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 with 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?