The Empire of Ice Cream (50 page)

“It sounds as if he had a troubled youth,” I said.

“He never had any friends, was always an outcast. The other children in our town taunted him constantly. It never seemed to bother him. His experiments with words, his investigations, were the only thing on his mind. I tried to protect him as much as I could. And when he was confused by life or frightened of something, which was rare, he would come into my room and get into the bed beside me.”

“But you say he will not see you now,” I said.

“True,” she said, and nodded. “As a child I was rather curious myself. My main interest was in boys, and it was not dispassionate. Once when we were somewhat older and our parents were away for the day, a boy I liked came to the house. Let it suffice to say that Albert came to my room in the middle of the day and discovered me in a compromising position with this fellow.” She sighed, folded her arms, and shook her head.

“This affected your relationship with him?” I asked, trying to swallow the knot in my throat.

“He would not look at me from that time on. He would speak to me, but if I was in the same room as him, he would avert his glance or cover his eyes. This has not changed through the years. Now I communicate with him only by phone.”

“Well, Miss Secmatte, I can tell you he is doing well. A little tired right now because of all the work he has taken on. He is making an enormous amount of money, and is pushing himself somewhat.”

“I can assure you, Mr. Fesh, money means nothing to Albert. He is more than likely taking all of these jobs you mention because they offer challenges to him. They require he test out his theories in ways he would not have come up with on his own.”

I contemplated telling Rachel the reason why I had offered to help Albert but then thought better of it. The possibility of apprising her of the nature of our work for Mulligan was totally out of the question. The phrase “Top Secret” ran through my mind. She leaned over and reached into the purse at her feet, retrieving a small box, approximately seven inches by four.

“Can I trust you to give this to him?” she asked. “It was something he had once given me as a gift, but now he said he needs it back.”

“Certainly,” I said, and took the box from her.

She rose and put on her coat. “Thank you, Mr. Fesh,” she said.

“Why did you tell me all of this?” I asked as she made for the door.

Rachel stopped before exiting. “I have cared about Albert my entire life without ever knowing if he understands that I do. Some time ago I stopped caring if he knows that I care. Now, like him, I continue simply because I must.”

V

Being the ethically minded gentleman that I was, I decided to wait at least until I got home from work before opening the box. It was raining profusely as I made my way along the street. By then my curiosity had run wild, and I expected to find all manner of oddness inside. The weight of the little package was not excessive but there was some heft to it. One of my more whimsical thoughts was that perhaps it contained a single word, the word with the greatest weight, a compound confabulated by Secmatte and unknown to all others.

Upon arriving at my apartment, I set about making a cup of tea, allowing the excitement to build a little more before removing the cover of the box. Then, sitting at my table, overlooking the rain-washed street, the tea sending its steam into the air, I lifted the lid. It was not a word, or a note, or a photograph. It was none of the things I expected; what lay before me on a bed of cotton was a pair of eyeglasses. Before lifting them out of the box, I could see that they were unusual, for the lenses were small and circular, a rich yellow color, and too flimsy to be made of glass. The frames were thick, crudely twisted wire.

I picked them up from their white nest to inspect them more closely. The lenses appeared to be fashioned from thin sheets of yellow cellophane, and the frames were delicate and bent easily. Of course, I fitted them onto my head, curving the pliable arms around the backs of my ears. The day went dark yellow as I turned my gaze out the window. With the exception of changing the color of things, there was no optical adjustment, no trickery. Then I sat there for some time, watching the rain come down as I contemplated my own insular existence, my sublimations and dishonesties.

Somewhere amidst those musings the phone rang, and I answered it.

“Calvin?” said a female voice. It was Corrine.

“Yes,” I said. I felt as if I was in a dream, listening to myself from a great distance.

“Calvin, I've been thinking of you. Your letters have made me think of you.”

“And what have you thought?” I asked.

She began crying. “I would come back to you if you will just show once in a while that you care for me. I want to come back.”

“Corrine,” I said. “I care for you, but you don't really want me. You think you do, but it's an illusion. It's a trick in the letters. You will be happier without me.” One part of me could not believe what I was saying, but another part was emerging that wanted to recognize the truth.

There was a period of silence, and then the receiver went dead. I pictured in my mind, Corrine, exiting a phone booth and walking away down the street in the rain. She was right, I had been too wrapped up in myself and rarely showed her that I cared. Oh yes, there were my fatuous transmissions of wonder, my little verbal essays of politics and philosophy and never love, but the real purpose of those was to prove my intellectual superiority. It came to me softly, like a bubble bursting, that I had been responsible for my own loneliness. I removed the yellow glasses and folded them back into their box.

The next evening, I went to Secmatte's as usual, but this time with the determination to tell him I was through with the sublimation business. When I knocked at the door, he did not answer. It was open, though, as it often was, so I entered and called out his name. There was no reply. I searched all of the rooms for him, including my office, but he was nowhere to be found. Returning to the printing room, I looked around and saw laid out on one of the counters the new flyers Albert had done for VanGeist. They were political in nature, announcing his candidacy for the state senate in large, bold headlines. Below the headline, on each of the different types, was a different paragraph-long message of the usual good-guy blather from the candidate. At the bottom of these writings was his name and beneath that a reminder to vote on Election Day.

“Top Secret,” I said, and was about to return to my office when a thought surfaced. Looking once over my shoulder to make sure Secmatte was not there, I reached into my pocket and took out the box containing the glasses. I carefully laid it down on the counter, opened it, and took them out. Once the arms were fitted over my ears and the lenses positioned upon my nose, I turned my attention back to the flyers for VanGeist.

My hunch paid off, even though I wished that it hadn't. The cellophane lenses somehow cancelled the sublimation effect, and I saw what no one was meant to. Inserted into the paragraphs of trite self-boostering were some other, very pointed messages. If one assembled the secret words in one set of the flyers, they disparaged VanGeist's opponent, a fellow by the name of Benttel, as being a communist, a child molester, a thief. The other set's hidden theme was racial epithets, directed mostly at blacks and disclosing VanGeist's true feelings about the Civil Rights Act being promulgated by Eisenhower, which would soon come up for a vote in the legislature. My mind raced back to that article in the paper about the assault in Weston, and I could not help but wonder.

I backed away from the counter, truly aghast at what I had been party to. This was far worse than unobtrusively coaxing people to eat Hasty bacon—or was it? When I turned away from the flyers, I saw on the edge of another table that week's note for Corrine printed up and drying. Turning my gaze upon it, I discovered that there were no sublimated words in it at all. It was exactly as I had composed it, only set in type and printed. I was paralyzed, and would most likely not have moved for an hour had not Secmatte entered the printing room then.

“Is Rachel here?” he asked, seeing the glasses on me.

“Rachel is not here,” I said.

“I asked her to bring them so that you could see,” he said.

“Secmatte,” I said, my anger building. “Do you have any idea what you are doing here?”

“At this moment?” he asked.

“No,” I shouted, “with these flyers?”

“Printing them,” he said.

“You're spreading hatred, Albert, ignorance and hatred,” I said.

He shook his head and I noticed his hands begin to tremble.

“You're spreading fear.”

“I'm not,” he said. “I'm printing flyers.”

“The words,” I said, “the words. Do you have any idea what in God's name you are doing?”

“It's only words,” he said. “A job to do. Rachel told me I needed a job to make money.”

“This is wrong,” I told him. “This is very wrong.”

He was going to speak but didn't. Instead he stared down at the floor.

“These words mean things,” I said.

“They have definitions,” he murmured.

“These flyers will hurt people out there in the world,” I said. “There is a world of people out there, Albert.”

He nodded and smiled and then turned and left the room.

I tore up as many of the flyers as I could get my hands on, throwing them in the air so that the pieces fell like snow. The words that were sublimated to the naked eye now were all I could see. I finally took the glasses off and laid them back in their box. After searching the building for a half-hour for Secmatte, I realized where he must be. When I was yelling at him he had the look of a crestfallen child, and I knew he must have gone to serve out his punishment in the closet. I went to my office and opened the door that led to the bathroom. That distant bulb had been extinguished and the great, cold expanse was completely dark.

“Albert?” I called from the door. I thought I could hear him breathing.

“Yes,” he answered, but I could not see him.

“Did you really not know it was wrong?” I asked.

“I can fix it,” he said.

“No more work for Mulligan and VanGeist,” I told him.

“I can fix it with one word,” he said.

“Just burn the flyers and have nothing more to do with them.”

“It will be fine,” he said.

“And what about my letters? Did you
ever
add any secret words to them?”

“No.”

“That was our deal,” I said.

“But I don't know anything about Love,” he said. “I needed you so that you could see what I could do. I thought you believed it was good.”

There was nothing more I could say. I closed the door and left him there in the dark.

VI

In the months that followed I often contemplated, at times with anguish, at times delight, that my own words, wrought with true emotion, had reached Corrine and caused her to change her mind. Nothing came of it, though. I heard from a mutual friend that she had left town without Walthus to pursue a life in the city in which she had been born. We were never officially divorced, and I never saw her again.

There were also two other interesting developments. The first came soon after Secmatte fell out of sight. I read in the newspaper that VanGeist, just prior to the election, dropped dead one morning in his office, and in the same week, Mulligan developed some strange disease that caused him to go blind. Here was a baffling synchronicity that stretched the possibility of coincidence to its very limit.

The other surprising event was a post card from Secmatte a year after his disappearance from Jameson. In it he asked that I contact Rachel and tell her he was well. He told me that he and Legion had taken up a new pursuit, something else concerning language. “My calculations were remiss,” he wrote, “for there is something in words, some unnameable spirit born of an author's intent that defies measurement. I was previously unaware of it, but this phenomenon is what I now work to understand.”

I searched the local phone book and those of the surrounding area to locate Rachel Secmatte. When I finally found her living over in Weston, I called and we chatted for some time. We made an appointment to have dinner so that I could share with her the post card from her brother. That dinner went well, and in the course of it, she informed me that she had gone to the old oil company building to find Albert when she hadn't heard from him. She had found it abandoned, but he had left behind his notebooks and the cellophane glasses.

In the years that have followed, I have seen quite a bit of Rachel Secmatte. My experience with her brother, with dabbling and being snared in that web of deceit, made me an honest man. That honesty banished my fear of women in that I was no longer working so hard to hide myself. It brought home to me that old saw that actions speak louder than words. In '62 we moved in together and have lived side by side ever since. One day in the mid-sixties, at the height of that new era of humanism I had so longed for, I came upon the box of Albert's notebooks and the glasses in our basement and set about trying to decipher his system in an attempt to free people from the constraints of language. That was nearly forty years ago, and in the passage of time I have learned much, not the least of which was the folly of my initial mission. I did discover that there is a single word, I will not divulge it, that, when sublimated, used in conjunction with a person's name and printed in a perfectly calculated sentence in the right typeface, can cause the individual mentioned, if he should view the text that contains it, to suffer severe physical side effects, even death.

I prefer to concentrate on the positive possibilities of the sublimation technique. For this reason, I have hidden in the text of the preceding tale a selection of words that, even without your having been able to consciously register them, will leave you with a beautiful image. Don't try to force yourself to know it; that will make it shy. In a half-hour to forty-five minutes, it will present itself to you. When it does, you can thank Albert Secmatte, undoubtedly an old man like myself now, out there somewhere in the world, still searching for a spark of light in a dark closet, his only companion whispering in his ear the wonderful burden of words.