Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (50 page)

And Farfalla would pay money for a video DVD, every once in a while. Every Futurist knew that the DVD medium was doomed. But, kindness to the doomed was a beautiful gesture.

Hepsiba’s cellphone beeped noisily. She glanced at the tiny screen. Then, she tilted her head at Farfalla, “Be a dear, and fetch that basket for me!”

Farfalla fetched up a jute gunnysack. She ventured outside the temple once again. The wind was picking up. Farfalla minced carefully over to the handcrank and rolled the bamboo wheel.

The iron cable thrummed and swayed with tension. The bamboo prayer-wheel squeaked and screeched. The sweat of the effort burst from Farfalla’s armpits and ran down her ribs.

The collection basket finally hove into sight.

Farfalla unlatched the basket’s straw lid. She stuffed all the contents into the gunnysask. She hauled the sack inside and placed the sacred temple offerings at Hepsiba’s feet. Baby-wipes, hooded towels, powdered milk, and oatmeal. Half a dozen packs of freeze-dried Thai ramen noodles.

“She remembered the noodles!” crowed Hepsiba. “Those are the Houngan’s favorites! Be a dear, and make him a nice hot bowl.”

“What’s with all this baby gear?” said Farfalla.

“Her baby died,” shrugged Hepsiba. “We invoke the baby’s soul every Sunday. So, she is grateful.”

Farfalla stared in horror at the pristine, unworn baby rubbish. “Oh Madonna!” she said, in a fresh river of tears, “to be pregnant is awful, but to have
a dead baby
is ten thousand times worse! How can this world be so cruel? How do we women endure it?”

Hepsiba glanced up in mild irritation. “Can’t this wait until the commercials?”

“Nana, why? Why am I so doomed and bad? I deserve to be this unhappy, don’t I? I was cursed! I am cursed with supernatural powers! Why am I so cynical? I am the future, but it’s like I am dead inside! I should be the source of light and happiness to everybody around me... I should bring everyone joy! Like I did when I was a little girl!”

“
You?
” said Hepsiba, waving her skinny arm. “Girl, I
knew you
when you were a little girl! Most nice little girls, when they hear the mousetrap snap... They hide their faces and they cry for the sweet little mouse! But not you, not Farfalla Corrado. You would run over there with your pigtails flying. To see that mouse die!”

“Did I do that?” said Farfalla.

“You did. Because you always
knew
the mouse was doomed,” nodded Hepsiba. “Your father’s compost heaps brought us plenty of mice. Go boil that ramen. Ramen is such a holy blessing! Ramen only takes three minutes!”

Farfalla gazed at the gaudy Thai grocery packet, which had somehow crossed half the planet to offer nourishment to the Brazilian underclass. “No, I will not do that,” she announced. “I have my moral principles. I am not going to cook this stupid, ugly, fast-food rubbish. I am going to make us a real dinner.”

“Don’t be troublesome,” Hepsiba said.

“Nana, I am Italian. I know how to cook. I can feed thirty European geeks in thirty minutes.”

Farfalla gathered her resolve. She ventured outside to confront the temple’s windowboxes. The big troughs of dirt were full of half-abandoned home-farmed crops. Cilantro, tomatoes, chives, parsley.

The African yam vines were particularly eldritch. Their leafy cascades tumbled way past the nineteenth floor. Farfalla grubbed up one of the yam-roots from its grimy, smelly bed. What a dirty, purple-tinted tuber.

Farfalla washed the yam in the rain barrel. She lugged the yam into the temple. It looked, if anything, even uglier in there.

Farfalla had at the yam with a paring knife. The ugliness flew off the yam in long thin strips. Its shining inner core emerged. The yam was gold inside.

Conviction struck her. A tremendous premonition. Farfalla put the paring knife aside. “I sense the presence of the man who shares my life,” she announced. “My bridegroom is coming for me.”

Bent over her TV romance, Hepsiba serenely ignored her.

“Did you hear me say that? The man I will marry is coming to get me! He is! I know it! He is on the way!”

“Well,” said Hepsiba, “’a man comes in at the door, but a child comes in at the heart.’ My child, he’s just a man, don’t worry so much! I am hiding you here! You are safe from this man! He couldn’t find you up here with an army.”

“But, he needs me now! I must fly to him!”

Farfalla jumped into her shoes.

Far below her, at the rubbled-covered root of the skeleton, a truck had pulled up. From Farfalla’s height, the truck looked as tiny as a boy’s tin toy. But she recognized it anyway. It was an armored Mitsubishi Pajaro, the standard drug trafficker’s truck. Young men were climbing out of it. Young men, carrying guns.

Gangsters. The favela gangsters had kidnapped Gavin Tremaine. The drug gang was going to torture and kill him. Gavin’s sweet body would be torn to bloody shreds before her eyes. Gavin had blundered into deadly trouble in his mad pursuit of her. Her beloved was in mortal peril. His death was all her fault.

She had no hope... Only the dark pleasure of dying with him.

She longed to simply fling herself off the skyscraper to crash on top of him, but it took Farfalla more than half an hour to reach the level of the street, on foot.

Gavin and the gangsters were still busy, down there at street level. They were gluing paper WANTED posters to the walls of the local favela shacks. They were also playing loud baile-funk music out of their pockmarked truck.

The gangsters were fending off a host of the local favela street kids, who were trying to beg from the gangsters, or sell them useless things, or steal something from them. There were mobs of kids living in the favela. The favela produced more kids than any other place in Brazil. The drug gangsters were teenagers, six or seven years older than the street-urchin kids, but on the same road ahead.

The older drug-gang kids were jovially threatening to kill some of the younger street-urchin kids.

Gavin glanced up as Farfalla hurried through the weedy construction rubble. Gavin squared away his stack of posters.

“Well, well, look here she is!” he announced. “Boys, we have a major win! Farfalla, let me introduce you to the boys: Bozinho, Itamar, Edson, and Marquinhos. The big guy driving the truck is Monstro.”

“É realmente ela?
” said the gangster named Bozinho.
“Pensei que ela fosse muito mais sexy.”
¹⁷

“What did he say to you, just now?” Gavin asked Farfalla.

Farfalla opened her mouth to translate for him, but then Itamar spoke up. Itamar had a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his wifebeater shirt, and two revolvers stuck into his gold nylon gym shorts. “Hey! You! Millionaire’s sexy girlfriend!”

“What?”

“Is your boyfriend here really a big computer man from America?”

Farfalla gazed into the lethal eyes of this feral, teenaged marauder. Slowly, she examined all four of the drug gangsters. They had homemade juvenile prison tattoos. They had scars and scabs and burns and bruises. They were filthy. They smelled. Doom was tattooed all over them. They were the walking dead.

“Yes, he is!” she cried out to them, “That is very true! My cute boyfriend really is a high-tech computer millionaire.”

The teenage killers exchanged high-fives and triumphant gang-signs. “I knew it!” cried Bozinho. “I always, always wanted to meet one of those phantom creatures! I always knew they must really exist!”

Marquinhos spoke up. Marquinhos had the scarred, puffy face of an elderly prizefighter. Some enemy had knocked out half his teeth. “Computer games,” he said, “are the only reason that we live.”

“I can make computer games!” said Farfalla.

“Well,” Bozinho allowed, “I guess that’s why he loves you.”

“I’m a zombie priestess in Warcraft!” said Farfalla.

“Warcraft zombies are a bunch of fags,” said Bozinho, gravely. “We never play Warcraft. We play War. Modern Warfare Two...”

“Halo Three...” said Marquinhos.

“America’s Army has the best small-unit urban tactics,” said Edson, shouldering his rusty rifle.

“Farfalla, I want you to tell these boys,” Gavin broke in, “that I appreciate all their urban reconnaissance work. That poster campaig with your face on it? That was their own idea. Plus, their sound-trucks, and those big announcements at all the local discos... I’m impressed by the way they’ve gotten this community organized. Tell ‘em I’ll always be grateful!”

The gangsters listened to Gavin with respectful incomprehension. Bozinho picked at his scanty goatee. “Your computer wizard almost looks like mortal flesh and blood. Will you marry him?”

Farfalla said nothing.

“Let us give you a wedding gift!” said Bozinho. “Edson, tell Monstro to bring out that gift box!”

Edson shook like a leaf in his flat, tattered zoris. “I don’t want to talk to Monstro...”

“I’ll do it!” Bozinho pried with scarred fingertips at the mud-stained Japanese sports truck. The armored rear doors opened with a heavy groan. Bozinho hopped inside the vehicle.

He emerged with a flimsy box of grease-stained cardboard.

“Every newlywed couple can use
this!”
said Bozinho.

Gavin examined the box.

“This gift means a happy future!” grinned Bozinho.

Gavin moved his bag from one shoulder to another. “Boys, the girlfriend and I kinda need to travel light.”

Bozinho tossed the cardboard box to the shattered earth. He fixed his dead-fish eyes on Farfalla. “I knew the wizard would refuse our gift. Computer millionaires are cyborg robot men. But girl, you are different. I can see you are undead, just like us. So, why don’t you take this gift, for your future? You’re sensible! You know you need it!”

Farfalla gazed in anguish at the cash-crammed box of blood money. American hundred dollar bills, jammed together in thick blocks of stained paper. That fortune in cash could have bought her a house. Two houses. Three houses in three different countries. It could have bought her freedom. Bought security. Money meant comfort and ease. Warmth, food, and dignity. Past, present, and future. Money meant everything there was in space and time. And that money was just sitting there.

“Oh, you want this all right!” chuckled Edson, jabbing at the cash with the rust-specked muzzle of his AK-47. “This stuff is every pretty girl’s best friend!”

Farfalla clutched in agony at Gavin’s sleeve.

Bozinho’s brow wrinkled. “You’re not afraid of us, are you?” he said.

“No,” said Farfalla. “We’re not afraid of you. It’s just... he and I, we have to climb a long way. Our road goes up. We have to climb far up... up till we can see the stars together.”

“Don’t be so afraid of us! We are folk heroes,” Bozinho urged. “The Premiero Comanda de Capital are urban rebels on the side of the oppressed and downtrodden! All we ever asked for was some justice! Some justice, respect, and decent prison food! And some brutal revenge for our dead.”

“I know about that,” said Farfalla. “Everybody here knows all about Premiero Comanda de Capital. But, I’m just a silly girl. You see? So I’m worried. This favela is not your turf. This favela is the turf of the Amigo des Amigos.”

“Oh, the Amigos are a bunch of weak sisters!” said Bozinho. “They only think they’re just like us. So, we kill them. All the time. Besides, they’re not here now. And we are.”

Farfalla silently pointed at a beam three stories above their heads. It held a sprawling, multicolored gang-tag the size of a railroad car.

“We’ll come back here later. With more of our trucks,” Bozinho announced, reaching for the truck’s door. “We’ll cut off their heads. We use their skulls for footballs. We’ll sell their organs to people in China. We know a lot of business people in China.”

“I know a place that buys skin,” said Edson, nodding. “Any color you like.”

The young gangsters piled into their Mitsubishi. The headlights flicked on. The armored truck crunched and rumbled down the littered alleyway.

“I’m so glad that I got to know those kids,” said Gavin, watching the departing truck with a look of mild contemplation. “I never realized that the South American cocaine trade was run by illiterate teenagers. I kept asking around the gang, to find their big kingpin criminal masterminds... But you know what? They’re all dead. Dead for years. They’re all ghosts, those so-called ‘criminal masterminds.’ Those masterminds are totally mythical. The guys who founded that gang all got killed years ago.”

“Those young men adore you, Gavin.”

“Yeah, they do! Brazilians love me! They couldn’t have been more hospitable, these killers! I had my own hammock in their derelict factory fortress. They even gave me my own bulletproof vest. I had to judge their capoeira fights. Those kids beat the crap out of each other.”

“Capoeira fighting makes them happy,” said Farfalla. “Because they’re dead.”

Gavin nodded slowly. “It’s so good to see you, baby. You’re always just the same. That’s comforting. Can we go to the airport and fly to Seattle now? Please.”

“No. Not yet. There is one other great ritual.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that,” said Gavin. “With you, it’s never straightforward and easy. Farfalla, I have harrowed Hell to find you. And I did it — look, here you are. I found you again. I have found you in what must be the worst place on earth. I can’t imagine any place in the world any worse than this.” Gavin craned his neck. “With the exception of that freaked-out, undead building, rising over our heads. What is with that colossal mess? It looks like the Bride of Frankenstein built a Mayan ruin.”

“That’s where I live,” said Farfalla. “That’s where we must go for the great ritual.”

“Okay. Great. I get why that has to happen. How do we get up in there?”

“We go very carefully. It’s full of snares and death-traps. You’ll have to hold my hand.”

Gavin casually kicked the abandoned box of hundred dollar bills. Wads of money scattered in their packets. “Baby, listen to me. I’ve got such a great idea. Let’s not do that. Let’s get the hell out of here. We charter a jet. We’re back in Seattle by morning. All this rubble, the stink, this colossal human tragedy... It’s history. It’s gone. It’s nothing to us. We’re like the last man and woman on Earth.”