The Empire of Ice Cream (13 page)

In the days I was at the hospital, I tried to process what had happened with Anna. Obviously, my bold advance had frightened her. It crossed my mind that it might be better to leave her alone in the future. The very fact that I was sure I'd made physical contact with her was, in retrospect, unsettling. I wondered if perhaps Stullin was right, and what I perceived to be a result of synesthesia was actually a psychotic hallucination. I left it an open issue in my mind as to whether I would seek her out again. One more meeting might be called for, I thought, at least to simply apologize for my mawkish behavior.

I asked the nurse if my things from the beach house had been brought to the hospital, and she told me they had. I spent the entirety of my last day there dressed and waiting to get the okay for my release. That afternoon, they brought me my belongings. I went carefully through everything, but it became obvious to me that my crayon score for the fugue was missing. Everything else was accounted for, but there was no large sheet of drawing paper. I asked the nurse, who was very kind, and actually reminded me somewhat of Mrs. Brithnic, to double-check and see if everything had been brought to me. She did and told me there was nothing else. I called the Varion Island police on the pretense of thanking them and asked if they had seen the drawing. My fugue had vanished. I knew a grave depression would descend upon me soon due to its disappearance, but for the moment I was numb and slightly pleased to merely be alive.

I decided to return to my parents' house for a few days and rest up before returning to the conservatory in order to continue my studies. In the bus station near the hospital, while I was waiting, I went to the small newspaper stand in order to buy a pack of gum and a paper with which to pass the time. As I perused the candy rack, my sight lighted upon something that made me feel the way Eve must have when she first saw the apple, for there was a bag of Thompson's Coffee-Flavored Hard Candy. The moment I read the words on the bag, I reached for them. There was a spark in my solar plexus, and my palms grew damp.
No Caffeine
the package read, and I was hard-pressed to believe my good fortune. I looked nervously over my shoulder while purchasing three bags of them, and when, on the bus, I tore a bag open, I did so with such violence, a handful of them scattered across the seat and into the aisle.

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.