Cover image: Painting by Eva Bovenzi, Black wing, 2022.
I’m the Director of Research and Development at a software company. That means I oversee innovation, sure—but it also means keeping the money flowing. My main job is to secure funding for new projects and manage relationships with both private and public investors. It sounds complicated, but it’s not.
Even dealing with my team isn’t complicated. I lead, they execute. Said like that, it might sound like the typical corporate hierarchy—something along the lines of: I am God, you are not. Be fruitful and multiply—and suffer while you’re at it. But that’s not how I see it. I honestly don’t care if they get an epidural—nobody has to suffer or sweat for my sake. I much prefer getting along with everyone. Or at least trying to.
Everyone knows my rule: if my office door is open, anyone can come in—preferably with coffee—to sit down and talk about anything. If the door’s closed, think twice before knocking. If it’s urgent, better to call me. Or even better—send me an email.
Long live asynchronous communication.
My attitude doesn’t come from some inflated sense of importance. I’m just aware of my own limits. When I’m stressed, I tend to overreact. And since I obviously don’t have a complete view of every possible consequence, my first instinct is simple: protect myself. Let me explain with an example.
Today I’m on edge. I don’t know why—maybe I slept badly, maybe it’s the rain, or maybe it’s because I have to dig up a six-year-old document that someone on Corporate Olympus has suddenly deemed critically important.
Either way, I’m tense. I’ve got a knot in my stomach that only a good surge of adrenaline could fix. I get to the office and, distracted, I leave the door open.
John walks in to tell me something about a meeting coming up in Seattle, and I try to trigger that much-needed adrenaline spike by telling him the report on Project Polaris is completely wrong, that I’ll have to get someone else to redo it, and that, in fact, as of today, he’s officially off the project. I also tell him to shut the door on his way out, but by then it’s too late.
This is the fourth workday in a row things have gone badly for John. Not coincidentally, it’s a Thursday. At 6:00 p.m., John goes home. After exchanging a few cold, distracted words with his wife, Erica, the two of them sit down and begin, once again, to reevaluate their situation. They do this every time one of them has had a rough day—which means, more or less, every day. With extreme civility, they decide it’s time to take a break. Maybe just for a little while, to think things over. And at the exact moment Erica says the word “breath”, right at the end of a sentence, the phone rings. John gets up and goes to answer it.
It’s Kate. She’s calling to see if John and Erica might want to grab dinner next week. As calmly as someone fully aware they’re about to drop a bomb, John replies that, for the time being, he and Erica should no longer be considered a couple. Kate swallows, says goodbye, hangs up, and mutters, “Shit,” as she walks back toward the dining room, passing between the TV and her four-year-old son, Ethan, who is staring intently at the main character of a Japanese cartoon—a vaguely techno-medieval warrior with bluish hair. Mark, still sitting at the dining table, is finishing a glass of red wine when he hears Kate’s exclamation. When she reaches him, he reminds her—without much conviction—not to use that kind of language in front of Ethan. Kate relays what John just told her, and the two of them drift into a half-hearted conversation about John and Erica. Neither one takes a side. They approach the topic from a distance, sketching out a few lame theories about relationships, goals, priorities, and the general idea of staying together.
The next day, Kate drops Ethan off at school. Ethan is in what they call a “mixed-age class”—kids from three to five, all learning and playing together. Kate and Mark had heard different opinions about it. Some people said having a four-year-old around both older and younger kids was great for social development. Others insisted it should be avoided at all costs. In the end, they chose the school closest to their home. It had the best parking. As usual, the moment Ethan walks into the classroom, he starts playing with the older kids. Then, out of nowhere, he yells, “Shit!” All the kids burst out laughing. Well—not all of them. Definitely not Finn, a five-year-old who’s terrified of bad words. They scare him because when he hears one, it gets stuck in his head—bouncing around his brain like an echo. He can’t forget it. He can’t stop it. The only way he knows to try to get rid of it is by shaking his head. Harder and harder. When the bell rings at the end of the school day, Finn, along with the rest of his class, gets on the bus to go home. He’s still shaking his head. Back and forth. Left and right. He gets off the bus at his stop and starts walking toward home, still shaking his head harder and harder. His glasses fall off and break. Now he’s scared. And instead of going home—where he knows he’d have to explain everything in reverse: how he broke his glasses, why he was shaking his head, and inevitably run into that word again—he picks up his glasses and starts walking. He walks past his house. And keeps going.
Finn walks for over an hour. He’s already wandered into a part of the city he doesn’t recognize. All of a sudden, he realizes someone’s following him. Then he feels a hand on his shoulder: an officer asks if he needs help. Terrified, Finn whirls around—and accidentally scrapes the officer’s hand with his broken glasses. The officer—his name is Rob—is young, a rookie assigned to community patrol. He pulls his hand back quickly, and in doing so, clips Finn in the face. It’s not exactly a slap, but it’s enough to make Finn burst into tears. Eventually, they both manage to calm down, and Rob walks Finn home.
When his shift ends, Rob heads home. Three hours earlier, at the precinct, his Commander had told him that some passerby had seen—and, of course, recorded with his mobile—the incident. They might even file a complaint. We’ll see what happens, he’d said. At home, Rob and Anna have fixed a cold dinner. Rob decides not to tell his wife anything—not yet. There’s no need to worry her about something that will probably resolve itself. The two of them watch the national news, then the regional broadcast. There’s the usual reporter with a slightly over-the-top intonation who, near the end of the segment, talks about an officer who will likely face trial for hitting an autistic child who had gotten lost. We’ll show you the footage taken by some bystanders, he says, and so on. Anna is shaken. Rob’s face is still staring back at her from the screen, right behind the reporter. She asks Rob to tell her what happened. Rob stammers, still frozen in shock from seeing his face—with his name—on TV. He seems unable to explain. His hands are cold, and he starts sweating. Anna gets up and goes to the bedroom. She closes the door. Rob hears her crying, and when he tries to go in—maybe now he’s figured out how to explain the facts—he realizes the door is locked. He walks back to the couch, and when he sees Anna leaving the apartment with a large bag, he doesn’t say a word.
Anna walks to the intersection, the evening growing darker with each passing moment. She gets into a taxi and gives the driver an address. It’s the address of a colleague of hers, Eric. But Eric isn’t just a colleague—they’ve known each other since high school. She arrives, rings the bell, and Eric lets her in. She’s shaking. He gestures for her to sit on the couch, but she doesn’t even bother to take off her coat. She starts telling him that her husband hit a kid in the street. He says he saw the news. He asks if her husband has explained himself. Anna answers, “No.” Eric sits beside her, wraps an arm around her shoulders. Anna rests her head on his shoulder and starts crying again. He gives her a friendly kiss on the top of her head, just as the door opens, and Paula—Eric’s girlfriend—is about to walk in.
From the doorway, through the living room door, Paula sees Eric and Anna on the couch. He’s holding her in his arms, burying his face in her hair. Paula raises her left eyebrow for a brief moment, then turns around and leaves quietly. Eric and Anna don’t notice a thing. Paula walks to a nearby bar. She’s been here before. She’s not angry—just a bit nauseous, with a vaguely metallic taste in her mouth. She sits at the counter and orders a vodka. The man sitting next to her stares at her. She pretends not to notice. The man places a hand—honestly, not very convincingly—on her thigh. Paula looks at the hand for a few seconds, as if it’s detached from the man’s body, like a dry leaf fallen from who knows where. Then she quickly gulps down the vodka, gets up, and sits at a table instead. She’s too tired to fight back. And anyway, she’s thinking about how to split the books—trying to remember which ones are hers and which are Eric’s. The man, still at the counter, watches her for a moment, not sure what to do with his hand, still resting, suspended, on her absent thigh. Then he goes back to his whisky, knocks it back in two large gulps, pays, gets up, and leaves the bar. His name is Frank.
Frank has just finalized his divorce. It happened only a few months ago. He didn’t take it well, and now he gets more and more into drinking. At work, he produces less and less. He’s almost fifty. When night falls, he doesn’t feel like staying home. He hops from bar to bar, until he realizes he can barely remember the way home. He walks for a while, then enters another bar and sits down. He doesn’t know why he did what he did. He’s not a harasser. Maybe he’s had more alcohol than he thinks. But now, in the crowded bar he has just entered, with the music a bit too loud, someone is staring at him. The man at the counter, in his thirties, is watching him. Then he says something Frank doesn’t understand, so he leans in a bit closer to hear him better. The guy is offering him cocaine. Frank shakes his head. The guy insists. Frank can barely hear him; the only thing he can think of, over and over again, is how he must have looked like an asshole in the last bar, he can still see the look of disgust in that woman’s eyes. The guy insists again. Frank realizes, for a moment, that they’re now walking together toward the bathroom, the guy practically pushing him. Once inside, the man shoves some white powder up Frank’s nose. Frank feels the urge to sneeze but instinctively holds it in. It feels like his head is going to explode. He can’t stop thinking about that woman and the asshole thing he did. He shoves the guy away and stumbles out of the bathroom. He trips as he exits the bar, maybe a little too forcefully, stepping right off the curb and into the street. He’s hit by a car. Two hours later, in the hospital, his toxicology report clearly reads “alcohol” and “cocaine”. The man behind the wheel is named Tom.
Tom wants to be kept updated about Frank’s condition. He is anxious to know, and the next day, after a sleepless night, he gets up very early and heads to the hospital. They won’t let him see Frank. A doctor tells him that during the night, Frank experienced intense pain in his back and lost consciousness several times. Tom doesn’t know what to think, and he stares at the doctor’s mouth as he continues to explain the matter, with what seems like total indifference. He’s saying that Frank was urgently taken into surgery around three in the morning. He was brought back to his bed around seven. Some kind of injury. Serious. It’s possible he won’t ever walk again. Tom doesn’t say anything. He goes home and locks himself in. He doesn’t know what to do. Actually, yes, he does. He opens the small safe in the living room and pulls out a .38 revolver. He sits on the bed and stays there for hours, the gun in his hand. Then he slips it into his belt, puts on a jacket, and heads out. He walks for half an hour, then decides to take a taxi and head out of town. A strange thought slid into his mind: out there, he’d make less noise. He asks the driver to take him to the hills. There’s an old farmhouse he knows, the real estate agency he works for has been trying to sell it for at least two years. The day is getting hotter. The taxi stops at a traffic light. Tom rolls down the window. A skinny guy, with a long beard, dirty hair pulled back into a pony tail, and wearing a jacket too heavy for the season, walks up to the window, presses a screwdriver to Tom’s throat, and tells him to hand him his wallet. Tom complies. As Tom is pulling out the wallet, the guy sees the gun. He hesitates for a moment, then presses the screwdriver harder against Tom’s throat and tells him to hand over the gun too. Slowly. Tom gives the gun to Nick, the junkie. Then the light turns green, and the taxi speeds off, tires squealing, the driver, pale, his eyes bulging out of his head.
Nick has never held a gun in his life. He’s totally high. He stumbles into a record store, trips, falls, gets back up, and shouts, “Everybody freeze! hands up, give me the fucking money!” He notices that everyone is a little stunned and staring at him, mostly with indifference. He fires the .38 and kills four people—including me. I had gone into the store to buy a couple of CDs, hoping it might shake the feeling of nervousness that had been gnawing at me for a few days. Just like that. Bang bang bang. Dead.
Got it? That’s why I keep my office door closed sometimes. Because chaos doesn’t start big. It starts small. And it listens for open doors.
Michele Carenini was born in Arezzo in 1963 and has lived in Pietrasanta, Melbourne, Pisa, Bologna, and Edinburgh, before settling once again in Bologna, where he has lived for several years. With a background in Mathematical Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, he manages international high-tech projects for a major multinational corporation and serves as a consultant for various European Commission agencies. In addition to numerous scientific publications, he has published short stories in magazines and anthologies over the years.
