by Jeffrey Ford
“Thanks,” he said. “Maybe if I can unload the set eventually that’ll be at least one thing on the scale in my favor.” He got up then and went behind the bar. When he came back, he was carrying a chessboard and on it were the golden pieces. He laid it down on the table between us.
“Man, they’re beautiful,” I told him.
“Listen, you gotta get going home now,” he said, the same as he had so many years ago. “I had a couple of rough-looking characters in here the other day, and I showed them the set, told them how much it was worth and that I kept it behind the bar all the time. It’s getting past midnight, and there’s a chance they’ll show up. I know the old man let Maria see it and told her about it for the same reason I’ve been flaunting it lately. Maybe when they come for it, I’ll get some of the old juice back like Desnia did, and we’ll have a good brawl.”
I stood up, a little wobbly from the bottle of VO we’d finished. “There’s no other way?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I turned and took in the mural one last time, because I knew I would never come back again. Bobby looked it over too.
“You know,” he said, “I bet you always thought that guy in the boat was trying to get to the island, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“The truth is, he’s been trying to escape all these years. Those women look like women to you, but count ’em—there are as many as there are pieces in a chess set.”
“I hope he makes it,” I said, and then reached out and shook Bobby’s hand.
Leaving The Tropics behind, I stepped onto the sidewalk and stood there for a minute to get my bearings. The night was cold, and I realized autumn was only a week away. I turned my collar up and walked along, searching my mind, without success, for the warmth from that painted vision of paradise. Instead, all I could think of was my old man, sitting in his recliner, smiling like the Buddha, while the world he once knew slowly disintegrated around him. I turned off Higbee onto my block and was nearly home, when from somewhere away in the distance, I heard a gunshot.
A Night in the Tropics
Story Notes
I think I had my old boy, Kipling, in mind when I wrote this one. I’d been rereading a lot of my favorite stories of his, especially “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows,” just before I wrote it. “A Night in the Tropics” was populated with characters right out of central casting from my early days in West Islip. The bar and the painting actually did exist. I know the bar is still there. In fact, a guy I grew up with now owns it, but I haven’t been in to check up on the painting in about fifteen years. The part about the gang robbing a blind man who pulled a sword on them is a true tale, as is a goodly portion of the rest of the story. Fellow writer, Rick Bowes, the Albert Schweitzer of story doctors, read the piece in an early draft and suggested a few key changes that really made a big difference. As a tip of the hat to him, I used his name for the guy in the story who buys gold teeth down on Canal Street. This story was written for Lou Anders for the first issue of the new Argosy Magazine. No doubt by some enchantment of Isiaso’s magic, the story clawed its way onto Locus’s Best of the Best list for 2003.
The Empire of Ice Cream
Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superseded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders—the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes as a golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus. There is a certain imported Swiss cheese I am fond of that is all triangles, whereas the feel of silk against my fingers rests on my tongue with the flavor and consistency of lemon meringue. These perceptions are not merely thoughts, but concrete physical experiences. Depending upon how you see it, I, like approximately nine out of every million individuals, am either cursed or blessed with a condition known as synesthesia.
It has only recently come to light that the process of synesthesia takes place in the hippocampus, part of the ancient limbic system, where remembered perceptions triggered in diverse geographical regions of the brain as the result of an external stimulus come together. It is believed that everyone, at a point somewhere below consciousness, experiences this coinciding of sensory association, yet in most it is filtered out and only a single sense is given predominance in one’s waking world. For we lucky few, the filter is broken or perfected, and what is usually subconscious becomes conscious. Perhaps, at some distant point in history, our early ancestors were completely synesthetic and touched, heard, smelled, tasted, and saw, at once, each specific incident, the mixing of sensoric memory along with the perceived sense, without affording precedence to the findings of one of the five portals through which “reality” invades us. The scientific explanations, as far as I can follow them, seem to make sense now, but when I was young and told my parents about the whisper of vinyl, the stench of purple, the spinning blue gyres of the church bell, they feared I was defective and that my mind was brimming with hallucinations like an abandoned house choked with ghosts.
As an only child, I wasn’t afforded the luxury of being anomalous. My parents were well on in years—my mother nearly forty, my father already forty-five—when I arrived after a long parade of failed pregnancies. The fact that, at age five, I heard what I described as an angel crying whenever I touched velvet would never be allowed to stand, but was seen as an illness to be cured by whatever methods were available. Money was no object in the pursuit of perfect normalcy. And so my younger years were a torment of hours spent in the waiting rooms of psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists. I can’t find words to describe the depths of medical quackery I was subjected to by a veritable army of so-called professionals who diagnosed me with everything from schizophrenia to bipolar depression to low IQ caused by muddled potty training. Being a child, I was completely honest with them about what I experienced, and this, my first mistake, resulted in blood tests, brain scans, special diets, and the forced consumption of a demon’s pharmacopeia of mind-deadening drugs that diminished my will but not the vanilla scent of slanting golden sunlight on late autumn afternoons.
My only-child status along with the added complication of my “condition,” as they called it, led my parents to perceive me as fragile. For this reason I was kept fairly isolated from other children. Part of it, I’m sure, had to do with the way my abnormal perceptions and utterances would reflect upon my mother and father, for they were the type of people who could not bear to be thought of as having been responsible for the production of defective goods. I was tutored at home by my mother instead of being allowed to attend school. She was actually a fine teacher, having a PhD in history and a firm grasp of classical literature. My father, an actuary, taught me math, and in this subject I proved to be an unquestionable failure until I reached college age. Although x=y might have been a suitable metaphor for the phenomenon of synesthesia, it made no sense on paper. The number 8, by the way, reeks of withered flowers.
What I was good at was music. Every Thursday at 3:00 in the afternoon, Mrs. Brithnic would arrive at the house to give me a piano lesson. She was a kind old lady with thinning white hair and the most beautiful fingers—long and smooth, as if they belonged to a graceful young giantess. Although something less than a virtuoso at the keys, she was a veritable genius at teaching me to allow myself to enjoy the sounds I produced. Enjoy them I did, and when I wasn’t being dragged hither and yon in the pursuit of losing my affliction, home base for me was the piano bench. In my imposed isolation from the world, music became a window of escape I would crawl through as often as possible.
When I would play, I could see the notes before me like a fireworks display of colors and shapes. By my twelfth year I was writing my own compositions, and my notations on the pages accompanying the notes referred to the visual displays that coincided with them. In actuality, when I played, I was rea
lly painting—in midair before my eyes—great abstract works in the tradition of Kandinsky. Many times, I planned a composition on a blank piece of paper using the crayon set of sixty-four colors I’d had since early childhood. The only difficulty in this was with colors like magenta and cobalt blue, which I perceive primarily as tastes, so I would have to write them down in pencil as licorice and tapioca on my colorfully scribbled drawing where they would appear in the music.
My punishment for having excelled at the piano was to lose my only real friend, Mrs. Brithnic. I remember distinctly the day my mother let her go. She calmly nodded, smiling, understanding that I had already surpassed her abilities. Still, though I knew this was the case, I cried when she hugged me goodbye. When her face was next to mine, she whispered into my ear, “Seeing is believing,” and in that moment I knew she had completely understood my plight. Her lilac perfume, the sound of one nearly inaudible B-flat played by an oboe, still hung about me as I watched her walk down the path and out of my life for good.
I believe it was the loss of Mrs. Brithnic that made me rebel. I became desultory and despondent. Then one day, soon after my thirteenth birthday, instead of obeying my mother, who had just told me to finish reading a textbook chapter while she showered, I went to her pocketbook, took five dollars, and left the house. As I walked along beneath the sunlight and blue sky, the world around me seemed brimming with life. What I wanted more than anything else was to meet other young people my own age. I remembered an ice-cream shop in town where, when passing by in the car returning from whatever doctor’s office we had been to, there always seemed to be kids hanging around. I headed directly for that spot while wondering if my mother would catch up to me before I made it. When I pictured her drying her hair, I broke into a run.
Upon reaching the row of stores that contained The Empire of Ice Cream, I was out of breath as much from the sheer exhilaration of freedom as from the half-mile sprint. Peering through the glass of the front door was like looking through a portal into an exotic other world. Here were young people, my age, gathered in groups at tables, talking, laughing, eating ice cream—not by night, after dinner, but in the middle of broad daylight. I opened the door and plunged in. The magic of the place seemed to brush by me on its way out as I entered, for the conversation instantly died away. I stood in the momentary silence as all heads turned to stare at me.
“Hello,” I said, smiling, and raised my hand in greeting, but I was too late. They had already turned away, the conversation resumed, as if they had merely afforded a grudging glimpse to see the door open and close at the behest of the wind. I was paralyzed by my inability to make an impression, the realization that finding friends was going to take some real work.
“What’ll it be?” said a large man behind the counter.
I broke from my trance and stepped up to order. Before me, beneath a bubble dome of glass, lay the Empire of Ice Cream. I’d never seen so much of the stuff in so many colors and incarnations—with nuts and fruit, cookie and candy bits, mystical swirls the sight of which sounded to me like a distant siren. There were deep vats of it set in neat rows totaling thirty flavors. My diet had never allowed for the consumption of confections or desserts of any type, and rare were the times I had so much as a thimbleful of vanilla ice cream after dinner. Certain doctors had told my parents that my eating these treats might seriously exacerbate my condition. With this in mind, I ordered a large bowl of coffee ice cream. My choice of coffee stemmed from the fact that that beverage was another item on the list of things I should never taste.
After paying, I took my bowl and spoon and found a seat in the corner of the place from which I could survey all the other tables. I admit that I had some trepidations about digging right in, since I’d been warned against it for so long by so many adults. Instead, I scanned the shop, watching the other kids talking, trying to overhear snatches of conversation. I made eye contact with a boy my own age two tables away. I smiled and waved to him. He saw me and then leaned over and whispered something to the other fellows he was with. All four of them turned, looked at me, and then broke into laughter. It was a certainty they were making fun of me, but I basked in the victory of merely being noticed. With this, I took a large spoonful of ice cream and put it in my mouth.
There is an attendant phenomenon of the synesthetic experience I have yet to mention. Of course I had no term for it at this point in my life, but when one is in the throes of the remarkable transference of senses, it is accompanied by a feeling of “epiphany,” a “eureka” of contentment that researchers of the anomalous condition would later term noetic, borrowing from William James. That first taste of coffee ice cream elicited a deeper noetic response than I’d ever before felt, and along with it came the appearance of a girl. She coalesced out of thin air and stood before me, obscuring my sight of the group that was still laughing. Never before had I seen through tasting, hearing, touching, smelling, something other than simple abstract shapes and colors.
She was turned somewhat to the side and hunched over, wearing a plaid skirt and a white blouse. Her hair was the same dark brown as my own, but long and gathered in the back with a green rubber band. There was a sudden shaking of her hand, and it became clear to me that she was putting out a match. Smoke swirled away from her. I could see now that she had been lighting a cigarette. I got the impression that she was wary of being caught in the act of smoking. When she turned her head sharply to look back over her shoulder, I dropped the spoon on the table. Her look instantly enchanted me.
As the ice cream melted away down my throat, she began to vanish, and I quickly lifted the spoon to restoke my vision, but it never reached my lips. She suddenly went out like a light when I felt something land softly upon my left shoulder. I heard the incomprehensible murmur of recrimination, and knew it as my mother’s touch. She had found me. A great wave of laughter accompanied my removal from The Empire of Ice Cream. Later I would remember the incident with embarrassment, but for the moment, even as I spoke words of apology to my mother, I could think only of what I’d seen.
The ice-cream incident—followed hard by the discovery of the cigar box of pills I hid in my closet, all of the medication that I’d supposedly swallowed for the past six months—led my parents to believe that heaped upon my condition was now a tendency toward delinquency that would grow, if unchecked, in geometrical proportion with the passing of years. It was decided that I should see yet another specialist to deal with my behavior, a therapist my father had read about who would prompt me to talk my willfulness into submission. I was informed of this in a solemn meeting with my parents. What else was there to do but acquiesce? I knew that my mother and father wanted, in their pedestrian way, what they believed was best for me. Whenever the situation would infuriate me, I would go to the piano and play, sometimes for three or four hours at a time.
Dr. Stullin’s office was in a ramshackle Victorian house on the other side of town. My father accompanied me on the first visit, and, when he pulled up in front of the sorry old structure, he checked the address at least twice to make sure we’d come to the right place. The doctor, a round little man with a white beard and glasses with small circular lenses, met us at the front door. Why he laughed when we shook hands at the introductions, I hadn’t a clue, but he was altogether jolly, like a pint-sized Santa Claus dressed in a wrinkled brown suit one size too small. He swept out his arm to usher me into his house, but when my father tried to enter, the doctor held up his hand and said, “You will return in one hour and five minutes.”
My father gave some weak protest and said that he thought he might be needed to help discuss my history to this point. Here the doctor’s demeanor instantly changed. He became serious, official, almost commanding.
“I’m being paid to treat the boy. You will have to find your own therapist.”
My father was obviously at a loss. He looked as if he was about to object, but the doctor said, “One hour and five minutes.” Following me inside, he quickly shut the door beh
ind him.
As he led me through a series of unkempt rooms lined with crammed bookshelves, and one in which piles of paper covered the tops of tables and desks, he said, laughing, “Parents—so essential, yet sometimes like something you have stepped in and cannot get off your shoe. What else is there but to love them?”
We wound up in a room at the back of the house made from a skeleton of thin steel girders and paneled with glass panes. The sunlight poured in, and surrounding us, at the edges of the place, and also hanging from some of the girders, were green plants. There was a small table on which sat a teapot and two cups and saucers. As I took the seat he motioned for me to sit in, I looked out through the glass and saw that the backyard was one large, magnificent garden, blooming with all manner of colorful flowers.
After he poured me a cup of tea, the questioning began. I’d had it in my mind to be as recalcitrant as possible, but there was something in the manner in which he had put my father off that I admired about him. Also, he was unlike other therapists I had been to, who would listen to my answers with complete reservation of emotion or response. When he asked why I was here and I told him it was because I had escaped in order to go to the ice-cream shop, he scowled and said, “Patently ridiculous.” I was unsure if he meant me or my mother’s response to what I’d done. I told him about playing the piano, and he smiled warmly and nodded. “That is a good thing,” he said.
After he asked me about my daily routine and my home life, he sat back and said, “So, what’s the problem? Your father has told me that you hallucinate. Can you explain?”
No matter how ingratiating he had been, I’d already decided that I would no longer divulge any of my perceptions to anyone. Then he did something unexpected.
“Do you mind?” he asked as he took out a pack of cigarettes.
Before I could shake my head no, he had one out of the pack and lit. Something about this, perhaps because I’d never seen a doctor smoke in front of a patient before, perhaps because it reminded me of the girl who had appeared before me in the ice-cream shop, weakened my resolve to say nothing. When he flicked his ashes into his half-empty teacup, I started talking. I told him about the taste of silk, the various corresponding colors for the notes of the piano, the nauseating stench of purple.