The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  The work was easy enough. I have, from my earliest years in school, been fairly good with grammar, and the requirements of proofreading came as second nature to me. I was given my own office at the back of the building. It was situated at the end of a long, dimly lit hallway, the walls of which were lined with shelves holding various sets of typefaces both ancient and modern. These were Secmatte’s building blocks, the toys with which he worked his magic upon paper. They were meticulously arranged and labeled, and there were hundreds of them. Some of the blocks holding individual letters were as large as a paperback book and some no bigger than the nail on my pinky finger.

  My office was stark, to say the least—a desk, a chair, and a standing lamp no doubt procured at a yard sale. Waiting for me on the desk upon my arrival would be a short stack of flyers, each a proof copy of a different batch, I was to read through and look for errors. I was to circle the errors or write a description of them in the margin with a green pen. The ink had to be green for some reason I never did establish. When I discovered a problem, which was exceedingly rare, I was to bring the proof in question to Secmatte, who was invariably in the printing room. Since typeface played such an important part in the production of the sublimation effect, and those not in the know would never see the words meant to be sublimated, he set his own type and printed the flyers himself on an old electric press with a drum that caught up the pages and rolled them over the ink-coated print. Even toiling away at this messy task, he wore his black suit, white shirt, and tie. The copy that Mulligan was supplying seemed the most innocuous drivel. Secmatte called them ads, I suppose, because he knew that after he had his way with them they would be secretly persuasive in some manner, but to the naked eye of the uninitiated, like myself, they appeared simple messages of whimsical advice to anyone who might read them:

  Free Fun

  Fun doesn’t have to be expensive!

  For a good time on a clear day, take the family on an outing to an open space, like a field or meadow. Bring blankets to sit on. Then look up at the slow parade of clouds passing overhead. Their white cotton majesty is a high-altitude museum of wonders. Study their forms carefully, and soon you will be seeing faces, running horses, a witch on her broom, a schooner under full sail. Share what you see with each other. It won’t be long before the conversation and laughter will begin.

  This was the first one I worked on, and all the time I carefully perused it, I wondered what banal product of his mercantile web Mulligan was secretly pushing on its unwitting readers. From that very first night at my strange new task, I paid close attention to any odd urges I might have and often took an inventory at the end of each week of my purchases to see if I had acquired something that was not indicative of my usual habits. I did, at this time, take up the habit of smoking cigarettes, but I put that off to my frustration and anguish over the loss of Corrine.

  These flyers began appearing in town a week after I started going to Secmatte’s on a regular basis. I saw them stapled to telephone poles, tacked to bulletin boards at the laundromat, in neat stacks at the ends of the checkout counters at the grocery store. A man even brought one into the library and asked if I would allow him to hang it on our board. I didn’t want to, knowing it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but I did. One of the library’s regular patrons remarked upon it, shaking his head. “It seems a lot of trouble for something so obvious,” he said. “But, you know, when I was over in Weston on business, I saw them there too.”

  Good to his word, at the end of our session on Thursday nights, Secmatte appeared at the open door to my office, holding a sheet of paper in his hand. Printed on it, in a beautiful old typescript with bold and ornate capitals and curving l’s and i’s, was that week’s letter to Corrine.

  “Your note, Mr. Fesh,” he’d say, and walk over and place it on the corner of my desk.

  “Thank you,” I would say, expecting and then hoping that he might return the thanks, but he never did. He would merely nod, say “Yes,” and then leave.

  Those single sheets of paper holding my message of wonder for my wife appeared normal enough, but when I’d lift them off the desktop, they’d feel weighted as if by as much as an invisible paperclip. While carrying them home, their energy was undeniable. My memories of Corrine would come back to me so vividly it was like I held her hand in mine instead of paper. Of course, I would send them off with the first post in the morning, but every Thursday night I would lay them in the bed next to me and dream that they whispered their secret vows of love while I slept.

  The night I happened to discover on the back of the cigarette pack that my brand, Butter Lake Regulars, was made by a subsidiary of Mulligan, Inc., I saw another side of Secmatte. There were two doors in my office. One opened onto the hallway lined with the shelves of type, and the other across the room from my desk led to a large room of enormous proportions without lights. It was always very cold in there, and I surmised it must have been the garage where the oil trucks had once been housed. If I needed to use the bathroom, I would have to open that other door and cross through the dark, chilly expanse to a doorway on its far side. Secmatte’s place—I would no longer call it a home—was always somewhat eerie, but that stroll through the darkness to the small square of light in the distance was downright scary. The light I moved toward was the entrance to the bathroom.

  The bathroom itself was dingy. The fixtures must have been there from the time of the original occupants. The toilet was a bowl of rust and the sink was cracked and chipped. One bare bulb hung overhead. To say the bathroom was stark was a kindness, and when necessity called upon me to use it, I often thought what it would be like to be in prison.

  On the night I refer to, I took the long walk to the bathroom. I settled down on the splintered wooden seat, lit a Butter Lake Regular, and in my uneasy reverie began to consider Mulligan’s program of surreptitious propaganda. In the middle of my business, I chanced to look down and there, next to me on the floor, was the largest snake I had ever seen. I gasped but did not scream, fearful of inciting the creature to strike. Its mouth was open wide, showing two huge, curving fangs, and its yellow and black mottled body was coiled beneath it like a garden hose in storage. I sat as perfectly still as I could, taking the most minute breaths. Each bead of sweat that swelled upon my forehead and then trickled slowly down my face, I feared would be enough to draw an attack. Finally, I could stand the tension no longer and, with a great effort, tried to leap to safety. I forgot about my pants around my ankles, which tripped me up, and I sprawled across the bathroom floor. A few minutes later, I realized the serpent was made of rubber.

  “What is this supposed to be?” I asked him as he stood filling the press with ink.

  Secmatte turned around and saw me standing with the snake in my hand, both its head and tail touching the floor. He smiled, but it wasn’t his usual, mindless grin.

  “Legion,” he said, put down the can of ink, and came over to take the thing from me.

  “It scared me to death,” I said.

  “It’s rubber,” he said, and draped it over his shoulders. He lifted the head and looked into the snake’s eyes. “Thank you, I’ve been looking for him. I did not know where he had gotten off to.”

  I was so angry I wanted a scene, an argument. I wanted Albert Secmatte to react. “You’re a grown man and you own a rubber snake?” I said with as much vehemence as I could.

  “Yes,” he said as if I had asked him if the sky was blue. Without another word, he went back to his work.

  I sighed, shook my head, and returned to my office.

  Later that evening, he brought me my letter for Corrine, this one concerning the music of humpback whales. I wanted to show him I was still put out, but the sight of the letter set me at ease. He also had another piece of paper with him.

  “Mr. Fesh, I wanted to show you something I have been working on,” he said.

  Taking the other sheet of paper from him, I brought it up to my eyes so that I could read its one typeset sentence.
“What?” I asked.

  “Keep looking at it for a minute or two,” he said.

  The sentence was rather long, I remember, and the structure of it, though grammatically correct, was awkward. My eyes scanned back and forth over it continually. Its content had something to do with a polar bear fishing in frozen waters. I remember that it began with a prepositional phrase and inserted in the middle was a parenthetic phrase describing the lush beauty of the bear’s fur. The writing did not flow properly; it was stilted in some way. Unable to stare any longer, I blinked. In the instant of that blink, the word “flame” appeared out of context in the very center of the sentence. It wasn’t as if the other words were shoved aside to make room. No, the sentence appeared stable, only there was a new word in it. I blinked again and it was gone. I blinked again and it reappeared. On and off with each fleeting movement of my eyelids.

  I smiled and looked up at Secmatte.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I am some way off from perfecting it.”

  “This is remarkable,” I said. “What’s the effect you’re trying for?”

  “Do you know the neon sign in town at the bakery? Hot Pies—in that beautiful color of flamingos?”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “Well …” he said, and waved his right hand in a circular motion as if expecting me to finish a thought.

  The words came to me before the thoughts did: “It blinks,” I said.

  “Precisely,” said Secmatte, smoothing back his hair wave. “Can you imagine a piece of text containing a word that blinks on and off like that sign? I know theoretically it is possible, but as of now I am only able to produce a line that changes each time the person blinks or looks away. It is excruciatingly difficult to achieve just the right balance of instability and stability to make the word in question fluctuate between sublimation and its being evident to the naked eye. I need a higher state of instability, one where the word is, for all intents and purposes, sublimated, but at the same time there needs to be some pulsating value in the sentence that draws it back into the visible, releases it, and draws it back at a more rapid rate. I’m guessing my answer lies in some combination of typeface and vowel/consonant bifurcation in the adjectives. As you can see, the sentence as it now stands is really not right, its syntax tortured beyond measure for the meager effect it displays.”

  I was speechless. Looking back at the paper, I blinked repeatedly, watching the “flame” come and go. When I turned my attention back to Secmatte, he was gone.

  I was halfway home that night before I allowed myself to enjoy the fact that I was carrying another loaded missive for Corrine. Up until that point my mind was whirling with blinking words and coiled rubber snakes. I vaguely sensed a desire to entertain the question as to whether it was ethical for me to be sending these notes to her, but I had mastered my own chemistry of sublimation and used it with impunity. Later, asleep, I dreamed of making love to her, and the rubber snake came back to me in the most absurd and horrifying manner.

  IV

  Mulligan’s flyers were myriad, but although the subject of each was different—the importance of oiling a squeaky hinge on a screen door, having someone help you when you use a ladder, stopping to smell the flowers along the way, telling your children once a day that they are good—there was a fundamental sameness in their mundanity. Perhaps this could account for their popularity. Nothing is more comforting to people than to have their certainties trumpeted back to them in bold, clear typeface. Also they were free, and that is a price that few can pass up no matter what it is attended to, save Death. I know from my library patrons that the citizens of Jameson were collecting them. Some punched holes in them and made little encyclopedias of the banal. They were just the type of safe, retroactive diversions one could focus on to ignore the chaos of a cultural revolution that was beginning to burgeon.

  Coinciding with the popularity of the flyers, I began to perceive a change in the town’s buying habits. It was first noticeable to me at the grocery store where certain products could not be kept in stock due to so powerful a demand. On closer inspection, it became evident that all of these desirable goods had been produced by the ubiquitous Mulligan, Inc. There was something undeniably irresistible about the sublimated suggestions hiding in the flyers. It was as if people perceived them as whispered advice from their own minds, and their attraction to a specific product was believed to be a subjective, idiosyncratic brainstorm. Once the products began to become scarce, others, who had not read the flyers, bought them also out of a sense of not wanting to miss out on an item obviously endorsed by their brethren. Even knowing this, I could not stay my hand from reaching for Blue Hurricane laundry detergent, Flavor Pops cereal, Hasty bacon, etc. The detergent turned out not to have the magical cleaning abilities it promised, the Flavor Pops were devoid of flavor, like eating crunchy kernels of dust, and Hasty described the speed with which I swallowed those strips of meatless lard. Still, I forbore the ghostly stains and simply added more sugar to the cereal, unable to purchase anything else.

  Even though I knew what Secmatte and Mulligan were up to was profoundly wrong, I vacillated as to whether I should continue to play my small role in the scam. I was torn between the greater good and my own self-serving desire to win back Corrine. This became a real dilemma for me, and I would stay up late at night considering my options, smoking Butter Lake Regulars, and pacing the floor. Then one night in order to escape the weight of my predicament, I decided to take in a movie. Funny Face, directed by Stanley Donen, with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, was playing at the Ritz, and it was advertised as just the kind of innocent fluff I required to soothe my conscience.

  I arrived early at the Ritz on a Wednesday night, bought a bag of buttered popcorn, my usual, and went into the theatre to take my seat. I was sitting there, staring up at the blank screen, wishing my mind could emulate it, when in walked a handsome couple, arm in arm. Corrine and Walthus passed right by me without looking. I know they saw me sitting there by myself. A gentleman alone in a theatre was not a typical sight in those days, and I’m sure I drew some small attention from anyone who passed, yet they chose not to recognize me. I immediately contemplated leaving, but then the lights went out and the film came on and there was Audrey, my date for the night.

  My emotions seesawed back and forth between embarrassment at seeing my stolen wife with her lover and my desire to spend time with the innocent and affectionate Jo Stockton, Hepburn’s bookish character, amidst the backdrop of an idealized Paris. When my dream date’s face was not on the screen, I peered forward three rows to where Corrine and Walthus sat. Tears formed in my eyes at one point, both for the trumped up difficulties of the lovers in the film and for my own. Then, at the crucial moment, when Stockton professes her love for Dick Avery, the photographer, I noticed Corrine turn her head and stare back at me. Of course it was dark, but there was still enough light thrown off from the screen so that our gazes met. I detected a mutual spark. My hand left the bag of popcorn and reached out to her. This motion prompted her to turn back around.

  I did not stay for the remainder of the film. But on my way home, I could not stop smiling. If there had been any question as to whether I would continue with Secmatte, that one look from my wife decided it. “My letters are speaking to her,” I said aloud, and I felt so light I could have danced up a wall as I had once seen Astaire do in Royal Wedding.

  The next evening, upon my arrival at Secmatte’s, he met me at the door to inform me that he would not need my services that day. He had several gentlemen coming over to talk business with him. He handed me my letter for Corrine—a little piece about a pair of Siamese twins joined at the center of the head who, though each possessed a brain, and an outer eye, shared a single eye at the crux of their connection. The missive had been set in type and carried the perceived weight of his invisible words. I thanked him and he nodded and smiled. As I turned to go, he said, “Mr. Fesh, eh, Calvin, I very much like when you come to help.” He looked away from me
, not his usual wandering disinterest, but rather in a bashful manner that led me to believe he was being genuine.

  “Why, thank you, Albert,” I said, using his first name for the first time. “I think our letters are beginning to get through to my wife.”

  He gave a fleeting look of discomfort and then smiled and nodded.

  As I turned to leave, a shiny limousine pulled up and out stepped three gentlemen, well-dressed in expensive suits. One I recognized immediately as Mulligan. I did not want him to identify me from the night at the community center, especially after I had questioned Secmatte’s sanity, so I moved quickly away down the street. In fleeing, I did not get a good look at the other men, but I heard Mulligan introduce one as Thomas VanGeist. VanGeist, I knew, was a candidate for the state senatorial race that year. I looked back over my shoulder to see if I could place him, but they were all filing into the bunker by then.

  When I visited Secmatte the next week, he looked exhausted. He did not chat with me for too long, but said that he had done a good deal of business and his work had increased exponentially. I felt badly for him. His suit was rumpled, his tie askew, and his hair, which was normally combed perfectly back in a wave, hung in strands as if that wave had finally hit the beach. Legion, the rubber snake, was draped around his neck like some kind of exotic necklace or a talisman to ward off evil.

  “I can come an extra night if it will help you,” I said. “You know, until you are done with the additional work.”

  He shook his head, “No, Fesh, I can’t. This is top-secret work. Top secret.”