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«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 passed along until I came into the world, thinking to command the ghostlike mechanisms that haunt the under tides, to wind up with the fifty-minute vaudeville routine in this sad, psychotic city?»
I got up and touched the fabulous brass symbol that hung like a scientific stalactite 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 Seyfertitz.
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 God, 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 Seyfertitz? 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, sexual trapeze performers' alley-oop, obscene finger-pantomimes, evil clown faces, gargoyles that talk when it rains and whisper when the wind rises, basement bins
full of poisoned honey, dragonflies that sew 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 Fruit-cakes Inc. And the Sigmund F. Dreamboats, split three ways!»
«You don't understand,» said Von Seyfertitz. «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 bean-bags 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. Some-times forty when I catnap noons. To answer your million fold offer, no.»
And suddenly he shivered all over. His hands clutched at his heart.
«My God!» 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 God,» 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 goddamn 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 Seyfertitz, 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 button. I jumped in.
«Say good-bye!» cried Von Seyfertitz, raising his fist as if it held a bomb.
«Good-bye!» I said. The doors slammed.
I did not see Von Seyfertitz 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 Gerarldo in one single cyclonic afternoon, with interchangeable hyperboles, positive-negative-positive every hour. There were Von Seyfertitz laser games and duplicates of his submarine periscope sold at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. With the super inducement 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 brass viewer arose in pop-up coloring books, paste-on tattoos, and inkpad rubberstamp nightmares 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 Seyfertitz, F 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 hell 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 fish, I call them! But take their money, spit, spend! You should have such a year. Don't laugh.»