Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (22 page)

“I’m the same way, Farfalla. Well, in my own way — but in my own narrative, I’m the same way.”

“Gavin, how did it happen to you?”

“Oh, it happened to me, all right... Once, I went to this little meeting of Microsoft kids. Like, this high-school trip thing, but it was very exclusive. We met the world’s greatest Futurist there. Dr Gustav Y. Svante. Nobody knows who he is. That’s
why
he’s the world’s greatest Futurist. He told us... He said that the future was already here, but nobody listens to the future. The future is all around us, but we don’t see the future yet. We don’t hear it or see it, so we can’t tell it.”

Gavin was telling her the truth. He was all itchy with the truth, he really wanted her to see and feel this private burden of his. “None of the other kids listened to Dr Svante. They just thought that Dr Svante was some boring, old Swedish guy who — somehow — happened to know Bill Gates. But
I
listened to him. Because I knew he was telling the truth.”

“Well, nobody ever listens to
me,
” moaned Farfalla. “Never, never, ever.”

“Look,
I
listen to you. Maybe it’s my
doom
to listen to you... You think it’s an
accident
that I’m here in this car with Cassandra? This is our destiny! Think how many times our paths have crossed already! I’ve been to your town, and you’ve been to my town...”

“Gavin, are you
really
listening to me? Men
never
listen to women...”

“Shut up and drive the car! I am telling you, don’t run off the road!
You
are not listening.”

Farfalla laughed. “Ha ha ha! I know I’ll never die in a car! That’s the truth.”

“That doesn’t mean
I
won’t die in a car! Slow down, or else kill me right now!”

Farfalla slowed the speeding sports car. Since there were other Italian drivers on this darkening, twisted mountain road, driving was that much more dangerous. She had to please him, because he was upset.

“We can park the car soon,” she told him. “We can walk together.”

“Let’s do that. Please. That would be good.”

“Let’s do something beautiful tonight. Let’s go to the top of Monte Solaro. It’s the peak of Capri, the highest spot in the island. We can see the whole world from up there. I can buy you a drink. I have money.”

“Fine, terrific,” he said, “that sounds perfect.”

Farfalla’s luck with parking had deserted her. There was no place to hide the car from the Capri cops. She had to leave Eleanora’s car in a spot that was sure to be ticketed.

Monte Solaro had a chair-lift that lifted tourists up to the mountain peak, but Farfalla couldn’t find the lift. Anacapri never had as many tourists as the town of Capri did. The signage on the streets was useless.

But, the frustration and the worry made Gavin hold her hand, and that was wonderful. To hold hands, and to walk at dusk, with a man who loved you. They were in love. Two Futurists in love. Such a simple, tender thing. So sweet and so good. She would never forget it. Not in thousands of years.

Other couples were strolling around Anacapri, too. Germans, Finns, whatever origin, couples clearly not so attractive and chic as themselves. These dumpy foreign lovers gave them hostile stares, as if they owned the island and a rival couple might steal it from them.

“I’m lost now,” Farfalla told him.

“And I left my map back at my hotel,” he said. “But we’ll get up there. We’ll climb all the way to the top of this island, even if I have to carry you.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t. That big party was important for your venture capital business.”

“I don’t even want to think about ventures or capital.”

They jaywalked across a street. Farfalla’s high heel plunged through a street grating. Gavin stopped. “Good Lord, now what?”

“Now, I’m stuck!”

Gavin examined the manhole cover. “Holy cow! Look at this rusty old iron here. It’s got a Fascist insignia.”

“I can’t move!”

“Well, no wonder. Look at the corrosion on this thing.” Gavin dipped to his knee before her, as if ready to propose. He cupped her shoe-heel in the back of his hand. “I can’t believe this. You’re jammed solid!”

“It went in there,” she said, “it has to come out.”

“We’re stuck in the middle of the street. What if a car comes and kills you?”

“Why are you always worried about cars? I can drive, Italians can drive, stop worrying.”

“You’d better abandon this shoe. I think I could leverage it, if it didn’t have your weight on it.”

“I am not
fat!
” Farfalla yanked hard at her stubborn shoe, but got nothing but a cruel pang in her ankle.
“Questa situazione è ridicola! Dovrei chiamare una squadraccia di leghisti e sguinzagliarla contro il sindaco di questo posto di merda!”
¹⁰

“No need to get all political,” said Gavin. He had an insufferable look of amused superiority. “Give me a crowbar, and I’ll rip this whole grate out.”

“Stop making fun of me.”

Gavin’s phone rang. He pulled it from his cargo pocket, glanced at the screen in irritation, and answered quickly. “Eliza, I can’t talk now, I’ve got a situation here... What? What’s that? No way! Never mind that, it went fine anyway. You did
what?
No, don’t eat those! You don’t know where they’ve been!”

Gavin clamped his hand over the phone and glanced up at Farfalla. “Where is the big party tonight?”

“Penthouse level, room B, sponsored by Alessi,” Farfalla said.

“The party is up in the penthouse level of the convention hotel,” Gavin told his sister. “You’ll have to take that big brass elevator — not the one in the lobby, but the private one up on the third floor... Don’t forget to take your conference tag with you...”

He threw the phone down and jumped to his feet. “A truck!”

Farfalla twisted, stared, and waved her arms at the driver. The oncoming truck, clumsy, huge, rattling, stupid, accelerated for the sheer pleasure of killing Italian girls.

Gavin yanked her from the street. He tore her loose, swooped her up, and jumped for the sidewalk.

The truck rumbled past and lurched around a corner.

“Put me down, Gavin. Let me go now.”

He said nothing.

“Put me down now.”

“The pavement is dirty.”

“You can’t carry me.”

Silently, Gavin carried her. He carried her twenty-two paces down the street. He set her on an abandoned café table. He then stalked back up the street, and plucked her crushed shoe from the rusty grate.

“My phone broke,” he told her. “I just cracked the case of my Blackberry.”

“Oh, look at my dirty shoe! Oh, my shoes were so pretty, and so cheap, too! I shopped forever to find those.”

“What are your shoes made of, tool-steel? My Blackberry’s a major fail, and all your shoe needs is fresh polish.”

He was lying, for the buckle of the strap had snapped. He had broken her shoe, as he yanked her into his arms. Her shoe was crushed, ruined, smashed by a truck, spoiled forever, and tomorrow, she would have to walk in it.

Farfalla sniffed back her tears. She loved her shoe, but it was just a shoe. “You saved my life. That must be fate.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, scowling.

“He didn’t see me.”

“Of course, he didn’t see you! He’s an idiot with no idea where he’s going! Cars kill a million people every year! Everybody in this world is going to die from damned cars! Cars are destroying the planet with climate change, oil wars, cyberwars, space wars, it’s total armageddon! I want to kill that guy.” Gavin put his hands out, his big hands, his strong hands, his violently trembling hands.

“You can’t kill him. He’s just a truck driver.”

“If I can find him, I can kill him. Maybe he’s on Facebook.”

Awkwardly, she patted his sweaty shoulder. She hopped from the café table and stood in her remaining shoe. “We should have gone to that party... They were expecting us there.”

“Why? You want to do what they
expected
us to do?”

“No,” she told him, meekly.

“We are Futurists, so we are climbing to the highest peak of this island! To look around the whole world! To have a drink and relax! Everything like we planned together.”

An elderly local couple wobbled by, walking their tiny, nasty, little dog, and sniping at each other in their island dialect. Farfalla asked them for directions to the Piazza Vittoria. It wasn’t far. Just hard for strangers to find.

Monte Solaro was serviced by a chair-lift, from the plaza up to the peak. The lift was a wiry contraption of open wooden seats, like a ski-lift without snow. Farfalla was terrified. Ski-lifts were merciless, uncontrollable, rattling pieces of junk.

These lifts had single chairs. Farfalla had no one to cling to in her fear. No one to scream with as she fell to her doom on the sharp patchy rocks below.

She looked behind herself as the lift cranked and clattered. She feared for Gavin’s composure in this fearful ordeal. Gavin was casually chatting on his Blackberry. He might have been in a booth at an American hamburger joint.

Farfalla clamped her eyes shut in nausea. At last, a clunk and rattle told her she had come to earth. Her broken shoe was a mess. Her ankle ached.

The cold and windy gauntlet of death had restored Gavin’s good mood. “Wow, what a cool ride!” he crowed. “I just straightened things out with Eliza. Can you believe it? She wanted me to go to her hotel and fetch her luggage. Kids!”

“Is Eliza in your hotel room?” Farfalla had some daring ideas about Gavin’s hotel room.

“Yeah. She said she would take a nap there. Somebody gave her some sleeping pills, melatonin... Eliza gets it about drugs. She’s okay, she’s smart about that. She’s smarter than I am, in some ways.”

Yes, thought Farfalla silently. His sister
was
smarter than Gavin, quite a lot smarter in most ways. Farfalla wouldn’t say that aloud, though. That wasn’t smart.

Besides, her own brother was extremely smart. Rafael was fiendishly clever. Cleverness made Rafael worse, it made him dangerous. Sometimes, with the men in your life, you lost either way.

“Eliza has proved that she can handle herself here in Capri,” said Gavin proudly. “She had a pretty good time here. I knew this trip would work out for her.”

“She loves you very much,” said Farfalla. This was an inspired thing to tell him. A beautiful thing. Love blew the cobwebs off of everything.

Gavin led the way up the slope the the peak. The sun was setting.

The charm of this vista was frightening. Capri possessed magical glamour, it was divine enchantment. Divine Capri had bewitched generations of mortals. Capri had stolen people from their homelands. Capri had broken and reunited the strongest bonds of human nature. Capri had turned scientists into mystics, and turned mystics into saints. Kings of the world had lived on this mountain.

Gavin gripped her shoulder. “Look, far down there, those rocks in the sea,” he said. “The Faraglione Rocks. I saw them when I first came here. Now, they’re so far away.”

She slid her arms around him. This was the most natural thing in the world to do. In those cruel distances of time and space, it was easy and sweet. It was comforting and human. It warmed her. It made her happy.

Another world was waiting in his arms. A future world better than any world she knew. A world in his arms where she was safe and good, where she knew all the things that a happy woman should know. A world she understood, that listened and understood her. A world that loved her.

“This is truly as good as it gets,” he said. “We are like a king and a queen on this mountain. This is the finest moment in my life.” He pulled his glance from the blue horizon. Then, he looked deep into her upturned eyes.

“You are beautiful,” he said. “You are the most beautiful thing life will ever bring to me.”

She pursed her lips for The Kiss.

“Look at those stars coming out,” Gavin said, lifting his chin. “I can’t believe that a divine view like this could get any more fantastic, but I guess I’m wrong. Look at those planets, Mars, Venus, and the darkness behind them! You know what I am looking at right now?
Deep Time!
It’s cosmic! ‘Cosmic’ means
thirteen-point-seven billion years
back to the first eruption of spacetime! And every moment of all those eons was
real time once,
that’s what kills me. That moments were all real moments, just like this passing moment in our life, when I kissed you, or almost kissed you, anyway. Think of all that time!”

“That hurts you,” she said.

“Yeah. Cosmic time hurts my soul. I don’t know why, but it has shaped my whole life. I am haunted by that hurt. Because it’s the
ultimate.
It’s like, two people, you and me, now – we can tell each other ‘this is our special moment, I love you forever’ — but there is no ‘forever.’ Forever doesn’t exist. The universe goes back to its limit and that is
it.
When I was a little kid, I saw that. You know when you’re a little kid, almost asleep? And you’re in bed, and staring up at the darkness? Well, I
saw
that. I saw time
to its beginning.
Time was clear to me, like those shining stars, it was in my soul, like, like your shining eyes. Before that beginning of time there is
nothing
. There is the black void. The Abyss. The Abyss has no clock, it is
cosmic nothingness.”

“You’ve been waiting a long time to tell somebody that.”

“It is my burden. Because I saw it, I felt it, it is the deep time of being. I’ve never gotten over it, I’m always aware of it, that is the universe, and I’m part of that universe. It’s scientifically proven. Our living flesh is made of star dust. I could go on about that all day.”

“Our flesh is made of star dust?”

“Yes, your beautiful, living body, that I’m touching, that you showed to me, yes, you are stardust.”

What a terrifying thing to hear. Very startling and upsetting. Farfalla couldn’t even speak, because her mouth was all stardust. Her tongue and her lips, unkissed, made of stardust.