The Tank

by Nicola Lombardi

  Everything finally fit. The fact that they had sent him the complete list of the casualties on the day of the assault and had given him all the information he had asked for...

  They had pleasantly surprised him with that sudden openness towards him; but reading everything under a new light, that behavior hid sinister implications. They had satisfied his requests because he would have no way of divulging what he knew. He would never meet that a Dino Bastiani. He would never write a book or release interviews or tell his experience in any way.

  It was incredible how his memory could remember a face registered practically one year earlier, when he had looked into the Well for the first time, upon arriving at the Tank. That man at the center of the screen, the one talking to the camera - talking to him! - who had sunk when the bodies under him had moved...was the Keeper that had preceded him. And he had been unloaded.

  What did he do to deserve such fate? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, if not living in there for a whole year. Had that man done something wrong and been convicted for it, they would have no doubt told him: it would have served as a warning, a valid deterrent against improper behavior. They had thrown him in the Shutter simply because it was how things were meant to be. Nobody could leave. Unpunished. Oh, how sad was the motto looming over the headboard of the bed: Nemo me impute lacessit. As if the Tank itself was saying it to anyone who indulged for too long in its sick seduction. So...would it be his fate, too?

  There, immobile, clad in darkness and the silence giving it form, sitting on the edge of the bed, his naked feet on the ice cold floor, Giovanni hid his face in his hands and let himself be devastated by loud, coarse sobs mixed with tears and laughter, until he fell on the mattress and lost himself into the void until morning.

  26 - Islands

  The last, grey days of the year passed slowly. Even Christmas, which usually soothed Giovanni’s soul with the sweetness of his memories, came and silently crept away, leaving behind a bitter aftertaste. No colorful lights, decorations, snows or songs. All the joys he had come to know with his family when he was a boy, a kid, nor burnt his memory like a thousand small braziers; he wanted to cool them off throwing buckets of that cold water adultness can pour remorselessly on the warmth of infancy, but he couldn’t. Like every year, he whispered prayers and wishes for his parents, then closed that window from which nothing but pain could get in.

  The small dumbbells were put back in the wardrobe and the books forgotten. The calendar in the vestibule kept marking a day in September (he hadn’t touched it since the day of the assault).

  During the last week the deliveries decreased even more. Giovanni kept on working with clockwork efficiency. He didn’t say useless words to the Guards, but couldn’t help noticing they often glanced at him, studying him with a hint of perverse curiosity, maybe. As if they knew...

  And of course they did. None of them bade him farewell like it was expected in case his work at the Tank would serenely come to its natural end and he was about to leave freely. They would have shaken his hand, smiled at him, maybe wished him good luck for the future, joked about the money waiting for him...

  They could pretend, actually. But they apparently didn’t feel like cheating in such a mean way and they preferred leaving coldly like usual. Giovanni appreciated that.

  The last food provisions and laundry service arrived on the 29th. On time until the end.

  He had taken on the habit of eating in utter silence, raising from time to time his gaze on the dark screen looking at his reflection imitate his movements like a monkey.

  He passed much of his time at the window, trying to imagine what good things could still be out there, on the outside. Was there an island? Maybe. There were a lot. Everywhere. Each place was an island. The Tank was an island...

  Will you manage to go back to living, Giovanni? After all this?

  It was a good question. Ot a terrible one. Depending on the point of view. But it was destined to remain unanswered, like all the questions that were born and died - sterile, useless - inside those curved walls.

  ***

  The day before the last of the year (only one double delivery in the morning), in the late afternoon he received a fax on headed paper. “Being unable to do so personally due to undelayable business, gen. A. Stevanich has charged us with expressing the NMO’s gratitude for your work. We also inform you that this morning’s delivery was the last for Tank 9. Since the operative arc of the Camp is coming to an end due to technical reasons, tomorrow you will be exonerated from service. Two people will come at 8:00 A.M. to assist you in the furlough operation.”

  A signature followed. And that was all.

  Giovanni read it from the top, to be sure he wasn’t overlooking anything. It was really over. Not even a personal greeting from Stevanich. He expected him to come there and shake his end, looking him dead in the eye. And tell him unequivocally how things really were. But there was other undelayable business. It didn’t matter.

  The following day, at 8:00, then.

  “They will come to assist me in the furlough operations...”

  It was a nice, well studied expression. With that kind of language one could say anything, however atrocious, making it sound like a common bureaucratic praxis.

  He crumpled the fax and threw it in the bin.

  ***

  He thought about running away. At night, through the Escape. He would cross the whole Camp 9, away from the Center, he would find a hole, jump over the fence...

  (Do you really think there will be nobody on watch out there? Nobody to swoop in on you in the exact moment you touch the ground with your feet? Do you remember how things went for Alex? You can’t get out of the Camp, you know that.)

  No, there was no way out. And what life could he lead after all, even if he was lucky enough to make it? Hunted down like a rabid fox. With no place to hide. And with no one to trust. They would catch him in a few hours.

  No, there was no way out, at all. He would only waste time and energy, when both were about to end.

  He didn’t eat that evening. He didn’t gather his things or pack his bags. He left everything as it was, turned the lights off and went to bed.

  He knew how things would go. He had no intention of leaving.

  27 - The Shadow of the Tank

  The alarm clock went off at 7 o’clock, but Giovanni wasn’t sleeping. He didn’t sleep all night.

  He re-lived every single day he had passed in the Tank; every single hour inside those walls had ticked together with his heart, without missing a beat. He still remembered what was in his head, full of wonderful hopes, when he first got in. Now little remained of those dreams. He realized that bitterly, but unsurprisingly. He had breathed the shadows, fed on death; he had quenched his thirst by imagining acid and blood...for too long. He would never get rid of it. His soul was so full of horrors that thinking of purifying it would have been silly. He had fooled himself until the last moment, but he couldn’t do anything more than acknowledge it. Staying there was his only way out.

  He dressed up without caring about stumbling due to weakness. He drank some orange juice to feed his willpower. Then he waited at the window.

  At 7:56 - when the sun had started rising, invisible from his point of view - a van left the almost completely desert Center and went towards the Tank. An oblique light flooded its route, freeing itself from the shadows, shining intermittently on the dark green hood.

  Good. It was time to go.

  Before exiting the apartment Giovanni stopped on the Control’s doorway. He thought back to all the work he had done in there, all the things he read, wrote, filled out. The Register was updated to the previous day in an impeccable way. They had no way of accusing him of leaving something behind. He had one thing left to do.

  Inside the Well, the phosphorescent amoeba fluctuated and stirred in its amniotic darkness, restless as ever.

  Giovanni didn’t hesitate. He extracted his Beretta, extended his arm and shot. Some sparks and shards
of glass answered the detonation. A strong smell of burning circuits came from the shattered screen, but quickly dissolved like the echo of the noise that had once and for all closed that door on another world.

  Well done.

  He could exclude that the two men had heard something. The vehicle was probably stopping in front of the building in that exact moment.

  He closed his eyes and started counting under his breath: “One...two...three...”

  He thought that the two soldiers who had been sent to deal with its furlough were the same that had escorted him on the first day of the year, the sergeants before whom he had sworn his oath. He had no real reason to believe so, but just had to listen to his guts to be sure.

  “Eleven...twelve...thirteen!”

  He opened his eyes. In that precise moment the Spy flooded the vestibule with red light and its buzzing echoed dully ripping the silence apart for a few seconds. A coincidence? Maybe. But Giovanni liked to think that he was so synchronized with the strange laws of the Tank that he could foresee any oddity.

  He opened the reinforced door and left the key in the lock. The small metal tetragram clinked for a few seconds, then stopped.

  The engine, tie-rods and wheels loudly made an effort to pull up the elevator cabin. If the NMO ever wanted to use it again, it would probably need some serious maintenance. But since it was probably it’s penultimate run, all those creaks would give them no more trouble.

  Giovanni moved next to the Shutter, where for hundreds of times he had waited the arrival of new convicts. He stood in the typical position of a soldier at ease, his legs slightly spread and his hands behind his back

  (Do you really want to do this?)

  When the cabin reached the floor and the two shutters opened, he wasn’t surprised to see the two sergeants - yes, it’s them, I knew it! - with the same martial pace, the same by the book expressions. Until he would get to know his names, he would call them Thick and Thin. They hadn’t changed at all in a year’s time. Maybe things don’t really change out there, despite the appearances. The Tank was different. To him, in a year, everything had changed. He had lost everything. Once he could see an island, far on the horizon. But the route had changed. Too many storms during the journey. Too many tears on the sails, on the hull, on the heart. And now, after months of wandering with no map whatsoever, drifting, there came the immense vortex...

  “Good to see you again, Keeper Corte.” Thick said.

  “Good to see you too, friends. Are you here to...help me with the furlough operation, I suppose.”

  The two soldiers exchanged an oblique look and Giovanni thought that if they had been fat, wore top hats and had long knives in their hands, they would be exactly like the two executioners who took away mister K to execute him in the final scene of The Process.

  (Do you really want to do this, Giovanni?)

  “I have no choice.”

  “What did you say, Keeper?”

  Thick and Thin were standing side by side, a couple of meters away from him. Giovanni showed his hands, which up to that moment were hidden behind his back, relishing the sight of the grimaces deforming their faces as soon as they saw the Beretta. But the surprise lasted for just a couple of seconds: they immediately extracted their weapons and aimed them at him with ferocious determination.

  “Put it down, Keeper.” Thick growled.

  Thin didn’t say anything. He clenched his teeth so much that they started creaking.

  “I’m not the Keeper anymore. My name is Giovanni.”

  He kept hanging on to his Beretta without aiming it on the two soldiers. He had no intention of shooting.

  “Ok, Giovanni. Now put it down. Don’t force us to...”

  “To do what?”

  The two looked at each other again.

  “Never mind”, Giovanni added. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Right. Nothing had anymore.

  With precise movements he holstered the Beretta, then he unfastened the holster from his belt and, bending slightly, made it slide on the linoleum towards Thin’s feet. The two sergeants sighed in unison. And the weapons disappeared.

  The neon lamps embracing the Ring crackled and the light dimmed sensibly. Half of the white tubes went off and the soldier’s and Giovanni’s still shapes faded suddenly, losing consistency and depth. From the Center, they were already de-activating some of the Tank’s electrical lines. The end was nigh. He could hear the vortex drawing near...

  It was Thick who talked first. But now that the initial tension had reduced, he had to clear his throat before speaking. “Keep...Giovanni, we are here in the name of the New Moral Order...”

  “I know.”

  “...and it’s out duty to inform you that we can’t let you go.”

  Maybe, after that statement, the officers were used to complaints, protests, pitiful scenes, crying, screams, escape attempts...

  But Giovanni didn’t move, he just kept staring at the soldier with no recognizable emotion in his eyes.

  Thick glanced at his partner, disoriented, the went on: “Do you...understand what I just said?”

  Giovanni nodded. “Yes, I do. I did a while ago.”

  Thin coughed, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Thick squeezed his eyes as to focus on the shape in front of him. “Good”, he said. “And...so?”

  “So what?”

  “Are you going to give us problems, or?”

  Giovanni felt his soul invaded by an endless tiredness. And he also felt nauseated by all those empty words, all those sounds creating a useless dialogue between ghosts. He breathed in deeply and gathered thee strength to speak again. “Did you bring the band?”

  Thick hesitated, evidently disconcerted by that demonstration of coldness. “Yes, but if you prefer...”

  In answer Giovanni turned around and put his hands behind his back. He heard the two sergeants approach and in a few seconds the plastic band was tightened around his waists.

  “He also have a pill”, Thin said, talking for the first time. “If you want.”

  “No, I don’t. Do what you have yo do, now. And do it quick, please.”

  Thick moved to the panel, while the neon lights wavered again.

  Giovanni stood in front of the Shutter and it wasn’t easy for him to see his reflection on the glass. It was the light’s fault, it was too dim. Or maybe he wasn’t there anymore. It could very well be a dream. Another one. The last one. He closed his eyes asked: “Can you tell something to general Stevanich on my behalf?”

  Thick was busy inputting the right sequence, so it was Thin (no more that a voice behind his back, in the half-light) who answered. “Ok.”

  “Tell him he was right about the need of facing one’s fear sooner or later. And tell him that I am not afraid anymore.”

  He wondered if it was really true, but he couldn’t answer. He was looking at his greatest fear dead in the eye. The one that would never let him go on with his life if he hadn’t indulged it, loved it. The Tank - with its sorrowful shadow of horror, death, and despair - would always darken his life, had he turned his back on it.

  There can be no Heaven if there is Hell.

  Now!

  The door slipped away with an exhausted puff. Giovanni breathed in deep, driving away the tears. Then he took a step into the Shutter.

  Don’t think, Giovanni. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think...

  He heard the two soldiers speak under their breath. Then Thin said: “We could shoot you in the head with your gun, say you killed yourself.”

  Giovanni’s heart shrunk. It was a powerful temptation. He would cross the abyss in a moment, without suffering...but he would never really get rid of it. He would never be redeemed.

  “I told you”, he answered without opening his eyes, “that I’m not afraid.”

  Another handful of silent grains fell down inside the hourglass, then Thick’s broken voice put an end to everything. “Goodbye, then.”

  A puff, and the Shutter
’s door cut the world away.

  Giovanni opened his eyes and saw nothing but darkness. His lips moved to ask his mother and father for forgiveness. He felt a fire in his heart, like a small star burning in its stead.

  Every single fiber of his body trebled when he heard that noise (clang!), louder and neared than he had ever heard it. It was the Suffering’s voice calling him opening its arms of glass and metal. The reek of blood and decomposing beasts filled his nostrils, but what really left him breathless was the silence. He had imagined that from the bottomless pit before him a wave of screams and laments would rise, but he heard nothing more than the cry of his own soul. He thought that in his whole life he had never known a fear so great.

  But it was right, it was necessary.

  A buzzing, a noise under his feet...

  Giovanni, finally forgetting himself, managed to smile.

  Epilogue

  January 1st. 7:45 A.M.

  A layer of hoarfrost covers like ephemeral white mildew the landscape of beaten earth, stones and clumps withered stems expanding out of sight on the other side of the fence. The whole Camp 10 is immersed in is pale isolation and the cold breeze blowing from north pushes the boy’s gaze forward. There, in the distance, about five hundred meters away from where he is, a cylindrical, colossal, snow white construction rises.

  Tank 10. Superb. So beautiful as to live him breathless.

  In the building serving as operative center many soldiers are already working, but won’t open the gates before 8:30. It doesn’t matter. He will wait.

  He closes his gloved fingers around the links and watches. He is only twenty-four. And they told him he is the youngest Keeper the NMO has ever designated. Pride drips from his lucid eyes, which close a little to mitigate the effect of the cold air.

  The guests will start arrived at about 9:00 and at 10:00, so the program said, the inauguration ceremony will commence. It will be an exciting moment. There was even a small stage, with decorations and flags with the tetragram on them, from which general Aurelio Stevanich will give a speech.