Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (31 page)

“Well, yes.”

“That’s the most romantic thing I ever heard! Gavin? Mr. ‘Due Diligence’? And you got all coy? You did! You got cold feet! You are wicked!”

Farfalla said nothing.

Eliza’s façade of composure cracked. She began to get shrill. “Look, are you as stupid as he is? Are you totally doomed, like Cassandra? You’re smart! You’re pretty, you speak three languages, and you’re a great bargain shopper! I don’t have a lot of time to waste on any more stupid, doomed people! Besides musicians, of course.”

Farfalla said nothing once more.

“Look, you have to make some kind of effort to save yourself! Wake up, be smart, save yourself, save your happiness! I can’t do all of this.”

Farfalla reached for her keyboard.

“Stop that!” Eliza screeched at once. “Don’t you dare turn me off!”

“Make other friends, Eliza. Go away and let me suffer in peace.”

“What an evil thing to say. I can’t believe you told me that.”

“I have my world. He has his world.”

“Oh, just shut up! We should be sisters!”

Farfalla hesitated.

“I know that you have the power to destroy him,” Eliza said, wiping at her eyes. “Because you have the power to
save him
. You can
redeem him.
Didn’t you ever
think
of that? Didn’t you ever
hope
for that? Can’t you see your happiness is there, when you’re with him? It’s happiness! Why? Why can’t you see that?”

Farfalla was stuck speechless.

“Look here, Internet Witchcraft Girl,” said Eliza. “I am finally getting it about you. You are
selfish
! Just because you are magic, you are snobby and full of yourself!” “Don’t insult me. You’ll regret it.”

“Put your curse on me! I’m not afraid of you! I may be just a teenage girl, but I’m not
nothing!
Teenage girls have power in the future. Teenage girls have to carry the future
on our backs!
What if I curse
you
for this evil thing you are doing? I could jump off the Washington Bridge, and I could
die
cursing you, and that curse would be
all your fault.
Maybe you can forget about
him
, but you would never forget about
me.
You would see my ghost every time you closed your eyes, you would see me forever, till the day you drew your last breath —”

Farfalla slapped her laptop shut.

Chapter Seventeen: You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away

Gavin was pleased at the way his father had lost his temper. He hadn’t seen his dad in such a foot-stamping, 1968-style rant in quite a while. All that heat and fury was a sign that his father’s medication was helping him. His attack of radical fever was much better than his pallor, his grayness. His pathetic trembling.

Gavin scarcely minded that the old man was unloading a fury on him. That bullying could no longer touch him where he lived. Not any more — not after what he had been through in Capri. Gavin had been through an emotional upheaval so complete, so total, that this family bluster and hassle was almost homely. Reassuring, somehow.

There was something touching about his dad’s many grievances. His impossible, corny demands for peace, justice, effective government action and vast Apollo Program initiatives to reform whatever-it-was. The complete set of phantoms.

Gavin had already made up his mind about what would happen next. He already knew what had to happen.

He wasn’t even angry. Not any more. He was resolved. The spreadsheet of his life had added up.

Gavin took a long, jetlagged nap. To avoid any attack of sleepwalking, he played the early Beatles. He listened to “Rubber Soul” and “Help.” Old-fashioned music helped him. He slept well.

Gavin woke with dawn and drove his Volvo downtown, early, ahead of the traffic rush. Gavin had his traditional welcome-back-to-Seattle meal. The big oyster omelette over at the Pike’s Place Market. This patriotic ritual made Gavin feel at home.

Pike’s Place Market was a famous Seattle heritage site. It was a pretty, let’s-pretend-Seattle where everyone was still a lumberjack, or a salmon fisherman, or an anarchist dock-worker. Gavin had a favorite booth in the café with a great view of the gray-blue harbor. Also, the Pike’s Place oyster omelette was the greatest meal in the world.

The relic café was playing early Beatles on its jukebox. Gavin was unsurprised by this coincidence. If anything had “synchronicity,” then music had synchronicity. The Beatles were old men, and two of them were dead, but their music was not limited by their mortality. Wherever Beatles music was needed, there it appeared. Ghosting back into daylight with tremendous urgency.

Very young guys, these early Beatles. Tremendously skilled pop musicians. Their artistic gift was supernatural. What well-crafted songs jumping out of the dusty jukebox. Those songs had become global classics. People in Nepal and New Guinea got it about the Beatles. All of the skeptics were dead.

These four fabulous mop-tops had exactly one topic in their classic early songs. Women. The Beatles were young men trying to figure out women. Boy, were they having a tough time of that, too. Women in early Beatles songs were horrifying. The women in Beatles songs were mysterious, perverse, and senseless creatures, bearing nothing but heartbreak and misery for men. Love was in their eyes, but only yesterday, or the night before. Women in Beatles songs hired men to drive nonexistent cars. They gloated over their Norwegian wall paneling, and sent their men to sleep in bathtubs.

Occasionally, the women in Beatles songs had to be threatened, bullied and pushed around some, but fits of male rage helped nothing at all. Leaving the women alone made life even worse. Women in Beatles songs refused to listen to you. They would not even see you. Your days were filled with tears.

Why did the world fall so hard for this fantasy? Why were these Beatles songs so fanatically, screamingly, swooningly, universally popular? Why were there no realistic Beatles songs about what the actual Beatles girlfriends really did in the real world?

The genuine girlfriends of the Beatles were nothing like the romance-fantasy girls in Beatles songs. Real Beatles girlfriends were cute, harmless British chicks modeling in London. At least, until the Beatles globalized, and married some American and Japanese women.

Gavin finished his oyster omelette. He dug into his wallet around some multicolored Euros, and he paid with some plain green dollars. He drove his Volvo from one Seattle parking garage to another, slightly more distant garage. He walked over to the offices of Cook, Bishop & Engleman. He popped the security doors with his plastic ID tag.

Gavin settled into his office within the venture capital firm. Gavin’s office was a modest place, with Ansel Adams photographs of the Rocky Mountains to make his narrow walls look grander. His office had only one window. When Gavin rolled his Aeron chair into just the right spot, he could glimpse the Seattle Space Needle.

Despite the early hour, Gavin was not the first one at work. Sally, the secretary, was already there. Sally had a doctorate in computational biochemistry, but Sally had never found any job in the sciences. Like many other other lost souls from science, Sally had found a job in modern finance. Gavin had never seen Sally outside the offices of Cook, Bishop & Engleman. He had the impression that Sally lived in the office building, maybe sleeping under her desk.

“So, Sally, what’s new around here?”

“Jeff Bezos just sold off two million shares.”

“So, why would our sci-fi paperback bookseller need to sell that much Amazon stock?”

“I think Jeff needs the cash for his private space rocket.”

“It’s great to be back in town,” said Gavin. “So, what can I do you for, Sally?”

“I have some problems with this temp you hired in Capri,” said Sally. “Hiring foreign people is a lot of paperwork for me.”

“Yeah, that’s Italy. Italy’s always like that. Sorry.”

“Did you have to hire this person for an entire
month
? She only worked for us for two days! How am I supposed to clear that with Martin? You know what a stickler he is.”

Gavin felt a sting of shame. He’d pulled a quick hack in Capri to work himself out of a tight corner. It had seemed like a smart move at the time, but that kind of easy hustle always created another problem in the longer run.

He had to think fast.

“We still have plenty of work for Farfalla Corrado to do,” he said. “We need her to translate Italian tech documents from Pancho Pola’s website. Pancho has a whole lot of cool, Italian open-source stuff going on. Pancho is very out-there. Pancho is disruptive. Pancho’s good work needs to be better known in the world.”

“Who? That Italian circuit-board guy? What has he ever done for us?”

“Plenty of startups use his open-source hardware. We need to give back to the Open Source Movement. The Europeans are super picky about that stuff. So, just write to the translator. Email her today. Tell her to talk to Pancho, and let Pancho choose the documents that he wants her to translate into English. The cost of that translation is on us.”

“That’s kind of a big favor, isn’t it? Are you sure you want to do that for him?”

“Sally, this is pure win! We already budgeted her salary! Don’t waste any more time on this. It’s a minor issue.”

Sally moused off to get that done. Gavin then fired up his Cook, Bishop & Engleman desktop computer. Gavin’s work in the firm concerned due diligence for venture capital proposals.

These proposals generally came in two parts: an awesomely cool technical notion and a hopeless business plan.

Killing people’s dreams was never easy work. But, most of these proposals were not businesses. Frankly, they were high-tech fantasies. People came to venture capital firms with their fantasies, not with their businesses. Gavin’s role in Cook, Bishop & Engleman was to point out, in black and white, that these fantasies would never make any money for anybody.

The Internet this year was crammed full of the ghosts of things that were not businesses. The ghosts of governments. The ghosts of charities. The ghosts of labor unions.

Plus, people uniting on the Internet and sharing things. Photo sharing. Software sharing. Location sharing. Sharing-sharing. Sharing was not paying. Real businesses had people paying, not people sharing. Businesses had customers. Businesses had shareholders, they didn’t have sharers.

Some enterprises gave things away for free, in the hope that people someone might pay for them in the future. “People will never pay for this,” Gavin typed on his screen. “Never. It will get cheaper to give this away, faster than anyone can sell it.”

Gavin did not enjoy his hard work. The optimistic startup guys sending in these crazy proposals were guys who enjoyed their work. Gavin had the solid, old-fashioned idea that work should be painful, so that people would pay you for doing it. If the “work” was fulfilling, then work was a form of entertainment. The workers should be paying people for being entertained.

Or, at least, that had made good sense, once. Nowadays, even entertainment wasn’t working out as a business. Not on the almighty Internet. The Internet had become so fantastically entertaining that nobody, anywhere, wanted to pay for being entertained. So, the people paying for their entertainment were either old or ignorant. Another harsh, modern reality. It was alarming how few people could grasp these simple and obvious facts.

Martin came into his office. Gavin hadn’t talked directly to Martin in over a month. Martin was a chummy, backslapping, golf-foursome, classic VC guy. Martin called himself a “team coordinator,” although he was the boss.

Martin offered a few pleasantries, then edged up to his point. “You gave a dynamite speech in Capri,” Martin said. “You hit that one out of the park. We all had a look at that. We couldn’t believe it. Very Franklin Roosevelt. You don’t know him. He was before your time.”

“Franklin Roosevelt was before
your
time, Martin. I’m very interested in Franklin Roosevelt’s time. I can see many parallels there. In the New Depression, we have his parallels with switched polarities. We have radical conservatives, and cautious progressives.”

Martin chewed this over for a while. He seemed to like the taste of it. Martin liked to hire Futurists, and was always keen about their seminars and scenarios. “So, what do you make of this strange new mayor of ours?”

“He’s our new mayor,” said Gavin. “He did some nice grass-roots organizing out in the neighborhoods. I don’t know if he can govern the city. Campaigning isn’t governing.”

“A major transition of this kind might be a signal opportunity to re-tune the firm’s strategy,” said Martin, who always talked like that.

“I agree with you there,” said Gavin, “because we’re not making a dime, otherwise. I don’t see one proposal in this heap that isn’t some kind of me-too pitch. I agree that we need to try something. I mean, something besides sending me back to Italy.”

“You’re still sore because we cashed out too soon on that Italian fashion website.”

“I’m not angry, Martin. This is a strategic issue. We need to arrange things so that foreign business comes to us. The Italians have a passionate interest in high-tech. The Italians are highly creative people. They just don’t have our venture infrastructure. Our Seattle scene should be providing that service to them. We ought to be the people the Italians turn to. We ought to be the people they trust.”

“You can give us the debriefing on your big trip to Capri? Up in the council room, three this afternoon?”

“Right. Absolutely. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the European tech scene. There’s still stuff that we know here, that they don’t know there.”

“Did you ever give any thought to running for public office, Gavin?”

Gavin was jolted by this sudden question. He was tempted to make a smart-ass remark. He wanted to say something sharp and snappy about how Tremaines had been involved in Seattle politics since, well, forever. Tremaines had been running Seattle since the town was nothing more than wooden boards on a marsh, with shovels to dig up the clams.