Since the year had began everything was going according to plan. The white truck with a red tetragram on the sides, the one that brought provisions, punctually came twice a week, on Tuesdays and on Fridays. In the late morning Giovanni would put the grey styrofoam bin full of left-overs and junk in the elevator, then get the one containing fresh food. Of course, he couldn’t choose the menu, but the food and drinks the NMO sent him were reasonably varied and of good quality.
The ironing and laundry service, which conveniently came on the same two days as the provisions, but in the early afternoon, was impeccable too. There was another truck (with a blue tetragram) and, without any need for interpersonal communication, the dirty sheets and clothes were put in a basket and substituted by those withdrawn and cleaned the previous time.
The average number of delivered convicts was between five and seven a day. He watched any possible kind of criminal walk into the Shutter. There were foreigners and fellow countrymen alike: thieves, murderers, crooks, pimps, drug-dealers, robbers, religious integralists, mafia thugs, rapists, pedophiles… beasts only fit for slaughter. Tumors to be removed. He hadn’t met any politicians yet, but there was a very simple reason for that: those who had perpetrated the ruse known as the Fourth Republic were already out of business; many once and for all, having probably inaugurated Tank 1 years earlier. Members of Mafia groups, families and similar historical and social aberrations had grown rare; the army had conducted carried out a great number of incursions in the so called hot zones of organised crime and cleaned them up using strong-arm tactics (which to be fair were the only effective ones).
There were also a lot of foreigners, but in a lower percentage that before. When the NMO substituted the former government, one of its first military-political measures was to gather and deport all clandestine immigrants, from nomads to false refugees; predictably, many had managed to get back in the country, but they had been caught.
There were usually two Escort Guards, but in case of single deliveries one was sufficient. Some days earlier Scar had come to the Tank, but there was no more than an impersonal exchange of formulae between Giovanni and him. The Keeper’s initial distaste in his regards was gone, he felt he had finally managed to fit in the context and could confidently manage both his job and relationships with other people. Each to its place and things would go smoothly.
He also had some bad dreams during the first nights. Nothing major. He kept seeing the Well. Predictable. The psychologist had warned him.
“You could have nightmares, especially during the first few weeks”, he had told him. “Don’t worry, it’s normal. Life in the Tank isn’t easy as it might seem. There’s a lot of people in there, it’s true. But you are alone. Are you aware of that?”
Giovanni had answered with confidence, smiling widely. To tell the truth, he was never one-hundred percent sure of the things he said during the interviews. He wasn’t sure he had been completely honest. He could doubtlessly say – but only yo himself – that he had more than once lied about his character and personality in order to be seen as the ideal candidate. Did it mean he had cheated? Maybe, maybe not. No doubt the others had done the same. The difference was he had succeeded. He felt he had had enough common sense and intuition in order to understand what he was expected to answer during tests; thus he managed to conform. Maybe that guy Alex, the one who came second, was more fit for the job, but he was the one who took it, and that was it.
The reasons why he wanted that job so much were essentially two. The first was ideological. The NMO always fascinated him. He agreed with it on every topic: politics, military, law, social welfare. He remembered that when he was a kid his home had been robbed by gypsies and since then, maybe, a feeling of rebellion towards some social categories had started to grow; a feeling that had grown to include all those people who could be seen as cancers hanging from an otherwise healthy tissue. The second reason was a lot more practical, he had to admit it. At the end of his year of service he would receive an monetary compensation that would allow him to realize one of his dreams: a long vacation somewhere in the Pacific or the Atlantic. An island, for example. He couldn’t say he knew them, but the Bahamas had a good ring to them… it was about the money. He was doing it for that, too.
Yeah, he had had nightmares. Considering what he had to see every single day, there was nothing to be surprised of. He lived surrounded by death, fear and suffering. The Tank itself was drenched in them. They seeped from the walls, saturated the very air he breathed. Moreover, it wouldn’t be long before the first Cleansing of the year. Giovanni thought it would test him further and give his subconscious new tools to have fun creating new, more unpleasant dreams.
But the nightmare he had that night was particularly vivid. And the impression that it wasn’t completely a nightmare wouldn’t leave before a long time.
Nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day. Two triple deliveries, the usual formalities, some exercise, a light meal, a documentary on african animals on Tv. He read a few pages from a book by Verne, then he fell asleep. In the dead of night, from the unaccessible caves of his mind, somebody…
…starts crawling from dark depths ridden with corpses and agonizing men. He digs a way up moving limbs, pulling ragged clothes, biting when necessary, and kicking. A constant rattle comes in and out his searing throat, becoming a beastly baying resounding in the curved walls of steel and concrete.
The man keeps on climbing without rest, it is Giovanni and a stranger at the same time. In the dream, sounds and smells are as real as the phosphorescent darkness stagnantly pulsating in the damp gaps between the seemingly endless bodies. Many of them are crawling too, their hands tied behind their backs and their mouths dirty with blood, telling stories of atrocious appetites. The man climbing upwards – Giovanni – uses his teeth too, but not to feed. He does so to make the others get out of his way, let him pass and reach the superficial layer of bodies, fill his lungs with the blessed air above them, see the light.
The weight on him gets less and less oppressing the more he advances, a centimeter at a time. There are groans, screams and cries everywhere. The smell is unbearable. It gets under the skin, closing the pores. Blood, sweat, urine, feces…
And he is finally out! Shaking off the hands trying to grab his legs and clothes to pull him back in that meat vortex, the man starts walking on that shaking, growling mass. He steppes on faces, making black spurts come out of crushed cartilage, breaks bones and joints among creaking sounds and ape-like screams. From a seemingly unreachable height a yellow, dust-particle light pours on him in gashes that have the same rhythm as his heartbeat. Giovanni knows that light comes from from the glass walls of the Shutter, like he knows that is the man’s goal, his goal.
He walks to the closest wall and puts his hands on it. The concrete is cold and rough on his wounded palms. An intense, burning, yet not unpleasant feeling runs through his whole body. It is like an unknown energy invigorating him. He feels reborn. He plunges his nails in the wall, penetrating it like claws, and starts climbing like a monstrous spiders, leaving behind the deadly miasma that still claims him. Until he reaches the Shutter. There he bends at unnatural angles, jumps and grips the Suffering, inserting bony but tough fingers between the shutters… and when they open to let him in, an asthmatic breath comes out of his lungs, slimily echoing on the cabin’s walls. All he has to do is reach out with his arm and push, and with a dark droning the first sliding door welcomes him with a whisper. Come, you have reached the Ring… Giovanni is not that man anymore. He is lying on his bed and when he hears three loud knocks on the flat’s door he springs up. He exits the room, his legs shaking, the sole of his feet snapping on the ice-cold floor. He reaches the door and cautiously puts an ear on the surface of fake wood. He listens and listens… on the other side he can hear a tired, laboured breath. It belongs to somebody who went a long way reach him. And nothing can make him go away.