The Teleportation Accident

classic Freudian displacement. My parents were psychiatrists, remember? I know about this stuff. “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.” You told me that once. There’s more than a minimal difference between Bailey and me, but we’re the same in some ways. Each of us is an isolated genius who wants to build a teleportation device. You’ve just got confused between us. He’s your metonym for me. At first I wasn’t even sure I believed that Bailey’s Teleportation Device worked. But now I know I was right to follow you all the way to America!’

‘That is irredeemable nonsense,’ said Adele.

‘Then how do you explain all these intimacies of yours I still have in my house? How else could I possibly know what you put in the chamber?’

‘You’ve just made a good guess. Perhaps you’ve been taking some sort of evening class in feminine psychology.’

She was more correct than she knew, thought Loeser, but Dames! And how to Lay them had not been any help in this particular case. From a long way off he thought he heard laughter, but out on Palmetto Drive nothing stirred. Ziesel had once told him about the heat death of the universe, in trillions of years’ time, when all thermodynamic free energy would have dissipated and so there would never again be motion or life: quite often west Pasadena felt like that. Millikan, apparently, had argued that cosmic rays were the ‘birth cries’ of new atoms being created all the time by God to delay this heat death, but Loeser found it hard to believe that God was forever slapping the face of the universe like a policeman trying to stop a drunk from falling asleep. ‘Let’s have dinner after the performance tonight,’ he said.

‘And I suppose if I don’t sleep with you, you’ll tell the Professor I’ve been defiling his Teleportation Device. You’re as bad as Drabsfarben.’

Loeser frowned. ‘What do you mean? What has any of this got to do with Jascha?’

‘You understand perfectly well what I mean. I should have guessed you’d copy his methods before too long.’

‘Drabsfarben is trying to seduce you?’

‘Don’t play ignorant. You know all about Drabsfarben and the Professor. What about those parties in the Palisades?’

‘I just take Bailey to the Muttons’ house sometimes because Dolores Mutton told me to,’ said Loeser. ‘On my parents’ graves, if there’s some intrigue afoot there, I’m not part of it. Come on, give me the rest. Is this why you’ve been so bad tempered in all the rehearsals this year?’

‘You really don’t already know?’

‘Adele, I smoked cigarettes for five years before I learned to inhale properly. I am not always’ — he reached for the American phrase — ‘ “quick in the uptake”.’

‘Drabsfarben’s blackmailing the Professor,’ said Adele.

‘What?’

‘He claims to know some secret about the Professor’s past. He says if he tells everyone, the Professor will be ruined. But he’s bluffing. The Professor’s never lied about his past. Why would he? Honestly, Egon, I can’t bear the thought that I tried to get Drabsfarben to go to bed with me once. Berlin seems like somebody else’s life now.’

To Loeser it didn’t feel as if any time had passed at all. ‘Adele, as it happens, I’m getting blackmailed by Drabsfarben myself. That’s what I meant about Dolores Mutton. He’s obviously a very prolific extortionist; a Balzac of the form. Can I please emphasise that I’m not about to use the same tactics to get you into bed?’

‘Let’s see what happens later when you’re drunk.’

‘Why doesn’t Bailey just go to the police about Drabsfarben?’

‘I keep telling him to. But he refuses to involve them.’

‘And what does Drabsfarben want from Bailey?’

‘I don’t know. The Professor won’t tell me.’

‘You don’t have any idea?’

Adele hesitated. ‘He did once mention something about Russia.’

‘Russia?’

‘Look, Egon, you specifically forbade me from going into the lab today because you said I had to be relaxed for the first night. This conversation has not been very relaxing. I’ll see you backstage. I hope you forget about all this by then.’ She hung up, and Loeser felt the last five years of his life begin to disrobe at last.

‘Couldn’t this have waited?’ said Dolores Mutton a few hours later as she sat down opposite Loeser on a red velvet banquette in the bar of the Chateau Marmont. He’d telephoned to demand a meeting in private, and since her husband was at home she’d reluctantly agreed to drive out as far as Hollywood. ‘Stent and I are coming to your play later. And what’s that smell?’

‘Death,’ said Loeser. He took a sip of his beer. ‘Is Drabsfarben a spy?’

Like a flock of blackbirds just before it knew which way to fly, the decision not yet made but already scribbled in its wings, Dolores Mutton’s face, in the three or four seconds that followed, seemed to disclose the whole polyphasic transit of her deliberations; but Loeser knew that it was only when you were in love with a woman, or at least had once been in love with her, that you could look up and follow the transit, read the wings, join the flight. And although Loeser would have mortgaged his bone marrow to see Dolores Mutton naked just once, he wasn’t in love with her, so he didn’t anticipate that she was about to call over a waiter, ask for a double vodka, wait patiently for it to arrive, and drink most of it down before replying: ‘Whenever I used to practise what I’d say when someone finally came out and asked me that, I used to assume it would be Stent. Or someone from the FBI. Or someone who mattered. I never guessed it would be somebody like you. I didn’t rehearse for this. And I’m trying to remind myself now why I’m supposed to say what I’m supposed to say. But this morning I feel closely comparable to somebody who doesn’t give a damn.’ She grimaced as if she’d only just noticed the taste of the alcohol. ‘You know, it’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when I really believed in it all. Years ago, back in New York, when they first got their hooks into me. I read Capital to the end — I don’t even think Bill Foster read Capital to the end! And I was happy to help, although I was never their favourite because I wasn’t one of those girls who’d put on lipstick and screw some diplomat for the good of the Party. Then I met Stent and we got married and we moved out here. I forgot all about it. Until one day in thirty-four Drabsfarben came to see me and said he’d been told I was a loyal friend of the Communist International.’

Loeser had always thought that was a song. He nodded.

‘At first, he just wanted Stent to put his name on some petitions. Then there were the letters to the newspapers. Then we had to go on that trip to Moscow and Stent had to write those articles. And meanwhile the novels all had to be anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, anti-government. I didn’t really mind any of that. It still felt like doing good, sometimes. But then Drabsfarben wanted us to help out more directly. He had people coming to California. Gugelhupf was the first. Do you think I ever wanted to live in that ridiculous glass box? Maybe in Berlin it’s a political gesture to build a house like that. Here, it’s no different from building a Gothic chateau or a Tiki hut or whatever the hell else. Except the house builders here don’t know what to do with the sort of blueprint you get from Gugelhupf, so not a damn thing fits together and there are nails sticking out of everything. And half the time it’s too hot to think! But Drabsfarben said we had to have Gugelhupf build us a house because it was the easiest way to get him set up in California. They needed him here. I still don’t know why. And how did that asshole thank us? He rehashed an old design. Then Drabsfarben made me set up the Cultural Solidarity Committee as a cover. We started having the parties. I hate those parties. I always hated parties. I never threw a party in my life before Drabsfarben told me to. Do you know what I like doing at night? I like cooking dinner with my husband and then making love on the beach. But Drabsfarben makes me fill our house with strangers twice a week so he can catch them in his lobster trap. Every year, it gets worse. Every year, Drabsfarben wants more.’

Loeser remembered that conversation he’d misunderstood five years ago at the Muttons’ party. One is always wrong, he thought now, always, always wrong about every single thing; if some young cousin was ever stupid enough to ask him for advice about life, that was all he would be able to tell them. The truth ran back and forth over your head at night but you never saw so much as the colour of its fur. ‘And what does your husband think about all this?’ he said.

‘Stent? He’s never had any idea! He just likes how I take an interest in his work. He likes how I always have suggestions and corrections. He says I’m the best editor a writer ever had.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t care what happens to me any more. I don’t care if I get locked up for spying. I don’t even care if Drabsfarben shoots me and