Jeffrey Ford - The Empire of Ice Cream

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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 For me, their aroma is superceded by a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

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Jeffrey Ford - The Empire of Ice Cream

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