Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (36 page)

“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.”

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.

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.”