The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Some people who read this story thought of Barney and the narrator as losers, but I don’t think they are. In dedicating one’s life to an art, there are myriad pitfalls and the possibility of never having your work recognized by the public. Still, there are millions of people who valiantly pursue their dreams long after others have forsaken theirs. To all those who think of art only in terms of success and remuneration, I suppose the two characters in this story would appear losers, but for anyone who keeps their creative dream alive in the face of grave consequences and a hostile populace of zombie-like naysayers, I see them as heroic. Our heroes in this story have traveled deeper and deeper inside themselves to chase that dream as the years have flowed on. Sometimes, in doing this, one can lose contact with the outside world and not realize that it is there that the answers to their questions sometimes lie (in both senses of the word).

  I think some readers were put off by this story because it dealt with the use of drugs. Drugs have, from ancient times, starting with the Rig Veda, been an integral part of fantastic literature—the elixir, the potion, soma, etc. They have always been agents of transcendence. Besides, they exist in the real world. To include drugs in a story does not mean that the writer advocates their use or is promoting them as a viable answer to life’s dilemmas, but when they are part of life, they should be expected to appear in fiction sometimes, just as murder is included in the Bible. Remember, there’s a reason we call it fiction.

  I took this story to the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference and received good advice on key elements from some of the other writers in attendance. The story was published by Deb Layne and Jay Lake of Wheatland Press in the third installment of their incredible anthology series, Polyphony.

  Summer Afternoon

  Henry James once said that the two most beautiful words in the English language were Summer Afternoon, and after he spoke those words they hit the atmosphere and shattered. Pieces of them flew this way and that. Some of each went into the ears of his listener, who heard them and nodded as if in agreement, even though she thought all along they should be Autumn Night.

  The shards that did not serve a purpose for James and the young Miss Pentrith flew on and later joined up as they left Earth’s atmosphere. In space they became a tiny ball of green fizz drawn into the far blackness by the electromagnetic pulse of a quasar.

  They made the cosmic pinball rounds at light speed—planets, suns, nebulae—rapping lightly against the door of Heaven, bouncing from moon to star, piercing molten cores and lodging momentarily between the ears of Sufra, Queen of the Harvang. In an ocean of gamma ray, a single seed of meaning germinated and grew into a thought that later had a memory of itself rolling off the spiral tongues of galaxies. Time came and went. On a summer afternoon those words returned to Earth, looking for Henry James.

  They looked for a good long time, flitting here and there, miasmatic and ineffable, but they did not think to look under the ground. Finally, in South Jersey, on a screened-in porch, they overheard brief mention of their creator and gathered themselves up in the corner of the ceiling to learn what they could.

  Beneath them, sitting on a wicker rocker, was a forty-year-old man holding a phone to his ear. He wore a shirt with no sleeves, gym shorts, and white socks. There was much of him, and he had a beard and glasses.

  He wasn’t speaking to Henry James on the phone as Summer Afternoon suspected. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t talking to anyone. He was making believe he was talking to Henry James. He was a writer and for months he had been unable to write. Summer Afternoon didn’t know he had sat every night for the past three months, smoking cigarettes, staring at a blank computer screen. He strained to pass greatness, but each night, the result—a mere handful of malodorous clichés. So he thought that while the kids were at school and his wife was at work, he would make believe calling Henry James for some advice.

  The first thing James told him was to soak his feet in ice water twice daily.

  “Whatever you say, Henry,” said the writer.

  Next, the old master told him to refrain from cursing.

  “That’s a toughie,” said the writer, “I say ‘fuck’ every other word.”

  Henry didn’t like to hear that and said it was a disgrace.

  “What else?” said the writer.

  “Moon bathing.”

  “Moon bathing?” he asked.

  Then Henry started laughing and the writer laughed too. But Henry kept on laughing at his own joke way too hard.

  “What a putz,” said the writer as he slammed down the receiver. He wondered what Thomas Mann was up to.

  The spirit of the words swooped down and filtered into the cigarette burning in the ashtray. The writer decided he didn’t have time to climb The Magic Mountain and knew Mann’s advice would be to clip his toenails or something equally innocuous. A better bet, he thought, would be to just dial at random and see who he got. He dialed and while the phone rang, he picked up his cigarette and took a drag. Finally a woman answered.

  “Are you a writer?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “my name is Dara Melsh. I wrote one novel called Autumn Night.”

  “Can you give me a little?” he asked.

  “A planet always in autumn—falling leaves, all day twilight, pumpkins, and endless meadows of yellow brown-grass as tall as a four-story building. The captain and his son fly over the grass in a balloon ship in the early evening and see herds of white behemoths lumbering through the wind-tossed sea. When night falls and the stars come out, the boy beds down with a sleeping bag on the deck next to where the captain stands, gracefully moving the wheel. Above the sound of the captain’s soft whistling, the boy hears the wind blowing through the grass and falls asleep to dream of summer afternoon.”

  “In the dream, is there a girl?” asked the writer.

  “Two,” said Dara.

  “A greenhouse?” he asked.

  “You guessed it,” she said.

  “A new strain of lily whose perfume draws a strange creature from the nearby forest at night?” he asked.

  “Orchids,” she whispered, “orchids with petals of human flesh.”

  “I see,” said the writer.

  “Why does the girl have to die in the last part?” he asked. “I mean, I know she spurns a monster of wisdom and all, but after they unveil the secret passageway to Queen Sufra’s kingdom in the grass, shouldn’t that have been it?”

  “Don’t forget the sullen countenance of the captain when he ceases whistling at the end of chapter three,” she said.

  “True.”

  “It’s in paperback this summer,” she said.

  “I’ll pick it up,” he said. “Later.”

  He hung up and thought, “Fuck.” He lit another cigarette and stared out through the screen at the summer afternoon. The sunlight fell through the leaves like bright rain. Dragonflies hovered over the koi pond and finches were at the feeder. Something insubstantial moved away from him. It passed through the screen like a breeze and headed out across the backyard. It walked in long, billowing strides, a halfhearted notion of a ghost.

  “Come back,” he called, and his words shot out to drill and splinter the well-traveled words of Henry James.

  All that summer, whenever he was in the backyard, he heard a small voice say, “Summer Afternoon,” and he’d look over his shoulder. The phrase was heard through August and even into the autumn when one night his wife, who was out in the backyard staring up through beams of the full moon at a balloon passing overhead, heard it too and wondered what it meant.

  In winter when the snow fell so heavily that Route 70 was closed, both the writer and his wife stayed home. It was while they were sitting on the couch in the living room drinking coffee that she finally admitted having heard it.

  “Do me a favor,” he said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “When you’re done with your coffee and you’re ready to get up, how would you love to lean out the back door and swipe me up
a bucket of snow?”

  “Yeah, right,” she said.

  But she brought it to him, a big bucket of snow. He kicked off his slippers and plunged his bare feet into it.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Waiting,” he said.

  He stuck his feet in snow twice that day and twice the next. On the following day he had a thought. Three days later, while walking past the lake through melting snow, he had a memory of tall grass blowing in the wind of a summer afternoon.

  Summer Afternoon

  Story Notes

  Back in the days when I used to drink in bars, I’d meet my friend Frank at this place near work and we’d have a few. Frank was a consummate storyteller in the Irish tradition, which, at times, made him a dangerous person to drink with. I could begin the evening with the idea that I’d have one or two and then head home, but when Frank was inspired, he could tell a story so long and involved, so rich with detail and looped with digressions, that the next thing I knew, Virgil, the bartender, was signaling last call and Frank would say, pulling his wallet from his pocket, “Okay, one more for the ditch.”

  On one of these nights, Frank told me a story that encompassed the entirety of his tour of duty in Vietnam. The next day, due to its deletion by a splitting headache, I remembered precious little of the story, but one small crumb of the aggregate stayed with me—a story about a guard tower in Saigon. This particular incident didn’t happen to Frank personally, but rather to his brother, who was also stationed there. Frank was a master of digression in his storytelling, as I said, and I remembered we detoured out of the main story as he filled me in on his and his comrades’ prevalent use of pot during the war. He told me you could buy marijuana cigarettes by the pack in Saigon. They even had a brand name—Park Lanes.

  Anyway, one night his brother had pulled guard detail in the tower, but beforehand he’d met up with Frank for some drinking and a stroll down Park Lane. By the time he got to the base of the tower, he was burnt crisper than a cinder. The tower was just a tall, concrete cylinder with a metal shack at the top. Guard duty consisted of watching for mortar fire coming in from the area surrounding the city. If any action was spotted, details were radioed into headquarters along with the coordinates of its origin. To get to the trapdoor, the entrance to the shack, at the top of the tower, he had to climb straight up a ladder with 200 rungs inside that concrete cylinder.

  By the time Frank’s brother got to the base of the tower, he was already a few minutes late, and he knew the soldier who was up there was waiting to be relieved. He shouldered his M-16, and started up the ladder. Climbing that ladder was scary enough when straight, but climbing it fucked up was downright frightening. Huffing, puffing, hand over hand, trying not to let his boots slip off the rungs, he ascended. Halfway to the top, he had to stop and hold on for a few seconds until the whirling in his head subsided.

  Eventually, he calmed himself and started climbing again, but now he was sweating. The sweat from his hands made the metal rungs slippery. A little less than three-quarters of the way to the top, his left foot slipped off the rung and then his right foot followed. The weight of his body pulled him down, and he managed to grab tightly to a rung with only his right hand. In the midst of this mishap, the shoulder strap of the M-16 slipped off, and the gun fell away.

  Frank’s brother had said that his mind became instantly clear, and in a single heartbeat he thought three things. The first thing he thought was that he never kept the rifle’s safety lock on. The second thought was that if the gun actually managed to fall straight down, without flipping or turning, but perfectly straight down, and the butt end hit the floor below, the rifle could go off. And the third thing he thought was, Move your ass. He did, scrabbling like a monkey up the last few rungs. Reaching the top wrung just as the report of automatic gunfire exploded inside the tower below him, its roar and echo deafening, he pushed up the trapdoor and rolled onto the floor of the lookout shack.

  The soldier who was on guard duty atop the tower heard the gunfire and thought they were under attack. Not knowing where the assault was coming from, he radioed headquarters and called in an air strike all along the perimeter of the city. Jets appeared out of the night and copious ordinance was dropped willy-nilly. Frank’s brother had said it was like the Fourth of July.

  This war saga, which went on for hours and included the incident of the tower, began with Frank taking his first sip of beer that evening and saying to me, apropos of nothing, “I read once where Henry James said, ‘The two most beautiful words in the English language are Summer Afternoon.’”

  Chris Rowe, the editor of Say … magazine (and author of the marvelous science fiction story “The Voluntary State” and chapbook Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories), asked me to contribute a story to the first issue. His enticement was one of the best lines I’ve ever heard from an editor: “Send me something. I can’t promise I’ll publish it, but I can promise you won’t be paid.” How could I turn down an offer like that? I sent him “Summer Afternoon.”

  The Weight of Words

  I

  Back in the autumn of ’57, when I was no more than thirty, I went out almost every night of the week. I wasn’t so much seeking a good time as I was trying to escape a bad one. My wife of five years had recently left me for a better looking, wealthier, more active man, and although she had carried on an affair behind my back for some time and, upon leaving, had told me what a drab milksop I was, I still loved her. Spending my evenings quietly reading had always been a great pleasure of mine, but after our separation the thought of sitting still, alone, with nothing but a page of text and my own seeping emotions was intolerable. So I invariably put on my coat and hat, left my apartment, and trudged downtown to the movie theatre where I sat in the dark, carrying on my own subdued affair with whichever Hepburn had something playing at the Ritz. When it was Monroe or Bacall, or some other less symbolically virtuous star featured on the marquee, I might instead go for a late supper at the diner or over to the community center to hear a lecture. The lecture series was, to be kind, not remarkable, but there were bright lights, usually a few other lonely souls taking notes or dozing, and a constant string of verbiage from the speaker that ran interference on my memories and silent recriminations. Along with this, I learned a few things about the Russian Revolution, How to Care for Rose Bushes, the Poetry of John Keats. It was at one of these talks that I first came in contact with Albert Secmatte, billed as A Chemist of Printed Language.

  What with the drab title of his lecture, The Weight of Words, I expected little from Secmatte, only that he would speak unceasingly for an hour or two, fixing and preserving me in a twilight state just this side of slumber. Before beginning, he stood at the podium (behind him a white screen, to his side an overhead projector), smiling and nodding for no apparent reason; a short, thin man with a slicked-back wave of dark hair. His slightly baggy black suit might have made him appear a junior undertaker, but this effect was mitigated by his empty grin and thick-lensed, square-framed glasses, which cancelled any other speculation but that he was, to some minor degree, insane. The other dozen members of the audience yawned and rubbed their eyes, preparing to receive his wisdom with looks of already weakening determination. Secmatte’s monotonous voice was as incantatory as a metronome, but also high and light, almost childish. His speech was about words and it began with all of the promise of one of those high school grammar lectures that insured the poisoning of any youthful fascination with language.

  I woke from my initial stupor twenty minutes into the proceedings when the old man sitting three seats down from me got up to leave, and I had to step out into the aisle to let him pass. Upon reclaiming my seat and trying again to achieve that dull bliss I had come for, I happened to register a few phrases of Secmatte’s talk and, for some reason, it caught my interest.

  “Printed words,” he said, “are like the chemical elements of the periodic table. They interact with each other, affect each other through a sort
of gravitational force on a particulate level in the test tube of the sentence. The proximity of one to another might result in either the appropriation of, or combination of, basic particles of connotation and grammatical presence, so to speak, forming a compound of meaning and being, heretofore unknown before the process was initiated by the writer.”

  This statement was both perplexing and intriguing. I sat forward and listened more intently. From what I could gather, Secmatte was claiming that printed words had, according to their length, their phonemic components, and syllabic structure, fixed values that could be somehow mathematically ciphered. The resultant numeric symbols of their representative qualities could then be viewed in relation to the proximity of their location, one to another, in the context of the sentence, and a well-trained researcher could then deduce the effectiveness or power of their presence. My understanding of what he was driving at led me to change my initial determination as to the degree of his madness. I shook my head, for here was a full-fledged lunatic. It was all too wonderfully crackpot for me to ignore and return to my trance.

  I looked around at the audience while he droned on and saw expressions of confusion, boredom, and even anger. No one was buying his bill of goods for a moment. I’m sure the same questions I presently entertained were going through their minds as well. How exactly does one weigh a word? What is the unit of measurement that is applied to calculate the degree of influence of a certain syllable? These questions were beginning to be voiced in the form of grumblings and whispered profanities.

  The speaker gave no indication that he was the least bit aware of his audience’s impending mutiny. He continued smiling and nodding as he proceeded with his outlandish claims. Just as a woman, a retired PhD in literature, in the front row, a regular at the lectures, raised her hand, Secmatte turned his back on us and strode over to the light switch on the wall to his left. A moment later the lecture room was plunged into darkness. There came out of the artificial night the sound of someone snoring, and then, click, a light came on just to the left of the podium, illuminating the frighteningly dull face of Secmatte, reflecting off his glasses, and casting his shadow at large upon the screen behind him.