GONDOS—Chapter 10!

Digestion

Sep 19, 2024

The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos,” serialized every Wednesday and Thursday. For more information and to get caught up, click here.

With the Venice Biennale’s closing weekend in full swing, the Magistrate of the Waters—city official and former teen pop starlet Alessia Barbarigo—sought reassurance from ELAINE that whatever problem the company had covered up at the Rialto was now under control. But sniffing around Lopez’s office, Barbarigo caught a whiff of something…fishy…and immediately phoned gondolier captain Dino Simonetti to report, “They’ve returned.”

Meanwhile, Millie, Guy and Benny rode into Venice on the gondos to battle the schifosi—which Guy dubbed “skeefs.” After fanning through the canals in the dark of night, each suddenly heard a far-off sound: the herd rushing into the city from the sea…

Far out of sight, a great rush of life was hurtling through the mouth of the Grand Canal, churning up a wake of dirty water and foam as it traveled upstream.

The migration advanced with the force of some terrible machine. The animals streaked beneath bridges, curled around bends. At the gondolier station in front of the opulent Gritti Palace Hotel, the array of tall, colorfully striped pylons suddenly exploded into the air—snapped off at their bottoms and blasted skyward by the creatures, who collided with the wooden posts underwater and plowed straight through.

Floating in front of the Marco Polo house, deep in one of Venice’s watery back alleys, Millie heard this far-off clamor get louder and louder—then eventually peak and recede. The herd must have coursed through one of the larger canals nearby and kept going.

In the stark silence that resumed, Millie scanned the slender canal ahead of her. The scene was like one of the paintings artists sold to tourists in Piazza San Marco. Small boats lined each side of the canal, motionless in the shadows, moored for the night. Laundry hung on a slumping line across the water.

Bing.

A bell.

Far down the canal, at the very limit of Millie’s vision in the dark, a small, green wooden rowboat rocked just enough for the bronze bell on its prow to ring softly, one time.

She could only assume this was the last, faint motion of the passing stampede’s wake. She watched small ripples travel toward her off the jiggling rowboat, kiss the neck of her gondo and expire.

Bing.

The ringing was louder this time. The rowboat rocked harder, scraping the stucco wall where it was moored.

Bong.

Another bell, on the larger boat parked just in front of it.

Then the dinghy in front of that one.

Bing. Bong. Clang.

And the next boat, closer to Millie.

And the small, flat barge ahead of it, which shuddered so violently that its front corner hopping partway out of the water and splashed down hard.

More boats were waggling wildly in the water now, as the disturbance got stronger, closer, moving through the black canal. The surface was roiling, sloshing like a tub. A cacophony of bells and banging overlapped.

Millie scrambled to power up her gondo. Suddenly, a brawny arm breached the surface, extending straight up. And then a second bolted forward, straight at Millie’s legs.

She swung her gondo sideways to dodge it, nearly tossing herself in the water, and screamed. But the sound of her voice was instantly buried under a long burst of thunder: Guy Rondack blazing into the little canal in his gondo, firing furiously at the water between him and her, just in time.

The tentacle lashing toward Millie went suddenly slack and plunged back under the surface. The one raised high in the air behind it snagged on the laundry line and yanked everything down as it fell.

Slowly, the animal’s great, lifeless head bobbled to the surface, upside-down. Its mane of tentacles splayed around it. Pale blood leaked from the slits of its gills.

Guy and Millie kept their fingers on their triggers as they watched the grisly shape joggle in the water between their two boats and gradually settle amid the floating laundry.

“Thank you,” Millie said. But Guy held up a finger to quiet her.

The sound of the herd was swelling again, coming from the opposite direction.

Over the radio, Benny said: “They’re heading back down the canal now.”

Guy looked at Millie, hesitant and confused. Was that it? Were they leaving? “Did we win?” he said.

He coasted closer to the creature and knocked the meaty underside of its neck with the tip of his gondo. The flesh tore open, releasing a moldering, fishy stench. The odor was powerful; it had heft and dimension. Guy had to close his eyes to keep from throwing up.

“Wait, I’ve got one,” Benny screamed on the radio. “They were all hightailing it out of here, but this one’s a straggler. I’m chasing him now.”

Guy’s entire posture changed. There was something else to fight.

He revved his gondo and raced away without even glancing back—where Millie, still idling in the center of the cramped canal, knelt on her gondo to examine the animal with fascination and grief.

She decided to take a closer look.

Three kilometers downstream, on the opposite bank of the Grand Canal, the 18th century Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was ablaze with light—the lone bustling, illuminated structure in the otherwise dormant city.

The wide, one-story palazzo housed the world-renowned Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which served as the artistic and social epicenter for Americans during the Biennale. That night, the museum was hosting a clandestine late-night reception, publicized only through a rarefied whisper network of collectors, benefactors and celebrities. Doors had opened at 1 AM.

A young, Los Angeles-based artist known as Raoul was unveiling new work—an ambitious and controversial installation which occupied the entire ground floor.

Attendees were titillated to discover that the rumor, leaked to ArtForum by an anonymous source, was true: Raoul had somehow secured permission to alter the historic building itself, cutting a three-foot circle in the tile floor of the Guggenheim’s central gallery—and through the Istrian marble foundation supporting it, all the way down to the sloshing lagoon below. At the center of the hole was a narrow pipe. Lagoon water was being pumped out of the hole, up the pipe, and through a tangle of delicate, blown-glass conduits that spread in every direction, filling the room.

The scale and intricacy of this labyrinth was arresting: six thousand linear feet of looping, spiraling, criss-crossing glass—a psychotic intestinal tract, a crystalline nest. The piece stretched from the museum’s entrance all the way across its ground-floor galleries to the decorative wrought iron gates on the opposite end of the building. Those doors opened onto the Guggenheim’s famously scenic marble terrace, with steps descending into the Grand Canal. All night, hundreds of people had been continually moving in and out, admiring Raoul’s achievement from as many vantages as possible. The work was titled “aqualinear III: Digestion (Ohm).”

A hesitant consensus quickly formed inside the gallery that it had something to do with the Anthropocene. “The work reframes our extractive relationship with nature as delicate and sacred while simultaneously undermining that redemptive impulse as naive and self-serving,” Raoul’s artist statement read. “Thus, the viewer is drawn into a recursive, paradoxical loop. The work’s themes, like its medium, are fluid.”

“Bracing,” one man told another, beholding it.

“I feel both seen and attacked,” another replied.

“Accused,” a third added. “But where is the water coming from?”

“The whole city is built on a lagoon,” the second man said.

“The buildings are on stilts,” the first added. “There’s water underneath us. Everywhere.”

Both men had turned slowly and deliberately to face the one who’d asked the question, to be sure he felt ignorant.

Just then, a fourteen-year-old boy with a faux-hawk and long rattail brushed past them all, returning from a vape break on the terrace. He wore a tuxedo jacket, couture sweatpants and a mess of overlapping friendship bracelets on one forearm. He was the youngest person in the room by a decade, having been dragged to this reception by his mother, a well-known Miami collector and pharmaceutical-fortune heiress who’d just put him on a private flight from Malmo where he’d been unceremoniously expelled from yet another boarding school. His mother was hardly fazed; it was clear to her that he was the victim of a reverse-racist witch hunt. What upset her was discovering that he’d also pierced his nose.

“Why don’t you spend some time with the work, darling?” she now told him, as he reappeared to sulk and whine at her side. She was in the middle of a conversation with the American ambassador and the co-founder of a smart-doorbell startup.

“The work blows,” the boy announced, staring pointedly at the ambassador as he said it, for maximum effect.

“That’s your considered opinion, is it?” the ambassador asked, taken aback.

“Well, an art critic would say it’s ‘derivative. But I’m not even sure it’s ripping off other art. It’s just a sump pump and a shit-ton of Krazy straws.”

“Go away, Compass,” the mother said sternly. (Compass was the boy’s name.) And Compass skulked away. He decided to take a closer look at the big hole in the floor.

The artist was present. Raoul—short, ponytailed, in an oversized yellow sweater—stood quietly in a corner, letting the light refracted through the glasswork dance across his face. He nodded pleasantly to people as they dipped their heads in his direction or raised their glasses from afar. He jiggled his tumbler of non-alcoholic, fermented-fennel cocktail and scanned the room, keeping tabs on certain collectors. His gallerist had told him Michael Stipe was here.

“Oh look!” he now heard a woman’s voice say, quite loudly over the din. “Lovely!”

She was pointing to a segment of the glass tubing close to the ceiling, near the center of the room. A bright, slender object darted and tumbled through a series of dramatic bends.

It resembled a tropical minnow. And many in the room interpreted this as a whimsical turn in the work. Perhaps the contamination of Venice’s waterways was being analogized to the bleaching of coral reefs.

But Raoul was perplexed. He took two steps forward and squinted up at the object. Was that a friendship bracelet?

Then his eyes moved further down the system of pipes. A second object was suspended in the glasswork, lower to the ground. This one was being thrust repeatedly upward by the pump but was too heavy to ascend. It bobbled in place. It was pale brown, with a single metallic dot that glinted, each time the object rotated toward Raoul in just the right way.

The artist took another step forward and dropped his drink. The tumbler shattered.

The dot was a stainless steel barb—a piercing. The object was a human nose.

People considered the nose. A kind of euphoric confusion swelled in the room; their expectations were being undone.

“Compass?” the mother called weakly, searching the gallery for her son.

One by one, the crowd began to notice a mealy clot of unknown pinkish material being sucked out of the hole. The pump began to hiccup and gurgle, as it strained to force the substance through.

The material was muscle tissue. It was flesh.

“Stand back,” a Brazilian fitness influencer called, approaching the hole in the floor. “It’s clogged.”

Everyone seemed relieved that someone was taking command.

The man took off his blazer, unbuttoned one sleeve of his shirt and performatively rolled it up to reveal his craggy forearm. He laid flat on his stomach next to the hole. Pressing one cheek against the floor, he reached as far down into the water as he could, wriggling his arm to feel for any blockage. Then, he let out a ghastly yowl and shot to his feet.

His arm was gone—severed just below the shoulder.

Blood pulsed vigorously from an open artery.

Everyone moved—but in no particular direction, with no particular purpose—while the armless influencer remained fixed vulnerably at the center of the room, unsure what one was supposed to do now. His eyes were peeled open in shock, forcing him to register the many other sets of eyes unable to tear themselves away from the site of him.

“Am I part of the art?” he whimpered, spraying blood.

Suddenly, a thick, purplish tentacle exploded out of the hole and, in the blink of an eye, coiled itself around the man’s torso three times and swept him backward through the hole in the floor.

The influencer was gone.

The clog in the glass piping dissipated, forcing itself free. Water began to flow again. But now, the water was red.

That was when two other tentacles shot out of the hole and planted themselves on the floor of the museum. You could see the muscles in them tautening, bulging, pushing down to lift the rest of the creature out.

Other, smaller tentacles arose and bashed away at the marble, crumbling it into the water, widening the opening in the floor. Then, all at once, the upper half of the animal’s body surfaced in the gallery, like a sea lion hauling out onto a rock. Its gills throbbed and gasped, momentarily deprived of whatever it breathed.

The skeef opened its horrible mouth, blinked its inscrutable dark eyes and screamed.

Outside, where the Guggenheim’s crowded terrace met the edge of the Grand Canal, the dark water churned as more arrived to feed.

Floating in front of the Marco Polo house, Millie, on her knees, reached over the side of her gondo, struggling to wind rope around the two long tentacles protruding from the dead skeef’s back. She would lash the carcass to the canal bank to keep it from sinking or being carried away by the tide.

Her first specimen. It needed to be preserved.

Millie ran her hand across the body. It was hairless and clammy, like a whale’s, not matted with short fur, like a seal or otter, as Millie would have guessed. The tentacles were leathery, goopy. Their tissue bulged between the lengths of rope as she was bundled them.

The creature’s mouth hung wide open as it floated upside down. Millie spied both a baleen—used to filter-feed, consuming small organisms like the Wonka in bulk—as well as two rows of forbidding, triangular teeth. She did not see a tongue.

Remembering Guy’s haunting description of the eye, she worked up the nerve to lift open the lid and examine it for herself. She was reaching her hand out when the eyelid twitched twice.

Millie leapt backward, landing on her butt at the rear of her gondo’s platform. Just leftover electrical pulses from the brain, she assured herself—a last, ghostly transmission.

But then the eyelid slowly lifted open.

The blubbery folds of the throat quivered. The mane of tentacles around the head began to agitate, and the two longer, dorsal tentacles strained against the ropes that Millie had banded around them—the whole thing pulsing and contracting like a heart.

Suddenly, the rope snapped. Both arms burst forward, snatching Millie by an ankle and knee and dragging her toward it. She skidded legs-first across the cockpit of the gondo—until her ribs smacked into the base of the throttle, snagging her in place.

Without thinking, she grasped the throttle with both hands and hoisted herself up on one foot. Then, with the creature still pulling, she snatched the trigger.

Millie let out a long and furious scream as she fired.

The animal’s head vibrated and tore apart in front of her, blood bursting from every opening.

Millie was still screaming when the sound of gunfire finally ceased; she’d let go of the trigger before she let go of her rage.

She worked to catch her breath, regulating her inhalations and exhalations just like Cooper had taught her to do when she used to hyperventilate as a child. But she never took her eyes off the skeef.

“I killed it,” Milie finally said aloud. She said it first in astonishment but then, several more times, with growing and inexorable resolve.

“I killed it. I killed it. I killed it.”

Guy Rondack sputtered through a hard, wishbone-shaped turn, blasting out of one narrow canal and backtracking up another, trying to find Benny. Suddenly, a skeef tore perpendicularly across his field of vision, racing through an intersecting waterway, thirty meters away. And hot on the tail of that straggler came Benny, his gondo teetering as he fired madly at the creature and missed.

Guy leaned on his throttle and joined the chase.

They charged after the creature recklessly, weaving in and out of each other’s way in the slender canals. At one point, Benny came close to scraping one of the stucco walls and leaned left hard, nearly colliding with Rondack instead. Rondack spun out of the way and found himself facing backwards. So he simply took off again through the tight passageway in reverse.

It was hard for them to get a shot off; the creature swerved erratically, dancing as fleetly in the water as a hummingbird through the air.

But try as the animal might, it could not shake the gondos. When the skeef flicked its upper tentacles to change direction, and swung around a sharp turn, Guy and Benny wrenched their rudder rods, swiveling the necks and tails of their gondos to wrap around the corner right behind it, still at full speed.

The animal shot back into the Grand Canal and headed downstream. It led them under Accademia Bridge—and soon, the Guggenheim’s illuminated terrace came into view.

The gondos wrenched to a sudden stop at the sight of it—while the lone skeef they’d been chasing charged ahead and rejoined its herd.

“That sound before wasn’t them leaving Venice,” Guy said. “They were all flocking there.”

The panorama was unfathomable—like a medieval painting of damnation come to life. Ear-splitting screams and the sounds of shattering glass streamed from the museum’s open windows and doors. Inside, Raoul’s elaborate glassworks were bursting everywhere, battered by the whirling tentacles of skeefs piling in through the floor.

The arms smashed glass and drywall haphazardly as they spun through the room, gathering up human bodies and drawing them. Other arms simply snatched people and constricted their torsos until their victims asphyxiated or broke. Blood steadily splattered the Picassos, Mondrians and Ernsts on the walls.

Outside, meanwhile, the Guggenheim’s terrace had gone blurry with partygoers in frantic motion. A few, working together, managed to shove closed the tall iron gates to the museum at the top of the stairs, barricading the rampaging creatures inside. And though the skeefs battered the ironwork, warping it, that barrier seemed to hold.

But now, the armada of skeefs revealed itself in the canal beneath the terrace—a violent, living lather, thrashing omnidirectionally at the bottom of the stairs. Guy couldn’t believe their numbers: Seventy-five. Eighty. They moved too fast to be counted—easily three-times as many as he’d encountered at the Rialto. On the terrace, people screamed and scrambled back up the steps to higher ground—retreating toward the same door they’d just labored to close.

They were trapped.

Tentacles began whipsawing out of the canal like toads’ tongues targeting flies. A low wall stood between the edge of the terrace and the water, but the creatures’ limbs effortlessly breached it: bashing through, or wrenching off, the marble balustrades. Arms kept snapping upward, sweeping bodies down the steps and into the water where they could be devoured.

Guy watched one tentacle coil around the leg of a svelte woman in a yellow gown and pull it out from under her—clear off the rest of her body—and carry it away. Another arm bolted straight through a man’s back as he ran up the steps, skewering him. Another clenched a waiter so tightly around the chest that the man’s insides appeared to burst through his ribcage; a dark purple gristle—his entrails—gurgled out of his mouth.

The people did their best to scatter and hide. Some turned over tables or hunkered behind the bar. Some threw plates or chairs at the skeefs. A few hugged the walls while the tips of tentacles probed their bodies, trying to find purchase. Guy watched one, finding no easy way to grasp a particular woman, finally rear back and compact her into the building with a crackling squish.

The pullulating and squirming; the soulless ferocity with which the animals teemed—Guy saw all of it, sizing up the entire sickening theater of war.

“Jesus, Rondack.” Benny said. “What’s the plan?”

“No plan,” he said. “We’re exterminators—that’s all.”

They revved their gondos and peeled forward into the fray.

in CHAPTER 11!

Alessandro hunched down in his gondola, wrenching back his oar with maximum leverage to turn his boat and retreat.

But his long, stiff, wooden craft was only barely beginning to swivel when he recognized that it was too late.

The creatures were only meters away…

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