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
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