The Seventh Candidate (13 page)

“Spasms?”

“Involuntary muscular contractions,” she
said, without looking up.

He insisted. Impatiently she got up and
accompanied Lorz to the room. She raised his candidate upright
against the backrest and examined him for a moment.

“Spasms,” she said and went back to the
office and her sheets.

By the time Lorz reached his office he had
doubts about what had happened. He’d been holding onto the armrest.
He may have shifted his weight and transferred the movement to the
armchair, jolting his candidate forward on to him. Or it may have
been spasms. He tried to drive out of his mind the fear he’d
experienced as the other’s body had pressed down on him.

Two days later, a Saturday, he received a
blue official-looking envelope, which he instantly assumed
contained bad news.

He read the letter a dozen times and then
dialed his assistant’s home number. The line was busy. He tried
over and over. Who could she be talking to that long?

When she finally answered he said he’d been
trying to reach her for a quarter of an hour. So had she, she said,
been trying to reach him for a quarter of an hour, dialing and
dialing. He told her he had news, the greatest of news. So had she,
she said, greater than the greatest. Not as great as mine, he
replied and told her that the compensation money had at last been
cleared and would be paid into their bank account before the end of
the month. They were saved. He named the sum and said he’d counted
the zeros five times to make sure. A miracle, he said. She asked if
it was a miracle he’d prayed for and told him she’d just come from
the hospital. On her way back she’d bought a bottle of white wine.
He shouldn’t pay attention to anything she might say except this:
after five months and twenty-five days Teddy had come out of the
coma. He was going to be all right, as she’d always said.

***

Part Two

1

How could you hope to explore all the
corridors and rooms of what they called “The Hospital”? It was
actually a jumble of buildings of all styles and original
destinations, from moldering medieval stone to steel and glass,
dumped down any which way by the centuries within a long circular
wall. During the month that followed the great news the director
went down miles of corridors. He opened hundreds of doors on
startled, ravaged, terminal, uninhabited faces, all the wrong ones.
And there were so many more miles of unvisited corridors, so many
hundreds of untried doors. In the course of his daily explorations
he found himself in places devoted to states of distress where his
candidate couldn’t possibly be: stumped torsos, bald children like
giant celluloid dolls, the chemically rigid masks of the insane,
hastily glimpsed and fled. It sometimes happened that he’d halt in
the middle of a strange corridor, wipe the sweat from his face and
wonder in painful lucidity what he was doing there.

Weeks before, in the late afternoon of
September 4, half an hour after the phone conversation with his
assistant, the director had arrived, half-running, down the
familiar corridor. At the last moment he slowed his pace to deceive
the vigilance – maybe imagined – of the nurses and doctors and
stood before Room 416. When he finally opened the door he saw a
ruined middle-aged man in a wheelchair. Room 416 was occupied by a
hemiplegic mason, he later learned. He wasn’t aware that the
incident would prefigure hundreds of similar frustrations in the
weeks to come.

Nobody knew where he was, they’d said. The
director stood voided in the corridor. He started wandering about,
opening doors here and there until an irritated doctor stopped him.
Teddy, as he’d already been told, wasn’t here anymore and in any
case couldn’t be visited wherever he might be.

He slowly spiraled down the staircase out
into the hospital grounds. An ambulance rolled up the driveway,
skirted the main hospital and stopped before the small dingy
building that housed the radiography unit. The director stopped and
stared as two attendants rolled out a wheeled stretcher with, he
was almost certain, his candidate, rigid and unconscious.

The director broke into a run. By the time
he reached the unit the ambulance had pulled away and the wheeled
stretcher with the two attendants had vanished into the building.
He looked everywhere, for hours it must have been, on all five
floors. That was how it started.

Day after day, for weeks, the director asked
what had become of his candidate. The doctors disclaimed knowledge
of his whereabouts. Some exchanged knowing glances, it seemed to
him, before coming out with the senseless official version. There
would be no visits for a week. They said it week after week. He
gained brief access to the nurses’ office on futile pretexts and
stole quick glances at the wall planning-chart. He didn’t see his
candidate’s name. Opposite 1:15 he did see a card with a penciled
scrawl T OH B3. Or was it P3? Or F3? Could “T” possibly stand for
the (false) name of his candidate? But the cryptic code that
followed discouraged the director. He could hardly ask.

The nurses were curiously reluctant to
speak about his candidate. It was as though they’d been given
strict instructions. By whom? And why? Some, insistently
questioned, ended by telling him hesitantly where, “they
thought
,” his
candidate might possibly be found. They sent him to empty rooms,
dead-end corridors, non-existent room-numbers.

He was being deliberately misled. Why?

Only the gruff mannish head-nurse with the
choleric neck and hacked iron hair came out with a blunt phrase:
“He can’t be seen.”

Lorz brooded over the ambiguity of her
words. Was the correct decoding: “It’s forbidden to see him?” Or:
“He’s in no state to be seen?” Why the mystery?

It was a temporary decision, Silberman said
soothingly and disclaimed responsibility. Teddy wasn’t his patient
after all. If his colleagues kept the boy in relative isolation
they must have valid reasons. If one were to believe him (but one
didn’t), Silberman had no knowledge of the boy’s whereabouts.

Silberman seemed more interested in Lorz’s
own condition than in his candidate’s. His fat face remained bland
throughout their conversations, but the director suspected his mind
was processing his daily presence in the hospital. By now it was
probably a subject of talk among the staff. Lorz was careful to
justify his insistent interest in locating the boy. Justification
was a constant concern during those weeks.

By the third week there developed an ideal
short-term justification for his daily presence.

He was suffering, he explained truthfully to
the young sharp-nosed doctor, from intermittent but severe
headaches, also insomnia, irritability and occasional visual
disturbances in the form of colored patterns. Invited to undergo
various tests – which all proved negative – he was no interloper
and could, with studied casualness, pose his questions about his
candidate’s whereabouts.

But before that medical justification for
his presence, he found others for Silberman. There was the curious
parallel, he explained. There but for the grace of God, so to
speak. Above all, his keen sense of responsibility toward the boy.
He’d unwittingly lured the boy to disaster with his advertisement,
he said. He added that he’d felt like asking him to sit up front
but hadn’t.

Lorz knew the doctor would translate
“responsibility” to “guilt,” a potently operative concept with the
mind-men and a run-of-the-mill syndrome: not really an obsession at
all, nothing alarmingly abnormal about it.

The director feared abnormal obsession. If
he continued visiting the hospital every day, he made sure it was
within strict limits. Theoretically the search could have gone
faster. But he was careful not to go beyond a very rapid
stiff-legged walk down the sterile corridors, as though hastening
to an encounter or fleeing one, but still preserving dignity, never
breaking into a trot. A broken stride, to his mind, would have
marked obsession instead of legitimate deep concern.

Just as he was careful never to exceed an
hour a day in his search, taken out of lunchtime, like a leisurely
walk after dessert. It involved lengthening his mid-day break by
just thirty minutes. He refused to let his quest encroach on his
business activities although his assistant could have handled
things. Abiding by that inflexible timetable (gone at exactly one
and back at exactly two-thirty) was a kind of barrier against
chaos. If a minute longer, why not five minutes longer, five hours
longer, the whole day, days and nights in the maze of corridors?
Anyhow he doubted that even a round-the-clock search would have
proved more productive than the actual hurried visits.

One day he encountered a young
nurse-in-training. She answered his automatic hopeless question.
“Teddy? He’s in Old Hospital.” She bit her lip. “I wasn’t supposed
to tell you that.” The director probed her last remark for hours.
Was “you” simply an impersonal pronoun meaning “anybody” or did it
apply to himself, to “you,” Edmond Lorz? By now they must all be
talking about him.

Then he made the connection with what he’d
seen on the planning-chart. O H: Old Hospital.

T stood for Teddy after all.

The ancient building with inky
pollution-streaks and white pigeon-droppings looked familiar.
Hadn’t he already visited it? Among eroded medieval statues
half-sunk at angles in the shabby lawn, stiff-faced patients
wandered about like automatons in the company of white-uniformed
attendants. At this sight the director recognized it as the place
of the chemically nullified insane where his mother had once
sojourned for a few months. Why had they placed his candidate
here?

He wandered about dingy corridors trying to
make sense of the progression of the room numbers. Turning a
corner, he was almost knocked down by a uniformed black
Subcontinental running wild-eyed with an empty wheeled stretcher.
The Subcon didn’t stop his lunatic running when the director posed
his question in his back. He had to run alongside the man.

“P 3, please?” he repeated, gasping. The man
shook his head. Badly winded, the director came out with: “T 3?
Tee, Tee three?” The man shook his head. Did he understand the
language? Lorz shouted: “B 3, B 3, Bee, Bee, Bee Three.”

Getting no answer, he stopped, panting. The
attendant, never slowing his pace, reached the end of the corridor.
Then, turning, he sing-songed, “T’ird floor basement,” and
vanished.

A floor, then, not a room. Lorz found it odd
that there was no room-number.

He looked about for an elevator and found
only a caged red bulb signaling a staircase. Gripping the sticky
railing, he descended cautiously step by step in the gloom emitted
by other tiny wide-spaced red bulbs. He went down three littered
flights and came up against a padlocked iron door.

He retraced his steps. Finally, in a poorly
lighted corridor, what seemed to be more wall revealed itself as a
big unmarked elevator. He would have missed it if the doors hadn’t
shuddered open as he went by.

It was an old service-elevator with dirty
padded walls. It was empty and unlighted. He made out a sign: “For
Stretchers Only!” The control-panel was an upright rectangle of
tarnished brass. In the gloom the floor-numbers were illegible. A
third-floor basement seemed inconceivably deep so he pressed the
bottom button. The doors groaned shut and he stood in darkness,
breathing through his mouth because of the reek of ether and urine.
Nothing happened. He tried to hold back panic. The motor started up
wearily.

The elevator began to tremble and then
shudder. What if the cables snapped? A minute went by. There was
absolutely no sensation of movement in spite of the vibrations. It
couldn’t be moving. Even at the slowest pace the elevator would be
in the bowels of the earth by this time.

When the doors started opening again the
director squeezed through. He expected to find himself back in the
grimy ground-floor corridor. Instead, he was in an ancient
passageway with rough-hewn walls. A succession of anachronistic
naked bulbs dangled from a vaulted ceiling.

The doors groaned shut in his back and the
mechanism started up. Left and right offered an identical dwindling
perspective of stretches of gloom alternating with pools of dirty
yellow light on irregular flagstones. He turned left and explored
the passageway. The only movement was his own shifting shadow as he
passed beneath the bulbs. The scuffing of his soles was the only
sound. Solid stone on both sides, no doors anywhere. It was obvious
that he’d pressed the wrong button. His candidate couldn’t be
here.

He was about to return and summon back the
disquieting elevator when he heard a muffled swelling roar from
somewhere far ahead. He tried to picture the medical apparatus
capable of making such a powerful noise. It meant activity of some
sort, people, staircases, operative elevators, safe ways out of
what seemed to be, after the padded elevator, another prison.

Prison: hadn’t he read somewhere of Old
Hospital and its dungeons used in medieval times for criminals,
prostitutes and (already) lunatics thrown together in total
promiscuity? Lorz started walking faster in pursuit of the sound.
He tripped occasionally on the irregular flagstones. The sound
slowly died away. Now there was nothing but silence. It started up
again. Again it died away. This time the silence seemed permanent.
The passageway curved and forked. He took the left fork. The new
passageway was identical to the first, empty and doorless.

He had decided to return to the elevator
when the deep vibration started up again. He began trotting toward
it. The sound lured him into a maze of passageways. Again it died
away, started up seconds later, no closer, and died away for long
minutes. He stood still and waited for it to begin. The vaguely
familiar sound was playing cat and mouse with him. Now again.