The Teleportation Accident Read Free Page B

darling. Don’t slip into the dark.’
    Even while drunk, Loeser immediately recognised these words. They were from an atrocious American melodrama called Scars of Desire that they had seen at the cinema on Ranekstrasse. Loeser had mocked the film all through dinner and all the way back to his flat, finding himself so funny that he thought he might write a satirical piece for some magazine or other, and confident of Marlene’s agreement, until finally he noticed her quietly sobbing, and she confessed that she had loved the film and felt it was ‘meant just for [her]’. He dropped the subject. Marlene went to Scars of Desire four more times, twice with female friends, twice alone. To summarise: late in the film, the male romantic lead has a moral convulsion about marrying the female romantic lead, who was previously engaged to his brother, who was killed in the war. He starts crying and knocking over furniture, and we realise that he is not really angry at his new fiancée, but at the pointless death of his brother. The female romantic lead coaxes him back to his senses by whispering, ‘Don’t slip into the dark, my darling. Don’t slip into the dark.’
    The problem wasn’t that Marlene was quoting from the film, although that would have been bad enough. The problem was that she said the line as if it had come not from any film but from deep in her own heart. She had internalised some lazy screenwriter’s lazy offering to the point where she was no longer even vaguely conscious of its commercial origins. Scars of Desire had been screwed into her personality like a plastic prosthesis.
    Naturally, he split up with her the next day.
    ‘So you’re trying to tell me that Marlene is herself a sort of avatar of the twentieth century,’ said Loeser, sipping his schnapps.
    ‘Yes,’ said Achleitner. ‘Because she nurses sentiments that have been sold to her as closely as she nurses sentiments of her own. Or perhaps even more closely. Like a magpie with discount cuckoo’s eggs. Did you ever bring her here?’
    ‘Once, remember. You were with us.’
    ‘Did she like it? I would have thought she’d be quite at home.’
    The jazz band concluded ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and trooped off stage, presumably ready to return to some sort of art deco hog ranch. ‘That is cruel,’ said Loeser. ‘You know she’ll probably be at the party tonight? Which is why I’m absolutely not going if we don’t get some coke.’
    ‘Egon, why is it that every single time you’re obliged to be in the same room with one of your ex-girlfriends you have to make it into a huge emergency? It’s incredibly boring.’
    ‘Come on. You know how it is. You catch sight of an old flame and you get this breathless animal prickle like a fox in a room with a hound. And then all night you have to seem carefree and successful and elated, which is a pretence that for some reason you feel no choice but to maintain even though you know they’re better qualified than anyone else in the world to detect immediately that you’re really still the same hapless cunt as ever.’
    ‘That’s adolescent. The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate and predictable that you have so few of them. It’s one of those elegant self-regulating systems that one so often finds in nature.’
    ‘I can’t lose this break-up. We’ve all seen what happens to the defeated.’
    ‘You didn’t even like her.’
    ‘I know. But at least she had sex with me. And it was really good. When am I ever going to have sex with anyone again? I mean, without paying. Honestly – when? Sometimes I wish I was queer like you. I’ve never seen you worry about all this. Upon how many lucky pilgrims have you bestowed your blessing this year?’
    ‘No idea. I gave up keeping count while I was still at school. Remind me what you’re on now?’
    ‘Five. Still. In my whole life. Not counting hookers. Sometimes when I walk down the street I look around at them