"d.a.m.n right," snorted the alienist, eyes shut. "And more than half of it true. Did you listen? What have you learned?"
"That more submarine captains should become psychiatrists."
"So? I have often wondered: did Nemo really die when his submarine was destroyed? Or did he run off to become my great-grandfather and were his psychological bacteria pa.s.sed along until I came into the world, thinking to command the ghostlike mechanisms that haunt the undertides, to wind up with the fifty-minute vaudeville routine in this sad, psychotic city?"
I got up and touched the fabulous bra.s.s symbol that hung like a scientific stalact.i.te in mid-ceiling.
"May I look?"
"I wouldn"t if I were you." He only half heard me, lying in the midst of his depression as in a dark cloud.
"It"s only a periscope-"
"But a good cigar is a smoke."
I remembered Sigmund Freud"s quote about cigars, laughed, and touched the periscope again.
"Don"t!" he said.
"Well, you don"t actually use this for anything, do you? It"s just a remembrance of your past, from your last sub, yes?"
"You think that?" He sighed. "Look!"
I hesitated, then pasted one eye to the viewer, shut the other, and cried: "Oh, Jesus!"
"I warned you!" said Von Seyfert.i.tz.
For they were there.
Enough nightmares to paper a thousand cinema screens. Enough phantoms to haunt ten thousand castle walls. Enough panics to shake forty cities into ruin.
My G.o.d, I thought, he could sell the film rights to this worldwide!
The first psychological kaleidoscope in history.
And in the instant another thought came: how much of that stuff in there is me? Or Von Seyfert.i.tz? Or both? Are these strange shapes my maundering daymares, sneezed out in the past weeks? When I talked, eyes shut, did my mouth spray invisible founts of small beasts which, caught in the periscope chambers, grew outsize? Like the microscopic photos of those germs that hide in eyebrows and pores, magnified a million times to become elephants on Scientific American covers? Are these images from other lost souls trapped on that couch and caught in the submarine device, or leftovers from my eyelashes and psyche?
"It"s worth millions!" I cried. "Do you know what this is!?"
"Collected spiders, Gila monsters, trips to the Moon without gossamer wings, iguanas, toads out of bad sisters" mouths, diamonds out of good fairies" ears, crippled shadow dancers from Bali, cut-string puppets from Geppetto"s attic, little-boy statues that pee white wine, s.e.xual trapeze performers" allez-oop, obscene finger-pantomimes, evil clown faces, gargoyles that talk when it rains and whisper when the wind rises, bas.e.m.e.nt bins full of poisoned honey, dragonflies that sew up every fourteen-year-old"s orifices to keep them neat until they rip the sutures, aged eighteen. Towers with mad witches, garrets with mummies for lumber-"
He ran out of steam.
"You get the general drift."
"Nuts," I said. "You"re bored. I could get you a five-million-dollar deal with Amalgamated Fruitcakes Inc. and the Sigmund F. Dreamboats, split three ways!"
"You don"t understand," said Von Seyfert.i.tz. "I am keeping myself busy, busy, so I won"t remember all the people I torpedoed, sank, drowned mid-Atlantic in 1944. I am not in the Amalgamated Fruitcake Cinema business. I only wish to keep myself occupied by paring fingernails, cleaning earwax, and erasing inkblots from odd beanbags like you. If I stop, I will fly apart. That periscope contains all and everything I have seen and known in the past forty years of observing pecans, cashews, and almonds. By staring at them I lose my own terrible life lost in the tides. If you won my periscope in some shoddy fly-by-night Hollywood strip poker, I would sink three times in my waterbed, never to be seen again. Have I shown you my waterbed? Three times as large as any pool. I do eighty laps asleep each night. Sometimes forty when I catnap noons. To answer your millionfold offer, no."
And suddenly he shivered all over. His hands clutched at his heart.
"My G.o.d!" he shouted.
Too late, he was realizing he had let me step into his mind and life. Now he was on his feet, between me and the periscope, staring at it and me, as if we were both terrors.
"You saw nothing in that! Nothing at all!"
"I did!"
"You lie! How could you be such a liar? Do you know what would happen if this got out, if you ran around making accusations-?
"My G.o.d," he raved on, "if the world knew, if someone said-" His words gummed shut in his mouth as if he were tasting the truth of what he said, as if he saw me for the first time and I was a gun fired full in his face. "I would be . . . laughed out of the city. Such a G.o.dd.a.m.n ridiculous . . . hey, wait a minute. You!"
It was as if he had slipped a devil mask over his face. His eyes grew wide. His mouth gaped.
I examined his face and saw murder. I sidled toward the door.
"You wouldn"t say anything to anyone?" he said.
"No."
"How come you suddenly know everything about me?"
"You told me!"
"Yes," he admitted, dazed, looking around for a weapon. "Wait."
"If you don"t mind," I said, "I"d rather not."
And I was out the door and down the hall, my knees jumping to knock my jaw.
"Come back!" cried Von Seyfert.i.tz, behind me. "I must kill you!"
"I was afraid of that!"
I reached the elevator first and by a miracle it flung wide its doors when I banged the Down b.u.t.ton. I jumped in.
"Say good-bye!" cried Von Seyfert.i.tz, raising his fist as if it held a bomb.
"Good-bye!" I said. The doors slammed.
I did not see Von Seyfert.i.tz again for a year.
Meanwhile, I dined out often, not without guilt, telling friends, and strangers on street corners, of my collision with a submarine commander become phrenologist (he who feels your skull to count the beans).
So with my giving one shake of the ripe fruit tree, nuts fell. Overnight they brimmed the Baron"s lap to flood his bank account. His Grand Slam will be recalled at century"s end: appearances on Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and Geraldo in one single cyclonic afternoon, with interchangeable hyperboles, positive-negative-positive every hour. There were Von Seyfert.i.tz laser games and duplicates of his submarine periscope sold at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. With the superinducement of a half-million dollars, he force-fed and easily sold a bad book. Duplicates of the animalcules, lurks, and curious critters trapped in his bra.s.s viewer arose in pop-up coloring books, paste-on tattoos, and inkpad rubber-stamp nigh-mares at Beasts-R-Us.
I had hoped that all this would cause him to forgive and forget. No.
One noon a year and a month later, my doorbell rang and there stood Gustav Von Seyfert.i.tz, Baron Woldstein, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"How come I didn"t kill you that day?" he mourned.
"You didn"t catch me," I said.
"Oh, ja. That was it."
I looked into the old man"s rain-washed, tear-ravened face and said, "Who died?"
"Me. Or is it I? Ah, to h.e.l.l with it: me. You see before you," he grieved, "a creature who suffers from the Rumpelstiltskin Syndrome!"
"Rumpel-"
"-stiltskin! Two halves with a rip from chin to fly. Yank my forelock, go ahead! Watch me fall apart at the seam. Like zipping a psychotic zipper, I fall, two Herr Doktor Admirals for the sick price of one. And which is the Doktor who heals and which the sellout best-seller Admiral? It takes two mirrors to tell. Not to mention the smoke!"
He stopped and looked around, holding his head together with his hands.
"Can you see the crack? Am I splitting again to become this crazy sailor who desires richness and fame, being sieved through the hands of crazed ladies with ruptured libidos? Suffering catfish, I call them! But take their money, spit, and spend! You should have such a year. Don"t laugh."
"I"m not laughing."
"Then cheer up while I finish. Can I lie down? Is that a couch? Too short. What do I do with my legs?"
"Sit sidesaddle."
Von Seyfert.i.tz laid himself out with his legs draped over one side. "Hey, not bad. Sit behind. Don"t look over my shoulder. Avert your gaze. Neither smirk nor pull long faces as I get out the crazy-glue and paste Rumpel back with Stiltskin, the name of my next book, G.o.d help me. d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l, you and your d.a.m.ned periscope!"
"Not mine. Yours. You wanted me to discover it that day. I suppose you had been whispering Dive, Dive, for years to patients, half asleep. But you couldn"t resist the loudest scream ever: Dive! That was your captain speaking, wanting fame and money enough to chock a horse show."
"G.o.d," murmured Von Seyfert.i.tz, "how I hate it when you"re honest. Feeling better already. How much do I owe you?"
He arose.
"Now we go kill the monsters instead of you."
"Monsters?"
"At my office. If we can get in past the lunatics."
"You have lunatics outside as well as in, now?"
"Have I ever lied to you?"
"Often. But," I added, "little white ones."
"Come," he said.
We got out of the elevator to be confronted by a long line of worshipers and supplicants. There must have been seventy people strung out between the elevator and the Baron"s door, waiting with copies of books by Madame Blavatsky, Krishnamurti, and Shirley MacLaine under their arms. There was a roar like a suddenly opened furnace door when they saw the Baron. We beat it on the double and got inside his office before anyone could surge to follow.
"See what you have done to me!" Von Seyfert.i.tz pointed.
The office walls were covered with expensive teak paneling. The desk was from Napoleon"s age, an exquisite Empire piece worth at least fifty thousand dollars. The couch was the best soft leather I had ever seen, and the two pictures on the wall were originals-a Renoir and a Monet. My G.o.d, millions! I thought.
"Okay," I said. "The beasts, you said. You"ll kill them, not me?"
The old man wiped his eyes with the back of one hand, then made a fist.
"Yes!" he cried, stepping up to the fine periscope, which reflected his face, madly distorted, in its elongated shape. "Like this. Thus and so!"
And before I could prevent, he gave the bra.s.s machine a terrific slap with his hand and then a blow and another blow and another, with both fists, cursing. Then he grabbed the periscope as if it were the neck of a spoiled child and throttled and shook it.
I cannot say what I heard in that instant. Perhaps real sounds, perhaps imagined temblors, like a glacier cracking in the spring, or icicles in midnight. Perhaps it was a sound like a great kite breaking its skeleton in the wind and collapsing in folds of tissue. Maybe I thought I heard a vast breath insucked, a cloud dissolving up inside itself. Or did I sense clock machineries spun so wildly they smoked off their foundations and fell like bra.s.s snowflakes?
I put my eye to the periscope.
I looked in upon- Nothing.
It was just a bra.s.s tube with some crystal lenses and a view of an empty couch.
No more.
I seized the viewpiece and tried to screw it into some new focus on a far place and some dream bacteria that might fibrillate across an unimaginable horizon.
But the couch remained only a couch, and the wall beyond looked back at me with its great blank face.
Von Seyfert.i.tz leaned forward and a tear ran off the tip of his nose to fall on one rusted fist.
"Are they dead?" he whispered.
"Gone."
"Good, they deserved to die. Now I can return to some kind of normal, sane world."
And with each word his voice fell deeper within his throat, his chest, his soul, until it, like the vaporous haunts within the peri-kaleidoscope, melted into silence.
He clenched his fists together in a fierce clasp of prayer, like one who beseeches G.o.d to deliver him from plagues. And whether he was once again praying for my death, eyes shut, or whether he simply wished me gone with the visions within the bra.s.s device, I could not say.
I only knew that my gossip had done a terrible and irrevocable thing. Me and my wild enthusiasm for a psychological future and the fame of this incredible captain from beneath Nemo"s tidal seas.
"Gone," murmured Gustav Von Seyfert.i.tz, Baron Woldstein, whispered for the last time. "Gone."
That was almost the end.
I went around a month later. The landlord reluctantly let me look over the premises, mostly because I hinted that I might be renting.
We stood in the middle of the empty room where I could see the dent marks where the couch had once stood.
I looked up at the ceiling. It was empty.