The Teleportation Accident

When the US military attacked Loeser’s house with poison gas, it was a short while after dawn and he was still in bed. He awoke to find his nostrils being savaged by an odour about a billion times worse than anything he had ever smelled in his life — a cacodemoniac swirl of rubber and garlic and dysentery and murder, perhaps not unlike what the audience at the Theatre des Encornets began to detect just before the Teleportation Accident of 1679. Remembering something he’d read once about British soldiers and chlorine shells early in the last war, he lunged for a discarded cotton undershirt, folded it over twice, pulled his penis out of his pyjama bottoms, and pissed until the undershirt was saturated with urine. Then he held it tightly over his mouth as he ran through the sitting room and out of the house, still in his bare feet. He looked around, but he couldn’t see any bombers in the sky, and indeed on Palmetto Drive there was an old woman walking her cabbage-faced black pug as if nothing had happened. Cautiously he took the undershirt away from his face. The air out here was as glib as ever. So Loeser really had been the lone target. It was clear that President Roosevelt, as lazy as any other modern American, had decided to begin his vengeance on Germany with the citizen of that nation who happened to be most conveniently at hand.

When Woodkin answered the front door of Gorge’s mansion, he looked like he’d already been up and dressed for so many hours that just meeting his eye was enough to give Loeser a mild feeling of circadian vertigo. ‘Good morning, Mr Loeser.’

‘Have you gone into the war?’

‘The United States, you mean? Not yet, sir, although the Colonel believes it’s only a matter of time. Would you like to come in? Perhaps I could take that for you?’

Loeser realised he was still clutching the urinous wad of undershirt, as if he’d wanted to bring Gorge a nice gift and had opted for a bold alternative to the usual bottle of wine or bunch of flowers. On the way here he’d been intending to ask if he could hide in Gorge’s cellar, but instead he said, ‘Can you come over to my house? Something’s happened.’

‘Certainly, Mr Loeser.’

Even just outside the threshold, they couldn’t smell anything. Only once they were through the door did the horror make its presence known. ‘I think it’s poison gas,’ said Loeser, no longer quite convinced. ‘Methyl heptin carbonate or something.’

Woodkin wrinkled his nose. ‘You’ve had some very bad luck, sir. It’s a skunk.’

‘A skunk? Don’t be ridiculous. Skunks squirt about a teaspoon at a time. A skunk would have to be the size of an Indian elephant to make a stink like this.’

‘Not in every case. When a skunk dies and begins to decompose, its glands will sometimes swell up with microbial gas and then explode. I’ve only encountered it once before, but one doesn’t readily forget the smell.’

‘I may be untidy but I think I would have noticed if a skunk had died in my wardrobe.’

‘A house like this has more voids than you realise. It might have gotten under the floor. Or into the walls.’

Loeser thought of his ghost. ‘Or into the roof?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. I did once have a raccoon that established a pied-a-terre in my roof space.’

‘What can I do about it?’

‘I’ll have someone sent over. We’ll have to hope the body of the skunk is accessible. In many cases, there isn’t any way to get to the animal without demolishing part of the house. Until then, I suggest you put out bowls of tomato juice and baking soda to absorb the smell. I’m afraid you may find that it has already worked its way into your belongings.’

Loeser had rather hoped that a prelate as senior as Woodkin in the religion of cleanliness might have the power to drive out odour by verbal incantation alone. ‘So all my clothes are going to smell permanently of putrid skunk venom?’

‘It could be worse, Mr Loeser. There exists a rare genetic disease called—’

‘But I don’t have time to deal with this now! The first performance is tonight!’

Conspicuous not far from where they now stood was the contusion on the wall from the day in September when Loeser had hurled a German–English dictionary across the room upon discovering from the Los Angeles Herald that Eric Goatloft, director of Scars of Desire, was planning to film an adaptation of Rupert Rackenham’s The Sorceror of Venice, with Ruth Hussey as Princess Anne Elisabeth, Tyrone Power as Adriano Lavicini, Charles Coburn as Auguste de Gorge and Gene Lockhart as Louis XIV. At the time he left Berlin, Loeser had been determined that he would put on The Teleportation Accident as soon as he got back; even seven years later, and even after all the success of Rackenham’s worthless novel, he still felt that Lavicini’s story belonged to him, and there was no way he would allow himself to be pipped to its first dramatic rendering by Mr Don’t Slip into the Dark. So he telephoned Millikan and demanded that the 1940 Christmas play at the Gorge Auditorium should not be The Christmas Carol as planned but instead the world premiere of his own magnum opus. Millikan told him that the students and faculty of the Institute would prefer to see something appropriate to the season. Loeser made an ultimatum, which they both knew was at best a penultimatum or an antepenultimatum. Negotiations bumped along, and at last it was agreed. This year, the California Institute of Technology Players would present a heart-warming historical fable by writer-director Egon Loeser entitled The Christmas Teleportation Accident.

Loeser was annoyed by that compromise, but he was hardly surprised. After all, in Pasadena, motorised sleighs were rolling along the streets like tanks, men in Santa Claus costumes were standing guard on corners like infantry, and carols were blaring from loudspeakers like patriotic anthems. As far as he could tell, Christmas here was equivalent to a sort of martial law. Perhaps he was lucky not to have any elves billeted in his home.

With the first performance of The Christmas Teleportation Accident, Loeser was — yes — painting the devil on the wall. In October, on the way to a party at the Muttons’, he’d mentioned the play to Bailey, and it had turned out that Bailey was already acquainted with Lavicini’s story from The Sorceror of Venice. In fact, the physicist had gone so far as to ask if he could help with the production — the Obediah Laboratories, he said, were full of devices that could very easily be adapted as novel theatrical effects. And although Loeser had decided not to attempt to replicate the mechanical Teleportation Device that had sexually upgraded Klugweil back in Berlin, it was true that in all the years he’d worked on Lavicini he had never had a clear idea of how he could convey the climactic destruction of the Theatre des Encornets. So he had told Bailey he was welcome to help. And Bailey had now spent over a week up on ladders and gantries in the Gorge Auditorium, installing his experimental stagecraft prototype, but he still hadn’t quite finished, and Loeser still didn’t know what it actually did. Meanwhile, his cast this year were on the brink of mutiny.

So he shouldn’t have had anything on his mind except how to make sure tonight’s premiere wasn’t a total catastrophe. After Woodkin left, though, all Loeser could think about was his ghost. If those noises over his head at night had been no more than a mustelid squatter, then half the reason to believe in her was gone. Perhaps the late Dr Clarendon had been right after all. But then Loeser had no explanation left for the girlish objets trouves that had continued to appear in his house. That antique wooden chest was like a forensic evidence box maintained by some aberrant police detective to investigate a sex crime that might never take place. Where did all its contents come from? How could so much just materialise? It was almost as if…

He telephoned Adele.

‘Egon, I haven’t even had breakfast yet. If you’re about to tell me you’ve rewritten the last scene again, then you will have to find an understudy.’ He heard her light a cigarette. In The Christmas Teleportation Accident, Adele had the part of the doomed ballerina (who was not, on this account, Princess Anne Elisabeth in disguise).

‘You want to fuck me.’

‘What?’

‘You want to fuck me,’ Loeser repeated. ‘You don’t want to admit it to yourself, but I can prove it. You’re still running your own experiments on the Teleportation Device, aren’t you? Nocturnal experiments that Bailey doesn’t know about? Well, I know what you’ve been putting in the chamber. Your little romantic tributes. Stockings and brassieres and lipsticks and handkerchiefs and so on.’ Adele choked on smoke and Loeser knew he was right. ‘You told me you can’t control where the objects go, because you can’t control your heart, and the teleportation device runs on love. But it doesn’t run on love. It runs on desire. And, unconsciously, you want to fuck me, so you’ve been sending everything straight here. You might think you’re in love with Bailey — chaste and unrequited — but that’s