Quicker than the Eye

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’ allez-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 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 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. 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 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 Geraldo 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 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 brass viewer arose in pop-up coloring books, paste-on tattoos, and inkpad rubber-stamp nighmares 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, 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—”