Liturgy of Ice--An Excerpt
Kyle saw the strange flyer on his way to work one day. It was pasted on the side of a telephone pole. The poster had a picture of ice crystals magnified to the point where they became furry fractals, and over this almost illegible typography formed the name of the group, 'The Frost Collective,' and below that were a date and an address. It was an arresting image, but what did it mean? Was it an art collective? An underground band? A political movement? The poster gave no clues as to the purpose.
The phrase and image stayed with him throughout the day. His job at the shop was boring, since no-one came in. Ambergris was a high-end perfume shop located on a side street with very little foot traffic. In addition to selling very expensive fragrances, the store also created custom perfumes for its clients, a vapid trend that had died when the Great Recession hit the country. Kyle could spend a week without seeing a single customer, and there were only so many times he could dust the ornate glass bottles. How Ambergris stayed in business was beyond him. The owner, the heiress to a honey company, would only pop in once a month before flitting off to another city or country.
Kyle had come to the northern city for college, after winning a minority science scholarship. After college, there had been an unpaid but prestigious internship at a pharmaceutical company. When funding for a position at the company fell through, he was forced to take a job outside his field. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical company promised a position for him--soon, soon. Three years later of whispered promises, and here he was, using his Chemistry degree to create designer scents for bored trustfunders.
Kyle hated the northern city, where winter was a tyrant for nine months out of the year. Lakes and streams froze solid. It snowed at least once a day. Winds howled and sliced through the glittering high-rises. Kyle came from the south, from desert country where the sun baked the earth so that it cracked, and the buildings were made of warm red abode. It was open space, with mile upon mile of cactus sentries and prehistoric rock formations. People there were friendlier, and tended to be some shade of brown or red. Here, people were pale, almost translucent, and asked him, "What are you?" As a result, he had few friends and an almost hermetic social life.
He didn't see anymore posters for a week, and his online research didn't turn up anything. The Frost Collective was a distant memory when the man entered Ambergris, dressed in all white. He wore a white fur coat. Beneath his coat was a white turtleneck and white leather pants. His boots were grey, but had fringes of white fur on them. He had balls, to walk around the filthy city dressed like that. Kyle thought, He must be a member of the Frost Collective. He was probably the son of some fabulously wealthy family.
It had been snowing, so the man shook off the wet flakes, and with his fur ensemble, he resembled a large white dog on its hind legs. Then he removed his large, face-obscuring sunglasses.
"Oh," said Kyle.
There were snowflakes in his eyes. Two identical, stylized snowflakes where his irises should have been rested against a milky blue background. It was a brain-fart second before he realized that the man wore specialized contact lenses.
"May I help you," he asked the gentleman. For some reason, he was nervous. The man's outfit and his demeanor were so--performative. Kyle was supposed to be his audience.
"Yes." The snowflake-man's voice was a deep baritone. "I am looking for a scent. Something that smells like--ice."
Kyle laughed. Clearly, this guy was a douchebag. "You're kidding me."
"Not at all." The snowflake-man picked up one of the designer bottles, traced its shape, and put it down. "When I say ice, I mean something that smells like pure, white bleak conditions. Something that smells like Winter. Ice. Glass. Snow. That sort of thing."
Kyle nodded and began setting out the bottles of scent and tester strips.
"No," said the man, rejecting the smell of pine needles. "Too alive."
The usual scents were out. No floral scents, no essence of bergamot, nor musk, nor spices.
"Let me try something," Kyle said to the man. "We mostly make fragrances that have names like Cupcake or Glitter or D'eau de Skylar. I think what you want is more--chemical. Something harsh."
He mixed together a tincture made of ethyl alcohol, methylbenzodioxepinone, lactic acid and the faintest wisp of cucumber. The snowflake-man inhaled the saturated tester strip.
"Yes," he said, "Yes. That's it. I can see the snow falling in frenzied drifts, turning everything bone white. The sky is the color of the grey coat of the wolf that will swallow the sun."
"So, you like it?" He wanted this Special Snowflake dude out of the store.
"Indeed," he said. Kyle sold the weirdo a 4 once bottle of Ice and an elaborate atomizer made of clear cobalt blue glass and sent him on his way. The rest of the day went by slowly, defined by desultory busy work and cellphone checking. Before he closed the shop, Kyle took a batch of the ice cologne home with him; he always liked to keep mementos of his olfactory creations.
It had started snowing again. Kyle supposed that there really were fifty words for snow. He'd experienced most of them during his time in the city. This was snow at its most pristine and ethereal. You could see the crystalline structure of the flakes. It fell lazily, in elongated pirouettes, then disappeared upon contact with any surface. He took the subway and walked the rest of the way home via the subterranean tunnel to his apartment building, one of the many such tunnels that snaked beneath the city. The pedestrian tunnels were the best part of the city. They were all tiled with ambient recessed lighting, and some of them had mosaic art on the walls. Each tunnel was color-coded, allegedly according some architect's dream. While they were not warm, they kept you out of the biting wind. The tunnel that led to the basement of his apartment building was done in russet tile that reminded him of home. Every now and then, the mosaic of a reindeer buck's head appeared on the floor. Again, this reminded him of home--the herds of mule deer that loped over the sand dunes.
After dinner (a roasted root vegetable salad) and channel surfing while drinking beer, Kyle settled in for bedtime. He knew that he would never get to sleep on his own. He was always tired but never sleepy. It had to do with the intense boredom and loneliness that surrounded him. So he took a sleeping pill, and waited the requisite 15 minutes before the chemical fog began seeping through his blood/brain barrier.
The sleeping pill had melatonin as an ingredient, so Kyle was not surprised that he had a vivid dream. That was one of the reasons he used it; if his waking life was boring, at least his sleeping life could be a little exciting. Most of the dreams were meaningless, surrealistic images that bled into one another, occasionally starring people from his childhood. This dream, however, was different.
It took place in the bedroom where he was presently sleeping. He watched himself sleep for a while, the tides of his breathing, and began to notice opaque condensation that misting from his mouth and nose. The northern city was hellishly cold, but that was outside. The northerners were excellent at heating; cold rarely invaded indoors, with insulation and double thick panes of glass the bare minimum of protection. Kyle also had a space heater in his efficiency. His dream-self checked to see if it was on. It was not. He figured that this was one of those border-dreams that signaled bodily discomfort, not unlike the dreams he had when he had to urinate. But it began to get colder and colder. The condensation from his breathing got thicker, less opaque, until plumes of white smoke spilled from his sleeping body's face.
The mist all coalesced above the body, and hovered there. It was a cloud floating just above his bed. At first, Kyle thought it was whimsical and beautiful, this wispy, amorphous shape made of molecules of moisture.
Then it became eerie, for Kyle began to feel that the cloud was somehow, watching him. The cloud was alive, was sentient, and observing him as he slept. This vaporous intelligence was letting him watch himself. Which was ridiculous, of course. It had no eyes or mouth or appendages. The fact that the dream-cloud was man-shaped was only the product of a mind under the influence of a drug. But such rationalizations did not work, because though Kyle couldn't see anything humanoid about the vapor, there were shifts and drifts in the form that could, at one point, be perceived as an eye, or a curl of hair.
The dream lasted for a long time and he was trapped in it, unable to move, paralyzed by the meta continuum of watching a ghost-thing watching him watch himself. He tried to use the lucid dreaming tricks he'd once read about, but he was frozen in place. Let me go, he thought at the cloud. This seemed to work. The tendrils of the cloud unfurled and became insubstantial, fl0wing upwards towards the ceiling.
At the last moment, he saw, or thought he saw, a glittering pupil made of condensation.
Kyle woke up immediately, shivering even though the radiator was going full blast. He'd tripped on peyote once, back in his 'getting back in touch with his culture' phase. But that had been mild, compared to this. He had the sudden urge to piss. As he pushed the comforter aside, he found the front of his boxers was moist. He tried not to think about what that meant as he rushed to the toilet.