“We got bored with the awards. They’re just pieces of dead metal, they’re for show.”
“Of course, woman, obviously we’re bored with them now, but people must have thought I was awesome! Imagine how many big acceptance speeches I had to deliver, to win all these awards and medals. You must have spent half your life in the front row with that worshipful, adoring-wife look on your face.”
“Yes. I did that. And I wore Milanese couture, too.”
“I must truly be a genuine sage of some kind. Gosh, I should have had a higher opinion of myself.”
“You are a sage. Because I helped you. I always helped. “Per tutti questi secoli le donne hanno avuto la funzione di specchi, dal potere magico e delizioso di riflettere raddoppiata la figura dell’uomo.”23
“Well,” said Gavin, “that’s a very bitter, mad, prophetess thing to say to a guy but, at least you did possess the delicious magic power to make me look twice my size. Where was my magic power, in all these years?”
“You never had a magic power.”
“I did.” He whispered into her ear.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s it. You said it. You finally said it! You really are my One, Gavin. You finally said my words, and you always were my One. You must be saying my words on the very last day of my life! You finally said my words, and now my story is finally fulfilled, so that means I will die tomorrow! How like you that is!”
“Cookie, come on. Maybe it’s me who dies tomorrow. Maybe I said your words at last, because this is the very last day of my own life.”
“Oh. I see. Hmm. Because I am a woman, and I’m younger than you, and women outlive men statistically, so, in all probability, you are the dying one. Not me, but you. Our universe is numbers, and the laws of the numbers say that men die first. My beloved dies, not me. And I outlive you, and I totter around in my grieving abyss of widowed darkness for a couple of useless years. I love Futurist statistics. They’re so useful.”
“I’m so happy that you understand how to reason in that way! You’ve finally caught on, baby! The scientific method is the hardest karma that there is! It’s the last of all beliefs — because there is no need to believe in it. No act of faith is required. You just try the experiment for yourself — and the result just the same as the last hapless dunce who went through that ritual.”
“Gavin, it used to upset me when you said dreadful things like that,” said Farfalla serenely, “but now I’m an old woman, and I have no more inner furies. Especially now that you finally fully entered the romance narrative and made the climactic male-lead emotional statement that fully validates the happy-ever-after conclusion. Why didn’t you tell me my magic words, Gavin? It was never so hard, to tell me those few words. They are just the secret words of a woman’s heart.”
“But I did tell you the words,” said Gavin. “It took me forever to say it, because we are Futurist lovers. Because, I just could not believe those words, enter into that story, grasp that meaning, not until now, here at the end of our lives, when it’s one vast, backward-looking, ironic perception. We are Futurists, and we are lovers, but we have lived a life of inversion — blown backward into futurity, beating our wings like two angels in a tempest of debris... Hey, wait, what’s that cool thing way out there?”
“What?”
“That weird entity, flying over our garden.”
“What? I don’t see anything.”
“Come on, I’m practically blind, but I can see it! Baby, we’ve got an angel in our back yard! There is like, a winged, uncanny, otherworldly presence out there. These are, like, the 2070’s or something, and all metaphysics aside, that thing is a solid fact. It’s probably virtual or augmented or geolocative or something. Look at it.”
“Yes. I do see it.”
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s something futuristic that normal people don’t understand. It’s hype. It’s speculation. It’s extrapolation. There’s no there there. It appears to us, because of who we are. But now, why should we care? Should we care now? We’re old! We’ve seen a thousand things like that!”
“But it’s a blessing! It’s an advent! It’s a glowing promise of hope! It’s a youthful, smiling, airborne glimmer of joy when existence seems darkest!”
“Gavin, it’s just some gadget, all right? We probably installed it ourselves. It’s in our own back yard, it’s not on the astral plane. It’s probably our lawn sprinkler.”
“You’re telling me that my encounter with divinity is a lawn sprinkler?”
“I am telling you,” she said, “that even if it was that, or something ten thousand times funnier, I would still love you. I am the sober one now, I trust in facts, and you became the mystic seer. But my heart has followed your heart. What a comedy love is. We are comic, and we have no dignity, and we ought be be a joke, even to ourselves by now, but... Well... Gavin, my sweet one, my precious one, what is that thing? I see it flying around over there, and I wish I could make some rational sense of it... but it’s really, just, so different.”
“Baby, we should have everything like that figured out by now, because obviously we’re almost dead now and we’ll never get any wiser — but we dwell within the House of Difference.”
“You must be right — and I’m really, really glad I’m not in that house alone.” She laughed, with a witch’s cackling laugh. “We had a pretty good time in this garden,” she said. “We did things in here that would make a snake blush.”
“That snake should write poetry about the things we did in this garden. Snakes and cherubs, very same line of work, just different uniforms. We went through every thrill-ride that a man and woman can, and you know what? My love was true love.”
“Honey, yes. How strange love is.”
He said nothing.
“We’re not really here right now,” she announced.
“Baby, I was surmising very same thing. We can’t be ninety years old, we are imagining all this. We are forecasting this. We’re not within this space and time. We can’t possibly be here, not without enduring every single dawning day and fading sunset that brought us here. We are in the space of spectral imagination.”
“Then we must be young people,” she said.
“Maybe, but how can you know?”
“Only young lovers can dream together like we are dreaming. An old couple, they wouldn’t dream of their future. They would have had their time. They would reminisce.”
“That must be a beautiful thing, reminiscence.”
“It is,” she said, “but we have to earn it first.”
“We are sleepwalking. Tell me to wake up.”
“Gavin, wake up.”
***
Gavin woke up. He was already standing on his feet. “Sleepwalking,” he said, into the air. “Sometimes I do that.”
“Help me up.”
Gavin reached to her. He looked around. “Good God, look at all this. Look where we really are.”
Farfalla gripped his hand, sat up, and rubbed at her dizzy head. “Where are we?”
“We’re still in the sacred temple, but…”
It was certainly the temple, and yet... The temple was not perched in the middle of any spectral skyscraper. The temple was a dismal shanty, under an overpass. Cars were racketing overhead, and the air smelled of traffic jams. The walls of the temple were stripped bare, no gods, no idols, no garlands or icons, everything caked with mildew... There was no one in sight, and sooty dust on every surface.
Gripping Gavin’s hand, Farfalla pulled herself to her feet. They stood on a tilted mass of bare and grainy overpass cement. The chalk outlines of their two bodies were inscribed there, like street-graffiti. All around their united figures, an intricate pattern of voodoo lines. Pretty. Like wedding lace.
“Look at this pattern that they drew around us,” said Farfalla. “They drew us together and united us.”
“That must have been a lot of work,” said Gavin. “Quite a ceremony.”
“It’s not magic. It
’s just chalk.”
Gavin knelt and touched the pattern. He broke one slender line with his fingertip, and gazed at the dust on his hand. “’From this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.’ That’s the most beautiful pattern I’ve ever seen. Wow, marriage makes even poverty and sickness seem romantic.”
“They have married us. We’re married now!”
“Oh yeah, we must be married,” he agreed. “We definitely have that morning-after sensation. I can feel that.”
“Look what they did to the temple. All the voodoo illusions are gone! How did that happen?”
“It’s revealed as rubbish,” said Gavin. “The sacred temple of romance is paper-thin, it’s cardboard hokum, and it’s just about the shabbiest fictional structure that could ever pretend to stand up.” He drew a breath of polluted air. “On the plus side, though, we’re definitely married.”
“They took the magic away, it’s all gone! Not a shred of a ghost. Not a trace of an aura. It’s us, you and me, and our... our bare existence as a couple.”
“That is so true,” said Gavin, patting grime from the back of her skirt.
Farfalla took two steps to the sagging door of the shack, which leaked daylight in all directions and was shackled with a rusty chain. There was no knob, there was no key. She gave the shabby door a kick, and the rusty hinges broke off it. She kicked it again. Staples snapped in cardboard and part of the wall broke loose.
Gavin rubbed his eyes. “So, what’s out there waiting for us?”
“It’s the world,” said Farfalla. “The here and the now. We obsolesced the past... we outwitted the future. And here we are, you and me, together, forever at last!”
“Well,” he said, “it’s the end, and that’s a start!”
18 “It’s true, I don’t speak one word of Portuguese. Very embarrassing for me. Hopefully some day I’ll get a little better.”
19 “The decor in here is amazing!” Gavin marveled, looking around. “It’s like someone built a nightclub from the 1970s that was remodeled by Amazonian psychiatrists.”
20 “What? No way! He did what? Why did he do this? I’ve never heard of this. I did not think that was possible!”
21 “Why is your beloved robot so worried?”
22 “Madame, please help me with this. She is young and strong, but she is stubborn and perverse. She has more passion than she has good common sense.” “I could have said so,” said Hepsiba. “I’ve known her since she was a girl, poor thing.” Gavin nodded soberly. “I know you cared for her, but I can take care of this. Maybe I’m not the best man for her, but nobody will ever do better.” Hepsiba cackled and slapped his shoulder. “No wonder she likes you! There is something so funny about you! At least I know she will have a good time!”
23 “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
“We started reading Black Swan and couldn’t put down our Kindle until the last word.”
[Brain Pickings]
2009 Sidewise Award Nominee
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«I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women.»
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Love is Strange
Bruce Sterling
© 2012 by Bruce Sterling
Copyright for all languages
© Digitpub srl 2012
Via Adige, 20 – 20135 Milano, Italia
www.40kbooks.com
[email protected]
ISBN EPUB 978-88-6586-106-6
ISBN MOBI 978-88-6586-606-1
Cover by Roberto Grassilli
warehouse.robertograssilli.com
December 2012
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Table of Contents
Cover
Welcome
Love Is Strange
1. The Haunted Hotel
2. The Convent of Crossed Destinies
3. Notre Grand Amour Est Mort
4. The Secret Statue of the Princess Amelie Troubetzkoy
5. The Bohemian Loves of the Scapigliati
6. Modern Dentistry
7. Tomorrow’s Trends in Web Couture
8. Prada Goth
9. The Disco Volante
10. Old-Fashioned Bossa Nova
11. The Return on Investment
12. Forever Right Now
13. Translation is Treason
14. Why I Hate You Forever
15. Consequences Ever After
16. The Chips Are Down
17. You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away
18. Shadows of Flames
19. Love Has A Nasty Habit of Disappearing Overnight
20. Seattle Voodoo
21. Looking for a Factory Girl
22. The Facts of Life
23. Bachelor Party
24. The Last Man and Woman on Earth
25. Holy Matrimony
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Copyright
Table of Contents
Cover
Welcome
Love Is Strange
1. The Haunted Hotel
2. The Convent of Crossed Destinies
3. Notre Grand Amour Est Mort
4. The Secret Statue of the Princess Amelie Troubetzkoy
5. The Bohemian Loves of the Scapigliati
6. Modern Dentistry
7. Tomorrow’s Trends in Web Couture
8. Prada Goth
9. The Disco Volante
10. Old-Fashioned Bossa Nova
11. The Return on Investment
12. Forever Right Now
13. Translation is Treason
14. Why I Hate You Forever
15. Consequences Ever After
16. The Chips Are Down
17. You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away
18. Shadows of Flames
19. Love Has A Nasty Habit of Disappearing Overnight
20. Seattle Voodoo
21. Looking for a Factory Girl
22. The Facts of Life
23. Bachelor Party
24. The Last Man and Woman on Earth
25. Holy Matrimony
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Copyright
Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) Page 44
