.
THE BANDAGED MAN
On sunny days the neighbors noticed a man who stood or sat for hours at a time, reading or sipping a drink through a straw, on the balcony of a building with few other tenants. The apartment had been vacant for some time. The owner lived far away and only used it on vacations. The man on the balcony was tall and always quite elegantly attired. Strangely enough no one had ever seen him at calle level, walking around, shopping or gaping at things like a tourist. Stranger still, the man’s face was completely covered in gauze bandages that left mere slits for the eyes, mouth and nose. Maybe he was a victim of bad plastic surgery. Or acid had been thrown in his face in some vendetta in a faraway country. Or maybe he had simply suffered a terrible injury, an auto accident or something, leaving his face dreadfully scarred.
Curious neighbors soon learned that the man placed orders for groceries and other necessities by phone, ordering that packages be left on the staircase outside his apartment door. Suppliers were paid in cash he slid under the door when deliveries arrived. The man never opened the door. He was obviously determined to keep his identity a secret.
.
.
Venice was not such a bad choice for that. In the part of town where he was living there were actually very few Venetians or steady inhabitants. The curious neighbors were not so much neighbors as locals who worked in the area, in nearby restaurants or shops. At night they went home to sleep, in some other part of town. This might be why it took a long time for anyone to notice that during the wee hours of the morning the man would often toss bottles containing messages into the canal.
.
.
The first person to notice the bottled messages was a gentleman named Armando Della Vittoria, who lived nearby and liked to fish from his balcony at night. The tides tended to bring up plenty of garbage, flotsam and jetsam near his building. He kept snagging plastic bottles with his hook. This only happened because for some strange reason the bottles had been wrapped in gauze, just like the face of the mysterious man.
.
.
At first Armando wasn’t sure that the bottles were in any way connected with the bandaged stranger. But his intuition told him there was some link. From his balcony he did not have a direct view of the man’s window. But one night he saw the white trail of a bottle as it arched through the air over the canal and made a muffled splash on the trash-strewn surface of the water. Armando thought maybe there was a method to this madness. Maybe the man wanted the bottles to get snagged by fishermen. Maybe the man even knew that he was a potential bottle snagger.
.
.
Armando had simply put the fished-up bottles aside, not wanting to throw them back into the canal. Now he opened them and realized they contained messages. The first three seemed like governmental or financial documents, which a bit of web research revealed to be connected with various scandals among high functionaries of international economic organizations or large banking and brokerage firms. Other messages contained evidence of abuses of human rights, trade in weapons, government involvement in drug trafficking. It was hard to get to the bottom of any of the stories, but it was clear that the documents were not merely fiction. And it was clear that more earth-shaking bad economic and political news might well be on the way if the papers got into the wrong (or right, depending on your viewpoint) hands. Armando felt as if he had been saddled with a grave responsibility. He also felt a little bit afraid. He hid the messages behind his kitchen cabinets. When he threw the wrapped plastic bottles into the trash, he tried to make sure no one saw him doing it. He even removed the gauze and threw it away in a separate bag, stuffing it in a public trash bin. After all, it was more ecological to separate the plastic from other materials.
.
As the days went by Armando fished more bottles out of the canal. He even started using different kinds of fishhooks, without bait, just to try to snag them. The messages started to change in character. They were more like prophecies, proclamations, criticisms of the modern world. Armando knew he could not possibly have fished up the entire series. So there were gaps in the narrative, if it could be even called a narrative. Clues were missing.
.
Some of the prophetic proclamations contained sections like this:
“In the future there will be so many images that it will become impossible to ever be certain that other people have seen the same images you have seen. Or, to put it more precisely, it will be impossible to know if any other people have actually looked at the same images you have looked at. People will learn how to ‘speedread’ images, capturing quick retinal impressions without actually focusing on the pictures, sorting and cataloguing in complete prosthetic symbiosis with their technological devices. The quantity will make it impossible to actually look at anything for more than a split second. When people have learned how to adapt to this visual blizzard, they will forget how to contemplate images and museums will no longer contain paintings.”
.
.
“In the future there will only be one song. Gangnam Style is just the beginning. When there is only one major record company left on earth, and only one major operating system, the number of currently available popular songs will be gradually reduced. Just as the way people look at images will change, developing into an intense process of rapid multiprocessing, so the way people listen to music will change. Music will continue to fulfill some deep physiological need, but its other aspects will be gradually leached away by a different kind of entertainment. Art music will not die. But pop music will be reduced to a bare minimum of songs, heard absolutely everywhere in the world. This will happen gradually. From just 10 songs per month, it will narrow to just 10 songs per season, and then progressively to just 1 song per season. Songs will be consumed like burgers. You need them to live, but for the purpose of survival one burger or another will do. You change the recipe now and then to break up the monotony. But after a while you don’t even do that. You just consume the standard fare. You have other things on your mind. You have no time for that. You have no time.”
.
.
Then there was one very interesting message.
“In the future everything will be mummified. People are already becoming walking mummies to try to conserve some semblance of youth. They will begin to mummify their objects and homes, their cities and gardens, in an attempt to protect all that surrounds them from inevitable decay, to delay the effects of time and wear, to disguise themselves from the increasingly constant presence of prying eyes and surveillance. Bandages will be a status symbol. If you hate something intensely enough you tend to grow to resemble it, and hatred of a veiled and beturbaned enemy will lead westerners to adopt their own form of swaddled mystery and aggressive invisibility. Bodies and other organic materials, including foods, will be progressively wrapped to the point of becoming their wrappers, genetically modified to grow on plants already in a wrapped state. Restriction of movement and bondage will become the norm of comfort, a last dash, or more like a sack race, in pursuit of an enveloping embrace that never lasts long enough, never reaches a peak of true satisfaction.”
One day as he was sticking phrases in Google to try to track down the secret of the documents and messages, Armando ran into an image that had, in fact, been imprinted on his retina in the past, though without leaving much of a conscious memory. The picture was of a man called Julian Assange… and the website told the story of an attempt to use the Internet to blow whistles on many important scandalous government secrets. Something clicked, and the clicking got louder when he noticed that the bandaged stranger had begun to mummify his balcony, neatly wrapping its parts in gauze.
So one day, consumed by curiosity, using his fishing pole with the skill of a great fly caster, he launched a message of his own in a swaddled plastic bottle, up onto the balcony of the mysterious man. The rest, as they seldom say, will be history.
.
.
Credits: story, photos, image processing, sounds and voice by Steve Piccolo.
((return to BLKNZM VENICE front page))