Quicker than the Eye. Ray Bradbury
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—”
“—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 cat-fish, 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 Seyfertitz 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, God help me. Damn you to hell, you and your damned 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.”
“God,” murmured Von Seyfertitz, “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 worshippers 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 Seyfertitz 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 God, 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 brass 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 mid-night. 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 in-sucked, a cloud dissolving up inside itself. Or did I sense clock machineries spun so wildly they smoked off their foundations and fell like brass snowflakes?
I put my eye to the periscope.
I looked in upon—
Nothing.
It was just a brass 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 Seyfertitz 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 God 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 brass 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 Seyfertitz, 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