Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (13 page)

Eliza curled up on the bed, but her eyes were open.

Farfalla took a deep breath, confronted the stained floorboards, and raised her arms.
“’Tam clara nunquam providae mentis furor ostendit oculis! Video et intersum et fruor! Imago visis dubia infallit meos, spectemus! Sed cur repente noctis aestivae vices hiberna longa spatia producunt mora, aut quid cadentes detinet stellas polo? Phoebum moramur? Redde iam mundo diem!’
Okay, now we go shopping. Get your purse.”

They left the hotel room together. “Leave your door open,” said Farfalla. “The maids are used to the ghosts.”

They took the creaking, carpeted stairs, since the old iron elevator was so slow and wicked. “Aren’t
you
afraid of ghosts?” asked Eliza.

“Not ghosts like him. I told that ghost I could see him. I made fun of him. They hate sarcasm.”

“You have supernatural powers,” Eliza said, in a small voice. “You are paranormal.”

“Look, are you an idiot? Of course I’m paranormal, but do I look ‘powerful’ to you? You think you want
my life
? You wouldn’t last one week.”

“Okay, okay, please don’t get mad at me. I’m new at this! I’m
really
new at
all
of this.”

They departed the haunted hotel. Farfalla had a hard time remembering where she had parked the borrowed Lancia. Everything in Capri was cunningly arranged for foot traffic — to guide the gullible tourists past the expensive stores. All the parking spots in Capri were hidden with an awful craftiness. These sacred, hidden spots were known only to the local adepts.

Farfalla herded Eliza past cracks in the fig-strewn sidewalk. “Eliza, did you go to the Futurist Congress?”

“Oh yeah, I did go to your Congress! I totally, totally want to go to more of your Futurist Congress. Your Futurist Congress is super.”

“Who did you see there?”

Eliza pulled a rumpled brochure from her tight-laced bodice. “Well, I saw this cool panel, with two women on it. ‘Web-Based Collective Action and Urban Revival’ with Patrizia Kosciusko-Morizet and Nathalie Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.”

Farfalla laughed in delight. “I never heard an American girl say their names!”

“I went up after, to talk to Signora Patrizia. My brother said I should mingle with the European brainy people. Patrizia runs this modern art museum. She has a big cultural center. I would love to do that, myself, some day. Because I want to be cultural, too. I
totally
want to be cultural. Like, to be the cultural musical princess!”

Farfalla thought this over. “What did Patrizia say to you?”

“She said I had to take responsibility, and build my public credibility. She said that I should go to Torino.” Eliza paused in wonder. “Patrizia was so nice to me. She talked to me like a grown-up.”

“Torino? I hate Torino! Torino — it’s nothing like Milano... You’re from Seattle? Well, Torino is just like Portland.”

“Patrizia is beautiful. She is so dignified and elegant. I have never met anyone like Patrizia. She’s a real lady.”

“The women in Torino dress like laboratory workers! Those little gray witches in Torino are full of occult esoterica! They’re even worse than Prague and Lyons... You know where a little music-scene girl like you should go? You should go to Berlin.”

“Oh yes, totally! Please! I would
love
to go to Berlin! D J Hell is from Berlin! Ellen Allien lives there. Hey, is this your car?”

“Get in the car,” Farfalla hedged.

Eleanora’s aging sports car lurched forward fitfully, since it hadn’t had an oil change in ages. The Lancia spent its sad, cramped life under canvas wraps in the TV presenter’s garage.

Farfalla put the Lancia’s top down. She busied herself with her hair-wrap and sunglasses. She ground the car into gear. The streets on Capri were as crooked as the Hebrew alphabet.

Eliza poked at the radio’s smoky, plastic buttons. A jazzy beach samba popped out of the Lancia’s dusty speakers.

“I never heard this song before,” said Eliza, cocking her head to one side. “It’s Brazilian. It’s from 1964.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s got a Mark II Farfisa electric organ, and that’s a four-track mix.” Eliza listened some more. “That bassist can’t play samba.”

Farfalla rasped and jolted her way to the next intersection, where German tourists were licking gelato cones. A question occurred to her. “What kind of music does your brother like?”

“Gavin doesn’t really ‘like’ music much. Gavin is a Futurist. So, Gavin mostly plays Brian Eno ambient music about ten-thousand-year old clocks. Where are you driving me?”

“We’re going to Anacapri now.”

“Why? Why would I want to go there?”

“Do you ever play Warcraft?”

“Yeah. Sure. Sometimes.”

“I’m a Horde 80th Level Undead Priestess.”

“Okay, fine, fine, Farfalla. I get it! You go wherever you want to go.” Eliza opened her Congress brochure. She scanned the fine print. “All these freaky lectures make my head hurt... But I want Gavin to think that I’m studying the future here in Capri, because, you know... I have to. Or else he gets mad at me. Tell me what I should see, Farfalla. How about ‘The Visible City and the Dynamics of Mobile Devices?’”

“That is architecture,” sniffed Farfalla. “Nobody can translate that nonsense! That panel stinks.”

“’Emotional Branding in Digital Communities?’”

“Ad men who lost their jobs.”

“’Theoria, Techne and Praxis in the Postmodern Refugee Camp?’”

“Left-wing politicals. I hate them.”

“My dad is a left-wing political.”

“So is mine.”

“Mmmmph,” nodded Eliza. “How about ‘Aggregatable Embeddable Widgets?’”

“Oh. That one is good. Yes, I’m translating that one. Lots of cool iPhone apps.”

“You have an iPhone, too? Hey, I have an iPhone! What other speeches are you translating?”

“I have to do ‘Affective Complexity in Machine-Generated Textiles’ and ‘Trans-Acousmatic Design for Shopping Environments.’” Farfalla sighed. “I wish they paid me more.”

“Okay. I just got a great idea. Why don’t I just go to the panels that you are translating? And, the rest of the time, we can just hang out?”

“I like your plan, Eliza.” Farfalla finally found a clear stretch of road. The road was very narrow, and it twisted straight up a mountain. At last, a chance to move fast-forward, Italian-Futurist style.

Farfalla kicked off her spike heel, and placed her stockinged foot flat on the pedal. The Lancia whipped up the mountain and whizzed down the far side of it.

Farfalla poked Eliza with her elbow. “
Guarda!
We’re almost there.”

Eliza pulled her white-knuckled fingers from the dashboard. She patted at her wind-whipped hair. “Hey, that song on the radio,” she said. “I know that song. That is Astrud Gilberto. That song is ‘
Call Me.
’”

Farfalla listened. Astrud Gilberto was pretty old, even by her parent’s standards. “
Call Me.
” Yes, Farfalla had heard that song before. That song was much older than she was.
“Call Me”
was a slinky, classy, and timeless bossa-nova standard.

Call Me
. The title said it all. It was a romantic song, all about calling.
Call Me
was an invocation, a cry of supernatural need. A woman is trying to get some strange, remote guy to come across for her. She’s coaxing her guy to call her. She’s reassuring him. She’s promising him all kinds of tender, sexy favors. So that he will call her.

“This is such a good song,” Farfalla said. “Carla Bruni should cover this song.”

“It’s ‘their song,’” said Eliza, wrinkling her nose. “My brother and his girlfriend, Madeleine. I had to listen to her play that song for him a thousand times.”

Chapter Nine: The Disco Volante

This third day of the Futurist conference was hitting its stride. Gavin was pleased with himself. He had done the right thing, flying here to Capri.

Yes, he’d done it mostly to flee the tense, gloomy, stressful scene in Seattle. And to help his sister out, emotionally. And to see if he could light a fire under that long-simmering Brazilian electronic business. He’d had a lot of reasons to visit Capri, but mostly, he did it because it felt right.

The choice was working out for him. The futurists were having a good time, this morning. A lot of new one-day people, in Capri, for the weekend. The conference speakers had loosened up, too — the big panel on Innovative Flat Freak Tipping Points was a circus.

This Congress had magic. This Congress had futuristic buzz. You could see it in the faces of people. You could hear it in their tone of voice. You could sense it in the air.

Gavin had to think it was due to the Brazilians. The visa hassles with Brazilians must have been tremendous, but the LOXY boys excelled at working through kinks like that. LOXY was just plain good at that kind of work. Sometimes, global network culture could sweep the world like a broom.

The Brazilians in the Capri crowd were the bubbles in the spumante. With Brazilians around, the Italians were less guarded with each other, more keen to show themselves off. The whole scene was just hotter. Hotter, stranger, sexier, and louder. Less haunted-castle, more jungle-paradise.

Just a strange, good, warm, intimate quality that Gavin couldn’t quite name. An alert, aroused, let’s-get-it-on feeling...
Hope,
a voice seemed to whisper to him. Yes, this was an Italian future with the living whisper of
hope
.

Hope.
A feeling commonly associated with the future. A feeling Gavin hadn’t felt much, lately. Not personally, anyway.
Hope
— were Futurists supposed to have such a thing? Serious, adult Futurists?
Hope?

The local Capri people were drinking the Futurist Kool-Aid. But was their Capri really the future? Capri, the goddess island of dead zombie Marilyn Monroe perfume? Well,
why not
Capri? A great quality of life on a beautiful Mediterranean island!

Gavin networked, he swapped business cards, he was cordial to people. Showing the flag for Cook, Bishop & Engleman.
Yes, you may have heard of CB&E. We are in the Italian venture space!

Then, time for Fabio Mascherati’s two-hour ‘lunch on the yacht’. Because Fabio hadn’t been making small-talk about this summit meeting. Polite Italian lunch arrangements were veiled commands.

Gavin caught Capri’s little vertical train down to the harbor. The Grand Harbor was insanely grand, just gorgeous. Landscape painters had infested Capri for centuries, painting every tint in the water.

The LOXY yacht adorned the sea like a jewel in the hair of a water-goddess. The
Disco Volante
made the pleasure yachts of Microsoft millionaires look like clumsy SUV’s.

Gavin made his way past the Capri cops, who were guarding the dock from Eurotrash moochers and imaginary Arab terrorists.

All the web geeks from LOXY had changed into crisp yachting gear. Not that their pretty boat was sailing anywhere. They did this because Italians always wore yachting gear while standing around on yachts. It was tradition.

A leggy booth-bunny in a scarf, hat and shiny swimsuit handed Gavin a filled plate.

The LOXY yacht was swarming with gorgeous women in scandalous swim attire. These hard-bodied young gals were not swimming. The overworked geeks who sponsored them were not yachting, either. Same story. Same business approach.

These web geeks would drown in a rowboat, and the model showgirls were there to sell. These young women were human eye-candy. A PR harem in designer sandals. The Italians never made a sexist fuss about any of this. Neither did the Brazilians. The all-over-tanned girls without any tops? They were the Brazilian girls.

Gavin ate his fresh fish and radicchio. The LOXY food was superb. It was better food than Gavin knew how to appreciate.

LOXY staffers came around to show off their English to Gavin. LOXY geeks asked to take pictures with him, to adorn their personal websites. ‘Stefano,’ the Python programmer. ‘Riccardo,’ the social-software moderator. They remembered him from their start-up days two years ago, though he sure didn’t remember any of them.

They just knew that he had been there at LOXY first. He’d created a new company, given them their jobs. This paranormal power made him, somehow, their hero. They knew that he had been there with the magic. He brought the start-up money, with funding-structures and a business plan, when nobody else had ever heard of LOXY. When stuffy, aging Italian bankers stared coldly at young Italian cybergeeks and told them to get a real career.

Two years was fourteen years in Internet years. Gavin was 26 years old and yet, to them, he was the godfather of their way of life.

Some of these LOXY guys thought Gavin had created LOXY. It wasn’t his idea, though. LOXY arose like Venus from the deep insights of the Futurist guru, Dr. Gustav Y. Svante.

Dr. Svante was not a mere, 26-year-old Seattle startup hustler, like Gavin Tremaine. Dr. Svante was 76 years old. Dr. Svante was the genuine Futurist article. He was a true 21st-century seer. A major Futurist of Dr Svante’s caliber would never clown around on a gorgeous yacht named ‘Flying Saucer’, swarming with semi-nude models. Dr. Svante had disciples like Gavin Tremaine to do such errands for him.

Fabio Mascherati manifested himself. Fabio insisted on a brief but intense photo session with Gavin. Fabio was obviously not ‘relaxing’ here at his informal lunch on this yacht. Fabio was putting on a two-hour publicity lunch.Fabio was pretending to look chic, relaxed and at ease. He was not. Aboard the
Disco Volante
, Fabio was ‘cool’ to the point of looking a little coked-out.

Local Italian television had shown up on Fabio’s yacht. “Italian television” meant adult women, not showgirls. These Italian television crew-women were pretty, but no longer young. They were older, vampire media pros who survived by chewing the bones of the younger, nuder showgirls. Oh yeah, some secluded little catered lunch this was.

The Italian TV women got their thirty seconds of glory from Fabio, with the glaring lights and imposing cameras. The ordeal left Fabio looking tense and ragged.