Read Online The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman - Free Book Online
Authors: Ned Beauman
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fantastic.’ At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. ‘And it makes Wagner sound really good.’
‘I’m sorry to be obtuse,’ said Loeser, ‘but has everyone gone insane? I take coke because it’s fun. I take coke because it makes me feel confident and talkative and full of energy, or at least it used to, when it wasn’t mostly brick dust. If I want to feel as if I’m being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.’
‘Well, anyway, the story is that Brogmann once took so much that he blacked out and then woke up in a stables surrounded by actual horses. Explain that.’
After interrogating several other people at the party, Loeser concluded that he was the last person in Germany to have heard of ketamine. But nobody offered him any. And after that episode, as the months passed, fashionable Berlin nightlife distorted into an unrecognisable parody. Nobody seemed to laugh or dance or kiss any more, they just lay around slurring and drooling, vanquished until morning. Certainly, most of his worthwhile friends didn’t bother with ketamine – why would they, when they still remembered what proper drugs were like? But they were twenty-five or twenty-six now. And it was the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who had all the clout. For the first time in his life Loeser had a sense of what the early days of Expressionism must have felt like to the prior generation of Realists. Not only did he almost begin to miss the exhausting and obnoxious conversations he used to have with people who were inconsiderate enough to have done more coke than him, he also almost began to envy Achleitner, off in the mountains with his new Nazi friends, far away from all this tranquilliser nonsense that had a real chance of ruining what was otherwise quite a promising decade.
The triumph of ketamine had coincided with the triumph of another dark horse, to use an unfortunate phrase – a certain pretty girl called Adele Hitler, who was now among the first rank of those all-too-influential foals and fillies. At that first party in Puppenberg, she’d been a novelty item, but by the end of 1931 she was getting more invitations than Brecht, and it wasn’t hard to see why: she could be relied upon to look stunning, she could be relied upon to get entertainingly drunk, and above all she could be relied upon to fuck someone worth gossiping about. Rackenham was just the beginning. When you heard about who Adele Hitler had gone to bed with after a particular party, it was like reading the solution to a really elegant murder mystery: you’d never for a moment suspected that it might be x , but now that you’d found out it really was x , you realised that it could never have been anybody other than x . She fucked Brecht because everybody did, she fucked Brogmann because nobody did; she fucked Littau because he was queer, she fucked Hannah Czenowitz because she was straight; she fucked Hecht because he had a girlfriend, she fucked Klein because he was known to be impotent; she fucked clarinet-playing Negroes and one-legged war veterans, drug dealers and ambassadors’ sons. And this was Adele Hitler’s legend: that in two years of astonishing promiscuity, she hadn’t ever fucked anyone more than once, and she hadn’t ever fucked anyone who could not, in one way or another, be considered a little bit of a coup.
There was something about beautiful, sexually prolific women that made Loeser feel as if his soul were being pelted with sharp flints. If they were being sexually prolific with him, then of course it was fine. But with anyone else it was agony. He couldn’t stop thinking about that occult moment of surrender, that critical turn when all their softnesses were redispersed, when their limbic electorate voted in some new and unfamiliar tyrant. How did it happen? Did those girls really enjoy these fleeting encounters with men they barely knew? There
‘I’m sorry to be obtuse,’ said Loeser, ‘but has everyone gone insane? I take coke because it’s fun. I take coke because it makes me feel confident and talkative and full of energy, or at least it used to, when it wasn’t mostly brick dust. If I want to feel as if I’m being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.’
‘Well, anyway, the story is that Brogmann once took so much that he blacked out and then woke up in a stables surrounded by actual horses. Explain that.’
After interrogating several other people at the party, Loeser concluded that he was the last person in Germany to have heard of ketamine. But nobody offered him any. And after that episode, as the months passed, fashionable Berlin nightlife distorted into an unrecognisable parody. Nobody seemed to laugh or dance or kiss any more, they just lay around slurring and drooling, vanquished until morning. Certainly, most of his worthwhile friends didn’t bother with ketamine – why would they, when they still remembered what proper drugs were like? But they were twenty-five or twenty-six now. And it was the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who had all the clout. For the first time in his life Loeser had a sense of what the early days of Expressionism must have felt like to the prior generation of Realists. Not only did he almost begin to miss the exhausting and obnoxious conversations he used to have with people who were inconsiderate enough to have done more coke than him, he also almost began to envy Achleitner, off in the mountains with his new Nazi friends, far away from all this tranquilliser nonsense that had a real chance of ruining what was otherwise quite a promising decade.
The triumph of ketamine had coincided with the triumph of another dark horse, to use an unfortunate phrase – a certain pretty girl called Adele Hitler, who was now among the first rank of those all-too-influential foals and fillies. At that first party in Puppenberg, she’d been a novelty item, but by the end of 1931 she was getting more invitations than Brecht, and it wasn’t hard to see why: she could be relied upon to look stunning, she could be relied upon to get entertainingly drunk, and above all she could be relied upon to fuck someone worth gossiping about. Rackenham was just the beginning. When you heard about who Adele Hitler had gone to bed with after a particular party, it was like reading the solution to a really elegant murder mystery: you’d never for a moment suspected that it might be x , but now that you’d found out it really was x , you realised that it could never have been anybody other than x . She fucked Brecht because everybody did, she fucked Brogmann because nobody did; she fucked Littau because he was queer, she fucked Hannah Czenowitz because she was straight; she fucked Hecht because he had a girlfriend, she fucked Klein because he was known to be impotent; she fucked clarinet-playing Negroes and one-legged war veterans, drug dealers and ambassadors’ sons. And this was Adele Hitler’s legend: that in two years of astonishing promiscuity, she hadn’t ever fucked anyone more than once, and she hadn’t ever fucked anyone who could not, in one way or another, be considered a little bit of a coup.
There was something about beautiful, sexually prolific women that made Loeser feel as if his soul were being pelted with sharp flints. If they were being sexually prolific with him, then of course it was fine. But with anyone else it was agony. He couldn’t stop thinking about that occult moment of surrender, that critical turn when all their softnesses were redispersed, when their limbic electorate voted in some new and unfamiliar tyrant. How did it happen? Did those girls really enjoy these fleeting encounters with men they barely knew? There
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