Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia About Fine Dining)

Utopia,

Even now it is rather hard to speak of. 

I have no idea what they were talking about.  Before I left, I mean, they said, here Snake, here are some biscuits, here are your glucosamine injections.  Don’t eat the meat Snake: it probably is man, or at best dog, and in any case it probably won’t be very fresh and if it is, well then you’re damn sure it’s man!  Here are your protein suppositories.  These other things are vitamin patches.  You can wear them on your thighs.  That way you don’t taste them.  Your cigarettes contain an experimental combustible compound of omega-3, horny goat weed, and electrolytes.  They’re gonna burn a bit slow but they taste like acai or that’s the story anyway and you’re lucky we still give you anything that even looks like a cigarette after what happened.  Those other boxes that are really cigarettes are for barter only.  Maybe you can buy the island from those savages?  Ha oh man, we’re kidding Snake and that’s in poor taste anyhow.  But seriously don’t touch the real smokes.  Because we’ll know.  We just will.

Well, you know what they didn’t know jack shit.  Because if they did well then I wouldn’t have sat down to an authentic Venetian meal would I?  I think they don’t know much as is.  There are loads of people here, whole boatloads.  They are still talking about the architecture and who did what to what buttress and when was a saint and they still put their tongues in each others’ mouths from time to time, and when they do that, they still look to the side to hope to see me looking so they can say, oh yeah what if this was the hole in the middle of your skull that I was lapping at, lapping at like a sloth, shhlp shhhllp, trying to steal little pieces of to bring back to mine?  And they still go out to eat.

And I found the place.  You know it’s the real deal because the waiters weren’t too nice, which would mean that it was just for tourists only, and they weren’t too asshole, which would mean the same thing, a big puffy bravado so everyone can feel like they’ve had an “Italian experience” and make a scorecard of restaurant service across the continents when they return to their hotel rooms and take their walking shoes off to let those stinky dogs rest and even put them up on the crinkling bedspread, without even washing them first.  No, they just were, and more than that, there were honest white tablecloths, clean and starched.  I hated the thought of getting wine on them so I stuck to beer.  I know, I know.

There might have been a menu but I did not take it because I saw what the others were eating and I knew what I would be too, it’s what I dreamt of, risotto al nero di seppia, risotto with little tendrils and slices of cuttlefish and the whole thing black, filled up with the ink of the thing that is cut up.  I’ve been having this recurrent nightmare, but not at night, just awake while eating in which I am utterly convinced that I am going to bite down on the fork, that I am to shatter my teeth even though the whole time I am saying be careful!  that’s not food, that’s a fork and this time it smelled so delicious that I actually stopped worrying about what was going to happen when I put the laden fork in my mouth. When they brought it out to me - I had already finished a beer and made that face while pointing at the empty bottle to say that  I will drink another beer, please - I swear even the steam was black, clinging to the corners, whole snarling wraiths of it.

And my god was it good, and hot, and the inky grit was rough on my teeth, so when I caught my reflection in the almost fogged window I grinned and it looked like I had no teeth just a hole in my head.  And I haven’t been drinking here - you know - and it kinda went to my head, because I felt like those old Japanese women, or not that they are old, but they are young in an old time, Ohaguro it was called, and this was a different standard of beauty and I was the prettiest here with these black choppers.  And after that anxiety about the fork and my teeth, that constant grinding fear, it was a relief to get to pretend that I didn’t have anything that could touch metal.  So I showed em big to everyone, bared my teeth and I think I was kind of dancing a bit in my chair, they were grinning back those missing grins at me, all of us toothless as babies or old women, and even the waiter laughed a bit even though he sees this every night of his cursed life.

This one face I kept looking toward because it wasn’t quite right, he was smiling too but it was as if someone had painted a perfect copy of his face on top of its face, so that it had feedback, a slight tremor, and he was sweating through his gray polo shirt a bit.  And then I noticed that he really was shaking, and that it started at his shoulder and went down his arm to his hand, which was under the table in his lap, and he kept that mirror smile fixed on me as his hand was working away down there.

He was grunting a little bit.

And I just couldn’t believe it, I knew just what he was doing, there with that sick smile on his face, that sheen of pleasure, just going to town on himself here, and I said loudly, really sir this is a family restaurant!  We are all trying to eat, every last one of us!

He didn’t seem to hear me but he shuddered, a rattle, and there was a clatter on the ground, and I looked and saw that it was his dinner knife and it was all red, and just then he brought his hand up to the table and in his hand was a large chunk of his thigh that he had sawed off loose and ragged, the fat bright as days, and he dropped it right onto his risotto and, tears in his eyes, panting, he said

Man can’t be expected to live on ink alone!

I thought I was going to be sick and raised my hand to cover my mouth and my hand too was red.  And I could not look down because I could feel the raw ache in my thigh and I did not see my knife on the table where it should have been, and none of us could, all of us dawning on what we had been doing, our black teeth clenched and we did not feel much like eating anymore and there is a movement to the door.

And I am not even a thing that has been thrown to the garbage heap and I am not even giving this thigh meat to someone whose children are hungry even thought they are already blackened with death.  I am not throwing myself in the pot.  We are just making a godawful mess, all of us, we don’t know how to cook, just to make slices and how.

And how is it that to write this means that we end in red again, that one more thing else has been cut, as if this city was a film but it is not, I cannot let it be.  Or how that I cannot see the white tablecloth which was the first stark thing I’ve seen in so long other than the black ink, which was also very dark.  Or that I can’t see either because, frankly, there is a blood everywhere.

The rain just started up again, delicate.  The canals shimmying in their little percussions.  I’m eating a cigarette under what I think should be called an awning.

And really I do miss you like I would miss a piece of me that had been taken away and I’m not saying that because I think there is actually a substantial piece of me that has now gone missing, although just like missing you I don’t want to look down and see because only then will it finally be gone.

Still, sorry about all the mess.  I hope you can read what I wrote through it.

Love,
Snake

Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia On Moving Fast Over the Water)

Utopia,

I’m sorry this is going to be so brief, as in just a bit, I’m going before the Tourism Bureau to present my proposal to revamp Venice.  I’m all nerves, hot stones in the gut, but I got a clean shave, I know my material, I’m feeling sharp. 

And they have to take my idea.  They just have to.  Because sure, I know what some of the others are talking about: better access to potable water, proper burning of corpses in a single quarter of the city, knife-free zones, killing those birds, hydroponic permaculture.  And I’ll admit, they really should do something about the corpses, which, I suppose, would also have a positive effect on the whole water that can be swallowed without coming back up problem.  And I shouldn’t even think that because when I think my lips tend to move and they will see and join forces to propose to Take All Corpses Out Of The Water Supply - TACOOTWS, they even have an acronym!  But christ, I heard one of them going over his notes, his lips fluttering silent too, to try and reopen some of the old guild workshops and to make new masks - with “organic materials” - to sell as handicrafts.  He swears that we could get a Fair Trade certification, like we were chocolate or bees, and I am neither, and that we are still a World Heritage site so double-whammy.  And this woman is promising that restarting Carnevale would be “just the ticket - a dazzle of mystery and romance to show that Venice has still got it.”  Yeah, got it like the plague, we got it.

But I got it.  I know what’s going to change the whole game.  Because what do you think when you see all this water, these tight twisting back alley canals, the wide-open spaces of the Grand one, all this rippling sheen, this shimmer surface?  When you see those dim tools putter around on those gondolas, sweating, their hands blistered into claws?  When you see how long it takes to get from place to place and how you’re supposed to respect tradition but what does tradition mean when it has necrosis and when what we all really want is the future, the future throwing up a hell’s spray, the future the way that particles of water in the air make - yes, I dare to say it - a rainbow, the future's wet, the future joyous, a bit American even, unwept, the future that roars into view, throwing out a big wake with a big grin on its face?

Because that’s what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about Jet Skis in Venice.

I mean, what else is there to do here?  Maggiore or minor, it’s not gonna matter, because these things don’t need more than a half-inch of water to run, hell, you can gun up over the stones if you got enough speed, they’re great for fishing, and on that note, if we did still want to do something about the soggy bodies, I mean someone should, they are full of holes but not holes that make something sink, and there is the problem of the eyes that remain, but if we wanted to get rid of them, just hook em, hook em up to a hot Polaris and it is on.  But mostly, just tearing all over, hauling big loads, doing some jousting, running the waves dog-tired past the breakers.  Just letting ourselves live, and live with something fiberglass and howling between our legs.  For once.

And this place will never be the same.  Down with the funereal pomp, that dirge of lapping waves.  I want them drowned out in the sound of what runs them.  Once they take my plan, there will be no sound anymore, just flash and burp, throttles floored, and the canals full, teeming as if we were birds and birds were painted hot green.

But what really matters is what I’ve been dreaming since I came up with this plan and I think I came up with it, a whole scheme not to better the city, because I do not need this place, I do not need this wrecked bilge pump, but I want it just to lay the groundwork for my big dream.  Which is you and me, queen and king of this swamp, the ones who brought the end of sound to it, who brought the new days, and everyone knows it, and we’re riding only the best, a custom painted, gondola black to mock the past but it is not all black because there along the side, there’s a growing neon, and the black is burned out with color, airbrushed flawless, a hunter orange off-set with purple accents, and written across it in double cursive, black and gold, is LA SERENISSIMA.  Yes.  And we sit above these words on this four-stroke Sea-Doo RXP-X, 260 horsepower, and at first, we’re barely using them, we’re chugging along real slow, a little time to ourselves through San Polo, and then we’re there in front of all of them, shining, bottle of champagne in your hands, we’re puffing bud, a little hazy now so that it looks as though the water was half-sand half-water and no glare, it’s all polarized.  And they are high-fiving us as they roll by, no one’s got a machine like ours but fuck it they’re happy I brought them this gift, ridded their world of the floating coffins and the day is good the weed is good, and you’re looking beautiful and sometimes I make us jerk forward just a bit so you scream and hit me playing a bit and then you put your arms around me tighter.

But we’re leaving all this behind, and I’m opening up the engine which is happy to finally let itself go, and we’re whipping under the bridges, like a tranche, the arching plume of spat water behind us doesn’t even have time to fall, it hangs there, a barricade in the river, made of river and the sun caught it just mirror right and there they stood, facing their own faces, their ache bodies hung in the light.  But we, we’re not there, and we can hardly be seen, we’re too fast, they can’t even read the back of my shirt where it says IF YOU CAN READ THIS, UTOPIA FELL OFF and they couldn’t anyway because you’re clutching hard to me, not a sound now, and we rip past the Academy, the Leoni, Maria de la Salute, Dogana di Mare into the channel, where the water past Giudecca joins it, colder, and we barely touch any of it, we are a stone that we have skipped ourselves.  And are curving just around Lido out to the open sea so that we follow the line of every ferry that runs through here but how there are none now, they are there just as shuddering brief images of themselves, white hulks, and it does not matter anyway, because there are those who wave when they see you pass and there are those who do not know what it is to wave, do not know what it is to see, do not know how it is to be held, and who do not understand the fact of this hurtling speed that touches so little.  And behind me you too shudder and I do not know what kind of shuddering sound it is and when I turn back to be sure that yes it is laughter I cannot help but see that even you are not there and there is no one at all to read my shirt or to laugh that the sea lasts a long time, whether or not you run across it like a stone.

Love,
Snake

Escape From Venice (2nd Lt J.S. Foster's First Interview with Marira Bentsson)

First Interview.  3:22 AM.  August 14, 2025.

2nd Lieutenant J.S. Foster: [Ruffling sound as he sits in the chair.] Testing, testing. [On the recording, a “THUMP THUMP,” as he taps the microphone twice.]  Are you comfortable?

Marira Bentsson: Yes.

2nd Lt JSF: I see you have a soda, that’s good.

 MB: Umm-hmm.

2nd Lt JSF: Did the man outside get it for you?  [Pause] You, you like grape flavored?  I mean, I bet you didn’t have that on the island, did you?  Or anything fizzy?

MB: Well, a few months ago, someone found a can of Coke that wasn’t opened.  Some people thought that was pretty cool.

2nd Lt JSF: I bet you did.  Did you taste some of it?

MB: No, I hate that syrupy stuff.

2nd Lt JSF: Isn’t this grape stuff sweet… Never mind. [He coughs.  He reaches across the table and turning the straw in her soda back to face her.] So. Do you mind telling me how old you are?

MB: I thought all of you died.

2nd Lt JSF: All of who?

MB: All of you who didn’t let us leave.

2nd Lt JSF: Well, I never said I did not want you to leave.  That wasn’t my choice.  That was the decision of a lot of people.  It was very complicated.

MB: But didn’t you all die?  When the movie started?

2nd Lt JSF: When the… no.  Do you mean the people in the boats?

MB: Yes.  All of you.  In the boats.  And in boots.  You don’t have boots on.  What are those things on your feet?

2nd Lt JSF:  Look, it doesn’t matter what I have on my feet.  [Pause.] They’re called loafers.

MB:  Are they comfortable?

2nd Lt JSF: Uh, yeah, they are.

MB: You don’t tie them up?

2nd Lt JSF: No, they just sort of slide on.

MB: They are ugly.  I bet they don’t even stay on when you run.  But it doesn’t matter.  I bet you own those boots.

2nd Lt JSF: Which boots?

MB: The ones that the soldiers wear.

2nd Lt JSF: Yes, I do. I am a soldier too.  Does that bother you?

MB: So why weren’t you there with the soldiers?

2nd Lt JSF: Well, I was here, sort of monitoring the situation. I was talking to the soldiers who were coming to help get you and the others off the island.

MB: And then they died.

2nd Lt JSF: Yes.  And they died.

MB: When the sea rained.  All of them?

2nd Lt JSF:  Do you know how old you are?

MB: I’m about 19.

2nd Lt JSF: [He notices she is straining forward against the snug wrist and neck restraints to reach her straw with her mouth.  He pushes the can closer to her.] Sorry, I hope that is better.  You said “about”?

MB:  Yes.  About 19. 

2nd Lt JSF:  You don’t know how long you have been on the island?

MB:  No. 

2nd Lt JSF: How old were you when, when the island was closed off?

MB:  I was 7.

2nd Lt JSF: That was five years ago.  That means you are 12 years old.

MB: I don’t feel 12.

2nd Lt JSF:  What is 12 supposed to feel like?

MB: I guess like this.

2nd Lt JSF: [Pause, as he stands up and takes two steps to the right.]I want to ask you something, if you can remember a long time back.  Can you remember back what happened at first?

MB: Umm-hmm.

2nd Lt JSF: [He clears his throat, and sits back down.] When did you start skinning the dogs?

MB: When I was 7.

Uccellacci e uccellacci che mangiano cadaveri

The noise would diminish, he would fall asleep, and then there would be more screaming boys, more clanging shutters.  It was a highly traditional uproar perhaps, but Venice seemed to have an unhappy aptitude for combining only the worst of past society with the society of today.  What might once have been falcons, had become hawks, and were now carrion crows.

(R. Aickman, “Never Visit Venice”)

Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia About Difference)

Utopia,

I’m writing you from hiding, because I’m hiding I have crouched down and pulled a wet version of a cardboard box over myself, right beside a short metal pole, and I am breathing very quietly.  To be perfectly honest my pen may give me away and then where will we be. Like dragging a dead car across tin foil.  SCRITCH SCRITCH

But I’m not hiding because it’s loud, I’m hiding because I just killed a man, he had sweet soft jowls, his hands were full of rope, just like a cartoon of an old-fashioned sailor, yeah, but he recognized me, that big dopey face opening and then darkening and I saw the mouth start to come open to say SN…  And he did not finish his word because I killed him and then I got inside the box.

But I’m not hiding because it did not say a name, I’m hiding still, still here and still as all, because nearby someone is playing the harp.  There must have been a very nice harp left somewhere because this is no janky bit of twine and stripped buoy parts, it’s the real deal.  And before I saw that man I heard the harp, I said to the guy playing it, I love that song! because he was playing Debussy’s “En Bateau”, which is very fitting because this is a city about water.  He said, yeah, I bet you do.  It’s killer.  And now I was gonna say to him, hey play that more, did you see what I just did to that guy, play that Debussy, but he never stopped playing, and I am hiding because I truly cannot tell you if he ever was playing Debussy or if he is playing Jimmy Buffett’s “Stranded on a Sandbar”.  I get convinced it’s the Buffett, and that’s fine, because the Debussy was good when it lasted, and it was different, it’s still good that way, it’s like milk totally surrounded by glass that’s sitting next to milk that is just sitting out and smells like it.  And then I’m saying, no, it’s definitely still the Debussy, I was such a fool, a real ninny for thinking of Buffett, I’m in Venice after all, Venice where one most certainly does not think of Jimmy Buffett or any music that is made for people in shorts who play songs about people who wear shorts and smoke weed and just talk about smoking it and crumple their dicks in their hands and do the same with puffy dying birds and lead business seminars.  Buffett does not have four hands!  You do not think of Buffett in Venice, in fact it is impossible to think of him here, the canals block it out, like moats do.  Because Buffett never makes the music water and vice versa, he’s never played a note that shook itself off and drunken slid back in amongst the rest of them, without shivering.  Buffett just writes songs about all that.  He wants to tell you, I have heard there are those who do not crumble puffy birds, dying or not.  This song is a war on them.

But I’m not hiding from anything, I’m hiding because there is no more difference anymore.  There is no more difference between “En Bateau” and “Stranded on a Sandbar” then there is between a city and a fog these days, between a bear chock-full of maggots that aim to conspire to rise and fall like a bear’s chest and a bear.  There used to be a difference.  A difference between dicks and birds.  It was plucked out by the century.  Between my left eye and where my right one used to be.  Between a day with a few clouds and a night with many things on fire spaced at very even intervals.  Between a city and a fog that is shaped like a city.


 If I don’t make it home, at least you will know exactly what happened and just what to tell them, and you should know also that I always thought there was a difference between you and a century and I do not even care if that is true or not because it does not matter to have difference but it does to have had you.


Love, Snake

Escape From Venice (Snake's first postcard to Utopia)

Utopia,

Just arrived in Venice.

As I suspected, tourists everywhere!  But what can you do about it.  Besides, it’s not as if I’m a local.  Not like I belong here.  (Not like anyone does.)

I’ll tell you one thing: this place ain’t what it used to be.  Trash everywhere.  Gonna be tough to get an authentic Italian meal.  Although they let you row the gondolas yourself nowadays.  That’s pretty awesome.  You know I always wanted to do that.

First thing I did on arriving?  Went to La Fenice, the opera house.  (That’s where I’m writing you from.)  Remember the one from that film, where the Italian woman is fucking that Austrian soldier whose pants are always wedged way up his ass and she gives him that cash that Italians were going to use to fight the Austrian soldiers? 

No one asked me for a ticket.  Found an empty seat near the back, though it was pretty packed.  Hushed.  I don’t know what they were performing, think it was Cavalli, but it’s been a while.  The stage was lit by three torches, or not torches, just big bowls with burning oil in them. One man was on stage, a bull of a man, his voice massive, it leapt and ran, climbed like a deer, like shadows, like the fact that I wept, sentimental old coot I am.  It soared high, highest and just then, just a moment ago, when it dropped from its peak, he drew the knife that had been drawing from the aria’s start the rest of the way across his neck, the last note ending in a hiss, in an opening gurgle.  His throat whistled.  The sound of the blood is lost in the applause, but still, I know it is there.

Wish you were here.

Love,
Snake

Escape From Venice, Part Two

[Part One here]

They started by sinking all craft capable of leaving the island. 

 Elite forces in scuba gear swam the night water, around the island and through its canals, with welders and auto-muffling explosives, and boat after boat went down, gurgling and burping delicately. The few tourists awake and sober enough to catch sight of the slippery shapes moving between the wrecked hulls were promptly dispatched. However, the gondolas were left untouched, a mark perhaps of a gesture of decency that those stuck there be able to circulate their pen with relative ease, perhaps of a certain perversion that relished the thought of them fumbling themselves through the city, capsizing and cursing, without skilled pilots in costumes. The vaporettos, the large water buses that moved around and between the islands, were sunk off the south coast of Giudecca. While excessive, this was a necessary measure: no chance could be left that an Italian, out of greed or compassion, would attempt a rescue of the prisoners. 

 Migrant workers were massacred without notice, their makeshift rafts torched. More than one visitor, unable to sleep in the stifled air and looking out their flung-wide hotel windows, mistook the guttering flames as sign of a local holiday.

Although the truly rich had tended to forgo Venice in its drift toward total tourist saturation, the fact that the penalization of the city occurred on the last night of the Biennale meant that the gaucher varieties of the noveau riche were still there to buy contemporary art by the yard, pound, and hour, and their personal cruise ships, named things like SLAVIC DAWN and SHAHNAZ, were still anchored off San Marco. They were boarded, inhabitants taken down with silenced shotguns, and laden with incendiary devices on timers: they blew sky high around dawn, in a carefully paced percussion echoing over the city, like the tolling of bells. The rain of Gucci-logoed upholstery, body parts, and hissing champagne was the first opaque announcement to the population of what had transpired in the night.

While the boats were being scuttled, workers went down in the defunct sewers and welded new grates, installed laser sensors linked to cyanide gas jets. Floating smart mines were placed in the surrounding waters, and thermal-sensing turret guns were mounted at strategic points on the surrounding islands. San Michele, the already fortified cemetery island, became a barracks and armory, with a fleet of black Jet-Skis at the ready to hunt down any who managed, against many odds, to navigate the waters without detection. They launched predator drones, which started to circle gracefully on updrafts, as polished vultures.

Of course, many of the relatively poorer tourists had been staying on those surrounding islands. Following a long debate about two possible options (drugging them in their sleep and dumping them on the main island or strongly encouraging them that their vacations were over and that they should be glad that they couldn't afford the pricier hotels along the Grand Canal), a third, simpler option was chosen. They simply shot them in the night. A similar debate was held regarding the few Italians unlucky enough to still live and work in Venice. The hard decision was made to leave them were they were, a difficult but unfortunately necessary cost of the operation.

And so, in the course of less than 6 hours, Venice was transformed from the most popular destination city in Europe to a guardless Alcatraz. Just a generalized life sentence passed on 83,721 tourists, on those still asleep, crammed into luxury economy suites, those planning the sights to be seen the next day, those trying to get laid, those looking over photos taken an hour before, those tossing fitfully, those dreaming of strange glaciers of frozen squid ink and shameful, back-canal encounters with no less than five gondoliers at once.

At 8 in the morning, Furbino made his announcement, to the island and to the world.

Citizens of the world and prisoners of Venice,

I address you on a joyous occasion: the proud renewal of an Italy who has found her teeth once more. And in case you haven't realized, they are sharp and strong. They are the same teeth that gnawed away the fetid umbilical cord of currency that tied us to Europe.

That day, a year and a half ago, I announced a shot across the bow of Europe. A wiser breed than you all would have taken it very seriously. For we were not bellicose, were we? It was the shot of a proud and radiant beast, locked in a cage too small for its frame, a beast who had learned to use the tools of those who thought themselves its master, who held in its grand paws a weapon it knew how to use: this was the fire arm of law and finance, of will and decision. It was not a salvo to declare war: only to declare secession and warning, to tell you to keep you pasty hands away from the bars. To leave us out of your charnal games.

But you didn't, did you? You shoved your thick fingers through, you acted like you owned the place and us with it. You came by the thousands, eating our food, staining our soil, making little pouty faces for your camera phones in front of our monuments to our heritage, pissing, like sweaty, drunken boars, on the sides of our churches. You thought that you were doing us a favor by shoving your reeking money into any hole that would take it.

Well, we will not take it. And so today we offer a second shot, this time across the bow of humanity. Across the very rights you have assumed come with belonging to a nation, of having a passport, as if those allowed you to go where you wanted and do as you pleased.

As of this moment, therefore, Venice is a penal colony. We will not fill it with those who commit crimes elsewhere, but with those whose crimes took place there, on its soil and water, with those who didn't have the decency to acknowledge their crimes, calling them merely “vacations.”

Their punishment is a life sentence. They will not get the pleasure of the authentic Italian experience they so desired: we will give up none of our own to tend them, feed them, clean their filth, discipline them. You have evacuated this city of its past and its present. Very well. Let you therefore become its future. Let us see how you handle yourselves, amongst each other, with no home to which you may return. We have heard many of you saying how you “would kill to live in Venice.” I suspect you will find yourselves testing the truth of those words sooner than you think.

But we are not the barbarians here. That would be you, with your humdrum polyglot babble. And so we will not let you starve. Besides, you paid good money for your time in Venice. Therefore, crates with enough food to live on will be delivered to the docks. How you divide it up is for you to figure out.

As for you affronted nations, you loved ones back home, you shocked and appalled: are you truly surprised, or do you merely think yourselves obligated to act as such? In this day and age, what are a few lost to the damp winds of history? A few who had it coming, a few who should be proud – and will have many years to learn to be so, or to perish – to be the base material with which a nation proves that it matters, that it alone is the form capable of making sense, of erecting a proud lighthouse, in of the disastrous, darkening storm that is our age.

And for those who don't get it: don't worry, you will. Because you know that this isn't worth a war. Because you know that at the first sign of such a move, we will slaughter them all, and all your mobilizations will be for naught. Because you know, in your sluggish heart of hearts, that you will happily throw to the wolves a few of your own lambs rather than have to become hawks once more. Because you know they simply aren't worth the cost. Take it as a cheap deal on a lesson well learned. And leave us be. As an added reminder of this, from this moment forth, all of Italy's borders are permanently closed. All trespassers will be shot. We will set the hounds on you.

And for those on the island who don't get it: don't worry, you will. The passage of time is a remarkable teacher. Because you know – or you will know, when you feebly try – that there is no escape. I am sure some of you will devise grand schemes. I am looking forward to seeing their torched remains brighten the night. Should you get tired of your life, as you well might, there is plenty of water deep enough to accommodate you. But why turn your back on a lifetime in La Serenissima, even if it gets a bit wild?

I'd say I'm sorry to have to break the bad news to you. But I'm not. And it is, after all, a new dawn, on a new day, after so many years of darkness. See how clear the sky with not a touch of red, see how fast the sun rises high over us all! It looks like it's going to be a real beauty.

There was a moment of silence around the globe. First, a brief peal of nervous laughter. After all, remember the fake declaration of war on Norway hackers released from Finland's State Department World in '16? And then world leaders muttered, in a chorus of many languages, oh, you little piece of shit. You miserable, monstrous, inflated little prick. For they had been apprised of the fact that this was not, unfortunately, a tasteless gag. The footage that streamed from a set of security cameras mounted on Venice, plus the immediate condemnation from other countries, quickly convinced all that this was very real indeed. A horrible shout arose, from those in front of their screens, those pouring over email and Facebook for word from those vacationing, and from those on the island themselves, who were beginning to register the lack of vaporettos, the wrecked craft littering the canals. The corpses borne by the waves, slapping up against the stone stairs, their heads open like violet and maroon flowers. The fact that they couldn't find a cafe open for a decent cup of coffee.

Still, despite the hyperventilations, the mad rushes toward other docks where perhaps a barge remained, they maintained some degree of order. This will all get sorted out. They can't leave us here. We'll just stay calm, stick together, and wait it out. Even when a Canadian man jumped into a gondola and began rowing out toward San Michele, even when a hollow-tipped sniper bullet eviscerated him not more than 20 yards out to sea, even then they decided to keep quiet.

The normal denunciations from nations and humanitarian organizations came immediately. U.S. President Newt Gingrich denounced Furbino as “a child who has stumbled onto his father's gun cabinet and who doesn't know muzzle from butt.” Others accused him of desiring to ignite a new “Mediterranean powder keg,” albeit a century later and 300 odd miles to the west of their point of reference. The Red Cross demanded immediate access to the island. They were told “their time would be better spent elsewhere, where hope remained.” World leaders gathered quickly in Geneva to draft a resolution. Global news outlets speculated on its content, but it was generally assumed that it would involve full economic blockade, swift international censure, and threat of coordinated military intervention if the prisoners were not immediately freed.

And yet, amidst the frenzy, when they emerged from their meeting, what was presented was, to be sure, strongly worded enough (“an unprovoked war crime in a time of peace”, “unpardonable actions unthinkable from any nation considering itself a responsible part of the international order”, and other attacks relying heaving on the prefix un-). Yet it was clear to any and all that what it truly amounted to was an early admission that real action would not be taken. To be sure, they declared immediate economic sanctions and exclusion from trade, but wasn't that what Furbino himself had urged and desired for the last several years? An ultimatum was given - “You have 36 hours to immediately release those unjustly imprisoned to their loved ones and home nations” - but its careful wording excised any specific reference as to what exactly was meant by “or else you will face the full consequences of your actions.”

In short, by not explicitly declaring war, and readying for invasion the assembled nations made it clear that while they would see out the time of this ultimatum and “weigh the difficult options necessary in the face of such an unconscionable act,” they would actually follow the out given by Furbino: sever ties, leave the Italians to their own cursed devices, and take this as a relatively low loss way to avoid a larger, messier, more expensive, and, most importantly, geopolitically destabilizing war. After all, Furbino had, in a rather brilliant move, managed to align himself with a number of OPEC countries (in part by playing Italy as a victim of the ungrateful EU and their “unquestioned assertion of right to resource access”) and the Russians, whose control of westward bound natural gas had become of crucial importance in the last decade. Hence while none of these openly supported the penalization of Venice, they nevertheless crucially noted, in a joint statement that afternoon, that they were “entirely opposed to plunging Europe back into a retrograde interstate conflict.”

And so while there was a ceaseless set of deliberations, threats, sanctions, blockades, secret mission plans, and attempts to palliate the growing cries of the families of those lost to the island, it was in the night of that first day that the new Venetians knew all too well that help, if it was coming at all, was not hours away but, at the best, weeks and months off.

And it was then, abrupt as the first rock through a window, that things took a turn for the very, very nasty.

Escape From Venice, Part One

[I decided that John Carpenter's Escape From New York and Escape From LA needed to become a trilogy.  I decided also that serial fiction is an under-utilized form.  Here, then, is a response to both those lacks.]

for Erik

 In 2020, Venice had its best tourist season since 1981. This might appear surprising, given the recent state of affairs. Italy had, over the course of a decade, become increasingly volatile. In the midst of a protracted and severe global financial crisis, just after Greece finally slipped through the grasping fingers of the European Union and into open revolt, filling the world news with the rather indelible image of forty-three riot police trapped inside the Treasury by external barricades and burned alive, the fire fed by reams of worthless promissory notes, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi finally stepped down from office on April 11, 2012.

He did so, however, on the condition of two emergency resolutions. The first was an executive order for his own execution by guillotine in Rome's Piazza Venezia. This was carried out promptly, and the footage left little doubt that after the decapitation, his severed and perma-tanned head still managed to whisper one last dirty pun, as if it had been his final snickering thought as the blade dropped. The second resolution, only revealed to the public after his execution, had been long in the works. It involved the transposition of his personality and memories into an algorithm which was allowed permanent veto power on any bills drafted by Parliament. It showed itself quite willing to do so, as it brought proceedings to an extended halt, and thereby proving that the condition demanded as input by the algorithm – a warehouse full of 16 year old women in their underwear dancing 24 hours a day, their presence registered and analyzed by thermal cameras, motion sensors, and facial recognition software – be ceaselessly maintained.

In a roughly two year period that followed, from the summer of 2012 to the fall of 2014, a dispute raised by a dairy farmer turned into a 6 day general strike and threw Spain for a loop, the Eurovision contest was won by a toddler, Luxemburg was taken in a surprising coup d'etat launched by a Swiss bank, and Greece continued to intensify, as it descended into brutal civil war and was subsequently occupied by IMF-Blackwater forces. It was during this time, referred to as “The Long Pause,” that the EU disbanded, discovered new heights of currency instability, and hastily reformed, having in the meantime conveniently booted out its troublesome southern nations, with the sole exception of Italy. Despite the fact that it showed almost no prospect of a rapid economic turn-around, the political sequence following Berlusconi's mathematicization convinced Merkel and her followers that they simply couldn't do without Rome, the new anchor in the Mediterranean. 

 After Berlusconi got himself beheaded, a nearly unknown young politician from outside Verona named Alessandro Furbino – known earlier only from his brief spell in prison for “accidentally” killing an Algerian auto mechanic – rose with alarming speed to the top ranks of the far-right Northern League. Elected to national office, he pushed ahead a set of extraordinarily conservative, xenophobic, and isolationist measures. It turned out to be just what the EU wanted, despite the annoyance of Furbino's attempts to always put Italy first in the list of EU nations and his constant empty threats to return to a national currency, known by all to be a leap into the financial void no country would dare take.

All turned out to be very wrong, however, as he took just this step in winter 2018, announcing it during his immediately infamous “A Shot Across the Bow of Europe” speech, which promised, among other things, a “slashing of our sham ties to this odious continent of bankers and pansies,” “a new era of Italian solitude and fortitude,” and, more particularly, a rigorous new coding of regionally specific food, gaining him some accidental and utterly unwanted respect from sustainability movements and “locavores.” And in the hurried space of a few weeks, Italy reverted to the Lira, which – to the surprise of no one – fell drastically against all major world currencies.

However, due to the already imposed near-martial order, Italy managed to maintain a semblance of stability. And combined with the insistence on preserving regional specificity, a new commitment to the upkeep and polishing of monuments and historical sites (with the exception of Napoli, where trash fires, stray dogs, and, in an unconfirmed report, stray dogs who had learned how to set fires had been gaining more than the upper hand of late), the strength of foreign cash against a Lira desperately in need of some inflow, and a sense that it may not be far off before the borders would be closed to any and all visitors, an utterly perfect storm of tourism was created, one that even the increasing lack of disposable income and cheap credit couldn't dampen.

This storm hit nowhere harder than Venice, which gained a extra push from a particularly lurid and widely read report on global warming that took as its prime example the destruction of Venice beneath the rising seas and fleshed this out with a battery of expensive CGI catastrophe – The ghetto becomes a soggy grotto! – for its prime time special report. In short, one had to come to Venice while there was still something left to come to. And so they did, in droves: American, Dutch, Chinese, German, Argentinian, French, British, Finnish, Japanese, Canadian, Swiss, Thai. Even the infrastructure of a city as utterly dependent on tourist cash as it long had been couldn't handle it. The last of the residents were squeezed out of their apartments, and walls either broken down to form new luxury suites or, more frequently, added, as the combined facts of a desire for a room of one's own and the teeming quantity of those who wanted to experience Venice meant that they packed them in with a rather uncanny echo of Soviet apartments. The poorer and relatively tourist-free zones near Calle Drio ai Magazeni and Calle Sagredo, with their De Chirico minimalism of poured concrete,were transformed into hostels and multi-story gelato shops. 

 But even this wasn't enough: there simply weren't enough buildings to remodel or take over. “Authentic Venetian” shanty town motels crowded the squares, and new floors were hastily thrown on top of whatever houses had the load-bearing capacity to take it. (The first collapse of one such addition, ungracefully dumping sixty-one primarily German and Malaysian tourists in the midst of brunch onto a piazza six stories below, in a terrible wet crunch of bones and croissants, had almost no effect on their continued construction.) New barges were anchored to the island and stacked with shipping containers hastily retrofitted with tasteful Swedish design and tiny pictures of San Michele hung off-center in polished aluminum frames. The design for the barges was borrowed straight from the Croatian Pavilion in the 2015 Biennale, in which it appeared as a mocking exhibition of yuppie sustainability and salvage fantasies, evidently nailing its mimicry a little too well.

The non-tourist population was reduced to near zero, as waiters, police, and gondola drivers gave up their houses for reasons of turning a decent profit and, more importantly, fleeing from the further horror their city became. (This relative absence of cops provided a unique opportunity taken up by a splinter group of the recently formed Italian Insurrectionary Anarchist Federation, but their attempt to destroy what remained of the high-end retail district was foiled by a rather terrifying spontaneous mob of tourists hell bent on protecting their shopping district who, armed with tripods and water bottles, killed four of the anarchists and drove the rest from the island. The communique that followed the disastrous action was the shortest ever released by the IIAF: “Fuck that place and its visitors. They deserve one another, like a corpse deserves its vultures.”) 

 The workers who could afford to commute moved further and further from the island and the surrounding ones, crowding into Spinea and Jesolo, as even Murano and Sant'Erasmo become uninhabitable. Many simply gave up on working there. Those who couldn't afford a long commute – the immigrant populations to whom the new xenophobia turned a partially blind eye in recognition that they alone would take up the slack of the nasty work – slept on massive, makeshift rafts, tethered to the island like leaky balloons. The prison became a hotel – though one of the cheaper ones, to be sure. The food got cheaper and worse, although still local. The city gave up on any illusion of waste management, rerouting the sewers and dumping the trash off the sides of the island, such that it was constantly ringed with a reeking, fish-shaped halo of empty bottles, small neon objects that flashed and spun in the air when thrown high with a slingshot, tampons, unfinished squid ink risotto, and a whole lot of fecal matter.

And still they came, in their very responsible sandals and gimmick hats, their massive camera bags strapped like bandoliers over chubby middles, their common smile of those who have nothing to do in an era of decadence but “experience” and document it. They came and walked, iPads held in front of their faces, its architectural recognition software beeping and cooing when the material city aligned with the image offered by Google street view. So they walked, clattering thick into one another, jabbing slippery fingers onto the screens to capture the images, to send them to friends who, it turned out on many occasions, were unbeknownst to them on the island as well, perhaps a few steps behind. The sound of sweaty thighs rubbing against themselves sang a low and constant hush, over the shrieks, babble, and exclamations of the phrase “off the beaten path” spoken in twenty-seven different languages.

Despite all this, it still came as a real surprise to the world when unannounced, on July 8, 2020, the Italian state transformed Venice into a penal colony in the course of a single night, trapping the still-sleeping tourists as prisoners with no escape other than death.