Unterseeboot Doktor

The incredible event occurred during my third visit to Gustav Von Seyffertitz, my foreign psychoanalyst. I should have guessed.

After all, my alienist, truly alien, had the coincidental name, Von Seyffertitz, of the tall, 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 sulfurous flames, destroyed slaves and knocked the world into earthquakes. After that, he could be seen riding the Hollywood Boulevard trolley cars as calm as a mummy, as quiet as an unwired telephone pole.

Where was I? Ah, yes.

It was my third visit to my psychiatrist. He had called that day and cried, "Douglas, you stupid 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 Seyffertitz 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 said, grinning his shark grin. "That's it!"

So, on my third visit to his strange office--a 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 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 into the ceiling.

Gustav Von Seyffertitz 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 Stroheim, the manservant in Sunset Boulevard, he lit a cigarette and let two calligraphic dragon plumes of smoke write themselves (his initials?) on the air.

"You were saying?" he said.

"No." I stayed on the floor. "You were saying. Dive?"

"I did not say that," he purred.

"Beg pardon, you said, very clearly, 'Dive!'"

"You hallucinate." He exhaled two more scrolled dragon plumes. "Why do you stare at the ceiling?"

"Because," I said, "unless I am further hallucinating, buried in that valve lock up there is a nine-foot length of Leica brass periscope."

"This boy is incredible, listen to him," muttered Von Seyffertitz to his alter ego, always a third person in the room when he analyzed. When he was not busy exhaling his disgust with me, he tossed asides at himself. "How many martinis did you have at lunch?"

"Don't hand me that, Von Seyffertitz. That ceiling, one minute ago, swallowed a long brass pipe, yes?"

Von Seyffertitz glanced at his large, one-pound-size Christmas watch, saw that I still had 30 minutes to go, sighed, threw down his cigarette, squashed it with a polished boot, then clicked his heels.

Have you ever heard the whack when a real pro like Jack Nicklaus hits a ball? Bam. A hand grenade! That was the sound my Germanic friend's boots made as he knocked them together in a salute.

Crrack!

"Gustav Mannerheim Auschlitz Von Seyffertitz, Baron Waldstein, at your service!" He lowered his voice:

"Unterseeboot Kapitän."

I scrambled off the floor.

Another crrack 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 said, shrugging, "little white ones."

He stepped to the periscope, slapped two handles in place, slammed one eye shut and crammed the other angrily against the eyepiece, 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 amidships, I sank into the couch.

"You, you!" I said mindlessly. "It!" I pointed to the brass machine. "This!" I touched the couch. "Why?"

"Sit down," said Von Seyffertitz.

"I am."

"Lie down."

"I'd rather not," I said uneasily.

Von Seyffertitz turned the periscope so its topmost eye, raked at an angle, glared at me. It had an uncanny resemblance in its glassy coldness to his own fierce hawk's gaze. His voice, from behind the periscope, echoed.

"So you want to know, eh, how Gustav Von Seyffertitz, Baron Waldstein, was suffered to leave the cold ocean depths, depart his dear North Sea ship, flee his destroyed and beaten fatherland to become this Unterseeboot 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 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 fiery glare and regarded me with cold fire.

"Why the monocle?" I said.

"Idiot! It is to cover my good eye so that neither eye can see and my intuition is free to work."

"Oh," I said.

And he began his monolog. And as he talked on and on, forgetting me, I realized his need had been pent up, capped, for years. During this monolog a strange thing occurred. I rose slowly to my feet as Herr Doktor Von Seyffertitz circled, his long, slim cigar printing smoke cumuli on the air, which he read like white Rorschach blots. With each implant of his foot, a word came out, and then another, in a sort of plodding grammar. Sometimes he stopped and stood posed 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 Seyffertitz stretched on his own 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 octopus, 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 of 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 would a submarine commander find his place, his work, his 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 ganglions. 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, ego-id, life, death, lust, kill, lust, dark, light, plummeting, falling, 90, 80, 50, 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!'"

"Ah," I said.

"'Dive!' I screamed so loudly that my fellow passengers, in shock, urinated. 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 nest my periscope, carried from the mutilated, divested, castrated Unterseeboot all these years. And I was too stupid to see my psychological future and my final downfall in it, my beautiful artifact, the brass genitalia of psychotic research, the Von Seyffertitz Mark Nine Periscope."

"That's quite a story," I said. (continued on page 231) Unterseeboot Doktor (continued from page 104) "And more than half of it true," snorted the alienist, eyes shut. "Did you listen? What have you learned?"

"That submarine captains should become psychiatrists."

"So? I have often wondered: Did Captain 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 undertides, to wind up with this 50-minute vaudeville routine in this 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 time past, from your last submarine, yes?"

"You think that?" He sighed. "Look!"

I hesitated, then pasted one eye to the eyepiece, shut the other and cried:

"Oh, Jesus!"

"I warned you," said Von Seyffertitz.

For they were there. Enough nightmares to paper a thousand cinema (continued on page 232) (continued from page 231) screens. Enough phantoms to haunt 10,000 castle walls. Enough panics to shake 40 cities into ruin. The first psychological kaleidoscope in history. My God, I thought, he could sell the film rights to this worldwide!

And in the instant another thought came: How much of this stuff in here is me? 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 that, caught in the periscope chambers, grew outsized? 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 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, obscene finger-pantomimes, cut-string puppets from Gepetto's attic, little boy statues that pee white wine, sexual trapeze performers alley-oop, 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 14-year-olds' orifices to keep them neat until they rip the sutures, aged 18. Towers with mad witches, garrets with mummies for lumber...."

He ran out of steam.

"You get the drift."

"Nuts," I said. "You're bored. I could get you a $5 million deal with Amalgamated Fruitcakes Inc. and the Sigmund F. Dreamboats, split three ways!"

"You don't understand," said Von Seyffertitz. "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. If I stop, I will fly apart. That periscope contains all and everything I have seen and known in the past 40 years of observing pecans, cashews and almonds. If I lost 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 80 laps asleep each night. Sometimes 40 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. "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 Seyffertitz behind me. "I must kill you!"

I reached the elevator and by a miracle it flung wide its doors when I banged the down button. I jumped in.

"Say goodbye!" cried Von Seyffertitz, raising his fist as if it held a bomb.

"Goodbye!" I said. The doors slammed.

I did not see Von Seyffertitz again for a year.

•

Meanwhile, I dined out often, telling friends and strangers on street corners of my collision with a submarine commander become head doctor.

I shook the tree and the ripe nuts fell--pecans, cashews, almonds. They brimmed the Baron's lap to overload his bank account. His grand slam: appearances with Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo in one single cyclonic afternoon. Von Seyffertitz laser games and duplicates of his submarine periscope sold out at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. With the inducement of an advance of a half million dollars, he dictated and published a bad best-seller. Duplicates of the animalcules and curious critters trapped in his brass viewer arose in pop-up coloring books, paste-on tattoos and ink-pad, rubber-stamp nightmares at Beasts R Us.

I hoped that this bounty would cause him to forgive and forget. No.

One noon a year and a month later, my doorbell rang and there stood Gustav Von Seyffertitz, Baron Waldstein, 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. Just like zipping a psychotic zipper. Two Herr Doktor admirals for the sick price of one. Which is the Doktor who heals and which is the sellout best-seller admiral?"

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 riches and fame, being sieved through the hands of crazed ladies with ruptured libidos? 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 Seyffertitz 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 Krazy Glue and paste Rumpel to 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 admiral speaking, wanting fame and money enough to choke a school of porpoises."

"God," murmured Von Seyffertitz, "how I hate it when you're honest--I'm 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 worshipers and supplicants. There must have been 70 people strung out between the elevator and the Baron's door, waiting with copies of 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 Seyffertitz said, pointing.

The office walls were covered with expensive teak paneling. The desk was an exquisite Empire piece worth at least $50,000. The couch was the best soft leather I had ever seen, and the two pictures on the wall were a Renoir and a Monet. My God, millions! I thought.

"OK," 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 it, 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 insucked, 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 eyepiece and tried to screw it into some new focus on a far place 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 Seyffertitz 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 to this incredible captain from beneath Nemo's tidal seas.

"Gone," murmured Gustav Von Seyffertitz, Baron Waldstein, for the last time.

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 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 blank ceiling.

"Nice job of repair," I said.

"Thank God," said the landlord.

•

What, I often wonder, ever happened to Gustav Von Seyffertitz? Did he move to Vienna to take up residence, perhaps, in or near dear Sigmund's very own address? Does he live in Rio, treating fellow Unterseeboot Kapitäns 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 his terrible shout, his cry.

"Dive! Dive! Dive!"

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