Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  That was real, true physics, but genuine physical reality got much worse that that. There were two places on Earth where serious people were supposed to tackle the ultimate nature of matter. One was under some mountains in Switzerland, and the other was in rural Texas.

  The attempt in Texas had completely failed. After blowing eleven billion dollars, it was lying in a hot sun covered with Texan dewberry briars. The American quest for the ultimate “God Particle” was a complete, total, scandalous disaster. No scientist even breathed the words “Superconducting Super Collider” any more. The SSC was the biggest boondoggle in the history of physical investigation. Total American reality failure. The “Desertron of the Real.”

  The other ultimate-reality machine was even older than the Desertron. It was called CERN, or the “Center for European Research Nuclear,” except they never used the word “Nuclear” there any more, because the word “nuclear” in Europe had become politically incorrect. The dirty nuclei of atoms were something that decent people in Europe didn’t want to confront.

  The upshot was that this Space Age high-tech showpiece was a European haunted castle. CERN was an eerie Gothic maze of endless secret tunnels and colossal stone dungeons. The Europeans had megatons of eldritch, rotting, duct-taped, scientific hardware jammed in their Gothic Castle of Reality.

  The Europeans would not give up on CERN, because the Europeans were huge on heritage castles. Also, there was nothing Europeans loved better than impossible multinational bureaucracies. But there wasn’t much ultimate metaphysical reality coming out of CERN. Maybe one thin trickle of European reality.

  This left String Theory and Dark Matter. These powerful ideas were also concerned with ultimate “reality.” They were completely different scientific concepts, yet united in some awful, incestuous way.

  They were horrible, brain-warping theories. Maybe the worst theories ever thought up by mankind.

  String Theory was what happened to science when you didn’t have physical evidence, but plenty of math. So, you just started pushing the math around, to see wherever the math would go. With enough String Theorists publishing, mathematics would go into all kinds of freaky places. Places like seventeen dimensions rolled up into vibrating cosmic tubes that were too small to detect.

  Yes, that sort of “physical reality.” Way too much of it. Then, there was the associated Dark Matter theory of reality. Dark Matter wasn’t really about “darkness” or “matter.” The normal stuff that people called “matter,” and the lack of normal light that people called “darkness,” these were very small parts of the extremely abnormal and scary Dark Matter Reality.

  Everything that was material, everything that could be seen, or touched, or tasted, or loved, or kissed, all that good-old-fashioned “real” stuff, was four percent of the universe. The rest of the universe, the vast majority of the universe, was made of two kinds of awesome nonstuff: Dark Energy and Dark Matter. The minor stuff that human beings lived in, loved on, wasn’t real. Not compared to them, the two great Cosmic Darknesses.

  If most of the Universe was a dark Abyss, then the Abyss was all the real action. The non-Abyss, left over for material beings like himself, attractive Italian Futurist witches and so forth, was the measly three or four percent that a major corporation would grant for an arts budget.

  Gavin was tempted to throw up his hands and simply ignore the stark truth of reality. But, the whole point of his retreat was to not ignore the stark truth any longer. The plan was to abandon all romantic illusion and come to firm grips with the real. He was supposed to mature himself and to steady himself. In order to get over his failed marriage proposal. In order to forget his broken Italian romance.

  The Abyss was definitely helping with this failed marriage proposal. The very idea of grown-up decency and marital stability in a world with this description — that idea was laughable.

  The Abyss did not help him much with Farfalla Corrado. The Abyss made every bitter loss much more intense. Gavin no longer peeked into his computer to moon over searched Internet photos of “Farfalla Corrado.” Farfalla wasn’t famous and there weren’t that many photos of her for him to find. Gavin had looked at them so often that each of them was burned in his memory.

  The pictures that hurt him most were some model-shots on FlickR that a minor Milanese fashion photographer had taken when Farfalla was eighteen. Because the teenage Farfalla was so young, and so brave, and artlessly trying to look grown-up and sexy. The Farfalla he had met six years later was a smart cookie. A smart cookie turning into a burnt cookie. A brittle, burning, hard-eyed cookie,crumbing around the edges.

  He could see the difference those six years had made to her. He could see the trend-line there. He hadn’t seen that reality before. Now, he saw it. He knew it.

  A cookie that was not his problem. Not at all. Not even of his world. Abyss.

  Gavin had a real world. He had to fit into that world. Somehow. It was hard to imagine what a man could do to “fit in” with a world that was Abyss.

  By the third day of his intellectual sojourn, Gavin’s studies had begun to prey on his mind. He ignored the polite and timid knockings of his mother and the plantive yells of his sister (because he had firmly explained to them that they had to leave him alone). Instead, Gavin began to lift his bed. Up and down. He needed some serious exercise in order to sleep, and the bed was the heaviest object in his bedroom.

  There was something physically reassuring about prying up the foot of his bed and letting it thump back down on the old hardwood floor. The bed was real, really heavy, that was the good part. It reassured him to feel that the phantom universe could still be so heavy.

  It was even better when he slithered under the bed and bench-pressed it with his arms. He hadn’t done that since his high-school days, working out for baseball. He could still do it, though. Because he was still a young guy. That was the truth about himself: he was still a young guy, with decades of life ahead. He could get back into good shape. Healthy mind in a healthy body. Nothing stopping him from doing that. A matter of will, really. A matter of setting future priorities.

  He fell asleep. He had one of those anxiety nightmares. One of those where distressed reality peeled away like layers of weathered wallpaper.

  He was fleeing Seattle, within this nightmare, because his life there had become untenable. Seattle was too dark, too cold, he couldn’t make a go of that life any more, and that much he understood. That much, he had decided on.

  The rest of it, though, was all mixed up with the fraudulent flim-flam of dreams.

  Like that scandalous dream when he was naked in public. Walking around in public, going about your dream business, and yet, you are naked to the world. Then, there are giant flashes of horrified dream-shame. Somehow, you forgot all your clothes. You’re exposed to the universe.

  In this naked dream, somebody was patting his naked shoulder.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “Pal, what are you doing out here?”

  “I’m going away,” Gavin pointed out.

  “It’s three in the morning, pal. You’re not gonna get a bus for quite a while.” The guy who was speaking to him — and smiling at him, with kind concern — looked drunk. He had strange laceless shoes, glittering, silky jeans, and a baggy souvenir University sweat shirt.

  This three-in-the-morning guy was a dark-haired, grinning, rather exotic-looking character. Like an Indian exchange student, or maybe more like some globalized half-breed Singaporean Chinese-Indian Seattle hipster dude. He had a puka-shell necklace and a cheesy totem bracelet, and a definite buzz on.

  He was the kind of strange night-owl you might meet in suburban Seattle at three in the morning. Because it really was three in the morning.

  “Do you know your address?” said Night-Owl Guy.

  “Yeah,” said Gavin, and he gave it.

  Night-Owl Guy stripped off his sweatshirt, and, with an easy and even elegant gesture, silently offered it up.

  At this point, Gavin
realized that he was really sitting in a Seattle bus stop, naked. Not in some dream bus stop, but in an actual bus stop. And not nightmare naked, either, but barefoot, tooth-chattering, and exposed to the raw elements of late November. That kind of naked.

  Night-Owl was a pretty good-sized guy for a Chinese-Indian of mixed ethnicity. His baggy sweatshirt almost covered Gavin’s bare ass. Gavin’s feet were naked, and very dirty. His bare left foot was scraped and bleeding.

  “We’re gonna walk you back to your house now,” advised Night-Owl. “Or at least, back to that address you just gave me. I know where that is, pal. Because this is my neighborhood.”

  Gavin looked around. “This is my neighborhood, too.”

  “Glad to meet you, neighbor. You know what? No matter what kind of condition we may be in, up here...” Night-Owl tapped his close-cropped head with one fingertip, meaningfully — “we’re all in this world together. So, we have to stand by one another. You know what I mean?”

  “Not exactly,” said Gavin, limping after him. The sidewalks of Seattle were not designed for shoeless, naked people. Every glittering patch in the streetlights looked like broken glass.

  “You ever read the work of Philip K. Dick?” asked Night-Owl.

  “I don’t think so,” said Gavin.

  “He was a philosopher,” advised Night-Owl. “Big literary classic writer. He’s in the Library of Modern America. You should read him. He’s got a lot to say to people of our West Coast sensibility.”

  “You read books?” said Gavin.

  “Sometimes, I read books,” allowed Night-Owl. “I admire the twentieth century! The twentieth century has plenty to say to us, now that it’s dead. I was just discussing this with some friends tonight. We all got drunk, and we talked about books. We all agreed that all books, when written on computers, always have the ghost of a computer in them somewhere. Now, I’m all for networks — don’t get me wrong! — but the only network that really matters is the network between the dead and the unborn.”

  Gavin had nothing to say about that.

  “So, this is your house?” said Night-Owl, gawking at it.

  “Yes.”

  “This is some kinda house you got, pal. I like these fine old places that people still keep in good condition. It looks like your house needs a moat. You should have guard dogs, or maybe guard tigers, around your house.”

  “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 relie
d 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?”