, somewhere on the sidewalk. There was no reason for Farfalla Corrado to be wandering the streets of Capri at midnight, but there was no reason for her to be anywhere else, either.

  Thank God that she had lost her temper and told him to leave. He would never have managed to leave her, not on his own. He lacked the willpower to free himself from her. Her power over him had him helpless.

  What a strange thing to learn about himself. Farfalla Corrado would always be proof to him that he didn’t know himself. That little Italian girl in her silly high-heel shoes had kicked the foundation-blocks of his psyche apart. Her blinding presence in his life was like a cave-dweller’s one glimpse of sunlight.

  Lightning from a clear blue sky. Well, he did not want any more boy-meets-girl scenarios. Boy-meets-girl, whenever that happened, was supposed to be good, cute fun, like a romantic comedy. This event had not been good, cute fun. This was a shattering encounter with the feminine principle. She had spun his universe like a yin-yang.

  He could no longer trust himself, his own impulses. Her number was still in his phone, for heaven’s sake. He knew her email. How long before he lost his last scrap of pride, and went begging to her? The Italian opera scenario! Mad love, daggers, screaming, poisons, and stilettos!

  Who would be his ally in a situation like this? Who would help him out of this danger? Madeleine — Madeleine could help him, but of course, he could never tell her about this... He could never tell anyone. It would have to be someone who knew nothing about this.

  No such person existed! What kind of savior did a man have, a rescuer who did not even exist? Important people, who could save you from yourself, but who did not even exist...

  An insight came to him. It rose from within his distress, as a piece of genuine wisdom. A saying from his guru, Dr. Gustav Y. Svante. “Real Futurists have children.”

  And that was it. That was the key. That important. That natural. An idea of utter simplicity.

  His children were important people who did not exist.

  His unborn kids, the future. His father’s grandchildren. A man should live to see his grandchildren. That was right, and that was proper. There were other people in this world who mattered, besides Gavin Tremaine. When he put his self-pity aside, his temptations, his own needs, his own greeds, the answer was obvious.

  The son gives his father a grandson. A tremendous consolation prize from life, which only a child can give to a parent. That adult act on his part would transform his father’s wintry suffering. It would temper his father’s fruitless anguish, the real estate crisis, his declining fortunes, his fear, his illness, his many miseries. Good old Granddad would sit in his easy chair with a happy tot on his knee. A new agenda, new players in the game. The people of a transformed world.

  It was time for him to do this. That was the great future lesson that events had offered. He could no longer be the thoughtless, footloose young man who had come to this island. Gavin Tremaine had to become a different man.

  He could knowledgeably prepare himself for the inevitable.

  Gavin left his hotel room. The phone might ring up there, he might be found in that room, that was too dangerous. He hauled the luggage downstairs, checked out at the hotel desk, and hid inside the hotel’s reading room. He had never seen any human soul reading books in the hotel reading room, so he felt safe from any disturbance there. He could brood there, plotand scheme about his future, undisturbed.

  Gavin pulled another Mark Twain book from the huge fake-antique bookcase. The great American comic novelist had written heaps of travel books, apparently. Gavin sat in a leather reading chair with the Twain book flopped open in his lap. Gavin took on the studious look of a man in deep lite
rary communion. Just in case anyone dropped by.

  Gavin was not reading, but thinking. He was thinking hard about an American girl. Actually, Gavin was thinking about baseball. The two concepts were deeply connected for him.

  There had been a time, at the age of seventeen, when Gavin had been pretty good at playing baseball. Great at baseball, because he was so lousy at everything else. He’d been failing at his posh private school, because it was so obvious that the things taught there were not true. The things his teachers said about the past were self-serving and inaccurate. Their corny notions of the future were flabby and delusional.

  Being seventeen years old, Gavin had had to point these facts out to his teachers. Not to be combative or surly, but just because he knew better — and his father hit the roof. It was the first time in his life when he and his father were seriously on the outs. The old man had cracked down on him, told him to stop sassing off. Gavin’s grades went to hell. Every day brought ugly struggle. The atmosphere at home was icy, mixed with fury.

  So, Gavin changed schools. At his Seattle public high school, he went out for baseball. Gavin Tremaine: the baseball jock. He was a big, strong 17-year-old guy in a uniform, with a club in his hands. Whacking baseballs out of the park was something active he could do that didn’t involve pounding his father.

  Gavin played left field. He wasn’t the strongest kid on his team, or the fastest. He did have one supreme talent at the sport of baseball, though. He knew what was going to happen during the game.

  Baseball had a narrative. Baseball had a flow. You could listen to baseball on radio, and get the whole game clear in your head, without even seeing the players. “The count is two and two, now the shortstop is closing in...” Narrating baseball games was practically as exciting as baseball itself.

  They made him the captain of the team. He was a natural for that role. A polite, good-looking kid, his dad on the city council, from a socially prominent family... He showed up for every practice, stayed in shape, had a good arm, led the league in stolen bases. Who wouldn’t like that?