The Teleportation Accident (24 page)

‘When the film started, Colonel Gorge assumed he must have been drugged, kidnapped, and taken to China. He assaulted one of the popcorn boys, fled, and found himself outside on Hollywood Boulevard. Thereupon he observed an advertisement for a depilatory product that made comical use of an image of a mountain gorilla, and attempted to wrestle the animal to the ground before it could endanger a nearby lady.’

‘Saw my mistake pretty soon after that, of course. Felt like a fool. Paid for all the damage.’ Gorge applied seven or eight spoonfuls of mustard to his hamburger and then turned to his newest acquaintance. ‘Living whereabouts, Krauto?’

‘The Chateau Marmont,’ said Loeser, who had hoped he might have misheard the first time Gorge called him ‘Krauto’.

‘I don’t know how you can stand to live in a hotel,’ said Marsh. ‘There’s no privacy.’

‘Yes, he should certainly move. Don’t you have a few properties near here, Colonel?’ said Rackenham.

‘Think so. Woodkin?’

‘Only one at present, sir. You own a house in that inconvenient triangle of land between your tennis courts and the Sprague mansion. It is currently untenanted.’

‘Why the hell untenanted?’

‘It’s quite small, sir, and there is nowhere to a park a car.’

‘Want it, Krauto?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Want to rent it? Work out a price with Woodkin. Needn’t pay much. No use letting it sit empty.’

‘Hold on, Colonel, not everyone wants to live in Pasadena,’ said Plumridge. ‘You haven’t even asked him.’

‘Good point. Want to live in Pasadena, Loeser?’

‘It’s nice here, but a bit out of the way,’ said Plumridge.

‘Not if you work at the Institute,’ said Marsh.

‘But he doesn’t,’ said Plumridge.

‘Loeser, may I say this,’ said Rackenham. ‘Everyone else who arrives in Los Angeles from Berlin seems to be settling in Pacific Palisades. And there is hardly any part of Los Angeles further from Pacific Palisades than Pasadena.’

Just then Loeser began to make out something now that he had first glimpsed in the shadows as he fled Bevilacqua’s office: the fear that he wasn’t going to find Adele tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that – that dispersion fortified you not just against coincidence but against serendipity – that two blind men wandering in a village square might die before they collided – that no amount of desire or determination could overcome the sheer brainless size of this place – that even though he’d extracted more than enough from his parents’ trust for a holiday to Paris, if he stayed on at the Chateau Marmont he would soon run out of money and have to go home with nothing to show for his sojourn.

All this was probably true. But he didn’t care. There was no way he was staying out here in this nonsensical country for one day longer that he had to. ‘I’m sorry, Colonel Gorge,’ he said, ‘but as I’ve already told Rackenham, I won’t be in California long enough to require a house of my own. I’m going back to Berlin soon.’

‘Tell me, Herr Loeser, what are the streetcars like in Berlin?’ said Plumridge.

‘Fantastic,’ said Loeser with some fervour. Apart from Nerlinger, who made paintings of the S-Bahn, no one at home ever seemed to want to talk in detail about public transport.

‘You fellows had the first electric trams in the world, of course.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Sure. Siemens. Beautiful engineering. I used to have one of their radios. Had to throw it out, though. They’re bankrolling the Nazis and my wife’s family are Jewish.’

‘I rode one of your American streetcars this morning,’ said Loeser. ‘It was adequate.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Hollywood to Pacific Palisades.’

‘On the Santa Monica Air Line, I guess? Second oldest line in California. Used to run all day, Red Cars, USC to the coast. Now it’s just for rush hours, and barely even that. Damn shame. You know, Los Angeles used to have the finest public transportation system in the whole country. Now we’ve got squat, practically.’

‘I heard it’s General Motors who are killing the streetcars,’ said Rackenham. ‘Some sort of conspiracy.’

‘Red propaganda!’ said Gorge, slamming the table so hard with his fist that Loeser thought he saw his half-eaten burger separate momentarily into its constituent vertical sections.

‘Our host is just about correct,’ said Plumridge. ‘The streetcar companies are dying for plenty of reasons, but a conspiracy’s got nothing to do with it. The main point is, people hate them. And so they should. Those companies run the minimum number of cars they can get away with. They don’t give a thought to safety or hygiene. They cheat and bribe. A lot of them only got started to manipulate real estate values, anyway. And even if they were a consortium of saints, they couldn’t last much longer. The traffic’s the problem. Who’s going to take a streetcar when it has to wait in downtown jams like any other jalopy? You can’t turn a profit like that. Hard enough before, and then the Depression came. No, we can’t leave anything to the streetcar companies. The city has to do it. Pittsburgh just bought up all their private railway companies, and they’re going to run them at a loss for as long as it takes to turn them around.’

‘How can the city afford to buy up the streetcar lines?’ said Rackenham.

‘It can’t. The streetcar companies overstate the value of their assets to keep the banks and the shareholders happy. But even if they’d give us a fair price, it wouldn’t be worth it. We’ll just let them fail. Meanwhile, we start fresh. Los Angeles isn’t Pittsburgh. We have to be a hell of a lot more ambitious. First and foremost, the lines have to be elevated to beat the traffic. We would have gotten elevated lines in twenty-six if it weren’t for Harry Chandler.’

‘Who’s that?’ said Loeser.

‘The tyrant of the
LA Times.
Back then, the railroad companies wanted to build the new Union Station at Fourth and Central. They had right of way there in every direction, so it could have been a terminal for the elevated lines. But Chandler had real estate holdings at the Plaza, by the old Chinatown, so he wanted Union Station there instead. He put the
Times
to work, and now Union Station’s at the Plaza, which nobody can run streetcars into.’ A land deal, Loeser thought, just like Louis XIV murdering Villayer so that Villayer’s post office couldn’t redeem the Court of Miracles. Perhaps that was just what cities were: land deals built on top of land deals built on top of land deals, with a few million warm bodies as mortar. ‘Anyway, this time, we won’t let Chandler kill the plan. Rackenham, can I borrow your pen? Thanks.’ Plumridge unfolded his napkin on the table. ‘We won’t try to build the terminal downtown, we’ll build it up in north Hollywood, at the foot of the hills. And then we’ll connect up every suburb in Los Angeles.’ He sketched out a map of the city, with a big box at the junction of Sunset Boulevard and North Kings Road, and routes looping off in every direction. ‘For instance, 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.’