He had no evidence, of course; they were just suppositions. After all, after that stupid, quadruple death threats, his mysterious enemy had disappeared. He even thought he got tired of the game or was transferred who knows where. Maybe he would be back; but he didn’t hear from him in at least twenty days, and that was enough.
The days passed in a predictable manner, alternating from the security and boredom coming from habit. Human waste being obliterated, watching the news (nobody saying anything about riots or political revolts), documentaries, larvae sent to die, more or less relaxing reds, music, parasites thrown in the abyss, war or adventure movies, some exercise…
One episode managed to breach the apparent emotional stability that Giovanni had reached happened in the last week of June, when a deafening storm one afternoon and the absence of any more deliveries suggested him to take a long run around the Ring.
The thunders almost always came unexpected, since the lack of windows didn’t let the lightning warn him. And every time the sky rumbled, the weak neon lights trembled.
Giovanni started running – at a moderate pace, a jog in the park – at 6:45 P.M. He had decided not to stop before an hour, but it was only an idea. The last time he had managed to go on for forty minutes, slowing from time to time in order not collapse. All in all, he was satisfied of his physical form. With that pace he would get out of the Tank a lot fitter than he was at the beginning of the year and that made him proud of himself. Some people had told him he would probably get thinner, or weaker, that closed spaces and artificial lights would endanger his health… to that thought, he swiftly raised his middle finger.
Running while his heavy breathing overlapped with the rumbling thunders infused him with a sort of primitive euphoria. He could almost feel, with an unknown antenna in the center of his brain, the screams of all the generations since the dawn of humanity, whose echoes resounded unheard in the head of the modern man. It was just an idea to be contemplated while his rubber soles hammered the linoleum – thump thump thump – and sometimes squeaked grotesquely.
He wasn’t interested in counting the laps this time. He wanted a free mind, in a free body. And each time a thunder coming from a faraway sky fell and shook the Tank to its foundation, he unconsciously accelerated, even if just a little; those long crashes reminded him of a beast’s roar, a beast he had to escape from. The comparison made him a bit dizzy, he could feel a needle penetrate in the back of his head.
Thump thump thump…
Porthole-Escape-Elevetaor-Apartment-Shutter… and a sabertooth tiger following him.
He wanted to relax; but he realized that his head had a desperate need to expel all the rot filling it, even in the form of pernicious fantasies. Physical effort, the circularity of the track, the ancestral, powerful, thunderous calls from the clouds… all those stimuli fighting against his balance, against the emotional armor inside which he knew he had hidden in order to go on and not give up. He didn’t want to see red cats on the bad, hear noises inside the walls.
Why on earth did he read that rubbish? He knew he was easily influenced and he also knew that everything that got into his brain would surface sooner or later. It was enough for him to be victim to the right amount of pressure, like in that moment, and everything started wavering.
Like the Tank.
Evelator-Apartment-Shutter-Porthole-Escape.
Running counterclockwise he bent slightly to the left. Thump thump thump. And with the right amount of concentration it wasn’t difficult to imagine that the Tank was abandoning its vertical axis, falling extremely slowly under its own weight. The ground – underneath and all around the building – was a swamp of rotten corpses, corroded and melt flesh, sick food for grass and worms. Tu-thump tu-thump tu-thump. And those tons and tons of steel and concrete couldn’t stay up anymore, however desperately the foundations tried not to sink in and let the Tank keep on towering…
Tu-thump… tu-thump…
It was while a thunder faded out in the distance that Giovanni realized he was hearing something new. And it did so suddenly , driving away any other useless speculation.
The noise of his steps had changed. Had… doubled?
Tu-thump tu-thump tu-thump tu-thump…
Without slowing down he focused on his hearing. Yes, there were no doubts. His quick and vigorous steps had started echoing along the Ring, a muffled reverb, yet a very audible one, that he hadn’t heard before.
The laws of physics couldn’t have suddenly changed without a reason. Maybe he had never noticed it before, while in that particular moment – because of the thunders, the tiredness, the blood pumping in his ears – he could, and that was all.
Yeah, it really seemed like…
(Don’t even think about it, Giovanni)
…someone else was in the Ring. Someone running, just like him.
He heard: Tu-thump tu-thump.
It was really eerie. The more his head revolved around that crazy idea, the more the impression of it being plausible grew stronger. The sounds bounced, rotated, intertwined…
As a result, it really looked like somebody was following him, or was running from him, constantly keeping on the opposite side, in the shadows of the Dark Side.
He tried slowing down. That strange acoustic phenomenon adapted immediately, slowing down the ghost that Giovanni’s mind kept on summoning. He then stopped, and so did the echo.
He remained still, panting, bending just enough to put his hands on his thighs. And listened. Beyond his own breathing, beyond the diminishing noise in the sky.
Nothing. And even if at a few meters from his hundreds of agonizing bodies contorted, he couldn’t hear any extraneous signals. The ghost had stopped, too.
What are you doing? You’re thinking about ghosts now?
Never. But he looked behind his back, driven by the image of a shadow slipping along the curved wall, announcing a human form. How would he react, had he really seen it? He hadn’t got his Beretta with him. Why would he ever run along the Ring armed? No, he was becoming paranoid. He had to snap out of it.
There was nobody else in there. And he let himself be fooled by sound-waves. He stood up again and heard some vertebrae click in response to the sudden movement. He brought a hand to his forehead. Hot and sweaty, of course. Was he catching the flu? Well, after supper he would probably take some medicine, go to bed, and good night. But now…
He couldn’t hold it. He sprinted forward, this time clockwise, and completed a lap among the slaps of his soles and the coughs, grinning because he couldn’t resist that temptation growing in his head like a fungus in a corner of his mind. Did he hope to find some intruders, using the surprise effect?
Now tired (how long did he run: half an hour?) and vaguely disgusted by his own fixations he went back to his apartment and decided he would find his calm and clarity of mind under a hot shower.
16 – The Interview
The following day began the wrong way.
The weird ideas that had filled his head the previous evening, as always, were washed away by a good night’s sleep, a couple of aspirins, cold water on his face and an abundant breakfast. But the aura of positivity that seemed to irradiate from the morning and from which Giovanni tapped to face each step of the day was destroyed in front of the Postman.
The icon message was blinking. He didn’t hear the beep. It had probably arrived when he was in the bathroom. He opened it without delay and stopped breathing for a few seconds.