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 couldn’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.
He was in the Control, updating the Management Register. From the kitchen, the performance of a celtic arp virtuoso – a kind of music Giovanni had always found particularly relaxing – was on TV when the well-known beep made him jump. 9:17 P.M.. An unusual time for receiving communications from the Center. It had to be something important. He had never been contacted after 8:00 P.M., and they were always comments on the deliveries or other events of the day.
He opened the message and the first impression he had was that the office chair he was siting on had distanced from the console, as if the floor had tilted. He would have felt the same on a ship pitching among the waves. Naturally it was just an illusion, an effect of the light faintness he had felt after reading those four words on the screen. “Did you read it?”
Paradoxically, the first thing that hit him as weird was the form, no the message. They had never directly asked him anything. It was of little importance, but considering the context, it gave the event a completely different emotional impact.