The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Secmatte loved that phrase and used it often. If I asked a lot of questions about the sublimation technique in a certain flyer we were working on, he would supply brief, clipped answers in a tone of certainty that seemed to assume he was dispensing common knowledge. I understood little of anything he said, but my interrogation would reach a certain point and he would say, “Top secret,” and that would end it.

  I wondered what it was that drove him to such lengths. He told me he was making scads of money, “a treasure trove,” as he put it, but he never seemed to spend any of it. This all would have remained an insoluble mystery had I not had a visitor to the library Wednesday afternoon of the following week.

  Rachel Secmatte seemed to appear before me like one of her brother’s sublimated words suddenly freed to sight by a reaction of textual chemistry. I had glanced down at a copy of the local newspaper to read more about the thoroughly disturbing account of an assault on a black man by a group of white youths over in Weston, and when I looked up she was there, standing before the circulation desk.

  I was startled as much by her stunning looks as her sudden presence. “Can I help you?” I asked. She was blonde and built like one of those actresses whose figures inspired fear in me; a reaction I conveniently put off to their wayward morals.

  “Mr. Fesh?” she said.

  I nodded and felt myself blushing.

  She introduced herself and held her hand out to me. I took it into my damp palm for a second.

  “You are Albert’s friend?” she said, nodding.

  “I work with him,” I told her. “I assist him in his work.”

  “Do you have a few minutes to speak to me? I am concerned about him and need to know what he is doing,” she said.

  I was about to tell her simply that he was fine, but then my confusion broke and I realized this was my chance to know something more about the ineffable Secmatte. “Certainly,” I told her. Looking around the library and seeing it empty, I waved for her to come behind the circulation desk. She followed me into my office.

  Before sitting down in the chair opposite me, she removed her coat to reveal a beige sweater with a plunging neckline, the sight of which gave me that sensation of falling I often experienced just prior to sleep.

  “Albert is doing well,” I told her. “Do you need his address?”

  “I know where he is,” she said.

  “His phone number?”

  “I spoke to him last night. That is when he told me about you. But he will only speak to me over the phone. He will not see me.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “If you have a few minutes, I can tell you everything,” she said.

  “Please,” I said. “With Albert, there should be quite a lot to tell.”

  “Well, you must know by now that he is different,” she said.

  “An understatement.”

  “He has always been different. Do you know he did not speak a single word until he was three years old?”

  “I find that hard to believe. He has a facility, a genius for language—”

  “A curse,” she said, interrupting. “That is how our father, the reverend, described it. Our parents were strict religious fundamentalists, and where there was zero latitude given to creative interpretations of the Bible, there was even less available in respect to personal conduct. Albert is four years younger than me. He was a curious little fellow with a, now how do I put this, a dispassionate overwhelming drive to understand the way things worked … if that makes sense.”

  “A dispassionate drive?” I asked.

  “He had a need to understand things at their most fundamental level, but there was no emotion behind it, sort of like a mechanical desire. Perhaps the same kind of urge that makes geese migrate. Well, to get at these answers he required, he would do anything necessary. This very often went against my father’s commandments. He was particularly curious about printed words in books. When he was very young, I would read him a story. He would not get caught up in the characters or the plot, but he wanted to know how the letters in the book created the images they suggested to his mind. One particular book he had me read again and again was about a bear. When I would finish, he would page frantically through the book, turn it upside down, shake it, hold it very close to his eyes. Then, when he was a little older, say five, he started dissecting the books, tearing them apart. Of course, the Bible was a book of great importance in our family, and when Albert was found one day with a pair of scissors, cutting out the tiny words, my father, who took this as an affront to his God, was incensed. Albert was made to sit in a dark closet for the entire afternoon. He quietly took his punishment, but it did not stop his investigations.

  “He didn’t understand my father’s reaction to him, and he would search the house from top to bottom in order to find the hidden scissors. Then he would be back at it, carefully cutting out certain words. He drew on a piece of cardboard with green crayon a symmetrical chart with strange markings at the tops and sides of the columns, and would arrange the cutout words into groups. Sometimes he would take a word and try to weigh it on the kitchen scale my mother had for her recipes. He could spend hours repeating a phrase, a single word, or even a syllable. All during this time, he would be caught and relegated to the closet. Then he started burning the tiny scraps of cutout words and trying to inhale their smoke. When my mother caught him with the matches, it was decided that he was possessed by a demon and needed to be exorcised. It was after the exorcism, throughout which Albert merely stared placidly, that I first saw him nod and smile. If the ritual had done anything for him, it had given him the insight that he was different, unacceptable, and needed to disguise his truth.”

  “He has a rubber snake,” I told her.

  She laughed and said, “Yes, Legion. It was used in the pageants our church would put on. There was a scene we reenacted from the book of Genesis: Adam and Eve in the garden. That snake, I don’t know where my father got it, would be draped in a tree and whoever played Eve, fully clothed of course, would walk over to the tree and lift the snake’s mouth to her ear. Albert was fascinated with that snake before he could talk. And when he did speak, his first word was its name, Legion. He secretly kept the snake in his room and would only put it back in the storage box when he knew the pageant was approaching. When our parents became aware of his attachment to it, they tried many times to hide it, and when that didn’t work, to throw it out, but somehow Albert always managed to retrieve it.”

  “It sounds as if he had a troubled youth,” I said.

  “He never had any friends, was always an outcast. The other children in our town taunted him constantly. It never seemed to bother him. His experiments with words, his investigations, were the only thing on his mind. I tried to protect him as much as I could. And when he was confused by life or frightened of something, which was rare, he would come into my room and get into the bed beside me.”

  “But you say he will not see you now,” I said.

  “True,” she said, and nodded. “As a child I was rather curious myself. My main interest was in boys, and it was not dispassionate. Once when we were somewhat older and our parents were away for the day, a boy I liked came to the house. Let it suffice to say that Albert came to my room in the middle of the day and discovered me in a compromising position with this fellow.” She sighed, folded her arms, and shook her head.

  “This affected your relationship with him?” I asked, trying to swallow the knot in my throat.

  “He would not look at me from that time on. He would speak to me, but if I was in the same room as him, he would avert his glance or cover his eyes. This has not changed through the years. Now I communicate with him only by phone.”

  “Well, Miss Secmatte, I can tell you he is doing well. A little tired right now because of all the work he has taken on. He is making an enormous amount of money, and is pushing himself somewhat.”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Fesh, money means nothing to Albert. He is more than likely ta
king all of these jobs you mention because they offer challenges to him. They require he test out his theories in ways he would not have come up with on his own.”

  I contemplated telling Rachel the reason why I had offered to help Albert but then thought better of it. The possibility of apprising her of the nature of our work for Mulligan was totally out of the question. The phrase “Top Secret” ran through my mind. She leaned over and reached into the purse at her feet, retrieving a small box, approximately seven inches by four.

  “Can I trust you to give this to him?” she asked. “It was something he had once given me as a gift, but now he said he needs it back.”

  “Certainly,” I said, and took the box from her.

  She rose and put on her coat. “Thank you, Mr. Fesh,” she said.

  “Why did you tell me all of this?” I asked as she made for the door.

  Rachel stopped before exiting. “I have cared about Albert my entire life without ever knowing if he understands that I do. Some time ago I stopped caring if he knows that I care. Now, like him, I continue simply because I must.”

  V

  Being the ethically minded gentleman that I was, I decided to wait at least until I got home from work before opening the box. It was raining profusely as I made my way along the street. By then my curiosity had run wild, and I expected to find all manner of oddness inside. The weight of the little package was not excessive but there was some heft to it. One of my more whimsical thoughts was that perhaps it contained a single word, the word with the greatest weight, a compound confabulated by Secmatte and unknown to all others.

  Upon arriving at my apartment, I set about making a cup of tea, allowing the excitement to build a little more before removing the cover of the box. Then, sitting at my table, overlooking the rain-washed street, the tea sending its steam into the air, I lifted the lid. It was not a word, or a note, or a photograph. It was none of the things I expected; what lay before me on a bed of cotton was a pair of eyeglasses. Before lifting them out of the box, I could see that they were unusual, for the lenses were small and circular, a rich yellow color, and too flimsy to be made of glass. The frames were thick, crudely twisted wire.

  I picked them up from their white nest to inspect them more closely. The lenses appeared to be fashioned from thin sheets of yellow cellophane, and the frames were delicate and bent easily. Of course, I fitted them onto my head, curving the pliable arms around the backs of my ears. The day went dark yellow as I turned my gaze out the window. With the exception of changing the color of things, there was no optical adjustment, no trickery. Then I sat there for some time, watching the rain come down as I contemplated my own insular existence, my sublimations and dishonesties.

  Somewhere amidst those musings the phone rang, and I answered it.

  “Calvin?” said a female voice. It was Corrine.

  “Yes,” I said. I felt as if I was in a dream, listening to myself from a great distance.

  “Calvin, I’ve been thinking of you. Your letters have made me think of you.”

  “And what have you thought?” I asked.

  She began crying. “I would come back to you if you will just show once in a while that you care for me. I want to come back.”

  “Corrine,” I said. “I care for you, but you don’t really want me. You think you do, but it’s an illusion. It’s a trick in the letters. You will be happier without me.” One part of me could not believe what I was saying, but another part was emerging that wanted to recognize the truth.

  There was a period of silence, and then the receiver went dead. I pictured in my mind, Corrine, exiting a phone booth and walking away down the street in the rain. She was right, I had been too wrapped up in myself and rarely showed her that I cared. Oh yes, there were my fatuous transmissions of wonder, my little verbal essays of politics and philosophy and never love, but the real purpose of those was to prove my intellectual superiority. It came to me softly, like a bubble bursting, that I had been responsible for my own loneliness. I removed the yellow glasses and folded them back into their box.

  The next evening, I went to Secmatte’s as usual, but this time with the determination to tell him I was through with the sublimation business. When I knocked at the door, he did not answer. It was open, though, as it often was, so I entered and called out his name. There was no reply. I searched all of the rooms for him, including my office, but he was nowhere to be found. Returning to the printing room, I looked around and saw laid out on one of the counters the new flyers Albert had done for VanGeist. They were political in nature, announcing his candidacy for the state senate in large, bold headlines. Below the headline, on each of the different types, was a different paragraph-long message of the usual good-guy blather from the candidate. At the bottom of these writings was his name and beneath that a reminder to vote on Election Day.

  “Top Secret,” I said, and was about to return to my office when a thought surfaced. Looking once over my shoulder to make sure Secmatte was not there, I reached into my pocket and took out the box containing the glasses. I carefully laid it down on the counter, opened it, and took them out. Once the arms were fitted over my ears and the lenses positioned upon my nose, I turned my attention back to the flyers for VanGeist.

  My hunch paid off, even though I wished that it hadn’t. The cellophane lenses somehow cancelled the sublimation effect, and I saw what no one was meant to. Inserted into the paragraphs of trite self-boostering were some other, very pointed messages. If one assembled the secret words in one set of the flyers, they disparaged VanGeist’s opponent, a fellow by the name of Benttel, as being a communist, a child molester, a thief. The other set’s hidden theme was racial epithets, directed mostly at blacks and disclosing VanGeist’s true feelings about the Civil Rights Act being promulgated by Eisenhower, which would soon come up for a vote in the legislature. My mind raced back to that article in the paper about the assault in Weston, and I could not help but wonder.

  I backed away from the counter, truly aghast at what I had been party to. This was far worse than unobtrusively coaxing people to eat Hasty bacon—or was it? When I turned away from the flyers, I saw on the edge of another table that week’s note for Corrine printed up and drying. Turning my gaze upon it, I discovered that there were no sublimated words in it at all. It was exactly as I had composed it, only set in type and printed. I was paralyzed, and would most likely not have moved for an hour had not Secmatte entered the printing room then.

  “Is Rachel here?” he asked, seeing the glasses on me.

  “Rachel is not here,” I said.

  “I asked her to bring them so that you could see,” he said.

  “Secmatte,” I said, my anger building. “Do you have any idea what you are doing here?”

  “At this moment?” he asked.

  “No,” I shouted, “with these flyers?”

  “Printing them,” he said.

  “You’re spreading hatred, Albert, ignorance and hatred,” I said.

  He shook his head and I noticed his hands begin to tremble.

  “You’re spreading fear.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I’m printing flyers.”

  “The words,” I said, “the words. Do you have any idea what in God’s name you are doing?”

  “It’s only words,” he said. “A job to do. Rachel told me I needed a job to make money.”

  “This is wrong,” I told him. “This is very wrong.”

  He was going to speak but didn’t. Instead he stared down at the floor.

  “These words mean things,” I said.

  “They have definitions,” he murmured.

  “These flyers will hurt people out there in the world,” I said. “There is a world of people out there, Albert.”

  He nodded and smiled and then turned and left the room.

  I tore up as many of the flyers as I could get my hands on, throwing them in the air so that the pieces fell like snow. The words that were sublimated to the naked eye now were all I could see.
I finally took the glasses off and laid them back in their box. After searching the building for a half-hour for Secmatte, I realized where he must be. When I was yelling at him he had the look of a crestfallen child, and I knew he must have gone to serve out his punishment in the closet. I went to my office and opened the door that led to the bathroom. That distant bulb had been extinguished and the great, cold expanse was completely dark.

  “Albert?” I called from the door. I thought I could hear him breathing.

  “Yes,” he answered, but I could not see him.

  “Did you really not know it was wrong?” I asked.

  “I can fix it,” he said.

  “No more work for Mulligan and VanGeist,” I told him.

  “I can fix it with one word,” he said.

  “Just burn the flyers and have nothing more to do with them.”

  “It will be fine,” he said.

  “And what about my letters? Did you ever add any secret words to them?”

  “No.”

  “That was our deal,” I said.

  “But I don’t know anything about Love,” he said. “I needed you so that you could see what I could do. I thought you believed it was good.”

  There was nothing more I could say. I closed the door and left him there in the dark.

  VI

  In the months that followed I often contemplated, at times with anguish, at times delight, that my own words, wrought with true emotion, had reached Corrine and caused her to change her mind. Nothing came of it, though. I heard from a mutual friend that she had left town without Walthus to pursue a life in the city in which she had been born. We were never officially divorced, and I never saw her again.

  There were also two other interesting developments. The first came soon after Secmatte fell out of sight. I read in the newspaper that VanGeist, just prior to the election, dropped dead one morning in his office, and in the same week, Mulligan developed some strange disease that caused him to go blind. Here was a baffling synchronicity that stretched the possibility of coincidence to its very limit.