Ned Beauman - The Teleportation Accident

‘I didn’t expect to find you writing a book about genocide.’ Rackenham wanted to change the subject, but he also wanted to know: ‘When did you start to…’

‘Care?’ said Loeser.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know. It happened gradually. Very gradually. Remember in that taxi when I bet Achleitner that Hitler would never make one bit of difference to my life? I was right. I was nearly right. All those years, all that history … Everyone was else was packed into a tram and I was riding along in my car with the air-conditioning on and the windows closed and the radio up. Still, I wasn’t the only one. Brecht was always so “political” but he never understood what was happening any better than I did.’

‘How would you know?’

‘I’ve been reading him a bit since he died. The poetry’s not so bad. “We know we’re only temporary and after us will follow/Nothing worth talking about.” ’

‘And that one on how LA is just like hell.’

‘He didn’t leave until forty-seven,’ said Loeser. ‘Much later than me.’

‘You got there earlier.’

‘Yes. I never lived there, though. Not in a sincere way. Did you ever hear about that question Bailey used to ask? “What’s the one thing in the world that can uproot almost anything?” And that’s what he thought he wanted to invent. But what he should have invented was the opposite of that. The opposite of a teleportation device. That’s what we all needed. Something that could actually root a man in his surroundings. Wipe off some of the lubricant.’

‘A bit of in-der-Welt-sein .’

‘No Heidegger in this apartment, please. I feel zum Tode quite enough of the time as it is.’

‘I think a man with a teleportation device could do good business in a city with a wall through the middle.’ Rackenham noticed a book on Loeser’s desk next to a bottle of cologne. ‘You’re rereading that?’

‘ Berlin Alexanderplatz ? Rereading? No. I’ve been reading it for thirty years. I only have eleven pages to go. I hope to finish by next autumn.’

Rackenham got up. ‘Can I open the window?’

‘If you want.’

So Rackenham opened the window, picked up Berlin Alexanderplatz , and tossed it out. The book slid down through the branches like an exhausted wood pigeon and then lodged itself between trunk and bough.

‘What the hell did you do that for?’

‘I just had a sudden conviction that if you ever finish that book you will immediately drop dead. Like something from Han Chinese medicine.’ Rackenham shut the window and sat down. The truth was, in spite of everything, he liked Loeser. ‘Will you do this film or not?’

But Loeser ignored the question. ‘Just tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘How did you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘How did you fuck all those women? Adele and Gorge’s wife and a million others? What was the secret? I still want to know. It’s too late to be of any use to me now but I still want to know.’

‘Loeser, if there really existed some trick that I could put into words, I’d … well, I suppose I’d write a manual or something. And get rich. Anyway, I never actually slept with Adele.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘After that party at the sewing machine factory or whatever it was. I left with her but she changed her mind.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Yes. She said I reminded her too much of her father.’

‘Gott im Himmel , if I’d known that, I might never have become so pathologically obsessed! I might never have gone to Paris. Or Los Angeles. Everything might have been different.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You left Berlin because you hated Berlin. You would have gone either way. What happened to her in the end?’

‘Adele? She stayed in Los Angeles. Married Goatloft, that director. I hear she’s very happy. Meanwhile Brogmann’s just been appointed Minister of the Interior and Marlene’s just been made film critic for Die Zeit . Seems like everyone from those days did all right for themselves. Everyone that survived. You know, last month I was on Kurfürstendamm and I was almost certain I saw Drabsfarben walking a dog. It can’t have been, of course.’

Rackenham took out a packet of Sobranies and offered one to Loeser, who shook his head. ‘I’ve got some coke,’ he said as he lit a cigarette for himself.

‘What?’

‘I’ve got three grams of really good coke that I bought from my cameraman. If you’ll be in my documentary, you can have as much as you want, on top of the “expenses”. We can do some now if you like.’

‘I haven’t taken coke in thirty years,’ said Loeser.

‘Then it will be a wonderful, sentimental reunion. Come on, just repeat after me: “In 1938 I went to a cabaret and I saw an SS officer with an evil face slap his mistress for spilling a glass of champagne and then I knew the good times were over for ever.” An hour of that tomorrow afternoon. That’s all it will take.’

Loeser didn’t answer straight away, and for a while the two men sat watching each other in silence. Outside, the breeze changed, and Berlin Alexanderplatz slipped from the tree.

The gondolier wore manatee-bone goggles, with pornographic engravings on the snout bridge, and when he cocked his head to the right in the Troodonian gesture signifying negation, the afternoon sun flashed in the smoked glass of the goggles’ lenses. ‘You don’t want to go to the temples.’

‘Why not?’ thought Mordechai.

‘Electric eels,’ thought the gondolier. ‘The biggest electric eels you’ve ever seen. They can shock you to ashes. May my slit close up if I lie.’ He chirruped the oath aloud for emphasis.

‘I can barter. I have manna.’

‘I don’t care. I’m not taking you into those waters. I value the life God gave me.’

So Mordechai knocked the gondolier unconscious and stole his boat.

As he paddled, he watched the turquoise surface of the lagoon, knowing that electric eels had an amateurish obligation to come up every so often to breathe. He’d licked the face of death more times than he could count as a soldier in the East, so he wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t want to be caught unawares. Every so often, to cool down, he flicked his tail through the water to douse his snout, then fluttered his dewlap feathers so they wouldn’t get too crusted with salt. In the distance, through their caul of heat shimmer, the viny white tops of the temples rose out of the water like a ribcage lying half submerged in a rock pool, and on his left were the rias of the mainland, their slopes fuzzy with groves of lychee trees. Many octaeterids ago, before Dagon-Ryujin’s half-fish came, when the Troodonians had still had the leisure to enquire into their world, archaeologists and playwrights had lived in villages on this coast, diving every day among the drowned conurbations of the apes. But now they were all gone, which was how the electric eels had begun to proliferate so menacingly in the lagoon, untroubled by hunters or trappers.

Like every Troodonian, except for a few thousand sickening heretics who had gone over to Dagon-Ryujin, Mordechai understood that all time was one instant, all space one point — that only God had the privilege of extension, and his creation was only the very tip of a claw — that any appearance to the contrary was just a sort of stereoscopic illusion. And so, like every Troodonian, he struggled with the paradox of how it could be that in the time of the half-fish, God wanted them to fight, and yet in the time of the apes, God had wanted them to humble themselves as shrunken quadrupeds, when the two periods were of course not only equivalent but simultaneous. Nonetheless, he knew that God did now want them to fight, and God did now want them to win. And that was why he, Mordechai, had abandoned his comrades and trudged across a continent to this lagoon. Whatever their clerisy might say, the Troodonians were losing the war, and if they ever hoped to drive the half-fish back into the sea, they would need either a direct intercession from God or some unimaginable new weapon. Since he did not dare rely on the former, Mordechai had come to these temples to look for the latter. The apes hadn’t understood much, but they’d understood fighting. There might be something here, forgotten in the ruins, an accidental legacy from an unmourned and intestate species. The chances were laughably slim. But he had to try, because no one else would. He was lost in these thoughts, and in the rhythm of his rowing, when his boat was flipped over like a dried peapod.