I called out, “Which freezer for ice cubes?”
“Left one,” he called back.
“What’s in the right one?” I asked, but then answered my own question by lifting the lid and finding inside the frozen head of a middle-aged man. His eyes were open. He looked a little judgmental. His prominent nose was thickly encased in ice.
“My father’s frozen head,” said my friend, coming into the kitchen. “Don’t tell me how the script is!” he added quickly, raising both palms toward me. “Just don’t say anything until you’ve read the whole thing. I know it’s bad.”
“No,” I lied. “Not at all.”
“It’s terrible, I know. But I want it all at once. Your critique, I mean. Also, even though he’s dead and frozen, I don’t like talking about my scripts in front of my father.”
He put on the leather work gloves and picked up his father’s frozen head. That was the sole purpose of these gloves, it seemed, picking up this ice-encrusted head.
“Probably curious why I have my dad’s frozen head in a freezer,” he said.
“Not if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t mind. Want to hold him? There’s another pair of gloves under the sink.”
“No, thank you.”
“It’s nothing, it’s just like holding a big icy rock.”
“Is it safe out of the freezer? It won’t, like, melt?”
He addressed the head as one would a baby: “Oh, we won’t let you melt, will we, Daddy?” Then, to me, he added, “He can be out for approximately fifteen minutes. Have a seat. Ice cubes are over there, by the way. So, what do you know about cryogenic freezing?”
I told him I actually knew of an Ottoman historian who was nearly cryogenically frozen, and in fact believed he was going to be cryogenically frozen, but unbeknownst to him was buried instead.
“Interesting. My dad was a historian, too.”
“Of what?”
“Of American labor movements.” He held up his father’s frozen head in front of his own and intoned humorously: “In that year the AFL and CIO merged to become the AFL–CIO.”
“Ha.”
“Samuel Gompers,” he intoned humorously, behind his father’s head. “SAMUEL GOMPERS.”
I laughed again, but I was thinking: I really hope I would treat my father’s frozen head with more respect than this guy treats his father’s frozen head.
The funerary circumstances of the labor historian were, it emerged, rather different from those of the Ottoman historian. The labor historian wanted to be cremated, not preserved at very low temperatures. “I was the one who wanted him frozen,” the son admitted.
On the table a small pool of water was forming under his father’s frozen head. I said, “Shall we put him back in the freezer? This is making me a little nervous.”
“I’ve done this like a million times,” he said, sort of annoyed, as he sponged up his father’s water with a rag and tossed his script, which I’d brought into the kitchen, to the far side of the table, out of range of the runoff from his father’s head.
The father wanted to be cremated, the son wanted him frozen. Why? Because, when the father died a decade ago, the son was at a “low point.” He had dropped out of college. He was making collage art—the ironic inflection is his — in Berlin. He had been operating under the assumption that he would have at least twenty or thirty more years in which to achieve success and impress his father, a respected public intellectual with a prestigious chair at Princeton. But instead his father died abruptly of pancreatic cancer at fifty-two. “You died thinking I was a failure,” my friend said tragically to his father’s frozen head, whose fleshy left ear was now almost entirely thawed out.
Was he killing his frozen father right in front of me? Killing, I should say, any hopes of future reanimation? He kept sponging up more and more of his father’s head water with that sopping rag and wringing it out one-handedly over the sink. What else could I say, though? “Put your father’s decapitated head back in the freezer, or I’m outta here”? That would sound rather dramatic. If the guy wants to let his dad’s head thaw out, I thought, let him thaw it out. It’s none of my business.
Now his father’s eyebrow ice was melting. One silvery strand poked free at a ferociously intelligent angle. As the layer of ice over his eyes thinned, I noticed that he seemed less judgmental and more just sort of skeptical and disappointed.
“Look at that!” my friend cried, pointing at his father’s eyes.
“What?”
“See the pupils kind of darting back and forth a little bit?”
“Are they?”
“He’s trying to read my screenplay from all the way across the table.” My friend shut the script and admonished the head: “No! No!”
“The neuroscience of it is pretty fascinating,” he whispered to me. “There are still brain waves. Not enough to have a conversation or anything, but he’s constantly trying to read my screenplays. Can I ask you one thing about what you’ve read so far, by the way?”
“Sure.”
“Never mind,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll wait till you finish. It’s about the scene at the laundromat, which you probably already got to, but I’ll let you finish first.”
Thank God. The laundromat scene was awful.
He returned to his story. Only once had he suggested the idea of cryopreservation to his father, right before he died. His father had ridiculed the idea. “The last bauble rich folks can buy,” he’d said, and then repeated his wish to be cremated. Those were his last words.
Ordinarily his mother would have taken the lead on the funeral arrangements, but she was too distraught, my friend said. So she gave her son enough money for a decent cremation and trusted him to take care of it. Bad idea. He took the money and his father’s corpse to a budget cryogenics facility. Bad idea number two. The budget facility was all he could afford with the cremation money. At first they seemed competent enough. They cut off the labor historian’s head and stored it in a fancy-looking freezer. So far, so good. But three years later the company was bankrupt. They announced that the freezers would be unplugged at the end of the week. What could my friend do? He ran to the cryogenics facility with a bag of ice from 7-Eleven, took his dad’s frozen head home, and stuck it in the freezer. Later he bought another freezer, wholly devoted to the head. “Hence the dual freezer arrangement,” he said with pride, perching his father’s head on his lap and thumping both freezers at once.
The last seven or so years of his life, his father’s frozen head had accompanied him everywhere. He went back to college, and his father’s head came, too. The frozen head looked relieved during that period, according to my friend, who even remembers seeing a faint smile. Then they moved to Manhattan, my friend and the head, for a job interning at Scott Rudin’s film production company. That was a hard year. Every night when he got back to his Alphabet City walk-up, there was his dad’s head in the freezer, looking a little dubious. A kind of is-this-what-you-really-want-out-of-life? expression, according to my friend. Then things got worse. Rudin fired him. The head was furious! From its face it was clear the head wanted to have a little chat with Mr. Rudin. The son was tempted. He actually put his father’s head in a bag of ice, hailed a cab, and was halfway to Rudin’s office before he realized what a huge mistake he was making. If he hoped to succeed in the biz, he probably didn’t want a reputation as “that guy who brought in his father’s frozen head to confront Scott Rudin.” He had the cab turn around. That night he stayed up till three talking to the frozen head, and the next morning he applied to film school at USC.