by Jeffrey Ford
I arrived by cab at my parents’ house and had to let myself in. Their car was gone, and I supposed they were out for the day. I hadn’t seen them in some months and almost missed their presence. When night descended and they didn’t return, I thought it odd but surmised they were on one of the short vacations they often took. It didn’t matter. I sat at my old home base on the piano bench and sucked on coffee-flavored hard candies until I grew too weary to sit up. Then I got into my childhood bed, turned to face the wall as I always had when I was little, and fell asleep.
The next day, after breakfast, I resumed my vigil that had begun on the long bus trip home. By that afternoon my suspicions as to what had become of my fugue were confirmed. The candy didn’t bring as clear a view of Anna as did the ice cream, let alone the black coffee, but it was focused enough for me to follow her through her day. I was there when she submitted my crayon score as her art project for the end-of-the-semester review. How she was able to appropriate it, I have no idea. It defied logic. In the fleeting glimpses I got of the work, I tried to piece together how I had gone about weaving the subjects and their answers. The second I would see it, the music would begin to sound for me, but I never got a good-enough look at it to sort out the complex structure of the piece. The two things I was certain of were that the fugue had been completed right up to the point where it was supposed to fall into chaos, and that Anna did quite well with her review because of it.
By late afternoon, I’d come to the end of my Thompson’s candies and had but one left. Holding it in my hand, I decided it would be the last time I would conjure a vision of Anna. I came to the conclusion that her theft of my work had canceled out my untoward advance and we were now even, so to speak. I would leave her behind as I had before, but this time for good. With my decision made, I opened the last of the hard confections and placed it on my tongue. That dark, amber taste slowly spread through my mouth and, as it did, a cloudy image formed and crystallized into focus. She had the cup to her mouth, and her eyes widened as she saw me seeing her.
“William,” she said. “I was hoping to see you one more time.”
“I’m sure,” I said, trying to seem diffident, but just hearing her voice made me weak.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked. “I saw what happened to you. I was with you on the beach all that long night, but couldn’t reach you.”
“My fugue,” I said. “You took it.”
She smiled. “It’s not yours. Let’s not kid ourselves, you know you are merely a projection of my synesthetic process.”
“Who is a projection of whose?” I asked.
“You’re nothing more than my muse,” she said.
I wanted to contradict her, but I didn’t have the meanness to subvert her belief in her own reality. Of course, I could have brought up the fact that she was told that figurative synesthesia was a known version of the disease. This was obviously not true. Also, there was the fact that her failed drawing, the one she had abandoned for mine, was based on Schubert’s Eighth, a product of my own knowledge working through her. How could I convince her she wasn’t real? She must’ve seen the doubt in my eyes because she became defensive in her attitude. “I’ll not see you again,” she said. “My therapist has given me a pill he says will eradicate my synesthesia. We have that here, in the true reality. It’s already begun to work. I no longer hear my cigarette smoke as the sound of a faucet dripping. Green no longer tastes of lemon. The ring of the telephone doesn’t feel like burlap.”
This pill was the final piece of evidence. A pill to cure synesthesia? “You may be harming yourself,” I said, “by taking that drug. If you cut yourself off from me, you may cease to exist. Perhaps we are meant to be together.” I felt a certain panic at the idea that she would lose her special perception and I would lose the only friend I’d ever had who understood my true nature.
“Dr. Stullin says it will not harm me, and I will be like everyone else. Goodbye, William,” she said, and pushed the coffee cup away from her.
“Stullin,” I said. “What do you mean, Stullin?”
“My therapist,” she said, and although I could still see her before me, I could tell I had vanished from her view. As I continued to watch, she lowered her face into her hands and appeared to be crying. Then my candy turned from the thinnest sliver into nothing but saliva, and I swallowed. A few seconds more, and she was completely gone.
It was three in the afternoon when I put my coat on and started across town to Stullin’s place. I had a million questions, and foremost was whether or not he treated a young woman named Anna. My thoughts were so taken by my last conversation with her that when I arrived in front of the doctor’s walkway, I realized I hadn’t noticed the sun go down. It was as if I had walked in my sleep and awakened at his address. The street was completely empty of people or cars, reminding me of Varion Island. I took the steps up to his front door and knocked. It was dark inside except for a light on the second floor, but the door was slightly ajar, which I thought odd given it was the middle of the winter. Normally, I would have turned around and gone home after my third attempt to get his attention, but there was too much I needed to discuss.
I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. “Dr. Stullin?” I called. There was no answer. “Doctor?” I tried again and then made my way through the foyer to the room where the tables were stacked with paper. In the meager light coming in through the window, I found a lamp and turned it on. I continued to call out as I went from room to room, turning on lights, heading for the sun-room at the back of the place where we always had our meetings. When I reached that room, I stepped inside, and my foot came down on something alive. There was a sudden screech that nearly made my heart stop, and then I saw the black-and-white cat whose tail I had trod upon, race off into another room.
It was something of a comfort to be again in that plant-filled room. The sight of it brought back memories of it as the single safe place in the world when I was younger. Oddly enough, there was a lit cigarette in the ashtray on the table between the two chairs that faced each other. Lying next to it, opened to the middle and turned down on its pages, was a copy of The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer. I’d have preferred to see a ghost to that book. The sight of it chilled me. I sat down in my old seat and watched the smoke from the cigarette twirl up toward the glass panes. Almost instantly a great weariness seized me, and I closed my eyes.
That was days ago. When I discovered the next morning that I could not open the doors to leave, that I could not even break the glass in order to crawl out, it became clear to me what was happening. At first I was frantic, but then a certain calm descended upon me, and I learned to accept my fate. Those stacks of paper in that room on the way to the sunroom—each sheet held a beautiful pencil drawing. I explored the upstairs, and there, on the second floor, found a piano and the sheet music for Bach’s Grosse Fugue. There was a black-and-white photograph of Mrs. Brithnic in the upstairs hallway and one of my parents standing with Anna as a child.
That hallway, those rooms, are gone, vanished. Another room has disappeared each day I have been trapped here. I sit in Stullin’s chair now, in the only room still remaining (this one will be gone before tonight), and compose this tale—in a way, my fugue. The black-and-white cat sits across from me, having fled from the dissipation of the house as it closes in around us. Outside, the garden, the trees, the sky have all lost their color and now appear as if rendered in graphite—wonderfully shaded to give them an appearance of weight and depth. So too with the room around us: the floor, the glass panels, the chairs, the plants, even the cat’s tail and my shoes and legs have lost their life and become the shaded gray of a sketch. I imagine Anna will soon be free of her condition. As for me, who always believed himself to be unwanted, unloved, misunderstood, I will surpass being a mere artist and become instead a work of art that will endure. The cat meows loudly, and I feel the sound as a hand upon my shoulder.
The Empire of Ice Cream
Story Notes
I initially got the idea for this story by reading a book about the phenomenon of synesthesia—The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic. While reading, I came across a passage that stated that when synesthetes experienced visual manifestations in response to sensory stimulation, these images were always abstract shapes, never figures. I thought to myself, What would it be like if the visual manifestations did take figurative form, like furniture or birds or, even better, people? I wrote up a proposal and tried to sell the idea as a novel. When the idea got shot down, I filed it away. Then JeffVanderMeer told me he was about to embark on an editing project with Mark Roberts—an anthology of fake illnesses called The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases—and he asked me to come up with a couple of my own diseases. I remembered my idea for “Figurative Synesthesia” and turned that into one of the maladies; and I wrote up another one called “Radical Lordosis.” I banged them out in a matter of about two hours, sent them in, and got word back later that day that they would be in the guide. After writing up the disease, though, it got me thinking about the story I had wanted to write using the idea. After a few days, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and Jeff and Mark said they didn’t mind if I turned the idea into a longer story for another magazine. The story, when it was finished, was nothing like my medical guide entry. I eventually sold the story to Ellen Datlow for SCIFICTION, and, as always, she provided me with a lot of good editorial advice. When the story appeared on the SCIFICTION website, I added a footnote that referenced the Lambshead Pocket Guide as the source where I first discovered figurative synesthesia. Later on, I was accused by a reader of having ripped off the concept from whoever had written the entry for that disease in the guide.
A few interesting things about this piece: The novel that continuously crops up throughout the story, The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer, is an actual book written by my teaching colleague, friend, and mentor William Jon Watkins, and has some bearing on the story. There’s a glaring mistake in the musical history part of the story, which only one person caught as far as I know—an Israeli editor who was translating the story into Hebrew. He also showed me how to effectively argue the point of this mistake so that my gaff could be seen as logical to the fiction. I was not aware, until long after the piece was published, that the structure of the plot emulated the shape of the fugue that the narrator plans to compose. And many people have commented that the story has something to do with Wallace Stevens’s poetry and, beyond that, William Carlos Williams as well, but the title was chosen merely as an interesting name for the ice-cream parlor the narrator visits in the course of the story and was never intended to be any kind of literary allusion.
A lot of readers seemed to really dig this story as it was nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It won the Nebula Award for best novelette.
The Beautiful Gelreesh
His facial fur was a swirling wonder of blond and blue with highlights the deep orange of a November sun. It covered every inch of his brow and cheeks, the blunt ridge of his nose, even his eyelids. When beset by a bout of overwhelming sympathy, he would twirl the thicket of longer strands that sprouted from the center of his forehead. His bright silver eyes emitted invisible beams that penetrated the most guarded demeanors of his patients and shed light upon the condition of their souls. Discovering the essence of an individual, the Gelreesh would sit quietly, staring, tapping the black enamel nails of his hirsute hands together in an incantatory rhythm that would regulate the heartbeat of his visitor to that of his own blood muscle.
“And when, may I ask, did you perceive the first inklings of your despair?” he would say with a sudden whimper.
Once his question was posed, the subject was no longer distracted by the charm of his prominent incisors. He would lick his lips once, twice, three times, with diminishing speed, adjusting the initiate’s respiration and brain pulse. Then the loveliness of his pointed ears, the grace of his silk fashions would melt away, and his lucky interlocutor would have no choice but to tell the truth, even if in her heart of hearts she believed herself to be lying.
“When my father left us,” might be the answer.
“Let us walk, my dear,” the Gelreesh would suggest.
The woman or man or child, as the case might be, would put a hand into the warm hand of the heart’s physician. He would lead them through his antechamber into the hallway and out through a back entrance of his house. To walk with the Gelreesh, matching his languorous stride, was to partake in a slow, stately procession. His gentle direction would guide one down the garden path to the hole in the crumbling brick and mortar wall netted with ivy. Before leaving the confines of the wild garden, he might pluck a lily to be handed to his troubled charge.
The path through the woods snaked in great loops around stands of oak and maple. Although the garden appeared to be at the height of summer life, this adjacent stretch of forest, leading toward the sea, was forever trapped in autumn. Here, just above the murmur of the wind and just below the rustle of red and yellow leaves, the Gelreesh would methodically pose his questions designed to fan the flames of his companion’s anguish. With each troubled answer, he would respond with phrases he was certain would keep that melancholic heart drenched in a black sweat. “Horrible,” he would say in the whine of a dog dreaming. “My dear, that’s ghastly.” “How can you go on?” “If I were you I would be weeping,” was one that never failed to turn the trick.
When the tears would begin to flow, he’d reach into the pocket of his loose-fitting jacket of paisley design for a handkerchief stitched in vermillion, bearing the symbol of a broken heart. Handing it to his patient, he would again continue walking and the gentle interrogation would resume.
An hour might pass, even two, but there was no rush. There were so many questions to be asked and answered. Upon finally reaching the edge of the cliff that gave a view outward of the boundless ocean, the Gelreesh would release the hand of his subject and say with tender conviction, “And so, you see, this ocean must be for you a representation of the overwhelming, intractable dilemma that gnaws at your heart. You know without my telling you that there is really only one solution. You must move toward peace, to a better place.”
“Yes, yes, thank you,” would come the response followed by a fresh torrent of tears. The handkerchief would be employed, and then the Gelreesh would kindly ask for it back.
“The future lies ahead of you and the troubled past bites at your heels, my child.”
Three steps forward and the prescription would be filled. A short flight of freedom, a moment of calm for the tortured soul, and then endless rest on the rocks below surrounded by the rib cages and skulls of fellow travelers once pursued by grief and now cured.
The marvelous creature would pause and dab a tear or two from the corners of his own eyes before undressing. Then, naked but for the spiral pattern of his body’s fur, he would walk ten paces to the east where he kept a long rope tied at one end to the base of a mighty oak growing at the very edge of the cliff. His descent could only be described as acrobatic, pointing to a history with the circus. When finally down among the rocks, he would find the corpse of the new immigrant to the country without care and tidily devour every trace of flesh.
Later, in the confines of his office, he would compose a letter in turquoise ink on yellow paper, assuring the loved ones of his most recent patient that she or he, seeking the solace of a warm sun and crystal sea, had booked passage for a two-year vacation on the island of Valshavar—a paradisiacal atoll strung like a bead on the necklace of the equator. Let not the price of this journey trouble your minds, for I, understanding the exemplary nature of the individual in question, have decided to pay all expenses for their escape from torment. In a year or two, when next you meet them, they will appear younger, and in their laughter you will feel the warmth of the tropical sun. With their touch, your own problems will vanish as if conjured away by isla
nd magic. This missive would then be rolled like a scroll, tied fast with a length of green ribbon, and given into the talon of a great horned owl to be delivered.
And so it was that the Gelreesh operated, from continent to continent, dispensing his exquisite pity and relieving his patients of their unnecessary mortal coils. When suspicion arose to the point where doubt began to negate his beauty in the eyes of the populace, then, by dark of night, he would flee on all fours, accompanied by the owl, deep into the deepest forest, never to be seen again in that locale. The pile of bones he’d leave behind was undeniable proof of his treachery, but the victims’ families preferred to think of their loved ones stretched out beneath a palm frond canopy on the pink beach of Valshavar, being fed peeled grapes by a monkey valet. This daydream in the face of horror would deflate all attempts at organizing a search party to hunt him down.
Although he would invariably move on, setting up a practice in a new locale rich in heavy hearts and haunted minds, something of him would remain behind in the form of a question, namely, “What was The Beautiful Gelreesh?” Granted, there were no end of accounts of his illusory form—everything from that of a dashing cavalry officer with waxed mustache to the refined blond impertinence of a symphony conductor. He reminded one young woman whom he had danced with at a certain town soiree as being a blend of her father, her boss, and her older brother. In fact, when notes were later compared, no two could agree on the precise details of his splendor.