The Empire of Ice Cream (48 page)

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. Mulligan 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.

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.”