Ned Beauman - The Teleportation Accident

‘So until then you hadn’t been…’

‘Oh, quite the contrary, we’d been trying for years. But I think Dolores’s womb refused to bring a child into a lie. An ethical organ.’

‘Do you all still live in the glass box?’

‘Yes. Although it wasn’t easy during the war. Our neighbours — and when I say “neighbours”, I mean interfering strangers who lived about a half-mile down the beach — got together a petition. They thought the Japanese pilots would use the lights of our house for navigation on their all-too-imminent night raids. In the end we papered over the whole place with birch bark. Not quite what Gugelhupf intended. But to perdition with Gugelhupf. Do you know what he did for most of the war? He got a job with the Chemical Warfare Corps, erecting replica Berlin tenements in the New Mexico desert, full of replica Bauhaus furniture. They burned them down again and again to improve the design of their incendiary bombs.’

So Germany City really had been built in America, only to be razed each week like a torment from Greek mythology. Did Gugelhupf, I wondered, imitate the streets and squares he missed the most, so that he could he could walk through them once more before they perished in trial by fire, or did he imitate the streets and squares he missed the least — we all have a few marked on the maps of our memory that we associate for ever with rejection or despair — so that their arson would be a secret revenge? And since then had Heijenhoort and his colleagues ever been rewarded for their hard work with a coach trip from their own laboratory across the orange desert to the site of this fitful dream of Heimat ? Mutton and I had a few more drinks — he told me he’s writing science fiction now — then I went up to fetch my wife, who was dressing after a bubble bath, and we all had dinner together at a Chinese restaurant not far from the hotel. Mutton’s lawyer had forbidden him from eating in the Shoreham itself in case the waiters were eavesdropping on your behalf.

The Chief Investigator:We don’t employ waiters.

The Chairman:We do bug telephones, though.

The Chief Investigator:And Woodkin was working for us all along.

Loeser:Really?

The Chairman:For the purposes of the present hearing, yes, he was.

The Chief Investigator:Mr Loeser, one last question. Why are you such a total prick all the time?

Mr Loeser:Excuse me?

The Chief Investigator:Do you think it’s something to do with your parents?

Mr Loeser:‘Something to do with my parents.’ With insights like that you should be a psychiatrist.

The Chief Investigator:You don’t seem to think about them very much or talk about them very often.

Mr Loeser:That’s because they’re dead.

The Chief Investigator:Yes. The Teleportation Accident.

Mr Loeser:Not a Teleportation Accident. Just a traffic accident.

The Chairman:Accidents, like women, allude. You remember, Mr Loeser, what Nietzsche said about the French Revolution? ‘The text has finally disappeared under the interpretation.’ So often the case.

The Chief Investigator:A lot of people had to die to get you to America. Your parents, and all those millions of Jews. Quite an advance on Lavicini’s two dozen.

Mr Loeser:You say that as if they were human sacrifices. But I didn’t kill anyone and neither did Lavicini (except that one girl) and there was no causal connection at all.

The Chief Investigator:Perhaps not. But they died, and you don’t seem to care any more than if they’d been clockwork automata.

Mr Loeser:Oh, grow up. We’re all clockwork automata.

The Chairman:Mr Loeser, you ought to remember that you are a guest of this nation.

The Chief Investigator:Did you follow the Nuremberg Trials in the newspaper?

Mr Loeser:Not if I could help it. Can I please read my statement now?

The Chairman:Yes, Mr Loeser, you may now read your statement.

Mr Loeser:Oh, I’m sorry, I…

The Chairman:Is something wrong?

Mr Loeser:I don’t understand what’s written here.

The Chairman:You wrote it yourself, didn’t you?

Mr Loeser:Yes, I thought I did, but…

The Chairman:What does it say?

Mr Loeser:It says…

The Chairman:Yes?

Mr Loeser:It says, ‘Wake up, Egon, you’re going to be late. Put some clothes on while I call down for a cab. Wake up, Egon. Can you hear me? Wake up. Wake up.’

Fitzgerald Estate Says ‘ Sorrowful Noble Ones ’ is Forgery

A lawyer for the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald released a statement yesterday charging that The Sorrowful Noble Ones , a purported lost work by the late author, is a deliberate fabrication. The statement reports that there is no reference to The Sorrowful Noble Ones anywhere in Mr Fitzgerald’s letters or notebooks, and that his daughter, Mrs Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan, has no recollection of such a book ever being mentioned. This contradicts the claims of Herbert Wolf Scramsfield, a self-described former friend of Mr Fitzgerald who attracted international publicity last week when he announced that he had been guarding the manuscript since 1931.

Interviewed by telephone from his home in Paris, Mr Scramsfield strongly denied any allegations of fraud. ‘The fact is, Scott trusted me to decide when the world was ready for this book,’ Mr Scramsfield said. ‘That’s why it’s been a secret all this time. Honestly, I’m flattered that anybody thinks I could write something as good as this. But that’s preposterous. I never wrote a book in my life, let alone a masterpiece.’

However, an enquiry by this newspaper has found that earlier in his career Mr Scramsfield did in fact write a manual of seduction, Dames! And how to Lay them , published pseudonymously in 1930 by the Muscular Press of Los Angeles, California. Reached yesterday for comment, Esquire magazine editor Arnold Gingrich said that he has cancelled plans to publish excerpts from ‘Rupert?’

Rackenham looked up from his newspaper. A woman of about his own age stood there in the posture of someone who has just dropped a fragile antique.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Don’t you recognise me?’

Rackenham smiled in apology.

‘You promised you’d keep me in your heart until the end of time.’

‘Oh. Did I really?’

The woman burst into tears. Rackenham searched his pockets for a clean handkerchief and his memory for a name or at least a context. He couldn’t help but feel she was behaving with extraordinary rudeness. Thankfully, after a few minutes, she seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to ask her to sit down with him, but before she’d leave him alone he still had to take down her address and promise to write her a long letter. Even her full name didn’t so much as gesture at a bell, and so, in the usual manner of these things, it wasn’t until she was on her way out of the café that Rackenham got any inkling. At the door, she looked back at his table, Orphean, and as she did so you could see in her face that she was already rebuking herself for her weakness, and then she turned away again and forced herself on, but too hastily, so that she bumped into a fat man on his way in and had to apologise in her bad German. The whole sad procedure took him straight back to 1932 or 1934 or whenever it was and he remembered her at last. One night she’d asked him to tie her naked to a clothes horse with shoelaces but it had collapsed and he’d had to pay his landlady for a replacement.