by Ned Beauman
‘You sound as if you positively long for his life to be a catastrophe.’
‘No, I don’t, I’ve got nothing against him, I just mean that there are some people for whom things must always go wrong, or the universe isn’t working properly. Ziesel is one of those. You can tell as soon as you meet him. So unless he’s got some other disturbing secret, he must be the Monster of CalTech.’
‘But, Egon, everyone knows it was Slate.’
‘Just because of his two-dimensional face and his speech impediment?’
‘No. He murdered all those dogs. There was never proof, quite, but everyone knew it was him. And they were found in just the same way — chests torn open, hearts missing.’
‘Jesus Christ, Marsh’s heart was missing?’
‘Yes. Slate has no alibi. And I know better than anyone, because I’m always here at night, and Slate’s always here too. He’s not cleaning. He’s just stalking around. He’s not even supposed to work after six, but I’ve seen him here at two in the morning. He tries to hide from me sometimes.’
‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘No. It sounds absurd, but the way he looks at me — I can just tell he wouldn’t hurt me. He might hurt anyone else, but he wouldn’t hurt me. I’m sure of it.’
‘I saw Dr Clarendon in the basement.’
‘Yes, he often works late too. I can’t understand why he’s not more afraid, after this morning — alone down there in the dark.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Egon, I need to take some more readings. You should go home. You’re not safe here either.’
‘Has Ziesel gone home?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we’re both safe. Don’t be silly. It can’t be Slate. That would be too obvious. I’m definitely not going home yet. What is it? What are you looking at?’ Loeser turned, and then let out the sort of noise a Pomeranian makes when you tread on its tail. Standing there in the doorway of room 11 was Slate himself, who for some reason gave a long, slow shake of the head and then hobbled on down the corridor and out of sight.
‘I think I might go home after all,’ said Loeser hoarsely. He waved goodbye to Adele, hurried out of the Obediah Laboratories, and sprinted to his bike.
As he cycled back down Del Mar Boulevard, he thought about Bailey’s Teleportation Device. Could it really run on love, as Adele claimed? He found the idea insipid. Loeser himself hadn’t been ‘in love’ since he was at university, and he’d long since forgotten what it felt like; the notion was as abstract to him now as it had been when he was a child. But desire was another matter. It was desire, not love, that had uprooted Loeser, that had brought him all the way to California. Desire, he believed, could uproot almost anything. Adele had probably just confused the two, as people did. But if the Teleportation Device ran on desire, then that implied that Adele felt some tremendous voltage of lust for wobbly old Professor Bailey. And that was just as implausible. Still, if she really did, did that mean he’d got to her too late? Something leaden settled in his stomach at the thought. What use was Dames! And how to Lay them now? Perhaps, as they said in English, ‘that ship had sailed’. Or perhaps, with Adele, the ship had never even docked. Perhaps there was no ship. Perhaps there was no harbour. Perhaps there was no sea.
China City
At the corner of Ord and Spring a huge iron gate led to a winding street calling itself Dragon Road. Past the gate, every roof had a pagoda, every surface was painted red or gold, and every nail held up at least one long string of paper lanterns or silk flags. Men in conical straw hats pulled rickshaws back and forth, shouting for business.
‘What is this?’ said Loeser as he stepped down from the bus.
‘China City,’ said Blimk. ‘It just opened and I been wanting to see it.’
Last night, after he got home, Loeser hadn’t been able to sleep. Marsh’s disheartened corpse had jigged in his mind with Slate hunched in the doorway, so that he found himself almost wishing for the familiar scuffling of his ghost over his head. So that morning — having tossed and turned for so long that his sheets had cycled through every possible permutation of rumple and were somehow actually neater when he got out of bed than when he got in — he dressed, abolished a pot of coffee, and took an early streetcar to Blimk’s shop. By the time he arrived, a plumber was already at work on a leaky pipe next to Blimk’s desk, and he was making too much noise for either of them to concentrate on their reading, so they decided to close the shop for a few hours and take a bus downtown. Blimk did have a car, but he was considerate about Loeser’s transport anxiety.
One of the consequences of Harry Chandler using the influence of the LA Times to make sure Union Station was built at the Plaza, Blimk now explained, was that the old Chinatown with its brothels and opium dens had been demolished in 1933 to make way for it, and for five years now the Chinese population of Los Angeles had not had anywhere in particular to live. But now there were two neighbourhoods competing for their favour: China City, built by a wealthy San Francisco socialite (and friend of Harry Chandler) called Christine Sterling who’d already converted nearby Olvera Street into a ‘Mexican’ tourist attraction, and New Chinatown, a few blocks north-east, built by a businessman called Peter Hoo Soo who was President of the Chinese American Assocation. Sterling’s development was a good deal more ornate: she’d leased studio props from Cecil B. DeMille and she’d had the town hall decorated by a set designer called Wurtzel to look like a Chinese pirate junk.
‘I knew him in Berlin!’ said Loeser.
‘He works on a lot of Goatloft’s movies now,’ said Blimk.
‘But I can’t actually see any Chinese people here. Except waiters and rickshaw drivers.’
‘Would you live here, if you were a Chink?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
At the Muttons’ parties, the most recent Jewish arrivals always complained about how first they’d been dismissed from their jobs and then they’d been forced out of their homeland. They said it had broken their hearts, and they claimed to miss every little thing about Berlin. Loeser now imagined stuffing them all into Germany City: a square mile of freshly painted beer halls and art galleries and cabarets, with its own miniature Potsdamer Platz and and its own miniature Romanisches Café and even its own miniature Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland (which like the real one would have its own USA-themed bar, which would have its own Los Angeles, which would have its own Germany City, and so on ad infinitum). They’d probably like it better than Pacific Palisades. Christine Sterling’s China City, he saw, was as if Paris had been rebuilt by a set designer who’d only heard about it from Herbert Wolf Scramsfield and The Sorceror of Venice; and yet it still didn’t feel any more obviously artificial than the rest of Los Angeles, even though Los Angeles wasn’t imitating anything except itself. A man with a gentle case of Gorge’s agnosia could walk down Dragon Road and believe he was really in Peking. What if that literalist walked down Sunset Boulevard? Would he understand this cosmopolis better than anyone, or would he be trapped in a recursion? When Loeser heard the exiles whine, he sometimes thought to himself that he, too, had been dismissed from his vocation and forced out of his homeland. His vocation was sex. His homeland was the female body. He felt just as lost as they did, but no one was ever sympathetic. And as he turned left down Lotus Road with Blimk, it occurred to him that China City was to China exactly as Midnight at the Nursing Academy was to a living, breathing girlfriend. The simulation might seem laughable at first, but perhaps after seven years away from home, an immigrant from Guangdong would come here and weep with guilty relief, because it was the nearest thing he had left to what he remembered. They passed a restaurant that advertised its chef as knowing ‘100 Different Ways to Fix a Chicken’ (but did not explain how the chicken was faulty), and Loeser said to Blimk that they should stop for chop suey because he’d never had it before. Blimk told him that chop suey didn’t even exist in China. And Loeser decided that Chinese food invented by Americans was exactly what he wanted to eat that morning.
�
�Couple of fellas came into the store yesterday,’ said Blimk after they’d sat down and ordered. Loeser had nearly asked for a starter of turtle soup but then he had thought of Urashima Taro. ‘Wanted to know what rent I paid, how long I’d been there. Asked them who they were and they said they were from the Traffic Commission, just wanted to check some facts. Can’t see what my rent’s got to do with the traffic. Didn’t know better, I’d be worried about Eminent Domain.’
‘What’s the Eminent Domain?’ said Loeser. It sounded like an old-fashioned euphemism for the afterlife.
‘When the government buys your property out from under you without asking, for a highway or a railroad or something. That’s how they got the Chinks out of Chinatown to build Union Station. I ever lost my store like that, think I’d just go back to Brooklyn and live with my sister. Not even worth relocating, amount I make. Can’t be Eminent Domain, though. I’m up in north Hollywood, and they already got a Union Station. Asked my landlord and he doesn’t know shit about it. Probably just want to put a tax on parking or something.’
‘Probably,’ said Loeser. And it wasn’t until their bowls of chop suey arrived, and Loeser unfolded his napkin on his lap, that he noticed the dragon embroidered on it in black thread, and was reminded by its shape of the map that Plumridge had drawn on one of Gorge’s napkins at that dinner in 1934: the network of elevated streetcar lines conjoining in Hollywood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Kings Road. He hadn’t heard anything of the plan since, and he’d assumed it had come to nothing. But just then, for the first time, he realised that Plumridge’s proposed terminal would occupy the very same block as Blimk’s bookshop.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Blimk. ‘Ain’t hungry now you’ve seen the food up close?’
The Gorge House
Gorge’s cigar gave off a smell like a village being razed by retreating infantry. ‘Sit down, Krauto,’ he said. ‘Got to CalTech?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘It seems that …’ The sentence was so absurd that Loeser almost couldn’t finish it. ‘It seems that Professor Bailey is trying to build a teleportation device.’
Gorge waved his hand impatiently. ‘Know that. Known that since thirty-six.’
‘Then why did you send me?’
‘Want to know if the fucking thing works, of course.’
‘Why?’ said Loeser. And then all at once it seemed obvious. ‘You think that if Bailey completes his Teleportation Device, it will replace the car. You want to destroy Bailey because you think Bailey will destroy your car polish business.’
‘Destroy Bailey? Never heard such horseshit! Say Bailey’s Teleport Gizmo is real. Say I destroy him. Next year, have to do the same thing to some other son of a bitch. Next year, dozen more. Invented one place, soon be invented everywhere — general rule. Can’t do a fucking thing about it.’
‘But what about your car polish business?’
‘1948: Teleport Gizmo in every house. Millions of ’em, all over the country. Think people won’t want their Teleport Gizmo shiny? Think people won’t want to buff ’em up every day? Sell just as many tins as before. Won’t cost me a dollar, the Teleport Gizmo.’
‘So you want to know if Bailey’s Teleportation Device is real’ — another sentence, this, that jammed its elbows in the doorframe until it could be dragged outside — ‘so that you can pre-emptively corner the market in teleportation device polish?’
‘Woodkin: mongoloid?’
‘On the contrary, sir, I believe Mr Loeser is of above average intelligence,’ said Woodkin.
‘Hard to believe. Listen here, Krauto. Remember Plumridge?’
‘Yes. He wanted to build an elevated streetcar network,’ said Loeser.
‘Can’t have it. Tell him, Woodkin.’
‘Colonel Gorge believes there are two reasons why an elevated streetcar network would be undesirable for Los Angeles,’ said Woodkin. ‘The first is that mass transit of any kind tends to promote authoritarian socialist leanings in its users, whereas drivers of automobiles tend to be committed free market capitalists. New York’s subway, which carries more passengers than all the other heavy rail systems in America combined, is only one example of how ubiquitous mass transit can pervert a city’s political tendencies. The Marxian uprising in this country, if it ever comes, will begin on a crowded commuter carriage. The second reason is that Colonel Gorge believes the wars of the future will be fought with weapons so mighty that at present we can hardly imagine them. Think of a bomb so big it could vaporise a whole town, perhaps by harnessing cosmic rays, or some other new spark from Vulcan’s forge. Drop that bomb in the centre of New York, and you would kill millions. Drop that bomb in the “centre” of Los Angeles, and you might only kill a few thousand. In any given urban area, high-capacity mass transit promotes concentration. Automobiles promote dispersion. If America is to win its next war, perhaps against Russia or China, without being crippled by a single surprise attack against its civilian population, it must spread its urban areas out as evenly as it can. Mr Plumridge may only be an Assistant Public Utility Liaison at the Traffic Commission, but that title belies his true significance. He has some very powerful interests behind him.’
‘If you hate his plan so much, why did you invite him to dinner?’ said Loeser.
‘Friends close, enemies so close you can see right down their throats,’ replied Gorge. ‘Saying goes.’
‘And what’s Bailey got to do with Plumridge?’
‘Teleport Gizmo works, no need for streetcars. Redundant. Bad for Plumridge, bad for Reds, good for America. Teleport Gizmo doesn’t work, have to save Los Angeles myself. No choice. But can’t just have Plumridge stomped. Same principle as Bailey: queue of other bastards behind him. Spend every cent I had, thought it would help, but no use with this kind of government horseshit. Delay it, best I can do. Piece of cake if I owned a newspaper, but don’t, and Harry Chandler hates my guts. Have to go straight to Norman Clowne.’
‘The Secretary of the Traffic Commission,’ interjected Woodkin.
‘Only bureaucrat powerful enough to sink these fucking streetcars for good. Says he’ll do it, Clowne. But wants my girl.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.
‘Wants to marry my daughter. Doesn’t deserve her. No other way, though.’
‘You’re going to hand over your daughter to Clowne in exchange for him sabotaging Plumridge’s elevated streetcar plan?’
‘Duty as a patriot,’ said Gorge. ‘Doesn’t mean I have to like it. Why I need to know if Bailey’s a shyster or not. Teleport Gizmo’s real, can tell Clowne to fuck himself. Teleport Gizmo’s a flop, have to start sewing Mildred’s trousseau.’ He leaned forward. ‘So?’
A line came into Loeser’s head from Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Blimk’s favourite of the late author’s stories and the only one that had ever been published in its own bound edition instead of in a monthly magazine: ‘I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach.’ That, really, was what got the narrator into trouble in the first place. Still, Loeser knew that a new public transport system, like an orthopaedic brace to correct the city’s bad posture, was the only thing that was ever going to make Los Angeles a tolerable place to live. He should just tell Gorge what Adele had told him: the Teleportation Device worked. Whether or not it really did, it would mean Plumridge could go ahead with his plan, without Gorge bothering to defeat it through Clowne.
But that would also mean that Blimk, Loeser’s only real friend here, would lose his shop and probably move back to Brooklyn. The streetcars might make Los Angeles tolerable for every other Berliner, but they would make it intolerable for Loeser.
Plus, Plumridge had seemed like a total prick at that dinner.
‘Well, Krauto?’ barked Gorge.
‘I’m sorry but I don’t know yet,’ said Loeser. ‘I went to Bailey’s lab and I met him and I met his assistant. But I didn’t see any of his experiments myself. So it’s stil
l too early to say.’
Gorge leaned back. ‘Good. Hoped you’d say that. Don’t want you pretending you’re sure when you’re not. Come back when you’re absolutely fucking certain. Not one minute sooner. Daughter’s pussy at stake.’
The Loeser House
Clarendon began to unpack his heavy combination-lock briefcase full of phasmatometric apparatus. ‘Are your houseguest’s manifestations concentrated in any particular part of the residence?’ he said.
‘Not really,’ said Loeser, ‘although I mostly hear her in the bedroom.’
‘ “Her”?’
‘Oh, that’s a hunch of mine. Did you have any luck with Marsh last night?’
‘I haven’t yet made any precise kinetic measurements,’ said Clarendon, bending to plug part of his ghost hardware into the electrical socket by the door. ‘But the readings I took gave unmistakable signs of his presence.’
‘I’m still intrigued as to what the State Department has to do with your experiments. I shouldn’t think anyone can eavesdrop on us here. Well, except the spectre, of course.’
Clarendon looked up at him. ‘How fast is this house moving, Mr Loeser?’
Loeser glanced at the window and thought of the bungalow on Sunset Boulevard. ‘I’m not sure that it’s moving at all.’
‘Incorrect. Add together the rotation of the earth, the motion of the earth around the sun, the motion of the sun through our galaxy, the rotation of our galaxy, and the motion of our galaxy through the universe, and relative to a certain arbitrary framework this house is moving at nearly two million miles an hour, or five hundred miles a second. The reason we are not left behind in space is that fortunately we are all moving at the same speed. The most important gift your mother ever gave you was momentum. However, there can be no transfer of momentum between a fresh corpse and its affiliated ghost, otherwise all energy would eventually leak out of our plane of existence into the ghost’s plane of existence, which would in some novel sense violate the first law of thermodynamics. Therefore, in order to keep pace with the locus of its haunting, a ghost must have its own means of accelerating to two million miles an hour — and, indeed, maintaining that speed, if the substrate of the ghost’s plane is not frictionless — by drawing on some massive, perhaps infinite source of energy. My hope is that it will one day be possible to build a machine to trap this energy — something between a treadmill and a turbine, existing half on our plane and half on the ghost’s. The machine will exert friction on the ghost, but since the ghost cannot be slowed down, the ghost will continuously pass energy into the machine. Even if it is only possible to drain a tiny fraction of the ghost’s terajoules, I estimate that a few hundred ghosts would be enough to power the entire continental United States, leaving our annual production of oil, gas, and coal available to our armed forces, and our cities smogless. As you will no doubt already have noted, my calculations rely on the assumption that in the afterlife ghosts retain considerable mass. My evidence for this is that victims of decapitation carrying their own severed heads have been observed to complain about the weight.’