Unterderseaboat
Doktor
Ray
Bradbury
The incredible event occurred during my third visit to
Gustav Von Seyfertitz, my foreign psychoanalyst.
I should have guessed at the strange explosion before it
came.
After all, my alienist, truly alien, had the coincidental
name, Von Seyfertitz, of the tall, lean, aquiline, menacing, and therefore
beautiful actor who played the high priest in the 1935 film She.
In She, the wondrous villain waved his skeleton fingers, hurled
insults, summoned sulfured flames, destroyed slaves, and knocked the world into
earthquakes.
After that, At
Where was I? Ah, yes!
It was my third visit to my psychiatrist. He called that day
and cried, Douglas, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, it's time for
beddy-bye!
Beddy-bye was, of course, his couch of pain and humiliation
where I lay writhing in agonies of assumed Jewish guilt and Northern Baptist
stress as he from time to time muttered, A fruitcake remark! or Dumb! or
If you ever do that again, I'll kill you!
As you can see, Gustav Von Seyfertitz was a most unusual
mine specialist. Mine? Yes. Our problems are land mines in our heads. Step on
them! Shock-troop therapy, he once called it, searching for words. Blitzkrieg?
I offered.
Ja! He grinned his shark grin. That's it!
Again, this was my third visit to his strange,
metallic-looking room with a most odd series of locks on a roundish door. Suddenly,
as I was maundering and treading dark waters, I heard his spine stiffen behind
me. He gasped a great death rattle, sucked air, and blew it out in a yell that
curled and bleached my hair:
Dive! Dive!
I dove.
Thinking that the room might be struck by a titanic iceberg,
I fell, to scuttle beneath the lion-claw-footed couch.
Dive! cried the old man.
Dive? I whispered, and looked up.
To see a submarine periscope, all polished brass, slide up
to vanish in the ceiling.
Gustav Von Seyfertitz stood pretending not to notice me, the
sweat-oiled leather couch, or the vanished brass machine. Very calmly, in the
fashion of Conrad Veidt in Casablanca, or Erich Von like Jack Nicklaus hits a
ball? Bamm. A hand grenade!
That was the sound my Germanic friend's boots made as he
knocked them together in a salute Crrrack!
Gustav Mannerheim Auschlitz Von Seyfertitz Baron Woldstein,
at your service! He lowered his voice.
Unterderseaboat-
I thought he might say Doktor. But: Unterderseaboat
Captain!
I scrambled off the floor. Another crrrack and-The periscope
slid calmly down out of the ceiling, the most beautiful Freudian cigar I had
ever seen.
No! I gasped.
Have I ever lied to you?
Many times!
But-he shrugged-little white ones. He stepped to the
periscope, slapped two handles in place, slammed one eye shut, and crammed the
other angrily against the view piece, turning the periscope in a slow
roundabout of the room, the couch, and me.
Fire one, he ordered.
I almost heard the torpedo leave its tube. Fire two! he
said.
And a second soundless and invisible bomb motored on its way
to infinity. Struck midships, I sank to the couch.
You, you! I said mindlessly. It! I pointed at the brass
machine. This! I touched couch. Why?
Sit down, said Von Seyfertitz.
I am.
Lie down.
I'd rather not, I said uneasily.
Von Seyfertitz turned the periscope so its topmost eye,
raked at an angle, glared at me. It had an uncanny resemblance, in its glassy
coldness, his own fierce hawk's gaze.
His voice, from behind the periscope, echoed. So you want
to know, eh, how Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, suffered to leave the
cold ocean depths, depart his dear North Sea ship, flee his destroyed and
beaten fatherland, to become the Unterderseaboat Doktor
Now that you mention
I never mention! I declare. And my declarations are
sea-battle commands.
So I noticed
Shut up. Sit back
Not just now... I said uneasily.
His heels knocked as he let his right hand spider to his top
coat pocket and slip forth yet a forth eye with which to fasten me: a bright,
thin monocle which he screwed into his stare as if decupping a boiled egg. I
winced. For now the monocle was part of his glare and regarded me with cold
fire.
Why the monocle? I said.
Idiot! It is to cover my good eye so that neither ther eye
can see and my intuition is free to work!
Oh, I said.
And he began his monologue. And as he talked I realized his
need had been pent up, capped, years, so he talked on and on, forgetting me.
And it was during this monologue that a strange thing
occurred. I rose slowly to my feet as Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz circled, his
long, slim cigar printing smoke cumuli on the air, which read like white
Rorschach blots.
With each implantation of his foot, a word ca out, and then
another, in a sort of plodding grammar. Sometimes he stopped and stood poised
with one leg raised and one word stopped in his mouth to be turned on his
tongue and examined. Then the shoe went down, the noun slid forth and the verb
and object in good time.
Until at last, circling, I found myself in a chair stunned,
for I saw:
Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz stretched on his couch, his long
spider fingers laced on his chest.
It has been no easy thing to come forth on land, he
sibilated. Some days I was the jellyfish, frozen. Others, the shore-strewn
octopi, at least with tentacles, or the crayfish sucked back into my skull. But
I have built my spine, year on year, and now I walk among the land men and
survive.
He paused to take a trembling breath, then continued:
I moved in stages from the depths to a houseboat, to a
wharf bungalow, to a shore-tent and then back to a canal in a city and at last
to New York an island surrounded by water, eh? But where, where, in all this, I
wondered, would a submarine commander find his place, his work, his mad love
and activity?
It was one afternoon in a building with the world's longest
elevator that it struck me like a hand grenade in the ganglion. Going down,
down, down, other people crushed around me, and the numbers descending and the
floors whizzing by the glass windows, rushing by flicker-flash, flicker-flash,
conscious, subconscious, id, ego-id, life, death, lust, kill, lust, dark,
light, plummeting, falling, ninety, eighty, fifty, lower depths, high
exhilaration, id, ego, id, until this shout blazed from my raw throat in a
great all-accepting, panic-manic shriek:
Dive! Dive
I remember, I said.
Dive! I screamed so loudly that my fellow passengers, in
shock, peed merrily. Among stunned faces, I stepped out of the lift to find
one-sixteenth of an inch of pee on the floor. Have a nice day! I said,
jubilant with self-discovery, then ran to self-employment, to hang a shingle
and next my periscope, carried from the mutilated, divested, castrated
unterderseaboat all these years. Too stupid to see in it my psychological
future and my final downfall, my beautiful artifact, the brass genitalia of
psychotic research, the Von Seyfertitz Mark Nine Periscope!
That's quite a story, I said.
Damn 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 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'
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 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. Dont laugh.
Im 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, Krishna murti, 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 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 Sigmunds 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.