Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (11 page)

The European Union was a huge empire where the lambs walked around on the lions’ backs. There was a suppressed violence to European life that got on Gavin’s nerves. You never heard Europeans address deep, dark issues in a frank, honest, way: “Hi, I’m from Italy and you’re from France! Remember when you French guys bombed us in World War Two?”

Europeans had their ghosts to remember things like that.

Italians were supremely good at hiding facts. Nobody could match them at this. A ceremonious people, the Italians. The public appearance, the live human presence, gesture and speech, the human breath, the flesh and blood- - that strongly appealed to Italians. Italian listeners were never bored by empty speeches. Italians loved a warm, positive, high-toned performance.

It wasn’t all just pleasant blather, either. Every once in a while, there would be a good stinging insult in an Italian speech. Just one good elbow-swinging zinger, to show that Italian life wasn’t all peaches and lemon meringue.

The Italian philosopher was talking about the loss of middle-class aspiration and the emergence of new forms of material culture. Gavin took this opportunity to open his computer and pretend to take notes. Actually, Gavin was catching up on his Twitter stream. “Twitter” was the web service where the Internet people in the audience were passing their secret messages.

There was a megaton of Twitter secret-messaging going on at the Futurist Congress, but almost all of it was in Portuguese. The Italians were much too busy respecting their Italian philosopher. They hung on his every empty word.

The Italian philosopher wound it up. The French fashion designer was the next to speak. He left his transparent stackable chair, and turned on the big screen with a click of his thumb.

He spoke to the crowd in Italian. An amazing feat for a French guy. Normally, the French assumed that every decent person in the world spoke French.

This French businessman was very lucid and clear. He’d come to Capri with a solid, practical agenda. He was well-rehearsed. He even directly addressed the topic of the LOXY panel: why Europeans would shop for their clothes on the Web of the future.

His detailed PowerPoint presentation highlighted the Web’s advantages for a major fashion house. Market segmentation. Reduced inventory. Integration of production with demand. Customer relations management. The change in user generations.

The children of the Baby Boomers were coming onto the fashion scene and the Web was their way of life. The Digital Natives had never known a world without a Web. They loved the Web. They were its slaves.

Micro-targeted promotion campaigns. Outreach to markets in Brazil, Indonesia, and the Gulf States. Web-savvy Moslem women in Iran could shop for sexy lingerie while never leaving Moslem seclusion.

Gavin sat up in his front-row chair. This was the kind of presentation he really liked: real, red-meat, commercial Futurism.

The French businessman sensed that he was on a roll. Paris had the Milanese reeling. And then he brought out his killer application: high-tech, French augmented reality.
Réalité augmentée!
Yes! Oui! Si! French women could use augmented reality to model imaginary, cyber-generated clothes. With augmented reality, the fashion house could take the client’s exact proportions (no matter how she lied about her body), and tailor clothing precisely for her. She would be able to see how imaginary clothes, on her own body, in any color, any fabric, and the fashion would never cut a stitch of real cloth until she had ordered and paid.

The French designer displayed his imaginary cyber-clothing. Gavin switched into the Twitter backchannel to see the audience response.

Not too great. The Italians were getting nasty. Spoken Italian tended to whip by Gavin, but he could read Italian just fine.
My grandma’s dog wouldn’t be caught dead in that. // Those are cheap rubber clothes for computer-game figures. // It’s like set design for the Smurfs
.

The Parisian gentleman was sweating it now, but he then brought out the big finish. The “Carla Effect.”

Carla Bruni
. There she was. A virtual Carla Bruni! A golden video of the willowy songbird, strolling around — no, Carla was sauntering, gliding — up on the larger-than-life display screen. Carla Bruni, in her Paris-tailored get-up as the First Lady of France.

Mr. Paris had cold facts and figures on what happened to French exports whenever Premiere Dame Carla Bruni dismounted from a French jet. Fashion earthquakes occurred when Carla alighted upon some primitive, backward locale, say, London. The French called that the “Carla Effect.” And the “Carla Effect” could be measured in euros, dollars, and pounds. For the first time in history, a First Lady’s charm could be monetized.

Mr. Paris had recovered his aplomb. The Italian audience adored Carla Bruni, because Carla Bruni was, in fact, Italian. She was Italian, and French by marriage, and her dad was Brazilian. The Carla Effect promised the future!

Then he sat down to the panel’s only round of applause.

Fabio Mascherati summed up the panel’s remarks, looking cool and crisp. Fabio’s LOXY was a Web retail company, based in Milan, that sold posh Milanese clothes. Fabio, therefore, had practical and informative things to say about tomorrow’s trends in Web couture. On Twitter, though, nobody could care less.

On the Twitter backchannel, it was all Carla Bruni. They were bewitched by Carla Bruni, they just couldn’t get over her. Even the Brazilians were keenly interested in Carla. The Brazilian futurists were asking many innocent questions about Carla — her Carla-ness, her Carla-osity. The Italians were burningly eager to discuss every last little doing of “the Green-Eyed Italian Witch.” They were so proud of her!

What a romantic story Carla Bruni had. Romance fiction was
too small
for the world-conquering Carla Bruni. Carla’s father was not her mother’s husband. In fantastic, soap-opera fashion, Carla hadn’t known the truth about her own father until she was an adult. Her father was Brazilian. The Italian-French-supermodel-pop-singer First Lady of France was half-Brazilian.

The news of Carla’s Brazilian heritage set off an instant Twitter Carnaval. Linked pictures of Carla suddenly showed up on Twitter. The Internet had never lacked for languorous, sexy photos of Carla Bruni. Carla had been a European supermodel, so there were vast archives of a seminude Carla, in all her slumberous, gym-toned glory. Carla had changed the world by lying on top of it in lingerie.

Here was the basic Futurist scenario. A President of France had his back to the wall, in the worst political trouble of his life. Because his wife was divorcing him, while he still held office. An awful scandal. Disasters like that are simply not supposed to happen in France.

And then this stunningly beautiful girl — a goddess, a witch, an unearthly, paranormal creature — comes by the Elysee Palace with her guitar, to talk about recording policy on the Internet. Carla was worried about her music royalties, like every other doomed musician in the world.

Eight months later, and Carla Bruni is a princess of music. Just like Eliza said, in her artless, hopeful, teen-girl fashion, but for real, in broad daylight. A princess of music whose new best-frenemy is the glamorous Princess Letizia of Spain.

Carla is a princess of music, married to the President of France — she gives away all her music royalties to an orphanage. An orphanage in Haiti. An orphanage in Haiti for the children of AIDS victims.

Fantastic. Unprecedented. Surreal, even. Gavin had heard of Carla Bruni, but he had certainly never heard about the orphanage in Haiti for the children of the AIDS victims. He stared in raw disbelief at his laptop screen.

This showed a mastery of human events that was, frankly, supernatural.

That was European soft-power at its most fierce. That was like being shot from a drone aircraft flying at a vast cultural height. That was terrifying.

Then, Carla’s romance story became even more surreal. And, in some sense, even more romantic. Carla Bruni’s gay brother had died of AIDS. Carla came from a stricken AIDS-victim family. Carla had fled from Italy at the age of seven because bloodthirsty Italian Communist terrorists were trying to kill her.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy was an AIDS-afflicted terrorist-refugee supermodel pop-star who married the President of France.

How could those bizarre words appear in newspapers? How could that possibly be the truth? Way, way too true to ever be fiction. Every single word of it true. You could look that up. On Wikipedia.

There were no objective metrics for this kind of contemporary weirdness. Could there be anything more to it, any further leap of fantasy to break the final limits of human disbelief? Yes. Carla Bruni had once been Mick Jagger’s girlfriend.

Gavin shut his computer and shoved it inside his shoulder bag. He wiped his sweaty brow with clammy hands. Then, he left his front-row chair to say hello to Fabio Mascherati.

Gavin knew Fabio rather well. Gavin had ‘discovered’ Fabio Mascherati. That was to say, Gavin had known, for a long time, that some speculative guy like Fabio Mascherati just had to exist. Web e-commerce was destined to move into haute couture, into the world’s most elite consumer goods. Gavin had known about this because his Futurist guru, Dr. Gustav Y. Svante, had told him that the trend was inevitable.

All the Amazon guys around Seattle were also aware of the trend. They all knew that, someday, European haute couture would sell online. The problem was that feat couldn’t be done by anybody from Amazon. Because Amazon guys were hacker geeks and cheesy hicks. Amazon had been invented to sell sci-fi books. The least chic thing in the world.

The European couture biz would never go anywhere near a dorky sci-fi geek like Jeff Bezos. As for Jeff himself, Jeff would much rather conquer outer space with his private rocket than ever dress the First Lady of France.

So, a serious Web retail couture outfit would have to be European. This was pretty obvious. It could be financed with money from Amazon founders, because they plenty of cash to spare, but it had to be run by a European fashion geek. Someone who understood both Amazon and European chic. And, somebody had to find that individual.

Gavin got his VC firm of Cook, Bishop & Engleman to send him over to Milan to sniff around for this hypothetical European fashion geek. And, Gavin found him. He was real.

Statistics didn’t lie. Fabio was not imaginary. Fabio Mascherati really existed. In fact, there were a small tribe of Fabios living in northern Italy. However, Fabio, himself, was the best candidate for the job.

Fabio was the right age for a tech start-up — just under 30. Fabio had website design experience — he had worked with a Milanese marketing firm. Fabio spoke excellent English. And most importantly, Fabio Mascherati just had the look-and-feel of a tech start-up guy. That was a quality Gavin knew well.

So Cook, Bishop & Engleman had hooked deep into LOXY — way before the new start-up was even named “LOXY.” But the Seattle boys had gotten out early, too. Cook, Bishop & Engleman got cold feet about the ugly downturn in Seattle venture capital. So, it had seemed like a shrewd idea to cash out fast from their European adventure, and turn a quick, solid, 35 percent return on the LOXY investment. Especially, when so many other VC houses in Seattle were slamming and bolting their doors.

Gavin had no position or leverage around LOXY anymore. Gavin had to sit and watch from the sidelines as LOXY grew and grew. Gavin was just a Futurist. The guy who had been there for LOXY ahead of the curve.

In Italy, though, that kind of friendship counted for plenty. Gavin dried his sweaty hand on his cargo pants, and hopped up on stage, his hand outstretched.

Fabio Mascherati was genuinely glad to see him. Fabio was not just being business-associate cordial, but was truly happy about meeting Gavin again. It was like meeting an old pal from a high-risk mountain-climbing team.

Gavin cleared his throat. “So, you put together quite a panel there, Fabio. Really eye-opening. The crowd loved it.”

“Thanks! I had my doubt about this strange mix of guests here — a bit confusing, perhaps. But today, this Congress...” Fabio did something odd and Italian with his hands. “The future is opening-up!”

“This crowd is loving the ‘Bruni Factor.’ Oh wait — I mean the ‘Carla Effect.’”

Fabio laughed in delight. “That little songbird! Our angel! You know who else is from Italy? Like Carla? Sonia Gandhi! Sonia married a Gandhi, and now Sonia runs India! The boss of India is a pretty Italian girl!”

“I didn’t know that,” said Gavin. “That is one crazy piece of trivia.”

“Are you coming to this Futurist Congress next year? Because it’s all settled — next year, we’re having another one. Capri loves us!”

“I might very well attend that gig. A lot is happening in Capri. Your venue is quite the happening place.”

“Are you doing LOFT in Geneva? How about ESPRIT in Amsterdam?”

“I heard those scenes were both good.”

“You must go, Gavin. You must! The tech scene in Europe is breaking open this year. You saw that Brussels woman on my panel here? It takes years to get Brussels to act! But when Brussels finally moves, that is an elephant walking the earth! You and I, we need to talk! How are our good friends at Cook, Bishop & Engleman?”

“They’re hanging on.”

“I heard about Puget Ventures.”

Gavin nodded somberly. “It’s way cheaper to sit on the money than put it into tech in Seattle right now.”

“That is so crazy, Gavin. Why? There’s so much tech talent in Seattle! The euro is crazy high, and our website needs programmers... You might be just the man I need for that, because...”

An apparition grabbed Fabio’s arm. She was tall and bony, lean yet busty... She had
that look
. That fashion-girl look. That plastic look his girlfriend Madeleine called “balloons on a stick.” Madeleine worked in the health-care industry and knew a lot about elective surgery.

Also, Seattle girls were never on very good terms with L.A. girls. This L.A. creature clinging onto Fabio screamed “Los Angeles.” She had the all-over tan, the long straw-blond hair, the cleavage down to there...