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.
The bed… actually, under the bed. Yes. Before running out of the apartment that night, lured by who knows what noises, he was about to check if somebody was hiding under it. He had moved away the covers with his gun, had knelt down, even if not completely… and he had seen something.
But of course, damn it!
He quickly got up from his chair, tapping the center of his forehead with a index finger, and went to his bedroom. With his heart pounding in his chest he went on all fours and lowered his head until he almost touched the floor with it.
And there it was. That white triangle…
It was a sheet of paper. No, some sheets, between the mattress and the frame. A corner hadn’t been hidden properly, so it was hanging generating the white form that had stuck to his subconscious. HE didn’t hesitate and extended his arm, grabbed the side of the sheets and started pulling cautiously. Nothing. He risked ripping them. So he stood back up and, keeping the mattress lifted with a shoulder, he managed to get hold of what somebody clearly wanted to hide.
“What the…?”
He sat on the edge of his bed and started examining that bundle of sheets on which the base had impressed an hexagonal pattern. Giovanni looked at the bottom of the last one, in case there was a signature or something. Nothing. The text looked incomplete, stuck halfway, as if the author had ben forced to stop writing and never got to it again.
There was no indication on the first page either. Yet reading the first few lines was enough to grasp the nature of that manuscript.
Today, March 29th, I heard voices coming from the Ring…
It was a diary, or at least a draft. Written on A4 sheets, certainly taken from the fax machine. By who? He had no doubts. The former Keeper.
“Oh my…”
The rules strictly forbade leaving any personal written traces of any kind. Even simple notes were considered a violation of the norms that regulated the role of Keeper. Nothing could be divulged. There was an oath. And yet… that’s why those papers had been hidden. He had never lifted the mattress completely when changing the sheets. He could as well never be able to find it. Provided it was there to be found. Right. But he didn’t see any other reason why his predecessor would leave a memoir in there. The risk of being found by someone else, and not the new Keeper, was high.
He casually leafed through the pages, catching another paragraph: 14 July – last night I heard a voice calling me. I woke up and saw a man inside the Control Room. His face was hidden by the shadows and he was pointing towards the screen. “There I am” he told, pointing his finger to a motionless body, on top of the mountain of pain. Then he added: “You threw me down there today.” So I passed out. This morning I was in my bed. A dream? Or are there ghosts in this place?
Giovanni stopped reading and blew through his teeth. So that’s how things were. The former Keeper hadn’t had it easy, it seemed. But… why did he write those things? To warn him, maybe? It was a plausible idea. He imagined that at some point the idea of leaving a testimony must have popped to the man’s head, worn down by solitude and tiredness as he was. Maybe as a self-defence mechanism. Giovanni knew a thing or two about psychology, and in some cases writing has a strong therapeutic value.
He read some more, browsing to read here and there: noises in the walls… a red cat staring at me, resting at the foot of the bed… the convicts stare at me in the eyes and judge me, before entering the Shutter… time never passes in here, never… few months left, I must get to the end… everyone cries an calls my name… their eating each other alive, down there…
Giovanni stood up with a sigh, shivering. That stuff had tired him. He already understood what it was and he already felt a mixture of nausea and compassion. The poor guy must have gone mad. At least he managed to complete his term, managing to vent out his tension through that delirious bundle of notes. Of course, he could only commiserate him, but…
He had done something that went against the NMO’s regulations, and that made him look wretched. How could he then, pass the selections – tests that included scrupulous psychological examinations – and in just a few months be a victim to hallucinations and disorders worthy of a madman? Deep inside him, however, Giovanni recognized his strict attitude as a shield, probably induced by
(Aren’t you afraid?)
some sort of fear. The fear of being conditioned, maybe. Hadn’t he already experience many disquieting moments? Hadn’t he already had the occasion to doubt his perception, his senses?
“Oh, to hell with it!”
He looked around him, instinctively trying to find a garbage can in which he could throw those papers. But then he realized he gave in to nervousness a bit too much and, with a long sigh, tried to calm down. He knew perfectly well that there were three cans in his flat: one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, and one in the Control. But what he had in his hands wasn’t something that could be thrown away just like that, to be carried away with the rest of the garbage. That stuff was hot. It was practically proof that his predecessor had acted against the New Order, however indulgent one could be because of his mental state. And he also had to consider that he had hidden those pages under the mattress. He didn’t get rid of them, nor carry them with him. He wanted him to read.
A thought started burning a hole in his mind like hot wax. A new perspective jumped onto him like a tiger out of the jungle: what if the NMO knew about that piece of writing and left it there on purpose, hidden, to test him? It was complex, but not impossible. It was the kind of initiative that fit in the New Order’s modalities, for which loyalty was one of the first qualities that were required in its collaborators. He felt sweaty all of a sudden, but the temperature in the apartment hadn’t changed. The feeling of being observed, controlled, monitored overwhelmed him like a torrid and oppressive gush. No, nobody was spying him. There were no cameras nor microphones… or were there?