The Teleportation Accident

Rackenham, you could get from Venice Beach to Pasadena in thirty minutes if you took an express. How long did it take you today in the traffic? Sixty minutes? Ninety minutes?’ Then Marsh, reaching across the table to point out an error, knocked over Loeser’s ginger ale so that it splashed across the napkin.

‘Flesh of Christ!’ screamed Gorge, jumping up from his seat. ‘Telephone, Woodkin! Newspapers! Ambulance! Thousands drowned!’

‘It’s just a map, sir. It’s not really Hollywood itself.’

Gorge coughed and sat down. ‘Map! Right. Pardon me. More ginger ale for Loeser.’

‘We’ll make it fast and cheap and modern like nobody’s ever seen,’ said Plumridge. ‘We’ve got all kinds of ideas. Some of the cars, the roof will come off when it’s sunny, like a convertible. Fit them out with soda fountains and magazine racks, like a drugstore. Coffee. Maybe cocktails in the evening. Jazz bands. Soon enough, people get used to going out without their Packards. They know that wherever they end up, they can catch a streetcar home, and they won’t be stranded. So they try walking. And then they start to realise how goddamned cracked it is that they’ll get in a car and drive an hour in traffic just to eat a steak. Maybe they’ll go to the place on the corner instead. You know, my wife comes from New York. She used to walk everywhere, since she was small. She can’t stand it here. Maybe one day we can make Los Angeles feel like New York.’

‘New York is a filthy, old-fashioned city,’ said Marsh as the maids cleared the plates. ‘New York was built for the horse and cart. We have electricity now. Telephones. Automobiles. Proximity is no longer a relevant parameter. The modern city is like water. It finds its own level in the volume it has available.’

‘But if that’s the case, why did we ever need to make a law against tall buildings in downtown? If people here want sprawl so much, why do we expressly have to forbid them to build skyscrapers and penthouses?’

‘Because next time there’s an earthquake we don’t want the same carnage as San Francisco had. Or Lisbon, for that matter. The lesson is not new. You’ve read Rousseau’s letter to Voltaire? “It was hardly nature that there brought together twenty thousand houses of six or seven storeys.” ’

‘Hundreds of years go by between earthquakes like that. The law is draconian. All it proves is that people crave density! The truth is, the “modern city” isn’t like water, it’s like oil. It spreads and slicks and stains. You know, if we don’t do something about it, in a few decades’ time, four fifths of downtown will be parking spaces. Four fifths! What kind of human being will be willing to live in a city like that? I know there’s plenty of space here. I know people love their cars. I know it seems like there’s no other way it can go. But think about how Los Angeles got started. There’s no reason for a town here. There’s no harbour, there’s no river. There’s not even enough water to drink. It’s nuts. But the place just willed itself almost arbitrarily into being. And if it can do that, it can do whatever it wants. This place is still a kid, after all. If it wants to grow up to be like New York, it can. Like New York, but with avocado groves.’

Marsh shook his head scornfully. The maids returned with pudding, which was strawberry pancakes with vanilla ice cream and maple syrup. Loeser had never encountered this delicacy before in his life, and the sheer rushing pleasure he got from the first mouthful was so great that it seemed to overflow the aqueduct delimited for it in his brain’s hedonic plumbing and slop sideways into the dried-up sexual reservoir that was adjacent, giving Loeser what felt like the closest thing he’d had in four years to a non-self-administered orgasm. He ate the rest so greedily it was only afterwards that he realised he’d been audibly grunting, and his stomach felt like wood. He had always hated the period towards the end of a meal when long gaps opened up between utterances: there was something repulsive and undignified about that shared awareness of the human animal’s basic inability to think and digest at the same time. The conversation torpidly returned to Marsh’s work at the California Institute of Technology, where, he said, he was being distracted from his proper administrative duties by a problem so unpleasant that he couldn’t bring it up over dinner. Then Gorge forced him to, of course. So: ‘We keep finding dead dogs all over the place,’ he said. ‘Six now. Mutilated and, uh, disembowelled.’

‘Is the cafeteria food that bad?’ said Plumridge.

Marsh ignored him. ‘The heck of it is, we know who’s doing it. We have a janitor called Slate. Odd fellow. Can’t look you in the eye. And he’s always sneaking around at night. Once, somebody even found a bloody rag in his mop cart. But we don’t have any positive proof.’

‘Find some pretext,’ said Gorge, passing out cigars from a box. ‘Fire him that way.’

‘I want to, but Millikan won’t have it. He knew Slate’s father, or something like that. And Slate does his job pretty methodically. So unless we actually catch him standing over a dead beagle with a linoleum cutter in his hand, there’s nothing we can do. A lot of the students are very frightened. And I have to worry about it all day — when I should be concentrating on the Gorge Auditorium.’

Too late, Loeser realised that a dinner without wine was not likely to last long after the last course, and he was still no closer to Midnight at the Nursing Academy. He could excuse himself to go to the lavatory, but the house was far too big to search. For all he knew, Gorge’s collection might be down some secret tunnel. The only plan he could think of was to wait awkwardly until all the other guests had left, then find some way of raising the subject with Gorge. Could he bring himself to do that? Before he made up his mind, Marsh and Plumridge had finished their cigars and were making their excuses, and then Rackenham said, ‘You know, Colonel, Loeser doesn’t have any way of getting home.’

‘Woodkin: sled.’

So Loeser got a lift back to Hollywood in the back of Gorge’s limousine, which he made sure to think of as a taxi. As they were turning off Palmetto Drive, Loeser said, ‘Colonel Gorge seems to be in remarkably vigorous health for a man of his age.’

‘Yes,’ said Woodkin. ‘He attributes it to an operation he had a few years ago.’

‘What sort of operation?’ said Loeser, with the feeling that he already knew the answer.

‘It was the invention of a French surgeon. He passed through California in twenty-six and the Colonel engaged his services. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? Dr Sergei Voronoff.’

‘No. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name.’

‘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.