Free The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman Page A

able to understand was how Achleitner didn’t get bored. With the exception of a few tolerable communists like Hecht who had the good sense not to bring up Marx every five seconds, any fee-paying member of a political party was certain to be petrifyingly dull. Even a castle full of stamp collectors or football supporters would be better because at least they wouldn’t be so self-righteous all the time. But Achleitner insisted that he hadn’t heard one word about politics since he arrived in Spunk Olympus. ‘Lots about diet and exercise and sunbathing and lots about the lost holy city of Agartha and lots of very tired Jewish jokes, but nothing on Versailles or unemployment or electoral reform, thank goodness. We get the papers delivered but nobody reads them.’
    Loeser, like most people, had from the age of fourteen regularly concluded that he didn’t have any real friends in the world, and like all fatuous melancholic generalisations this was wonderfully comforting because it so drained the lake of one’s responsibilities. But to realise that it might actually be true was a different matter. For a few weeks, Loeser had tried to persuade Achleitner to come back to Berlin, but he knew it was no use. No one would give up paradise for a Berlin of ketamine and coloured string. And without Achleitner, who was left? Yes, if Loeser went to a party, there were always dozens of basically interchangeable people with whom he could have a drunken good time. But if he woke up the next morning in need of a companion for a rueful breakfast, there was almost nobody he could telephone. These days, the individual he saw most often was probably Klugweil. Not long after the Teleportation Accident, Blumstein had shamed his two collaborators into apologising to each other so that they could get back to work on Lavicini , and in fact they now got on better than they had before their rift. Loeser had even started to confide in Klugweil about his loneliness, going so far as to ask whether Klugweil thought it was a sign of hermitical derangement that one afternoon he had absent-mindedly said ‘Thank you’ out loud to a chewing-gum machine on a U-bahn platform. But the actor, who had finally come to his senses about dull Gretel the previous summer, never seemed to answer the telephone any more, so one could only assume he’d found some new girl he didn’t want to tell anyone about. The result was that Loeser might actually have to resort to – but, no, the thought was too terrible. He’d just have breakfast at home.
    Except that, upon further inspection of his kitchen, it appeared that he had eaten all the food in the flat when he got home from the party last night. In fact, a few minutes’ forensic reconstruction seemed to suggest that he had attempted to make jam doughnuts from scratch, using mostly raw cabbage and angostura bitters. Indeed, since the results were gone, there was no reason to suppose he hadn’t succeeded. If only he’d kept some record of the experiment.
    So he would have to go out after all. And he would either have to go out on his own, or he would have to call Ziesel. He knew Ziesel would be free. Ziesel was always free. In Berlin there were typhoid bacteria more socially in demand than Ziesel.
    He cast around his flat for some means of putting off this horror. On his desk were a dirty wineglass, an unpaid tailor’s bill, a few notes for Lavicini, Berlin Alexanderplatz with its bookmark at page 202 and an attempted letter to his great aunt in Cologne, which so far stood at two sentences in length. All of them looked back at him imploringly.
    He called Ziesel.
    ‘Hello?’ In the background there was some chatter.
    ‘Dieter. It’s Egon. Have breakfast with me at the Romanisches.’
    ‘I can’t.’
    ‘See you in about twenty minutes.’
    ‘Egon, I can’t.’
    ‘If you get there before me, order the double ham and eggs.’
    ‘I’m very sorry, Egon, but I just can’t join you. I’m already in the middle of