The Empire of Ice Cream
by Jeffrey Ford

Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me,
their aroma is superceded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass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 all at once—each
specific incident mixing 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 pharmacopoeia 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 Ph.D. 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 crawled through as often as possible.

When I'd 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 notation on the pages accompanying the notes of a piece referred to the
visual displays that coincided with them. In actuality, when I played, I was
really painting—in mid-air, 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 64 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, and so 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
good-bye. When her face was next to mine, she whispered into my ear, "Seeing
is believing," and in that moment, I knew that 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.

"What'll it be?" said a large man behind the counter.

I broke from my trance and stepped up to order. Before me, beneath a bubble
dome of glass, lay the Empire of Ice Cream. I'd never seen so much of the
stuff in so many colors and incarnations—with nuts and fruit, cookie and candy
bits, mystical swirls the sight of which sounded to me like a distant siren.
There were deep vats of it set in neat rows totaling thirty flavors. My diet
had never allowed for the consumption of confections or desserts of any type,
and rare were the times I had so much as a thimbleful of vanilla ice cream
after dinner. Certain doctors had told my parents that my eating these treats
might seriously exacerbate my condition. With this in mind, I ordered a large
bowl of coffee ice cream. My choice of coffee stemmed from the fact that that
beverage was another item on the list of things I should never taste.

After paying, I took my bowl and spoon and found a seat in the corner of the
place from which I could survey all the other tables. I admit that I had some
trepidations about digging right in, since I'd been warned against it for so
long by so many adults. Instead, I scanned the shop, watching the other kids
talking, trying to overhear snatches of conversation. I made eye contact with
a boy my own age two tables away. I smiled and waved to him. He saw me and
then leaned over and whispered something to the other fellows he was with. All
four of them turned, looked at me, and then broke into laughter. It was a
certainty they were making fun of me, but I basked in the victory of merely
being noticed. With this, I took a large spoonful of ice cream and put it in
my mouth.

There is an attendant phenomenon of the synesthetic experience I've yet to
mention. Of course I had no term for it at this point in my life, but when one
is in the throes of the remarkable transference of senses, it is accompanied
by a feeling of "epiphany," a "eureka" of contentment that researchers of the
anomalous condition would later term noetic, borrowing from William James.
That first taste of coffee ice cream elicited a deeper noetic response than
I'd ever before felt, and along with it came the appearance of a girl. She
coalesced out of thin air and stood before me, obscuring my sight of the group
that was still laughing. Never before had I seen through tasting, hearing,
touching, smelling, something other than simple abstract shapes and colors.

She was turned somewhat to the side and hunched over, wearing a plaid skirt
and a white blouse. Her hair was the same dark brown as my own, but long and
gathered in the back with a green rubber band. There was a sudden shaking of
her hand, and it became clear to me that she was putting out a match. Smoke
swirled away from her. I could see now that she had been lighting a cigarette.
I got the impression that she was wary of being caught in the act of smoking.
When she turned her head sharply to look back over her shoulder, I dropped the
spoon on the table. Her look instantly enchanted me.

As the ice cream melted away down my throat, she began to vanish, and I
quickly lifted the spoon to restoke my vision, but it never reached my lips.
She suddenly went out like a light when I felt something land softly upon my
left shoulder. I heard the incomprehensible murmur of recrimination, and knew
it as my mother's touch. She had found me. A great wave of laughter
accompanied my removal from The Empire of Ice Cream. Later I would remember
the incident with embarrassment, but for the moment, even as I spoke words of
apology to my mother, I could think only of what I'd seen.
The ice-cream incident—followed hard by the discovery of the cigar box of
pills I hid in my closet, all of the medication that I'd supposedly swallowed
for the past six months—led my parents to believe that heaped upon my
condition was now a tendency toward delinquency that would grow, if unchecked,
in geometrical proportion with the passing of years. It was decided that I
should see yet another specialist to deal with my behavior, a therapist my
father had read about who would prompt me to talk my willfulness into
submission. I was informed of this in a solemn meeting with my parents. What
else was there to do but acquiesce? I knew that my mother and father wanted,
in their pedestrian way, what they believed was best for me. Whenever the
situation would infuriate me, I'd go to the piano and play, sometimes for
three or four hours at a time.

Dr. Stullin's office was in a ramshackle Victorian house on the other side of
town. My father accompanied me on the first visit, and, when he pulled up in
front of the sorry old structure, he checked the address at least twice to
make sure we'd come to the right place. The doctor, a round little man with a
white beard and glasses with small circular lenses, met us at the front door.
Why he laughed when we shook hands at the introductions, I hadn't a clue, but
he was altogether jolly, like a pint-size Santa Claus dressed in a wrinkled
brown suit one size too small. He swept out his arm to usher me into his
house, but when my father tried to enter, the doctor held up his hand and
said, "You will return in one hour and five minutes."

My father gave some weak protest and said that he thought he might be needed
to help discuss my history to this point. Here the doctor's demeanor instantly
changed. He became serious, official, almost commanding.

"I'm being paid to treat the boy. You'll have to find your own therapist."

My father was obviously at a loss. He looked as if he was about to object, but
the doctor said, "One hour and five minutes." Following me inside, he quickly
shut the door behind him.

As he led me through a series of unkempt rooms lined with crammed bookshelves,
and one in which piles of paper covered the tops of tables and desks, he said,
laughing, "Parents: so essential, yet sometimes like something you've stepped
in and cannot get off your shoe. What else is there but to love them?"

We wound up in a room at the back of the house made from a skeleton of thin
steel girders and paneled with glass panes. The sunlight poured in, and
surrounding us, at the edges of the place, also hanging from some of the
girders, were green plants. There was a small table on which sat a teapot and
two cups and saucers. As I took the seat he motioned for me to sit in, I
looked out through the glass and saw that the backyard was one large,
magnificent garden, blooming with all manner of colorful flowers.

After he poured me a cup of tea, the questioning began. I'd had it in my mind
to be as recalcitrant as possible, but there was something in the manner in
which he had put my father off that I admired about him. Also, he was unlike
other therapists I'd been to, who would listen to my answers with complete
reservation of emotion or response. When he asked why I was here, and I told
him it was because I'd escaped in order to go to the ice-cream shop, he
scowled and said, "Patently ridiculous." I was unsure if he meant me or my
mother's response to what I'd done. I told him about playing the piano, and he
smiled warmly and nodded. "That's a good thing," he said.

After he asked me about my daily routine and my home life, he sat back and
said, "So, what's the problem? Your father has told me that you hallucinate.
Can you explain?"

No matter how ingratiating he'd been, I had already decided that I would no
longer divulge any of my perceptions to anyone. Then he did something
unexpected.

"Do you mind?" he asked as he took out a pack of cigarettes.

Before I could shake my head no, he had one out of the pack and lit. Something
about this, perhaps because I'd never seen a doctor smoke in front of a
patient before, perhaps because it reminded me of the girl who had appeared
before me in the ice-cream shop, weakened my resolve to say nothing. When he
flicked his ashes into his half-empty teacup, I started talking. I told him
about the taste of silk, the various corresponding colors for the notes of the
piano, the nauseating stench of purple.

I laid the whole thing out for him and then sat back in my chair, now somewhat
regretting my weakness, for he was smiling, and the smoke was leaking out of
the corners of his mouth. He exhaled, and in that cloud came the word that
would validate me, define me and haunt me for the rest of my life—synesthesia.

By the time I left Stullin's office that day, I was a new person. The doctor
spoke to my father and explained the phenomenon to him. He cited historical
cases and gave him the same general overview of the neurological workings of
the condition. He also added that most synesthetes don't experience the
condition in such a variety of senses as I did, although it was not unheard
of. My father nodded every now and then but was obviously perplexed at the
fact that my long-suffered condition had, in an instant, vanished.

"There's nothing wrong with the boy," said Stullin, "except for the fact that
he is, in a way, exceptional. Think of it as a gift, an original way of
sensing the world. These perceptions are as real for him as are your own to
you."

Stullin's term for my condition was like a magic incantation from a fairy
tale, for through its power I was released from the spell of my parents'
control. In fact, their reaction to it was to almost completely relinquish
interest in me, as if after all of their intensive care I'd been found out to
be an imposter now unworthy of their attention. When it became clear that I
would have the ability to go about my life as any normal child might, I
relished the concept of freedom. The sad fact was, though, that I didn't know
how to. I lacked all experience at being part of society. My uncertainty made
me shy, and my first year in public school was a disaster. What I wanted was a
friend my own age, and this goal continued to elude me until I was well out of
high school and in college. My desperation to connect made me ultimately
nervous, causing me to act and speak without reserve. This was the early
1960s, and if anything was important in high school social circles at the
time, it was remaining cool. I was the furthest thing from cool you might
imagine.

For protection, I retreated into my music and spent hours working out
compositions with my crayons and pens, trying to corral the sounds and
resultant visual pyrotechnics, odors and tastes into cohesive scores. All
along, I continued practicing and improving my abilities at the keyboard, but
I had no desire to become a performer. Quite a few of my teachers through the
years had it in their minds that they could shape me into a brilliant concert
pianist. I would not allow it, and when they insisted, I'd drop them and move
on. Nothing frightened me more than the thought of sitting in front of a crowd
of onlookers. The weight of judgment lurking behind even one set of those
imagined eyes was too much for me to bear. I'd stayed on with Stullin,
visiting once a month, and no matter his persistent proclamations as to my
relative normalcy, it was impossible for me, after years of my parents'
insisting otherwise, to erase the fact that I was, in my own mind, a freak.

My greatest pleasure away from the piano at this time was to take the train
into the nearby city and attend concerts given by the local orchestra or small
chamber groups that would perform in more intimate venues. Rock and roll was
all the rage, but my training at the piano and the fact that calm solitude as
opposed to raucous socializing was the expected milieu of the symphony drew me
in the direction of classical music. It was a relief that most of those who
attended the concerts I did were adults who paid no attention to my presence.
From the performances I witnessed, from the stereo I goaded my parents into
buying for me, and my own reading, I , with few of the normal distractions of
the typical teenager, gathered an immense knowledge of my field.

My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand
mathematics … and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater
understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the
reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common.
Whereas others simply heard his work, I could also feel it, taste it, smell
it, visualize it, and in doing so was certain I was witnessing the process by
which all of Nature had moved from a single cell to a virulent, diverse
forest. Perhaps part of my admiration for the good cantor of Leipzig was his
genius with counterpoint, a practice where two or more distinct melodic lines
delicately join at certain points to form a singularly cohesive listening
experience. I saw in this technique an analogy to my desire that some day my
own unique personality might join with that of another's and form a
friendship. Soon after hearing the fugue pieces that are part of The
Well-Tempered Clavier, I decided I wanted to become a composer.

Of course, during these years, both dreadful for my being a laughingstock in
school and delightful for their musical revelations, I couldn't forget the
image of the girl who momentarily appeared before me during my escape to The
Empire of Ice Cream. The minute that Dr. Stullin pronounced me sane, I made
plans to return and attempt to conjure her again. The irony of the situation
was that just that single first taste of coffee ice cream had ended up making
me ill, either because I'd been sheltered from rich desserts my whole life or
because my system actually was inherently delicate. Once my freedom came, I
found I didn't have the stomach for all of those gastronomic luxuries I had at
one time so desired. Still, I was willing to chance the stomachache in order
to rediscover her.

On my second trip to The Empire, after taking a heaping spoonful of coffee ice
cream and experiencing again that deep noetic response, she appeared as
before, her image forming in the empty space between me and the front window
of the shop. This time she seemed to be sitting at the end of a couch situated
in a living room or parlor, reading a book. Only her immediate surroundings,
within a foot or two of her body, were clear to me. As my eyes moved away from
her central figure, the rest of the couch, and the table beside her, holding a
lamp, became increasingly ghostlike; images from the parking lot outside the
shop window showed through. At the edges of the phenomenon, there was nothing
but the merest wrinkling of the atmosphere. She turned the page, and I was
drawn back to her. I quickly fed myself another bit of ice cream and marveled
at her beauty. Her hair was down, and I could see that it came well past her
shoulders. Bright green eyes, a small, perfect nose, smooth skin, and full
lips that silently moved with each word of the text she was scanning. She was
wearing some kind of very sheer, powder blue pajama top, and I could see the
presence of her breasts beneath it.

I took two spoonfuls of ice cream in a row, and, because my desire had
tightened my throat and I couldn't swallow, their cold burned my tongue. In
the time it took for the mouthful of ice cream to melt and trickle down my
throat, I simply watched her chest subtly heave with each breath, her lips
move, and I was enchanted. The last thing I noticed before she disappeared was
the odd title of the book she was reading—The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer. I'd
have taken another spoonful, but a massive headache had blossomed behind my
eyes, and I could feel my stomach beginning to revolt against the ice cream. I
got up and quickly left the shop. Out in the open air, I walked for over an
hour, trying to clear my head of the pain while at the same time trying to
retain her image in my memory. I stopped three times along my meandering
course, positive I was going to vomit, but I never did.

My resistance to the physical side effects of the ice cream never improved,
but I returned to the shop again and again, like a binge drinker to the
bottle, hangover be damned, whenever I was feeling most alone. Granted, there
was something of a voyeuristic thrill underlying the whole thing, especially
when the ice cream would bring her to me in various states of undress—in the
shower, in her bedroom. But you must believe me when I say that there was much
more to it than that. I wanted to know everything about her. I studied her as
assiduously as I did The Goldberg Variations or Schoenberg's serialism. She
was, in many ways, an even more intriguing mystery, and the process of
investigation was like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, reconfiguring a blasted
mosaic.

I learned that her name was Anna. I saw it written on one of her sketch pads.
Yes, she was an artist, and I believe had great aspirations in this direction,
as I did in music. I spent so many spoonfuls of coffee ice cream, initiated so
many headaches, just watching her draw. She never lifted a paintbrush or
pastel, but was tied to the simple tools of pencil and paper. I never
witnessed her using a model or photograph as a guide. Instead, she would place
the sketch pad flat on a table and hunker over it. The tip of her tongue would
show itself from the right corner of her lips when she was in deepest
concentration. Every so often, she'd take a drag on a cigarette that burned in
an ashtray to her left. The results of her work, the few times I was lucky
enough to catch a glimpse, were astonishing. Sometimes she was obviously
drawing from life, the portraits of people whom she must've known. At other
times she'd conjure strange creatures or mandalalike designs of exotic
blossoms. The shading was incredible, giving weight and depth to her
creations. All of this from the tip of a graphite pencil one might use to work
a calculation or jot a memo. If I did not adore her, I might've envied her
innate talent.

To an ancillary degree, I was able to catch brief glimpses of her
surroundings, and this was fascinating for the fact that she seemed to move
through a complete, separate world of her own, some kind of other reality that
was very much like ours. I'd garnered enough to know that she lived in a large
old house with many rooms, the windows covered with long drapes to block out
the light. Her work area was chaotic, stacks of her drawings covering the tops
of tables and pushed to the sides of her desk. A black-and-white cat was
always prowling in and out of the tableau. She was very fond of flowers and
often worked in some sun-drenched park or garden, creating painstaking
portraits of amaryllis or pansies, and although the rain would be falling
outside my own window, there the skies were bottomless blue.

Although over the course of years I'd told Stullin much about myself, revealed
my ambitions and most secret desires, I had never mentioned Anna. It was only
after I graduated high school and was set to go off to study at Gelsbeth
Conservatory in the nearby city that I decided to reveal her existence to him.
The doctor had been a good friend to me, albeit a remunerated one, and was
always most congenial and understanding when I'd give vent to my frustrations.
He persistently argued the optimistic viewpoint for me when all was as inky
black as the aroma of my father's aftershave. My time with him never resulted
in a palpable difference in my ability to attract friends or feel more
comfortable in public, but I enjoyed his company. At the same time, I was
somewhat relieved to be severing all ties to my troubled past and escaping my
childhood once and for all. I was willing to jettison Stullin's partial good
to be rid of the rest.

We sat in the small sunroom at the back of his house, and he was questioning
me about what interests I would pursue in my forthcoming classes. He had a
good working knowledge of classical music and had told me at one of our
earliest meetings that he'd studied the piano when he was younger. He had a
weakness for the Romantics, but I didn't hold it against him. Somewhere in the
midst of our discussion I simply blurted out the details of my experiences
with coffee ice cream and the resultant appearances of Anna. He was obviously
taken aback. He leaned forward in his chair and slowly went through the
procedure of lighting a cigarette.

"You know," he said, releasing a cascade of smoke, the aroma of which always
manifested itself for me in the faint sound of a mosquito, "that is quite
unusual. I don't believe there has ever been a case of a synesthetic vision
achieving a figurative resemblance. They are always abstract. Shapes, colors,
yes, but never an image of an object, not to mention a person."

"I know it's the synesthesia," I said. "I can feel it. The exact same
experience as when I summon colors from my keyboard."

"And you say she always appears in relation to your eating ice cream?" he
asked, squinting.

"Coffee ice cream," I said.

This made him laugh briefly, but his smile soon diminished, and he brought his
free hand up to stroke his beard. I knew this action to be a sign of his
concern. "What you are describing to me would be, considering the current
medical literature, a hallucination."

I shrugged.

"Still," he went on, "the fact that it is always related to your tasting the
ice cream, and that you can identify an associated noetic feeling, I'd have to
agree with you that it seems related to your condition."

"I knew it was unusual," I said. "I was afraid to mention it."

"No, no, it's good that you did. The only thing troubling me about it is that
I am too aware of your desire to connect with another person your age. To be
honest, it has all of the earmarks of a wish fulfillment that points back to a
kind of hallucination. Look, you don't need this distraction now. You're
beginning your life, you are moving on, and there is every indication that
you'll be successful in your art. When the other students at the Conservatory
understand your abilities, you'll make friends, believe me. It won't be like
high school. Chasing this insubstantial image could impede your progress. Let
it go."

And so, not without a large measure of regret, I did. To an extent, Stullin
was right about Gelsbeth. It wasn't like high school, and I did make the
acquaintance of quite a few like-minded people with whom I could at least
connect on the subject of music. I wasn't the only odd fish in that pond,
believe me. To be a young person with an overriding interest in Bach or Mozart
or Scriabin was its own eccentricity for those times. The place was extremely
competitive, and I took the challenge. My fledgling musical compositions were
greeted with great interest by the faculty, and I garnered a degree of
notoriety when one day a fellow student discovered me composing a chamber
piece for violins and cello using my set of crayons. I would always work in my
corresponding synesthetic colors and then transpose the work, scoring it in
normal musical notation.

The years flew by, and I believe they were the most rewarding of my entire
life. I rarely went home to visit, save on holidays when the school was
closed, even though it was only a brief train ride from the city. The
professors were excellent but unforgiving of laziness and error. It wasn't a
labor for me to meet their expectations. For the first time in my life, I felt
what it meant to play, an activity I'd never experienced in childhood. The
immersion in great music, the intricate analysis of its soul, kept me
constantly engaged, filled with a sense of wonder.

Then, in my last year, I became eligible to participate in a competition for
composers. There was a large cash prize, and the winner's work would be
performed at a concert in the city's symphony hall by a well-known musician.
The difficulty of being a composer was always the near-impossibility of
getting one's work performed by competent musicians in a public venue. The
opportunity presented by the competition was one I couldn't let slip away.
More important than the money or the accolades would be a kind of recognition
that would bring me to the attention of potential patrons who might commission
a work. I knew that it was time to finally compose the fugue I'd had in mind
for so many years. The utter complexity of the form, I believed, would be the
best way to showcase all of my talents.

When it came time to begin the composition of the fugue, I took the money I'd
made tutoring young musicians on the weekends and put it toward renting a
beach house out on Varion Island for two weeks. In the summers the place was a
bustling tourist spot for the wealthy, with a small central town that could be
termed quaint. In those months, I wouldn't have been able to touch the price
of the lowliest dwelling for a single day's rent. It was the heart of winter,
though, when I took a leave from the school, along with crayons, books, a
small tape player, and fled by way of bus and cab to my secret getaway.

The house I came to wasn't one of the grand wooden mansions on stilts that
lined the road along the causeway, but instead a small bungalow, much like a
concrete bunker. It was painted an off-putting yellow that tasted to me for
all the world like cauliflower. It sat atop a small rise, and its front window
faced the ocean, giving me a sublime view of the dunes and beach. What's more,
it was within walking distance of the tiny village. There was sufficient heat,
a telephone, a television, a kitchen with all the appliances, and I instantly
felt as at home there as I had anywhere in my life. The island itself was
deserted. On my first day, I walked down to the ocean and along the shore the
mile and a half to the eastern point and then back by way of the main road,
passing empty houses, and I saw no one. I'd been told over the phone by the
realtor that the diner in town and a small shop that sold cigarettes and
newspapers stayed open through the winter. Thankfully, she was right, for
without the diner, I would have starved.

The setting of the little bungalow was deliciously melancholic, and for my
sensibilities that meant conducive to work. I could hear the distant breaking
of waves and, above that, the winter wind blowing sand against the window
glass, but these were not distractions. Instead, they were the components of a
silence that invited one to dream wide awake, to let the imagination open, and
so I dove into the work straightaway. On the first afternoon, I began
recording in my notebook my overall plan for the fugue. I'd decided that it
would have only two voices. Of course, some had been composed with as many as
eight, but I did not want to be ostentatious. Showing reserve is as important
a trait of technical mastery as is that of complexity.

I already had the melodic line of the subject, which had been a cast off from
another project I'd worked on earlier in the year. Even though I decided it
was not right for the earlier piece, I couldn't forget it and kept revising it
here and there, playing it over and over. In the structure of a fugue, one
posits the melodic line or subject, and then there is an answer
(counterpoint), a reiteration of that line with differing degrees of
variation, so that what the listener hears is like a dialogue (or a voice and
its echo) of increasing complexity. After each of the voices has entered the
piece, there is an episode that leads to the reentry of the voices and given
answers, now in different keys. I had planned to use a technique called
stretto, in which the answers, as they are introduced, overlap somewhat the
original subject lines. This allows for a weaving of the voices so as to
create an intricate tapestry of sound.

All this would be difficult to compose but nothing outlandishly original. It
was my design, though, to impress the judges by trying something new. Once the
fugue had reached its greatest state of complication, I wanted the piece to
slowly, almost logically at first, but then without rhyme or meter, crumble
into chaos. At the very end, from that chaotic cacophony, there would emerge
one note, drawn out to great length, which would eventually diminish into
nothing.

For the first week, the work went well. I took a little time off every morning
and evening for a walk on the beach. At night I would go to the diner and then
return to the bungalow to listen to Bach's Art of the Fugue or Toccata and
Fugue in D minor, some Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, and then pieces from the
inception of the form by composers like Sweelinck and Froberger. I employed
the crayons on a large piece of good drawing paper, and although to anyone
else it would not look like musical notation, I knew exactly how it would
sound when I viewed it. Somewhere after the first week, though, I started to
slow down, and by Saturday night my work came to a grinding halt. What I'd
begun with such a clear sense of direction had me trapped. I was lost in my
own complexity. The truth was, I was exhausted and could no longer pick apart
the threads of the piece—the subject, the answer, the counter-subject snarled
like a ball of yarn.

I was thoroughly weary and knew I needed rest, but even though I went to bed
and closed my eyes, I couldn't sleep. All day Sunday, I sat in a chair and
surveyed the beach through the front window. I was too tired to work but too
frustrated about not working to sleep. That evening, after having done nothing
all day, I stumbled down to the diner and took my usual seat. The place was
empty save for one old man sitting in the far corner, reading a book while
eating his dinner. This solitary character looked somewhat like Stullin for
his white beard, and at first glance, had I not known better, I could've sworn
the book he was reading was The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer. I didn't want to
get close enough to find out for fear he might strike up a conversation.

The waitress came and took my order. When she was finished writing on her pad,
she said, "You look exhausted tonight."

I nodded.

"You need to sleep," she said.

"I have work to do," I told her.
"Well, then, let me bring you some coffee."

I laughed. "You know, I've never had a cup of coffee in my life," I said.

"Impossible," she said. "It looks to me like tonight might be a good time to
start."

"I'll give it a try," I told her, and this seemed to make her happy.

While I ate, I glanced through my notebook and tried to reestablish for myself
the architecture of the fugue. As always, when I looked at my notes,
everything was crystal clear, but when it came time to continue on the score,
every potential further step seemed the wrong way to go. Somewhere in the
midst of my musing, I pushed my plate away and drew toward me the cup and
saucer. My usual drink was tea, and I'd forgotten I had changed my order. I
took a sip, and the dark, bitter taste of black coffee startled me. I looked
up, and there was Anna, staring at me, having just lowered a cup away from her
lips. In her eyes I saw a glint of recognition, as if she were actually seeing
me, and I'm sure she saw the same in mine.

I whispered, "I see you."

She smiled. "I see you too," she said.

I would have been less surprised if a dog had spoken to me. Sitting
dumbfounded, I reached slowly out toward where she seemed to sit across from
me in the booth. As my hand approached, she leaned back away from it.

"I've been watching you for years," she said.

"The coffee?" I said.

She nodded. "You are a synesthete, am I right?"

"Yes," I said. "But you're a figment of my imagination, a product of a
neurological anomaly."

Here she laughed out loud. "No," she said, "you are."

After our initial exchange, neither of us spoke. I was in a mild state of
shock, I believe. "This can't be," I kept repeating in my mind, but there she
was, and I could hear her breathing. Her image appeared even sharper than it
had previously under the influence of the coffee ice cream. And now, with the
taste that elicited her presence uncompromised by cream and sugar and the
cold, she remained without dissipating for a good few minutes before beginning
to mist at the edges and I had to take another sip to sharpen the focus. When
I brought my cup up to drink, she also did at the same exact time, as if she
were a reflection, as if I were her reflection, and we both smiled.

"I can't speak to you where I am. They'll think I've lost my mind," I
whispered.

"I'm in the same situation," she said.

"Give me a half hour and then have another cup of coffee, and I'll be able to
speak to you in private."

She nodded in agreement and watched as I called for the check.

By the time the waitress arrived at my booth, Anna had dissolved into a vague
cloud, like the exhalation of a smoker. It didn't matter, as I knew she
couldn't be seen by anyone else. As my bill was being tallied, I ordered three
cups of coffee to go.

"That coffee is something, isn't it?" said the waitress. "I swear by it.
Amazing you've never had any up to this point. My blood is three-quarters
coffee, I drink so much of it," she said.

"Wonderful stuff," I agreed.

Wonderful it was, for it had awakened my senses, and I walked through the
freezing, windy night, carrying in a box my containers of elixir, with all the
joy of a child leaving school on Friday afternoon. The absurdity of the whole
affair didn't escape me, and I laughed out loud remembering my whispered plan
to wait a half hour and then drink another cup. The conspiratorial nature of
it excited me, and I realized for the first time since seeing her that Anna
had matured and grown more beautiful in the years I had forsaken her.

Back at the bungalow, I put the first of the large Styrofoam containers into
the microwave in the kitchen and heated it for no more than thirty seconds. I
began to worry that perhaps in Anna's existence time was altogether different
and a half hour for me might be two or three or a day for her. The instant the
bell sounded on the appliance, I took the cup out, seated myself at the small
kitchen table and drank a long draught of the dark potion. Before I could put
the cup down, she was there, sitting in the seat opposite me.

"I know your name is Anna," I said to her. "I saw it on one of your drawing
pads."

She flipped her hair behind her ear on the left side and asked, "What's
yours?"

"William," I said. Then I told her about the coffee ice cream and the first
time I encountered her image.

"I remember," she said, "when I was a child of nine, I snuck a sip of my
father's coffee he had left in the living room, and I saw you sitting at a
piano. I thought you were a ghost. I ran to get my mother to show her, but
when I returned you'd vanished. She thought little of it since the synesthesia
was always prompting me to describe things that made no sense to her."

"When did you realize it was the coffee?" I asked.

"Oh, some time later. I again was given a taste of it at breakfast one
morning, and there you were, sitting at our dining room table, looking rather
forlorn. It took every ounce of restraint not to blurt out that you were
there. Then it started to make sense to me. After that, I would try to see you
as much as possible. You were often very sad when you were younger. I know
that."

The look on her face, one of true concern for me, almost brought tears to my
eyes. She was a witness to my life. I hadn't been as alone as I had always
thought.

"You're a terrific artist," I said.

She smiled. "I'm great with a pencil, but my professors are demanding a piece
in color. That's what I'm working on now."

Intermittently in the conversation we'd stop and take sips of coffee to keep
the connection vital. As it turned out, she too had escaped her normal routine
and taken a place in order to work on a project for her final portfolio
review. We discovered all manner of synchronicities between our lives. She
admitted to me that she'd also been a loner as a child and that her parents
had a hard time dealing with her synesthetic condition. As she put it, "Until
we discovered the reality of it, I think they thought I was crazy." She
laughed, but I could tell by the look in her eyes how deeply it had affected
her.

"Have you ever told anyone about me?" I asked.

"Only my therapist," she said. "I was relieved when he told me he'd heard of
rare cases like mine."

This revelation brought me up short, for Stullin had told me he had never
encountered anything of the sort in the literature. The implications of this
inconsistency momentarily reminded me that she was not real, but I quickly
shoved the notion from my thoughts and continued the conversation.

That night, by parsing out the coffee I had, and she doing the same, we stayed
together until two in the morning, telling each other about our lives, our
creative ideas, our dreams for the future. We found that our synesthetic
experiences were similar and that our sense impressions were often transposed
with the same results. For instance, for both her and me, the aroma of
new-mown grass was circular and the sound of a car horn tasted of citrus. She
told me that her father was an amateur musician who loved the piano and
classical music. In the middle of my recounting for her the intricacies of the
fugue I was planning, she suddenly looked up from her cup and said, "Oh no,
I'm out of coffee." I looked down at my own cup and realized I'd just taken
the last sip.

"Tomorrow at noon," she said as her image weakened.

"Yes," I yelled, afraid she wouldn't hear me.

Then she became a phantom, a miasma, a notion, and I was left staring at the
wall of the kitchen. With her gone, I could not sit still for long. All the
coffee I'd drunk was coursing through me, and because my frail system had
never before known the stimulant, my hands literally shook from it. I knew
sleep was out of the question, so after walking around the small rooms of the
bungalow for an hour, I sat down to my fugue to see what I could do.

Immediately, I picked up the trail of where I had been headed before
Saturday's mental block had set in. Everything was piercingly clear to me, and
I could hear the music I was noting in various colors as if there were a tape
of the piece I was creating playing as I created it. I worked like a demon,
quickly, unerringly, and the ease with which the answers to the musical
problems presented themselves gave me great confidence and made my decisions
ingenious. Finally, around eight in the morning (I hadn't noticed the
sunrise), the coffee took its toll on me, and I became violently ill. The
stomach pains, the headache, were excruciating. At ten, I vomited, and that
relieved the symptoms somewhat. At eleven A.M., I was at the diner, buying
another four cups of coffee.

The waitress tried to interest me in breakfast, but I said I wasn't hungry.
She told me I didn't look well, and I tried to laugh off her concern. When she
pressed the matter, I made some surly comment to her that I can't now
remember, and she understood I was interested in nothing but the coffee. I
took my hoard and went directly to the beach. The temperature was milder that
day, and the fresh air cleared my head. I sat in the shelter of a deep hollow
amidst the dunes to block the wind, drank, and watched Anna at work, wherever
she was, on her project—a large, colorful abstract drawing. After spying on
her for a few minutes, I realized that the composition of the piece, its
arrangement of color, presented itself to me as the melodic line of Symphony
no. 8 in B Minor, by Franz Schubert. This amused me at first, to think that my
own musical knowledge was inherent in the existence of her world, that my
imagination was its essence. What was also interesting was that such a minor
interest of mine, Schubert, should manifest itself. I supposed that any aspect
of my life, no matter how minor, was fodder for this imaginative process. It
struck me just as quickly, though, that I didn't want this to be so. I wanted
her to be apart from me, her own separate entity, for without that, what would
her friendship mean? I physically shook my head to rid myself of the idea.
When at noon she appeared next to me in my nest among the dunes, I'd already
managed to forget this worm in the apple.

We spent the morning together talking and laughing, strolling along the edge
of the ocean, climbing on the rocks at the point. When the coffee ran low
around three, we returned to the diner for me to get more. I asked them to
make me two whole pots and just pour them into large, plastic take-out
containers. The waitress said nothing but shook her head. In the time I was on
my errand, Anna, in her own world, brewed another vat of it.

We met up back at my bungalow, and as evening came on, we took out our
respective projects and worked together, across from each other at the kitchen
table. In her presence, my musical imagination was on fire, and she admitted
to me that she saw for the first time the overarching structure of her drawing
and where she was headed with it. At one point, I became so immersed in the
work, I reached out and picked up what I thought would be one of my crayons
but instead turned out to be a violet pastel. I didn't own pastels, Anna did.

"Look," I said to her, and at that moment felt a wave of dizziness pass over
me. A headache was beginning behind my eyes.

She lifted her gaze from her work and saw me holding the violet stick. We both
sat quietly, in awe of its implications. Slowly, she put her hand out across
the table toward me. I dropped the pastel and reached toward her. Our hands
met, and I swear I could feel her fingers entangled with mine.

"What does this mean, William?" she said with a note of fear in her voice and
let go of me.

As I stood up, I lost my balance and needed to support myself by clutching the
back of the chair. She also stood, and as I approached her, she backed away.
"No, this isn't right," she said.

"Don't worry," I whispered. "It's me." I took two wobbly steps and drew so
close to her I could smell her perfume. She cringed but did not try to get
away. I put my arms around her and attempted to kiss her.

"No," she cried. Then I felt the force of both her hands against my chest, and
I stumbled backward onto the floor. "I don't want this. It's not real," she
said and began to hurriedly gather her things.

"Wait, I'm sorry," I said. I tried to scrabble to my feet, and that's when the
sum total of my lack of sleep, the gallons of caffeine, the fraying of my
nerves, came together like the twining voices in a fugue and struck me in the
head as if I had been kicked by a horse. My body was shaking, my vision grew
hazy, and I could feel myself phasing in and out of consciousness. I managed
to watch Anna turn and walk away as if passing through the living room.
Somehow I got to my feet and followed her, using the furniture as support. The
last thing I remember was flinging open the front door of the small house and
screaming her name.

I was found the next morning, lying on the beach, unconscious. It was the old
man with the white beard from the diner, who, on his daily early-morning
beachcombing expedition, came across me. The police were summoned. An
ambulance was called. I came to in a hospital bed the next day, the warm sun,
smelling of antique rose, streaming through a window onto me.

They kept me at the small shore hospital two days for psychological
observation. A psychiatrist visited me, and I managed to convince him that I'd
been working too hard on a project for school. Apparently the waitress at the
diner had told the police that I'd been consuming ridiculous amounts of coffee
and going without sleep. Word of this had gotten back to the doctor who
attended to me. When I told him it was the first time I had tried coffee and
that I'd gotten carried away, he warned me to stay off it, telling me they
found me in a puddle of my own vomit. "It obviously disagrees with your
system. You could've choked to death when you passed out." I thanked him for
his advice and promised him I'd stay well away from it in the future.

In the days I was at the hospital, I tried to process what had happened with
Anna. Obviously, my bold advance had frightened her. It crossed my mind that
it might be better to leave her alone in the future. The very fact that I was
sure I'd made physical contact with her was, in retrospect, unsettling. I
wondered if perhaps Stullin was right, and what I perceived to be a result of
synesthesia was actually a psychotic hallucination. I left it an open issue in
my mind as to whether I would seek her out again. One more meeting might be
called for, I thought, at least to simply apologize for my mawkish behavior.

I asked the nurse if my things from the beach house had been brought to the
hospital, and she told me they had. I spent the entirety of my last day there
dressed and waiting to get the okay for my release. That afternoon, they
brought me my belongings. I went carefully through everything, but it became
obvious to me that my crayon score for the fugue was missing. Everything else
was accounted for, but there was no large sheet of drawing paper. I asked the
nurse, who was very kind, actually reminding me somewhat of Mrs. Brithnic, to
double-check and see if everything had been brought to me. She did and told me
there was nothing else. I called the Varion Island police on the pretense of
thanking them and asked if they had seen the drawing. My fugue had vanished. I
knew a grave depression would descend upon me soon due to its disappearance,
but for the moment I was numb and slightly pleased to merely be alive.

I decided to return to my parents' house for a few days and rest up before
returning to the conservatory in order to continue my studies. In the bus
station near the hospital, while I was waiting, I went to the small newspaper
stand in order to get a pack of gum and a paper with which to pass the time.
As I perused the candy rack, my sight lighted upon something that made me feel
the way Eve must have when she first saw the apple, for there was a bag of
Thompson's Coffee-Flavored Hard Candy. The moment I read the words on the bag,
I reached for them. There was a spark in my solar plexus, and my palms grew
damp. No Caffeine the package read, and I was hard-pressed to believe my good
fortune. I looked nervously over my shoulder while purchasing three bags of
them, and when, on the bus, I tore a bag open, I did so with such violence, a
handful of them scattered across the seat and into the aisle.

I arrived by cab at my parent's house and had to let myself in. Their car was
gone, and I supposed they were out for the day. I hadn't seen them in some
months and almost missed their presence. When night descended and they didn't
return, I thought it odd but surmised they were on one of the short vacations
they often took. It didn't matter. I sat at my old home base on the piano
bench and sucked on coffee-flavored hard candies until I grew too weary to sit
up. Then I got into my childhood bed, turned to face the wall as I always had
when I was little, and fell asleep.

The next day, after breakfast, I resumed my vigil that had begun on the long
bus trip home. By that afternoon my suspicions as to what had become of my
fugue were confirmed. The candy did not bring as clear a view of Anna as did
the ice cream, let alone the black coffee, but it was focused enough for me to
follow her through her day. I was there when she submitted my crayon score as
her art project for the end-of-the-semester review. How she was able to
appropriate it, I have no idea. It defied logic. In the fleeting glimpses I
got of the work, I tried to piece together how I'd gone about weaving the
subjects and their answers. The second I would see it, the music would begin
to sound for me, but I never got a good-enough look at it to sort out the
complex structure of the piece. The two things I was certain of were that the
fugue had been completed right up to the point where it was supposed to fall
into chaos, and that Anna did quite well with her review because of it.

By late afternoon, I'd come to the end of my Thompson's candies and had but
one left. Holding it in my hand, I decided it would be the last time I would
conjure a vision of Anna. I came to the conclusion that her theft of my work
had cancelled out my untoward advance, and we were now even, so to speak. I
would leave her behind as I had before, but this time for good. With my
decision made, I opened the last of the hard confections and placed it on my
tongue. That dark, amber taste slowly spread through my mouth, and, as it did,
a cloudy image formed and crystallized into focus. She had the cup to her
mouth, and her eyes widened as she saw me seeing her.

"William," she said. "I was hoping to see you one more time."

"I'm sure," I said, trying to seem diffident, but just hearing her voice made
me weak.

"Are you feeling better?" she asked. "I saw what happened to you. I was with
you on the beach all that long night but could not reach you."

"My fugue," I said. "You took it."

She smiled. "It's not yours. Let's not kid ourselves; you know you are merely
a projection of my synesthetic process."

"Who is a projection of whose?" I asked.

"You're nothing more than my muse," she said.

I wanted to contradict her, but I didn't have the meanness to subvert her
belief in her own reality. Of course, I could have brought up the fact that
she was told that figurative synesthesia was a known version of the disease.
This was obviously not true. Also, there was the fact that her failed drawing,
the one she'd abandoned for mine, was based on Schubert's Eighth, a product of
my own knowledge working through her. How could I convince her she wasn't
real? She must've seen the doubt in my eyes, because she became defensive in
her attitude. "I'll not see you again," she said. "My therapist has given me a
pill he says will eradicate my synesthesia. We have that here, in the true
reality. It's already begun to work. I no longer hear my cigarette smoke as
the sound of a faucet dripping. Green no longer tastes of lemon. The ring of
the telephone doesn't feel like burlap."

This pill was the final piece of evidence. A pill to cure synesthesia? "You
may be harming yourself," I said, "by taking that drug. If you cut yourself
off from me, you may cease to exist. Perhaps we are meant to be together." I
felt a certain panic at the idea that she would lose her special perception,
and I would lose the only friend I had ever had who understood my true nature.

"Dr. Stullin says it will not harm me, and I will be like everyone else.
Good-bye, William," she said and pushed the coffee cup away from her.

"Stullin," I said. "What do you mean, Stullin?"

"My therapist," she said, and although I could still see her before me, I
could tell I had vanished from her view. As I continued to watch, she lowered
her face into her hands and appeared to be crying. Then my candy turned from
the thinnest sliver into nothing but saliva, and I swallowed. A few seconds
more, and she was completely gone.

It was three in the afternoon when I put my coat on and started across town to
Stullin's place. I had a million questions, and foremost was whether or not he
treated a young woman named Anna. My thoughts were so taken by my last
conversation with her that when I arrived in front of the doctor's walkway, I
realized I had not noticed the sun go down. It was as if I had walked in my
sleep and awakened at his address. The street was completely empty of people
or cars, reminding me of Varion Island. I took the steps up to his front door
and knocked. It was dark inside except for a light on the second floor, but
the door was slightly ajar, which I thought odd, given it was the middle of
the winter. Normally, I would have turned around and gone home after my third
attempt to get his attention, but there was too much I needed to discuss.

I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. "Dr. Stullin," I called. There
was no answer. "Doctor?" I tried again and then made my way through the foyer
to the room where the tables were stacked with paper. In the meager light
coming in through the window, I found a lamp and turned it on. I continued to
call out as I went from room to room, turning on lights, heading for the
sunroom at the back of the place where we always had our meetings. When I
reached that room, I stepped inside, and my foot came down on something alive.
There was a sudden screech that nearly made my heart stop, and then I saw the
black-and-white cat, whose tail I had trod upon, race off into another room.

It was something of a comfort to be again in that plant-filled room. The sight
of it brought back memories of it as the single safe place in the world when I
was younger. Oddly enough, there was a cigarette going in the ashtray on the
table between the two chairs that faced each other. Lying next to it, opened
to the middle and turned down on its pages, was a copy of The Centrifugal
Rickshaw Dancer. I'd have preferred to see a ghost to that book. The sight of
it chilled me. I sat down in my old seat and watched the smoke from the
cigarette twirl up toward the glass panes. Almost instantly, a great weariness
seized me, and I closed my eyes.

That was days ago. When I found the next morning I could not open the doors to
leave, that I could not even break the glass in order to crawl out, it became
clear to me what was happening. At first I was frantic, but then a certain
calm descended upon me, and I learned to accept my fate. Those stacks of paper
in that room on the way to the sunroom—each sheet held a beautiful pencil
drawing. I explored the upstairs, and there, on the second floor, found a
piano and the sheet music for Bach's Grosse Fugue. There was a black-and-white
photograph of Mrs. Brithnic in the upstairs hallway and one of my parents
standing with Anna as a child.

That hallway, those rooms, are gone, vanished. Another room has disappeared
each day I have been trapped here. I sit in Stullin's chair now, in the only
room still remaining (this one will be gone before tonight), and compose this
tale—in a way, my fugue. The black-and-white cat sits across from me, having
fled from the dissipation of the house as it closes in around us. Outside, the
garden, the trees, the sky, have all lost their color and now appear as if
rendered in graphite—wonderfully shaded to give them an appearance of weight
and depth. So too with the room around us: the floor, the glass panels, the
chairs, the plants, even the cat's tail and my shoes and legs have lost their
life and become the shaded grey of a sketch. I imagine Anna will soon be free
of her condition. As for me, who always believed himself to be unwanted,
unloved, misunderstood, I will surpass being a mere artist and become instead
a work of art that will endure. The cat meows loudly, and I feel the sound as
a hand upon my shoulder.

The End

    I wouldn't normally cite resource material for a story, but in the writing
of "The Empire of Ice Cream" I was dealing with concepts I was not readily
very familiar with. For information on the condition of synesthesia, I turned
to The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard E. Cytowic. The Art of Fugue, by
Alfred Mann, was a great help in understanding the history and architecture of
this unusual musical form. I first came across the condition of figurative
synesthesia in Thackery T. Lambshead's Guide to Eccentric and Discredited
Diseases.




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© 2003 Jeffrey Ford and SCIFI.COM.