Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  “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 rea
l 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.

  Like a lot of men who claimed that they “cared nothing for money,” Pancrazio was amazingly stingy. After she blew a few hundred of his Euros on lingerie, perfume and shoes — strictly to please him, and for no other reason — he set Farfalla a very strict household budget. His budget for his live-in girlfriend was a dreadful budget. It was an impossible budget. It was like a hateful Communist Five-Year Plan.

  But the factory’s kitchen had a nice big budget. Pancrazio’s factory kitchen was always his soft spot. As soon as Pancrazio’s business was thriving, his factory’s kitchen grew sleek and high-tech. Spotless white ceramic cleavers, gleaming copper-bottomed saucepans, and golden bamboo spoons. Three gas ranges, a spectacular stainless fridge, large whirring blenders. A monster, killer, gorgeous cappuccino machine.

  Her Italian geek boyfriend fussed like a maniac about every cent that anybody spent, but he never fussed about the sacred altar of the Italian kitchen. The cappuccino machine was the hearth of the factory. It was the ultimate meeting-place, covered with Post-It Notes. As the mistress of that kitchen, Farfalla drank more of this superb coffee than anybody else. She swam in that coffee. It was like living in fifth gear.

  This regimen had her sweating and scolding and screaming at people, but Pancrazio was okay with that. Pancrazio liked people around him who were, as he put it, “hard core.” Pancrazio was an Italian man’s man. Pancrazio loved Italian heavy metal bands. He howled at Italian soccer games on Italian television. He liked loud, fast, Italian motorcycles, planes and speedboats. He liked Italian stereo equipment and precision machinery and FIAT rapid-prototype machines. That was Pancrazio Pola. The future of Italy. Take him or leave him.

  Farfalla had tried leaving Pancrazio. She had left him for America, to work for almost three years, translating computer games into Italian. She’d been living in Seattle, and New York, and San Francisco, too. Translating computer games into Italian was very “of the future,” just like him.

  But, that translation work was pretty boring, compared to Pancrazio. So, she came back to Ivrea. It was like she had never left. To tell the truth, it was like Pancrazio had never noticed.

  Farfalla pedaled over to Pancrazio’s factory on her parents’ bamboo rickshaw. As usual, Pancrazio was out of town again. Pancrazio had gotten world-famous for being so artistically futuristic, so he traveled all the time.

  Farfalla hauled her luggage into her private room. The factory had one hundred and eight empty rooms in it. This one precious sanctum was all hers.

  Farfalla’s private factory room held every single thing that Farfalla owned in the world. Farfalla’s sanctuary had blacklight posters, astrology charts, incense burners, and rosewood rosaries. She had amulets, crystal bath salts, and brass candelabra shaped like human hands. She had Tarot cards, horror fumetti comics, and a complete Dario Argento DVD horror-movie collection.

  Most of Farfalla’s precious things were remaindered bargains from Milanese New Age stores. Once Farfalla had been very proud of all her cool little occult treasures, and how wonderfully magic they were. She wasn’t proud any more, though. Of course, they were magic, they were ‘real magic,’ but so what? Farfalla’s magic always worked. Magic disgusted her. Her room was like a taxidermy shop for the dead dreams inside her own head.

  Exhausted from her long rail trip and her noble effort to be nice to her parents, Farfalla dragged out her lonely futon. She sprawled on the dusty floor of her factory room. Her lonely room was silent, haunted, and reproachful. Her room smelled of mysticism, of hopeless illusion, of bitter self-deception. Of heartbreak and eventual death.

  Farfalla lay there marinating in her own sour mood. Pancrazio was not there to greet her, or chuck her chin and at least wink at her, or make her feel any better about anything in any way. Pancrazio was in Brussels, testifying to the European Parliament and getting some fancy European innovation award. Pancrazio left Ivrea even more often than she did, and she left the place as often as she could.

  So, she lay there – alone, bitter,
neglected, wistfully hoping for a peaceful sleep. No chance of that, of course. No peace in this sour darkness, just her dark future. Her waiting. Her foreboding. Her terrible, primal foreboding. Her dark Cassandra dread. Her certainty that the future was falling on her like a black avalanche, and that she deserved the worst from her future.

  She had done something bad and wrong.

  Love. Pangs of love. The torment of love. Love had no pity on her. Love should had killed her off in one moment. Love should have pierced through her heart and flicked out the far side of her body like a shotgun wound. She could endure a few bloodied heartbeats of love, a few dizzy moments of hot, carnal passion... The Cupid arrow of time flying through her, here yesterday, gone today... That arrow had not passed through Farfalla. She was stuck on that arrow. Pinned like an insect in a box on a shelf. Her fate was impalement.

  Love was not a flying arrow. Frustrated love was frustration. Frustration was cold iron, solid iron. She could feel it there, a colossal presence.

  This new feeling was solid,weighty, and terrible. No mere words could ever chase this ghost away. This was not a dead, dry leaf from the past. This was a heavy, suffocating burden. It was full of inertia. A monster on her bleeding heart, cold and unyielding, like a black anvil.

  This was Regret. Regret did not screech or bluster at her, like Lust, Rage, or Jealousy. Regret said nothing to Farfalla. Regret was a huge, solid, implacable presence. Regret was indestructible, fit to outlast her life. Every attempt to evade Regret, or forget Regret, or ignore Regret, bounced off its dark bulk like a spark. Regret meant decades of silent misery. The sorrow of her Regret could outlast seven generations.

  Her tears were coming now. Her tears came thick and fast, and each one left one tiny, tiny trail of rust on her Regret. A river of them wouldn’t wash it away. Not a sea, not seven surging planetary oceans.

  ***

  In the morning, Farfalla woke in complete bewilderment. Then, reality dawned like a rising sun. Capri was over. She had returned to real life. The cold reality. The romantic dream of Capri was two thousand years gone. It would never return.