The Seventh Candidate (22 page)

Lorz had another idea. “Look.” Explaining
why, he eliminated another public face. He blew on the full moon
that advantageously replaced that face. The white ink crusted. With
the fine #3 ballpoint pen he drew eyes and a nose. “You draw the
mouth, Theodore. It could only be an improvement.”

It was a decisive moment. The boy did it.
His fingers had forgotten none of their skill: an exquisite mouth,
more feminine than masculine. In the space of five minutes they’d
adumbrated the three stages of image-correction of the next month
although Lorz didn’t realize this.

The following visit, as the log testified,
they remained within the limits of the first stage, simple
effacement of graffiti. The coffee-stain incident had given the
director the idea. Warring on disfigurement had been the boy’s last
activity before the explosion. Mightn’t resumption of that activity
pull him back to normality?

So he minutely prepared the magazine for the
visits, just as, nine months before, he’d disfigured Helena’s
loveliness twenty-one times in view of later rectification. Except
now the graffiti was ugliness on ugliness. He spent hours each
evening in the uncomfortable vertiginous role of defiler. This
disturbed the perfect sleep he’d been enjoying for a week, ever
since the start of the newsmagazine experiment.

More and more frequently he’d awaken in the
middle of the night, stare up toward the ceiling and then get up
and sit at his study desk alongside the cacti in the cone of light
and prepare more of the photographs.

Lorz often brought the magazine into the
office, as he’d done earlier with the Chinese puzzles and the
Schlechter and Moch volumes. He was careful to conceal his
activities from his assistant although sometimes this wasn’t
necessary since, during lulls, she’d often be plunged in her
pink-and-blue diary with the flowers and brass clasp. They’d sit
there, oblivious of one another, she sucking her pen and staring at
the wall for inspiration and then scribbling away, he thinking up
new graffiti for the photos. Then the phone would ring and, almost
guiltily, they’d conceal their activity and turn back to
business.

Once, he forgot to lock up the magazine in
his desk-drawer. When he returned to the office he found her
standing alongside his desk leafing through his magazine as he’d
done with hers months before. There were no intimate revelations in
his. Still, not knowing the motive for what he did, she must have
found his graffiti almost insane. Impassively, she closed the
magazine and returned to her desk.

Her silence was almost insulting. His
immediate impulse was to explain his particular therapeutic
approach. But he was offended at being placed on the defensive and
he said nothing. Shortly after that incident the director gave up
graffiti. He and his candidate had gone on to a new stage.

By then he realized that most of the
news-photos were already, in a sense, graffiti of the ideal, of
what a man or a woman or a landscape or a city should be like.
Those images contained their own distortion. For that reason the
director no longer spent long ambiguous hours marring what was
already essentially marred.

And this was just as well. His interventions
in the small hours of the night had multiplied. Often, he would nod
off in the office and open his eyes on his assistant’s intensely
serious stare which immediately shifted away. Later she’d sometimes
say in the flat ungracious tone she adopted when commenting on his
health: “You don’t look well at all,” and inquire if he was taking
the pills regularly and urge him to go to the hospital for a
check-up.

So now Lorz and his candidate rectified the
unaltered photographs. They systematically obliterated (with Basic
White now) what deserved to be obliterated, usually faces but also
elements of landscapes. At first Lorz guided his candidate,
justifying his choice with anecdotes drawn from his personal
experience.

Soon Theo proved he didn’t need guidance. He
eliminated the things Lorz himself would have himself eliminated.
It was true that the boy didn’t indulge in fine distinctions. He
reserved the same white fate to certain basically unobjectionable
images as he’d done to the soft-focused perfume-torso. But the
director regarded this excess of zeal as something minor.

That was the second stage of correction.

The third stage (which Lorz mistakenly
thought was the last) occurred in early December. Unlike the first
two it was fully creative and his log devoted long pages to it. The
two of them recreated the ideal on the obliterated real. It was an
extension of the initial operation weeks before: the exquisite
mouth on the full moon that had replaced the grafty face of the
politician. Now they did it systematically in intimate
collaboration.

He’d tell Theodore to blot out the cars in
the street-scene and then the pedestrians. “Wouldn’t trees be nice
in the middle of the street instead of the cars?” he’d ask his
candidate, thinking of the encyclopedia woodcut of the Third
District three centuries before: the charcoal-burner’s hut among
big leafy oaks with a stream and a deer drinking from it.

Silently as always, with a gravity that
verged on severity, the boy bent over the magazine and with
astonishing rapidity, one by one, the cars vanished in the
whiteness flowing from his brush. Then, one by one, trees appeared,
a forest where cars had been. The trees were red, but why not? The
whiteness engulfed the pedestrians too. They were replaced by more
red trees.

That had been December 5, almost two months
ago. Clearly connected with the magazine breakthrough was the
spectacular verbal breakthrough the following day.

Lorz finished the last drop of the
plum-alcohol. He set down the glass and turned over the pages.

The entry for that date, which he knew by
heart, was dramatically understated.

Dec 8. This morning learned
(D.R.) that Theodore spoke. A nurse heard him pronounce words. What
words? She (D.R.) doesn’t know.

A day later the director found out but at
first didn’t know what to make of the three words. Nobody did.

At the very moment (9:00pm January 29) that
the director reached the page that recorded those words, the alarm
clock next to the cactus plants summoned him to dinner.

After a quick cold meal the director went
into his bedroom and opened the closet. He mustered his suits and
ties for the best combination for tomorrow morning’s meeting with
Dr Silberman. Details counted. He stood there for a moment
rehearsing in his mind the alternate strategies for broaching the
proposal. The old doctor wouldn’t be able to veto it now.

He returned to his study and set the alarm
clock for 11:30pm. His mind had to be clear tomorrow.

Then he turned back to the second notebook,
opened on the revelation of his candidate’s first words.

***

2

Dec 9. Saw the nurse. She was alone in the
room with him when he opened his eyes and stared at her and spoke.
“Base” she says she understood. Then a long pause, she says. Then:
“It.” Then another long pause. Finally, she thinks, a question:
“Why?”

The words had gnawed at Lorz for days. He
grappled with them in the small hours of the night. He resorted to
metaphysical exegesis to make sense of them.
It
: perhaps the mysterious unnamable Something that
was at the
Base
of the
universe.
Why?
The
ultimate question, naturally. It sounded profound but did it make
sense?

In the third day of the enigma, while
brushing his teeth, the solution came to him in a flash. What the
boy had said, slurred, wasn’t “Base, it, why?” but of course “Basic
White”, the phrase that Lorz had half-jokingly employed at the
beginning of the magazine sessions.

Despite the loss of the metaphysical
dimension, he felt keen satisfaction at his solitary possession of
the true meaning of the boy’s first communication. Satisfaction
also that those first words were a repetition of what he, Lorz, had
pronounced. Not even his assistant had been able to make sense of
them.

But those two words weren’t followed by
others. No one heard the boy say anything else.

One day, marked by the season’s first snow
flurries, briefly whitening the park outside the window of Room
404, the director found the boy crouched over the previous week’s
issue. That had been December 14, the log reminded him.

Theodore had begun rectifying the world on
his own, with no need for guidance or prompts, page after page.
Little found grace before his brush. His corrections were radical,
sometimes disturbing. Why crab claws instead of hands here, why
flames instead of hair there? One full-page photograph was
completely effaced with Basic White. The worst of the photographs
had salvageable details that normally his brush spared. But not
here. And he’d drawn nothing on the void white surface. The
director wondered what had merited total obliteration and had
admitted no transformation.

Lorz grasped the full extent of Theodore’s
progress only when he learned that for two months now the boy had
been going outside regularly. The red asterisk before the entry for
December 16 communicated the incredible information. Most of
Teddy’s week-day activities now took place outside the hospital,
his assistant informed him. She’d struck up an acquaintanceship
with a Volunteer Worker who had told her all about it. The sad
middle-aged woman had confided that her own son had died in the
hospital at the age of nineteen three years before and now she did
this. She allowed Dorothea to accompany them at a safe distance in
order not to distract Teddy as they went shopping in a supermarket.
There was also that squat attendant behind them. Teddy had wandered
about with the shopping list and his cart like any other customer,
unhesitatingly choosing, weighing, queuing up, unloading his
purchases on the check-out belt, paying.

Lorz found it hard to imagine this radical
transformation of his candidate, pushing his trivial cart from
potatoes to tinned fruit salad after the miracles with puzzles,
pictures and chessmen. There was bitter irony in the fact that
Theodore was being forced to integrate that world of ugliness he
obliterated in the magazine.

Lorz got to know the Volunteer Worker. In the
hospital cafeteria she told him all about those exercises in
normality that for some reason had been kept secret from him and
his assistant. They, the professionals, she explained, had been
preparing for this programmed stage for months. Teddy had first
been placed in SIUS. At Lorz’s blank face she explained:
“Simulations of Independent Urban Situations”: purchases, reading
bus-route maps, going on errands within the hospital grounds,
preparing simple meals for himself in the kitchens that were part
of the rehabilitation equipment, etc. All of this was part of the
“struggle for autonomy.”

The first outings beyond the hospital gates
were exercises in STSA. “Short-Term Semi-Autonomy,” she added
immediately. She was fond of the technical abbreviations. They
allowed her to imagine, Lorz guessed, that she was a professional
mender of the broken instead of a bereaved volunteer. She explained
STSA: the sort of accompanied activities outside the hospital that
Miss Ruda had witnessed. She called it “preparations for total
autonomy.” She also called it “making do with what was left.” To
Lorz the phrase sounded like a description of life, anybody’s,
universally applicable.

One thing alarmed him in her account. Teddy
had to learn to get about in the city on his own, she said, use the
bus and the underground. Lorz objected that the underground had
become “a hotbed of violence.” She laughed and said that she felt
she had a bodyguard with Teddy next to her. Anyhow, someone else
from the hospital always accompanied them wherever they went.

Finally she spoke of the two negative
aspects of the situation to date.

She confirmed what his assistant had already
found out. Outside of the nurse who claimed to have heard three
slurred words, no one had heard Teddy speak. But one didn’t really
have to open one’s mouth to manage in a city, the Volunteer Visitor
added.

Lorz readily agreed. He thought of some of
his own weekends when not a sound got past his lips for lack of
necessity. He thought of the hordes of “guest-workers” who managed
in the capital without any knowledge of the host language. The
standard urban situations were self-explanatory. They dispensed
with the need for words. Before the supermarket check-out one was
defined as a payer and one wordlessly paid the electronically
indicated sum. Before the bars of the underground teller one was
defined as a purchaser of a ticket, the price of which was clearly
printed. Before the underground teenage thug with the drawn knife
one was defined as a victim and went down bleeding wordlessly. She
shouldn’t take him there.

So his candidate was learning to manage in
the outside world with no need for words, said the Volunteer
Worker. More troubling was the employment problem, she said. Even
if he was capable of the basic reflexes of urban survival, for them
to envision an outpatient status and an independent flat he had to
be employable. Not that money was anything of a problem for him, so
far as the immediate future was concerned in any case. He too
received compensation money, deposited monthly in a special
account. It was managed for him by the “Tutelage Board.” But beyond
financial considerations, work was the key to “relational
integration.” It was the precondition for an end to institutional
dependency.