“I am the NMO. I am the NMO. I am the NMO...”
He had started repeating it slowly when he went down to attend the Cleansing - stopping to interact without making mistakes - and he had gone on and on until the lieutenant's jeep and the tanker had departed, leaving him and the corroding bodies behind. As a result, he had felt pleasantly dazed, unable to feel dismayed by the pictures in his mind.
“I am the NMO!” He stated before the Well, noticing how the level of the greenish bodies had decreased.
“I am the NMO!” He repeated, sitting on the side of his bed, while violins and brass instruments chased each other in the otherworldly dimension where music exists, while we can only hear its echo.
“I am the NMO...”
***
Two deliveries that afternoon: a triple one (three drug dealers and panderers, who had already been filed and were recidivist) and a single one, a man who had killed his wife. Nothing particularly demanding or exciting. Apart from the fact that Alex was escorting the single delivery, at 6:15 P.M.
“So, how are you?” He asked the Guard as soon as Giovanni had counted to thirteen and closed the Suffering.
“I get by, thanks.” It was a vague answer, yet not so detached as to sound rude. “What about you? Do you still like your job?”
Alex wiped away a thin layer of sweat glistening under his nose using a fingers. “It’s OK. I’m not screaming in joy, but I can’t complain. They continuously move us, you know? That’s why you rarely see me.”
Giovanni raised an eyebrow. “As you said last time, I’m no military. Don’t let anything important slip.” He said it with a serious look on his face, but a trembling of his mouth was enough to express he wasn’t talking seriously.
Alex took the joke with levity. “Yes, yes...oh well, big deal: I had just got the job, so I wanted to stick to what we have been taught. I don’t think it’s a secret.”
“Neither do I.”
“Yes, we take turns in different Tanks, to avoid bonding with the Keepers. And if it happens...and it does happen, it’s inevitable...reporting every word isn’t strictly necessary. You know?”
“I do.”
“And rumors spread among us Guards, even if not officially. For example, I heard about what happened hear, the convict who tried to get shot by Lorenzo...”
Giovanni nodded, thinking it was Scalp’s true name. “Yeah, it was a bad one.”
“These things happen. I still have had no problems whatsoever, but I’ve heard that other people have. Maybe I can tell you someday.”
Giovanni understood their time was up and Alex had to go. But he needed to get a question out of his teeth. “Excuse me, Alex, but...how are things out there?”
“Out there?”
“In the outside world. The real world.” In the very moment he had used that curious expression he wondered how he came to think of it. As if the Camp and the Tank belonged to a less real universe.
“Why, don’t you watch the new?”
Yeah, the news...
“Yeah, but...they say everything is all right, everything’s awesome, everything according to the Order’s plans.”
“So? You don’t believe them.”
Giovanni, watch our: you’re walking on nails. You’re expressing your doubts to an NMO officer.
“Of course I do. It’s just that sometimes I get to unload some revolutionaries, so I was asking myself...”
Alex looked at his watch, then quickly approached the lift. “Sorry, but I can’t stay. Delivery times are monitored, and if I go back after the scheduled time I need to find an excuse. Anyway, don’t worry. Everything’s under control. Believe me. See you!”
He pronounced those last words with a higher volume, so that he could hear him above the buzzing doors cutting him away from the Ring, and from Giovanni.
Everything under control.
He had spoken like one of those anchormen. All anchormen of all the news channels. Giovanni wondered if he had dared too much, asking that question.
He could look like he had doubts.
And the NMO didn’t like doubts.
***
That night, while he waited to fall asleep, he thought back to the former Keeper’s diary, that bundle of sheets on which he slept every night. He hadn’t thought about it in several days. But if his psyche decided that was the time for it to surface again, maybe there was a reason.
“Maybe it’s an answer”, he whispered to the grey shadows trembling on the ceiling. What did that sentence mean? He didn’t know. It always happened to him, when he started to get tired. Most of the times he slipped into unconsciousness without realizing it; but there were times he noticed the small, weird, inappropriate ideas appearing in his head and surprising him with their apparent extraneousness.
How could the hidden diary on which he was lying be an answer? Had he been on the island, on the sun, relaxing, he could have thought of a simple and linear explanation, perfectly understandable and rational. But in there...there, in that huge concrete cylinder full of acid and rotting corpses, where not a single minute passed without it being filled with anguish, suffering and death, with him not even noticing...him, the Keeper of Tank 9, the only sane cell in a world of endless pain. An angel in hell...
He was startled by a sudden twitch of a nerve of his leg and his heart painfully skipped a beat. He was hot. With a brusque movement he pushed the blanket away, annoyed. It was windy outside. A suffused, far, modulated whistle. It should have helped him sleep, and yet...he was still awake. But how much time had passed since he went to bed? He could ask the alarm clock on his bedside table just by pressing a button; the torpor he felt in his arms discouraged him, so he decided to lie on his back, waiting to fall into slumber. It was inevitable. Or maybe it had already happened, he couldn’t say. It wasn't the first time he dreamt of being awake and when it happened he had no way to understand his condition. Sleeping? Awake? What difference could it make?
The diary on which he slept. It was an answer, sure. But to what question? The one that sometimes came back to molest him, like a fly being repeatedly driven away, but always returning. Aren’t you afraid? Yes, sometimes. At night...
He wondered whether his eyes were closed or open, and he decided that particular doubt was of very little importance.
What am I afraid of? Well...there are a lot of things to be afraid of. (But you...you, Giovanni: what are you afraid of? To lose your mind like Keeper before you?)
Maybe. Everything oscillates. Here’s sleep, here comes sleep...and if those papers on which I lie, those sick pages compressed between the frame and the mattress, dripped madness, infecting me, drenching the bed with the crazy ideas infecting it like parasites of ink?
(It’s a nice picture, Giovanni. Parasites made of ink that produce fear...it would be an answer. You have to take that diary, burn it. Even if you didn’t read it all, that taste was enough to envenom your should, haven’t you noticed?)
No, such idiocy! It’s just scrap paper, and in here I can’t burn anything. I could unload it. Good idea. Let’s give those poor souls something to read, just to ass the time...
And among the senseless spires of such thoughts Giovanni fell asleep, leaving his mind open for the most terrifying dream he had ever made.
***
All of the Tank’s convicts have gotten out. How they did it is irrelevant. They did it and what’s important is their irrepressible thirst for revenge. The Suffering has been torn away and so has the first door of the Shutter. Now tenths, hundreds of men fill the Ring, and many more surface from the black void vomiting them. And not all of them are alive, in the true sense of the word at least. Some have their neck bent in unnatural angles. Others have horrid bites on their necks, faces, or scrapes, bruises, lacerations. Giovanni knows, sees all this, despite being still locked up in his apartment. With his ear on the reinforced door he listens to his own anguished rasping breath mixing with the hoarse groans and the unintelligible words coming from the circular h
allway. The neon light work intermittently, their work about to be over. From the shadowy mouth of the Shutter even more bodies, each time less and less intact, less and less human, keep on coming out. The sulphuric acid has damaged them in various manners and in a short amount of times the things coming out of the Tank’s depth haven’t even got a recognizable shape.
in the meanwhile, more and more ferocious fists bang on the door. They didn’t come out to run away. They have come for him. It’s him they want and they will soon have him. Giovanni feels his heart crushed by the fingers of a terror so unbearable that it could even kill him. And it would be a blessing for sure. If those monsters get in, not only would be die a horrible death, but his soul would be lost for eternity.
Screams an laments, out there. A whirl of suffering filling the Ring, rotating without rest. Anger and sorrow spat by throats more or less alive. Voices shouting truncated words; syllables flying like maddened birds in a sky of intermittent electric lights, trying to form his name. Giovanni knows they are calling for him, reclaiming him...
The terror devouring his insides is paroxysmal, and the Keeper understands there are only two ways out there: he can either die, or...
***
He woke up - in a hot and damp bed, all messed up, a tangle of covers - and he felt like he was going to explode. His heart and brain were screaming in unison inside him. The land of Nod shot him out of its territories with the speed of a cannon ball, sending him back to reality.
But...was he truly awake? He clumsily started moving his arms and hands, touching his sweating body.
Despite recognising the shapes and shadows of his bedroom’s furniture, he could still hear those sounds, those groans, those curses. And a few seconds were enough to convince himself that they weren’t echoes from his subconscious.
“It’s not true!” He said in melodramatic voice, branding everything he was perceiving as surreal. His heart - which since his awakening should have had slowed down a little - kept on drumming in his chest; and Giovanni couldn’t resist the impulse of slapping himself, hoping he would manage to banish those unrelenting voices in the back of his mind.
It was a continuous wave of laments and squeaks, brays and cries; and those wave spread on the floor of a low sizzle, as if they came from another world and could only materialize thanks to an audio device decrypting them.
The answer hit him like a wrecking ball.
Nobody had got out of the Tank. Nobody was laying siege on him.
On shaky legs he staggered out of the room, and, despite being sure enough about what he would find, he welcomed with infinite gratitude the confirmation to his suspicions. The voices were suddenly louder know. And also the underlying crackle. Entering the control, he had to put his hands on his ears.
On the console, a control light was on. The green light of the audio channel. And from a small amplifier hidden in the well the unbearable voice of damnation was pouring onto him.
An unpleasant thought spread his small, sturdy wings inside his head: did he press that button? More than once had he been tempted to do it, that much was true, but his common sense had always suggested to avoid that morbid act, not to hurt himself. What could he possibly gain by such an experience? But maybe, after holding back for so long, his mind had found a way to bypass the obstacle and satisfy his curiosity. Things had to be that way, there were no other explanations. And...when did he do that? In his sleep? The idea of sleepwalking wasn’t alluring, but it was the only one excluding action from other people. And there was nobody there, nobody...
He approached the console with hesitating steps and pressed the audio channel button with a finger. Inside the Well - at a much lower level than usual, due to the recent Cleansing - a mass of phosphorescent bodies churned obscenely. Those men’s voices ascended through the Tank, were captured by a microphone and vomited right on his face, while he listened to it in a state of bewilderment.
Had this happened the night before, with a much more crowded Tank, maybe those groans of pain would have been more deafening.
His thumb on the button. His eyes on the screen. A knot of thorns in his stomach. And the his head full of sound waves, concentrical circles bringing echoes of death from that lightless dimension directly to his soul. It was impossible to keep on listening. But so was stopping.
Turn it off, Giovanni.
“Yeah, I’ll turn it off now...”
He was sleepy. His legs were shaking, as if he was standing on a vibrating platform, but he was also feeling light, ethereal, almost levitating. Those dying, molded, half-corroded bodies slipped one over the other, beyond the screen’s crystal veil. And from their gaping mouths all of the world’s despair seemed to come out.
He let another ten minutes pass before pressing the red button and let the maws of silence swallow him.
13 - The Diary Issue
The following morning he found himself in an unusual position, the one he was in when he tried to get back to sleep: curled up like a fetus, at the bottom of the bed: this is how he had fallen asleep, victim of such an emotional discombobulation he wouldn’t normally be able to go back to sleep. But physical exhaustion got the better of him and he fell into a darkness merciful enough not to produce any more dreams.
A light, reassuring greyness reached his eyes and ripped away the shadows still clinging to his brain like useless posters hanging from a wall. He recollected all the night’s events and immediately promised himself he wouldn’t let them influence him in a negative way, thus ruining his day. What happened had to stay where it was, in the dark room where all the mental flotsam and jetsam were thrown away, with no real use no matter how many times one would examine them on different lights. Rubbish. Junk. Like the ones groaning down there.
He ate an abundant breakfast with pineapple juice, apple pie and pudding. He felt the need to store some energy. He had a devastating nightmare? Good, it was over now. Had he sleepwalked, turned on the Tank’s audio, listened to those fires? Yes, so what? They were all pieces he needed to put into place, thinking of the year in the Tank as a big, uneven mosaic. His predecessor had suffered; maybe he wasn’t as strong as he was expected to. But it was useless to look back, and so was the fear of possible future experiences: the path had been walked for a third. Four sheets of his calendar and been folded back, disappearing against the wall. And there he was, steadfast after all, and determined to get what he was owed once the job was over.
Staring at his image in the bathroom mirror, he whispered: “I am the NMO.” And with that, he had said it all. Let the nightmares come. They would eventually leave like the others. He just had to not give importance to things that hadn’t got any. It was a good forma mentis with which to face the eight remaining months.
He mimed shooting his reflection with his fingers, like a true american gangster of the movies.
***
The notion that the diary under the mattress had to be destroyed - which in his nightly, numb mental distortion had seemed reasonable - to him was now utter idiocy. How could he come to think it could infect him? He had also thought about the possibility of throwing them into the Shutter, and that would objectively be the surest way to eliminate them. But the matter of getting rid of them or leaving them where they were was an old one, and a waste of time to go back to. As far as he was concerned, that stupid diary could stay there for eternity. Moreover - and he hadn’t consider the possibility it up to that moment - maybe it wasn’t even his predecessor who wrote the diary, but the one before him, or the one before that one. It was an unlikely, but interesting hypothesis. And if by any chance...
With admirable timing, the buzzing announcing the first delivery of the day saved him from the web of useless thoughts in which he was entangled.
***
May passed without incidents. The food and laundry services worked with clockwork precision. Books, movies, documentaries and music occupied the many gaps he had during his days, together with the physical exercise.
He still cou
ldn’t grasp the delivery schedule of the Escort Guards (Giovanni came to think that they were balloted), and from time to time some new faces to which he could give new, secret nicknames appeared. Like Carnival, a man with such a somber look that he seemed more crestfallen than the convicts he escorted, or Burr, a blond-haired man with a bad case of rhotacism. This kind of things wasn’t fitting for a NMO representative, of course; but Giovanni managed to benefit from keeping his humor and fantasy alive. The Tank was the ideal place to make both disappear in a heartbeat, and growing these little bushes in the midst of the desert could be helpful.
The spring that filled Camp 9 didn’t just affect the weather. It was also a state of mind. The bright light shining on the barbed wire filled everything with purity and, when Giovanni open the window of his bedroom, his lungs expanded at their maximum capacity to benefit from the invigorating power of nature. Even the deliveries and the unloading had become less emotionally engaging. No doubt that it was also because habit had kicked in: any monster could become family living with it long enough. In the new order, throwing those people, the kind who couldn’t fit with society, into the jaws of pain and death was nothing but a dutiful act to be carried out with automatic gestures. Numbers and buttons, nothing else. There couldn’t be a man in all this. Living inside the Tank required self-detachment; the more one’s character fit in the required physical and psychological standard, the more linear would his year at the service of the NMO be. For him, to be honest, the path was steeper than he had initially thought. But once having dealt with all the obstacles more or less directly bound to the role of Keeper, even a potentially unpleasant job like that became routine.
Giovanni was so sure of knowing the ins and outs of his job that he really felt more relieved. And it was probably because of that confidence that, when the message arrived on the first night of June, the floor seemed to tilt under his feet.
The Tank Page 10