Bradbury Stories (27 page)

“And watch us go to hell in a year and bury us forever?”

“Are you that afraid, Ollie? Don't you believe in me or you or anything? God, why are men such cowards, and why the hell do you have such thin skins and are afraid of a woman like a ladder to lean on. Listen, I've got things to do and you're coming with me. I can't leave you here, you'll fall down those damn stairs. But if I have to, I will. I want everything now, not tomorrow. That means you, Paris, and my job. Your novel will take time, but you'll do it. Now, do you do it here and feel sorry for yourself, or do we live in a cold-water walk-up flat in the Latin Quarter a long way off from here? This is my one and only offer, Ollie. I've never proposed before, I won't ever propose again, it's hard on my knees. Well?”

“Have we had this conversation before?” he said.

“A dozen times in the last year, but you never listened, you were hopeless.”

“No, in love and helpless.”

“You've got one minute to make up your mind. Sixty seconds.” She was staring at her wristwatch.

“Get up off the floor,” he said, embarrassed.

“If I do, it's out the door and gone,” she said. “Forty-nine seconds to go, Ollie.”

“Stan,” he groaned.

“Thirty,” she read her watch. “Twenty. I've got one knee off the floor. Ten. I'm beginning to get the other knee up. Five. One.”

And she was standing on her feet.

“What brought this on?” he asked.

“Now,” she said, “I am heading for the door. I don't know. Maybe I've thought about it more than I dared even notice. We are very special wondrous people, Ollie, and I don't think our like will ever come again in the world, at least not to us, or I'm lying to myself and I probably am. But I must go and you are free to come along, but can't face it or don't know it. And now—” she reached out. “My hand is on the door and—”

“And?” he said, quietly.

“I'm crying,” she said.

He started to get up but she shook her head.

“No, don't. If you touch me I'll cave in, and to hell with that. I'm going. But once a year will be forbearance day, or forgiveness day or whatever in hell you want to call it. Once a year I'll show up at our flight of steps, no piano, same hour, same time as that night when we first went there and if you're there to meet me I'll kidnap you or you me, but don't bring along and show me your damn bank balance or give me any of your lip.”

“Stan,” he said.

“My God,” she mourned.

“What?”

“This door is heavy. I can't move it.” She wept. “There. It's moving. There.” She wept more. “I'm gone.”

The door shut.

“Stan!” He ran to the door and grabbed the knob. It was wet. He raised his fingers to his mouth and tasted the salt, then opened the door.

The hall was already empty. The air where she had passed was just coming back together. Thunder threatened when the two halves met. There was a promise of rain.

He went back to the steps on October 4 every year for three years, but she wasn't there. And then he forgot for two years but in the autumn of the sixth year, he remembered and went back in the late sunlight and walked up the stairs because he saw something halfway up and it was a bottle of good champagne with a ribbon and a note on it, delivered by someone, and the note read:

“Ollie, dear Ollie. Date remembered. But in Paris. Mouth's not the same, but happily married. Love. Stan.”

And after that, every October he simply did not go to visit the stairs. The sound of that piano rushing down that hillside, he knew, would catch him and take him along to where he did not know.

And that was the end, or almost the end, of the Laurel and Hardy love affair.

There was, by amiable accident, a final meeting.

Traveling through France fifteen years later, he was walking on the Champs Elysées at twilight one afternoon with his wife and two daughters, when he saw this handsome woman coming the other way, escorted by a very sober-looking older man and a very handsome dark-haired boy of twelve, obviously her son.

As they passed, the same smile lit both their faces in the same instant.

He twiddled his necktie at her.

She tousled her hair at him.

They did not stop. They kept going. But he heard her call back along the Champs Elysées, the last words he would ever hear her say:

“Another fine mess you've got us in!” And then she added the old, the familiar name by which he had gone in the years of their love.

And she was gone and his daughters and wife looked at him and one daughter said, “Did that lady call you Ollie?”

“What lady?” he said.

“Dad,” said the other daughter, leaning in to peer at his face. “You're crying.”

“No.”

“Yes, you are.
Isn't
he, Mom?”

“Your papa,” said his wife, “as you well know, cries at telephone books.”

“No,” he said, “just one hundred and fifty steps and a piano. Remind me to show you girls, someday.”

They walked on and he turned and looked back a final time. The woman with her husband and son turned at that very moment. Maybe he saw her mouth pantomime the words, So long, Ollie. Maybe he didn't. He felt his own mouth move, in silence: So long, Stan.

And they walked in opposite directions along the Champs Elysées in the late light of an October sun.

T
HE 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 Liberty,” 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 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 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!”

“Not possible.” He exhaled two more scrolled dragon plumes. “You hallucinate. 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 German Leica brass periscope!”

“This boy is incredible, listen to him,” muttered Von Seyfertitz to his alter ego, which was 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 Seyfertitz. I know the difference between a sex symbol and a periscope. That ceiling, one minute ago, swallowed a long brass pipe, yes!?”

Von Seyfertitz glanced at his large, one-pound-size Christmas watch, saw that I still had thirty minutes to go, sighed, threw his cigarette down, 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?
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 viewpiece, 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 the 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, to 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 fourth 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
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, for 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 the Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz circled, his long, slim cigar printing smoke cumuli on the air, which he read like white Rorschach blots.

With each implantation of his foot, a word came 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: