Free The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

stand it if I were unfaithful, but you’re also the sort of man I couldn’t help but be unfaithful to. You’re that type. You’re an apprentice cuckold.’
    An apprentice cuckold! Was he truly? As Loeser lay clammy in bed he couldn’t remember how the rest of the conversation had gone. What a joke on mankind, he thought, these random deposits of beauty, like random deposits of gold, an arbitrary and purposeless desideratum, the stipulation at the start of a philosopher’s or a mathematician’s tract – ‘Let x be what you want most in the world’; ‘Suppose y is worth killing for’ – that condemns all that follows to the status of ornamented tautology. And then he thought of what she’d look like if she were next to him now, a creature of blinking eyes and tangled hair, regrowing limbs with each yawn but still so slight that the shape of her body could hide among the rumples in the sheets. He went back to sleep and had a series of dreams in which he was drinking glass after glass of ice water but he never got any less thirsty, and then was woken up again at eleven by the usual shouts of ‘Jump!’ and ‘Stretch!’ and ‘Kick!’ This, at least, was worth getting up for, so he pried open his eyes like two stubborn oysters and then somehow got himself to the window. Diagonally across Kannerobertstrasse there was a big music box factory that had reopened after a period of bankruptcy, and three times a day the girls who worked there were all obliged to assemble on the roof for twenty minutes of productivity-boosting exercise. For Loeser, this cabaret was both a torture and a more wholesome alternative to Midnight at the Nursing Academy , and he rarely missed a performance. One day he planned to go down and wait outside the factory door at the end of a shift, begging for autographs.
    Afterwards, moving around his flat as if he’d been beaten by prison guards, he took mercy on his mouth under the kitchen tap and then opened the letter his landlady had delivered, which was indeed from Achleitner. Loeser hadn’t seen his best friend in nearly three months, ever since Achleitner had met a leonine fifty-two-year-old Nazi aristocrat called Buddensieg at an art exhibition and Buddensieg had taken Achleitner off to his castle in the Black Forest, where he apparently played host to a sort of never-ending homosexual jamboree. Achleitner, in his letters, raved about the food, the wine, the rooms, the countryside, and, above all, the boys. The Nazis, he had written in his latest, ‘are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal kinship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don’t assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology. Queers do it too, of course, but not so much, because we were all boys once ourselves, so boys aren’t mysterious to us in the same way that girls will always be mysterious to you, and we we can be a bit more sceptical. Or take any fairy tale – Cinderella must always be beautiful, and her sisters must always be ugly, even though the story would surely have a great deal more force if it were the other way round. All the Nazis have really done is make a cult out of this romantic faith in physical loveliness – there’s something almost touching about how childish it is. As aesthetes, they don’t even have the ruthlessness of a Gilbert Osmond. Anyway, the result is that there are more exquisite boys in this castle than there are in all of Berlin put together. I woke up this morning with three in my bed. I am absolutely drunk on it. Although I must remember not to neglect old Buddensieg or he might kick me out.’
    What Loeser hadn’t been