The Seventh Candidate (31 page)

But what might happen when he wasn’t
underground to mount guard over Theo with his father’s dagger? Lorz
tried to reduce those dangerous hours by staying on in
Crossroads
till 4:00pm, sometimes till
4:30pm. This amounted to a 180-minute lunch-hour. When,
unavoidably, he returned to the office his assistant was pointedly
silent. He resented the guilt she made him feel.

This didn’t prevent him from leaving shortly
after to pick Theo up at 6:30. They’d shared the job before. Now he
relieved her of this “chore” as he phrased it. She frowned and
assured him insistently that it was no chore. He pretended not to
understand.

He left
Ideal
earlier and earlier for the 6:30pm return to
Crossroads
.
Actually there was little point returning to the office at all in
the afternoon for such a brief period but he insisted on doing it
as some kind of obscure discipline.

Inevitably there was another unpleasant
scene. She sat stiff-faced at her typewriter with folded arms when
he returned one late afternoon. She didn’t unfold them even when
the phone rang. She said that he could answer the phone, at least
do that. She said that she couldn’t do everything all by herself.
The business was suffering badly from his absences.

The director was certain she was on the
presumptuous verge of asking him where he disappeared all afternoon
long. He owed her no explanations. But what would happen if she
quit again? He’d be imprisoned in the office, far from Theo.

The dilemma was partially solved when
suddenly in the middle of the night the conviction came to him, as
it had to, that somehow the potency of the dagger was such that it
cast an aura of protection over Theo even when it wasn’t there.

He decided to shorten the lunch-hour to
mollify his assistant and left a box of chocolates and flowers on
her desk for safety’s sake.

A week later a new problem arose. It was
his assistant who told him about it. As part of the tacit
compromise that ended the unpleasantness, she’d once more taken
over her share of the chore (no chore at all, she’d repeated) of
picking Theo up at 6:30pm. The first thing she said after the boy
left the
Ideal
office for
the hospital was: “It’s getting hard to make him stop with the
posters. I didn’t think he’d come back with me this time. I had to
yell, practically. And there’s something else too.”

She paused and rubbed a speck of dust off
her typewriter.

“
He’s doing the wrong posters now, other
people’s posters, not just ours. He’s doing all of the posters
in
Crossroads
.”

The following afternoon Lorz observed his
employee finishing the last of a contractual series (313 to 345).
Without the slightest hesitation the boy pushed the wheeled ladder
before a non-contractual poster (
Greenfields
) and started in.

“
No, no!” the director cried, “Not
Greenfields
!”

Theo went on. It was as though the
director didn’t exist. Theo went on and on in this alien territory,
cosmetizing one non-contractual poster after another.
Ideal’s
services were being bestowed on
a poster firm that hadn’t even had the courtesy to reply to a
single one of
Ideal’s
annual
solicitations.

At first the director was unable to define
his profound alarm at the sight of what Theo was doing. It wasn’t
the waste of time and chemicals. He had trouble formulating it.

To break into his employee’s field of vision
Lorz slipped into the narrow space between the ladder and the
poster and immediately received a brushful of Basic White on his
right cheek, dangerously close to his eye.

Foolish thoughts flashed through his mind.
Does he think I’m part of the poster? Where is the graffiti on my
face? Or does he take my whole face for graffiti?

The boy blinked. The mechanism of his hands
stalled. His eyes now focused on his employer’s rectified visage,
as though trying to distinguish this real face from the paper
ones.

“Look what you’ve done, Teddy!” Lorz
scolded, gently.

He called him Teddy when he was irritated
with him. That occasionally happened. As though reciprocating the
gentleness of his employer’s voice, Theo (Theo now) took the cloth
and carefully wiped the white off the director’s face. Lorz closed
his eyes, perhaps to protect them against the Basic White. When he
opened his eyes again Theo was staring obediently into his face.
Was he smiling? Was it conceivable that he’d done it as a joke?

The director slipped away from the poster
and coaxed Theo off the ladder. He started explaining the problem.
He pointed at the numbers on the boy’s sheets. Then he pointed at
the numbers on the panels he’d been doing.

“They’re not ours, Theo, they aren’t our
concern. Not our concerns. Do you understand?”

The director explained and explained until
he thought he made out an expression of comprehension on the boy’s
face.

When the director finished Theo climbed back
up the ladder and resumed rectifying the non-contractual
posters.

That night the director was finally able to
formulate his alarm. Theo’s correction of non-contractual posters
was a grave symptom of refusal of bounds. The boy didn’t know where
(or perhaps how) to stop. There had to be limits, frontiers,
barriers, no-man’s-lands of indifference. Sanity, survival even,
depended on recognition of that fact.

The director knew about the problem. It
had already happened in the early days of
Ideal
that he too had rectified non-contractual posters
bordering on the contractual ones. He did that when they bore
particularly obscene graffiti sure to intrude on the visual field
of the viewer of the contractual posters, contaminating the message
of the advertiser, undoing what he, Lorz, had just painstakingly
achieved. So he’d sometimes rectify them. But such non-contractual
zeal never exceeded three or four posters, the establishment of a
sort of buffer state between order and chaos.

It had got worse before the well-dressed fat
man with the pigskin briefcase imposed commercial limits on his
activities.

There had been a period when only the
closing of the underground at 1:30am drove Lorz out into the
street. He hadn’t been well during the weeks that followed his
mother’s death. In those days he’d devised a strategy to create the
illusion of total rectification. He’d limit himself to the smallest
stations: just two platforms and a few short runs of corridor. The
last poster cleansed, he won a brief feeling of plenitude, as
though he’d purified the universe. It was an illusion of course.
Even in those tiny stations newly rectified posters were constantly
being graffitied again behind your back. If you returned to the
starting point after finishing that supposedly last poster you saw
that the graffiti had returned to the first ones, an endless cycle
of futility.

So the fat man had, in a sense, saved him.
He’d marked limits. There were the Company posters that had to be
salvaged and the others. Lorz learned (or tried to learn) to look
upon all those other mutilated but non-contractual posters as one
did catastrophes in distant lands read about in the papers. And
what happened to the rectified posters behind your back was a task
for the following day. To each day its task. You couldn’t take on
all the chaos of the world.

The director tried to explain all of this to
Theo. Having to explain it clarified things in his own mind. What
had slowly taken shape deep in your mind you found out, often to
your surprise, only when circumstances forced you to articulate it.
He articulated it now to the boy and to himself. One had to
compromise, he said in effect. He’d once been like Theo, he said.
He’d got out of it at the price of a certain loss of purity. But
who could be absolutely pure in a soiled world? He explained it in
simple words over and over again in the week that followed.

But Theo went on correcting the
non-contractual posters. He went on methodically effacing the
graffiti, unconcerned with commercial demarcations, touchingly pure
in his dedication.

Three days later, at 6:30pm (it was his
turn to pick him up) the director couldn’t find the boy anywhere in
the
West
Gate
corridor. He
searched for an hour in the other corridors and platforms. Then he
rang up his assistant at the office on the off-chance that she was
still waiting for both of them to return and maybe, miraculously,
would tell him that Theo had come back to
Ideal
by himself.

She was there, still waiting for the two of
them. The director imagined the three cups on her desk, the
electric kettle, the three careful piles of biscuits.

She joined him in
West Gate
corridor before poster-site 354. Each one took
half of the great station and agreed to return in an
hour.

Lorz returned first and collapsed onto a
bench. She came a minute later and sat down beside him without
saying anything. Finally she tried to reassure him. Teddy must have
returned to the hospital on his own. She said that but went on
scrutinizing the passing crowd as he was doing. It was a symptom of
self-reliance on Teddy’s part, she explained. Why should he wait
in
West
Gate
corridor at 6:30
for one of them to pick him up? He had nothing to leave at
the
Ideal
office now
that he took the ladder and the knapsack back with him to the
hospital. The only thing he did in the office at the end of the day
was have coffee with them. Maybe it didn’t matter to him any more.
Maybe that too was a sign of self-reliance, she added
sadly.

Lorz said that he agreed completely with
her explanation. Theo must have returned on his own to the
hospital. Of course it was impossible to check. Suppose (one chance
out of a hundred they agreed) he wasn’t there, after all. What
would the hospital people, the Commission people, say? They’d have
naturally remarked the boy’s absence. They couldn’t push
indifference so far as not to have. But in that improbable case,
the hospital mustn’t learn that
Ideal
had lost track of Theo. His assistant, so quick-witted that
way, could invent some plausible explanation for the boy’s
absence.

Lorz accompanied her to her train. He told
her that he was going home too. Of course Teddy had returned to the
hospital. That’s for sure, she replied.

He explored
Crossroads
again.

Leaning against the white tiles, he shut
his eyes and tried to project himself into the boy’s mind. Theo
must have had the sudden conviction – an illusion, of course – that
he’d finally rectified all of the
Crossroads
posters. He’d have taken a train and at the
inevitable sight of the graffitied posters of the very first
station would have got off with his equipment and started
in.

The next station, then. But which one?
Twelve lines radiated from
Crossroads
.

It was already past nine when the director
started systematically exploring those lines. The first (Line 2)
yielded nothing. He had to return to
Crossroads
, jog down endless corridors to a new line, travel
to the next station where there was nothing, then back again
to
Crossroads
,
another maze of corridors, a new line, a new station, the same
operation over and over, to and fro like a spider weaving futile
threads, all for nothing.

An hour or so later, from his carriage
window on Line 12, he saw his assistant walking out of a corridor
onto the platform of the next station,
Archives
. It wasn’t her line home. She’d had the same
idea. Her gaudy mask was set in severe lines. She turned left and
went down the platform rapidly. The director quickly got off.
Careful not to be seen, he returned to
Crossroads
.

He found Theo at 10:16pm, busy on the
platform of
National Library
(Line 7). He’d burst the time bounds as well as the
territorial bounds. His brush went on and on. The director darted
glances right and left at the nearly empty platform and pleaded
with him to stop. He had to return to the hospital. Did he know
what time it was? They’d been sick with worry, both of them. The
director wheedled, commanded, wheedled. The promise of unlimited
quantities of raw beef in the spiced blood sauce had no effect. The
boy went on and on.

It was almost eleven when Theo ran out of
Basic White. He suddenly unplugged. He slumped down on a bench,
arms dangling between his knees, eyes empty. What would have
happened if the boy had gone on till closing time and the
Underground Police had tried to force him out? He’d have offered
resistance, passive but stubborn. They’d have arrested him.
Notified, the Commission would have taken that final decision. The
end of it all.

The director let himself down on the bench
next to the boy. He felt drained.

Theo’s breathing became labored, then
raucous. The director stared at his profile. His lips were moving
soundlessly. Lorz leaned closer to gain a better view. He placed
his hand on the boy’s shoulder and asked at intervals: “What are
you saying, Theo?” The movements of the boy’s lips went on, over
and over, the same movements, but no sound came. Wasn’t he trying
to say “Edmond” as he had (perhaps) that terrible time over the
chessboard?