Nicola Lombardi - The Tank

His own scream of terror woke him from his daydreaming. And when he realized he was simply inside the lift, back from the Cleansing, he sighed as if his lungs had been squeezed.

He entered the Ring almost stumbling and entered his flat with a hand on his mouth and the that on his stomach.

He had thought that the last months would flow away with haste; that the days would pass one after the other painlessly. He was wrong.

Time had taken a new form. The obsessive repetition of gestures and words seemed to generate a slow vortex enlarging at each turn in an hideous kaleidoscope of pictures and feelings. Whatever he did, he spontaneously wondered if he was doing it in that moment, or if he was remembering, dreaming, imagining, all very vividly, something he had done hundreds of times.

He tried picking up the book he had left off, but Dostoevskij kept pushing him out of his novel; eventually The Idiot went back to his bookshelf. Making an effort to maintain a good physical shape didn’t seem so important to him, in that moment his mind needed his attention way more.

It was true that mens sana in corpore sano , but he didn’t feel sick or thought he needed therapy. He knew that everything would ho back to its place once that experience was over, once he could go back to the world he had abandoned.

( Does that world still exists, Giovanni? )

There was an island. Somewhere. And the money, too, yes.

All the things he had always wanted.

The deliveries went on, but November saw them lessen sensibly. Some Escort Guard stopped showing up and Giovanni wanted to believe they were transferred, or that the temporary decrease in workload made their presence superfluous. Bags, Glutton, Wrinkles, Steve… he never really befriended any of them in particular, but he would rather imagine them ready to work in the Tank, the tenth, the one that would maybe be operative who-knows-where in the beginning of the new year…

But a part of him knew they were dead, that their names and surnames were in that damn list. He never asked the other EGs. They wouldn’t answer. But their silence would be enough.

Then came a day, about halfway through the month, when Scalp came alone, escorting a young foreigner who had killed his girlfriend. Once he had unloaded that scum, Giovanni took advantage of the situation task what was happening out there. “Excuse, can I ask you…”

Scalp looked at him as if he had just tossed a cake on his face, but he pretended not to notice. “…how come the deliveries have decreased so much lately? Has it something to do with the new Tank?”

Scalp stared at him for a few seconds, just enough time for him to evaluate whether he would lose something by answering him. He came to the conclusion that the question was acceptable. “It is possible, yes.”

It was a start. Giovanni felt authorized to ask another question. “But… isn’t the alternation between male and female Tanks valid anymore? After this, they should…”

“The next won’t be after , but in place of this one.”

Giovanni opened his mouth, but did so more to let the information get in his head better that to talk.

Scalp interrupted any possible comment. “But you are done here at the end of the year. Why do you care?”

“No, of course… nothing. I was just asking.”

Scalp snorted through his nostrils, shaking his head and smiling tiredly. “How many questions have you asked since coming here?”

Giovanni shrugged, catching that shard of levity. “I’ve lost count.”

“And how many answers did you get?”

“Let’s see…” He pretended to think about it, frowning, then: “Two? Three?”

“What’s that, another question?”

It was impossible to choke the laughter overwhelming them both. A short, warm, honest laugh. The silence that followed ate its echo along the Ring.

“That’s how thing go around here, Keeper. You have to make do with what you are given and ask for nothing more. Do you think you can do it?”

Giovanni felt a clump of infinite bitterness in his throat. He had already forgotten he was laughing just a few seconds earlier.

“Yes. I think so.”

Scalp nodded, simulating a serious and meditating expression, then went back to the elevator. “See you, Keeper. If we don’t, I wish you good luck.” He saluted. But he wasn't smiling, not even with his eyes.

Giovanni imitated him immediately. “you too!”

It was the last time they saw each other.

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.