The Princess Author was writing for the sake of the One in her life. He was the One who needed her to work for him, the One who really needed her support. The Prince in her life, the creator of the Cosmic Cupid.
That had been a strange feeling — the feeling that had come over her as she met Amaldi’s eyes. It was as if they were recognizing each other, rather than just becoming acquainted. It was odd how everything about him seemed familiar to her.
The Princess-Author’s books were littered with spiritual events of this kind. Omens, totems, left-handed intuitions, dark forebodings and foreshadowings. Tons of them. Writhing, and screaming the unseen truth. Right, left and center. Huge numinous fits of spiritual insight. They were as common as dirt.
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.
&nbs
p; 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.”
“I’ve heard that said. That’s a very Futurist thing to say.”
“I married when I was forty-five.”
“Um, yeah.”
“You need to concentrate, you need to focus,” said Dr. Svante, leaning back in his Swedish bentwood desk chair. “You are miserable today. You are useless to anyone. Disengage from your daily affairs. The time has come for you to study the deeper topics, the topics of lasting importance. I mean philosophy. Study reality, Gavin. Put aside your emotional confusion. Engage with the great intellectual works of world civilization. The works mankind has written, about the bedrock of reality.”
“All right,” said Gavin, undaunted. “Since you say so, I’ll do that.” This was indeed the counsel he had asked for. It might be hard penance — karma — but it felt like something he deserved.
“Learn about human doubt and uncertainty. Learn how we humans know what we do know about our world. All Futurists have to plumb that sea, eventually. This is your opportunity. I will send you a proper reading list. Go to your beautiful Seattle Public Library designed by Rem Koolhaas, and read philosophy books.”
Gavin had to voice a doubt. “I’m not sure I have the mental gift to tackle the world’s truly deep thinkers... I mean, I had to read some of that ‘postmodernity’ stuff in Princeton, and...”
“Never mind that. You will find that all the truly serious philosophers are in as much emotional distress as yourself. That is the ‘consolation of philosophy.’ Go to a place where you can be alone. Go, and find your authenticity. If you live to be my age, young man, you will live another sixty-one years. This world will not vanish while you look within yourself.”
“Right. Thank you so much, Dr. Svante, for telling me that.”
&nbs
p; Having sought out counsel and received it, Gavin did his best to follow his mentor’s advice. He went to the handsome Seattle Public Library and ignored the large stacks of romance and science fiction. Instead, he checked out an ominous, looming stack of dense, important nonfictional tomes about the real reality of real reality. Then, he called in sick at work. Gavin had plenty of sick-time at Cook, Bishop and Engleman, because Gavin never called in sick.
He bought a hotplate and some boxes of his favorite macaroni and cheese.
Then, he threw his phone and his computer out of his bedroom. He locked and bolted his bedroom door.
There was no reason for him to leave his house to complete his spiritual work, Gavin thought. The old Tremaine mansion was roomy. Twenty Tremaines could have lived in the place. The place had once housed twenty people, in fact, if you counted all the servants and the in-laws.
His own home was the best place to look into the Abyss.
The Abyss, immediately, looked back into him. The Abyss was very, very interested in Gavin Tremaine.
Until abandoning romance and tackling philosophy, Gavin hadn’t realized that the Abyss was part of reality. He had figured the world for a practical, businesslike affair, made mostly of solid objects.
He’d known in a vague, handwaving way that real, solid objects were made of atoms. And atoms were made of particles. If you messed around way down at the quantum particle level, then ‘reality’ got a little weird. Dr. Svante had recommended a couple of cogent books on the state of modern research there.
It turned out that Gavin’s layman’s notions about the true nature of ultimate reality were thirty years out of date. In the twenty-first century, scientists had discovered all kinds of additional kinky weirdness about quantumness. For instance, science had recently established that atoms could be teleported across China. Real stuff, atoms, material reality, vanishing, and showing up kilometers away.
Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) Page 27