The Teleportation Accident

by Ned Beauman

  If some confidant had learned that the sole reason Loeser didn’t like going to prostitutes was that they made him feel so uncomfortable, he might have deduced that Loeser had no moral sentiments at stake in the matter — or otherwise he might have deduced that this very feeling of awkwardness was itself a sort of moral sentiment — a sickly, selfish, and impotent sort of moral sentiment, but a moral sentiment nonetheless. Whatever the case, Loeser hadn’t gone to a prostitute sober since he was nineteen, and he hadn’t even gone to a prostitute drunk since late last year. That last occasion had been particularly bad. About a minute into the act he had stopped thrusting and cleared his throat nervously.

  The girl, who called herself Sabine, turned her head to look back at him. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. Loeser’s forehead felt riverine with sweat but hers, as usual, was somehow still talcum dry.

  ‘Look, if it’s all the same to you…’

  ‘What do you want me to do, darling?’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort you put in, with all the moans and the lofty commendation of my dick and so forth, but the truth is …’ He’d never had the courage to say this before. ‘I don’t like it when a waiter or a clerk pretends to be a bosom friend, and I don’t like it when you pretend to be enjoying all this, either. No offence meant. I know it’s part of the job. But we both know you’re not really enjoying it. The suspension of disbelief isn’t quite there. And on the whole it just puts me off.’

  He’d expected her to get a bit sulky but in fact she just said, ‘Whatever you say.’ Relieved, he went back to work, but straight away she started squirming away from him and gasping, ‘No, no, please, let me go, please, it’s too big!’

  He stopped in horror. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She looked back at him again. ‘Why did you stop? Did I get it wrong?’

  He hadn’t realised she’d been acting. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘You told me to pretend I wasn’t enjoying it.’

  ‘No, I just told you to stop pretending that you were enjoying it.’

  ‘So am I supposed to be enjoying it or not?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘But not in that way.’

  ‘If I’m not enjoying it, then I’m going to want you to stop, aren’t I?’

  ‘But you weren’t enjoying it previously, and you didn’t want me to stop. Well, I mean, I’m sure on some level you did want me to stop, actually, that’s part of my point, but the difference is you didn’t say anything.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me to say anything.’

  The exasperation in her voice was murdering Loeser’s erection. ‘I know, but … Look, can we just agree that I’m not giving you hundreds of orgasms, but I’m also not raping you, I’m just a polite stranger offering you a fair wage in exchange for the efficient completion of a specific service within a capitalist system of alienated labour, all right? That’s my shameful fantasy.’

  From then on she was as silent and still as a coma patient. Which was by far the worst of the three scenarios. After another few minutes he had to pretend he’d ejaculated just so that he could leave, which was not something he’d ever anticipated he’d have to do with a paid consort, but he knew it was his own fault.

  So it was with a rucksack of apprehension that he stepped out of the taxi outside the Zinnowitz Tearooms on Lieblingstrasse. At two in the morning the streets of Strandow were crowded with screeching drunks from the beer halls near by, many now queuing up like a congealed riot to buy boiled meatballs with caper sauce from stalls to eat on the way home. He nodded to the brothel’s bouncer and went inside, where he was greeted straight away by Frau Diski, the dwarfish proprietor. ‘Herr Loeser! What a pleasure. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Sit down, sit down. What would you like to drink?’

  ‘I suppose I’ve probably had enough tonight.’ He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the bottle of vodka.

  ‘Some tea, then.’

  ‘Fine.’ Around the room sat six or seven other men, alone or in pairs, some of them with girls on their laps. Mercifully there was no one among them he knew. With its floral wallpaper, bentwood chairs, and Blandine Ebinger records playing softly on the gramophone in the corner, the Zinnowitz Tearooms, even after midnight, really did retain the stolid atmosphere of the sort of place your aunt would take you for chocolate cake, which was presumably a calculated psychoanalytic strategy on Frau Diski’s part to stop her customers from getting rowdy: they had all been nice boys once and there were some deep bourgeois instincts that even a barrel of beer couldn’t drown.

  ‘You seem to be in low spirits, Herr Loeser.’

  ‘I haven’t had a fantastically good evening.’

  Frau Diski sat down beside him. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘There’s no point.’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Well … I was after a girl, of course. And I should have got her. But someone else got her instead. And what makes it really intolerable is that it was my fault that he did.’ He meant that he’d handed Adele over to Rackenham, but now he remembered that he’d also been too stubborn to let her believe he was a writer. Would that have made a difference? Did writers really get more sex just because they were writers? Presumably writers hoped and prayed that they might. He’d read somewhere that Balzac only took up writing because he thought it might help him meet women. And it worked, of course: he married one of his fans. But that was after he’d written ninety-two novels, and they were married for just five months before Balzac died of a lung complaint. Even assuming they’d fucked every day since the wedding, that meant Balzac had written about half a book for every wheezy sexual encounter. Not a very efficient rate of return. Still, it was better than nothing, and if Countess Ewelina Hanska was as good in bed as Marlene Schibelsky, it might just about have been worthwhile.

  ‘Who is she, this object of desire?’ said Frau Diski.

  ‘Oh, I used to tutor her when she was about fifteen. But naturally she’s older now,’ he added hastily.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Adele.’

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Ravishing long black hair like nobody has any more except peasants. Huge innocent eyes. Perfect pale skin. Musical laugh. So slender you just want to reach out and stroke her collarbone and her shoulderblades and her spine and her hips and her spine and all the rest.’ He wondered if it was possible to vomit with lust.

  ‘You needn’t say any more, Herr Loeser. Come this way.’ Frau Diski got up again and led him down the carpeted corridor towards the bedrooms.

  ‘But I haven’t chosen a girl yet. Have I?’ He realised he was staggering a bit.

  ‘There’s no need to bring them all out on parade as usual when your description is so evocative. You should be a writer.’

  ‘I mean, not that I really mind. Just as long as it’s not Sabine again. Not that there’s anything wrong with Sabine.’

  ‘Here you are, Herr Loeser.’ They stopped, and Frau Diski opened the door to the bedroom before them. Inside, a girl sat on the bed brushing her hair with her back to the doorway. She wore nothing but lacy white underwear, and in the gaslight her skin looked as soft as water, the vertebrae of her spine a row of pebbles half submerged in a stream. The room smelled of clean linen. For a dilated instant Loeser felt as if he were looking at something unreal behind glass, like a photograph in an old locket, but then Frau Diski said, ‘This is … Anneliese,’ and the girl turned and Loeser felt his heart leap into his mouth.

  ‘Frau Diski, I think you must have misunderstood me,’ he stammered. ‘Just now, I wasn’t trying to explain the sort of girl I wanted, I was only trying to explain what had happened to me tonight. Like you asked me to. I’m not — I don’t…’

  ‘I’ll leave the two of you alone,’ said Frau Diski with a smile. She gave Loeser a gentle push into the room and then closed the door, trapping him inside the locket.

&
nbsp; ‘Anneliese’, who could not have been more than fifteen years old, looked like Adele, but she did not look like Adele at fifteen, nor did she look like Adele at eighteen. Rather, she looked just as Adele would have looked at fifteen if she had already been beautiful, if she hadn’t been pudgy and half finished. She had the hair, the eyes, the skin, the bones, but she also had the youth — she was the old Adele he had once known so well, combined with the new Adele he had met only for a few minutes. The likeness was uncanny, but it was a likeness to somebody who had never existed, a loan from a parallel world.

  He knew, though, that this was not a job that anyone should be doing at this girl’s age. Even his own atrophous moral faculties could tell him that. He tried not to look at her body because he knew he’d feel so guilty if he got an erection. Naturally he’d seen very youthful harlots on street corners before, but he wouldn’t have known that there were any to be found here in the cosy Zinnowitz Tearooms.

  Loeser stared at the girl, and the girl smiled shyly back at Loeser. Cries of synthetic pleasure seeped very faintly through the wall to his left.

  He couldn’t, of course. He couldn’t.

  Could he?

  2. BERLIN, 1933

  When Loeser awoke he realised at once that a mistake had been made: he had been sent the wrong hangover. Somewhere in northern Rhodesia there was a bull elephant who had got drunk on fermented marula fruit, rampaged through a nearby village, and fallen asleep in a ditch, and was now pleasantly surprised to find itself greeting the day with only the mild headache that follows a couple of bottles of good red wine from the Fraunhofens’ cellar. Perhaps if Loeser got in touch with the relevant authorities he could get this unfortunate little mix-up corrected, but he would have to do so without moving his head or opening his eyes. Otherwise he would die from the pain.

  After twenty minutes of lying there motionless as he pondered his strategy, he heard his landlady come up the stairs to slip a letter under his door. Probably it was from Achleitner, which wasn’t worth getting up for. But at least it must be quite early. There was still most of the day left to be ruined. Except then he remembered about Adele and the waiters from the Schwanneke, and he decided to go back to sleep, wondering if it was possible to set his alarm clock to wake him up when everyone he knew was dead. He thought of Hecht’s recent play about the legend of Urashima Taro, the Japanese fisherman who rescued a turtle from some children, discovered that the turtle was the daughter of Ryujin the sea dragon god, was rewarded with a trip to Ryujin’s palace, and returned to his village to find that somehow three hundred years had passed. What bliss that would be.

  By early 1933, even the most heedless and egotistical Berliner — so, even Loeser — couldn’t help but notice that something nasty was going on. At parties now, optimism had given way to dread, and yells to whispers — the really good times were never coming back, and to think what might come next was just too horrible. Of course, it was mainly young working-class toughs who had propelled this awfulness at the beginning, but now people of every generation and every class had joined the brainless charge. They seemed to think that, just because the civilised solutions of the 1920s had begun to falter, that was a reason to dash headlong in the opposite direction. Most of Loeser’s friends agreed that something urgently needed to be done, but no one had any idea how to fight what was somehow already so dominant. Some had even begun to talk about leaving the country, at least until sanity was restored. German history was at a turning point.

  Loeser could still remember the first time he had heard of this new drug ketamine. Everyone had taken the train up to an estate north of Ritterbrücke that belonged to somebody’s absent parents. It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon. At about midnight, bored with playing hide-and-seek, Loeser had wandered out to the back lawn where the jazz band was performing, hoping to find a girl to dance with. Instead, he nearly tripped over a boy who lay flexing and humming in the grass, and looked around to see several others in the same state. So when he spotted Hildkraut he went over to ask him if there had been a mustard gas attack, since they couldn’t all be so drunk already, and Hildkraut explained that they’d taken a black-market horse tranquilliser called ketamine, at which point Loeser began to feel as if he had slipped into some sort of Dada world.

  ‘Why on earth would anyone voluntarily take horse tranquilliser?’

  ‘Because they can’t get good coke any more.’

  ‘They can’t get good coke any more, so this is the logical alternative?’

  ‘Yeah. Started with scummy kids from the suburbs, then it got to the art schools, and now everyone takes it.’

  Vanel wandered past looking for a cigarette lighter and they both ignored him. ‘What does it do?’ said Loeser.

  ‘You feel as if you’re being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it’s as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to be replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can’t really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down.’ Hildkraut smiled wistfully. ‘It’s fantastic.’ At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. ‘And it makes Wagner sound really good.’

  ‘I’m sorry to be obtuse,’ said Loeser, ‘but has everyone gone insane? I take coke because it’s fun. I take coke because it makes me feel confident and talkative and full of energy, or at least it used to, when it wasn’t mostly brick dust. If I want to feel as if I’m being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.’

  ‘Well, anyway, the story is that Brogmann once took so much that he blacked out and then woke up in a stables surrounded by actual horses. Explain that.’

  After interrogating several other people at the party, Loeser concluded that he was the last person in Germany to have heard of ketamine. But nobody offered him any. And after that episode, as the months passed, fashionable Berlin nightlife distorted into an unrecognisable parody. Nobody seemed to laugh or dance or kiss any more, they just lay around slurring and drooling, vanquished until morning. Certainly, most of his worthwhile friends didn’t bother with ketamine — why would they, when they still remembered what proper drugs were like? But they were twenty-five or twenty-six now. And it was the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who had all the clout. For the first time in his life Loeser had a sense of what the early days of Expressionism must have felt like to the prior generation of Realists. Not only did he almost begin to miss the exhausting and obnoxious conversations he used to have with people who were inconsiderate enough to have done more coke than him, he also almost began to envy Achleitner, off in the mountains with his new Nazi friends, far away from all this tranquilliser nonsense that had a real chance of ruining what was otherwise quite a promising decade.

  The triumph of ketamine had coincided with the triumph of another dark horse, to use an unfortunate phrase — a certain pretty girl called Adele Hitler, who was now among the first rank of those all-too-influential foals and fillies. At that first party in Puppenberg, she’d been a novelty item, but by the end of 1931 she was getting more invitations than Brecht, and it wasn’t hard to see why: she could be relied upon to look stunning, she could be relied upon to get entertainingly drunk, and above all she could be relied upon to fuck someone worth gossiping about. Rackenham was just the beginning. When you heard about who Adele Hitler had gone to bed with after a particular party, it was like reading the solution to a really elegant murder mystery: you’d never for a moment suspected that it might be x, but now that you’d found out it really was x, you realised that it could never have been anybody other than x. She fucked Brecht because everybody did, she fucke
d Brogmann because nobody did; she fucked Littau because he was queer, she fucked Hannah Czenowitz because she was straight; she fucked Hecht because he had a girlfriend, she fucked Klein because he was known to be impotent; she fucked clarinet-playing Negroes and one-legged war veterans, drug dealers and ambassadors’ sons. And this was Adele Hitler’s legend: that in two years of astonishing promiscuity, she hadn’t ever fucked anyone more than once, and she hadn’t ever fucked anyone who could not, in one way or another, be considered a little bit of a coup.

  There was something about beautiful, sexually prolific women that made Loeser feel as if his soul were being pelted with sharp flints. If they were being sexually prolific with him, then of course it was fine. But with anyone else it was agony. He couldn’t stop thinking about that occult moment of surrender, that critical turn when all their softnesses were redispersed, when their limbic electorate voted in some new and unfamiliar tyrant. How did it happen? Did those girls really enjoy these fleeting encounters with men they barely knew? There was no satisfactory answer, because if they didn’t, then their beauty was being exploited and despoiled, which was a tragedy, and if they did — well, they couldn’t. They just couldn’t. For eyes as dizzying as Adele’s to exist in the same body as a banal urge to get stoked over a desk by an unwashed playwright was a paradox as imponderable as the indivisibility of the Trinity.

  Loeser himself, meanwhile, hadn’t had sex for a very long time. He had worked hard to erase all mental records of the night of the corset factory, but if he assumed, in the interests of supplying his own biography with at least a minimally sympathetic protagonist, that he hadn’t laid a finger on that fifteen-year-old prostitute, then the last time was with Marlene Schibelsky, and that was nearly two years ago. When he’d said to Achleitner that he might never manage it ever again, he hadn’t believed his own words, but now he retrospectively detected in them a vibration of plausibility. So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.