The Teleportation Accident

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.

Loeser’s favourite book in Blimk’s shop, where he spent most of his afternoons, was still Dames! And how to Lay them. He referred to it constantly, like a psalter, with an inexhaustible excitement at the notion that it was possible to seduce a woman just by following a rigorous system of instructions. The problem was, there wasn’t much in it that he felt he could put to practical use. ‘Want to impress a dame the morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she’s still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That’s one of every type of egg on a tray: a soft-boiled egg, a hard- boiled egg, an egg over easy, an egg sunny side up, a poached egg, a devilled egg, a pickled egg, a coddled egg, a scrambled egg, a one-egg omelette, and a shot of egg nog for the hangover. No dame will be able to believe you know so many ways to cook eggs. Egg protein is good for the manly function, and after you’ve pulled off the Egg Majestique, you’ll probably need it, if you know what I mean.’ This sounded pretty authoritative to Loeser but he just wasn’t quite sure.

His amity with Blimk was of an unfamiliar kind. They’d never been drunk or hungover together; they had no one to gossip or complain about; and they were of such different backgrounds that they didn’t feel even secretly competitive. In other words, they had brought together none of the essential constituents of a friendship, and yet the result was still recognisably a friendship, which to Loeser was by definition an avant-garde achievement, like Duchamp’s urinal. When he was still living back at the Chateau Marmont, it was only really out of boredom that he had first got into the habit of visiting the shop, but Blimk had seemed to appreciate the company. Now, they often sat reading together for hours at a time inside a companionable silence so sturdy that customers looked almost apologetic when they had to interrupt it to buy a book. On Sundays, to Loeser’s faint disbelief, they played tennis.

In April the previous year, word had reached Blimk that H.P. Lovecraft had died of intestinal cancer at his aunt’s house in Providence. By that time, diligent as a seditionist, Blimk had collected nearly all the fiction Lovecraft had ever published, swapping decade-old issues of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories in the post with a network of eight or nine other Lovecraft obsessives. Often Loeser would read out a story from beginning to end so that Blimk, who couldn’t type without glaring at the keys, would still have a copy after he was obliged to pass on the original magazine. One of his correspondents was a Professor of classics at Harvard, another was an inmate at Attica prison in New York, and another was a congressional aide in Washington, from whom Blimk had first heard that rumour about the Secretary of State’s complete faith in the scientific accuracy of these ‘stories’. To Loeser, Lovecraft’s work seemed to be in flight from its own unlikelihood. How on earth could one plausibly account for the presence of ancient evil in a country as young as the United States of America? In New England and Rhode Island, Lovecraft could just about sustain it, but if he had lived in sunny, modern Los Angeles, Loeser sometimes felt, the man could never have become a writer.

But of course it was wrong to assume that, as with some obsolete make of spark plug, the production of ghosts had been discontinued. There could be ghosts in new places, in airports and automats and amusement parks. Loeser had become aware of his own ghost within a week of moving into Gorge’s spare bungalow in Pasadena. In the middle of the night, he had been awoken from a dream about pencils by a thumping and scratching above his head, loud and wild as if something was about to smash through the ceiling. Terrified, he pulled on a dressing gown, got a torch from the kitchen, and went out on to the patio to see what was on the roof. But there was nothing there. When he went back to his bedroom, the thumping had stopped, but a few hours later, just as he’d finally calmed down enough to doze off, it started again, even louder. He slept on the sofa that night, hearing only the snores of the icebox motor. The following morning, he decided he ought to venture out as usual — this was when he hadn’t yet run out of ideas for how he might find Adele — so it wasn’t until he got home that evening, and made a thorough investigation of his bedroom, that he discovered what the ghost had left for him: a pair of dark stockings, expensive ones, stuffed down behind the headboard of his bed like the discarded cocoons of two great pedigree silkworms. Doing his best to be sceptical, he tried to think of other ways they could have got there. But all the doors and windows had been locked when he went out and they still were when he got home. The house had no secret tunnels. There was no way any human being could have got in. And ever since then, he had heard the same thumping and scratching about once a week, and found a physical deposit from the ghost in some odd hidden place about every few months. They were almost always feminine in nature, which is how he’d decided the ghost itself was a woman. He didn’t want to bring it up explicitly with Woodkin in case Woodkin thought he was a lunatic, but he had at least managed to ascertain that the house had never had any female tenants, murdered or otherwise.

Were ghosts moored to structures, he sometimes wondered, or to spatial coordinates? If he had his house jacked up on wheels and towed to Venice Beach like that house he’d once seen on Sunset Boulevard, would the ghost be dragged with it, or would it continue inanely to haunt the same triangle of land even after it was empty? If you could have a ghost ship, could you have a ghost tram? Could the ghost be Scramsfield’s fiancee, the one he’d strangled to death in that Boston art gallery, passed on to Loeser by some ritual invocation over the champaggne?

He decided to open his post. The first letter was his monthly cheque from the Cultural Solidarity Committee of California. The second was from Achleitner. And the third was from Blumstein. He hadn’t heard from the director since he’d left Berlin.

Dear Egon,

Perhaps you are surprised to find me writing to you. It has been so long now since our friendship was interrupted. After you dismissed my first & only attempt at reconciliation, it would have been unpleasant for both of us if I had pressed the matter. So I decided, unhappily, to respect your wishes. If I am to explain why I have altered that policy now, I want to do so without using a melodramatic phrase like “last chance”. I will only say that I truly believe that we in Germany are approaching some sort of rupture, some sort of chasm, in our history. From this side of the chasm, I can still speak to you. From the other side of the chasm, there is no way of knowing. So I write to you now, hoping you will indulge my letter.

Perhaps you are already sceptical. I know you never believed in politics, or in history. For a long