The Teleportation Accident Read Online Free PDF Page B

perfectly well that I’m better than everyone else around here, except maybe Drabsfarben,’ he had said to Achleitner. ‘But what if that makes no difference? I mean, girls don’t seem to care, so why should the rest of the world? If I achieve anything really important, I won’t mind about being unhappy, and if I did end up really happy, I suppose I could just about tolerate not achieving anything important. But what if I get neither? My whole life I’ve been so scornful of anyone who could make peace with failure, but what if I have to? Not everyone can get to the top. Someone’s got to be at the bottom. It could happen. Except I think I’d gnaw out my own spleen first.’
    ‘You’re never going to be at the bottom,’ Achleitner had said.
    ‘How can you know?’
    ‘Because of Dieter Ziesel.’
    ‘Who’s that?’
    Achleitner had pointed, and Loeser had looked over to see a fellow student with all the classical good looks and muscle definition of a shop-window dummy dipped in birthday-cake icing, who sat alone with a glass of beer. Ziesel was in their year at university, Achleitner explained, but almost nobody knew him. He was still a virgin because he had been too nervous ever to undress in front of a prostitute, and in fact he had never even kissed a girl. He vomited down his shirt whenever he had more than two drinks. He was miserably conscious of his flab jiggling up and down whenever he ran for the tram, which he often did because he was always late. Every weekend he took the train back to his parents’ house in Lemberg and all afternoon would cry into his mother’s lap while she cooed to him like a baby. He spent his evenings drawing maps of imaginary planets. ‘And he even plays the tuba! Isn’t that too perfect? So you’d think he’d be a mathematical genius, wouldn’t you? Specimens like him usually are. But he’s not. He does all right in his exams because he spends so many hours in the library without bothering to wash, but all his Professors say he lacks any real feeling for his subject.’
    ‘How do you know all this?’
    ‘He left his diary somewhere and somebody found it. The point is, however bad you may think your life is, you can be sure that Dieter Ziesel’s is worse. You’re never going to be at the bottom, because Dieter Ziesel is always going to be at the bottom. In mathematical terms, he is the n minus one.’
    ‘That may be the most gladdening thing I have ever heard,’ Loeser had said.
    ‘Yes. Dieter Ziesel is a gift to us all. I often feel that in some respects he is our Jesus.’
    In the years that followed, Loeser took strength thousands of times from the thought of Dieter Ziesel. At one point he considered commissioning a miniature portrait of Ziesel and keeping it in his wallet. When his great redeemer won a prestigious research fellowship it was a bit of a blow, but apparently a particular Professor had championed Ziesel’s cause to the selection committee, and that Professor was no doubt taking pity on the fellow, knowing that he would have no prospects in any other walk of life.
    What Loeser found especially hilarious was that Ziesel still refused to accept his role. When he heard about a party thrown by people he knew, he always turned up, even though it must have been clear that nobody wanted him there. He had recently bought a suit in the gross American style that was now fashionable among the middlebrow public – huge shoulders, slim legs, leather belt – as if everyone would suddenly change their opinion about him as soon as they had a chance to admire this up-to-date garb. And, most absurd of all, he maintained his abusive relationship with Heijenhoort. The two had been good friends at university, but at some point Ziesel must have realised that his skinny classmate was the one person he could bully who was certain not to bully him back. This was because Heijenhoort – also a bit like Jesus, but in a less useful way – was basically the nicest man in the