The Tank

by Nicola Lombardi

  “I think it’s impossibile, general.”

  “Yes, it. Do you know why I ask you this question, Corte? Or better, why I ask you again?”

  “I’m afraid not, general.”

  “Because our work lives on fear. Without fear, the New Moral Order couldn’t stand. I feel it a lot, Corte. Consider it a confidence. I always feel it. Everyone do. You, Corte, just answered me by saying you were afraid, and you will be again. Past and future. But mow, in this precise moment...can you say in all honesty you don’t feel fear’s presence at each and every heartbeat? Think about it.”

  Giovanni was listening trying to pay the utmost attentions, keeping away all the other thoughts (Did Alex manage to die?) barking in his head like rabid dogs kept at bay by way too think chains. Why was the general telling him all those things? And why in that moment, when he knew that his clarity was compromised by everything that had just happened? But maybe that’s what he wanted: open his mind when it was particularly fragile and vulnerable. Than man had to be a skilled psyche manipulator, other than an inflexible man of charge.

  (Or maybe he’s a madman. Eh? You never thought about it?)

  “Did you understand what I just asked you, Corte?”

  A twitch in his stomach. Mutating shadows on the edges of his eyes. “Of course general. And...you’re right.”

  “About what?”

  “On the fact that...I’m afraid. Even now.”

  “And of what? Can you precisely tell me what the object of your fear is?”

  What was apparently born as an informal conversation had rapidly become a true interrogation. Or a ruthless psychoanalysis. Giovanni took some seconds, while the other was piercing his head with his eyes. He finally answered:

  “No, general.”

  Stevanich breathed a satisfied smirk through his nose. “Just as I thought. We now live in a world where everything scares us. We are surrounded by fear. we reached a point where we don’t even recognize it anymore. So we face it day by day without knowing. What were you doing inside the Shutter, Corte, on the night of July 7th?”

  That question hit him like a wrecking ball. The plastic clipboard he kept in his hands with an increasingly weak hold fell with a sudden, dry thud on the linoleum floor. He was about to turn around and pick it up, but the general voice froze him: “Leave it there, and answer me. What were you doing?”

  Giovanni gasped. “I...as I wrote on the report...the power went out...I was inspecting...”

  “Right, you were inspecting.”

  Giovanni interpreted that condescending comment as an invitation to stop lying. So he just shut up.

  “You see, Corte, when the power goes out the emergency batteries take its place. And were there any anomaly in the system, you know that your attention would be drawn by the light and sound alarms. You know it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, general, sir, I know. But...”

  “Entering the Shutter is very dangerous. A contact, a tension drop, and probably you wouldn’t be here talking to me, know.”

  Giovanni felt the sweat running down his spine. “You are right, general. It was...an imprudence.”

  “I think...or better, I suppose...it was curiosity. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Denying it was useless. It would just be offensive. “You’re not wrong general. I used the emergency lights to...to look inside. I apologize officially for...”

  “No need, Corte, no need. You didn’t commit any infraction. You are authorized to move as you please, here. Within the limits you are aware of naturally. And tell me: have you satisfied your...curiosity?”

  Giovanni was sure he was sharing the same feelings of those who found themselves before Vlad the Impaler, undecided on which question to give in order to get away with their lives. But now that he had chosen sincerity...

  “Yes. It was enough, general.”

  Stevanich stroked his black mustache. “And what did you feel, when that criminal tricked you into believing he would activate the mechanism?”

  A nervous smile contracted Giovanni’s cheeks, he didn’t even have to think about it. He was in it deep now, so it was better to be honest and direct. “I was scared shitless.”

  The silence that followed lasted exactly thirteen seconds. Giovanni counted them. He had given a very informal answer, but he didn’t think he could get into trouble. He was not part of the military. And in no way had he been disrespectful.

  When Stevanich spoke, Giovanni understood the torture was over, the grate turned off. “Well said, Corte. Scared shitless. No beating around the bush. So...I’ll leave you to your duties. And don’t think about what you did too much. It was simply your duty, nothing less. And eat something, you look a bit pale.”

  “Yes, general, sir.”

  Stevanich turned around, went to the elevator, pressed the button that called it, waited for it to arrive, stared at the opening doors...

  All this while Giovanni followed his every movement, as rigid as a tree trunk, sweating, shaking. He knew perfectly well that the general would add something before disappearing. There was a sort of script behind that conversation. As if those things had been said to others before him.

  To give confirmation to his feeling, Stevanich turned around and stared at his for a few seconds before saying: “Remember that fears must be faces, Corte. We all have to do it sooner or later. There is no escape.”

  Giovanni saluted and clicked his heels.

  And the maws of the elevator swallowed the general.

  ***

  Once back in his apartment Giovanni went to kitchen to eat some cookies and drink pineapple juice. His esophagus seemed to have shrunk, so he had to swallow with insistence. He had lived through what he thought had been the worst thirty minutes of his life. He felt exhausted, with a burning fever. The general’s words had fallen on his brain like acid rain and almost managed to impair the horror Alex’s tragic confession and execution.

  Suddenly, the idea of that man thrown into the arms of death made him want to check the Well. He staggered to the Control and, with his arms on the console, brought his face to just a few centimeters from the screen and looked hard.

  He checked the faces floating on the surface one by one, but they were too small. He then activated the zoom function (he had done that once already, to understand how it worked, but the abundance of details had disgusted him). Using the small joystick to move the camera, he glided like an invisible vulture over the mass of dying bodies. He recognized some of those he unloaded one or two days earlier: they gasped, eyes open or closed; they talked, cried, laughed. He saw a man screaming, his bent backwards, his neck exposed to whoever wanted to bite it in the dark. Another one, his nose pressed against the wall, was laughing maniacally. A third one, with only his chest emerging, looked upwards and shook his head left as right, as if he wanted to state a strong dissent.

  But there was no trace of Alex. They had already pulled him down (Dead? Still Alive?). Of course he could just watch the recording, should he want to hurt himself. Out of curiosity. Again, and always, curiosity. No. He wouldn’t. No...

  He barely managed to run to the bathroom. With a chocked groan he bent over the toilet and vomited what little he had eaten.

  ***

  He spent the day in a state of half-lethargy. He zealously supervised the deliveries and effortlessly unloaded assassins, scammers and perverts. But his head was flying elsewhere, and he didn’t understand if it was too high or too low. He felt detached from what he was doing, as if a dark glass (the Shutter’s?) was separating him from a part of himself, from the daily life around him.

  He couldn’t read nor watch TV. He tried, of course, just to verify whether his mind could get some new ideas, gravitate around alternative fulcrums. But he was rapidly convinced of the uselessness of his efforts. He went to bed early and stared at the ceiling with wide open eyes.

  Up there, clusters of shadows started staging all the main events of the day: a sinister show put on by his mind to torment him wit
h replicas of the day’s worst moments over and over again.

  That damn Keeper’s diary was all a trick, then. A goddamn hoax. The manuscript that had troubled him so much was nothing but a ruse from that wretch and he had spent hours among doubts, remorses, uncertainties, fears. And what for? To get to that point. To regret the time and energies he had thrown away. He should have been offended for how he was fooled in such a stupid way. But he just felt embittered. For how everything had come to an end. Was it possible that a you man - intelligent, educated, with an already more than commendable job - could stoop so low on a moral level? And for what then? For envy? Of what? The money he would get at the end of the year? Ok, it was a tempting perspective, but...could it really justify such folly?

  Moreover, now that he thought about it, he probably didn’t confess everything he had done. The fact the had access to a copy of the keys, for example, made him suppose he was the one who had “mysteriously” turned the audio channel on in the middle of the night. At the time, Giovanni had blamed himself; but now, in the light of all those revelations, he started thinking it was an unconfessed incursion by Alex, rather than an unpleasant and isolated episode of sleep-walking.

  Shadows, over shadows, over shadows...

  He wanted to cry. It would help him. But tears evaporated inside his eyes even before falling.

  Fears must be faced.

  “I...am...” he started saying, trying to find some consolation in his mantra. But he lacked the strength to even talk.

  We all have to, sooner or later.

  He wished Alex, that poor devil, could rest in peace.

  If only I could, too, he thought. And he immediately gave up to sleep, beyond any expectations.

  20 - Before the Storm

  August began with a Cleansing, the third. Thousands of liters of acid were injected in the Tank, as always, to melt as many corpses as possible.

  Giovanni stolidly supervised the process . He was well aware that everything fell under unquestionable and proven schemes, and the sphere of emotions had to give up, disappear. In Camp 9 people died every day. The soil, the air, the sunlight, everything was full of death. But that wasn’t a good reason to give up to useless interior torments with the only result of suffering even when on the right side of the barricade. He had learnt his lesson long ago. And hundreds of melt bodies dispersed under his feet weren’t something appropriate to think about. That was just how things were.

  Back in his apartment he ate an abundant breakfast, ignoring the trembling that created many concentrical circles on the surface of his latte in the cup he was holding with both his hands.

  ***

  The month went on between some of hot days and others graced by the northern breeze.

  He didn’t receive any other communications from the general and asked the EGs how things were going out there was as useful as asking his reflection in the mirror. He actually could get some answers from it from time to time. He knew that talking to oneself was a sign of instability, but he was of the mind that his condition justified that small deviancy. And who could hear him anyway? The amoeba? He grinned every time he thought about the mass of dying bodies that way.

  One day, while staring at the Well, he fantasized about that green circle surrounded by black being his brain. Half-closing his eyes he could see it melt in a slimy, waved, spongy mass that could very well be the radiography of his cranium. The idea was intriguing. But he was clever enough to rapidly stray from the path that lead to such thoughts. There were weeds there, and sharp stones emerged from the ground. Better to proceed on the beaten path, the one paved with hard work, obedience and rigor leading him to...

  Where? He wondered looking in the mirror. And with a peaceful smile he answered: “To your island, of course.”

  For time to time he still thought about his life before the Tank. In the beginning nostalgia had been overwhelmed by enthusiasm, so he had little time think back to a not particularly brilliant or attractive past; not so much to make him regret his choice, at least. Now, after eight months inside that huge cylinder, he realized difficult it was for him to mentally rebuild the apartment he had left and where he had lived for many years. The topographical references of the outside world, which were once straight lines guiding him, had folded like the legs of a chair inside the trunk of a car, amassing inside his head.

  There were lots of faces and names in the world of his past, the outside world. It was incredible how so many things inside him were fading away. His memories were hundreds of balloons attached to a thread, like those tied outside houses for a child’s birthday. But the birthday had already passed and in time the balloons were left there in their uselessness, bending their heads, getting smaller, withering...

  He had promised to always look forward. And it was what he had managed to do. Of what was behind his back - all those things that couldn't keep up with him or couldn’t reach him - he could do without.

  No, he was happy about being there. He was satisfied of his job. He didn’t want to go home early.

  “I am the NMO, yes sir!” He showed his tongue to the mirror and, thinking back to Stevanich’s word, he added: “And whatever fear awaits him, I will face it.”

  He would have to keep that promise a few weeks later, when the fires lit.

  21 - Fires of Death

  September 21, 6:43 P.M.

  Giovanni was sitting in the kitchen in front of a cup of tea that had gotten out the microwave twenty minutes earlier, but was now almost cold now. The TV, muted. Some hunters were frantically building a bamboo cage inside which they hoped to put some animal, a gorilla, maybe, or a leopard...

  Giovanni would have looked asleep if it weren’t for the wide open eyes. He was aware of himself and what surrounded him, and to some degree also of the content of the documentary about Africa managed to get in through a crack in his awareness; but for all intents and purposes his mind had imploded in a state of peaceful apathy. It happened often lately. The activities he used to fill the many empty spaces in his daily life - reading, listening to music, exercise with weights - had momentarily lost their appeal.

  It’s the upcoming autumn, he had told himself.

  Even when he was still studying, he remembered it well, the end of the summer was always accompanied by a lack of spirit, or to be more honest, laziness. So, when it seemed nothing could invigorate him, he found comfort in sitting there in front of a mute television, in a state of interior void he found extremely relaxing.

  But in that late afternoon, suddenly an alarm in the center of his brain violently pulled him away from his mediation. He raised his wrist, looking at the clock with horror.

  6:43!

  He immediately stood up, almost kicking the chair over. How was that possible? He had had two deliveries in the morning, a third one in the afternoon at 4:15, and he was waiting for a fourth one...at 6:30.

  Nobody in sight. It was inconceivable. Or had he misunderstood?

  In the meanwhile the hunters in the TV were pushing some big feline inside a cage that looked inadequate to contain an animal that size. But Giovanni’s problem was way worse. He approached the window in the kitchen to see if he could get some information from there.

  In the distance, the siren in the Center cried, a lament that expanded and shrieked hysterically alternating high and low pitched sounds. He had never heard it before and immediately got the goosebumps. The general alarm had gone off. In the same moment he realized it, a chain of rapid beeps came from the Control. The alert had been automatically forwarded to him, too.

  Through the small window he could only see some distant flashes, a vibrating redness imitating the sunset. He ran to the bedroom. And what he saw while breathing out vapor stains on the wall made his legs weak.

  Fires had been lit. There three, four blazing from the tops the roofs and through many windows he could see yellow and red tongues. Under the siren’s cry, despite being distant, rifle gunshots and even grenade explosions could be heard. In the eye of hat s
mall hell tenths of black human shapes moved about.

  He bit the side of his hand. There was a battle, down there. But who? The answer penetrated his head like a needle: the revolutionaries. He was witnessing an attack to Camp 9, an operation that had been organized long ago and with great attention to detail. But how was it possible that the NMO had been blindsided?

  The continuous, obsessive sound from the Control was piercing his brain. It wasn’t the right moment to thing about how they had come to that. They needed to do something about it, and quick.

  Another explosion, this time stronger. Beyond the trees circumscribing the parking lot, now, vivid flames rose, pillars of black smoke on top of them. Some vehicle had been blown up. Giovanni had never received any instructions on what to do in case of an armed assault. One idea came forward in the confusion of his mind: he needed to isolate himself. He needed to prevent anyone unauthorized to get in the Tank. Because it was the target. Camp 9 wasn’t, from a tactical-military point of view. The many hearts of the NMO, the ones pulsating with deadly armaments, where others, elsewhere. The attack had no other goal than to conquer the Tank, seen as a symbol of the Order’s power on life and death.

  We are many...and we are ready...

  The words of that revolutionary crawled out of his memory and, like the blue, acid spitting anaconda, injected him the venom of fear. He had to move.

  He rushed to the kitchen, grabbed a chair and dragged it out of the apartment. One of the lean metal legs got stuck in the door for a second. Giovanni freed it with a kick and a curse. His organism was now producing adrenaline at full regime. He went to the elevator and pressed the call button. Never like in that moment the slowness with which the cabin went up had been so exasperating and, from the noises echoing in the vertical tunnel, he feared that the cables were about to snap. It was just his imagination, he was sure. But he couldn’t avoid grinding his teeth and growl like a trapped beast.