The Tank

by Nicola Lombardi

  Had they asked him that question, lying or telling the truth would lead to the same, disastrous result. And maybe he wouldn’t even be there in that moment.

  17 - Inside the Shutter

  On the night between the 6th and the 7th of July Hell itself paid him a visit.

  One week had already passed since his dangerous interview with Corsini and he still hadn’t received any news about the possible developments. He had thought over and over about what he had been told that date on the real age of the manuscript. He really didn’t know what to think.

  His first hypothesis was that his predecessor had written those pages during his last month in the Tank, taking from memories, notes, dreams and so on, simulating a pretty concise yearly diary. The reason? He had no idea. That poor guy, for what he had understood, had reached the end of the year with a big nervous breakdown; every kind of weirdness was possible.

  To be truly honest with himself, the first idea he had had was different. But he wanted to discard it immediately for two reasons. First, it was highly unlikely, if not impossible; second, only taking it into consideration would endanger the stability of his mind’s structure. It wasn’t possible that he, in who-knows-what altered state, would write those pages, hide them under the bed and then forget everything. The writing wasn’t his, of course, but any schizo could alter it without effort. No, no, no. That wasn’t the right way.

  And yet, if the writing were his predecessor’s (and the diary had no doubt been examined graphologically), they would have already traced him. Did they? Of course. He was sure to be their first suspect. But...if they were still looking for a culprit, it meant that the former Keeper had nothing to do with it. It was a complex matter. So complex that in a couple of days he decided not to think about it anymore. The NMO’s investigation could go on in a superior dimension unreachable to him. If they decided to let him know something about it, then good; otherwise, he would be much better off just forgetting about it.

  ***

  In the late afternoon of July 6th started what would be the strongest storm of the whole summer, and it went on all night.

  Immense, dark cloud could already be seen coming from the west in the first hours of the afternoon, foreshadowing the chaos they would eventually bring. The first drops started falling - loud, heavy and cold - after the last delivery of the day, at 5:30 P.M.. From the window of his bedroom Giovanni watched the two Guards, Wrinkle and Carnival, run to the jeep and leave in a rush to reach the Center before a lightning bolt could strike them. That image made him smile, thinking it wasn’t too unlikely after all.

  Then, finally, the clouds’ bad mood - which to that point simply manifested with a dull growl - exploded in a hail of bursts, roars, lightning, and most of all water, a loud grey curtain isolating the Tank from the rest of the world.

  Giovanni killed the time separating him from dinner trying to read something while lying on the bed. At the pace he was finishing his reads, he would soon have to ask for more. Whether they could satisfy his request or not was a different matter. He had started a collection of short stories by Calvino, then he would probably move on to Tolkien. He wondered if his predecessor had the passion for literature he had and how many of the books did he read. The volumes didn’t look used, at least not as much as the ones in libraries. He couldn’t say, so he could just hope that his predecessor didn’t have the horrible habit of turning the pages after licking his fingertip.

  After half an hour or so he realized the storm’s racket didn’t let him concentrate properly. His eyes went from one line to the other, but the information he sent to his brain were crossed by thousands of other thoughts, filters destroying their meaning.

  The thunders, the pounding water, the feeble, yet unsettling wind whistling through the cracks in the window’s frame...Giovanni’s ears were filled with sounds and noises. And his mind - damn it! - wandered back to the laments of that night. He closed the book and placed it on his chest, keeping a finger inside it as if he truly believed he would eventually get back to it.

  He tried focusing on the money he would receive at the end of his adventure. HE thought about the cruise, the faraway island, the sun heating the silvery sand. Closing his eyes he tried to imagine th landscape as he always did, but...it was raining there, too. There was a cold, disturbing wind. No use in staying.

  He opened his eyes and decided to watch some TV.

  On the documentary channel there was a show about nuclear fission, while on the cinema channel an old american sci-fi movie had just started, from the fifties of the previous century. He chose the latter, and since he was quite hungry, decided to turn a late snack into an early supper.

  The afternoon became evening, but he couldn’t see the difference. He ate cheese-filled eggplants, absently watching the vicissitudes of a group of scientists fighting a clumsy but relentless tentacle monster. Once the alien was defeated, between flames and contortions, a french comedy started, giving him a good reason to change the channel.

  The news, good. An elderly journalist was explaining the exchange rates of the main foreign currencies, while various headlines passed in the lower part of the screen. Giovanni read them automatically, cutting off the woman. A soldier had saved a child who had fallen on the tracks. A school had won a literary price for the group project Freedom and Future. New appointments among the higher ups of the NMO. And then there was - curiously - something about politics-related disorders: A revolt has been stopped in B***, 23 revolutionaries on trial. Well, they weren’t under his jurisdiction. They would be delivered to some other Keeper. Because that’s how they would end. Unloaded. He had never watched an NMO trial, mainly because, for what he knew, they were conducted behind closed doors; but the suspected that the Arrest, Trial, Conviction, Confinement, Unloading, Elimination chain was rarely interrupted.

  He wondered how many people, beyond the Camp’s enclosure, were scheming in the shadows, plotting to overthrow the Order. They were probably demo-republican groups, who had disbanded with the coming of the NMO. In time, it was predictable they would try to reorganize and launch an attack. History is a book starting over at each chapter. Nothing new underneath the sun.

  When the news ended, Giovanni changed the channel again and found a documentary on the production of japanese katanas. recognizing the first signs of digestion-induced sleepiness, he turn the volume down a bit and sat more comfortably on his chair, his hands on his lap.

  Beyond the thick walls of his apartment, the storm went on. He could hear a crackling noise, interrupted now and then by seemingly faraway explosions, while in reality they were shaking the sky right above him.

  A man wearing a garishly colored kimono was showing to the spectators the incision of the blade of a katana. Giovanni couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he didn’t really care anyway. He close his eyes.

  Just a few seconds, he told himself.

  His island was far. Like Japan. The thunders reminded him of the fireworks he so liked when he was a kid. He kept his father by one hand and his mother by the other, his nose up, filling his eyes with those loud blooms which then plummeted down, as it was said the firmament would do one day...

  The sound of a sword cutting bamboo. Oriental music in the air. The sound of a gong, barely audible, under the rain, in the heart of the storm...how much could a katana cost? Almost as much as flying to a deserted island, maybe? Wasn’t it absurd?

  His head leaning on his chest, Giovanni loosened the reins. And his head galloped away in the night.

  ***

  The sudden awakening was a blow to his heart.

  The chair trembled due to his muscles contracting and his neck stood up painfully. The furious thunder that had ripped him from an already forgotten dream was still in the sky, rolling from one cloud to the other.

  He instinctively brought one hand to his heart and pushed, almost as if he could placate it and keep it inside his chest.

  From the dirty dish in from of him came the sugary smell of the
sauce he had put on the eggplants, making him feel slightly nauseous. He spent an entire minute mentally rebuilding the context he was in and only after doing so he noticed something was wrong.

  The TV was off, and so was the white ceiling light. The kitchen floated in a cold, ghostly light. He rubbed his eyes, blaming a momentary fogging of his sight. But he only needed to turn towards the point whence that new, cold light came to realize that the battery-powered emergency light had turned on. The power had gone out in the whole flat.

  An alarm sounded in his brain. Did he need to follow any particular procedure? He remember something on the manual about what to do in case of a power outage.

  In the meanwhile, rain kept scratching the Tank’s walls. He went out of the kitchen and into the Control, vaguely disoriented from the new perspective and field of depth brought by that soporific whiteness. And he found confirmation to his suspicion: the Well, now, was only a dark rectangle on which the emergency lamp on the door frame reflected.

  Nothing had changed for the convicts, of course. But he had responsibilities. His duty was to personally verify that there were no anomalies (and on their possible nature the manual was more than exhaustive) and to do so he had to check through the Porthole. Just so that he could write it on the Register.

  He was about to do towards the reinforced door when a sudden idea made him go back. There was something he needed to take before leaving the apartment.

  Once he had locked the door and got into the Ring, Giovanni stood still for about a minute, at a loss. The neon lamps were off and the emergency ones were on in their stead; but they were a lot less intense and numerous. As a result, the corridor was drowned in shadowy gulf barely lit by sporadic whitish, sickly halos. Droning, pounding noises and rumblings were everywhere...and also his heartbeat, which Giovanni thought he had managed to calm down, but was now going wild again.

  Stevanich’s question (aren’tyouafraid?) came back to haunt him, annoying like a mosquito. Had the General asked him the question in that precise moment he would still answer no (but that Adelfi or Adelchi wouldn’t even need to see him to point out his lie).

  The momentary confusion from the disquieting scene, however, dissipated quickly. And when he had calmed down, he closed the flat’s door and walked rightwards, towards the Porthole.

  Walking past the Shutter something scared him, so he coughed and hit his side with a fist to breath normally again. With the corner of his eye he had seen his reflection on the dark glass and the resulting illusion was something to cancel from his mind immediately.

  The noises from outside made his steps very silent, almost inaudible. He felt as if he was levitating, moving at zero gravity in an surreal, curved tunnel that adapted to his altered perception. He was walking inside a dream, similar to a drug-induced trip. The emergency lamps were scant and at extremely far from each other - distances full of obscene possibilities - and between one another foggy areas of darkness reluctantly let themselves be crossed growling threats that were lost among the roaring thunders.

  There was the emergency door, the Escape. The lamp set at its side faded from emerald green to olive. Exactly in front of it, on the inner wall of the Ring, there was the round window of metal and glass trough which Giovanni had never seen anything but his face deformed by opalescent reflections. But now, the Porthole shone. There was light on the other side. A feeble emergency light.

  With his heart pounding in his chest he approached it, looked in it, scared, as if he was looking at the edge of another world...and it was like watching Hell itself through a telescope on the abyss.

  He should have been used to it, since not a day passed with his not watching, at least for a few minutes, the agonizing convicts inside the Well. But that sort of surreal electronic phosphorescence made him think he was not looking at people, but lifeforms from another dimensions, beyond his space-time context. Now - however small and deformed - people stirred beneath him. They could be taken for extremely realistic dolls, human-shaped puppets contorting in a glass globe, and it would probably had been better to think so. But he had no intention to cheat himself: those were all men (outcasts) that he had personally dumped in the Tank. He felt no remorse: those tumors had to be removed. And he was no more than a scalpel in the hands of superior powers.

  He stood there watching for a few minutes, and saw that everything was as usual. He could go back home and wait for the power to be on again. He would go to sleep, send a report the following morning, and then...and then...

  His train of thought vanished in an hypnotic vapor. He was trying to think about what he had to do, but he couldn’t. His head was filled with what he wanted to do.

  Rain, thunder, rain...

  He started at those slimy figures moving on the other side of the Porthole while trying to lead his mind to safer waters. But the current became strong, more impetuous. Fall into temptation was so much easier.

  How much autonomy did the light’s batteries have? He couldn’t remember. And even if he did, he didn’t know how long they had been on, so he couldn’t predict when they would go off and leave him into the darkness.

  He didn’t have much choice. If he didn’t do it in that moment, now that he had the right state of mind, maybe he would regret it later. So...

  He could reach the shutter keeping on going counterclockwise, of course. But he preferred going retracing his steps. There was no reason for such a choice, if not the free will he had elected as his guide. It was instinct. And even if he had often taken for instinct the fruits of his paranoias, disguised as wise confidants, he felt it was the right time to indulge in that absurd whim. Nobody could see him, or at least nobody who could tell on him.

  Once he reached the input panel he glanced apprehensively at his wristwatch under the light of the nearest lamp. he had lost track of time. No, midnight still hadn’t passed. For 45 more minutes it would still be the 6th of July. That meant the Unlocking Code was still the same. He had used it three times, that day. He still remembered it.

  He thought back to the emergency batteries activated when the power went off and remembered that the Shutter had one just for the opening and mechanisms, and the moving platform (a power outage during the Unloading process would be really bothersome). He was sure the buttons would be operative.

  12. Asterisk.

  Good. The palpitations were almost unbearable.

  7. Asterisk.

  His index finger trembled. Applying the right pressure was difficult with such a numb fingertip. Another thunder. Would the storm ever end? The shadowy parts of the Ring seemed to gasp, waiting.

  6. The moment of truth.

  Opening...

  The door trembled for a second, then started sliding. Being powered by less energy, it took longer for it to open. Giovanni held his breath, and the Shutter was finally open before him, he felt a cramp in his stomach and shivered. He had to thank his good and sound health, quoting the medical files, if is heart didn’t explode.

  What are you doing, Giovanni? Don’t you think this is crazy? Or stupid?

  No, he didn’t think so. He was perfectly lucid, despite the dreamlike atmosphere, a fever-induced fantasy. It was something he had wanted to do for a long time. Nothing sick. A curiosity. Like when he listened to the convicts’ voices. He hadn’t done that on purpose, either; but since he still thought he did so while sleeping - something absolutely sporadic - he feared that maybe someday his psyche would lead him to satisfy that desire without consulting him. So...

  How did it feel to stand inside the Shutter? Nobody who ever got in could then tell the tale.

  Not that it was important, of course, but...

  Even if it was formally forbidden, in a recess of Giovanni’s mind he never excluded writing about it, someday. Tank about his experience. Write a book. A faraway day, of course. Or maybe never. The more emotions and experiences he could live through during his path, the more opportunities could come to him, one day, to exploit that adventure. History is a teacher. He was f
ront-line witness, after all. He didn’t want to betray. The vow was sacred to him. But in twenty, thirty years...who knew?

  He took a step in.

  The first thing that hit him was the dampening of any sound coming from outside.

  Under his soles, the rubber platform welcomed him by bending slightly due to the rollers underneath; the illusion it had started moving was strong, even if just for a second, and Giovanni groaned, the sound bouncing darkly on the glass walls.

  You really are crazy.

  No, not at all. Reckless, maybe. But not crazy. He thought that maybe the Center knew about the Shutter’s door being opened and that they would investigate as soon as they could. It wasn’t really likely. But, in that case, he could give a plausible explanation. He was there to supervise. Was there anything wrong with him deciding to make sure the power outage hadn’t damaged the mechanism? It could affect the following deliveries. No, he could explain everything.

  He took another step in and put his hands on the walls of the suffering. The shutters vibrated, welcoming his open, sweaty palms.

  And now, Giovanni...look.

  Below him - six, seven meters away - the first layer of convicts tangled restlessly, a unstable mass of suffering bodies, a cauldron of pain, a maze of broken, bound, displaced limbs, among which stunned, beastly faces bloomed like rotten fungi. From above, a tired light dripped on that small hell with deceiving, pale scratches, an undeniably fascinating continuous metamorphosis. It was useless to try and recognize somebody. Even those who had been unloaded that same day were already lost, absorbed, swallowed by that absurd, primordial human ooze.

  Inside Giovanni’s mind, dismayed by the vision, terror and fantasy flooded his brain. There was grandeur in what he was contemplating. He felt pervaded by a feeling he had never experienced before, but still he recognized it. It was as old as mankind itself. A feeling of unavoidability filling his brain, his blood, his nervous system. There was life, there, under his feet. The meaning of existence itself magnificently revealing to him, and he couldn’t do anything but stare at it, let that state of inhuman grace expand, delate in his soul. And hadn’t he resisted, his body - unable to contain it - would have exploded. Tears filled his eyes, unstoppable, unmotivated, and he felt dizzy trying to counter them.