The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Observe,” he said, and stepped out of the beacon of light to fetch a sheet from a pile of papers he had left on the podium. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out that he was placing a transparency on the projector. There appeared on the screen behind him a flypaper-yellow page, mended with tape and written upon with a neat script in black ink.

  “Here is the pertinent formula,” he said, and took a pen from his jacket pocket with which to point out the printed message on the transparency. He read it slowly, and I wish now that I had written it down or memorized it. To the best of my recollection it read something like—

  Typeface + Meaning x Syllabic Structure – Length +

  Consonantal Profluence / Verbal Timidity x Phonemic

  Saturation = The Weight of a Word, or The Value

  “Bullshit,” someone in the audience said, and as if that epithet was a magical utterance that broke the spell of the Chemist of the Printed Word, three quarters of the audience, which was not large to begin with, got up and filed out. If the esteemed speaker had looked more physically imposing, I might have left, myself, timid as I was, but the only threat of danger was to common sense, which had never been a great ally of mine. The only ones left, besides me, were the sleeper in the back row, a kerchiefed woman saying her rosary to my far right, and a fellow in a business suit in the first row.

  “And how did you come upon this discovery?” said the gentleman sitting close to Secmatte.

  “Oh,” said the speaker, as if surprised that there was anyone out there in the dark. “Years of inquiry. Yes, many years of trial and error.”

  “What type of inquiry?” asked the man.

  “That is top secret,” said Secmatte, nodding. Then he whipped the transparency off the projector and took it to the podium. He paged through his stack of papers and soon returned to the machine with another transparency. This he laid carefully on the viewing platform. The new sheet held at its middle a single sentence in typeface of about fifteen words. As I cannot recall for certain the ingredients of the aforementioned formula, the words of this sentence are even less clear to me now. I am positive that one of the early words in the line, but not the first or second, was “scarlet.” I believe that this color was used to describe a young man’s ascot.

  Secmatte stepped into the light of the projector again so that his features were set aglow by the beam. “I know what you are thinking,” he said, his voice taking a turn toward the defensive. “Well, ladies and gentleman, now we will see …”

  The sleeper snorted, coughed, and snored twice during the speaker’s pause.

  “Notice what happens to the sentence when I place this small bit of paper over the word ‘the’ that appears as the eleventh word in the sequence.” He leaned over the projector, and I watched on the screen as his shadow fingers fit a tiny scrap of paper onto the relevant article. When the deed was done, he stepped back and said, “Now read the sentence.”

  I read it once and then twice. To my amazement, not only the word “the” was missing where he had obscured it, but the word “scarlet” was now also missing. I don’t mean that it was blocked out, I mean that it had vanished and the other words which had stood around it had closed ranks as if it had never been there to begin with.

  “A trick,” I said, unable to help myself.

  “Not so, sir,” said Secmatte. He stepped up and with only the tip of the pen, flipped away the paper covering “the.” In that same instant, the word “scarlet” appeared like a ghost, out of thin air. One moment it did not exist, and the next it stood in bold typeface.

  The gentleman in the front row clapped his hands. I sat staring with my mouth open, and then it opened wider when, with the pen tip, he maneuvered the scrap back onto “the” thus vanishing the word “scarlet” again.

  “You see, I have analyzed the characteristics of each word in this sentence, and when the article ‘the’ is obscured, the lack of its value in the construction of the line creates a phenomenon I call sublimation, which is basically a masking of the existence of the word ‘scarlet.’ That descriptive word of color is still very much present, but the reader is unable to see it because of the effect initiated by a reconfiguration of the inherent structure of the sentence and the corresponding values of its words in relation to each other. The reader instead registers the word ‘scarlet’ subconsciously.”

  I laughed out loud, unable to believe what I was seeing. “Subconsciously?” I said.

  “The effect is easily corroborated,” he said, and went to the podium with the transparency containing the line about the young man’s ascot only to return with another clear sheet. He laid that sheet on the projector and pointed to the typeface line at its center. This one I remember very well. It read: The boy passionately kissed the toy.

  “In this sentence you now have before you,” said Secmatte, “there is a sublimated word that exists in print as surely as do all of the others, but because of my choice of typeface and its size and the configuration of phonemic and syllabic elements, it has been made a phantom. Still, its meaning, the intent of the word, will come through to you on a subconscious level. Read the sentence and ponder it for a moment.”

  I read the sentence and tried to picture the scene. On its surface, the content suggested an image of innocent joy, but each time I read the words, I felt a tremor of revulsion, some dark overtone to the message.

  “What is missing?” said the man in the front row.

  “The answer will surface into your consciousness in a little while,” said Secmatte. “When it does, you will be assured of the validity of my work.” He then turned off the projector. “Thank you all for coming,” he said into the darkness. A few seconds later, the lights came on.

  I rubbed my eyes at the sudden glare and when I looked up, I saw Secmatte gathering together his papers and slipping them into a briefcase.

  “Very interesting,” said the man in the front row.

  “Thank you,” said Secmatte without looking up from the task of latching his case. He then walked over to the gentleman and handed him what appeared to be a business card. As the speaker made his way down the aisle, he also stopped at the row I was in and offered me one of the cards.

  I rose and stepped over to take it from him. “Thanks,” I said. “Very engaging.” He nodded and smiled and continued to do so as he walked the remaining length of the room and left through the doors at the back. Putting the card in the pocket of my coat, I looked around and noticed that both the woman with the rosary and the sleeper had already left.

  “Mr. Secmatte seems somewhat touched in the head,” I said to the gentleman, who was now passing me on his way out.

  He smiled and said, “Perhaps. Have a good evening.”

  I returned his salutation and then followed him out of the room.

  On my way home, I remembered the last sentence Secmatte had displayed on the projector, the one about the boy kissing the toy. I again felt ill at ease about it, and then, suddenly, I caught something out of the corner of my mind’s eye, wriggling through my thoughts. Like the sound of a voice in a memory or the sound of the door slamming shut in a dream about my wife, I distinctly heard, in my mind, a hissing noise. Then I saw it: a snake. The boy was passionately kissing a toy snake. The revelation stopped me in my tracks.

  II

  Having been a book lover since early childhood, I had always thought my job as head librarian at the local Jameson City branch the perfect occupation for me. I was a proficient administrator and used my position, surreptitiously, as a bully pulpit, to integrate a new worldview into our quiet town. When ordering new books, I set my mind to procuring the works of black writers, women writers, the beats, and the existentialists. Once I had met Secmatte, though, the job became even more interesting. When I wasn’t stewing about the absence of Corrine, or imagining what she must be doing with the suave Mr. Walthus, I contemplated the nature of Secmatte’s lecture. Walking through the stacks, I now could almost hear the ambient buzz of phonemic interactions transp
iring within the closed covers of the shelved books. Upon opening a volume and holding it up close to my weak eyes, I thought I felt a certain fizz against my face, like the bursting bubbles of a Coca-Cola, the result of residue thrown off by the textual chemistry. Secmatte had fundamentally changed the way in which I thought about printed language.

  Perhaps it was a week after I had seen his talk and demonstration that I was staring out the large window directly across from the circulation desk. It was midafternoon and the library was virtually empty. The autumn sun shown down brightly as I watched the traffic pass by outside on the quiet main street of town.

  I was remembering a night soon after we were married when Corrine and I were lying in bed, in the dark. She used to say to me, “Tell me a wonderful thing, Cal.” What she meant was that I should regale her with some interesting tidbit of knowledge from my extensive reading.

  “There is a flower,” I told her, “that grows only on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, called by the natives of that paradisiacal atoll, the Warulatnee. The large pink blossom it puts forth holds a preservative chemical that keeps it intact long after the stem has begun to rot internally. From the decomposition, a gas builds up in the stem, and eventually is violently released at the top, sending the blossom into flight. As it rapidly ascends, sometimes to a height of twenty feet, the petals fold back to make it more streamlined, but once it reaches the apex of its launch, the wind takes it and the large, soft petals open like the wings of a bird. It can travel for miles in this manner on the currents of ocean air. Warulatnee means ‘the sunset bird’ and the blossom is given as a token of love.”

  When I was finished, she kissed me and told me I was beautiful. Fool that I was, I thought she loved me for my intelligence and my open mind. Instead, I should have held her more firmly than my beliefs—a miasma of weightless words I could not get my arms around.

  Memories like this one, when they surfaced, each killed me a little inside. And it was at that precise moment that I saw, outside the library window, Mr. Walthus’s aquamarine convertible pull up at the stop light at the corner. Corrine was there beside him, sitting almost in his lap, with her arm around his wide shoulders. Before the light changed, he gunned the engine, most likely to make sure I would notice, and as they took off down the street, I saw my wife throw her head back and laugh with an expression of pleasure that no word could describe. It was maddening, frustrating, and altogether juvenile. I felt something in my midsection crumple like a sheet of old paper.

  Later that same day, while wandering through the stacks again, having escaped into thoughts of Secmatte’s printed language system, I happened to pass, at eye level, a copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. At the sight of it, a wonderful thought, like the pink Warulatnee, took flight in my imagination powered by effluvia from the decomposition of my heart. Before I reached the coat closet, I had fully formulated my devious plan. I reached into the pocket of my overcoat and retrieved the card Secmatte had given me the night of his lecture.

  That afternoon I called him from my office in the library.

  “Secmatte,” he said in his high-pitched voice, sounding like a child just awakened from an afternoon nap.

  I explained who I was and how I knew him and then I mentioned that I wanted to speak to him at more length concerning his theory.

  “Tonight,” he said, and gave me his address. “Eight o’clock.”

  I thanked him and told him how interested I was in his work.

  “Yes,” was all he said before hanging up, and I pictured him nodding and smiling without volition.

  Secmatte lived in a very large, one-story building situated behind the lumberyard and next to the train tracks on the edge of town. The place had once held the offices of an oil company—an unadorned concrete bunker of a dwelling. There were dark curtains on the front windows, where, when I was a boy, there had been displayed advertisements for Maxwell Oil. I approached the nondescript front door and knocked. A moment later, it opened to reveal Secmatte dressed exactly as he had been the night of his lecture.

  “Enter,” he said, without greeting, as if I were either a regular visitor or a workman come to do repairs.

  I followed him inside to what obviously had once been a business office. In that modestly sized room, still painted the sink-cleanser green of industrial walls, there was an old couch, two chairs, stuffing spilling out of the bottom of one, and a small coffee table. Next to Secmatte’s chair was a lamp that cast a halfhearted glow upon the scene. The floor had no rug but was bare concrete like the walls.

  My host sat down, hands gripping the chair arms, and leaned forward.

  “Yes?” he said.

  I sat down in the chair across the table from him. “Calvin Fesh,” I said, and leaned forward with my hand extended, expecting to shake.

  Secmatte nodded, smiled, said, “A pleasure,” but did not clasp hands with me.

  I withdrew my arm and leaned back.

  He sat quietly, staring at the tabletop, more with an air of mere existence than actually waiting for me to speak.

  “I was impressed with your demonstration at the community center,” I said. “I have been an avid reader my entire life and …”

  “You work at the library,” he said.

  “How …?”

  “I’ve seen you there. I come in from time to time to find an example of a certain style of type or to search for the works of certain writers. For instance, Tolstoy in a cheap translation, in Helvetica, especially the long stories, is peculiarly rich in phonemic chaos and the weights of his less insistent verbs, those with a preponderance of vowels, create a certain fluidity in the location of power in the sentence. It has something to do with the translation from Russian into English. Or Conrad, when he uses a gerund, watch out.” He uncharacteristically burst into laughter and slapped his knee. Just as suddenly, he went slack and resumed nodding.

  I feigned enjoyment and proceeded. “Well, to be honest, Mr. Secmatte, I have come with a business proposition for you. I want you to use your remarkable sublimation procedure to help me.”

  “Explain,” he said, and turned his gaze upon the empty couch to his right.

  “Well,” I said, “this is somewhat embarrassing. My wife left me recently for another man. I want her back, but she will not see me or speak to me. I want to write to her, but if I begin by professing my love to her openly, she will crumple up the letters and throw them out without finishing them. Do you follow me?”

  He sat silently, staring. Eventually he adjusted his glasses and said, “Go on.”

  “I want to send her a series of letters about interesting things I find in my reading. She enjoys learning about these things. I was hoping that I could persuade you to insert sublimated messages of love into these letters, so that upon reading them, they might secretly rekindle her feelings for me. For payment of course.”

  “Love,” said Secmatte. Then he said it three more times, very slowly and in a deeper tone than was his normal child voice. “A difficult word to be sure,” he said. “It’s slippery and its value has a tendency to shift slightly when in relation to words with multiple syllables set in a Copenhagen or one of the less script-influenced types.”

  “Can you do it?” I asked.

  For the first time he looked directly at me.

  “Of course,” he said.

  I reached into my pocket and brought out a sheet of paper holding my first missive concerning the Column of Memnon, the singing stone. “Insert some invisible words relaying my affection into this,” I said.

  “I will make it a haunted house of love,” he said.

  “And what will you charge?”

  “That is where you can assist me, Mr. Fesh,” he said. “I do not need your money. It seems you are not the only one with thoughts of putting my sublimation technique to work. The other gentleman who was at the lecture on the twelfth has given me more work than I can readily do. He has also paid me very handsomely. He has made me wealthy overnight. Mr. Mullig
an has hired me to create ads for his companies that utilize sublimation.”

  “That was Mulligan?” I said.

  Secmatte nodded.

  “He’s one of the wealthiest men in the state. He donated that community center to Jameson,” I said.

  “I need someone to read proof copies for me,” said Secmatte. “When I get finished doctoring the texts they give me, playing with the values and reconstructing, sometimes I will forget to replace a comma or make plural a verb. Even the Chemist of Printed Language needs a laboratory assistant. If you will volunteer your time two nights a week, I will create your sublimated letters one a week for you. How is that?”

  It seemed like an inordinate amount of work for one letter per week, but I so believed that my plan would work and I so wanted Corrine back. Besides, I had nothing to do in the evenings and it would be a break from my routine of wandering the town at night. I agreed. He told me to return on Thursday night at seven o’clock to begin.

  “Splendid,” he said in a tone devoid of emotion, and then rose. He ushered me quickly to the front door and opened it, standing aside to ensure I got the message that it was time to go.

  “My letter is on your coffee table,” I turned to say on my way out, but the door had already closed.

  III

  My evenings at Secmatte’s were interesting if only for the fact that he was such an enigma. I had never met anyone before with such a flat affect at times, so wrapped up in his own insular world. Still, there were moments when I perceived glimmers of personality, trace clues to the fact that he was aware of my presence and that he might even enjoy my company on some level. I had learned that when he was smiling and nodding, his mind was busy ciphering the elements of a text. No doubt these actions constituted a defense mechanism, one probably adopted early on in his life to keep others at bay. What better disguise could there be than one of affability and complete contentment? An irascible sort is constantly being confronted, interrogated as to the reason for his pique. Secmatte was agreeing with you before he met you—anything to be left to himself.