Szczepanski (but was that really his name?) gazed blankly at the screen of his computer. An ice-blue icosahedron in perpetual motion was tumbling slowly through sidereal space, randomly revolving to display its twenty facets and playfully bouncing off the walls of the screen, set on its course for all eternity. As he surrendered himself to the geometric fatality of the figure’s trajectory, losing himself in a warm narcotic trance, Szczepanski realized he wouldn’t at all mind being that icosahedron.

Then, with a brusque and inexplicable spasm, his right hand accidentally collided with the mouse crouched on its blue foam-rubber pad and the screensaver vanished in a trice to make way for a page of text. The words quivered before his eyes, detached themselves from the blue-grey background and started to dance slightly, impelled no doubt by his own feverishness. Behind this page there were other invisible pages, an endless palimpsest now abolished by the accumulated operations of cut and paste and other devices of electronic editing. For the past couple of hours he had been neurotically scrolling back and forth, changing a word here, adding an adjective or an adverb there, subtracting and then replacing a comma or a semi-colon, changing single quotation marks into double quotation marks and vice versa. Couple of hours? Four to five years, more likely. Yes, it was just on five years now that he had been fussing and fretting over a prose piece—a novella if it had to be classified, but did it?—that offered a fictionalized account of the construction of the ice palace built by the Russian Empress Anna Ivanovna in the 1730s. The writing had been stopped and started on numerous occasions and the edifice, rather than melting, had simply remained frozen, a text as cold, forbidding and gorgeously rare as the subject itself.

Szczepanski had encountered the first suggestive embryon of his mad project one gloomy autumn Sunday in Paris while he was sitting by the fire in a borrowed apartment on the Île de la Cité, nursing a third large J&B on the rocks in a Waterford tumbler and reading Poetical Works of William Cowper, an 1870 edition he had picked up while distractedly browsing just the day before among the bouquinistes of the Quai de Conti. (Extremities rubbed, previous owner’s label on title page and initials stamped on front-free endpaper. Housed in a quarter grey morocco slipcase, black morocco label mounted on spine, gilt-stamped. Very good.) It was Cowper’s poem ‘The Task’ that awoke in Szczepanski vague schoolboy reminiscences of the fabulous palace of ice:

Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ,
Thy most magnificent and mighty freak,
The wonder of the north. No forest fell
When thou wouldst build, no quarry sent its stores
T’enrich thy walls; but thou didst hew the floods
And make thy marble of the glassy wave.
In such a palace Aristaeus found
Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale
Of his lost bees to her maternal ear.

As he leafed through the volume in a pose of tipsy connoisseurship, it occurred to Szczepanski that he was very possibly the only person on the entire planet who was at that precise moment drinking J&B and reading William Cowper, and this made him feel, well, kind of special. Of course he was reluctant to imagine that he was the only person who had ever simultaneously consumed Cowper and J&B, but at that precise moment—the fire crackling in the hearth, the amplified commentary of a tour guide rising from the bateau-mouche as it scudded by on the grey surface of the Seine—it seemed to him immensely unlikely that anybody else was concurrently replicating his brand of Scotch and his brand of poetry. No doubt somebody out there somewhere was inwardly or outwardly reciting Dylan Thomas while sipping The Famous Old Grouse, or alliteratively allying Laforgue and Laphroaig, or wittily marrying Maiakovski and Red Label, but as for the Cowper/J&B double, no, it was difficult to imagine. In his mind’s eye he pictured two intersecting circles, an enormous one representing ‘Drinkers of J&B’ and a minute, almost microscopic one standing for ‘Readers of Cowper.’ Then, under the magnifying glass kindly provided for the exercise he saw the shaded area of overlap between the two circles, a cozy little subset occupied by a gay party of one: himself.

Szczepanski drained the dregs of his Scotch and held up the tumbler to inspect it. The elaborate facetting of the crystal itself clearly prefigured the work to be done on the inert blocks of ice within. Armed with a little imagination and considerable reserves of Dutch courage, he tilted the tumbler towards him and peered deep down inside, where a solitary sculptor dressed in a heavy Shetland sweater and tweed plus-fours had already planted his crampons on the top slab and would soon begin discreetly chiselling away.