Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (37 page)

“I have a guardian angel,” said Gavin.

In the morning, Gavin found the sweatshirt inverted, lying beside his bed. His feet were dirty, and his left foot was cut.

So, it wasn’t safe for him to stay in his house any more. Time to give that up that inadequate plan. He knew of another, better place, though. A place better suited to his philosophical needs. There was a Swedish Methodist spiritual retreat in the distant forest of southeastern Washington.

Gavin hadn’t been there in fifteen years, but this retreat had always been in the back of his mind, as an ultimate asylum. A peaceful place, whose reason for being was to aid the spiritually troubled.

No harsh questions would be asked of him there. Not as long as he was sincere about his spiritual difficulties. They would take him in there. No one would throw him out.

Gavin took the bus. The Swedish Methodist spiritual retreat was very much as he remembered it from many years ago. Just a modest chapel in the woods, and some small, bare, mouse-smelling wooden cabins.

The retreat was occupied by a group of portly, scarf-wearing lesbian activists who were holding a series of formal discussions on the ordination of gays. Obviously, this was a serious matter for them. They’d had no warning at all that he would show up on foot there, after limping from the nearest bus stop.

Yet, they were completely polite and supportive. Stubbled, sweaty, male intruder though he was, he was welcome to their last GMO-free tortilla and a bowl of their cruelty-free potato salad.

So, Gavin moved into a tiny cabin. The spiritual retreat was just the same. But, the woods around it had changed. The trees in the forest had been killed. By insects. Bark beetles. The extent of the damage from these bark beetles was colossal. The green and lovely forest, which he remembered from his childhood as a Grimm’s Fairy Tale adventure, was a leafless, skeletal parade of stricken tree-ghosts.

Somehow, summer after summer, these trees had not yet caught fire. But, the trees were going to burn. Gavin knew that. They had to burn in the future, because they were dead.

Gavin walked some of the crooked forest trails that he remembered from his youth. They’d been full of jolly hikers, back in the day. Not a lot of Americans leaving the old computer couch to go out and see a dying, bug-infested wilderness. Far more attractive to update Facebook.

Insects were a reality. Insects were some cold-blooded, very statistical little guys. An advantage of two or three degrees Fahrenheit was enough to give insects an old-school dot-com boom. The bark beetles sucked the sappy life out of forests like a continental horde of bedbugs. And they’d done that
years ago,
while nobody realized... The future of the American West was already here, and the bad news just hadn’t been distributed.

So, this retreat was a perfect place for Gavin to forget all about love and romance, and confront stark metaphysics. Not just some scientific physics, like before, but
metaphysics
. Metaphysics was the age-old story of how people really knew what reality was. Metaphysics was hermeneutics and ontology.

The first thing to understand about metaphysics was that it was all about what
people
knew about reality. People. More to the point, metaphysics was about what
writers
knew about reality. Metaphysics that wasn’t published wasn’t even in the game.

Since bark beetles didn’t write much, they weren’t considered metaphysical competitors. Although beetles had killed more trees in two years than two millennia of the Dialogues of Plato.

Nobody had ever given those busy bark beetles a word-in. None of ‘em: Kant, Hume, Berkley, Karl Popper...

Maybe Richard Rorty. To be fair. Yet another dead philosopher, Richard Rorty, and pretty upset about everybody else’s lame, lousy metaphysics. But, Rorty was so righteously upset about a world of injustice and oppression that it was hard to stop reading him. Gavin kind of got Richard Rorty. Gavin was getting the bracing feeling that, yes, there were certain things going on in wiser minds that he had overlooked. Things that taught him good lessons about his own ignorance.

There would come a day, in some remote day of his future life, when this trial of metaphysics would help him. It might be thirty years or even fifty years from today. But, there would be a day, of some obscure struggle, some misty conflict of intellectual armies by night, when Gavin Tremaine was going to whip out and lay down some ontological hermeneutics. That would be the act of a gentleman. A scholar and a civilized man.

Gavin was still knee-deep in metaphysics — hip-deep even — when Eliza surprised him at his studies.

He hadn’t known Eliza was coming to visit him. He hadn’t thought about Eliza in quite a while. He certainly hadn’t expected to meet anyone in a forest, dressed in boots, gloves, a toque, and a hot pink tropical dashiki.

“What are you doing here, Eliza?” he said.

“When are you going to stop it with the philosophy?” Eliza demanded. “When are you going to come home? It’s almost Christmas! It’s time for the holidays now!”

“I’ll come home once I’ve got life all figured out.”

“You win,” said Eliza. “Please don’t do this to us any more. Please, please come home, Gavin. Dad says you can marry anyone you want.”

“So,” said Gavin, rubbing his chin. “What’s this all about?”

“Our pastor told us where you were,” Eliza admitted. “We had to have a family-crisis counselling session.”

“Why is that?” said Gavin. They began walking together, back toward the cabins, under the leafless, bug-infested trees.

“The pastor said it wasn’t your fault. He said we should look within our own hearts-- Dad and me. We were wrong to do what we did to you. We relied on you too much! It’s because you were always there for us, that’s why! We knew you were upset. We could see that. We knew you were acting strangely, but... When we started opening up — about all the terrible psychological pressure we were putting on you — we all wanted to die of shame.”

“I still don’t get it,” said Gavin. “What are you babbling on about? I wasn’t complaining.”

“It was always about what
we
wanted! It was always about what
we
needed. We never offered you any emotional support! Nothing but scolding and ranting from Dad, and from me... All those immature things I did, and I said, when you were just trying to help me...” Eliza wiped at her reddened eyes with a Thinsulate hiking glove. “What if you
died?
What if
you never came back
to us? It’s the worst!”

“Look, it’s only been a few weeks, a month maybe, you know? Philosophy is hard work! I’m only just now getting into Alfred North Whitehead.”

“But it’s been
forever
! We were sure you were dead! Not a word, not a whisper, not an SMS, not an email... it’s been awful! Dad talks about nothing else! If he loses you, if he loses his only son! What else does he have, he has
nothing!
He says he’s sorry. He never said that before.”

“What did Mom say about all this?” said Gavin.

“What?”

“You guys, and your big family-crisis... Did Mom say anything about Dad’s health problems? Did Mom intervene? Did Mom come out of his shadow? Did Mom stop worshipping every thing he does? Did Mom do anything?Did Mom assert herself as a person? Did Mom finally raise her voice and speak up for herself... Wait. Did Mom even go?”

“Why would Mom go to a counseling session? Mom is great! Mom is always great. It was just me and Dad.”

“Oh,” said Gavin. “So, well, how are
you
doing, then, Eliza?”

“Well, I’ve been super-worried about you. I’m very upset. You’re messing up my birthday party plans and everything. You said that you would help me with my party budget. Remember?”

“Yeah, I said that, I guess. Even a Futurist can’t keep track of everything in the world.”

“Well, I’m still pretty far from being a ‘princess of music.’ But some people think that I’m a ‘countess.’ Because I have an accountant.” Eliza offered him a girlish smile, although the subject was no joke to Eliza. Eliza was in deadly earnest about her strange ambitions and he could easily foresee a lifetime of struggle for her. A few queenly, glamorous victories against a general background of squalor and oppression. That was the music scene, anywhere in the world, accountants or not.

Gavin looked his sister over. “Eliza, you look great. Being of voting age has really matured you. I’m impressed. That’s an awesome... silk tunic, or whatever it is.”

“Really?” said Eliza, brushing at her fabric. “Pablo gave this to me. It’s from Sao Paulo.”

“Pablo,” said Gavin.

“Yeah, Pablo’s this Brazilian veejay. He’s been helping me a lot with the music plans for my birthday party. Pablo’s an interaction designer who knows augmented reality. He’s a big pal of Sonja Khalecallon.”

“So, you’ve got a Brazilian boyfriend now? I should have guessed that.” Yes, thought Gavin silently, he had been warned about that subject. He had been briefed. Brazil was coming. He had agreed with that scenario. He even believed it. He just... couldn’t make Brazil fit into his future. A big place, Brazil.

“Sonja is planning a West Coast tour. Sonja’s coming to Seattle. Sonja has all kinds of plans.”

“No doubt,” said Gavin. “Well, I’m going to wash my hands.” He went back to his meditation shack and dabbled his hands in a tin basin of water.

Eliza blinked, intimidated, as she looked around his gloomy wooden cell. “You sure have been living in a tiny place. It’s dirty. And freezing, freezing cold.”

“It’s all the same to me.”

“You’re not very clean, Gavin. I mean, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you haven’t shaved in about a month, and your clothes really smell. You’re like a wild animal.”

“’To live without society, a man must be either very like a god or very like a wild beast,’” Gavin quoted. “To live outside the law, you must be honest.’”

“Gavin, can’t you please come home now?”

“For a while, before I go to Brazil,” he said. “Yes. I will go home.”

Chapter Twenty: Seattle Voodoo

A pin through a butterfly was good-old-fashioned voodoo. One fatal steel pin, straight through the butterfly. To nail the butterfly. Inside her dry cigar box. Stored there, perfect and dead. Dead in darkness. A pretty trophy for futurity.

But, in a world of global networks, the steel pins came from all directions. When you lived on the Net, you left vulnerable traces everywhere. A picture, an address. A lock of hair, a drop of blood, a look, a touch. A blown kiss.

Suddenly, after weeks of silent suffering, a gloomy Christmas, a cheerless New Year’s Eve... The new year comes for you. The new decade, the year 2010. It brings a reason for you to go to Seattle.

Yes, to Seattle. Not to New York, not Capri, not Rome, or Rio — fatal Seattle. You don’t
want
to go to Seattle. You don’t
need
to go to Seattle. Avoiding Seattle forever is what you most want to do.

Hiss, whiz, here comes a voodoo pin of email, to pierce your aching heart: “Come to our computer-game conference in Seattle! We need you, we miss you, Farfalla. Happy New Year!”

You crazy people miss me? When I last heard from you, you were conducting a fire-sale at your dead console company. Now you’re trying to drag Italian gamers to your pricey, future-of-games event in Seattle?

Is this an insult? This
is
an insult. My voodoo doll has tender skin. The skin of my voodoo doll has been stretched taut across the whole planet. A silent voodoo pin has pierced me, and though there’s no visible wound, I’m limping, I’m hurt, I’m bleeding.

I’m home talking to my mother, over the vegetarian spaghetti. I’m dealing rather successfully with Mama’s forty-year-old counterculture eccentricities, and then Mama says... Not so much a voodoo pin, as a motherly mortar attack... she says, “Cara, have you thought of going back to Seattle?”

But mother, why,
why
would I go to Seattle? And mother says, quite casually, without a blush of shame, that she is following the Facebook page of Madeleine Lindholm.

Mama, no. Why, Mama? Mother, why
why
are you a Facebook “friend” of the insanely evil Madeleine Lindholm?

Mother says
because she is there on Facebook,
that’s why! If
you
followed her, that would be too obvious! On Facebook, Madeleine Lindholm is “Single.” Madeleine is “Looking.” Mama knows what that means. Even the wife of a retired Italian architect on a state pension in rural Italy has heard all about Madeleine’s romantic condition. This elderly woman, who uses her computer
once a week
to keep up with her lists of human-rights victims on Amnesty International. But mother knows.

Dear, don’t you think you might go to Seattle? If you have no money, we understand. Your father and I have a little money put aside for emergencies like this.

Well, that’s bad. But at least it is not the boyfriend’s fault. Whatever it is, this dreadful thing that has happened, it was not the boyfriend’s fault. The boyfriend is Pancrazio Pola, he’s the same Pancrazio Pola that he’s always been. Whatever has happened is not because of the boyfriend, because he has always been who he is.

If he neglected you, then, he always neglected you. If he was selfish, he was always selfish in that same, predictable way. You knew what you were getting when you started with him. This is all your fault, not his. He was perfectly happy with his soldering irons. He tolerated you because, well, men are men. Any guy is going to be pretty happy with a pretty woman who insists.

But now the boyfriend also wants a big talk with you. He’s all thrilled about the way events have twisted. For him, this new year brings exciting promise of the future! It’s his big break! And he’s like, “Cara, Microsoft! Microsoft in Seattle!”

And you respond, naturally, “But Pancrazio, Microsoft is evil! Microsoft is the source of all evil in the world of computing!” And he responds, yes of course, of course Microsoft is evil, but I didn’t realize that Microsoft would be
reading what I wrote on my website!
Those web documents you were translating about my microcontroller circuitry! An all-expenses first-class trip to lecture at Microsoft Research Labs! In Seattle!