The Seventh Candidate (15 page)

The director worked the puzzles even in the
underground, at first openly. Then, irritated by the stares of
other passengers, behind the barricade of his briefcase. Once he
looked up and surprised an elderly female, lips compressed with
scandal, wattled neck craned, trying to view the activity of his
hands busy in his lap.

In the office, when his assistant left on
errands, he took them out of his briefcase. On her return, hearing
her hand turning the knob, he would sweep them back jingling into
his briefcase. Finally he learned to disassemble one of the Chinese
puzzles in less than two minutes. He timed himself.

When he entered the hospital office for the
second time the director immediately opened the gift-wrapped
package and took out the puzzle he’d finally mastered. “Too late,”
said the doctor. There were no more puzzles on the table. “Look!”
said Lorz anyhow, jingling the construction to capture his
candidate’s attention. He started working on it. In his eagerness
he got it wrong. “Wait,” he said. He said “wait” a dozen more times
before a triumphant “There!”

His candidate wasn’t looking. His candidate
couldn’t care less. And the chocolates were ignored. “He doesn’t
accept sweets,” said the old doctor. “And the puzzle phase is over.
It is the chess phase now. He operates by phases.”

The director took in the setup of the
chessboard, the confusion of pieces. Wasn’t it regression? Two
weeks before, in the subterranean maze, his candidate had been in
the stage of rehearsing the moves, some correct, even if most were
mistaken. He recalled the rook forced into diagonal movement, the
knight advancing hobbled square by square, like a pawn. A week ago
the boy had learned to place the pieces, progress. Now this
chaos.

Suddenly the director realized the logic of
the seemingly haphazard pattern of the pieces. It was a game, an
end game, the white king done to death by a black knight and
bishop. Was it conceivable that his candidate, a week before
ignorant of the basic moves, could have played a game? Or if he
played, was unable to respond to the director’s greetings and
gifts?

“He didn’t play, he can’t have played,” the
director exclaimed incredulously, turning toward the old
doctor.

“Yes, he played,” said the doctor. The
attendant was watching the director and the boy seated on either
side of the wooden table with the chessboard between them.

“Who won?”

“He. He also lost.”

The director instantly understood the true
sense of the ambiguous statement. “How is that possible? How can
you play against yourself?”

“He refuses any other opponent.”

The director turned back to the table and
encountered the boy’s eyes staring beyond and before him and in
despair, isolated somewhere in between, knowing that words were
useless, reached out toward him.

At the last moment his hand took fright and
deviated to the left and downward and took a chess piece.

“Touch nothing on the table, nothing that
belongs to him!” the old doctor snapped, as though an invisible
thread attached the piece, a white bishop, to high explosives.

The director’s hand froze. Long seconds
passed. The boy hadn’t moved. He was staring down at the
chessboard.

Lorz took another piece. The doctor said
nothing. Lorz took a third piece.

The boy took a black rook and placed it on
its square.

“Do you play chess?” the doctor inquired in
a low voice.

“Years ago.”

“Play,” the doctor ordered. “Ask him
first.”

The director stared at his candidate’s
expressionless face. “Let me play a game with you,” Lorz said as
gently as he could. The doctor leaned over and whispered something
in the ear of the attendant who got up and sat down next to the
director. The doctor drew his chair closer to get a better view of
the board.

Lorz took the other white pieces and started
placing them on their squares. In adolescence he had played a good
game.

The first surprise came from the rapidity
with which the hands opposite his placed the black pieces. Then
greater surprise at the rapidity of the black counter-moves after
the laborious cogitation that preceded his own white moves. The
boy’s face was empty but it was as though his hands had independent
intelligence, as though each contained a miniature intact
brain.

The surprise grew steadily during the game,
culminating with the twenty-seventh move twenty minutes later when
his candidate’s knight side-winded and uncovered at 5C the black
bishop’s diagonal penetration of the white king at 1E.

The director stared down at the checkmate.
He laughed in incredulous joy and leaned back in his chair. His
candidate also leaned back and immobilized, still staring down at
the pieces, like a chess-playing automaton. Lorz turned to the
doctor.

“He beat me. Incredible!” He laughed
again.

“You did bad mistakes, elementary mistakes,”
said the doctor.

The director tried to conceal his irritation
at the doctor’s words. They minimized both his patient’s exploit
and his own skill at the game, which had been considerable
twenty-five years before.

“And he is of only average competence,” said
the doctor. “For the moment.”

He paused and then added as if in
consolation:

“Perhaps it was better you have lost.”

Before the director could ask what he meant,
the doctor went on.

“You are the first person he has accepted to
play with.”

“How do you explain that?” inquired the
director with a show of perplexity, not really needing an
explanation.

He got it anyhow: an upward phase, plus the
right medicine with a correct dosage.

The director told his assistant about the
chess game. She nodded but said nothing. Didn’t she realize what a
fantastic breakthrough this represented? He asked her if she had
tried to play chess with him on Saturday. She replied that she
didn’t play chess, hadn’t the brains, that anyhow she didn’t need
chess to get through to him. There were other ways.

The director had only chess. That evening
he rummaged about and came up with his old chess set and the two
worn volumes of Schlechter and Moch’s
Handbuch des Schachspiels
(8th edition, Berlin,
1914-1929). He replayed certain classic tournament and problem
games, black and white, puzzling out the comments move by move. It
afforded blessed abstraction. The world vanished. Why had he given
up chess? In imitation of his candidate he even tried to play
against himself but couldn’t achieve the necessary
mind-split.

The following day he bought a miniature
pocket chess-board with pegged pieces and sat in the train on the
way to
Ideal
, the
chessboard on one knee, volume two of Schlechter and Moch on the
other. He almost missed his stop. He would have been oblivious to
massacres in the carriage.

His sudden craze – the other’s, actually –
even invaded the office. It was hard to concentrate on business
with that elegant mobile geometry in his mind. He found himself
glancing uneasily at his assistant out of the corner of his eye and
concealing the massive book beneath papers like something
clandestine. Once she saw what he was doing but said nothing. The
toilet was a refuge, as for some secret guilty activity.

“Is there something the matter?” he once
heard her voice, infinitely distant, on the other side of the
locked door, intruding into Anderson vs. Kiesseritzky, London,
1851. He’d been there half an hour.

It all came back, the forgotten language.
Even his window-shopping was monopolized by the game. He returned
again and again to a nearby specialized shop. He gazed briefly at
the ultra-modern sets, the stylized spun-aluminum pieces, and then
for a long time at an exquisite old set, the board inlaid rosewood,
the pieces intricate ivory and ebony. The price was outrageous.

Following the success of the second visit the
director was allowed two hours now, but still only once a week,
still on Sunday. He asked why the visits were so limited but
received no explanation. At least he was practically alone with his
candidate now. The irascible old doctor left after the first five
minutes or so and returned a few minutes before the end of the
visit. The attendant sat outside in the corridor reading a comic
book. The door was left ajar.

When the director entered the office that
third time he saw that six chessboards occupied nearly the entire
surface of the table. His candidate was staring down at one of the
boards. He didn’t look up or respond to Lorz’s greeting. The
director turned toward the old doctor and received the latter’s
permission in the form of a slow magnified blink.

He started placing his white pieces on the
board opposite his chair. The sound activated the automaton who
turned to the board and started placing the black pieces. They
played again. Both had made tremendous progress since last week’s
game, the director perhaps a little less than the boy who again
defeated him. But Lorz had narrowed the gap.

The old doctor came back toward the end of
the second game at the precise moment the boy fell into a trap by
accepting the black rook/white queen exchange. The doctor looked
down at the board.

“Do not defeat him,” he said in a scarcely
audible voice.

There was no question of Lorz’s doing that.
He wouldn’t have been able to. So he passed over the bishop
sacrifice with mate four moves removed and shortly after, deprived
of the queen, was checkmated.

“You have improved,” said the doctor, as
though the vast improvement of his candidate was something
minor.

“Not as much as he has,” said the director.
“He must play a great deal.”

“He does little else,” the doctor
replied.

“With other players?”

“With himself. Except when you come.”

It went on that way for another month.

Later Lorz would look back at the period, for
all its frustrations, as one of the happiest of his life. At last
his activities outside the office had purpose. The Cycle was
distant. Evaluating strategies of approach to the boy or analyzing
chess moves on his knee in the train, he hardly gave a thought to
the worsening situation in the underground (an average of two
murders a week) or to the alarming things happening to the posters
even before the vandals got to them.

There was also an improved atmosphere in the
office that contributed to the changed quality of his life. The
help-wanted section of her paper had vanished from his assistant’s
desk. She made no more phone calls in answer to ads or calls of a
personal nature. She received none. He was no longer concerned
about a possible resignation, not since what he regarded as the
final unpleasantness between them.

During the second week of October she’d
started commenting on how much better he was looking, how much
better the business was doing. Her remarks surprised him. He began
glancing in mirrors. He scrutinized the accounts. He saw no radical
improvement in himself or
Ideal.
He wondered at her diagnoses until one morning when she
told him that the coming week would be her last at
Ideal
.

She was at the filing cabinet, her back
turned to him, when she said it. She added that she’d finally found
something else.

He didn’t react. That morning at
Central
Station
, months ago, she
said, she’d told him that her return to
Ideal
would be just for a week or so. They’d agreed then
that she wouldn’t have to give notice but she was giving a week’s
notice anyhow. There was still that efficient person she’d already
told him about to replace her.

She went on filing the invoices in the
continuing silence. Finally she shoved the drawer shut and turned
around. He was reading a letter and making notes. She returned to
her desk saying that she’d drop in now and then to see how things
were going. He nodded, absorbed in his work. After a while she
added that she’d drop in once a week. They could have lunch
together if he liked. He said, “Why not?” and asked her if she’d
filed the
Prospects
letter
they’d received the day before.

Three o’clock came round, then five past. At
3:22 she reminded him of the pills. He paid no attention to her
remark. He was plunged in paper work. She reminded him at
five-minute intervals. He didn’t answer until 4:05 when he cut her
short.

“It’ll be a relief anyhow not to be nagged
anymore. I’m not a child. I’ll take the pills if I want to. If I
don’t want to I won’t. And I don’t want to, now or ever. This is
what I do with your bloody pills.”

He yanked the vial out of his pocket,
snapped the plastic stopper free with his thumbnail and with the
gesture of a sower, created a brief blue spray. The pills pattered
to the floor, rolling about.

“And keep your competent lady. I can do
everything you do and just as well. I already did once, the first
time you left.”

They weren’t her bloody pills, she said,
picking two of them from her lap and placing them on her desk. She
picked up three more under her desk and placed them alongside the
two on her desk and looked around for the others.

He didn’t show up at the office the next day,
which was a Friday. She rang him at 10:00am and asked if he wasn’t
well. “Not well at all,” he replied with no elaboration. She asked
if he wanted her to pick something up for him after work: food or
medicine. He replied that it wouldn’t be necessary. She advised him
to rest over the weekend.