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The Ice Cream Truck

Mark Pearce

    I sat on my deck reading Aldous Huxley as the sun set behind the tall buildings to the west. Dimly at first, then more clearly, a delightful melody came wafting through the air. Calliope music of a tune from the days when my grandfather courted my grandmother. I knew without looking that it was an ice cream truck. I didn’t know they still existed. I looked down the avenue and here it came, rolling along, playing its merry tune. It reminded me of lazy Saturday afternoons—not of my own childhood, but of an age before I was born. It came slowly; when you’ve traveled through time, you’re in no hurry.
    I watched as it turned the corner and passed out of sight. I regretted that I had missed my chance to step back into another era. I should have flagged it down. But I’ve seen enough episodes of the Twilight Zone to know that if I had stopped the truck and bought a cone, I might have found myself in the 1920’s, surrounded my men in flat-topped straw hats and women with parasols.
    As I sat musing, I heard the sound again. It was returning. It turned into the driveway of my apartment complex. I had no choice.
    I went out onto the sidewalk and around the corner. There it was. No one else was around. I went up to the truck. The driver was small and wiry, with old, tattered clothes and a three days’ growth of beard.
    He smiled at me. “What’ll you have?”
    I placed my order and gave him the money. He handed me a cone.
    “I didn’t know ice cream trucks existed anymore,” I said.
    He smiled enigmatically.
    “I like your jersey,” he said.
    I was wearing a football jersey I had ordered special-made. The player’s name is “Orwell” and the number is “84.” I wondered if the grizzled little driver understood the shirt. I had had it made in the colors of the local sports franchise so that I would blend in with the people who don’t think they’re traveling through time when they see an ice cream truck.
    He leaned toward me; I could see each separate whisker on his unshaven face.
    “Orwell was a fascinating thinker,” he said. “He and Huxley were opposite poles of the same idea. Huxley talked about the dissemination of information. Orwell talked about its destruction.”
    A chill went up my spine that had nothing to do with the ice cream. There would be no pork pie hats or parasols, but I could not say with certainty that the walls of reality were solid.
    He began to speak of books that had been banned through the ages. He said that every book that had ever been banned, that had ever been burned, still existed. That no state, no religion, no mob had ever succeeded in destroying an idea.
    Who was this little philosopher who had traveled to me through time in an ice cream truck?
    I talked, but I mostly listened. He was younger than me—or older by 100 years. I’ll never know which. At length we said goodbye. I returned to my deck.
    It was with a sense of vertigo that I picked up my collection of Huxley. I listened as the calliope music faded into the distance and watched the dusk slowly darken into evening until I was unable to read.

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