The Tank

by Nicola Lombardi

  The tanker truck and the military keep were approaching the Tank on the invisible rails of a barely distinguishable path, drawing black trails on the previously intact snow.

  But he...had to hurry. He was standing there like a kid contemplating the beauty of nature, when he had to fill some modules and supervise the operation.

  He rushed to the elevator - making sure he closed the apartment door - and found himself outside exactly when the big vehicle stopped at a short distance from the Gate of Cleansing, which was protected by the round wicket gate similar to that of a submarine or an old-fashioned safe. His punctuality - fortuitous, but who could prove that? - made him feel proudly worthy of the NMO’s perfect gear. The crisp air welcomed him with an electrifying embrace and Giovanni only barely noticed that it was the first time he set foot outside the Tank since he had arrived.

  In the meanwhile the truck’s driver, a podgy, moustached man in a blue jumpsuit, had jumped down the cabin leaving the engine on. One of the two soldiers who had followed him on the jeep, which was now parked several meters away with its engine off, one remained at the wheel and the other was approaching with some clipboards and paper sheets in his hands. The rhythmic, crunching sound of the fresh snow followed his every step.

  Giovanni joined them: a martial salute for the official - maybe one of those who had escorted him on the first day? He hadn’t got a good memory for faces, so he couldn’t be sure - and a firm hand shake for the moustached man.

  Then, without fussing, the latter took a tubular key out of his pocket and approached the Gate. He messed about for a few seconds muttering some insults at the snow and the ice-cold steel. He took out a pair of thick yellow gloves from the back pocket of his jumpsuit, wore them, and firmly grabbed the round handle.

  “Keeper Corte?”

  Giovanni, who was vacantly watching the driver’s actions, was shaken awake by the soldier’s stern voice. No, he wasn’t one of those who escorted him. And he was higher in rank. But maybe, after being in the NMO for some time, everyone began to look alike in the bearing, voice, and even the hauteur. But the small, flashy tetragrams on his uniform spoke clearly: he was a lieutenant. He had to avoid answering arrogantly.

  The officer was handing him a clipboard with a ballpoint pen hanging from a chain attached to it. He was also staring at him intensely, with grey eyes that seemed to evaluate and doubt his competence.

  Giovanni quickly grabbed it, muttering: “I apologise...”

  In the meanwhile the truck driver was bustling about in his field of view, going to the back of his vehicle and then coming back with a long tube a few inches in diameter. It looked like a cobalt blue anaconda sneaking in the the snow following its prey. Giovanni avoided looking at it and concentrated on the document that was given to him.

  So: Cleansing Bill B9.22.49.C-165n. Date, hour, technical info of the vehicle, the diver’s personal details and Cleansing Operator, liters...

  All that whiteness around him fuzzed him, making his eyes wet with tears. When he rushed outside he had forgotten to wear gloves or an adequate hat. The cold air was making his fingers go numb and his nose run. He quickly cleaned his nostrils with the back of his hands and coughed, then he sluggishly grabbed the pen and put it on the line that was waiting for him to sign.

  “What are you doing, Keeper?”

  The officer again, with the same tone of a indignant teacher scolding a pupil who had just written some mistake on the blackboard.

  He had to swallow before he could answer. “I’m...I’m signing.”

  “Are you aware that signing the paper means to validate what is written on that document?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  The officer stared at him in silence, as if he was waiting for Giovanni to come to a conclusion on his own. Then, after deciding that the clear lack of experience could at least grant him a bit of indulgence, he added: “How many liters can the truck contain?”

  Giovanni glanced at the bill, even if he remembered the correct answer. “Five thousands.”

  “And how many have been poured into the Tank?”

  Giovanni couldn’t avoid to turn his head towards the driver, who was fixing one end of the hose to the nozzle, usually protected by the now open round Gate, using a monkey wrench. And he had the answer, clear and shamefully obvious, on the tip of his tongue.

  “Still none, sir.”

  The officer joined his hands behind his back while a semblance of satisfaction appeared on the edges of his mouth. He would have been a perfect teacher. The kind students hate from the first to the last day of school.

  “I will sign only when the procedure is complete, sir.”

  Giovanni wasn’t cold anymore. He felt an unpleasant wave of heat climbing up his neck, making his face go red to match the colour of his ears.

  The soldier didn’t add anything else and set the matter aside, then he began follow the operator’s maneuvers with ostentation.

  Giovanni couldn’t do but imitate him, still brooding on his behaviour. He didn’t make any mistake after all, did he? He was about to, yes, but he didn’t. Could he be blamed for his intentions?

  Now that the anaconda-hose had firmly bitten the nozzle, the operator had disappeared behind the vehicle again. Mechanical noises came from his position, until the body of the big rubber reptile (which had an internal steel-thread cladding) started flexing and vibrating while vitriol started flowing inside it copiously.

  The operator appeared again, taking off his gloves and putting them back in the big back pocket he had on his right buttock; he brought himself to one side of Giovanni and the officer, then took a small red and green packet out of the front pocket on his chest. “Cigarette?” He asked.

  The soldier shook his head.

  Giovanni smiled at him. “No, thanks. I don’t smoke.”

  The man then decided not to smoke himself and laid a hand on the side of the truck. “Is this your first Cleansing, son?”

  A rhetorical question, just to start a conversation. Giovanni couldn’t even give a vague answer, as the officer immediately gave him an eloquent look. The protocol didn’t allow futile chats during a procedure. It actually forbade them. The couldn’t do anything but shut his mouth and go back to staring at the Tank.

  The podgy Cleansing Operator looked up to the sky for a moment. He had clearly already been deterred from starting pointless conversation many times before; so he leant more comfortably against the truck using a shoulder, arms crossed and a bored expression, and began to wait for the five thousand liters of acid to be injected in the Tank’s side.

  ***

  It took less than ten minutes. Giovanni spent that time guessing what was happening in there.

  The Tank’s bottom wasn’t made of a compact flooring nor dirt. There was a grating, a huge round grating on which the first guests fell when the Tank was empty: the first layer, which became the deepest one in just a few weeks, the one whence no voices or breathing came. Under the grate - which was about one meter above the soil - there an open space about half a meter tall, called Drainage Area, under which there were simply earth and rocks, and then the foundations.

  The Gate of Cleansing was about one meter above the ground and was connected to a steel tube running through the whole circumference of the structure, inside the concrete. Cleansing Crown, the manual called it. It had a great number of holes, about as large as common rings, communicating with the inside of the Tank, on the lower layers of the mass of bodies. When hundreds, thousands of liters of sulphuric acid were injected inside it, the last part of the detention and punishment process, named Elimination, finally took place.

  Arrest, Process, Conviction, Confinement, Unloading, Elimination: the six phases of the NMO’s penal system. The last one, the one closing the circle, was undoubtedly the most cruel; even if, for logistic and security reasons, there was no possibility of watching it, one couldn’t help but imagine what was happening.

  Camp 9 was silent, immersed in an almost surreal tr
anquillity. The rumbling of the engine with the gearbox in neutral was part of that silence now, to which the gurgles and the swishes of the acid inside the hose acted as a counterpoint.

  No sound came from inside the Tank, of course. And yet that immense dark lair, whose existence was only conceivable in terms of spatial and temporal coexistence with the candor and quietness of the world surround Giovanni, was probably filled with screams, cries and laments. Not from those who were flooded by the corrosive jets, no. Death had already come for them, granting them grace. Nobody could still be alive where the acid was injected; unless, because of some unpredictable movement of the human mass, somebody who had recently been unloaded was pulled or pushed towards the bottom of that swamp, finding themselves, so to speak, in the wrong place at the wrong time. At that point all that they could do was to welcome like a blessing the deathly touch that would deliver them turning them to nothing.

  The corpses dissolved in what the manual defined Draining Division Zone (acrostic on which some wiseass had invented the name Demographic Drop Zone), poured in the Drainage Area underneath and from there on it was plausible that they were just lost forever, absorbed by the soils. Within a certain range around the Tank, the underground had to be soaked with them.

  ***

  A loud metallic noise informed them that the truck’s distribution valve had closed.

  The Operator quickly moved to unplug the hose from the nozzle and close the wicket gate. Giovanni had to make an effort to stop fantasizing about the dark lair where tenths and tenths of corpses were still silently melting, and looked at the official. In turn, the soldier stared at the clipboard Keeper Corte had in his hands: was is a tremor making it vibrate? Probably. It was because of the cold, no doubt. What else could it be?

  Giovanni, who was still keeping hold of the pen, quickly signed at the bottom of the Cleansing Bill. He then gave the clipboard to the lieutenant who, without a word, ripped the carbon copy and handed it to him so that it could be filed in the Tank-related documents. In the meanwhile the anaconda was rolling back to its nest in the back of the tank truck.

  “Do you know what to do now?”

  Giovanni hoped not to be wrong. “Of course, sir. Open the Drainage Openings for at least an hour.”

  A laconic “Good work, Keeper” was all the officer answered him. Maybe he had tried to trick him again and had no success. Or maybe not. Maybe it was his way to tell him you’re good. Giovanni was growing excessively defensive attitude towards the NCOs.

  ***

  Alone again, closed up in lift’s cabin, he let out a long sigh studying the puddle of dirty snow that was expanding under his feet. With his back leant against a wall he let the vibrations penetrate in his bones like an invigorating massage. He caught mid-air, with a quick movement, the bill that was slipping through his fingers, risking to become an intelligible scrap of paper. In case of an inspection he would be accountable for his negligence. Sure, that was just a copy. The original would be stored in the Camp’s central archives. But that was his copy, the one that had been given to him. He was accountable, like for everything else. He thanked the heavens for his quick reflexes despite the physical and mental torpor.

  He was right to think that the first Cleansing would unnerve him. Not for the procedures themselves - which had been carried out as expected, apart from the hitch of him almost signing too early - but for the images that got into his head and, sooner or later, would undoubtedly come to him in his dreams.

  ***

  The first thing he did after going back to his apartment and filing the copy of the Bill in the appropriate binder was to activate the Gates’ commands from the console in the Control. It was the first time he really did so, but it was a very easy procedure. Two simple levers under the DO label had to be lowered. Cla-clack, almost at the same time. And two small red lights informed him that everything was going as expected.

  On the roof of the tank two large horizontal panels in reinforced fiberglass were being lifted by hydraulic pistons. Their task was to avoid saturation from the gasses produced by the acid’s corrosive action in order not to make the convicts die too soon and avoid any infiltrations in the Ring at the next Unloading. The Shutter’s door were hermetic, but as an additional security measure there would be no deliveries in Cleansing days until the late afternoon.

  There had to be many inches of snow on the roof; but the engines activating the GOs were calibrated to face natura obstacles. The Openings would stay open for at least one hour: the estimated time for the miasma to disperse. It was the Keeper’s task to close them and write everything down on the Register.

  After being sure of zealously complying to his duty Giovanni stooped to look at the Well. He squinted to see better.

  The bodies belonging to the most superficial layer seemed a lot smaller, like worms plunged in their putrid phosphorescence. It was the effect produced by the lowering of the level. The distance between them and the camera had increased, since many had been - to say it in lingo - drained. Giovanni felt his stomach twitch thinking about the Draining Division Zone, the shapes that the corpses must have taken down there...

  The convicts that hadn’t been reached by the acid were thrashing more vehemently than usual because of the panic caused by the inexorable descent. There was also the devastating effect of the vapor emitted by the corrosion of flesh and bone.

  The Openings undoubtedly helped make it vanish, but in the meanwhile the lungs of everyone that was still alive were filled with gas and it surely wasn’t pleasant. Giovanni wondered what they could vomit, having nothing in their stomachs...probably even their their screams were distorted, their throats filled with natural and chemical gasses produced by the Elimination process.

  Driven by a sudden, morbid curiosity, Giovanni slowly reached out for the green button labeled AUDIO CHANNEL. He had never done that before, in that month or so he had been there. Nor had he ever wanted to. But in that moment - slave to emotions he had never felt before, his brain trapped in barbed wire, his whole nervous system flowing with an undefinable aggressiveness and unjustified remorse - he thought that hearing the screams and howls and roars at high volume would be helpful in a way he couldn’t explain. Unable to scream himself, maybe satisfying that perverse need could be a way of venting.

  But his intentions remained such. A sudden beep forced him to come out that dangerous mood, and a message appeared on the Postman’s screen. “The first Cleansing went ok. No confidence to civilian operators.”

  Before he could even think about an answer Giovanni noticed there was a fax waiting for him. He took it and read it impatiently. Two triple deliveries, that afternoon. Good, he had all the time in the world to calm down. So, who was it this time? Thieves, murderers, children prostitution panders. Worms. Worms even before becoming so inside the Tank. It was a pity they wouldn’t be alive to see the joy of the next Cleansing.

  He had to dedicate some time to lifting weights. It did him good. It calmed his nerves and built his muscles. He would also run later. But first he had to answer to that message, because if he didn’t somebody could think he did not take their approval and advice into consideration. He didn’t want to give such an impression, of course not.

  He stared at the agony inside the Well for a few more seconds. Then he turned his gaze back to the internal communication screen. There was nothing about him almost signing the Bill at the wrong time. It was for the better. Had there been anything about it he would probably really scream. Just to relieve the tension in his chest.

  After a short reflection he decided that a laconic “Thank you” was enough.

  9 - The White Triangle

  His memory gave him a sudden gift during the third week of February.

  He had had two triple deliveries in the morning. And a single one awaited him at 5:00 P.M.. He never understood the process behind such unbalanced subdivisions in the day. These matters were tied to the NMO’s judiciary system and he, as a civilian, had no right to know anything. Unl
ess, at the end of the year, he would confirm his presence as a soldier; in that case he would gain access to a good part of the notions that were unknown to him. But - unless he changed his mind in the meantime - he wasn’t keen on doing so. He was proud to give his contribution to the Order, but once he put his hands on the compensation...well, his expectancies for the future were way different. There was the tropical island. The rest would come naturally.

  He didn’t feel like reading, so he had sat in front of the TV watching a series he didn’t know. It wasn’t much, but it managed to make him smile from time to time. It was not small feat, inside the Tank. There was a fat, black actor shouting at the maid, accusing her of not cleaning well enough. The girl was uselessly trying to defend herself, but the man, in order to demonstrate her how dusty the room still was, he grabbed the side of the bed and lifted it with so much force that he turned it over completely. But neither the fact that underneath it was his wife hugging another man nor everything that follow that discovery (together with lots of pre-recorder laughter) could breach into Giovanni’s subconscious, as he was suddenly struck by an haunch. No, it wasn’t exactly a haunch. It was the classic light than one turns on after a long time trying to make head or tail of the situation while groping in the dark.

  He hadn’t thought about the night he had that awful nightmare in days, when he had believed someone to be in the corridor, someone that then ran away using the elevator, disappearing. Or at least he thought so.

  The immediateness with which his might had brought him back to that episode, with the scene he saw on TV as its accomplice, convicted him otherwise.