The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  All this would be difficult to compose but nothing outlandishly original. It was my design, though, to impress the judges by trying something new. Once the fugue had reached its greatest state of complication, I wanted the piece to slowly, almost logically at first, but then without rhyme or meter, crumble into chaos. At the very end, from that chaotic cacophony, there would emerge one note, drawn out to great length, which would eventually diminish into nothing.

  For the first week, the work went well. I took a little time off every morning and evening for a walk on the beach. At night I would go to the diner and then return to the bungalow to listen to Bach’s Art of the Fugue or Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, some Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, and then pieces from the inception of the form by composers like Sweelinck and Froberger. I employed the crayons on a large piece of good drawing paper, and although to anyone else it wouldn’t look like musical notation, I knew exactly how it would sound when I viewed it. Somewhere after the first week, though, I started to slow down, and by Saturday night my work came to a grinding halt. What I’d begun with such a clear sense of direction had me trapped. I was lost in my own complexity. The truth was, I was exhausted and could no longer pick apart the threads of the piece—the subject, the answer, the counter-subject snarled like a ball of yarn.

  I was thoroughly weary and knew I needed rest, but even though I went to bed and closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep. All day Sunday I sat in a chair and surveyed the beach through the front window. I was too tired to work but too frustrated about not working to sleep. That evening, after having done nothing all day, I stumbled down to the diner and took my usual seat. The place was empty, save for one old man sitting in the far corner reading a book while eating his dinner. This solitary character looked somewhat like Stullin for his white beard, and at first glance, had I not known better, I could’ve sworn the book he was reading was The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer. I didn’t want to get close enough to find out for fear he might strike up a conversation.

  The waitress came and took my order. When she was finished writing on her pad, she said, “You look exhausted tonight.”

  I nodded.

  “You need to sleep,” she said.

  “I have work to do,” I told her.

  “Well, then, let me bring you some coffee.”

  I laughed. “You know, I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life,” I said.

  “Impossible,” she said. “It looks to me like tonight might be a good time to start.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” I told her, and this seemed to make her happy.

  While I ate, I glanced through my notebook and tried to reestablish the architecture of the fugue. As always, when I looked at my notes, everything was crystal clear, but when it came time to continue on the score, every potential further step seemed the wrong way to go. Somewhere in the midst of my musing, I pushed my plate away and drew toward me the cup and saucer. My usual drink was tea, and I’d forgotten I had changed my order. I took a sip, and the dark, bitter taste of black coffee startled me. I looked up, and there was Anna, staring at me, having just lowered a cup away from her lips. In her eyes I saw a glint of recognition, as if she were actually seeing me, and I’m sure she saw the same in mine.

  I whispered, “I see you.”

  She smiled. “I see you too,” she said.

  I would have been less surprised if a dog had spoken to me. Sitting dumbfounded, I reached slowly out toward where she seemed to sit across from me in the booth. As my hand approached, she leaned back away from it.

  “I’ve been watching you for years,” she said.

  “The coffee?” I said.

  She nodded. “You are a synesthete, am I right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But you’re a figment of my imagination, a product of a neurological anomaly.”

  Here she laughed out loud. “No,” she said, “you are.”

  After our initial exchange, neither of us spoke. I was in a mild state of shock, I believe. This can’t be, I kept repeating in my mind, but there she was, and I could hear her breathing. Her image appeared even sharper than it had previously under the influence of the coffee ice cream. And now, with the taste that elicited her presence uncompromised by cream and sugar and the cold, she remained without dissipating for a good few minutes before beginning to mist at the edges and I had to take another sip to sharpen the focus. When I brought my cup up to drink, she also did at the same exact time, as if she were a reflection, as if I were her reflection, and we both smiled.

  “I can’t speak to you where I am. They’ll think I’ve lost my mind,” I whispered.

  “I’m in the same situation,” she said.

  “Give me a half-hour and then have another cup of coffee, and I’ll be able to speak to you in private.”

  She nodded in agreement and watched as I called for the check.

  By the time the waitress arrived at my booth, Anna had dissolved into a vague cloud, like the exhalation of a smoker. It didn’t matter, as I knew she couldn’t be seen by anyone else. As my bill was being tallied, I ordered three cups of coffee to go.

  “That coffee is something, isn’t it?” said the waitress. “I swear by it. Amazing you’ve never had any up to this point. My blood is three-quarters coffee, I drink so much of it,” she said.

  “Wonderful stuff,” I agreed.

  Wonderful it was, for it had awakened my senses, and I walked through the freezing, windy night, carrying in a box my containers of elixir, with all the joy of a child leaving school on Friday afternoon. The absurdity of the whole affair didn’t escape me, and I laughed out loud remembering my whispered plan to wait a half-hour and then drink another cup. The conspiratorial nature of it excited me, and I realized for the first time since seeing her that Anna had matured and grown more beautiful in the years I had forsaken her.

  Back at the bungalow, I put the first of the large Styrofoam containers into the microwave in the kitchen and heated it for no more than thirty seconds. I began to worry that perhaps in Anna’s existence time was altogether different and a half-hour for me might be two or three or a day for her. The instant the bell sounded on the appliance, I took the cup out, seated myself at the small kitchen table, and drank a long draught of the dark potion. Before I set the cup down, she was there, sitting in the seat opposite me.

  “I know your name is Anna,” I said to her. “I saw it on one of your drawing pads.”

  She flipped her hair behind her ear on the left side and asked, “What’s yours?”

  “William,” I said. Then I told her about the coffee ice cream and first time I encountered her image.

  “I remember,” she said, “when I was a child of nine, I snuck a sip of my father’s coffee he had left in the living room, and I saw you sitting at a piano. I thought you were a ghost. I ran to get my mother to show her, but when I returned you had vanished. She thought little of it since the synesthesia was always prompting me to describe things that made no sense to her.”

  “When did you realize it was the coffee?” I asked.

  “Oh, some time later. I again was given a taste of it at breakfast one morning, and there you were, sitting at our dining room table, looking rather forlorn. It took every ounce of restraint not to blurt out that you were there. Then it started to make sense to me. After that, I would try to see you as much as possible. You were often very sad when you were younger. I know that.”

  The look on her face, one of true concern for me, almost brought tears to my eyes. She was a witness to my life. I hadn’t been as alone as I’d always thought.

  “You’re a terrific artist,” I said.

  She smiled. “I’m great with a pencil, but my professors are demanding a piece in color. That’s what I’m working on now.”

  Intermittently in the conversation we’d stop and take sips of coffee to keep the connection vital. As it turned out, she too had escaped her normal routine and taken a place in order to work on a project for her final portfolio review. We discovered all manner of
synchronicities between our lives. She admitted to me that she had also been a loner as a child and that her parents had a hard time dealing with her synesthetic condition. As she put it, “Until we discovered the reality of it, I think they thought I was crazy.” She laughed, but I could tell by the look in her eyes how deeply it had affected her.

  “Have you ever told anyone about me?” I asked.

  “Only my therapist,” she said. “I was relieved when he told me he had heard of rare cases like mine.”

  This revelation brought me up short, for Stullin had told me he had never encountered anything of the sort in the literature. The implications of this inconsistency momentarily reminded me that she was not real, but I quickly shoved the notion from my thoughts and continued the conversation.

  That night, by parsing out the coffee I had, and she doing the same, we stayed together until two in the morning, telling each other about our lives, our creative ideas, our dreams for the future. We found that our synesthetic experiences were similar and that our sense impressions were often transposed with the same results. For instance, for both of us, the aroma of new-mown grass was circular and the sound of a car horn tasted of citrus. She told me that her father was an amateur musician who loved the piano and classical music. In the middle of my recounting for her the intricacies of the fugue I was planning, she suddenly looked up from her cup and said, “Oh no, I’m out of coffee.” I looked down at my own cup and realized I’d just taken the last sip.

  “Tomorrow at noon,” she said as her image weakened.

  “Yes!” I yelled, afraid she would not hear me.

  Then she became a phantom, a miasma, a notion, and I was left staring at the wall of the kitchen. With her gone, I could not sit still for long. All the coffee I’d drunk was coursing through me, and because my frail system had never before known the stimulant, my hands literally shook from it. I knew sleep was out of the question, so after walking around the small rooms of the bungalow for an hour, I sat down to my fugue to see what I could do.

  Immediately, I picked up the trail of where I had been headed before Saturday’s mental block had set in. Everything was piercingly clear to me, and I could hear the music I was noting in various colors as if there were a tape of the piece playing as I created it. I worked like a demon, quickly, unerringly, and the ease with which the answers to the musical problems presented themselves gave me great confidence and made my decisions ingenious. Finally, around eight in the morning (I hadn’t noticed the sunrise), the coffee took its toll on me, and I became violently ill. The stomach pains, the headache, were excruciating. At ten, I vomited, and that relieved the symptoms somewhat. But by eleven A.M. I was at the diner buying another four cups of coffee.

  The waitress tried to interest me in breakfast, but I said I wasn’t hungry. She told me I didn’t look well, and I tried to laugh off her concern. When she pressed the matter, I made some surly comment to her that I can’t now remember, and she understood I was interested in nothing but the coffee. I took my hoard and went directly to the beach. The temperature was milder that day and the fresh air cleared my head. I sat in the shelter of a deep hollow amidst the dunes to block the wind, drank, and watched Anna at work, wherever she was, on her project—a large, colorful abstract drawing. After spying on her for a few minutes, I realized that the composition of the piece, its arrangement of color, presented itself to me as the melodic line of Symphony no. 8 in B Minor by Franz Schubert. This amused me at first, to think that my own musical knowledge was inherent in the existence of her world, that my imagination was its essence. What was also interesting was that such a minor interest of mine, Schubert, should manifest itself. I supposed that any aspect of my life, no matter how minor, was fodder for this imaginative process. It struck me just as quickly, though, that I didn’t want this to be so. I wanted her to be apart from me, her own separate entity, for without that, what would her friendship mean? I physically shook my head to rid myself of the idea. When at noon she appeared next to me in my nest among the dunes, I’d already managed to forget this worm in the apple.

  We spent the morning together talking and laughing, strolling along the edge of the ocean, climbing on the rocks at the point. When the coffee ran low around three, we returned to the diner for me to get more. I asked them to make me two whole pots and just pour them into large, plastic takeout containers. The waitress said nothing but shook her head. In the time I was on my errand, Anna, in her own world, brewed another vat of it.

  We met up back at my bungalow, and as evening came on, we took out our respective projects and worked together, across from each other at the kitchen table. In her presence my musical imagination was on fire, and she admitted to me that she saw for the first time the overarching structure of her drawing and where she was headed with it. At one point I became so immersed in the work, I reached out and picked up what I thought would be one of my crayons but instead it turned out to be a violet pastel. I didn’t own pastels, Anna did.

  “Look,” I said to her, and at that moment felt a wave of dizziness pass over me. A headache was beginning behind my eyes.

  She lifted her gaze from her work and saw me holding the violet stick. We both sat quietly, in awe of its implications. Slowly, she put her hand out across the table toward me. I dropped the pastel and reached toward her. Our hands met, and I swear I could feel her fingers entangled with mine.

  “What does this mean, William?” she said with a note of fear in her voice and let go of me.

  As I stood up, I lost my balance and needed to support myself by clutching the back of the chair. She also stood, and as I approached her, she backed away. “No, this isn’t right,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It’s me.” I took two wobbly steps and drew so close to her I could smell her perfume. She cringed but did not try to get away. I put my arms around her and attempted to kiss her.

  “No,” she cried. Then I felt the force of both her hands against my chest, and I stumbled backward onto the floor. “I don’t want this. It’s not real,” she said, and began to hurriedly gather her things.

  “Wait, I’m sorry,” I said. I tried to scrabble to my feet, and that’s when the sum total of my lack of sleep, the gallons of caffeine, the fraying of my nerves came together like the twining voices in a fugue and struck me in the head as if I’d been kicked by a horse. My body was shaking, my vision grew hazy, and I could feel myself phasing in and out of consciousness. I managed to watch Anna turn and walk away as if passing through the living room. Somehow I got to my feet and followed her, using the furniture as support. The last thing I remember was flinging open the front door of the small house and screaming her name.

  I was found the next morning lying on the beach, unconscious. It was the old man with the white beard from the diner, who, on his daily early-morning beachcombing expedition, came across me. The police were summoned. An ambulance was called. I came to in a hospital bed the next day, the warm sun, smelling of antique rose, streaming through a window onto me.

  They kept me at the small shore hospital two days for psychological observation. A psychiatrist visited me, and I managed to convince him that I’d been working too hard on a project for school. Apparently the waitress at the diner had told the police that I’d been consuming ridiculous amounts of coffee and going without sleep. Word of this had gotten back to the doctor who attended to me. When I told him it was the first time I had tried coffee and that I’d gotten carried away, he warned me to stay off it, telling me they found me in a puddle of my own vomit. “It obviously disagrees with your system. You could have choked to death when you passed out.” I thanked him for his advice and promised him I’d stay well away from it in the future.

  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.