The Teleportation Accident (25 page)

‘The operation normally involves the transplantation of certain primate glands into the human body. But the Colonel didn’t believe anything that came out of a “little chimp” would be of any use to him.’

‘Where did he get the glands, then?’

‘From a coyote. The Colonel shot it himself.’

Loeser decided that this was his last chance to get anything useful out of the evening, so he needed to be bold. ‘Is hunting one of Colonel Gorge’s hobbies?’

‘Yes. He is very proficient with a rifle. And a bow. And a tomahawk. And his hands.’

‘Does he have any other hobbies?’

‘Several.’

‘Do they include . . . A mutual acquaintance told me that Colonel Gorge has a very impressive collection of . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Of specialist incunabula, I suppose you might say.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not sure what you might be referring to. The Colonel is not a particularly keen reader. His hobbies are mostly of the outdoorsman type. By the way, Mr Loeser, if you change your mind about the Pasadena house, you only need to telephone. Mr Rackenham comes by the mansion often, so I can give him the keys and he can drop them off with you on his way back to Venice Beach. I won’t have time to show you the house myself, I’m afraid, but you can go and inspect it whenever you want. If you like it, you can simply move in. If you don’t, you can bring the keys back, no harm done. We could let you have it for thirty dollars a month. As Colonel Gorge says, it’s wasteful to leave it empty.’

Even Loeser, with his tenuous grasp of the value of the American dollar, knew that was a cheap rent. Still: ‘That’s kind of you, but it won’t be necessary.’ He could tell he wasn’t going to get any further with Woodkin, and for the first time he wondered if Blimk’s gossip might be baseless after all. Perhaps he’d been wasting his time tonight. But then, all at once, he made the connection that he should have made an hour ago. If Gorge and his wife didn’t sleep together any more, the neglectful party wasn’t necessarily female. A man with Gorge’s neurological defect would have an extraordinary appreciation for certain types of photographic stimulus. In fact it rather dizzied Loeser to think of quite how much you could enjoy a book like
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
if you were lucky enough to have a disorder like visual agnosia. Of course you would start a collection. Of course you would keep adding to it until it was the biggest in the world. Of course you would be distracted from your wife. Loeser almost wanted to snort a gallon of polish himself. He’d never have to worry about rejection again.

Not that anyone ever really said no in this city, he’d noticed. Probably even if you came right out and begged a girl to let you fuck her, she’d say, ‘I’m awfully sorry but right at this time we just don’t have a suitable vacancy. However, we’ll keep you in mind, and something may develop shortly. And we do appreciate your applying and are aware of your fine qualifications.’ As they paused for a minute at some traffic lights, he could see by the side of the road, just next to a school playground, a copse of oil derricks in those black wooden frames like lifeguard towers on the beach. They were everywhere in this city, always nodding, nodding, nodding, an endless dumb affirmation. Perhaps when the big earthquake was about to come, they’d all finally start shaking their heads.

The Chateau Marmont

Loeser was awoken by the telephone. Every night that he’d slept in California, his eyes had produced almost geological quantities of dried rheum, like a waste product of his body’s slow adjustment to the climate. He rubbed them clear and then reached for the receiver. ‘
Hallo?
’

‘This is Dolores Mutton.’

‘I have not been nowhere near of the house!’ screeched Loeser, so alarmed that his grammar started to tilt.

‘Yes, about that. I’m calling to apologise, Mr Loeser. I can’t tell you how rotten I’ve been feeling about how I behaved yesterday. You’d only come to pick up your clothes and take some pictures and I treated you like some sort of vagrant. And I was just as bad before that at the party. I can be a real ogress when I’m in the wrong mood, and I don’t come to my senses until it’s too late. You can’t imagine how many friends I’ve lost over it. Poor Stent bears the brunt, of course. If you’ll ever forgive me, then I want you to know that you’re welcome at the house whenever you like. It goes without saying that I’ll replace the camera and the clothes. By the way, I suppose you’re wondering why your friend Jascha was at the house that day. I should have explained. Jascha is on the board of the Cultural Solidarity Committee. We were having a little meeting over coffee. And in fact, Mr Loeser, your name had already come up that morning. There is an empty seat on the board, which we’d very much hoped to fill with someone of your race. Not to be too blunt about it, but most of the refugees coming to America are Jewish, and yet we don’t have one Jewish board member – it’s a real embarrassment. I don’t suppose you’d be interesting in joining the Committee? We can’t offer much money – just a token stipend, about thirty dollars a month – but the duties are very light and we’d be honoured to have such a distinguished artist among us. What do you say?’

Loeser was excited to realise he was being bought off. Evidently, Dolores Mutton had conferred with Drabsfarben, and they’d decided that bribes would be safer than threats. He hoped they wouldn’t go back to the threats when he turned down the bribe. ‘I’m grateful for the offer, Mrs Mutton, but I won’t be in Los Angeles nearly long enough to take up any kind of job.’

‘Are you quite sure?’

‘Yes. So let’s just consider the whole matter permanently closed, shall we? The whole matter,’ he repeated significantly.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘I see. Thank you, Mr Loeser. Goodbye.’

Loeser decided to have breakfast in the hotel restaurant. He dressed and went downstairs, picking up a copy of the
Los Angeles Herald
from the sideboard as he found a table. There was a story about some musicologists who had measured the wave frequency of traffic noises at various spots throughout the city and discovered that the tonal pitch of Los Angeles was F natural.

Flipping past the international politics and the Hollywood gossip, he came to an article by none other than Stent Mutton, who had a long account of his trip to the Soviet Union. The prose was so different to his novels that it was almost hard to believe that this was the author of
Stifled Cry
and
Assembly Line
. He explained that he had arrived a sceptic but after a fortnight he was a convert. ‘The citizens of Moscow joke about minor inconveniences, usually if not always with complete good humour, but they never think of allowing these shortcomings to blind them to the big things that life in the Soviet Union alone can offer. How sturdily and with what calm confidence do they face life, feeling that they are organic parts of a purposeful whole. The future lies before them like a well-defined and carefully tended path through a beautiful landscape.’ Mutton had toured a prison, which he found clean, comfortable and humane. ‘So well known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted. An eventual disappearance of wrongdoing is expected by Soviet authorities as the mental habits produced by the socialist system become established in Soviet life.’ He’d even had a short audience with Stalin. ‘A lonely man, he is not influenced by money or pleasure or even ambition. Though he holds enormous power he takes no pride in its possession. His demeanour is kindly, his manner almost deprecatingly simple, his personality and expression of reserve, strength and poise very marked. His brown eyes are exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.’ Loeser felt he ought to cut the article out and send it to Hecht. Except that Hecht couldn’t be a communist any more if he were out here making five hundred dollars a week at a film studio. Could he?

He finished his breakfast and went out on to Sunset Boulevard, where a hearse was inching down the street so slowly that it looked as if someone had merely forgotten to put on the handbrake. The air smelled of pasteurised honey. He planned to spend the day talking his way into casting agencies to find out if they had anyone matching Adele’s description on their books. If he hadn’t found her in thirty days, he would give up and go home. He couldn’t bear to stay here any longer than that. Nothing could be allowed to change his mind. One month, and then back to Berlin.

5

LOS ANGELES, 1938

The Loeser House

When Loeser came inside and saw the lipstick on his writing table, it struck him that he had been living with his ghost for nearly three years now and, like the husband in an arranged marriage, he still didn’t really know her. He put down the three letters that he’d taken from the mailbox outside, picked up the lipstick, and took it over to the antique wooden chest where he kept everything the ghost left in his house. Only once had the ghost ever taken anything back: a pearl necklace that he’d found underneath the sofa. Perhaps she’d changed her mind about him keeping it – if, after all, these things were indeed gifts, and not, as he was coming to believe, merely droppings, secretions.

His ghost was making him gullible. Last year, wandering along the beach near the Muttons’ house before a party, he’d seen a strange white scattering in the distance like a flock of baby seagulls come to rest on the sand. When he got closer he saw that they were condoms, thousands of them, every one still slimily tumescent as if stretched around an invisible penis. Here was all the sex he ever hadn’t had in his life, he thought, the counterfactual rubber wraiths of every stolen chance and near miss, come here to haunt him, as mocking as the lingerie brought to him by the lodger in his house. Next time he tried to talk to a pretty girl, there they would be, squelching around his shoes, wriggling up his trouser legs, bellyflopping like giant maggots into his glass of wine. He stamped on one angrily and it collapsed with a fecal burp. Surely his domestic ghost didn’t look so ugly, if she had a form at all. Only later, at the party, did he find out from Stent Mutton that there was a sewage line hidden further up the beach, and every few months, after a Saturday night, a glob of used condoms would get trapped in a pipe then washed out all at once on to the sand, inflated by methane and ammonia. So in fact Loeser had only one prophylactic spectre in his entourage – the Trojan in his wallet that had expired the previous April. He decided to bury it in its wrapper.

No, Loeser still hadn’t got laid. He’d mostly given up hope. Time, like space, could rush so peremptorily past. The monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece, he had read, were supposed to be the holiest places in the world because no women had set foot on the island for a thousand years, and by that odd criterion he felt his penis should be venerated as a relic on a par with the incorrupt cadaver of Saint Athanasios the Great. In the Greek Orthodox Church to which those monasteries belonged, there were bishops who said that Hell was just being without God’s love; Loeser could never take seriously the idea of hell as a mere privation, but life without sex did feel like hell, and either way at this point he would have swapped an eternity of God’s love for one middling blowjob. He had developed a habit of clenching his left hand into a fist whenever he saw something that made his frustration jolt: a bare shoulder, a giggling couple, a swimwear advertisement in a magazine. Then one morning he was looking at himself in the mirror before getting into the bath and his left forearm seemed visibly more muscular than his right. Horrified, he took out a tape measure, and found a difference at the thickest point of nearly half an inch. He went to his desk, searched through his papers, found an example of his signature from 1935 on a carbon copy of an immigration form, and wrote his name again next to it. His new ‘Egon Loeser’ slumped broad and clumsy compared to the old. Lust had deformed his body. He couldn’t sign a cheque without confessing it. There was a Venetian proverb from around the time of Lavicini: ‘The first sin is to be born desperate.’

After seven years, he still thought about Marlene Schibelsky a lot. The memory of his last girlfriend seemed to have chased him around the world as doggedly as Loeser himself had chased Adele. This was partly, of course, because she was the last woman he’d slept with, and the most enjoyable ever, but also because Loeser, unlike the reader of a biography, did not have the luxury of referring back to an earlier chapter to remind himself of the circumstances of his parting from Marlene, and so he had allowed himself to patch the narrative into something a bit more – well, sorrowful and noble, to use Scramsfield’s conjunction. All memories, after all, were implausible ghosts, bad historical novels, as tawdry and convenient as Signor da Vinci in
The Sorceror of Venice
, as dank and dead as the giant sloths dredged out of the tar pits south of the Chateau Marmont. And so Loeser had decided, in squinty retrospect, that he’d loved Marlene, and he hadn’t really wanted to break up with her, but he’d hoped it would be best for the both of them. (Or something like that.) Since leaving Berlin, he’d thought often, inexplicably often, of the men she’d fucked before and after their time together, Klugweil and the waiters at the Schwanneke and all the others. The thought of it hurt him, although the pain, at least, had begun to lose its spikes, plotting a curve of much the same shape that certain greater pains once had. He found it odd, in fact, how dispassionately, how empirically, he could verify its continued presence by calling on specific recollections, as if his nostalgia were a doctor tweaking a dislocated joint and asking, ‘Does that hurt? What about that?’ And the pain really did feel as if it were located somewhere in the torso, although Loeser would not really have placed it in the heart, as in the anatomical doctrine of cabaret songs, but just behind the lungs, snuggling there like an unwanted gland transplant from some especially dolorous species of mollusc (a ghost condom with a shell). Once Marlene had told him an anecdote about where she’d taken ‘boys’ when she still lived with her parents and it was difficult to find a place to make love. He was supposed to find it funny, and at the time he had, but now all he could think of was that word she used, ‘boys’. She probably just meant two or three, but he had no way to know, and, as it was, Cantor himself could not have conceived of an infinity big enough to enfold that plural. All those boys. Them instead of him. He thought about that and it made the gland throb softly, reliably, and sometimes he had to clench his fist, even though he was trying to give that up.