The Teleportation Accident

by Ned Beauman

  ‘So Jascha got him after all,’ said Dolores Mutton.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.

  Dolores Mutton glanced at Adele, then beckoned Loeser out into the corridor where they couldn’t be heard. ‘Jascha was running out of time, remember?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Maybe tonight was his last chance. Maybe he knew that, whatever happened, he’d be gone by tomorrow. Either on his way back to Moscow with Bailey, or bundled into the trunk of a car by some NKVD agent and taken out to the desert for execution.’

  ‘But he was in the theatre with you.’

  ‘Yes. He was. But then you called your fire drill, and by the time we got outside, he’d vanished.’

  ‘How could he have known about Slate’s skylight?’

  ‘He probably has something on this Slate guy. Like he has something on everyone.’

  Drabsfarben could have picked the padlock on the lavatory, thought Loeser, or just used a duplicate key, and then lowered the ladder so that Bailey could escape. After that, he could have replaced everything as it was. There would just about have been time during the search for a cutting torch. Perhaps Slate had even made sure to delay telling Loeser about toilet cubicle until Drabsfarben had made his escape with Bailey. Up and down through the trapdoor was always how the devil made his entrances and exits. ‘But if Drabsfarben’s gone,’ said Loeser, ‘that doesn’t prove he got anywhere near Bailey. Maybe the NKVD picked tonight to retire Drabsfarben. Maybe they had someone on campus. You told me he goes out in public less and less now. Maybe this was their best opportunity.’

  ‘In any other circumstances, if Jascha had just disappeared like this with no warning, that’s what I might have thought. But Bailey’s gone. You said he couldn’t have got out from the inside. So it must have been Jascha. There’s no other explanation. Jascha’s saved himself. The son of a bitch.’

  ‘I’m going to talk to Slate again.’ Loeser went back down to the basement, where the janitor now sat smoking on a bench, his body hunched tensely around the cigarette as if he thought it was only half dead and might still escape from him.

  ‘Are you you you you you going to tell Adele?’ said Slate.

  ‘I don’t know yet. But listen to me, Slate, did Jascha Drabsfarben know about your shrine? Did he blackmail you with it? Did he ask you questions about Bailey? Did you ever tell him about your secret trapdoor?’

  Slate just looked at his feet.

  ‘Come on, Slate, answer me. Jascha Drabsfarben.’

  ‘I don’t know who who who who who that is.’

  ‘Tell me the truth. You didn’t have to show me your shrine. But I think you looked almost relieved afterwards. Was that because Drabsfarben can’t hold it over you any more now that he’s not the only one who knows?’

  ‘I don’t know who that is,’ repeated Slate. And Loeser couldn’t tell if this rare forbearance of his stammer was a sign that he was lying or a sign that he was telling the truth. He went back upstairs to room 11 and, as he entered, he heard a sound from the door of the teleportation chamber like a bolt slamming back.

  ‘What was that?’ said Dolores Mutton.

  ‘The ultramigration accumulator should have finished a basic cycle by now,’ said Adele, ‘so the time lock’s disengaged.’

  Loeser pulled open the door of the teleportation chamber, and then took a step back as a gush of liquid ran out over the threshold. He hadn’t noticed before when he was looking down from the room above, but the whole chamber was puddled, as if someone had emptied out most of a bath full of water in there. Curious, he squatted down, wet his finger on the floor, and then licked it.

  ‘Egon, what are you doing?’ said Adele.

  ‘It tastes salty.’

  ‘That’s probably Dieter’s blood. You’re going to make me vomit.’

  ‘No, it’s more like … sea water.’

  ‘We’re twenty miles from the ocean. A pipe must have leaked or something.’

  ‘Why would there be salt water in the pipes here?’

  ‘Dr Carradine and his eels are upstairs, maybe it’s something to do with that.’ She glanced sideways at the open door of the teleportation chamber. ‘I can’t make myself believe it yet. About the Professor.’

  ‘I believe it about the Professor, but I don’t think I really believe it yet about Ziesel. When he shut that door he must have known he’d probably die in there.’

  ‘He did it to save you and me from the Professor. After all those years you bullied him … You should say something nice to Lornadette.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His wife.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ Loeser knew he never would.

  Adele glanced at Dolores Mutton, then beckoned for Loeser to kneel down next to her so she could whisper in his ear. ‘Egon, do you really still want to fuck me?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d probably let you, when I stop hurting, and when you’ve washed. You saved my life just as much as Ziesel did. But when you kissed me, earlier, it didn’t feel as if you really still wanted to fuck me. So do you?’

  Did he? Loeser felt like a wrinkly and complacent Professor of Euclidian geometry who had consented to take a few questions after a lecture and had just been asked, for the first time in his entire career, how he could be absolutely sure that all right angles were equal to one another. He swayed at his lectern with a mixture of terror and joy. For nine years his desire for Adele had been the basic axiom from which all other truths could be inferred. If it were false, then everything might be false. He had to want to fuck her. He had to.

  Which was, perhaps, exactly why he didn’t.

  Loeser realised that he could no more arouse himself with the thought of Adele’s willing body than he could comfort himself with the thought of the equality of right angles. It had been so deep in him for so long that it almost didn’t mean anything any more. There was no music in the sound of your own heartbeat, no savour in the taste of your own mouth. There was no lust in an axiom.

  ‘I’m very confused,’ he said. And then, as if in sympathy, the whole room shook. He looked up at Dolores Mutton. ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘Sounded like a bomb going off.’

  Loeser ran outside, and saw what Bailey had wrought. The Gorge Auditorium looked as if it had been dropped from the height of a weather balloon and had just now crashed down in the middle of the campus, so that the roof was gone, the east wall was gone, the other walls were still crumbling as he watched, and a thick grey ruff of dust was rushing after the audience of The Christmas Teleportation Accident as they scattered in panic from where they had stood near the theatre’s doors. Beyond that he could just make out an orange glow, perhaps a fire beginning to spread through the velvet upholstery of the seats, an oven from which he’d stolen the meat. There were no tentacles. Loeser looked at his watch: it was half past eight. In the play, this was just about when the Théâtre des Encornets would have been destroyed. Bailey must have had his ‘novel theatrical effect’, like his Teleportation Device, on a timer. He went back into the laboratory. Adele, belatedly, had fainted.

  After he’d accompanied her as far as the little hospital in Pasadena, he decided to walk straight home. Stent Mutton had told him that he ought to stay on campus to answer questions for the police, but he felt sure they had no chance of finding Bailey, so a delay would hardly matter, and after all that had happened he very much needed a solipsistic whisky. When he turned off Palmetto Drive on to his own street, however, he saw that the lights in his house were on. Was even Woodkin so efficient that he could already have engaged some sort of skunk mortician?

  Loeser unlocked the front door. ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, hello, Loeser,’ said Rackenham, who stood naked in the middle of the sitting room. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back until later. Isn’t it your play tonight?’

  Loeser closed his eyes and told himself that it would be an overreaction to ajudge that this was the absolute worst thing to which he could possibly have come home. Lo
ts of other things would have been worse. A ghost, for instance; or a skunk; or a giant ghost skunk; or the vengeful and newly cyclopean Professor Franklin Bailey digging his spurs into a giant ghost skunk like some grim mounted herald of the fish god Dagon; or even his ex-girlfriend Marlene.

  No. There was nothing. There was not one thing worse than Rupert Rackenham standing there naked. ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house?’ said Loeser in German.

  ‘I can promise it will be much better for your peace of mind if I don’t tell you.’

  ‘Just tell me.’ He was trying not to look at Rackenham’s penis but it seemed to occupy about two thirds of his field of vision.

  ‘Fine, if you must know: I was with Gorge’s wife. We didn’t know what the smell was — I’d be fascinated to learn, by the way — and there wasn’t time to find anywhere else to go before her appointment with her psychiatrist, so I insisted we make the best of it. At Winchester I slept in a dormitory with eight other boys every term for five years, so this strikes me as pretty mild. But we’d only just got the motor running, so to speak, when she began to feel queasy. So she got dressed and left. I would have left too, but it occurred to me that if the stain on the air turned out to be indelible I might not have any occasion to come back here again, and I ought to find Delia Sprague’s nail scissors at last, so I stayed. They’re some sort of cherished family heirloom and she’s been pestering me for weeks. Wealthy women learn to be forgetful because they know everything can pleasurably be replaced — except that once in a while it can’t. To tell you the truth, when I looked in that box of yours, I couldn’t quite believe the quantity and variety of the rejectamenta. I’m surprised you never wondered where it was all coming from.’

  ‘Of course I fucking wondered! How many women have you brought here?’

  ‘A good deal. When you’re out. They can hardly receive me at home, can they? They’re millionaires’ wives. The servants would talk. And my house in Venice Beach is an hour’s drive away. Los Angeles is so spread out. Why do you think I was so keen for you to take this place? And so helpful about bringing you the key after I got it from Woodkin? I hope you haven’t forgotten that when I got you that first invitation to dinner at Gorge’s house, you said you’d owe me a favour.’

  There were quite a lot more questions Loeser wanted to ask, but in his bewilderment he could only manage: ‘So why are you still nude?’

  ‘It’s a warm night for December. Now, old chap, I really must find these nail scissors — might you have any idea where they are?’

  ‘I can promise it will be much better for Delia Sprague’s peace of mind if I don’t tell you. Just get your clothes.’

  The skunk’s colleague gathered his clothes, went into the bathroom to get dressed, and came back out. ‘You know, as it happens, I could ransack a pot of tea: I don’t suppose before I go I could just—’

  ‘No,’ said Loeser.

  ‘By the way, have you heard about Brecht?’

  ‘What about Brecht?’

  ‘He’s coming to Los Angeles. He’s in Finland now, but he’s going to apply for a visa.’

  ‘Please just leave my house before you tell me anything else that makes me want to walk into the Pacific.’

  Since the only regular visitor to Loeser’s bungalow was the postman, the sound of Rackenham’s departing footsteps was enough to remind him that he hadn’t checked his mailbox that day. He went outside and found in it a letter with a Berlin postmark. When he looked at the address, he recognised the handwriting, and breathed out the vapours of an overwhelming relief.

  Loeser had never replied to that letter about the incident on the tram that Blumstein had sent him in 1938. But his former mentor had persisted in his attempt to patch up their friendship, continuing to write every three or four weeks. Each time, Loeser got through about a paragraph, and then as soon as Blumstein made any reference to the conditions in Berlin, he would stop reading and throw the letter away. Loeser told himself that he hadn’t come to live six thousand miles from the Allien Theatre just to endure rambling appeals for sympathy from his irrelevant former mentor. He began to resent them more and more. Each ivory envelope was like a ragged little emigrant from Blumstein’s life that could not be turned back at the border because it had all the right stamps from all the right officials — like a pestering ghost condom, a dead French letter, stuck down with the warm fluid of all that Loeser had not done but probably should have — as unwelcome in his mailbox as any strange deposit from the domestic spirit in which he had once believed. And as the months went on, it became harder and harder to persuade himself that, when the sight of his own address in Blumstein’s handwriting made him feel as if he had his head caught in a bear trap, it was just some banal combination of boredom and annoyance, rather than, for instance, guilt: because to concede that he felt guilty about Blumstein’s letters, or even to concede that there was any reason whatsoever why he might expect to feel guilty, would demand an internal readjustment of a magnitude not unlike his recent experience with Adele — except without a comparable sense of liberation. And no one could make him concede any of that, so he didn’t.

  Then the letters stopped.

  When Blumstein was writing letters, Loeser wanted him to stop writing letters. But then when Blumstein stopped writing letters, Loeser wanted him to start writing letters again — and he wanted it ten times as much. When Blumstein was writing letters, Loeser had to force himself not to think about Blumstein. Then when Blumstein stopped writing letters, Loeser still had to force himself not to think about Blumstein — and he had to force himself ten times as hard. Quite often, he’d dreamed about getting more letters, but nothing had actually come until today.

  Loeser closed the mailbox. He went back inside. He sat down and he tore open the envelope. He saw that there was nothing inside.

  And for some reason the sight of the empty envelope made him think of Ziesel lying dead in that locked chamber, and he coughed twice on the skunk rot, and his eyes filled with tears, and at that moment he knew for sure that Blumstein was going to die before he ever wrote another letter.

  This wasn’t logical, of course. There were all sorts of reasons why an envelope might have arrived empty. Blumstein might have made an absent-minded error; or his wife Emma might have; or it might not have been an error at all, but rather a deliberate performative metaphor for the end of any chance of reconciliation; or some postal official might have steamed open the envelope for the purposes of censorship or espionage or theft and neglected to replace the contents afterwards. All those explanations made some sense, whereas there was no causal connection at all to be drawn between an empty envelope and Blumstein’s doom.

  Nonetheless, Loeser was certain. He would never see Blumstein again. Not without a phasmatometer.

  The telephone rang and Loeser went to pick it up. Just like the very first time a missive from Blumstein had arrived at Loeser’s house, it was Woodkin, mercifully interrupting his thoughts with a summons to the mansion.

  He hadn’t seen Gorge since the summer, and upon Loeser’s arrival Woodkin stopped him in the hall. ‘Before you go any further, Mr Loeser, I must warn you that my employer’s condition has continued to deteriorate.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘He can no longer read.’

  ‘Mein Gott, he’s that ill?’

  ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. Colonel Gorge is still perfectly capable of interpreting words on a page. That, you might say, is just the problem. When the Colonel reads the word “hurricane” in a newspaper, he now actually believes himself to be in the presence of a hurricane. It’s a further extension of his ontological agnosia — the trouble he has distinguishing between representations and the objects of those representations.’

  ‘You once told me reading wasn’t one of Gorge’s hobbies.’

  ‘No, but the Colonel did used to pay close attention to Sky-Shine’s ledgers. Now, however, when he reads “$898,854.02”, for instance, he sees 898,854 actual dollars and two
actual cents there in front of him, even though in reality all hard currency was banned from the residence after the third time the Colonel took up arms to rescue George Washington from kidnappers. And when he reads “-$898,854.02”, he sees — well, in the event, after he recovered from his seizure, he was still not quite able to describe the experience — but from what I can understand, it is a kind of palpable and marauding embodiment of a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar deficit. Unpleasant for any businessman. Colonel Gorge, like your compatriot Mr Gödel, is now an adamant mathematical realist. As you would expect, he must conduct his affairs by telephone and get his news from the radio.’

  ‘What about when he reads a word that signifies an abstract concept?’ said Loeser. ‘ “Regret”, say? What does he see then?’

  ‘Fortunately, as the Colonel has often told me, abstract concepts mean nothing to him. That is one of the personal qualities to which he attributes his success.’

  Despite all this, Gorge didn’t seem at all subdued when Loeser found him in the billiards room. ‘Macbeth, Krauto?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Said Macbeth when they shouldn’t have?’ joked Gorge. ‘One of your actors?’

  ‘Professor Bailey destroyed your theatre. Not a curse.’

  ‘Yes. Bailey. Dynamite, he used. Pounds and pounds of it, police are saying. Enough to blow up this whole plaaa—’ And then Gorge rolled like a commando over the side of his armchair and lay on the ground with his hands over his head.

  Loeser was now so well trained in the psychopathology of ontological agnosia that it took him only a moment to work out that the tycoon had begun to make an expansive hand gesture signifying the hypothetical destruction of the mansion, caught sight of that hand gesture, mistaken it for the actual destruction of the mansion, and attempted to take cover. ‘That wasn’t an explosion, Colonel, that was just your own hands.’ An expedient as crude as dynamite, thought Loeser, was a poor tribute to Lavicini on Bailey’s part, although perhaps not incompatible with the New Expressionism.