Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (35 page)

The heroine of
Shadows of Flames
was named Sophy. Sophy was not a Princess-Authoress, like Amelie, but a Baroness-Poetess. Wisdom was Sophy’s name, and Poetry was Sophy’s calling, but her avocation was Love. Sophy wrote her poetry by fits and starts, while her daily life was devoted to a manly British noble, a sporting New York millionaire, and an aristocratic Italian patriot.

These three wealthy, handsome, charming, sexy men rushed to Sophy through no visible effort of her own. Then, after tormenting her tender heart for several chapters, Sophy’s three fictional men perished horribly of alcohol, morphine and pornography. That was the plot of the 590 pages of
Shadows of Flames.

Each one of those five-hundred-and-ninety tiresome pages had been a small scar scraped onto the soul of Farfalla Corrado. But, when Farfalla put her mind to it, she could endure that trial. She could win her way through these romance novels, she could break them and defeat them. Because she was motivated.

To read one page of
Shadows of Flames
took her about three minutes, the length of time it took to play “Call Me” by Astrud Gilberto. This song had become the soundtrack of Farfalla’s literary pilgrimage to hell. So far, she had played “Call Me” eight hundred and fourteen times. Every time, some new subtlety unfolded within the immortal samba classic. Every time the song touched her ears, it revealed some new level of the Golden Honey Girl’s infamy.

It sometimes struck Farfalla, in her agonized trolling through the witchy depths of the romance books, that there must be an easier way to get Gavin Tremaine’s attention. Forget looking for long-lost cosmic bronze statues of Cupid, forget the tangled history of the Belle Epoque romance genre. Just call him on the phone, for instance. “Call Me.” Why not.

But she was not Gavin Tremaine’s Golden Honey Girl. She was Gavin Tremaine’s Witchy Bitter Poison Girl. So, she would always have to do it the hard way. The occult way. The way of a deeper, darker knowledge.

Back to the romance books. Back to Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy, a dark, troubled, witchy woman with a huge, dirty heap of non-fictional, real-life female problems. Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy, in 1913, had problems that belonged to American female Beatnik poets in 1959.

So,
Shadows of Flames
was a romance book set at least forty years in the future. Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy was putting ink on paper in a prophetic trance.

This much was obvious to Farfalla, who was also a prophetess... But did Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy actually
know?
This long-forgotten seer, did she
know
? Did she realize that her life was premonitory, clairvoyant, scattered, and, somehow, lived in the wrong order?

Did Amelie understand that her craziest fantasies were hidden truths? Did she know that she was cursing people with her foresight? Maybe, she did know that. There were some vague hints of that in the awful, terrific poetry of Sophy, the Baroness-Poetess.

Farfalla hated poetry. Within the pages of
Shadows of Flames
,
everybody
read poetry. Every fictional character, every single one of them. They all read the precious poetry of the heroine of the book. Old Virginia landowners, decadent London toffs, motherly Italian housemaids... they
all
read the slender books of verse, written by the heroine. All the characters in the books were readers.

And without exception, they were stunned, enchanted, amazed and, yes,
doomed
by the author’s Circean gift. They could get over Sophy’s radiant good looks, her effortless wealth, her innate charm and tenderness, and her lovingly-described wardrobe. But, Sophy was slaughtering them with those poetic verses of hers. Sophy’s prophecies were leaching through the text like a deadly poison. Everyone who understood Sophy’s verses was dying. Dying, unhappily, ever after.

Within the paper cage of Amelie’s book, there was no escape from the deadly poems of Sophy.

Except for Amaldi, the Italian male lead. Amaldi was the most devoted of Sophy’s numerous male admirers. Amaldi was the One. Because he was the only lover of Sophy’s who wasn’t killed dead by her poetry.

Amaldi was an Italian romantic artist. Amaldi was an amazing, monstrous fantasy figure. Everything about Amaldi was impossible and absurd. Amaldi was an Italian artist, who worshipped an American woman as a radiant spiritual being. Amaldi made divine art for Sophy. He treated her like a priestess, and he laid sincere tributes at her feet. Tremendous works of art, stained glass, sacred icons, statues...

No Italian artist would create sacred icons for his own wife, especially for the Princess-Author, Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy, who was not a priestess of Venus, but a big, busty, fried-chicken-eating babe from Virginia.

Unless — thought Farfalla, with a bone-chilling click of intuition — unless some American woman actually did appear in Italy with radiant paranormal powers. A witch whose every word was freighted with a double-dealing truth. A witch cursed to exist without her own proper place. A witch without her own proper time.

A witch who had found the true love of an adept, the One who was meant for her.

Chapter Nineteen: Love Has A Nasty Habit of Disappearing Overnight

After the failure of his marriage proposal, Gavin’s life became much easier to comprehend. Heaps of things became clear to him that he had never grasped before. Gavin was overwhelmed by the clarity of his newfound existence. Life had become as flat and simple as a black-and-white cartoon.

Gavin went about his daily work at the venture capital firm. He took up the loose and tangled threads of the Brazilian circuitry business. He had long talks with his father about the possibility of going into city politics. His dad was all for that plan, of course. His dad was visibly losing his grip on reality, but he was thrilled to see his only son mimicking his activities.

Weeks went on. October left, November commenced and progressed. Things went smoothly. As smoothly as things could go, inside a black-and-white cartoon. Nobody noticed that Gavin had entered a state of enhanced mental clarity. Except for Eliza, who looked at him with pity and dread.

Madeleine was calling him. It was unheard-of for Madeleine to call him, because Madeleine had always depended on him to call her. But now, Madeleine was upset. She wanted to get over their “little tiff,” as she put it, to “get back to normal.” So Madeleine would booty-call him. Late at night. Drunk.

Gavin understood what had happened between himself and Madeleine, but he did not know how to say it. It was embarrassing to admit that he had lost all desire for her. He could not tell her how badly he felt cheated by life. Just demeaned.

He couldn’t tell Madeleine that he had become another man, a man she didn’t know. This man didn’t want her. He didn’t want her perfume, her lingerie, or her warm and obliging bed-manners, any more than he wanted the little red fire truck he took such delight in pedaling when he was five years old. Then there was the other major part of his life — his work. He’d had a similar breakthrough there. Somehow, he’d held the boyish notion that venture capital firms were in the business of making a better future. But that was vague, sentimental thinking. In reality, venture capital firms were all about protecting the interests of investors.

So, Gavin was not in the futurity business. Gavin was in the business of getting rid of far-fetched proposals that wasted important people’s money. Once he internalized this, his work became easy. He could lay out a devastating refutation of a business in five minutes flat.

Gavin had the new force of conviction in what he said. He had become the bottom-line guy. He was realistic, he was talking hard financial sense. Nobody at work could deny that. With his newly assertive tough-mindedness, they even whispered that the job was too small for him now. They said that he belonged in public office.

So, his days went well. It was his nights that were dark, stormy, troubled.

One November night around three a.m., Gavin woke up with a “staring moment.” The fits were a rare affliction for him. They were like his sleepwalking episodes, except that his body was too tired, cold, and paralyzed to rise and move around.

So, his eyes would flick open to stare at the infinity of the ceiling. His conscious and unconscious mind were united as one. Dream-reality. He could see to the Beginning of Time.

He gazed into the depth of the Cosmos — effortlessly, through enormous, telescopic stretches of spatiality — and he realized that he was alone.

He wondered, idly, why he had never had the guts to admit this to himself before. He was alone in the cosmos. Mostly, it was his own misapplied modesty that had blinded him to that truth. He was a Futurist seer, yet he knew that he didn’t know everything. No mortal man could know everything. But, he had sensed that, somewhere, there was a kindly, good-hearted Creative Spirit. Someone in the Universe who
did
know everything, to Whom it all made sense.

And that was, in some way, to his benefit. It was not his purpose to question such a Person, or His divine right to exist. It was his purpose to eke out his own mortal life, in a righteous spirit.

But, Gavin now saw that these delusions were cotton-candy wishful thinking. If there was any such Cosmic Spirit, He had about as much interest in Gavin Tremaine as Gavin did in a bacterium.

No man had any privileged place in the Cosmos. The Cosmos had no purpose to offer Gavin Tremaine. He was much like the other inhabitants of his home. Like the nine-inch Seattle banana slugs that haunted the damp patches under the refrigerator.

When Gavin woke in the morning, the dark fit of night-brooding had not deserted him. On the contrary, it had set up camp in his soul.

Gavin went to work. He looked over the extensive list of zany venture-capital proposals that he had recently slaughtered like so many mad dogs. He could see that they were idiotic ideas, but... the numbers nagged at him. The numbers didn’t add up. They couldn’t
all
be bad ideas, could they? Statistically speaking — whether God existed or not, speaking strictly as an accountant — could
all
business proposals be this lousy?

Not one single success in there, not one plan with potential? Not a single good thing to do?

The world didn’t make any sense to him any more. He was in deep trouble. He was in a jam, a real jam that he couldn’t think his way out of. He had to call his mentor, Dr. Gustav Y. Svante.

Despite the steep time-zone difference between Seattle and Sweden, Gavin found Dr. Svante on video Skype. Dr. Svante sat under a blazing grow-light in the Scandinavian gloom of his home office. The Futurist seer’s snow-white hair was glittering. His ageless face was immobile.

Gavin choked out his unhappy story in disjointed bits and starts. “I’m sorry to make such a mess in telling you all this,” Gavin concluded. “But I’ve heard that — statistically speaking —
depressed
people are
more realistic
than people who are in a healthy frame of mind. So, I think something has gone wrong with my judgement.”

Dr. Svante tilted his veiny, pale neck and examined the notes on his yellow legal-pad. “Let me repeat your story to you, to see if I have it right,” he said crisply. “In Italy, you had a sudden, unhappy encounter with an attractive young woman. You returned home to Seattle, and you immediately broke up with your long-term girlfriend. Your work now seems empty and meaningless to you, and you take pleasure in crushing and dismissing plans that your co-workers consider useful. You are confronting the mortality of your father. Also, you are deeply involved in a confidential business deal in Brazil. That you can tell no one about. Not even me.”

“Yes, Dr. Svante. You have summed up my situation really well. That’s just about it.”

“In the long-term,” said Dr. Svante, “it’s all about the Brazilian business deal.”

“Really?”

“Yes, the story is about Brazil.”

“But Dr. Svante, that’s the part of my story I’ve been spending the least amount of my time on. I mean, sure, I have some business interests there in Brazil. But I’m not upset about
Brazil
. Brazil isn’t breaking my heart, Brazil isn’t driving me crazy. Brazil is far away. Brazil has nothing to do with anything.”

“That is a mistake. I would strongly urge you to consider the long-term implications of Brazil. While you are preoccupied with your domestic difficulties, the signifiers of massive change are in Brazil. Brazil has radically expanded its diplomatic corps. Brazil has become the world’s fourth-largest military exporter. Brazil is lobbying against intellectual property in the WIPO and Brazil is lobbying for a place on a reformed UN Security Council. These are
legitimate aims
on the part of Brazil. These are sensible things that a superpower of the future would do.”

“I haven’t been following futuristic Brazilian developments,” said Gavin, sheepishly. “I can’t see what that has to do with my problems.”

“That’s why you will be blindsided from that direction. You are obsessing with your personal circumstances and failing to look ahead! For a client that is permissible, for a Futurist, that is a flaw! You have to lift your eyes to the horizon! You have to ask yourself: what kind of world am I creating with this engagement with Brazil?”

“I’ve been too worried about my engagement with my girlfriend. I mean, with Madeleine.”

“That is a problem about
two women
,” chided Dr. Svante. “Brazil has
eighty-five million
women. Brazil does not exist for your personal benefit. Brazil will not let your future alone.”

“Well, when you put it that way...”

“A young man’s romantic failures are an episode. You need to find a different partner. A woman who does not merely attract you as a man, but can share your aims and help you steer your life in your chosen direction. You will need to be patient about that. There are not many such women in our world. If you marry in haste, you will repent at leisure.”