Carol’s Freezer
A 9/11 short story
It was November when I got back to Rome. The rain was beating on the roofs that had been cleaned of asbestos the month before and it soaked the beggars’ hats, it was up to them to collect those few coins from the bottom of the wretched Trevi fountains of our times.
The administrator of our condo was a bastard: he had misspelled my name on the doorbell and hadn’t gotten around to correcting it yet.
He continued to call me Finardi. Like the Italian singer.
As I was saying, I’d returned to Rome. I’d come back with a new set of eyes and a new pair of coloured frames. I’d been operated on in Southern Italy, bontà mia. I’d finally gotten up the courage to get rid of my nearsightedness but since I couldn’t get used to seeing myself without glasses I’d decided to get a pair with normal non-prescription lenses. It was also a question of vanity, I confess. There are people who do 100 sunlamp sessions or spend years at the beautician’s and even become their good friend. I, instead, put on glasses.
As soon as I got out of the elevator, I found a note under the door of my apartment. It was a message from my neighbour, at No. 17. Her name was Carol but I’d never actually met her. Some time ago I had helped her solve a blackout in her apartment, but even then she wasn’t home. It was the cleaning lady who had asked me to help her. A few days later I remember having received a note in which Carol thanked me and promised that she would have stopped by soon. Then, nothing until today.
The note said:
Dear Marco, could you take a quick look at the freezer? I don’t think it’s working well but I’m hopeless when it comes to these things. The keys are under the doormat. Sorry, when I get back from work I’ll ring your doorbell so that we can finally meet. Kisses, Carol
I got the keys and went inside her house. I admit that I was curious to see what it looked like. I knew that the girl lived by herself, so I was sure that nobody would be there. It was all very neat. There was a long luminous corridor that connected the living room, decorated with wooden furniture and a huge very kitsch golden chandelier, to the bedroom. In between, there was the kitchen and the bathroom. It looked like a furnished apartment that had never really been lived in, like the stage sets used in the famous American soap operas with the canned laughter that gets on your nerves. Aside from that, the only object in the house that seemed to be real and in working order was the frig. I could hear its constant droning polluted only by the ticking of the clock on the wall, the type that mechanics or opticians give you as a present. It was a loud and persistent droning, a noise that seemed to be the sum total of lots of other little ones.
I was about to open the freezer door when I noticed the calendar attached to it. It was stuck on the month of November of 2005. This Carol must be very distracted or otherwise very busy not to notice that the calendar was eight years old. Maybe she was the lazy type or perhaps she was particularly attached to that period. There was a date circled, 11 November 2005, and a newspaper clipping stuck to it with a thumbtack.
Russian woman finds alien and freezes it for two years
This is what it said:
It appears that she heard a deafening explosion out in the garden of her house in Novosibirsk and found metal debris scattered all around a small monstrous looking creature, one metre tall, huge and dilated black eyes and skin of a very strange consistency. The woman picked up the alien and, having ascertained that it was dead, preserved it in the freezer, among the steaks and the vegetables, for two years.
Obviously the story ends with a couple of G-men who apparently confiscated everything and the woman finds herself having to tell everybody that she isn’t crazy.
Be that as it may, I opened the freezer and remained there with my mouth hanging open.
In front of my eyes a colossal city in miniature spread out.
Skyscrapers everywhere, and lots of parallel streets neatly laid out teeming with thousands of tiny men made of ice. They moved around frenetically, in their elegant suits in the cold ice, like the night, like the streets of Florence in January. I could see an incredible number of tiny elegant men converging towards one particular area, a small plaza with in the middle the statue of a bull made of ice. And there, not far away, I could see the TV towers of the two most famous skyscrapers of the city begin to melt.
There was New York inside Carol’s freezer.
There was New York inside Carol’s freezer. That’s what I kept repeating to myself following that terrible moment. Then I got myself under control and slammed the freezer door shut, leaning against it with my back, bug-eyed. That droning, therefore, was not the noise of the refrigerator motor. It was the hubbub of the tiny brokers speaking on their cell phones with microscopic earplugs and the pounding of their shoes on the sidewalk. A deafening aggregate of each and every step on the sidewalks of New York.
I ran all the way back home. I’d written on the note that there was nothing wrong with the freezer, that everything was OK and stuck it under her door. I’d even thought of going to see a doctor the following day, to try to explain the thing to him in some way. I was convinced that inside that freezer there were thousands and thousands of tiny men along with all of their hopes, and fears and joys who were playing the stock market on Wall Street while looking at the World Trade Centre towering above their tiny semi-transparent profiles.
That night, while I was trying to fall asleep, I thought about that droning. In fact, maybe I actually heard it, that droning sound. I drank a camomile but it seemed like boiling coffee. Around four in the morning I heard a huge flock of seagulls cawing outside my balcony. I went out bare-chested in that cold November air, in this November of the year 6 D.C. where the C naturally stands for “Crisis” and I saw them. Hundreds of seagulls producing that sound so similar to human laughter but with a completely different meaning. I stayed there watching them for the longest time, while I saw them laugh at us with gusto. They circled calmly over our heads, convinced that it was only a question of time before they would have won. They would have taken over Rome and Paris, then Tokyo and finally Berlin. It was a cold war focused on their patience and on our incapacity to be cured. Then I abruptly went back inside taking refuge in my huge bed and I managed to fall into a restless sleep, demoralized in a way that it’s useless to describe in words.
The following morning there was another note under my door.
Dear Marco, Thanks for trying to solve the problem with the freezer the other day. I know that it’s a rather challenging job. I’ve never managed to do it myself, but I’m sure that sooner or later you’ll find the solution. As you’ve probably noticed it’s a old freezer but I’m very attached to it. The keys are still under the doormat. Thanks, Carol
I couldn’t believe it. I went into the apartment (mine this time) and for a moment sat down on the bed. It was Autumn, an Autumn that penetrated deep in my guts and in everything else, in the air made pallid by the neon lights of the hairdresser. Dampness everywhere and not a job to be found. When I needed to distract myself, I’d go to Villa Ada to watch the leaves falling down which I interpreted when I was young as the tree yielding to its surroundings. Now I don’t see it that way anymore, but despite the fact that one interprets it as a perfectly natural phenomenon, the weight that I felt inside was the same.
I lifted my head towards the ceiling of the room I was renting under the counter. In the apartment above me, the sound of high heels could be heard racing down the corridor, running off I bet towards another weekend at Piazza Trilussa or Campo dei fiori.
As you’ve probably noticed it’s a old freezer but I’m very attached to it.
Maybe I did it because I had nothing better to do than just hang around feeling sorry for myself. Whatever the reason, I took a screwdriver and went out the door. I took the keys out from under the doormat and opened the door.
As soon as I entered I got hit with this deafening buzz coming from the kitchen. It was something that got inside your brain and occupied it completely, like those guys occupying the Valle Theater or those seagulls from the night before. The house was decorated in a completely different way from the previous day. There were no paintings on the walls and even some of the furniture had disappeared. It all looked a bit more dated, not much, just slightly. When I entered the kitchen, the buzzing of the frig became unbearable but it didn’t keep me from glancing at the calendar. It read 2001, September 2001 to be exact. There was a cross on the second Tuesday of the month.
Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z
Despite my uneasiness I remember having tried with all my strength to pull open the freezer door but without success. After more than ten minutes I started forcing it open with the screwdriver. I could feel the door giving way slightly and, after a couple more minutes, it flew open. The noise, a terrible high-pitched sound worse than the buzzing of before, started to invade the kitchen and at the same time this steady white smoke was coming out of the freezer, but I had great difficulty understanding what I was seeing because of the noise. A noise that made me suffer down to the bottom of my soul.
While I put down the screwdriver and started moving towards the freezer I tried to cover my ears with my hands to muffle that terrible racket. Now I was beginning to see what was going on in there.
The two towers of the World Trade Centre were burning relentlessly. I could see thousands and thousands of little ice men screaming in terror and running away from the zone of the disaster. So that’s what that buzzing noise was, it was the screams of these men and women overwhelmed by the series of attacks. All of a sudden it was 9:59 and with a sound of breaking eggs I saw the South Tower suddenly collapse and a terrible ZZZZZZZZZZZZ filled my brain and all of its passages. These were scenes that I could clearly remember having taken place in my previous life, a easier and less hectic life that had ended on that day.
The dynamics of the disaster were perfectly clear to me and in the same way inside that freezer everything was taking place in a precise manner, clear and indistinct. At 10:28 the second tower would collapse, the North Tower, and together with it the lives of thousands of little men would abruptly come to an end.
Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z
***
The noise filled my head and before my eyes the smoke was spreading, thousands of cases of suffering in miniature to be confronted with the natural size suffering that I knew was taking place outside of that freezer, beyond that house, thoughts that I put aside for now in the face of the recurrence of this catastrophe. No place to take shelter.
At that precise moment, Carol showed up. She was colourless, a beautiful vision in black and white that didn’t prevent me from imagining her blond, dressed in black and smoking a cigarette. Sunglasses to protect her eyes. She didn’t seem surprised to find me there nor was she curious about the confusion reigning in her freezer.
Stepping over the pieces of ice and water all over her kitchen, she came right up to me and touched the tip of my nose with hers. She slowly lowered her sunglasses and stared at me with her huge eyes. They were the colour of ice and they didn’t blink while she pronounced the only phrase that I ever heard her say.
This frig is twelve years old.
What can we do? was the only question that came to my mind. A living person can always do one of two things. One is wait. The other is take action. When was the last I took action? I couldn’t even remember. It’s been a while now that I don’t include studying in my list of actions undertaken. It’s become more of a conditioned reflex, a sort of out-of-habit mental gargling that you do in view of the next written exam of the next public competition, the winners of which are already known. While I was thinking about it I stared at the burning towers and I could see tiny half melted men waving white rags from the shining open windows.
Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z
And then I saw him, the man who falls.
I hadn’t forgotten that scene. Throwing himself without any hope, he who a few hours before had thought it was just another normal day, in front of his Dell computer preparing Excel spreadsheets and life is so unpredictable that while he spun around in the air he thought that never would he have imagined regretting that air conditioned routine as the adrenaline and the terror shot sky high with the approaching asphalt. I could see that man step up to the edge of the window looking right and left, searching for some rational solution that wasn’t to be. And soon after he would have jumped into the void. It was a story that I remembered very well. Despite the smoke, I stuck my head in the freezer to observe these living creatures from close up as they scrambled onto the window ledges looking for a way to escape that doesn’t exist.
As the smoke started to clear, I remember flinching in shock and hitting my head inside the top of the freezer.
These tiny men’s faces resembled the faces of my friends who had graduated from the university and couldn’t find a job. They were all there, even the most distant ones.
And I was there too. Wearing the pre-operation tortoise shell frames that I’d been forced to wear at that time. Balanced precariously on top of this burning skyscraper that was about to collapse. Now the time had come to act. Stalling wouldn’t have worked any more.
It was time to take the plunge.
And my Myself made of ice did it.
I could see him spinning around helplessly in the murky air of a New York under attack such as would happen, twelve years later, in Bologna, Milano, Sciacca and that marvellous Rome abandoned to itself that I knew so well. The most beautiful phantom city of all times. I wanted to reach out with my hands to try to save that miniature copy of myself that was falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Centre on a limpid afternoon in New York but I couldn’t interfere with the events taking place inside the freezer of that glacial Carol dressed in black and white. I could only relive the event hoping to draw some belated lessons.
I was about to hit the ground when I turned my head towards Carol so as not to look, in tears for this subzero tragedy that I was forced to experience again after so many years. Carol was still staring at me. She had taken my head in her colourless hands and while she was doing it the buzzing was overwhelming us:
Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z
In any case before passing out I remember seeing her moving her lips and clearly enunciate the words:
This frig is twelve years old.
Then the buzzing of the firemen and of the masses that were dying drowned out everything else, and I lost consciousness.
When I woke up there hadn’t been any phantasmagoric changes in the scenery. The rain continued to beat on the roofs that had been cleaned of asbestos the month before and the fingers of the beggars were collecting coins from the sodden hats set down on the sidewalk. I was laying down on the floor of Carol’s kitchen. The freezer door was wide open, with a sea of white foam that had dripped down to the foot of the frig reminding me of some sperm whales I’d seen stranded on the beach on any old day after 9/11 around Capojale. The only objects that I managed to recognize were some nasty little cutters, a miniature of an American passport issued in the name of a certain Mohamed Atta and some fragments of my infamous pre-op tortoise shell frames.
