The Teleportation Accident Read online

  The Teleportation Accident

  Ned Beauman

  In the declining Weimar Republic, Egon Loeser works as a stage designer for New Expressionist theatre. His hero is the greatest set designer of the 17th century, Adriano Lavicini, who devised the so-called Teleportation Device for the whisking of actors from one scene to another — a miracle, until the thing malfunctioned, causing numerous deaths and perhaps summoning the devil himself.

  Apolitical in a dangerous time, sex-driven in a dry spell, Loeser leaves the tired scene in Berlin in pursuit of the lubricious Adele Hitler (no relation), who couldn’t care less about him, heading first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, where he finds his entire tired Berlin social circle reconstituted in exile, under the patronage of a hack writer and his possibly philandering wife. He also finds himself uncomfortably close to a string of murders at CalTech, where a physicist, assisted by Adele herself, is trying to develop a device for honest-to-God teleportation.

  Following his breathtaking debut, Boxer, Beetle, Ned Beauman raises the stakes, creating in The Teleportation Accident a marvelous mash-up of historical fiction, LA noir, science fiction, and satire. Here are sluts and scam artists, ghosts and ancient dinosaur-men, all wrapped up in one page-turning plot. Beauman is a writer of audacity and style; his second novel proves him a star on the rise.

  Ned Beauman

  THE TELEPORTATION ACCIDENT

  I hate politics and belief in politics, because it makes men arrogant, doctrinaire, obstinate, and inhuman.

  Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man

  …all I had to do was go down into the subway. It was like fishing down there. Go down into the subway and come up with a girl.

  Philip Roth, The Human Stain

  PART I

  Literary Realism

  1. BERLIN, 1931

  When you knock a bowl of sugar on to your host’s carpet, it is a parody of the avalanche that killed his mother and father, just as the duck’s beak that your new girlfriend’s lips form when she attempts a seductive pout is a quotation of the quacking noise your last girlfriend made during sex. When the telephone rings in the night because a stranger has given a wrong extension to the operator, it is a homage to the inadvertent substitution of telegrams that terminated your adulterous cousin’s marriage, just as the resonant alcove between the counterpoised struts of your new girlfriend’s clavicle is a rebuttal to the apparent beauty of your last girlfriend’s fleshier décolletage. Or this is how it seemed to Egon Loeser, anyway, because the two subjects most hostile to his sense of a man’s life as an essentially steady, comprehensible and Newtonian-mechanical undertaking were accidents and women. And it sometimes seemed as if the only way to prevent that dread pair from toppling him all the way over into derangement was to treat them not as prodigies but rather as texts to be studied. Hence the principle: accidents, like women, allude. These allusions are no less witty or astute for being unconscious; indeed, they are more so, which is one reason why it’s probably a mistake to construct them deliberately. The other reason is that everyone might conclude you’re a total prick.

  And that was the final worry to flutter through Egon Loeser’s mind before he pulled the lever on his Teleportation Device one morning in April 1931. If it went wrong, they would all say: for what possible reason did you name your experimental stagecraft prototype after the most calamitous experimental stagecraft prototype in the history of theatre? Why make that allusion? Why hitch those two horses together? Paint the devil on the wall and the devil will come, as every child knows. Or, to sieve the German idiom down to an English one, don’t tempt fate. But Loeser was so unsuperstitious he was superstitious about it. He’d once got up on the stage of the Allien Theatre half an hour before a performance to shout ‘Macbeth!’ until he was hoarse. And one of his father’s long-standing psychiatric patients had been an American financier who named his yacht Titanic, his daughters Goneril and Regan, and his company Roman Empire Holdings in the same spirit. So he couldn’t credit the English idiom’s characterisation of fate as something like a hack playwright who never missed a chance to work in an ironic pratfall, any more than he could credit the German idiom’s characterisation of the devil as something like a preening actor who checked every gossip column in every newspaper every morning for a mention of himself (although perhaps God was like that). Accidents allude, but they don’t ape. Naming one thing after another cannot, logically, increase the chances of the new thing turning out like the old thing. But if the test today went straight to ruin, people would still say he shouldn’t have called it the Teleportation Device.

  What choice did he have, though? This machine was primarily intended for use in a play about the life of Adriano Lavicini, the greatest stage designer of the seventeenth century. And the climax of the play portrayed the ghastly failure of Lavicini’s Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place, better known in modern discourse as the Teleportation Device. Since Egon Loeser was, in his own opinion, Lavicini’s closest modern counterpart, and since this new Teleportation Device was his finest innovation just as the old Teleportation Device had been Lavicini’s, then to stifle the parallel between the two would have been even more perverse than to let it breathe.

  Anyway, Lavicini himself had painted the devil on the wall with far bolder strokes than Loeser possibly could. Back in 1679, the Teleportation Device wasn’t allowed a test run. Like a siege weapon, it had been constructed in total secrecy. No stagehand had seen more than a single jigsaw piece of the plans. Even Auguste de Gorge, the dictatorial owner of the Théâtre des Encornets, had not been permitted a peek, and even at the final dress rehearsal of Montand’s new ballet The Lizard Prince the machine had not yet been in operation, so neither the dancers nor their choreographer had any idea what to expect on opening night. But Lavicini insisted that the operations of the Teleportation Device were so precise that it didn’t matter, and the essential thing was that no rumours about the nature of the machine should escape.

  The comparison to a siege weapon was especially apt here, Loeser always thought, because in the seventeenth century the struggle for supremacy between the great theatres and opera houses of Christendom resembled nothing so much as an arms race. For the ruling family of any major Italian city it would have been a political catastrophe to fall behind, and even within Paris the competition was fierce, which was why a set designer like Lavicini, who had in fact once held a job at the Venetian Arsenal, could expect to be bound as tightly by his contract of employment as the average twentieth-century germ-warfare scientist. (His salary, naturally, was large enough to make up for it.) This was an age in which the audience expected sphinxes pulling chariots, gods dancing in the air, lions transforming into girls, comets destroying city walls — all the really good stuff, of course, towards the middle of the play, because during the first act you would still be on the way to the theatre and by the fifth act you would already be doffing your hat to a platter of oysters. A typical published libretto might proudly list all nineteen contraptions that were to be set into motion during a performance, but neglect to mention the composer. Impresarios were bankrupted in their dozens, and enlightened critics complained that genuine dramatic values had been surrendered to this obsession with ‘the marvellous’, continuing a debate about the overuse of special effects that had begun with the Reformation and would presumably last until Hollywood fell into the San Andreas fault.

  So Lavicini’s employer could forgive him for wanting to keep the Teleportation Device a total secret. Still, even de Gorge, who had once strangled a man while dictating a love letter, must have felt a little nervous as the entire bejewelled elite of Paris, including, last of all, Louis XIV
and his queen, arrived at the Théâtre des Encornets for the première of The Lizard Prince, greeting each other with hand-kissings so formalised and ostentatious they were like miniature ballets in themselves. For the thousandth time he must have reminded himself of what his mentor Lunaire had once taught him: as an impresario, you shouldn’t flatter yourself that you were really anything to do with the show. You couldn’t conjure a hit. Your job was just to sell tickets. And if you had done that to the best of your ability, said Lunaire, then the only thing left to pray for was that nobody in the audience arrived with a dog bigger than a child or a pistol bigger than an upholstery hammer. But all this without even rehearsing the new machine — that was painting the devil on the wall.

  Loeser’s Teleportation Device, by contrast, was about to be demonstrated at the little Allien Theatre in Berlin in front of only two other people: Adolf Klugweil, the putative star of Lavicini, and Immanuel Blumstein, the putative writer-director. The latter, at forty, was old enough to have been a founding member of the famous November Group, which seemed really pretty old to his two younger collaborators. Behind his back, they mocked him for his baldness, they mocked him for his nostalgia, and they mocked him for his habit, whenever he thought he might have misplaced his wallet or pipe (which was always), of patting himself down with such impatience, such savagery and such complete disregard for the actual location of his pockets that it began to resemble some sort of eroto-religious self-flagellation ritual — and yet they also had enormous respect for their mentor’s refusal to let the convictions of his youth fall out along with his hair. The belief all three men shared was that Expressionism had not been pushed nearly far enough. ‘Expressionism is no more a form of theatre than revolution is a form of state,’ Fritz Kortner had written. Perhaps, but in that case the revolution had been botched. The New Objectivity that had replaced Expressionism in the middle of the 1920s was nothing but the old state with a new cabinet. In reply, the New Expressionism would be the old revolution with new bombs.

  Klugweil, meanwhile, was a twenty-four-year-old so languid as to be almost liquid, except when he went on stage and broke open some inner asylum of shrieks and contortions, wild eyes and bared teeth — which made him perfectly suited to Expressionist acting and almost useless for any other type. He’d been at university with Loeser, who had always wondered what he was like during sex but had never quite had the cheek to make an enquiry with his dull girlfriend.

  ‘Is everyone ready?’ said Loeser, who stood in the wings with his hand on the lever. The Allien Theatre had been an old-fashioned music hall before Blumstein took it over, and renovations were still only half complete, so after a few hours backstage your clothes and hair were so thick with paint flakes, dust clumps, loose threads, cushion stuffing, cobwebs, and splinters that you felt like a veal cutlet rolled in breadcrumbs.

  ‘Yes, get on with it,’ said Blumstein, who sat in seat 3F of the empty auditorium.

  ‘This pinches under the armpits,’ said Klugweil, who stood on stage, strapped into a harness like a test pilot missing a plane.

  Lavicini’s Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place was, as it turned out, genuinely extraordinary. Once, as many as sixteen stagehands communicating with whistles had been required to change a scene. Giacomo Torelli’s invention of a single rotating axle had since made possible the simultaneous movement of multiple flats, reducing that number from sixteen to one. But that leap forward was rendered instantly trivial by the magnificence of Lavicini’s Teleportation Device. At the end of the first scene, the audience gave a gasp so great you could have marked it on a barometer as the stage suddenly took flight like a flock of birds. A vast hidden assembly of ropes, cranes, cranks, wheels, springs, runners, gantries, pulleys, weights, and counterweights was lifting every part of the set into the air — was rearranging it in a flurry of swoops and swaps and spins — and was setting it down again with barely an audible bump. The Third Temple of the Lizards was replaced by a Dagonite slave-cove before anyone in the room even thought of breathing out. All the violinists missed their cues and one ballerina fainted, but the cheering afterwards was so loud that it didn’t matter. At the back of the theatre, Auguste de Gorge decided that, having gone to bed with eight whores after the last première and five whores after the première before that, he would go to bed tonight with thirteen. (Not long ago someone had told him about the Fibonacci sequence and he had construed it as a challenge.) In the wings, Adriano Lavicini stepped back from the controls with a temperate smile. A stagecraft machine so ambitious that it was indistinguishable from magic: that was painting the devil on the wall.

  Loeser’s Teleportation Device, by contrast, was not supposed to be spectacular. It was just a means to an end. The first half of Lavicini, before the protagonist’s emigration to Paris, would take place during the Venetian Carnival, when the entire city strapped on masks — when lawyers would wear masks to plead in court, maids would wear masks to go to market, and mothers would put masks on their newborns — and not just masks, in most cases, but also a long domino-cloak, so that it was impossible to tell a man from a woman until they spoke. Anyone could go anywhere, and anyone could mix with anyone: ‘prince with subject’, as Casanova wrote, ‘the ordinary with the remarkable man, lovely and hideous together. There were no longer valid laws, nor law-makers.’ The inquisition, omniscient and omnipotent for the rest of the year, gave up completely. To Loeser and Blumstein, the glamour and intrigue of the old Carnival were nothing compared to its unacknowledged political radicalism. At what other time in history had there been a social experiment on such a scale? No Bolshevik would have had the guts. The plays on which Loeser and Blumstein collaborated always stressed a notion they called Equivalence: the communist was shown to be no different from the Nazi, the priest from the gangster, the wife in furs from the prostitute in army boots. So the Carnival was perfectly suited to their themes. And so was the Teleportation Device. Like Lavicini’s machine, Loeser’s machine used springs and pulleys and counterweights, but whereas Lavicini’s machine moved the scenery around the cast, Loeser’s machine just moved the cast around the scenery, which was a lot easier. The idea was that a harnessed actor could make a speech as a stockbroker in the little bank at the top right of the stage, step back out of view, and be whipped across to the little casino at the bottom left, from which he would step back into view almost instantly as a compulsive gambler. This would be an effective if unsubtle way of driving home the point about how the two were just the same. And if in this new play there was some business with masks and cloaks coming on and off, the effect could be even more striking.

  At the Théâtre des Encornets, by the time the second act drew to a close, the Teleportation Device was a novelty more than twelve minutes old, and yet the Paris upper crust weren’t quite bored to death with it yet. Montand’s lovely Dance of the Half-Fish came to an end, the dancers fluttered off stage to make way for an orchestral interlude, and the scenery began once again to lift into the air. And then there was a rumbling sound like thunder ground up with a pestle.

  No two accounts quite agreed on what happened next. The confusion was understandable. Loeser knew only that the Théâtre des Encornets began to crumble — not the entire building, fortunately, but only its south-east corner, which meant one side of the stage and several of the nearby private audience boxes. There was a stampede, and even after all those centuries it was perhaps with a moistness in the eye that one recalled the tragic and senseless sacrifice of some of the most deliriously beautiful couture in the early history of the medium. Most of the inhabitants of that couture, as it happened, were unharmed — as were the musicians, who were shielded from tumbling marble by the position of the orchestra pit, and the dancers, who by great good luck had just exited stage right rather than stage left. The dead, in the end, numbered about twenty-five audience members from the private boxes nearest the collapse, who were recovered from the rubble after the fires had been put out b
ut were in every case too badly mashed to be identified; the swooned ballerina, who had not been in the wings with her sisters but rather languishing on a couch backstage; Monsieur Merde, the Théâtre des Encornets’ cat; and Adriano Lavicini himself.

  The Teleportation Device, meanwhile, had deleted itself along with the building. No part of it could be salvaged for an investigation into what might have gone wrong, and no plans or even sketches could be found in Lavicini’s workshop. Auguste de Gorge was, of course, ruined. And Louis XIV never went to the theatre again.

  Two hundred and fifty years later, at the Allien Theatre, a spring sprang. A counterweight dropped. An actor shot across the stage. And a scream was heard.

  The original Teleportation Accident was not notorious solely because it was the only time that a set designer was known to have inadvertently and suicidally wrecked a theatre and flattened sections of his audience. It was notorious also because of claims that appeared in certain reports of the cataclysm. Several reliable witnesses recalled that just before the end of the second act they had detected a stench somewhere between rotten metal and rusty meat. Others had felt an icy draught lunge through the theatre. And one (not very reliable) marquis insisted to friends that, as he fled, he had seen grey tentacles as thick as Doric columns slithering moistly out from behind the proscenium arch. Rumours began that — well, that an aforementioned German idiom was more literally applicable here than any post-Enlightenment historian would be willing to credit. Before his death, Lavicini had, after all, been nicknamed ‘the Sorceror’.

  Whatever the truth, that was Lavicini’s Teleportation Accident. As for Loeser’s Teleportation Accident, that wasn’t nearly so bad. Nobody died. The Allien Theatre was not rended apart. Klugweil just dislocated a couple of arms.