Men Against the Current

Twenty-one years Ambroso Garzolo had spent, after the death of his lover, looking for that other Venice—and without any apparent success.

Johann had been an earthy man, hearty and sensible, and so of course in his absence, without his counsel, Ambroso sought him through every excess of esotericism.

He followed every contradictory suggestion in a dozen ancient codices. He prayed. He fasted. He sponsored monasteries and ascetics. He took tinctures of potent spices. He worked gematria with kabbalists and sought wisdom with alchemists. He summoned spirits on the occasion of rare astrological conjunctions. He purchased saintly relics and profaned them. He drew the symbols of Hermetic magic on his floors in chalk and on his walls in blood and fire.

Nothing worked. After every rite and every ordeal, Ambroso always awoke to the same Venice, except he had become notorious, or wounded, or was in trouble with the law, his creditors, or the church. Not one experiment ever recovered a glimmer of Johann’s smile, or hint of his perfume, let alone brought Ambroso to the other Venice. Twenty-one years.

And then, tonight, he finds it without trying.

He steps out of the back of his palazzo onto his private quay and up above the sky is gone, replaced with a vast parchment, lit from within, an obscure branching diagram inscribed upon it in vast strokes of ink.

Though the pale sky suggests daytime, nevertheless the city, the other Venice, is immensely dark and cold. All the palazzos—and there are many, many palazzos, countless buildings of all kinds, two dozen at least for every edifice that stands in the Venice of living men—are in shadow, torches burning in their sconces to hold away the night. In the distance, interlocking inverted districts of the other Venice rise up at odd angles, as though the city herself sat not on a flat lagoon but instead on a sort of peculiar saddle-shaped hill; but Ambroso (born centuries before Escher or Gauss) cannot name the hyperbolic tessellation, and must simply note that the horizon is not exactly visible and in any case quite the wrong shape altogether.

The cold is so bitter that Ambroso’s face and hands chap immediately. It is colder than he can ever remember, colder even than the midwinter day in his boyhood when all the canals froze. But the canals of the other Venice are not frozen. Something is moving in them, something that is not water; something odorless and dark and shining, neither blood nor ink.

The private quay is unchanged: a simple spit of fitted stone. The gondola at its end is just like any gondola that has ever passed Ambroso’s window.

The gondoliere is a skeleton. He wears a traditional gondoliere’s costume and a blindfold over empty eye sockets. Half his teeth are missing or chipped; his cheekbone has broken and healed. He makes no gesture, neither of invitation nor dissuasion, as Ambroso boards the gondola.

How else to travel, in any Venice?

Hands of bone push the pole through the liquid that is neither water nor quicksilver. The gondola glides out into the canal. For a long time they pass through branching paths in silence.

At last, Ambroso speaks. “Have I died?”

“Do dead men ask this question?” Which is much less than an answer. But independent gondolieri are quarrelsome and contradictory even in the living Venice; Ambroso knows better than to complain.

They pass the Piazza San Marco, where in life Ambroso Garzolo had first spied the burly Dutchman who would become king of his heart; his soul sings out with the memory.

They pass the Piazza San Marco again; but this time, the facade of the Biblioteca Marciana has been shattered by cannonfire. Suppurating holes march across its surface like buboes across a victim of plague. They pass the Piazza San Marco again, and now, instead of the basilica looming above, there is a Saracen minaret, such as the Turks have built beside the Hagia Sophia.

“So this is not the Venice of the dead,” murmurs Ambroso, as if to himself. He is relying on the natural disposition of a quarrelsome man to correct another in his private thoughts; even when the quarrelsome man is a quarrelsome skeleton. “This is...the other Venice of...other Venices.”

“The living Venice is a city of countless canals,” says the skeleton. He, too, pretends he is talking to himself. “In my Serenissima they are countless beyond countlessness.”

“Gondoliere?” asks Ambroso.

The skeleton spits nothing over the boat’s edge.

“Can you take me to the Venice where Johann survives?” Some other Venice, quite nearby, where the fires of plague had on that fatal night receded and spared the man Ambroso had nursed like a baby and whose corpse he had subsequently wept over, rather than rising to an all-consuming peak and lifting his beloved’s incinerated soul off to heaven.

“I can take you to any place you can point out.”

But what good is this? The other Venice is devoid of life. No boats, no boatmen; no merchants, no monks; not even pigeons erupting from the Piazza San Marco, which they are passing again, only now the papal banner of the Borgias flies from the clocktower. Only the shimmering liquid over which they fly displays the barest sign of movement. How can Ambroso pluck a living Johann from this dead maze?

No matter. For the chance to lay a hand on Johann’s arm for but a moment, Ambroso defies impossibility.

“Onward,” he says, and onward they go.

Palazzo upon palazzo; church after church. Wondrous sights: a Roman amphitheater; the Arsenal expanded to colossal proportions with a massive Sumerian lamassu above its threshold; a nine-masted junk laying at anchor whose figurehead is a feathered serpent of hammered gold. Terrible sights also: bridges shattered, buildings sunk, palaces in wind-worn ruins.

Yet regardless of its condition, the empty city shows no sign of Johann. Hour by hour Ambroso’s thoughts spiral toward despair.

Even if he could find a Venice where Johann lived, his happiness would be far from assured. Perhaps there would be another Ambroso there, to dispute possession; perhaps Johann would have departed for his homeland, or Brazil, or Macau, following his own wandering heart. Perhaps they would have broken from one another acrimoniously; and Ambroso’s aged face would be hateful to this strange Johann.

Borne down by the weight of these forebodings on what had seemed the threshold of triumph, Ambroso slumps on his bench, defeated. He leans over the edge of the boat and looks down into what is not the water.

And there, in the blond-bearded, ruddy face looking up at him that is not his reflection, he finds what he had no hope of finding. The answer to his question: where do you find your lost beloved, for whom you have spent twenty-one long years searching?

You find him where he is searching for you.

Ambroso reaches out. His fingers enter the frothing darkness. Only Ambroso knows whether Johann’s fingers, reaching back, brush against his own—and even he is uncertain.

“I cannot advise this,” says the skeleton.

But Ambroso Garzolo is beyond advice. With only uncertainty to guide him, Ambroso goes over the side, into the beyond.

© 2021 Louis Evans

About the Author

Louis  Evans is a sci-fi writer with stories in Interzone, The New Modality,  Escape Pod and more. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner and two cats  who have never known a life before lockdown.