Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)
Page 39
“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.”
“We are mortal,” said Farfalla patiently. “It’s getting dark.” She lifted her phone to call ahead.
17 “Is this really her? I thought she would be much sexier than this.”.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Holy Matrimony
The first three floors of the skeleton skyscraper were just big flat plazas of cement. Heaps of weeds, some rubbish, and chasm-like elevator holes. No kind of building for flesh-and-blood mortal people. A parking garage that might house machines, maybe.
And above that third level, it got much weirder. Much less plausible. Just much more architecturally out-there. Like Russian Constructivism with stray Brazilian weeds.
The fifth level and no sign of humanity at all. A tough climb inside dark narrow stairwells. Black passages with intense stenches of damp rat manure. Batty rustling. Dripping echoes.
“I’m finally glad that I left my laptop behind,” said Gavin. “I haven’t seen one pixel of the Internet in two long weeks. That makes it a lot easier to handle this situation. Losing the Internet is just like moving to another country. They do things differently, here in non-Internet world. It’s a magical place, that past world that had no Internet at all. It’s fading from human memory, like a fairyland.”
Gavin shifted his shoulder bag. Nothing much inside it now. A first-aid kit, spray deodorant, mosquito repellent, latex gloves, a hip flask of cheap rum, and an English-language guide to the Brazilian martial arts.
From below , some happy laughter. Then, shrieks of hysterical glee. Then, feral howls. Then, gunfire.
“They found that drug money,” Gavin observed.
“It is raining soup,” said Farfalla, “and the poor were born with forks.”
“So exactly what have you been up to, in this zombied-out tower, Farfalla? Why did you leave me? Why did you flee here?”
“I gave you the chance to escape me,” said Farfalla. “I didn’t want you to be like me — doomed. You could have gone home, Gavin. That road was opened to you. You could have been a free man. Free of me. This place was never meant for you. You should never have to think about a place like this.”
Gavin enjoyed a cheery laugh at this remark. The gunfire grew a little louder. Gavin was getting used to the sporadic gunfire in the Sao Paulo favelas. Sao Paulo was the murder capital of the planet, as everyone knew, but it took a lively town to seize a major world title like that.
Gavin knew that he should be more morally upset about the murder-capital business. But, to tell the truth, he felt at ease in the favela. From a futurist’s perspective, favelas were great. There wasn’t anything remote or exotic or intellectually difficult about the favelas. They were all about abject poverty, huge blocks of drug cash, and completely disposable human beings outside any legal or property system. And tons of guns. Favela futurism was easy to figure out.
Farfalla led him trudging upward through yet another abandoned stairwell. This one smelled of the bloody excrement from vampire bats. Gavin never smelled this specific reek before, but his body sensed, on a cellular level, that this dark stony space was full of small flying sharp-toothed things that ate people. No human being should ever occupy such a space, and yet, it existed on the Earth. And he was inside it now.
“Baby,” he said to Farfalla, “normally, I have a pretty good feeling for the logic of a situation. I just know the way something is going to play out... You understand that about me, right?”
“Yes, Gavin,” she said, kindly, “I do. I understand you as you are. I know that is your way.”
“I can’t make any sense of this now. How on Earth did we find ourselves in such a bizarre situation? Wouldn’t we be much, much happier almost anywhere else?”
“You are here because you chose to come here,” she said.
“Yeah,” he told her, “because you were running off to ‘protect me.’ Man, only a woman would think like that!”
“I will never, ever protect you like that again,” Farfalla swore.
“That promise is good to hear. I like your promises. Every time you make one, they always come true.”
“In the future, you will pay me back for what I did to you here,” Farfalla prophesied. “When we are married, and you get angry at me, you will vanish. You will run away into the forest. To ‘do your philosophy.’ That’s what you’ll say to me. But I’ll know that you are mad at me. I’ll know that I am being punished. And for me, in the future, that will feel just like this feels for you.”
The gunfire down at street-level was getting more eager. Police helicopters had shown up. Random bullets began panging into the skyscraper skeleton.
The bullets interested Gavin a great deal. Bullets had a very guy-thing feeling about them. Real bullets didn’t make any exciting, phony, Hollywood ricochet noises. Real bullets made tense, quirky, sullen noises. Bullets were pointy pieces of metal flying with the force of sledgehammers.
“You must be right about that,” said Gavin. “I do have a temper, and I guess I always will. I want to do the right thing, I want to be true to myself… But, I’m not an angel. I’m a man, and I have my flaws. I am flawed to the core.”
“It’s good that you can admit that,” said Farfalla. “I agree. I can also foresee you’ll never change, not in that way. But then, neither will I. Not about anything that matters. Not when it comes to loving you.” She sighed.
“You can frame it that way, and maybe it sounds pretty bad,” he said. “But who cares? It doesn’t matter that we’re not perfect, that we’ll never think the same way. What matters, is that we think together.”
“We are together,” she agreed. She gripped his hand.
“This is such a marvelous town,” Gavin said. “Seattle is so foggy, mystical, and magical, while Sao Paulo is so honest, hot, and straight-up. Everything’s right out in the open here. Just look at that vast horde of marching skyscrapers, surrounding this ghetto. I’ve never seen the like, but it sure makes me feel right at home. The inside of my head has always looked like Sao Paulo.”
“I love it here, too,” Farfalla said. “Sao Paulo is beautiful. It’s a great city. It is full of truth.”
“So, you know where I’ve been all this time? I was living right over there.” Gavin pointed helpfully. “Up there on the twentieth floor. I could have leaned off that terrace and waved at you.”
Farfalla glanced at the local skyscraper. Golden lights were appearing at its windows. It was a fine, sturdy building.
“Well,” she said, “I believe in us. I want us to be together. I want us to be together, from now on, as long as we live. I want your arms to be my true home.”
“I had an exciting adventure, searching for you,” Gavin told her. “My story was full of intrigue, conspiracy, and lots of daring.”
“You can tell me your story later,” said Farfalla. “Right now, this is all about you being my One.” She paused. “I love you, and I’m going to marry you. But — every omen says you’re not my One. If you were my One, you would surely have told me that, by now. Even though you tell me all kinds of strange things, you have never told me that. So we need to discuss what we are going to do about that. In the future.”
“Why are we always ‘discussing’ your side of our story?” said Gavin. “My story is amazing! I have such an incredible story to tell! I just spent two weeks with a high-tech real estate developer. Very with-it, local honcho guy. He’s an accountant, like me. He taught me all kinds of astonishing things about this city. He even knows the story of this building — this haunted wreck we’re stuck inside, right now.”
Farfalla fell silent as they worked their way up the echoing tomb of an empty stairwell. This one was strung with rusty razorwire that could slash their heads off. They had to count their steps, bow, and duck.
It was also a very tall building. Gavin fancied himself as a guy in good shape, but the endless pitch-dark staircases were wearing him out. Farfalla had a little rhyme to get one to the top, a prayer or mantra. Voodoo as a spiritual practice was always full of death traps that you couldn’t see.
“It would be just like my life,” said Farfalla, breathing heavily, “if you died in here now. Then, I would never know if you were my One. If I never get to know... I swear that would kill me by itself!”
“Baby,” said Gavin. “We’re alive. Get over it.”
“I’m so happy to see you that my heart is bursting,” said Farfalla. “I could die from joy, to see you here. My father designed this building. It was a bad place that failed, and I am bad like that, too. This place is the world’s promise to me, that I’m the badgirl from badworld. It would be easy for me to live in this bad way, always, until I died. But, not with you.”
“Cookie, even though we have our differences, I know, as a proven fact, I can promise you, that —”
A phone chirped in Gavin pocket. Irritably, Gavin pulled it out. “In Brazil, everybody wants to help me! Those posters of you are plastered up all over town. I put my phone number on them.” Gavin shook his head. “Just now, I was about to explain something important to you. It was all about our relationship. I had a great plan. How we would work things out just, from now on. Then this phone yapped and now I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to say. It was brilliant, too. I was gonna, like, win our big argument, just for once.”
“I know that I will marry you,” said Farfalla. “I can’t face another day without you.”
“So, we’re definitely getting married.”
“Yes. We are. Tonight.”
“I don’t have to call Eliza back on this cellphone, and have her convince you to do it? Because Eliza just sent me an SMS. Eliza’s very keen on the subject of our marriage. She even wrote you a speech on why you should join our family. She’s all ready to arrange a formal Seattle rave wedding with Brazilian electronica.”