The Teleportation Accident

‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘No. It sounds absurd, but the way he looks at me — I can just tell he wouldn’t hurt me. He might hurt anyone else, but he wouldn’t hurt me. I’m sure of it.’

‘I saw Dr Clarendon in the basement.’

‘Yes, he often works late too. I can’t understand why he’s not more afraid, after this morning — alone down there in the dark.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Egon, I need to take some more readings. You should go home. You’re not safe here either.’

‘Has Ziesel gone home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we’re both safe. Don’t be silly. It can’t be Slate. That would be too obvious. I’m definitely not going home yet. What is it? What are you looking at?’ Loeser turned, and then let out the sort of noise a Pomeranian makes when you tread on its tail. Standing there in the doorway of room 11 was Slate himself, who for some reason gave a long, slow shake of the head and then hobbled on down the corridor and out of sight.

‘I think I might go home after all,’ said Loeser hoarsely. He waved goodbye to Adele, hurried out of the Obediah Laboratories, and sprinted to his bike.

As he cycled back down Del Mar Boulevard, he thought about Bailey’s Teleportation Device. Could it really run on love, as Adele claimed? He found the idea insipid. Loeser himself hadn’t been ‘in love’ since he was at university, and he’d long since forgotten what it felt like; the notion was as abstract to him now as it had been when he was a child. But desire was another matter. It was desire, not love, that had uprooted Loeser, that had brought him all the way to California. Desire, he believed, could uproot almost anything. Adele had probably just confused the two, as people did. But if the Teleportation Device ran on desire, then that implied that Adele felt some tremendous voltage of lust for wobbly old Professor Bailey. And that was just as implausible. Still, if she really did, did that mean he’d got to her too late? Something leaden settled in his stomach at the thought. What use was Dames! And how to Lay them now? Perhaps, as they said in English, ‘that ship had sailed’. Or perhaps, with Adele, the ship had never even docked. Perhaps there was no ship. Perhaps there was no harbour. Perhaps there was no sea.

China City

At the corner of Ord and Spring a huge iron gate led to a winding street calling itself Dragon Road. Past the gate, every roof had a pagoda, every surface was painted red or gold, and every nail held up at least one long string of paper lanterns or silk flags. Men in conical straw hats pulled rickshaws back and forth, shouting for business.

‘What is this?’ said Loeser as he stepped down from the bus.

‘China City,’ said Blimk. ‘It just opened and I been wanting to see it.’

Last night, after he got home, Loeser hadn’t been able to sleep. Marsh’s disheartened corpse had jigged in his mind with Slate hunched in the doorway, so that he found himself almost wishing for the familiar scuffling of his ghost over his head. So that morning — having tossed and turned for so long that his sheets had cycled through every possible permutation of rumple and were somehow actually neater when he got out of bed than when he got in — he dressed, abolished a pot of coffee, and took an early streetcar to Blimk’s shop. By the time he arrived, a plumber was already at work on a leaky pipe next to Blimk’s desk, and he was making too much noise for either of them to concentrate on their reading, so they decided to close the shop for a few hours and take a bus downtown. Blimk did have a car, but he was considerate about Loeser’s transport anxiety.

One of the consequences of Harry Chandler using the influence of the LA Times to make sure Union Station was built at the Plaza, Blimk now explained, was that the old Chinatown with its brothels and opium dens had been demolished in 1933 to make way for it, and for five years now the Chinese population of Los Angeles had not had anywhere in particular to live. But now there were two neighbourhoods competing for their favour: China City, built by a wealthy San Francisco socialite (and friend of Harry Chandler) called Christine Sterling who’d already converted nearby Olvera Street into a ‘Mexican’ tourist attraction, and New Chinatown, a few blocks north-east, built by a businessman called Peter Hoo Soo who was President of the Chinese American Assocation. Sterling’s development was a good deal more ornate: she’d leased studio props from Cecil B. DeMille and she’d had the town hall decorated by a set designer called Wurtzel to look like a Chinese pirate junk.

‘I knew him in Berlin!’ said Loeser.

‘He works on a lot of Goatloft’s movies now,’ said Blimk.

‘But I can’t actually see any Chinese people here. Except waiters and rickshaw drivers.’

‘Would you live here, if you were a Chink?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

At the Muttons’ parties, the most recent Jewish arrivals always complained about how first they’d been dismissed from their jobs and then they’d been forced out of their homeland. They said it had broken their hearts, and they claimed to miss every little thing about Berlin. Loeser now imagined stuffing them all into Germany City: a square mile of freshly painted beer halls and art galleries and cabarets, with its own miniature Potsdamer Platz and and its own miniature Romanisches Cafe and even its own miniature Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland (which like the real one would have its own USA-themed bar, which would have its own Los Angeles, which would have its own Germany City, and so on ad infinitum). They’d probably like it better than Pacific Palisades. Christine Sterling’s China City, he saw, was as if Paris had been rebuilt by a set designer who’d only heard about it from Herbert Wolf Scramsfield and The Sorceror of Venice; and yet it still didn’t feel any more obviously artificial than the rest of Los Angeles, even though Los Angeles wasn’t imitating anything except itself. A man with a gentle case of Gorge’s agnosia could walk down Dragon Road and believe he was really in Peking. What if that literalist walked down Sunset Boulevard? Would he understand this cosmopolis better than anyone, or would he be trapped in a recursion? When Loeser heard the exiles whine, he sometimes thought to himself that he, too, had been dismissed from his vocation and forced out of his homeland. His vocation was sex. His homeland was the female body. He felt just as lost as they did, but no one was ever sympathetic. And as he turned left down Lotus Road with Blimk, it occurred to him that China City was to China exactly as Midnight at the Nursing Academy was to a living, breathing girlfriend. The simulation might seem laughable at first, but perhaps after seven years away from home, an immigrant from Guangdong would come here and weep with guilty relief, because it was the nearest thing he had left to what he remembered. They passed a restaurant that advertised its chef as knowing ‘100 Different Ways to Fix a Chicken’ (but did not explain how the chicken was faulty), and Loeser said to Blimk that they should stop for chop suey because he’d never had it before. Blimk told him that chop suey didn’t even exist in China. And Loeser decided that Chinese food invented by Americans was exactly what he wanted to eat that morning.

‘Couple of fellas came into the store yesterday,’ said Blimk after they’d sat down and ordered. Loeser had nearly asked for a starter of turtle soup but then he had thought of Urashima Taro. ‘Wanted to know what rent I paid, how long I’d been there. Asked them who they were and they said they were from the Traffic Commission, just wanted to check some facts. Can’t see what my rent’s got to do with the traffic. Didn’t know better, I’d be worried about Eminent Domain.’

‘What’s the Eminent Domain?’ said Loeser. It sounded like an old-fashioned euphemism for the afterlife.

‘When the government buys your property out from under you without asking, for a highway or a railroad or something. That’s how they got the Chinks out of Chinatown to build Union Station. I ever lost my store like that, think I’d just go back to Brooklyn and live with my sister. Not even worth relocating, amount I make. Can’t be Eminent Domain, though. I’m up in north Hollywood, and they already got a Union Station. Asked my landlord and he doesn’t know shit about it. Probably just want to put a tax on parking or something.’

‘Probably,’ said Loeser. And it wasn’t until their bowls of chop suey arrived, and Loeser unfolded his napkin on his lap, that he noticed the dragon embroidered on it in black thread, and was reminded by its shape of the map that Plumridge had drawn on one of Gorge’s napkins at that dinner in 1934: the network of elevated streetcar lines conjoining in Hollywood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Kings Road. He hadn’t heard anything of the plan since, and he’d assumed it had come to nothing. But just then, for the first time, he realised that Plumridge’s proposed terminal would occupy the very same block as Blimk’s bookshop.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Blimk. ‘Ain’t hungry now you’ve seen the food up close?’

The Gorge House

Gorge’s cigar gave off a smell like a village being razed by retreating infantry. ‘Sit down, Krauto,’ he said.