Nicola Lombardi - The Tank

It was a suggestive story anyway.

There was another tale about a convict – whose name seemed to change each time, even if every version seemed to agree on him being a dealer of heavy drugs – who before falling had spread his legs, propping himself up against the walls of the Shutter; the Keeper was forced to open the first door and he was almost thrown in the Tank by the convict. That was a good one too, one of those that sticks into your head and never leaves.

Like the one of a guy who hid a lighter in his rectum and tried to set himself and all the others on fire, but the continuous movements of the human mass made him sink, making his plan fail. Of course there were other versions were he was hiding a swiss knife and this kind of episodes lead the NMO to more through body inspections (this was actually fake since nobody thought about confiscating from convicts belts or other pieces of clothing with which they could kill themselves; once they were thrown in the Tank, what they did was their business).

There were also accounts of cannibalism, practiced by the convicts who reached the ultimate level of degradation, madness and despair. But those were tales best left for camping: everyone gathered around a campfire at night listening to the narrator. It didn’t matter if some of them had plot holes or made pretty clear that they had been invented on the spot just to frighten those who listened. It was exactly what they were looking for.

Giovanni realized he had ridden his train of thought for too long, letting the recorded footage play for several minutes. He rapidly went beck to the recording mode, but as soon as he tried to look for the newcomers in that tangle of human bodies, there was a beep from the Postman. He immediately turned to face the smaller screen and he saw the incoming message icon. With a suddenly heavier heart he rapidly clicked it and a short yet eloquent sentence appeared: “All good with the first delivery, but watch the protocol.”

Giovanni instinctively smiled. It was a bitter smile, as if he was squeezing a slice of lemon with his teeth. Watch the protocol…

Those two sons of bitches, Scar and his comrade. They didn’t pass on the chance to report his error to the higher ups. He bet they even made it worse than it actually was.

“Bastards…”

Well, it was too late. It wasn’t a tragedy after all. It was his first delivery and surely enough they would turn a blind eye. Or should he expect a Warning? No, no… the tone of the message didn’t look menacing. He had to answer though. Opening a message immediately signalled its reception, so he couldn’t avoid it.

“ I thank you”, he wrote “ And humbly apologise for the hitch in the execution of the procedure. It won’t happen again. ”

He read it from the top, satisfied by the humble yet martial tone he had managed to convey. Then, to have a bit of fun, he added: “ And tell those two idiots that if they show their faces around here I’ll personally kick their asses into the Tank. ” He remained still for several moments, a weird smile on his lips, his finger over the ENTER button. He tried to imagine what would happen if the actually lowered his fingertip of about one centimeter and pressed. He had sent three people to hell by pressing a button just a few minutes earlier. With that same gesture he could end up destroying his dreams, hopes, maybe even his own life. Crazy. Just by pressing a button…

He carefully cancelled that last sentence and sent his answer.

He sat back on the armchair and held his hands to his chest looking at the big screen he had personally re-named the Well. There, in that moldy circular mess, tens and tens of bodies were crawling, sliding on top of each other, pushing and kicking to remain on the surface just to once meow fill their lungs with hot, stinking air.

The other two deliveries went smoothly, or almost. Giovanni expected to see the same EGs as that morning, but it wasn’t so. There were different Guards each time, at least in that same day. They surely had their own reasons. It was better that way.

At 1:30 P.M. – exactly as written in the fax, not late by a single minute – three north-african rapists, at 6:00 P.M two slavs who assaulted and old couple to rob them and a revolutionary. Giovanni, who had no right to ask the EGs for further explanations regarding the crimes committed by the convicts and had to make do with what was written in the communications he received, wasn’t sure about the true nature of what the last convict had done to be brought to him. The label of revolutionary implied a large variety of actions, more or less glaring, taken against the NMO.

He had read something about that too, of course: the choices and decision of the regime were written on the pages of recent history, not just on newspapers. A revolutionary was someone who theorized returning to democratic social structures, who printed clandestine propaganda, who made satire… and who planted bombs.

While cherishing the other guests’ exclusion from society, Giovanni didn’t get any satisfaction from seeing the revolutionary (so-called Ettore Assonitis, same age as him) approach the Shutter with the other two convicts. And when the young man passed by him – gaunt and with a bruised face – the Keeper surely didn’t expect him to talk.

“I just threw… some fliers… in the university.”

He said so in a low voice, trembling and drowsy from the sedatives. Giovanni opened his mouth, but didn’t reply. He knew he was not allowed to. But he was left breathless.

He completed the procedure under the EGs watchful eyes while telling himself that he was simply an arm to the NMO. Not a heart, not a brain. Just an arm.

Neither that second evening did he eat much. A lot had happened in a single day. He would get used to it. Some days would be better, others worse. He just needed to learn the ropes, then everything would ho smoothly. A year is long, he told himself . But two days have already come and gone.

The first very unsettling episode happened on January 23rd, in the dead of night, when Giovanni could finally tell he had integrated with the Tank’s routine at a psychological level.

He was woken up by someone knocking at the door.

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).