Nicola Lombardi - The Tank

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.

The last, grey days of the year passed slowly. Even Christmas, which usually soothed Giovanni’s soul with the sweetness of his memories, came and silently crept away, leaving behind a bitter aftertaste. No colorful lights, decorations, snows or songs. All the joys he had come to know with his family when he was a boy, a kid, nor burnt his memory like a thousand small braziers; he wanted to cool them off throwing buckets of that cold water adultness can pour remorselessly on the warmth of infancy, but he couldn’t. Like every year, he whispered prayers and wishes for his parents, then closed that window from which nothing but pain could get in.

The small dumbbells were put back in the wardrobe and the books forgotten. The calendar in the vestibule kept marking a day in September (he hadn’t touched it since the day of the assault).

During the last week the deliveries decreased even more. Giovanni kept on working with clockwork efficiency. He didn’t say useless words to the Guards, but couldn’t help noticing they often glanced at him, studying him with a hint of perverse curiosity, maybe. As if they knew …

And of course they did. None of them bade him farewell like it was expected in case his work at the Tank would serenely come to its natural end and he was about to leave freely. They would have shaken his hand, smiled at him, maybe wished him good luck for the future, joked about the money waiting for him…

They could pretend, actually. But they apparently didn’t feel like cheating in such a mean way and they preferred leaving coldly like usual. Giovanni appreciated that.

The last food provisions and laundry service arrived on the 29th. On time until the end.

He had taken on the habit of eating in utter silence, raising from time to time his gaze on the dark screen looking at his reflection imitate his movements like a monkey.

He passed much of his time at the window, trying to imagine what good things could still be out there, on the outside. Was there an island? Maybe. There were a lot. Everywhere. Each place was an island. The Tank was an island…

Will you manage to go back to living, Giovanni? After all this ?

It was a good question. Ot a terrible one. Depending on the point of view. But it was destined to remain unanswered, like all the questions that were born and died – sterile, useless – inside those curved walls.

The day before the last of the year (only one double delivery in the morning), in the late afternoon he received a fax on headed paper. “ Being unable to do so personally due to undelayable business, gen. A. Stevanich has charged us with expressing the NMO’s gratitude for your work. We also inform you that this morning’s delivery was the last for Tank 9. Since the operative arc of the Camp is coming to an end due to technical reasons, tomorrow you will be exonerated from service. Two people will come at 8:00 A.M. to assist you in the furlough operation.”

A signature followed. And that was all.

Giovanni read it from the top, to be sure he wasn’t overlooking anything. It was really over. Not even a personal greeting from Stevanich. He expected him to come there and shake his end, looking him dead in the eye. And tell him unequivocally how things really were. But there was other undelayable business . It didn’t matter.

The following day, at 8:00, then.

“They will come to assist me in the furlough operations…”

It was a nice, well studied expression. With that kind of language one could say anything, however atrocious, making it sound like a common bureaucratic praxis.

He crumpled the fax and threw it in the bin.

He thought about running away. At night, through the Escape. He would cross the whole Camp 9, away from the Center, he would find a hole, jump over the fence…

( Do you really think there will be nobody on watch out there? Nobody to swoop in on you in the exact moment you touch the ground with your feet? Do you remember how things went for Alex? You can’t get out of the Camp, you know that.)

No, there was no way out. And what life could he lead after all, even if he was lucky enough to make it? Hunted down like a rabid fox. With no place to hide. And with no one to trust. They would catch him in a few hours.

No, there was no way out, at all. He would only waste time and energy, when both were about to end.

He didn’t eat that evening. He didn’t gather his things or pack his bags. He left everything as it was, turned the lights off and went to bed.

He knew how things would go. He had no intention of leaving.

The alarm clock went off at 7 o’clock, but Giovanni wasn’t sleeping. He didn’t sleep all night.

He re-lived every single day he had passed in the Tank; every single hour inside those walls had ticked together with his heart, without missing a beat. He still remembered what was in his head, full of wonderful hopes, when he first got in. Now little remained of those dreams. He realized that bitterly, but unsurprisingly. He had breathed the shadows, fed on death; he had quenched his thirst by imagining acid and blood… for too long. He would never get rid of it. His soul was so full of horrors that thinking of purifying it would have been silly. He had fooled himself until the last moment, but he couldn’t do anything more than acknowledge it. Staying there was his only way out.

He dressed up without caring about stumbling due to weakness. He drank some orange juice to feed his willpower. Then he waited at the window.

At 7:56 – when the sun had started rising, invisible from his point of view – a van left the almost completely desert Center and went towards the Tank. An oblique light flooded its route, freeing itself from the shadows, shining intermittently on the dark green hood.

Good. It was time to go.

Before exiting the apartment Giovanni stopped on the Control’s doorway. He thought back to all the work he had done in there, all the things he read, wrote, filled out. The Register was updated to the previous day in an impeccable way. They had no way of accusing him of leaving something behind. He had one thing left to do.

Inside the Well, the phosphorescent amoeba fluctuated and stirred in its amniotic darkness, restless as ever.

Giovanni didn’t hesitate. He extracted his Beretta, extended his arm and shot. Some sparks and shards of glass answered the detonation. A strong smell of burning circuits came from the shattered screen, but quickly dissolved like the echo of the noise that had once and for all closed that door on another world.

Well done.

He could exclude that the two men had heard something. The vehicle was probably stopping in front of the building in that exact moment.

He closed his eyes and started counting under his breath: “One… two… three…”

He thought that the two soldiers who had been sent to deal with its furlough were the same that had escorted him on the first day of the year, the sergeants before whom he had sworn his oath. He had no real reason to believe so, but just had to listen to his guts to be sure.

“Eleven… twelve… thirteen!”

He opened his eyes. In that precise moment the Spy flooded the vestibule with red light and its buzzing echoed dully ripping the silence apart for a few seconds. A coincidence? Maybe. But Giovanni liked to think that he was so synchronized with the strange laws of the Tank that he could foresee any oddity.