Candy comes in several sub genera; chocolate, banana, licorice, marshmallow, wafer, rice puffs and some others.
Many combinations are formed from the above categories. I tried to catalogue all the different forms of candy in Iceland and although it's possible, I decided not to. Candy's worth more than plain itemisation I thought, it needs points of reference that evoke its origins, its use, where it starts and where it ends.
I want to feel Icelandic candy. I want to be inside it.
So I'm taking my mind back......
........to the year 1986.
I'm working in a confectionery factory in the suburbs of Reykjavik. I'm a guy in my mid 30's with long, curly black hair. I like riding on my snowmobile, my girlfriend when she's wasted, getting rides into town, watching subtitled re-runs of Mork & Mindy and of course, lazy Sundays.
My friends call me Bú, and I've been making chocolate bars that look like this:
But I'm riding some new waves right now. I've stopped watching Mork & Mindy re-runs and I've started playing my Commodore 64 late into the night. Iridescent limes, lilacs, beige and gray sear my retinas at regular loading intervals in my darkened room. Strangely, my pupils have shrunk, and I've started to use more abstractions in my day to day conversations.
Some evenings pass where I eat nothing but licorice, and my lazy Sundays have turned into apathetic Sundays. On my Commodore 64, one game has me hooked a lot more than the others..
The Sentinel
The weeks go by and my girlfriend starts getting wasted at her friend's house. One Friday, I go in to work as normal. Kolfinna, a sturdy machinist, is in the lunch room as I make a coffee. Kolfinna's always got an oddly stunned look on her face, like a toddler who's just done a poopy. Her eyes are humongous, round, extruding snooker balls. She's really in to small talk, and she sets herself off by making a coffee at the same time as me.
"You know", she says
"I got invited to this really nice wedding. And I just can't wait to go, I just can't wait."
"Oh yeah", says I
"Yes, I just...can't.....wait.......... to go", her bug eyes are almost inside the rim of her coffee cup as she places it to her mouth to take a sip, she's shaking her head in disbelief, or perhaps ecstasy. Her breathing's slowed and she's slowly turning away from me, like a colossal star craft making an about turn beside Jupiter.
I don't have any retort for her, because she hasn't abstracted enough. Previously I'd have said something like wow, or tell her how nice it sounds. But I can't.
"You know..... it's a 5 star hotel" she says softly as she does an about face on her about turn, locking me in the eyes with her now cantilevered eyeballs. She seems inconsolable, quivering beneath her importance. And her eyes tell me that she's in a bliss that can only be reached by her. I'd have to have been blind from birth to feel what she's feeling. I look at the wall and aim the corner of my mouth in her direction, to feign servitude and to hide my indifference.
That night after playing Sentinel with the lights off I went to bed and dreamed;
I was in a rain lashed valley with very gradually inclining sides. Every so often a black coloured man-thing would come running from a ditch and scare someone to death. The people in the valley knew it was going to happen to all of them sooner or later. When it came my turn, the man-thing ran up to me very fast and thrust his whole forearm down my gullet. Suddenly he was Kolfinna and then just as suddenly we were aboard a broad, quiet star liner, drifting slowly into a planet. I ran for the bridge with Kolfinna, who told me she loved me as we sprinted in tandem along the corridors. At the bridge upon our arrival, lattices and grids threw themselves up about us and sounded out the impact balefully.
That's when I woke, with an afterglow of feeling like dying that lasted for days. And for days Kolfinna was lost to the stars, thinking about that 5 star wedding and how she'd be there.
When my girlfriend broke up with me I didn't tell anyone, I played The Sentinel on my Commodore 64.
And at work I suggested we make a new candy bar, one like a dream, with the black arm of a man-thing thrust inside it, that throws grids about itself as it hurtles towards the end.
