The Seventh Candidate (14 page)

In pursuit of that erratic elusive sound he
discovered the inexplicable vastness of the subterranean windings.
He reassured himself that there was no possibility of getting lost,
for the building wasn’t gigantic like New Hospital. Yet he did get
lost. Peculiarly, the tangle of corridors seemed to cover an area
far greater than the visible surface part of the building itself.
He couldn’t orient himself. Over and over the passageway forked.
Some of his choices were wrong. They degenerated into unlighted
dead-ends, where the flagstones underfoot gave way to earth and
pot-holes and he backtracked, wiping his sweating face free of
cauls of spider-webs.

How long had he been wandering about? For
some reason he couldn’t recall, it was essential that he return to
the office by 2:30, not a minute later, to that other subterranean
space. He halted in the middle of a dim yellow pool of light and
looked at his watch. It had stopped at 3:07. He resisted the urge
to run, to shout for help in those underground corridors of the
institution for the insane. He did try an interrogative “hello”,
absurdly low and well-bred, then a little louder, but in tight
control. Then much louder.

Voices babbled back at him. The echoes died
away.

In the silence he became aware that the
medical apparatus had apparently stopped operating. How long had it
been since he last heard that distant swelling then dying roar? It
was as though its malevolent function had been accomplished now
that it had lured him into the heart of the maze.

Lorz spread his handkerchief on the
flagstones, hiked up his trouser legs and sat down in the dead
center of the dim pool of yellow light. He hunched forward,
clasping his knees, surrounded by darkness. Somebody would come.
Somebody necessarily came to change the burned-out electric light
bulbs. Why the bulbs? Why did they feebly shine on in the empty
corridors?

The sound awoke him. It had started up again.
This time it was a violent roar, tantalizingly familiar, very
close, coming from beyond the turn in the passageway, perhaps fifty
meters away. He rose to his feet, jubilant. Beyond that curve the
machine promised clean well-lighted corridors, a bustle of staff,
the sound of voices other than the echoes of his own, arrows
everywhere pointing to the way out through the lobby, past the
ancient blunted statues sunk like tombstones in the lawn, arrows
pointing to the way out of the hospital complex, for good, no
return ever to the senseless perilous quest.

Now a few steps removed from deliverance he
allowed his mind to acknowledge the vastness of the fear he had
felt, lost in that maze.

He broke into his habitual controlled
stiff-legged stride. The roar died away as he rounded the bend.
Immediately to his left, right-angled to the main passage, was
another passage, far narrower, like a tomb-cleft. It ran no more
than ten meters and ended with a low massive bolted iron door.
Badly corroded, it was secured by a huge padlock, itself reduced to
a mass of rust. The director stood staring at it in
bewilderment.

After a while, very faintly, the sound,
unmistakable now, started up behind the iron door, grew in
intensity. The director instantly pictured it. He was more familiar
with the map of the underground than with his own face. Was it
conceivable that the two mazes touched each other, communicated?
The uproar died away and the director knew the train was pulling
into the station a little beyond. The line, judging by the violence
of the noise, must run a scant dozen meters from the walls of the
old hospital. A thick precipitation of door-rust lay on the cement
floor from the reiterated vibrations of the eighty-odd years of the
run, perhaps two hundred passages a day (and night). It formed a
strange pattern, like cryptic graffiti. Line 12, of course. And now
the noise started up again. The train was pulling out of the
station.
Circus Place
?
Trinity Square
?

The roar swelled and then diminished. He
stood in silence in the gloom between two overhead bulbs which
generated opposed shadows of himself on the flagstones.

He began running blindly down the main
passageway, fleeing the echoes his soles raised on the flagstones.
Once he sprawled full length, bruising a knee and skinning his
palms. The passageway swung right and its aspect changed.

There were doors in the walls.

At the far end of the corridor a line of
light came from under one of those doors. He stopped running and
tried to master his breath and heart. He slowly approached the door
with the crack of light. He heard nothing inside at first. Then he
made out a faint jingle. He turned the knob and slowly pushed the
door open.

He was there, finally, in the white room,
seated at a plain wood table under a powerful cone of light,
totally absorbed in a Chinese puzzle. Life had returned to his
hands. They were much larger than the director had remembered. His
fingers ceaselessly interrogated the interlocked elements, the
steel spirals, pierced triangles, loops, linked rings. The revived
muscles worked in bunched knots beneath the pale skin of his
forearms, astonishingly massive now, like his shoulders. Also
astonishing was the vigorous growth of the dark gold hair, which
almost concealed the criss-cross of stitches in his skull. A click
and jingle and his candidate removed a steel spiral from the
construction. He placed it accurately alongside the other detached
pieces of the Chinese puzzle.

Lorz drew closer and squinted against the
glare. He made out on the table things he himself had had to
confront and puzzle out months before, among others, Silberman’s
cards with their whorls and dots and zigzags and bull’s-eyes; the
familiar pictures of a stylized apple-tree, a woman, a sun, waves;
plastic blocks of varied shapes and colors. But there were also
things he didn’t recall: a chessboard with rigorously centered
pieces on the wrong squares; jacks and marbles; other complex steel
Chinese puzzles, dozens of them. His candidate undid a tortured
twist of steel and then the interlocking spirals. The rest of the
puzzle came apart like the petals of a metallic flower.

Suddenly his candidate looked up. Their gaze
didn’t mesh. There was a strange failure of focus somewhere: his
own dazzled eyes or something wrong with the blue gaze?

Before the director could determine the
source of the block, a sharp foreign voice in his back challenged:
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

The director turned about and was confronted
by an elderly thin-lipped doctor emerging from the gloom of the
corner. Silver strands of hair were plastered back on his ruddy
skull. Thick lenses magnified his oyster-colored eyes.

“Who are you?” he repeated. “Leave this room
immediately.” He was holding a notebook in one hand, a fountain pen
in the other. A squat white-uniformed attendant seated next to the
doctor’s chair got up and moved forward. The director shrank back.
The attendant stopped between the seated candidate and Lorz. The
boy paid no attention to the scene. He was now engaged with the
chessboard. He was moving the pieces about, sometimes the right
way.

It was a mistake, the director stammered,
he’d pressed the wrong button, he was lost, what was the way
out?

The doctor told him.

When the director turned in the corridor as
instructed and pushed the right door there was again sudden
illumination: functional mercury-tubes that brought tears to his
eyes despite his dark lenses, cleanliness, hurrying interns and
nurses. A shiny modern elevator efficiently let him out on the
desired ground floor, into the lobby of gay colored plastic.

The incident, by a strange coincidence,
marked the end of Lorz’s month-long wanderings.

He learned the following day, 30 September,
at 1:30, that Teddy could be visited during the weekend. It was as
though the director had been rewarded for his success in the
subterranean maze. They evaded his immediate questions: “How is
he?” “Who is he?” He also learned that there would be, at best,
only one visit a week for him, on Sunday. And, at best, one visit a
week for his assistant, on Saturday. Moreover the visit would last
no more than a few minutes. However this first visit, “if
successful”, might be repeated and the length of the visit
lengthened.

He wondered what they meant by a
“successful” visit?

Above all, there was the unanswered
question: Who is he?

***

2

The visit took place in a large impersonal
office. The elderly harsh-breathing doctor with the magnified
oyster-eyes was there along with his massive shadow, the
expressionless attendant. They didn’t seem to recognize him as the
filthy scared interloper in the subterranean room a week
before.

His candidate was again seated before a
crowded wooden table. Dozens of the Chinese puzzles of the week
before formed miniature scrap heaps in a corner. There was the
chessboard too. Now the pieces were correctly positioned as for a
game. His candidate was crouched over a sheet of paper absorbed in
a sketch. It made no sense viewed upside down. Did it make sense
viewed the right way?

The foreign doctor, seated in the corner,
exuded authority like a force field. He dispensed with amenities.
First a command: “Sit down opposite to him. No, not that close.
Push your chair to the left. Further.” Then a warning: “Don’t touch
him. Don’t touch his things.” Lorz asked why. Impatiently the
doctor replied as though to an inquisitive child: “He doesn’t like
that people touch him. Nor his things.” A moment of silence.

“Talk to him,” the doctor ordered.

That was what Lorz longed to do. Accumulated
for a whole month, the longing was painfully pent up. But there was
no question of talking to the boy in the presence of the doctor and
his shadow. The room was heavily silent.

“
Talk to him, please,” repeated the doctor.
The
please
added
asperity to the command.

The director went through the familiar
powerless formula. Self-consciously he said his name was Edmond
Lorz, director of
Ideal Poster
.
His candidate didn’t look up. “Louder, please,” the doctor ordered,
almost as if he, Lorz, were the patient. The doctor was leaning
slightly forward in his chair looking at them both. His fountain
pen was poised over the sheet of paper ready to note intimate
revelations.

The director repeated his identity. He said
that they both had been injured in the explosion. What’s your real
name? Don’t you remember me? Lorz tried to believe it was in
response to this last question that the boy looked up at him. The
dark blue eyes were fixed on his face but something was wrong. The
focus was unsteady. It wavered between the extremes of inward and
beyond. He, Lorz, was somewhere between. Did the boy even see him?
Did his questions even reach him?

In the silence that followed the useless
words Lorz had an impulse to try another way, to brave the doctor’s
prohibition and reach out and touch his candidate. He’d felt the
weight of the boy’s body against his once but he’d never touched
him. His one attempt had been long ago at the climax of their first
meeting. It had been forestalled by the explosion. Sometimes, when
pursued by the image months ago, the director’s mind had given to
those parallel phenomena an absurd relationship of cause and
effect. It was absurd to think that the movement of his hand toward
the other had triggered the explosion.

Lorz was summoning up courage to reach out
when the old doctor dismissed him. “That will be all. You can go
now.”

Had he been there for three minutes? The old
doctor, still seated in the corner, was going through his papers.
He assumed the director had gone. But Lorz lingered humbly like a
student at the end of an oral examination felt to be disastrous.
Did I pass? Finally the doctor looked up. He frowned on seeing him
still there.

“It wasn’t very successful,” Lorz stated
rather than asked, as though hoping that the use of the declarative
form to such an authoritarian person as the old doctor would elicit
a contradictory affirmation.

“What was not successful?”

“The visit, I mean.”

“He looked at you, he heard you. What more
did you expect?”

Was that the measure of success now, after
the second “recovery,” like autonomous breathing, after the
first?

“He seems to tolerate you quite well,” the
doctor added in reluctant concession.

Lorz found the word “tolerate” wounding.
Didn’t he tolerate everybody? he asked.

No, was the unelaborated reply.

On Monday the director and his assistant
exchanged impressions. She considered that her visit had been an
unqualified success. “There wasn’t much communication,” Lorz
objected, referring to his own visit, meaning hers too,
understating what he regarded as a second fiasco after so much
hope. “No?” she said with her mysterious smile, as if in possession
of a secret she wanted him to ask about. He didn’t ask. After a few
seconds, she said: “You don’t always need words to communicate.” He
didn’t answer. She must have reached out.

The director’s second visit the following
Sunday was a spectacular success in certain respects.

It began inauspiciously. Lorz came with
costly chocolates and Chinese puzzles. The aim was interaction. He
imagined his candidate’s hand reaching out for the proffered
chocolates and then both of them communing in the same bittersweet
taste. He imagined himself expertly unlinking the puzzle before his
candidate’s gaze, then assembling it, handing it to the boy who
would repeat his gestures.

These gifts, as it turned out, were useless.
They cost him, moreover, frustration, humiliation and a great deal
of money. The imported chocolates, of course, but why were the
Chinese puzzles – mere twists of metal – so outrageously dear too?
He’d spent all of Saturday morning selecting them in toyshops. They
were fiendishly difficult. There were no instructions, not even in
Chinese. For hours the director sat on the edge of his chair,
leaning forward, scowling down at the defiant lunatic imbrications
in his lap. He wasn’t gifted. A consolation was a feeling of
closeness to his candidate who, at that precise moment, perhaps,
was engaged, far more efficiently, in the same activity.