Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  Farfalla was broke. It had happened just like that. Overnight, practically. She couldn’t understand it. All she had done was buy herself a bicycle, and a case of Nebbiolo, and a weekend trip to Geneva to see some World of Warcraft costume players. Those golden-brown fifty-euro notes had taken flight from her purse like so many clothes moths.

  Farfalla was so broke that she was reduced to doing technical translations. Luckily, some lunatic had written in from Seattle, demanding that she translate some of Pancrazio’s circuit-design documents. Farfalla had never heard of this person, “Sally Scithers,” but she was willing to pay. Farfalla had done translation work in Seattle before. Seattleites always paid her. Being Americans, they paid on time, too.

  She’d meant to ask Pancrazio about it, but when Pancrazio showed up in Ivrea, Pancrazio was busy being very Pancrazio. Pancrazio arrived from Brussels mid-morning, affectionately pinched her on the ass, demanded some lunch, ate it, had some hasty, gleeful sex with her, knocked back three cappucinos and charged into his lab to build robots. Or rather, the interfaces for someone else’s robots. Pancrazio was very big on building interfaces to things that might, or might not, exist, someday.

  As usual, Pancrazio’s arrival in Ivrea was followed by a flood of packages. Everybody who used Pancrazio’s circuit boards wanted the great man to see what they had built. They sent their creations straight to Ivrea, as a cordial tribute to the world-famous electronics guru.

  Those homemade things were generally crazy. Interactive goldfish bowls. Interactive flowerpots. Interactive joysticks for controlling toy airplanes. All kinds of airplane-control things.

  Pancrazio’s geeks would rip these objects out of their package-service wrappers, and try to power them up and get them to function. Commonly, the gizmos didn’t work at all. Then, all the geeks would laugh mockingly. When the gizmos did work, all the geeks would laugh uproariously, and give each other high-fives. The geeks took pictures and videos of these rickety constructions, as they flew around the ceiling, and beeped and blooped, and rolled around on the floor. They uploaded the pictures to FlickR and Picasa and YouTube and Vimeo. So that everybody on the Internet could see.

  The geeks were all going broke doing this. Nobody seemed to notice that. The geeks did not care. No, it was worse than that. To care for nothing was their Italian badge of honor. “I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death! Let him who loves his gizmos with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me!” Giuseppe Garibaldi said that. Except the part about the gizmos. That part was pure Pancrazio Pola.

  In three days, Pancrazio had another conference on his calendar, and like that, he was gone again. Farfalla was just as broke as she had been before. More so.

  So, Farfalla started translating the technical documents she found in Pancrazio’s files. Pancrazio had tons of these documents, because Pancrazio documented everything. It was much cheaper just to publish everything, and get famous, than it was to make some ridiculous fuss about how supposedly secret these technologies were.

  There were tons of electronic documents on Pancrazio’s website that nobody ever read. Absolutely no one.

  So, she chose to translate the documents read by no one. Documents with no readers at all. That would be a good lesson for somebody. At least it would pay.

  Farfalla took some comfort in the brain-numbing work of technical translation. The pure drudgery of it hid her secret sorrows from herself. Translation work took up all of her brain. Not enough to brain left to think with. Or to feel with. Or to hurt with.

  Until, a geek arrived and told her that package had arrived for her. This was not one of the hundreds of packages addressed to Pancrazio Pola. This package was addressed directly to her, Farfalla Corrado, care of Pancrazio’s factory.

  What could this mystery package be? Farfalla never ordered anything on the Internet, because Pancrazio had cut up her credit-cards with tin shears. Farfalla had to stop work. She had unveil this package right away.

  She found books inside the mystery package. Three novels by Princess Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy.

  Three old books came from an Internet antique book-finding service. So the three books were wrapped up astight as bubble-packed mummies, but they were still very pretty.

  Nobody made books like this any more. The books were a hundred years old, but they were still sturdy. The pages were sewn in signatures. The edges of the pages were marbled. The covers were made of gold-embossed leather. Their titles were Shadows of Flames, Virginia of Virginia, and The Ghost Garden.

  No return address, because Gavin Tremaine had never touched these books. But, he had sent the books to her by Internet. Books from that little adventure they’d had, down in the museum basement. Obviously, it was Gavin who had done it, even though, with gentlemanly modesty, he had left no trace of himself.

  He hadn’t forgotten her.

  Farfalla ran her hands wonderingly over the romance novels. Their once-bright, embossed surfaces gave off a fine but palpable dust. Look how ladylike and fancy these old-fashioned novels were. Somebody — (the princess-authoress herself, most likely) — had made a big fuss about making her books so fancy.

  These books didn’t seem to belong in the world any more. They were unearthly books. They looked like they belonged in the boudoir of a drug-addled Southern aristocrat who had married a Russian-Italian prince.

  Farfalla paged through the romance novels, to see if Gavin had enclosed some tender love-note for her. No. After the way they had parted in Capri, he would never, ever speak to her again.

  However, there were many traces of other people in the books. Because these books were all “associational copies.” They had pasted-in private bookplates. Clearly, these precious books had once been owned by some of the princess’s most devoted fans. The author’s fans were crazy people. These peeling, eldritch bookplates featured cupids, and skeletons, and dragons, and half-nude fairies on horseback.

  One of the books had been directly signed to its owner and reader, by the Princess-Author herself. The Princess-Author had beautiful, gorgeous, swishy handwriting. For Miss Ermintrude Cabell, With all best wishes for tomorrow… From her friend and kinswoman, Princess Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy. With a sharp, flying, ink-stroke French accent over the “e” in Amelie.

  No woman alive on Earth could sign autographs like that any more, thought Farfalla. Even if some modern woman really wanted to sign her name like that (and she really was a princess) she would never know how to put the ink on the paper.

  That kind of big brassy pen-nib no longer existed. Princess Amelie’s ink was time-browned, watery and viscous ink, ink from a squid. Her paper was astonishing. It looked like a special romance-novel paper made from Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation cotton.

  One thin sheet of long-forgotten onion-skin paper slid from the dense time-browned pages of The Ghost Garden. This personal note had typewriter marks. The crude, early-model typewriting machine had banged its way right through the fragile onion paper, knocking big manly holes with the o’s. “Thanks fOr cOming tO my birthday party, Princess! COme up tO New YOrk and see a lOnely Old man sOme time — Sam’l Clemens”

  Farfalla shoved her laptop to one side. She thumped the three romance books onto her rusty metal factory desk. She glared at the archaic romances. The books looked back at her, ladylike, demure and innocent. Farfalla wasn’t fooled by that for one moment. Okay, dead woman, she thought, narrowing her eyes over the texts. It’s just you and me now. Where did you hide that cosmic statue?

  The guilty books said nothing, or rather, the books said what novels said, which was thousands, and thousands, and thousands of words. Silent, inert, ink-on-paper words. Farfalla would have to tackle those words. She would have to break them with her occult understanding.

  Farfalla was unafraid of century-old romance novels written in archaic American English. Could reading these novels be any worse than translating electronic circuit-board diagrams? Maybe, well, probably yes, but she was a professional, she was
hard and tough! She could read romance novels!

  She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.

  Farfalla’s cheerful assumption was wrong. The romance books were much worse than circuit diagrams. A circuit-board diagram was trying to reveal something obscure. These romance novels were trying to hide things that were obvious. They hid ten dark things for every thing they revealed in print.

  At first, Farfalla had thought that the book’s occult obscurities were due to the bad writing of the Princess-Author. Maybe the Princess-Author was an unreadable writer – but that couldn’t be true. Because the ghost of the reader was also there, visibly present within the book. The dead reader, “Miss Ermintrude Cabell”.

  This dead reader had paged through Shadows of Flames, over and over and over again. The dead reader was worshipping the Princess-Author’s book, mooning over it repeatedly. The dead reader had dog-eared the book’s most sticky, swoony episodes. She left half-moon, chewed-fingernail marks on the margins. The reader had even tear-stained some pages. Hot, raindrop reader tears that had melted the author’s ink into tiny gray circles of grief.

  The strange book from 1913, called “Shadows of Flames,” was very disturbing. There wasn’t any sex in this romance book, and that was very weird and not-human. Entire, eerie, passionate non-sex scenes lurked everywhere in “Shadows of Flames.” They popped out of nowhere, screaming at the readers in magical code.

  “Sophy found her first mushroom — small, but a beauty. It nestled low in the grass on its plump, naked leg. Its round, white top was faintly browned like a well-cooked meringue. Then, she found another, enormous — a real prize, it seemed. But, something about it was too perfect — too white. She nipped it out of its green bed, and looked at the gills. They were snowy white. Its slender leg was cased in a fine, white-silk stocking that was ‘coming down.’

  “’Oh,’ said Sophy, looking queerly at the too-lovely creature,’how very like you are to some other mistakes of mine... And yet... if I ate you... you would cure them all,’ she ended quizzically.

  “She threw the false mushroom away. It lay, pale and corpse-like, in the wet grass. It was so like damp, dead flesh that Sophy shivered.”

  Farfalla had to look that one up on Google. Yes. At the moment that Amelie’s pen was leaking this over-obvious business about the tall, fleshy mushrooms, Sigmund Freud was busy explaining these things in Vienna. That couldn’t be any accident. The Princess-Author had to know Sigmund Freud.

  Was this American-Italian novelist socialite the kind of woman who would know Sigmund Freud? She must have known about him, and maybe met him personally. Did Sigmund Freud like pretty, crazy, artsy, flirtatious women? What did Wikipedia say about “Lou-Andreas Salome’?”

  Lou-Andreas Salome’ was all over Google. Because she was very famous, still famous. Princess Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy, weirdly obscured... Farfalla stared at her laptop screen. What was wrong with this woman, Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy? The dates in her biography were bizarre. She was living her life in reverse!

  First, there was “Emmeline Rives,” an unknown Virginian rural belle living in genteel poverty. Then, came “Princess Amelie Troubetzkoy,” the celebrated writer of novels and Broadway plays. Then, there was elderly “Mrs. Troubetzkoy,” not a princess any more, not a famous romance author, but just a rural Virginian widow, dying in deep obscurity. Forgotten by time, dying in the very place where she was born. A woman who transformed into her own grandmother. How could a Princess become her own grandmother?

  Even her name warped and transformed with the passage of time... The Princess-Author was “Emmeline, Amelia, Amelie...” Some few incidents of her life had survived on the Internet, and they were frightening. Oscar Wilde had introduced this Princess to her Prince. In London, at a society party. That’s where Amelie met the One in her life. Because Oscar Wilde told them, “I think you two need to know each other!”

  Then, there was the entire Scapigliati business, which for Farfalla, hit very close to home. The Scapigliati were ancestors of the Italian Futurists, and they were about as Italian as it was possible for any art movement to be. Except, that these artists weren’t all Italians.

  Princess Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy was an American Scapigliati. Yes, her. Amelie, the romance writer, was a proto-Futurist. Amelie was a Futurist before Futurism had been invented.

  Farfalla kept clawing at the mists of history through Google. Amelie’s mother-in-law was an American Scapigliati, too. These two obscure American women were important, central, Italian cultural figures. Why? Because their Troubetzkoy family was the bomb shelter of the Scapigliati Movement. Their family home, run by these overlooked women, was a place of safety and order for the Scapigliati artists. The Troubetzkoy women maintained the home where the bohemian Scapigliati artists, all hair-tearing, syphilitic and eaten-up with absinthe, could find a place to sleep and a decent home-cooked meal.

  So this strange, strange woman, this Emmeline-Amelie... known, when known at all, for her “minor female regional writings”... she was underwriting the whole Scapigliati enterprise. Amelie was their unheard prophet. Amelie was their slave.

  That was why Amelie was churning out her overwrought romance bestsellers. Among this whole gaggle of pretentious, nerve-shot Italian artists, this American romance writer was the only one who was earning a living.

  In her woman-writerly seclusion, the Princess-Author created imaginary women. Imaginary, “roman à clef” women, women very like Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy.

  Amelie Rives was selling pieces of her own identity to women readers. Every lovelorn Amelie Rives heroine was a splintered-off, fantastic version of the young, hungry Emmeline Rives. They were like idols and icons in vast hall of gilded, overlit mirrors. Pretty, romantic, ultra-loveable, spiritual women, dressed in the velvet drapes that Scarlett O’Hara had torn off the walls of Tara, in a brave woman’s last-ditch assault on sex-appeal.

  Amelie Rives was shapely and blonde – rather good-looking — for a writer that is, a breed that tended to be near-sighted and portly. However, Amelie’s mother-in-law, the once-famous American actress, was even more romantically gorgeous than Amelie. This mother-in-law, whose older role in this enterprise was so obscure that Farfalla couldn’t even find her name on the Internet... She had propped up this bohemian enterprise with her stage earnings. She had also supplied the Scapigliati movement with a teeming brood of Scapigliati artist kids.

  Amelie, with her many names, and her nameless mother-in-law. Gifted, visionary women, strange women nobody had ever heard of, holding up the world on their backs. This was a multi-generational effort. A subterranean, witchy tradition. Maybe, it had been going on for centuries.

  The mother-in-law must have been a major presence in the Amelie Rives life, but she never appeared in the Amelie Rives novels. Why was that?

  It was because of her story. Not the fake, romantic stories in Amelie’s novels, but the real story of a genuine living woman. This was her forgotten story, the mother-in-law. “I was very famous, gifted, beautiful and rich. Then I met the One. So, I abandoned myself to him, and I loved him, and I vanished completely. I gave him, and the world, seven children. Then, I died.”

  From the bright lights of the stage to the wails of seven kids in the nursery. That was not a romance-novel narrative. Why? Not because it didn’t happen, but because it really, truly did happen.

  And because — women would never pay to read that story. True Love was a fantasy narrative. True Love was the ultimate fantasy because it was the only story in the world that created new readers.

  Women didn’t pay to read romance novels that told them that True Love made women disappear forever and never be heard from again.

  All novels were fictions. But, there were certain truths that could never be said inside novels, because they made novels explode. For i
nstance, “I wrote this novel so that you would buy it.” There was no way for Amelie to say that, within a novel. Romance was all about loving tenderness, and never about earning money.

  Even if you were a best-selling romance writer, and writing exclusively for women about the tenderest feelings of women, you could never write about that part. That part was a deep, dark secret.

  If you were an aristocrat, you couldn’t write for money. How vulgar, how low! If you were a bohemian, you scorned to even think about money. How crass, how bourgeois! If you were Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy, the Scapigliati Princess, and therefore, somehow, amazingly, both an aristocrat and a bohemian, you could never tell the reader that you desperately needed her money.

  Money for yourself, for your family, for the people you loved, and especially for him, the man in your life. That dreadful story was super-invisible. Even the sex, and there wasn’t any sex, was less well-hidden than the money.

  So, there was something divine, dark and dreadful at stake in Shadows of Flames... and Farfalla sensed that it was all in the flaming shadows of what was not being said to the reader. Awful, flaming, haunting, shadowy things haunted the romance book. Its author, its readers, its world.

  There was a lot not being said about drugs, because Amelie-Emmeline clearly knew a whole lot about drugs, and not in a cute dopey party-girl way, either. More in a pit of despair, valley-of-horror, find-my-last-unscarred vein kind of way.

  All the romantic sex went unsaid in a very loud way. Not in a modestly ladylike, reticent way, because it was 1913 and all the readers were ladies, but more in a I-know-way-too-much, my first husband was crazy from syphilis, I have intimate bleeding ulcers and I will never have children, suffering flower-of-evil kind of way.

  But mostly, there was a whole cosmos of things not being said about the Princess-Author’s own survival. As in, “Please buy this romance book so that I can support all my beloved husband’s crazy, spendthrift artist relatives.” That was the golden key to the whole set of works there: Amelie wrote her novels, as a bleeding act of womanly self-sacrifice. Please Send Me Cash should have been the title of Virginia of Virginia, because it was a book about a woman, who was the opposite of virginal. Virginia of Virginia was an artless tale of rural sincerity, virtue and devotion, written by a money-hustling, globalized, drug addict.