The Empire of Ice Cream (49 page)

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.”

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.”