The Seventh Candidate (21 page)

He opened the second log, took off his
glasses and placed his face inches from the first of the
fifty-eight photographs of his candidate. They were pasted side by
side and carefully dated. In theory they should have furnished
objective proof of the transformation of the boy’s face, like a
speeded-up film-sequence of a bud opening to flower.

The problem was they’d been taken in the
worst of circumstances, technically speaking. In the hospital park
with his candidate, he found for some reason that he couldn’t take
the camera out of his briefcase and lift it to his eye. People were
constantly passing by. Or looking down at them from the glass-cliff
of New Hospital. He couldn’t. It was a foolish feeling but
unconquerable.

So Lorz started taking the clandestine
snapshots, clicking blind from his lap. They were invariably poorly
centered, sometimes featuring shrubbery to the total exclusion of
his candidate when they didn’t behead him. Often as not they were
blurred because of miscalculation of distance. In the boy’s room
they were alone and the director could use the range finder. But
nearly always the available light was insufficient and the
shutter-speed too slow for the hand-held camera. Blurs again. He
could hardly lug in a tripod. The solution would have been
flash-shots. But he feared the effect of explosive light on his
candidate.

The picture taking had come to an abrupt end
on December 8, the event duly noted.

That Wednesday afternoon in his candidate’s
room he’d tried to stabilize the camera on the arm of a chair to
compensate for the low shutter speed. The boy was drawing at his
table. “Theodore, look!” he said. His candidate looked up. Lorz
pushed the shutter release and the room exploded. He was blinded
and paralyzed by the blue dazzle. Finally he was able to cry out,
“Theodore! Theodore!”

A nurse passing by in the corridor had heard
his outcry. Imprinted on his retina, light and dark inverted like a
photographic negative, the sun-burst and his seated candidate
persisted, while against this static red backdrop the nurse and his
candidate moved spectrally, approaching his chair. Both of them
were now standing by his chair, looking down at him.

He’s all right, I’m all right, he thought
and then: it’s another breakthrough, he cares, he’s come to me. The
nurse asked him if he was all right, what had happened? His
candidate had taken the camera and was inspecting it to the total
exclusion of anything else. The director pulled himself together
and removed his glasses. He was weeping from the glare. He spoke of
a defective flashcube that had spontaneously exploded.

The obvious explanation – that he must have
accidentally touched the flash-button while fumbling with the
camera-controls – hadn’t at first occurred to him because, perhaps,
of the violence of the light. The wall behind his candidate
couldn’t have reflected the light with such force. It was as though
he himself had received the exploding flash bulb full in the
face.

When the film was developed he understood
what had happened. The bathroom door behind his candidate had been
left half open. The mirror above the washbasin had hurled back the
sunburst into the lens and his eyes. By some quirk of optics the
bottom of the mirror had been spared along with a tiny fatigued
middle-aged face at the bottom of that mirror, unspeakably ugly.
After a few seconds he recognized it as his own face. All the rest
of the photo was an explosion of light that obliterated his
candidate. He tore up the photo and flushed it down the toilet.

His assistant too experimented. Lorz turned
the pages of his log to November 17 and her story about Teddy and
the atlas. She’d begun the experiment a week before. The way it had
ended was a source of keen disappointment for her and secret
satisfaction for the director. She couldn’t possibly suspect
why.

She’d shown Teddy her old school atlas. The
binding was now in tatters, the pages dog-eared, torn and
ink-stained. Her theory was that he must be a foreigner if no trace
of family, friends or acquaintances could be found here. Seated
alongside the boy she’d systematically introduced country after
country, alert for an expression of recognition on his face. At
first he’d shown complete indifference as she slowly leafed through
the book, reciting the names of the lands.

Then he’d stared hard at one particular
badly torn page, mainly ocean, and prevented her from turning the
page over. Hours after, her wrist still hurt from his grip, she
said. He bent closer over the page and went on staring but
responded to none of her questions. Still, she considered it an
encouraging sign. And he’d refused to give her back the book when,
on leaving, she wanted to put it away with the others in the
closet. She’d felt joy at this sign of continued interest.

All week long she’d tried to convince
herself that the land of his birth was somewhere on that torn page
with its blue vastness sprinkled with archipelagos of inkblots and
islands. But how could he be a citizen of coral islets, once
cannibal?

When she returned to Room 343 the following
Saturday, the book was lying on the table. She opened it and saw
that he’d skillfully mended the torn page with fine slivers of
scotch-tape. The black inkblots had been obliterated, the ones on
the sea with blue paint, the ones in the margins with white
ink-effacer.

For her it was a defeat. Her experiment
overlapped with his own, startlingly successful, which she wasn’t
aware of. He hadn’t spoken to anybody about it. The comment in red
ink at the bottom of the page devoted to her attempt referred him
to that experiment, to November 11.

That day he’d found Theodore in his room
leafing through a copy of a newsmagazine which he must have picked
up somewhere in the hospital. Normally Lorz avoided such
periodicals just as he avoided television. Both were magnifying
mirrors to the world as it had become. But the idea occurred to him
that the photographs in the magazine might possibly offer the boy
something to respond to, provide a link with the past. Maybe a
woman who’d remind him of his mother. Or a house like his own lost
one. There must be innocent photos somewhere in the magazine. Not
all of the houses could be the sites of mass murders, not all of
the middle-aged women serial poisoners.

His candidate responded to none of the
houses or middle-aged women. But the director made a fundamental
discovery, flipping over those slick, horror-filled pages. They
allowed him to communicate with his candidate. Certain photos,
naturally, couldn’t be commented on. Could hardly be even glanced
at.

Example, page 126 with the cinema-starlet
giving birth before TV and magazine cameras with her pigtailed
“friend” grinning in the background in his sun-glasses and
pineappled sport shirt opened to the navel on hairiness and she too
grinning at the lens in her impeccable makeup and hairdo, despite
what was going on below. Could hardly be thought of.

The next hastily turned page featured the
trial of the State (ex-Royal) Museum vandals. Unexpectedly it
provided the opening.

One of the accompanying photos showed the
youths being hustled into a police van. The husky one with the
shaved skull was making an obscene gesture with his middle finger
at the lens, the thin one the V of victory for what they’d
accomplished with the priceless Flemish primitive, reproduced
before and after. Even after the fuel oil and excrement one could
make out the perfect oval purity of the Virgin’s face contemplating
the babe (wise and sad as though foreseeing his fate at barbarous
hands five hundred years later). Both were haloed. Blotted out was
the white doe in the background standing in a clearing with
star-like flowers.

Since it wasn’t sure that Theodore
understood the text, nothing was more normal than that the director
should read it aloud and comment on it, as anybody would have done,
even to a stranger. What could be more normal than this spontaneous
reaction to blatant abnormality? He could almost feel, physically,
the boy’s dark blue gaze fixed on his lips as he asked the
rhetorical question: why did they do it? Why do they do it?
Millions of normal scandalized readers must have asked that
question. The vandals’ sense of their own insignificance before the
eternity of art? he hazarded. The duo had been sentenced to three
months imprisonment (in private carpeted cells with hot and cold
running water and TV, he guessed. They were somehow victims, after
all).

The director couldn’t help thinking of the
Integral Iconoclasts, the lopped chin of the black Christ and what
it had cost the desecrators. He mentioned this to the boy. If you
could only see that painting as it once was, he said. But you know
it. You were an artist yourself. Weren’t you? An artist? Maybe one
day we’ll both go there and look at it again. If they’re ever able
to repair the damage. And provided the others don’t set fire to the
museum first. Not just museums and the Virgin, cemeteries as well,
the innocent dead as well.

What could be more natural in such a context
than to attach private experience to the public event? With great
but controlled emotion the director told the boy about the tombs of
his parents which had undergone similar indignity, the smashed
stone of the other man’s wife. The violated coffin and what
followed was too terrible to tell but he did repeat what the other
man had said: slow fire too good for them.

His candidate listened gravely, staring at
Lorz. Surely he understood what he was saying. Hadn’t they both
been victims of disorder too, that fateful March morning? The
director turned over page after page of chaos. Even his indignation
at what was happening to the advertising posters could receive
expression. A good many of the underground posters were reproduced
in the magazine.

He turned over the next page (129). It was
like a door opening on grace, shutting out disorder. She was there,
full-paged and in color, the exquisite long-necked girl, with the
perfect oval purity of her face not unlike the Virgin on page 128
(if one could imagine the Mother of God in a sailor suit holding a
pistachio ice-cream cone). She was there before them as at their
beginning and end almost a year ago. They both looked at it for a
long time in silence. Lorz felt the tears coming. He did nothing to
hide them.

Leaving the hospital, he felt dizzy and
fatigued but disburdened. That night and the six nights that
followed he slept deeply without dreams.

One day, the November 14 (it was all down
there in the log, painstakingly detailed), his candidate perceived
a coffee stain in the margin of one of the pages. He attempted to
efface it with his finger, then with the rubber. After a minute of
this, Lorz tried to go on, turning the pages. But the boy clumsily
turned the pages back to the stain, ripping them in the process. He
resumed his useless rubbing, breath coming fast, a symptom that by
then Lorz recognized as the beginning of agitation.

“Wait,” he said, wanting to touch the boy’s
shoulder therapeutically, but not daring to. “I’ll be back in a
second.” He left the room. Part of the motive, he later recognized,
may have been fear at what the boy’s agitation might culminate in
again.

He went over to the nurses’ office and
borrowed white ink-effacer. He returned to the room, stood in the
doorway, saw that things hadn’t worsened, entered and showed his
candidate the tiny bottle. The scene seemed familiar to him. He
smiled, wanting to relieve the tension.

“Basic White,” he joked.

That was another revelation. He could joke
with his candidate. “Basic White,” he repeated. Then his mood
became intensely serious. It was as if they were both together
again in the subterranean room during the lesson before everything
came to an end. But alone now, the other six candidates eliminated.
Eliminated like the stain. He dipped the brush in the narrow neck
and deftly obliterated it.

Wasn’t that an expression of marvel in the
boy’s face? Like a child marveling at a magician? He was achieving
contact, dialogue almost, not through words but through images.

There was a fat politician on the page. Lorz
pointed at him and explained his long career of lies and betrayals.
Look, Theodore, he said, obliterating the grafty face with an
expert circular movement. The body had a full moon topping the
shoulders now in the place of a visage. The fat demagogue looked
better that way.

The boy took the bottle and turned over the
page. Full-paged, a man and a woman stood holding hands in profile,
eye-locked and enraptured for a Swiss watch. Personally the
director had no quarrel with the image. He would have spared the
couple. But the boy transformed their faces into full moons. He
turned over more pages and eradicated more faces as the director
had done.

He looked up at Lorz, as though for
approval. He received it. Also, as a material reward, the slices of
raw peppered meat he relished. The director ate one of them too.
For the first time they were meshing (the director pictured the
cogs and the pulsing mainspring of the recent watch-works). Their
contact had never been so intimate.

“We are Censors, Theodore,” he said as a
joke with prim pinched lips, pronouncing the capital C by means of
a theatrical tremolo. Their intimacy was such that he could joke
with him.

Lorz dipped the brush into the ink-effacer
and warred on the most outrageous of the advertisements,
distributing white rectangles strategically. Again his candidate
imitated him, went perhaps too far. He started rectifying a perfume
advertisement, abolishing the plum-colored nipples of the vaporous
soft-focus denuded torso, actually in perfect taste. “I think we
can spare her, it’s not pornography but art,” Lorz observed.
“Pornography is always sharp-focused.” But his candidate paid no
attention to his words.