Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  “We do, don’t we?” She paused. “That must be confusing to some people.”

  “We Futurists can’t help but be confusing, to the straights and the mundanes! The future, the past, all mixed up, because you can see it all at once… I’m kinda starting to enjoy this!” said Gavin. “It doesn’t bother me, it feels liberating! I’m starting to think that activity is very ‘us.’ No event ever happens to us when it should happen.”

  Farfalla gnawed her thumbnail. “I’m still mad at you for that sex you had with me that happens in the future.”

  “See, that’s just it! We can’t help that! I’m from the future, and you’re from the future! When we’re together, everything gets ten times more far-out.” He sighed contentedly. “So, then, it’s kind of nice that you and I have some quiet time together, before this aircraft-factory tour with my Dad’s old friend. Just tell me your own story, baby, about your cool, little, mystical divine statue! I promise that I’ll sop up every word.”

  “My story of Cupid is an important story.”

  “Sure, sure it is important! I told you you could tell it.”

  “Well, the police had seized the Cosmic Cupid, because of the huge sex scandal in Naples,” said Farfalla. “I’m sure you heard all about that story. You remember, that gay Communist Party leader in Naples whose lover was a Brazilian transvestite.”

  “Well, no. No, I never heard that strange story. I haven’t been keeping up with Italian regional developments. Even a Futurist only has so much room in his head.”

  “You don’t know about that story? But, everybody has heard about that famous scandal! Tutto il mondo, Dio Mio, that scandal was huge!”

  “All Italian sex scandals are huge. So, how did you get the statue away from the cops?”

  “I bought it at a police auction. I had to buy the entire crate, because they sold it in lots. I had to buy the feather boas, the transvestite’s underwear, too.” Farfalla shuddered delicately. “The police thought the statue of Cupid was ugly. But Gavin, it isn’t ugly. It is precious.”

  “It is ugly,” Gavin said. “But, it is also precious. It’s holy. It has a sacred precious ugliness. There should be some special word for that otherworldly quality It has. ‘Prugly,’ maybe.”

  Farfalla laughed. “What a funny thing to say. Perfetto. Sometimes, you say just the right thing.”

  Gavin shrugged.

  “Gavin, please tell me my words. Please, just say them to me! I know you’re the One. I don’t want anyone else! I love you! Please do it.”

  “Can’t do it,” Gavin said, gazing out the mirrored window. “I’m not magic, I can’t say magic.”

  “You are torturing me! Please, I’m so tortured with doubt! You are hurting my heart! I want you to be my One. Please, just say it. I know you must know the words. Somehow. How could you not know what to say?”

  “I told you that I would recite anything you wanted,” said Gavin. “It’s all your own stupid stubbornness, for not telling me.”

  “But it’s not!” Farfalla wrung her hands in anguish. “It’s never just that! Why can’t you do it? You are killing me! I didn’t even get my Kiss! My story is ruined, you’ve destroyed my story...”

  Gavin slid across the seat and kissed her.

  “That’s not it! You already kissed me. In the bed. That was like a husband kissing a wife. That kind of kiss.”

  “What do you know about ‘that kind of kiss’?” scoffed Gavin. “You’ve never been married yet.”

  Farfalla said nothing.

  “I love you, but I get tired of you always telling me how to behave,” said Gavin, scowling. “Why are you always the boss in our situation? What about my agenda? I told you that I loved you. I’m ready to marry you. In the future, I did marry you. You know that and so do I! There must be someone I can talk to about this, who’s not a complete, stubborn knot-head, like you. How about your parents? Can I talk to them, please?”

  “My parents know nothing that matters.”

  “Maybe you had better let me and your parents figure that out. I bet they can tell me how long you’ve been manifesting these episodes.”

  “All right,” said Farfalla, pursing her lips. “Fine! Why not? My parents deserve that! My parents deserve to meet you.” She laughed. “You, you and my parents! I can only imagine!”

  “Great. Now, we’re getting somewhere. We’ll blow through this little courtesy-call here in Sao Paulo, and then I’m gonna book myself a flight. Not you — you stay here in Brazil. You just stay right here, and sit tight. I’m flying to Ivrea and I’ll go tackle the nutty Communists in their den. I’m going to make an honest woman of you. Where do Mr. and Mrs. Corrado actually live?”

  “My mother is a Corrado. My father is Mr. Menotti.”

  “So how come you’re not ‘Farfalla Menotti’?”

  “My parents never married. Because they are Communists. That was a matter of principle. They are philosophers. They are very principled people.”

  Gavin considered this assertion. “That moral decision must have been kind of tough on you and your little brother.”

  “Tough?” Farfalla shouted. “They made our lives hell! We suffered every day because of them! Every single day, we suffered because of the moral principles of Enrico Menotti! We had to scratch, suffer, and bleed so that he could be morally pure!”

  “So, your dad is that kind of a tyrant, huh? I should have guessed that,” said Gavin. “Your dad’s a big Communist bully, am I right? He’s given you every kind of grief, for your whole life. Yeah, I’ve sure seen that stuff, around Italy. It’s all very macho, these men-of-respect in the family, always swaggering around... So, this punk-ass Red wouldn’t even properly marry your Mom... So typical! I guess he’s carrying on like he’s the great architect Enrico Menotti.”

  “He is the architect Enrico Menotti.”

  “Yeah, sure he is, but he’s not like the famous visionary ecologist architect Enrico Menotti.”

  “Yes, that’s him. That’s my father.”

  Gavin sighed. “Please don’t tell me that. There is just no way.”

  Farfalla jammed both her hands into her hair. “Do you think another woman like me suffers from an Enrico Menotti? That is him! He is my father.”

  “But... every green eco-freak in Seattle totally worships that guy! Enrico Menotti built, like geodesic houses out of dirt! And cardboard! He’s, like, wackier than Buckminster Fuller.”

  “Oh, of course, yes, yes they all talk about my father. They never send us money! My father never made any patents for his work! He gave everything away, like a fool, like an idiot! My parents live in a dirty hut! They eat turnips.”

  “Wow,” said Gavin. “I was so keen to go punch the lights out of your grumpy moron Dad, but this guy’s a famous international maestro! I’ll have to, like, really work on my Italian, to talk to a genius like him.”

  “The ‘great maestro,’” scoffed Farfalla. “My father wears dirty rags. He has rubber shoes on his feet. Shoes cut out of truck tires.”

  “So, that’s the great Enrico Menotti,” mused Gavin. “A saint! I don’t want to say I’m intimidated, but... well, I sure feel impressed. I feel proud. Good God, that explains everything to me. No wonder you’re the way you are.”

  “You don’t understand! He’s very rigid in his policies! He doesn’t allow any compromise. He’s a 1970’s radical architect. Even, Ettore Sottsass was scared of my father. My father is impossible.”

  “Yeah, Farfalla, that is totally you. That is just you to a T. You are just like your Dad. Exactly.” Gavin sighed. “I’m not even mad at you any more. I will never be mad at you again. Not that way. ‘To understand all is to forgive all.’”

  “You understand nothing! You only think you understand.”

  “Baby, you are underestimating me. I know I’m just some hick American moron, but I get it, all right. Seattle has a very keen design awareness. We’ve got museums full of that Ettore Sottsass, Memphis-style rubbish. Archizoom, Superstudio, Michele di
Lucchi, do those Italian names ring a bell for you? Yeah, they do, they have to. In Italy, that stuff is just tableware made by hippie loons. In Seattle, we put that stuff into our vitrines and dust it off every day.”

  Farfalla said nothing.

  “My dad would wig out if he thought his daughter-in-law was the child of the great Enrico Menotti. It’s like, debate over! That debate doesn’t even start.”

  Farfalla said nothing.

  “Farfalla,” Gavin said, at last, “there’s something tremendous about all this. This is scaring me. We are turning the world inside out, we are literally bending space and time. I was all ready to fight with my father about you. I was going to passionately have it out with him. I was going to assert myself against him, and yell at him that I was going to possess you, no matter what he said or what he wanted. I was finally going to get on my own two feet and face down my old man.”

  Farfalla blinked at him. “Why? If your father likes me, then I would be happy.”

  “But, that is my whole life story, since I was a little kid! And that very important part of my story is, like, turned to mush now! If my dad adores you, where does my problem go? If my father is all thrilled to meet you, he loves you, like a daughter.… Well, I never expected that to happen! I never predicted that, expected that, not at all! I don’t like it! There’s something eerie about that.”

  “Now you know how I feel,” said Farfalla. “I feel eerie all the time.”

  “It’s like something in this world is forcing us together. If love is this powerful, where is our free will? It’s worse when we like it.”

  “Every time you say something like that, it hurts me,” said Farfalla. “Sometimes you’re mad at me — and that hurts me. And sometimes, you’re sweet to me, and that hurts me more, because it makes me guilty. Then sometimes, just sometimes, you say something terribly weird, and I know it is true. And that destroys me. It kills me that you understand the weirdness of the future. It kills me that you understand me, sometimes. God knows, no one else ever has.”

  “We can work our way out of this,” said Gavin. “I promise — we can analyze this problem, we can think about it, we can pick it apart, and figure out how to fix it.”

  “That is not true,” she said. “You can’t do that to me. That is not in your power.”

  “Well! What can I do, then, if I can’t do that? I’m not your One, so I’m less than dust to you.”

  “It’s so true,” she said sadly.

  “Is our story together just a cruel, tragic hoax? Are we a wreck when we’re together, and dying when we’re apart? How could that be? Does that make any sense to you? Is that the cruel world we live in? Is the world that bad?”

  Farfalla said nothing.

  “Did you ever consider that philosophically?” Gavin insisted.

  “Why? I hate philosophy.”

  “Maybe,” said Gavin, “the universe really is divided between male and female principles. Maybe those two cosmic principles can never really unite. Maybe, men and women, because of their love for one another, are doomed to tear each other apart.”

  “You never used to talk like this,” said Farfalla.

  “I can only talk like this to you. We paranormals really have issues. There isn’t anyone else who remotely gets it about my life.”

  “Why do you always say horrible things to me? You are a happy man! You are rich, you are handsome! You have a nice body. You are kind. Women desire you.”

  “I say it because I suffer. I suffer because the woman I love cannot love me. Even if she cares for me in some kindly way, she cannot ever be mine. We are star-crossed lovers, with quarrels no one can resolve. Our Universe is an Abyss. It’s Abyss before we are born, and it’s Abyss after we cease to be. All we can do is tear each other’s flesh like animals in the brief period not of the Abyss. We know Love for a few brief moments, but our natural state is Abyss. We are both nothingness, waiting to happen.”

  “I never heard anyone tell me that,” said Farfalla, her face crumbling into despair. “I always knew that I would die someday. I always foresaw that. I’m a weak, frail thing with wings. I have wings like paper. I live for one summer and then, I fly away into dust.”

  “I suffer because of you,” said Gavin. “Nothing else means anything to me. My life has no meaning without you. Without you, I still go through the motions of living, but I become a phantom in my own life. Without you, I hate the look of my own face in the mirror.”

  “I am a drudge,” said Farfalla. “Without you, I pine away, day by day. I’m rags and bones, with a snarl of hair on top. The only thing that keeps me alive is one thought. One thought, one bare, naked hope that I might wake up some day and think, ‘I am his!’ Not even that I’m happy! Happiness is too good for me! Just that someone needs me to exist!”

  Gavin looked stunned. “Are you really that miserable?’

  “I’m so miserable without you that I can’t go on living. I have no future without you!”

  “I think I have a much more searing unhappiness than you do, Farfalla.”

  “You are lucky to have a nice, hot, searing unhappiness! I have a cold, wet, rotten unhappiness.”

  Gavin looked at his watch. “You know something? Not three hours ago, we were both really happy and completely pleased with ourselves. And here we are, at the point of joint suicide. I’m so totally miserable right now that death would come as sweet relief.”

  The limo pulled to a stop.

  “Well,” said Gavin, “we’re here at last. Here comes my important business appointment, where I have to play the talking-dog again.” He snagged her by the wrist. “Don’t sit there sulking. Come on, we’ve got to fake it. Pull yourself together.”

  Farfalla trudged along behind him, too listless to resist.

  Gavin followed the pair of thugs, who were making phone calls in Portuguese, as they gazed through the factory razor-wire.

  “Wow, look at the size of this place,” Gavin marveled. “This is just like those assembly plants that Boeing used to run, back in the Space Age.” He gazed around the host of sun-baked metal-sided sheds. “You know, you always hear about ‘globalization,’ and the ‘massive export of American jobs’, but look, that’s really real. Here it is, all around us. I mean, aviation was an American heavy industry, and here it is, relocated to Brazil. My grandmother used to work in an aircraft plant just like this.”

  The rippled doors of a hangar slid open, and a chattering army of young women left the huge, air-conditioned structure. These women wore identical overalls and industrial hairnets — and, rather strangely in the Brazilian heat — brightly patterned sweaters. Nice, warm sweaters tied round their tapered, womanly waists, or draped coquettishly over their shoulders.

  “So many woman here,” said Farfalla.

  “Women are perfect for detailed assembly work,” said Gavin, approvingly. “Especially, electronics.”

  Farfalla gazed at the vast marching harem of electronics workers. Some of them were very pretty women. Prettier than herself.

  “I never realized that my dad’s old Brazilian associate ran such a thriving enterprise,” said Gavin. “He’s supposed to be semi-retired.”

  They entered a second security barrier. They had to have their faces and fingerprints photographed. Then, they were given plastic radio-badges with their names in block letters.

  “This old guy was a big wheel in the Brazilian Air Force, back in the ‘70s. He trained in the USA, though. He used to hang out in Seattle with my dad and all his Boeing pals.”

  “In the 1970’s,” said Farfalla, “Brazil was a dictatorship. The military made people vanish in Brazil. They turned living people into ghosts. My parents knew some of those people.”

  “What, are you trying to freak me out here? This is a courtesy call!”

  Their host was still manning his factory office, although it was late in the day. A cloud of model plastic aircraft dangled from his lofty ceiling, like a host of cherubs.

  The general-turned-indu
strialist was courtly and silver-haired. He wore a stiff civilian blue suit.

  The general offered Gavin a Brazilian cigar. Gavin accepted it cheerfully, made a mess of cutting it, and pretended to smoke it.

  Farfalla said a few cordial words in Portuguese. The general stared at her. He had not expected to meet her. Gavin Tremaine, he had fully expected to see, but he had no idea what to make of her. Not a woman like her, here in his factory, inside his own realm. Her Milanese clothes and her Italian accent seemed to bother him quite a lot.

  The general and Gavin began discussing Brazilian military aviation imports. Also, complex technology transfers from the French Dassault aviation works.

  “The French make very cute, delicate warplanes,” said Gavin. “That ‘Dassault Rafale’ is the Carla Bruni of fighter aircraft.”

  The general laughed through his cloud of cigar smoke. This remark had amused him.

  He decided to show Gavin something confidential — from a bound photo-album. The two of them retired into a corner of the office.

  Abandoned, Farfalla sat in a padded office chair. She stared at the towering office wall, which was crowded with industrial awards and framed photographs of international business celebrities.

  There was a particularly large, gold-framed photograph behind the general’s desk. A very distinguished and handsome old man in full military uniform. Farfalla had seen that man before. She’d seen him sitting in a café, in Capri. He seemed to be looking at her through the picture in the glass. His eyes were following her.

  The General and Gavin were going at it hammer and tongs, speaking English. Their negotiations were not going well, though. Gavin was being stubborn and polite, while the general was being scornful and insistent.

  Gavin was refusing to do what was asked of him. Or else, he was not in a position to do it. Gavin was in trouble.

  Farfalla climbed to her feet. “Excuse me,” she trilled. “Could I have a glass of ice water, please?”

  A silence fell. The general turned his angry, gimlet eyes her way.

  Farfalla stared back at him. “It’s so hot in here. I’m thirsty.”

  “Perhaps,” the general said in English, “the little lady would like a glass of sweet lemonade.”