Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2. Ray Bradbury
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2 - Ray Bradbury страница 60
Название: Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2
Автор: Ray Bradbury
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Классическая проза
isbn: 9780007497690
isbn:
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.
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 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 СКАЧАТЬ