The Seventh Candidate (23 page)

For the present it was out of the question
trying to employ Teddy in other than in “SPWS” (Subsidized
Protected Work Situations). And even here the results had not been
good, said the sad-faced woman. He’d already been tried out on the
watch-repair job, for which he seemed ideally suited, but this
“hadn’t been a hundred percent satisfactory.”

Lorz instantly understood: a fiasco. By this
time he was adept at decoding. He wondered if once again the boy
had insisted on keeping the repaired watches for renewed dissection
and assemblage, an unending cycle, or even taking those of his
work-mates. The director never found out. The Volunteer Worker
didn’t know.

She had more details about the second job.
The hospital authorities had agreed to try him out for a few hours
a day in the garbage-collecting service. Teddy was strong as an ox
and didn’t mind getting up at dawn. The first early morning
collection round came to a practical halt because of the boy’s
“perfectionism.” The slightest apple-paring, scrap of tin-foil,
speck of coffee grounds unavoidably spilled during the transfer of
the contents of the bins to the revolving maw of the garbage truck
were the object of almost pedantic attention on his part. He
wouldn’t allow the garbage truck to go on before everything had
been cleaned. His work was thorough, so thorough that at the end of
the week they congratulated him over and over, a way of discharging
him.

He still didn’t know how to compromise. It
had been hard to dissuade him from showing up for the dawn patrol.
For the next week, before the compulsion wore off, he warred on
scraps of paper and cigarette butts and pigeon droppings in the
hospital park. Nobody dared flick away a smoked cigarette in his
presence.

In a week or so they would try him out on a
painting job, again within the hospital. Perhaps it would go better
than the garbage-collecting job.

The woman didn’t sound optimistic.

Then there was an abrupt end to Theodore’s
outings, an end to the newsmagazine experiment, an end to the
visits. The boy disappeared. The log entry under December 21
tersely recounted the reason.

The old foreign doctor had rung the director
up for the last time and summoned him to his office. Lorz knocked
and entered. With his usual calculated rudeness, Dr V didn’t look
up from what he was reading behind his desk. Lorz’s presence was
acknowledged only by a stabbing index finger assigning him to the
chair opposite. The doctor was examining one of the newsmagazines
the director and his candidate had corrected. Lorz sat down with a
sinking feeling.

The old doctor’s harsh breathing, like
reiterated expressions of exasperation, filled the office. He
leafed through the magazine. His thin lips were pursed in distaste.
At certain pages his oyster-gaze shot over the rims of his glasses
at the director.

Finally he pronounced: “You do not like
titties.”

The director was dumbfounded by the vulgar
slang term, rendered even more grotesque by the foreign accent.
Before he could express his indignation, the doctor pursued.

“Why like a child do you scribble over the
photographs? Or cover them up with white paint? What is this
madness of teaching Teddy such things?”

Who could have told the doctor that he had
taught the boy the new activity? He thought he knew. He was certain
he knew.

Lorz tried to justify the procedure as a
means of establishing contact with Teddy. He also mentioned his own
occupation, which had almost been the boy’s.

“I know about your occupation,” said the old
doctor. “Your peculiar occupation. But this, what you have done, or
rather what you have taught Teddy to do, is not the removal of
graffiti. This is the removal of the photograph itself. Part of the
photograph. Mainly titties. Which is graffiti itself!” he cried,
triumphantly for some reason. “Not additive but subtractive
graffiti,” he added. He grinned on long yellowed skull teeth in
satisfaction at his formulation.

“I’m not your patient,” the director
muttered. “I’m nobody’s patient.”

The old doctor ignored the interruption.
“What has given you such an idea? Talk to him, yes, show him
flowers and mountains as does Miss Ruda, perhaps, if this makes you
happy. But do not attempt therapy. Leave such things to us. You
have done perhaps irreparable harm. What has given you such an
idea? You are perhaps a doctor? You have made long and specialized
studies in medicine? You have in your office your framed
diploma?”

The old doctor formulated the accusation
against Lorz.

There had been the obsessions with the
Chinese puzzles, the chess games, the jigsaw puzzles, he said. Then
months of gratifying progress. Now, because of Lorz, a relapse into
obsession. An obsession with magazine corrections. More and more
the magazines were monopolizing the boy’s daytime activities to the
detriment of his rehabilitation sessions. It was the familiar
worsening downward spiral. Teddy would even get up in the middle of
the night and work over the magazine. He was getting less and less
sleep. He had begun to refuse food. Finally, once again, they had
had to inject soporifics, experiment with new drugs. All because of
Lorz.

The old doctor halted and gasped
harshly.

The relentless voice momentarily stilled,
Lorz was able to reflect on the hopelessness of his candidate’s
uncompromising efforts with the magazines. In any issue there were
hundreds of news photographs, hundreds of advertisements. His
candidate’s judgments were severe and a great proportion of these
illustrations were rectified. Each averaged at least five minutes
of work. The boy hadn’t finished one issue when the next came out
with its inexhaustible imperfections demanding correction.
Necessarily he lagged behind. To catch up he had to sacrifice
rehabilitation activities, then sleep, finally food. And there were
other newsmagazine titles that he was sure to discover. What
then?

Lorz recalled his own beginnings with the
posters. What his candidate was trying to do with the magazines was
almost as hopeless as trying to achieve a definitive cleansing of
the posters in the capital’s sixty-three underground stations,
9,369 of them at any given moment. And they changed every three
weeks. Worse, unlike the newsmagazine photographs which, once
rectified, stayed that way, the posters were no sooner cleansed
than the vandals assaulted them again. An army of dedicated
operators laboring day and night wouldn’t have coped. In the
opening months of his underground activities, not yet a
commercialized vocation, he, Lorz, had known this mad temptation to
let nothing go by.

There was no end to it. You had to learn to
compromise.

“You do more harm than good, finally,”
resumed the old doctor. “Perhaps this will be the end of your
association with Teddy. I will reflect on the question.”

Lorz stared for a moment into those
magnified colorless eyes. He stood up and left without a word.

Two weeks went by.

On January 4, as the log recorded, his
assistant was given permission to see Theodore. She told her
employer about it the next day.

“You wouldn’t recognize him,” she said, her
face illuminated. “I don’t want to spoil it for you. You’ll see
tomorrow.”

Lorz wasn’t so sure. When he phoned the
hospital to arrange the visit he steeled himself to hear in
administratively neutral language that there were no more visits
for him. However nothing had changed.

But the next day at five he found Room 416
empty. He was told that Teddy was with Dr V.

Two days later his assistant again recounted
the extraordinary progress of his candidate. It was like describing
a banquet to a starving man. The director rang up the hospital and
complained bitterly of the mix-up on Monday. The anonymous woman’s
voice expressed vague surprise. She wasn’t aware of the incident.
Yes, of course he could see Teddy tomorrow at four.

The following day at four he came up against
a locked door. He heard a slow unintelligible voice from inside. He
knocked. There was no response. The voice continued. The director
went on knocking, louder and louder. Behind the locked door the old
doctor’s querulous voice, a second voice, asked who it was.

Lorz identified himself. He mentioned his
appointment with Teddy.

The old doctor said that he was disturbing
them, he should go away, he had already been told that there would
be no more visits for him, ever.

Behind that hateful painfully gasping voice,
the other voice went on. It could only be his candidate’s. What was
he saying? The director raised his fist against the door but before
he could pound and pound a nurse came and he was forced to
leave.

Lorz visited Silberman’s office the next day
for intercession on his behalf. At the very beginning of his plea,
as soon as he mentioned the foreign doctor’s name, he learned that
intercession wouldn’t be necessary.

Silberman made a small gesture of
powerlessness and informed Lorz that Dr Vinovski had succumbed to a
heart attack the day before. He had been suffering from a heart
condition for years. He should have let up. The attack had occurred
during a session with Teddy. It might have had a bad effect on the
boy. As it was, even though he was staring at the dead man when the
nurse opened up Teddy probably hadn’t even realized what had
happened.

Dr Silberman paused a moment and added that
it wasn’t the worst way to go, suddenly and peacefully, in the
midst of what one liked best to do. Dr V had been fascinated by
Teddy’s case. Just the day before he’d rung up Silberman. He’d told
him that Teddy had spoken again, not incoherent words this time.
He’d been greatly excited. Too excited, as it turned out.

“What words?” Lorz asked, trying to conceal
his own excitement. Silberman didn’t know. “But he must have
written it down somewhere,” Lorz protested. He no longer even tried
to hide his excitement. “He must have a file. Maybe he recorded it
on tape.”

Silberman agreed that it was more than
possible that he had noted it all down. He had been an extremely
methodical man. His papers, however, hadn’t been gone through yet.
In any case, if Teddy spoke once he would speak again.

The phone in Lorz’s study rang again.

His assistant excused herself. Did he want
her to ring him up early tomorrow morning? In case he overslept? He
assured her that he wouldn’t oversleep, not on the morning of the
interview with Silberman. It was unlikely he’d sleep at all, he
felt like adding. He thanked her, said a definitive, “Good night,”
and returned to the log and the January 17 entry that had given him
the great idea.

On that day, he’d talked to the Volunteer
Visitor again in the hospital cafeteria. Yes, she’d said, Teddy had
overcome the crisis and was continuing to make progress. There was
something negative, though. Teddy’s painting job hadn’t turned out
well at all. He’d been very good at the preliminary work. He
derived visible satisfaction from the cleaning of the dirty walls.
The application of the paint too was successful as long as the
paint was white.

“Why didn’t it work out then?”

“It was hard to make him stop,” she said
cryptically.

Did that mean in terms of time or walls?
Lorz wondered.

She repeated that ability to work was the
precondition for an end to institutional dependency.

Jan 20. The obvious solution.
Why did it take me so long? Think it over carefully. No
precipitation. Try to persuade Doctor Silberman. Talk about it to
DR?

The clock on his desk rang the end of that
evening’s session.

With military discipline Lorz shut the log.
Yawning, he placed the bottle and the two notebooks in the desk
drawer. He took the alarm clock and the glass with him and turned
the lights out in his study with the exception of the circle of
light on the cacti. He washed out the glass in the kitchen, dried
it and placed it in its former position in the cupboard. He washed
his hands and face. He brushed his teeth meticulously for three
minutes. He set the alarm clock for ten past six. He also set a
second alarm clock for the same hour, for safety’s sake although he
felt sure that his assistant would ring too. Before he went to bed
he opened the closet and made his final choice of clothing for the
interview.

As he’d suspected, he couldn’t sleep.

***

3

Lorz wore the most subdued of his ties, none
of which were exclamatory, also his most sober jacket, an almost
funereal charcoal gray. He surveyed his voice, not allowing it to
escape into registers other than those of dryness and
matter-of-factness. He felt that he projected soundness, a quality
he set great and envious store by. The black leather briefcase
provided assistance here with the competent click of the brass
clasp as he freed the flap and took out the typed pages of his
proposition (Silberman might ask to see it and weren’t the mind-men
graphology experts too?). This too was for show, for he had it all
within him, rehearsed in the small hours a hundred times.

He sat down and explained with a purposeful
touch of pedantry in vocabulary and syntax that the idea had not
originated with him. His assistant, Miss D Ruda – with whom the
doctor, he believed, was acquainted – had suggested the move.

Technically this was true. But it was also
true that the idea had come to Lorz a week earlier, an idea so bold
that he’d kept it to himself, not daring to broach the subject to
Silberman. He polished it in his mind. He rounded the edges,
experimented with cunning formulations and time went by. He decided
to talk it over with his assistant but kept putting it off. He was
certain that she would point out all the dangers involved. She was
always right about whatever concerned
Ideal
.