Catching and sewing together small parts of the news Giovanni managed to get a pretty clear picture. Tank 9 and the whole Camp would be abandoned at the beginning of the new year, when the wonderful Tank 10 (bigger, more secure, more everything) would be the star of the New Moral Order. A huge building with every technological comfort, in a Camp that would be officially inaugurated by general Aurelio Stevanich himself. Well, hearing that the stern general, despite the recent loss, continued to be the man he had always been reassured him. A speaker had underlined, while talking about Stevanich, that his strength of character was the one supporting the NMO and, as long as there would be a man of such nerves in the system the Country would never have reasons to fear the weak, destructive wave of restoration.
Giovanni tasted those affirmations between tongue and palate. Once, those words would be like a kindle to fire up his spirit; now he felt them slip away leaving only a faint smell of dust. His mood was the season’s fault. Together with the perception of the end of a cycle.
(And don’t forget the tiredness. You are tired, Giovanni.)
Yes, yes, he really was tired. But of what? All that death, probably. He had lived with dying people, corpses and ghosts for more than eleven months. He could easily calculate the exact number of people he had thrown beyond the barrier, but what would the use be? To compare it with the sum he would get once out of that dying, grey tower?
It had already been some nights, now that the first ten days of December were fading behind his back, that he really struggled to fall asleep. He had tried asking, using the Postman, if it was possible to receive some drugs, without referring to Nicastro and the sleep pills he had given his that time, maybe not in a completely official way. But no answer was given to him. What Scalp had told him had then come back to his mind: “You have to make do with what you are given and ask for nothing more. Do you think you can do it?”
He would, he had no choice.
Thinking back to Scalp and the fact that he hadn’t seen him since the day they even got to laugh together, he had come to two conclusions: either he had been transferred to the new, wonderful (and hideous) Tank, or he had received some kind of punishment for staying there with him longer than it was allowed for a single delivery without a convincing reason. Everything was possible. Despite Giovanni had been inside there for almost a year, he couldn’t say he had understood the mechanism regulating the gigantic structure of the NMO. He didn’t even know who was sitting behind the desks, there, at the Center. Who wrote him, who answered him, who sent him faxes, who managed the laundry and food services, every little thing he had to deal with for months. He knew it could very well be the same person every time and that for him the interlocutor was always the NMO, as if it was an autonomous, sentient superior entity. Of which he (I am the NMO) would be a part for a few more days.
Beyond the windowpane, from the bedroom, he contemplated the long, pale strokes with which the wind painted the sky, silently unraveling old, cloudy blankets. In the distance, flocks of birds united and disbanded in the air, while tired sunlight fell over the world.
He could stare at that landscape for hours, hearing it drip into his soul. It comforted him. It gave him tranquillity. All that December greyness inspired indolence and resignation. It help him watch with the right emotional detachment the vans that day after day left the parking lot of the Center to disappear in the mist. After the fog and mournful rigor of winter, nature would explode with life, the splendor of an inevitable new birth, in an endless cycle. But not there. Not at Camp 9. Not for Tank 9.
Everything was ending in there. Nothing would begin anew.
What would happen to all the corpses that were amassed in there? Would another Cleansing be necessary, a definitive one? No, the time for great works was over. They would simply leave them there. Putrefying, rotting, stored in the greatness of that decaying mausoleum. Even while he would be lying in the sun, in his island, at the Bahamas, they would keep dying, in silence, in darkness. They wouldn’t stop disintegrating for a single moment, screaming the mute horror of their condition.
***
In the morning of December 17th, at 5:45 P.M., he woke up with an idea nailed to his brain.
He had dreamt of Lucas, the guest that had caused him so many problems when unloading him. Trapped in the Shutter, he kept repeating: “I’m waiting for you I’m waiting for you I’m waiting for you...” Nothing new. He had met him in his dreams many times before. But his face had started dripping with sweat and, after wiping it with his sleeve, it wasn’t Lucas anymore, but Alex. And he wouldn’t stop saying: “I’m waiting for you I’m waiting for you I’m waiting for you...”
After that his faced had changed again, becoming a bearded man with wild eyes who kept on renewing that dark promise. In that moment, Giovanni was struck by the impression of having seen him before, but after waking up all he was left with was a vague feeling of familiarity. He knew that the craziest truths revealed during sleep by the psyche are like fresh water at the bottom of the well, with nothing more than a broken bucket to try and gathering it.
But a tiny splinter of suspicion trapped in his mind made him do something that he would normally define hopeless, but that in that moment seemed to him as reasonable as going to the kitchen, heat up a cup of coffee and then go back to bed, waiting for the right moment to act.
***
After receiving the fax announcing the two daily deliveries (they were always about the same amount), at 8:10 A.M. he wrote his curious request through the Postman: “Considering the upcoming end of my term, is it possible to receive some information on the Keeper that preceded me?”
The beep came after nine seconds. “For what reason, Keeper Corte?”
Ah, for what reason, the ask...well, let’s see...
“If I should ever meet him one day, I would like to talk to him about the experience we have in common.”
Could it be enough? It was impossible to say. But it was worth a try.
He glanced at the well. The usual, desolate sight. It would miss it. It was incredible, totally crazy. Or maybe it was normal and inevitable. He would miss almost everything from the Tank. After a year even the darkest and most tormenting shadows, when they are about to fade forever, acquired soft, nostalgic tones. He kept looking at the amoeba made of many small phosphorescent specters, so familiar in its movements, so hypnotizing, so...
The buzzing of the fax was a sudden stab to the heart.
A sheet of paper crawled out of the fissure and Giovanni had to shake his head to get his thoughts back on track.
What...?
He saw the the console before him rotate slightly rightwards and at the same time he was under the impression that his chair for dragging him backwards. But it lasted for just one second.
From the paper rectangle he had in his hands a bearded man was staring at him. It was a low-quality, black and white picture, probably obtained by zooming a passport photo, but it was enough to superimpose it on the memory of the face he had seen in his dream and remain widemouthed.
Under the photo were written the same aseptic data one may find on an ID card. Name: Dino. Surname: Bastiani. Place and date of birth followed (he was merely two years older than him), address, hair and eye color, profession (student), marital status (unmarried). Giovanni wondered whether the stupor in the form of dizziness was because he had recognized - or believed he had recognized - in that photo the man in his dream, or the fact they had answered him in such a thorough, almost flagrant way. He was so used to the silence and discretion that receiving such an answer to a useless question like that one made him cringe.
He looked closer at that expressionless face.
“And so you are...Dino, uh?” Until that moment, that guy had always been an unidentified predecessor, the one that for one hear had roamed through those same rooms, had the same nightmares and hopes, who had supposedly written a diary full of nonsense, but it wasn’t actually true...
He stared at the picture he had received by fax, impressed on the paper by the toner, its lights and shadows, that varied spot of ink to whom he was talking and calling him Dino, and almost smiled.
How could I dream of you if it’s the first time I see you?
The answer came by itself that same night.
It took him all day to slowly climb up from the depths of his memories, but eventually he surfaced like the body of a drowned men, blotted, awful to look at. And then Giovanni understood.
It was 2:57 A.M. when he looked at the screen of his alarm clock. He couldn’t get to sleep since he went to bed a couple of hours earlier. He watched TV until late, pretending to follow an action movie full of stuntmen jumping off race cars, but he couldn’t prevent his mind from digging and digging...
And finally, from a darkness only apparently impenetrable the spark of an answer came. He sat on the edge of his bed, breathing him deep the cold darkness enveloping him like a wet blanket. It wasn’t the first time he saw that men. That’s why he had dreamt of him...
He could check, if he wanted to. He had but to sit at the Control, before the Well, turn on the playback mode and go backwards and backwards...
But it wasn’t necessary. The certainty with which he had come to that conclusion made further investigation utterly futile. He knew he was right, just like when only one card remains unturned on the table: there’s no need to turn it to know its value.
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.