Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (27 page)

“Madeleine is a parasite. She’s like mistletoe, growing all over your body. She sucks the life out of you. She has never let you be real, not for one day. She has turned you into what she needs you to be. She makes you stupid.”

“Elizabeth, you are a smart-ass kid. All right? You have dad’s brains, instead of mom’s heart. You think you know my own girlfriend better than I do? Go to hell! Name
one time
she ever lifted her hand against me. Name one mean or wicked thing that she ever did to me. You think I don’t know who Madeleine is, what kind of life she has? She had
to fight her own family
to be with me. She still has to fight against
you
. You kicked and fought against her every step of the way, and don’t think I ever liked that! You get along so great with Farfalla Corrado? Well, you fell for the Italian opera there. Let me clue you in! Madeleine is a Valkyrie from a Wagner opera. So there.”

“No she isn’t. Madeleine would never die on fire for her love of you. Madeleine is not your Valkyrie. Madeleine wouldn’t put you out if you were on fire.”

“Madeleine would never let me catch fire in the first place.”

“You need to wake up, Gavin. You’re a very weird, intense guy. You
belong
on fire. People think that you’re okay, because you talk like a Microsoft nerd and you wear a business suit. That’s crap! You are
super-weird
, Gavin.
You don’t even live in our time-zone. Not
even
, Gavin. Nobody else knows that — but I’m your sister. And now I know there is somebody else in this world, someone else who is like you.”

“She’s not ‘like me’ at all, okay?
She’s a woman
. I didn’t do anything to her! She ordered me to go. Flat out. She told me to beat it. Never look back, she said! She had the right idea, too. She went her way, and I went mine. End of story.”

Eliza thought about this. She hated every word of it. She was struggling. “That was it? ‘End of story’?”

“Yes. The story ends just like
Roman Holiday
.”

“That movie stinks! Not even an email, or anything? I mean, even some corny 1950’s princess would have Facebook nowadays.”

“No way I would do that. Very bad idea there. Long-distance relationships have all the downsides of screwing around, without any of the benefits. I have some good friends who have been through that. I may be a fool, but I’m not stupid.”

Eliza’s thin face slowly wrinkled in misery. “That’s it, huh? You cut her off like she was dead! She was my friend, and she helped me so much, and she was so good and smart, and now she’s a ghost.”

“Cry me a river, Eliza. We grownups are not teenage drama queens.”

“I’m not like
her
, you know. And I’m not like
you
, either. You two are the freaks. I just
dress up
like a freak. Underneath, I’m a real human being.”

Gavin said nothing. There wasn’t a lot to say to a remark of that kind.

The clock ticked.

Eliza spoke up again, at last. She had a new, sly, cajoling tone. “You wouldn’t even help her find that little bronze statue? You promised that you would help her find that statue.”

“A statue? What statue? Oh wait, I forgot all about that silly thing. Farfalla’s still looking around for that statue? She never said anything to me about that.”

“She got hired to look for the statue. That’s her quest. Farfalla needs the money. Farfalla is totally street. She’s always hustling. Because she’s
poor
. I don’t think she’s ever held one real, paying job in her whole life! Obviously, she’s not gonna ask some dork like
you
for any help with statues. Because, boy, that would sure be embarrassing.”

“Look, that statue business was never about Farfalla Corrado. I was helping out this nice little old lady who doesn’t even have email. That old professor is completely helpless in the modern world. As for Farfalla Corrado, she’s a tough cookie who can look after herself. Forget the statue.”

“Great job on ducking the issue there, Mr. Technicality.”

“The Cosmic Cupid is all water under the bridge! The Cosmic Cupid is a minor detail! It’s barely in the story, and anyway, Farfalla was never serious about that. She’s never going to find that thing.”

“Yeah, she’s sure to fail. Especially if
you
have anything to do with it.” Eliza tucked her white iPhone earbuds in her ears.

She was giving him the silent treatment. She didn’t say another word to him for twelve hours.

Chapter Sixteen: The Chips Are Down

Ivrea was just the same. The same, at least, as Farfalla had always known the town. Once upon an earlier time, in the
dolce vita
days of the 1960’s, Ivrea had been a thriving city. A wholly-owned division of the almighty Olivetti. The home of a mighty industrial company that made real goods that real people bought. Typewriters, calculators, and analog office equipment.

Olivetti even created the Programma 101 computer, the first commercial desktop computer in the whole world.

Then, other people’s computers stole over the Italian town like some ghostly, invisible tide. Proud, beautiful, analog Olivetti went broke. One third of Ivrea vanished. Slowly and painfully.

Of course, Ivrea’s buildings were still standing upright. There was just no life and no wealth left inside them. Haunted buildings. No industry there. No money. Just hip, chic, with-it 1960’s architecture, while a cold wind whistled through the broken windows.

After their hapless adventures rescuing the proletariat of the Third World, her parents had settled down near Ivrea. Farfalla’s parents were natives of the local Canavese region. Her parents had no money, because they were selfless and idealistic people. They had devoted their lives to creating “appropriate technology” for suffering poor people. Poor people who were not Italian poor people. Brazilians, mostly.

The upshot of their noble, selfless crusade was predictable. Her parents became very poor. Her parents were Italian intellectuals with advanced degrees in architecture. They were alternative dropouts, and poorer than church mice.

Farfalla had been pretty happy in Brazil. Surrounded by poverty, she hadn’t really known what ‘poverty’ was. Once back in Italy, Farfalla was left to become what Farfalla was today: a poor, pretty girl, living in Italy. Italy was full of trapdoors that led straight to hell for pretty girls. The pretty girls in Brazil were just the pretty girls. Pretty girls in Italy were an Italian national resource.

Farfalla went through some of this Italian pretty-girl ordeal, because her parents, and even her very elderly grandparents, really needed the money. So did her little brother, who had arrived late in her parents’ life and was their pride and joy. Rafael was too young to remember Brazil. Rafael was an Italian boy through and through. And he acted it, too. He over-acted it. Farfalla’s parents and grandparents were her burden, but her brother was the bane of her life.

As always, after a trip, the first thing Farfalla did in Ivrea was to dutifully visit her parents. Her parents lived on a tiny organic farm outside of town. They occupied a humble ecological shack that they had built by themselves. Farfalla’s parents were extravagantly proud of this hand-crafted hovel, which had many of the features they had always recommended to poor people. Their toilets didn’t flush. Their roof was covered with dirt. They had no air-conditioning. Flow-through ventilators gave mosquitoes the run of the place. They had a big garden, but since they refused to use any pesticides, most of their produce was eaten by bugs.

Farfalla had a pleasant chat with her parents — pleasant for them, anyway. She could have told them something of serious interest to them — for instance, “I just met an American millionaire who wanted to marry me” — but she didn’t dare to try that. This startling news would surely provoke an earnest debate with her parents. Any serious discussion with her parents always involved much quoting of deep Italian political philosophers, such as Antonio Gramsci and Enrico Berlinguer. The most boring, craziest, stuffiest dead men in the whole world.

Her parents had always been like that. Her parents were politically committed Italian leftists from the 1970’s. When she wasn’t around, they talked about left-wing politics, all day, every day.

Farfalla successfully avoided telling her parents what she had been doing. This had been Farfalla’s family survival strategy since the age of fourteen. And whenever she vanished from her family circle, her brother filled up that empty space. Her parents doted on Rafael. They couldn’t get enough of Rafael, the son of the family. His every gesture of careless contempt deepened their devotion to him. There was scarcely one breath of air, or beam of light, or scrap of bread, in which her brother hadn’t jumped in her way.

Her parents had some big news about her brother. Rafael was coming back to Ivrea, from the distant Dutch town where he was freeloading off the Dutch government — Eindhoven, Enschede, whatever it was. Rafael needed more money. Of course, her parents would provide Rafael with money. They were thrilled to do that. Her mother would do his laundry, feed him tenderly, and sort his dirty socks.

Farfalla left the hovel of her parents and went to her own apartment. Farfalla lived inside a factory. This 1960’s concrete heap had been abandoned, but partially rescued. Italy was too beautiful to have its towns stay empty. Whenever there were empty buildings in Italy, weird oddities would show up.

The oddest thing in Ivrea was the man who owned Farfalla’s factory. He was Dr. Pancrazio Pola. Pancrazio was an Italian electronics engineer. He built circuit boards. This sounded like the dullest, geekiest, most boring activity in the world. It was, too — except when Pancrazio did it. Pancrazio had decided to build circuit boards as an Italian art form.

Pancrazio was an Italian techno-artiste. He was an artist, so he said he cared nothing for money. That was not entirely true. Pancrazio despised money so much that he actively tried to repel money from his life. Pancrazio was bitterly anti-money. He was an alternative, drop-out, open-source, freeware guy.

Pancrazio certainly knew how to build circuit boards. He’d held real jobs as an electronics engineer, so he knew how to salvage machinery from dead Italian factories. Pancrazio installed that junk in his own revived factory in Ivrea. And once he flipped the big switch, his dead factory walked like Frankenstein.

People in the circuit-building business didn’t know what to make of Pancrazio Pola. Nobody in the world had ever built pretty, elegant, highly-artistic circuit-boards. Italian art was always worth some kind of money to somebody, somewhere. The twenty-first century had a big romantic weakness for circuit boards. Circuit boards hid in every cranny of the twenty-first century. Mice were less common than circuit boards.

So, Pancrazio Pola and his atelier were prospering in Ivrea. They were getting famous — very famous, in many different parts of the world. Pancrazio was an open-source rebel. Pancrazio never played by the old rules. He’d forgotten that there were any rules.

Pancrazio and his geeky technical friends — and he had plenty of them — they were much more Italian than Farfalla. They were twenty-first century
Italian
Italians. They had
futurismo
written all over them.

That was why Farfalla had decided to set her hat for Pancrazio Pola. She was young, poor, pretty and achingly lonely, and Dr. Pancrazio Pola was the future, and she knew that, because she could see it. Hear it, smell it, and touch it, too.

It wasn’t hard for Farfalla to get close to Pancrazio Pola. Everybody knew that he and his geeks hung out in a local beer bar.

Sometimes, a few local Ivrea girls ventured into the geek bar. They had one good look at the Italian geek boys and ran away as fast at their cheap high heels could carry them. Farfalla got a barmaid job in the beer bar. She brought all the geeks all their beers.

Then, she set siege to Pancrazio. This took her a while. She had a few rivals for Pancrazio’s favors — sort of. Not all Italian girls were afraid of circuit boards and geek guys. Some Italian girls really, truly wanted to build Pancrazio’s circuit boards. There were three of these women. They all had doctorates in electrical engineering. They came from Torino, Bologna and Genoa. They were extremely geeky and weird Italian women. Pancrazio Pola famously had “no time for women,” but he had plenty of time for these women, because they were geeks, like him.

Farfalla was not a geek, and this was why Farfalla had ended up becoming Pancrazio’s woman. And living inside his house. Or, rather, living inside his factory. Because Pancrazio’s house was always a factory.

Pancrazio was a kindly man, to the people who shared his obsessions. Not many people in Europe got it about building futuristic circuit boards that had freakish, bent circuits, in twisted, artistic shapes. One in a million people got it. However, the European Union had four hundred and ninety-one million people in it. That meant four hundred and ninety-one people were burningly eager to show up at Pancrazio’s doorstep. To learn from him. And to sponge off of him.

Farfalla would never build any circuit boards. Pancrazio was the future, so she found some ways to save him time. There were a thousand aspects of Pancrazio’s geeky life that cried out — screamed out, even — for a woman’s touch. A real bed, for a start, instead of an East German canvas cot. And real sheets for the real bed. Pillows. Toilet paper. Drapes on the blank-eyeballed windows. The occasional broom and a vacuum. Laundry.

And, especially, the food. Nobody in the factory every did anything about this vital feature of human life. Pancrazio and his geeks were starving techno-artists. They were ravenous. The crazy techno-tourists would show up at the maestro’s factory to learn all about his artsy circuit boards, and they would slurp “Red Bull” and “Monster” for forty-eight hours straight. They would write “Processing” code and solder light-emitting diodes. And they would starve. Unless Farfalla took pity on them.

Pancrazio’s starving geeks ate anything that she wanted to sling at them. All her favorite childhood comfort-foods. Feijoada, churrasco, caruru, salgadinhos, pasteis, coxinha, forafa, polenta, and chorizo. Farfalla was the Brazilian cook for a mobile horde of ditzy European geeks.