The Empire of Ice Cream (9 page)

“He's surprised when the pope's go-between says, ‘Cool, we'll cut the deal.' What Isiaso doesn't know is that the Vatican has had their eye on him as a troublemaker, and they want him out of Rome anyway. On the voyage home, the ship drops anchor for a day off a small, uninhabited island. Isiaso is asked if he would like to go ashore and witness a true paradise on Earth. Being a curious guy, he says yes. He and a sailor go to the island in a rowboat. They explore the place; but in the middle of looking around, Isiaso suddenly realizes that he's alone. When he makes it back to the beach, he sees the sailor in the rowboat heading back to the ship.

“The ship pulls up anchor and splits, stranding him there. It was the plan all along. They wanted him out of Rome, but they were too afraid of his supposed magic to come right out and boot his ass. So they got the chess set
and
got rid of him, and the legend has it that he put a curse on the chess set. Legend also has it that if you play the demon side of the board, you can never lose. You could play fucking Gary Kasparov and not lose. But at the same time, the person who owns it is doomed, cursed, screwed, blued, and tattooed, and you can't give it away, you can't throw it away. Believe me, I've tried and it's a shit-storm of misery and the dreams just get too intense. The only way to unload it is to have it stolen from you, and in the process blood must be drawn. Die with it in your possession, and you ain't going to be seeing paradise.

“Now,” said Lennin, “what do you think of that? I swear on my mother's grave that it's all completely true.” He lifted the bottle and filled each of our glasses. “And the biggest kicker of all is that I dug all this up on my own. Man, I could have gotten through high school and college, for Christ sake.”

“So, you believe in the curse?” I asked.

“I'm not gonna bore you with how many times I tried to dump the pieces,” he said.

“You don't seem cursed, though,” I said.

“Well, there's cursed and then there's cursed. Look at me. I'm a wreck. My liver is shot. I've been in and out of the hospital five times in the last year. They told me if I don't quit drinking, I'm gonna die very soon.”

“What about some kind of addiction center where they can treat you?” I asked.

“I've tried it,” he said. “I just can't stop. It's my part of the curse. I'm in here every day, throwing back the booze, it doesn't matter what kind it is, and staring at that mural, a castaway like Isiaso. It doesn't make any sense, but I swear that's his hand in the picture, down in the corner by the bathroom. All my attempts at relationships went south, all my plans to better myself dried up and blew away. I'm slowly killing myself. You see,” he said, lifting his shirt to show me his sagging chest, “the scar is right here, over my heart, and my heart is poisoned.”

“I don't know what to say,” I told him. “You were always kind to me when I was a kid.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Maybe if I can unload the set eventually that'll be at least one thing on the scale in my favor.” He got up then and went behind the bar. When he came back, he was carrying a chessboard and on it were the golden pieces. He laid it down on the table between us.

“Man, they're beautiful,” I told him.

“Listen, you gotta get going home now,” he said, the same as he had so many years ago. “I had a couple of rough-looking characters in here the other day, and I showed them the set, told them how much it was worth and that I kept it behind the bar all the time. It's getting past midnight, and there's a chance they'll show up. I know the old man let Maria see it and told her about it for the same reason I've been flaunting it lately. Maybe when they come for it, I'll get some of the old juice back like Desnia did, and we'll have a good brawl.”

I stood up, a little wobbly from the bottle of VO we'd finished. “There's no other way?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I turned and took in the mural one last time, because I knew I would never come back again. Bobby looked it over too.

“You know,” he said, “I bet you always thought that guy in the boat was trying to get to the island, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“The truth is, he's been trying to escape all these years. Those women look like women to you, but count 'em—there are as many as there are pieces in a chess set.”

“I hope he makes it,” I said, and then reached out and shook Bobby's hand.

Leaving The Tropics behind, I stepped onto the sidewalk and stood there for a minute to get my bearings. The night was cold, and I realized autumn was only a week away. I turned my collar up and walked along, searching my mind, without success, for the warmth from that painted vision of paradise. Instead, all I could think of was my old man, sitting in his recliner, smiling like the Buddha, while the world he once knew slowly disintegrated around him. I turned off Higbee onto my block and was nearly home, when from somewhere away in the distance, I heard a gunshot.

A Night in the Tropics

Story Notes

I think I had my old boy, Kipling, in mind when I wrote this one. I'd been rereading a lot of my favorite stories of his, especially “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows,” just before I wrote it. “A Night in the Tropics” was populated with characters right out of central casting from my early days in West Islip. The bar and the painting actually did exist. I know the bar is still there. In fact, a guy I grew up with now owns it, but I haven't been in to check up on the painting in about fifteen years. The part about the gang robbing a blind man who pulled a sword on them is a true tale, as is a goodly portion of the rest of the story. Fellow writer, Rick Bowes, the Albert Schweitzer of story doctors, read the piece in an early draft and suggested a few key changes that really made a big difference. As a tip of the hat to him, I used his name for the guy in the story who buys gold teeth down on Canal Street. This story was written for Lou Anders for the first issue of the new
Argosy Magazine.
No doubt by some enchantment of Isiaso's magic, the story clawed its way onto
Locus's
Best of the Best list for 2003
.

The Empire of Ice Cream

Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superseded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders—the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes as a golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus. There is a certain imported Swiss cheese I am fond of that is all triangles, whereas the feel of silk against my fingers rests on my tongue with the flavor and consistency of lemon meringue. These perceptions are not merely thoughts, but concrete physical experiences. Depending upon how you see it, I, like approximately nine out of every million individuals, am either cursed or blessed with a condition known as
synesthesia
.

It has only recently come to light that the process of synesthesia takes place in the hippocampus, part of the ancient limbic system, where remembered perceptions triggered in diverse geographical regions of the brain as the result of an external stimulus come together. It is believed that everyone, at a point somewhere below consciousness, experiences this coinciding of sensory association, yet in most it is filtered out and only a single sense is given predominance in one's waking world. For we lucky few, the filter is broken or perfected, and what is usually subconscious becomes conscious. Perhaps, at some distant point in history, our early ancestors were completely synesthetic and touched, heard, smelled, tasted, and saw, at once, each specific incident, the mixing of sensoric memory along with the perceived sense, without affording precedence to the findings of one of the five portals through which “reality” invades us. The scientific explanations, as far as I can follow them, seem to make sense now, but when I was young and told my parents about the whisper of vinyl, the stench of purple, the spinning blue gyres of the church bell, they feared I was defective and that my mind was brimming with hallucinations like an abandoned house choked with ghosts.

As an only child, I wasn't afforded the luxury of being anomalous. My parents were well on in years—my mother nearly forty, my father already forty-five—when I arrived after a long parade of failed pregnancies. The fact that, at age five, I heard what I described as an angel crying whenever I touched velvet would never be allowed to stand, but was seen as an illness to be cured by whatever methods were available. Money was no object in the pursuit of perfect normalcy. And so my younger years were a torment of hours spent in the waiting rooms of psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists. I can't find words to describe the depths of medical quackery I was subjected to by a veritable army of so-called professionals who diagnosed me with everything from schizophrenia to bipolar depression to low IQ caused by muddled potty training. Being a child, I was completely honest with them about what I experienced, and this, my first mistake, resulted in blood tests, brain scans, special diets, and the forced consumption of a demon's pharmacopeia of mind-deadening drugs that diminished my will but not the vanilla scent of slanting golden sunlight on late autumn afternoons.

My only-child status along with the added complication of my “condition,” as they called it, led my parents to perceive me as fragile. For this reason I was kept fairly isolated from other children. Part of it, I'm sure, had to do with the way my abnormal perceptions and utterances would reflect upon my mother and father, for they were the type of people who could not bear to be thought of as having been responsible for the production of defective goods. I was tutored at home by my mother instead of being allowed to attend school. She was actually a fine teacher, having a PhD in history and a firm grasp of classical literature. My father, an actuary, taught me math, and in this subject I proved to be an unquestionable failure until I reached college age. Although x=y might have been a suitable metaphor for the phenomenon of synesthesia, it made no sense on paper. The number 8, by the way, reeks of withered flowers.

What I
was
good at was music. Every Thursday at 3:00 in the afternoon, Mrs. Brithnic would arrive at the house to give me a piano lesson. She was a kind old lady with thinning white hair and the most beautiful fingers—long and smooth, as if they belonged to a graceful young giantess. Although something less than a virtuoso at the keys, she was a veritable genius at teaching me to allow myself to enjoy the sounds I produced. Enjoy them I did, and when I wasn't being dragged hither and yon in the pursuit of losing my affliction, home base for me was the piano bench. In my imposed isolation from the world, music became a window of escape I would crawl through as often as possible.

When I would play, I could see the notes before me like a fireworks display of colors and shapes. By my twelfth year I was writing my own compositions, and my notations on the pages accompanying the notes referred to the visual displays that coincided with them. In actuality, when I played, I was really painting—in midair before my eyes—great abstract works in the tradition of Kandinsky. Many times, I planned a composition on a blank piece of paper using the crayon set of sixty-four colors I'd had since early childhood. The only difficulty in this was with colors like magenta and cobalt blue, which I perceive primarily as tastes, so I would have to write them down in pencil as licorice and tapioca on my colorfully scribbled drawing where they would appear in the music.

My punishment for having excelled at the piano was to lose my only real friend, Mrs. Brithnic. I remember distinctly the day my mother let her go. She calmly nodded, smiling, understanding that I had already surpassed her abilities. Still, though I knew this was the case, I cried when she hugged me goodbye. When her face was next to mine, she whispered into my ear, “Seeing is believing,” and in that moment I knew she had completely understood my plight. Her lilac perfume, the sound of one nearly inaudible B-flat played by an oboe, still hung about me as I watched her walk down the path and out of my life for good.

I believe it was the loss of Mrs. Brithnic that made me rebel. I became desultory and despondent. Then one day, soon after my thirteenth birthday, instead of obeying my mother, who had just told me to finish reading a textbook chapter while she showered, I went to her pocketbook, took five dollars, and left the house. As I walked along beneath the sunlight and blue sky, the world around me seemed brimming with life. What I wanted more than anything else was to meet other young people my own age. I remembered an ice-cream shop in town where, when passing by in the car returning from whatever doctor's office we had been to, there always seemed to be kids hanging around. I headed directly for that spot while wondering if my mother would catch up to me before I made it. When I pictured her drying her hair, I broke into a run.

Upon reaching the row of stores that contained The Empire of Ice Cream, I was out of breath as much from the sheer exhilaration of freedom as from the half-mile sprint. Peering through the glass of the front door was like looking through a portal into an exotic other world. Here were young people, my age, gathered in groups at tables, talking, laughing, eating ice cream—not by night, after dinner, but in the middle of broad daylight. I opened the door and plunged in. The magic of the place seemed to brush by me on its way out as I entered, for the conversation instantly died away. I stood in the momentary silence as all heads turned to stare at me.

“Hello,” I said, smiling, and raised my hand in greeting, but I was too late. They had already turned away, the conversation resumed, as if they had merely afforded a grudging glimpse to see the door open and close at the behest of the wind. I was paralyzed by my inability to make an impression, the realization that finding friends was going to take some real work.