Unterderseaboat Doktor Read online

  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 view piece 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 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.

  “What's wrong?” said the landlord. “Didn't they fix it so you can't see? Damn fool Baron made a damn big hole up into the office above. Rented that, too, but never used it for anything I knew of. There was just that big damn hole he left when he went away.”

  I sighed with relief.

  “Nothing left upstairs?”

  “Nothing.”

  I looked up at the perfectly blank ceiling.

  “Nice job of repair,” I said.

  “Thank God,” said the landlord.

  What, I often wonder, ever happened to Gustav Von Seyfertitz? Did he move to Vienna, to take up residence, perhaps, in or near dear Sigmund’s very own address? Does he live in Rio, aerating fellow Unterderseaboat Captains who can't sleep for seasickness, roiling on their waterbeds under the shadow of the Andes Cross? Or is he in South Pasadena, within striking distance of the fruit larder nut farms disguised as film studios?

  I cannot guess.

  All I know is that some nights in the year, oh, once or twice, in a deep sleep I hear this terrible shout, his cry,

  “Dive! Dive! Dive!”

  And wake to find myself, sweating, far und my bed.

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