The Seventh Candidate (16 page)

The following week neither referred to her
forthcoming departure Friday evening. Friday morning she asked him
if he had advertised the job. He said he hadn’t. She commented on
the weather and then said goodbye.

“Monday,” she added as usual.

On Monday evening they left the office.
Normally they walked together toward his underground and her bus
stop. But when they got out of the building she halted, staring
across the street, and abruptly said goodbye to him there. Lorz
went his way alone for a few seconds, then turned around.

His assistant was dangerously weaving
through traffic toward an antiquated battered black car
double-parked opposite the
Ideal
building. She went up to the car and tried to open the
front passenger-door. It was locked. The director could see within
a thin arm with bracelets reaching over. The forearm muscles worked
and the window jerked down. His assistant tried to open the door
again. It remained locked. She remained there in a crouch, talking,
her hands eloquent. After a few minutes the thin arm reached over
and the window jerked up. The car started down the street slowly.
His assistant broke into a trot alongside it, her hands even more
active. Again the car stopped. Cars behind honked angrily. Again
the car started up but fast, gear after gear, no possibility of
pursuit. His assistant stopped running. The car picked up speed and
went through a traffic light turning red, turned a corner and
disappeared.

The next day it was her turn to ring up and
say she was ill. She missed two days. When she came back, pale and
drawn, she was doggedly mute. Five past three went by without a
word on her part. By 4:00 she still had said nothing.

He took the pills finally. He’d almost
forgotten them, perhaps he’d got used to her reminding him, he
said. He’d forgotten to take them yesterday, he added.

He didn’t expect her to ring him up to
remind him did he? she said. She’d been sick herself.

“What’s this for?” his assistant asked the
next day, as though what her employer was holding out to her was a
dead cat instead of flowers. She’d just hung up hurriedly as he
entered. Without that ungracious remark and expression he might
have said, “For you, of course.” Instead, he said, “To brighten the
place up,” and the gesture of offering the flowers became a demand
for her to find a vase, fill it with water, place the flowers in
the vase and the vase on a suitable surface, which she did in
silence. A few minutes later (as though disposing of flowers were a
non-contractual imposition) she said that she wasn’t getting enough
money for the work she did and demanded a ten percent raise. He
should have thought of it before she did.

Then one day the atmosphere in the office
changed. Her stance of confrontation was gone. It coincided with
her first claims of non-verbal communication with Teddy and with
the director’s first chess games with the boy. He no longer
encountered her painted gaze in the spy-mirror. One day she removed
the tarnished mirror for good along with the old calendars. She
called it “autumn-cleaning.”

Now she paid as little attention to him as
he did to her. It was as though their investment were outside the
windowless subterranean office, their mutually disengaged gaze
convergent on what was going on in the hospital. They started
relaxing into an indifferent familiarity that had never existed
between them in the five and a half years of their relationship,
marked by an unequal balance of power, first one way then the
other. Her appearance no longer shocked him. Her modish political
opinions wouldn’t have bothered him anymore even if she’d gone on
expressing them, which she didn’t.

Communication was no longer a problem. He’d
swivel about in his chair toward her desk and say whatever he had
to say without fearful preliminary censorship, she answering
politely enough. And then he would swivel back to his affairs. She
was no more than his assistant, almost a new, not a rehired, one.
Her connection with the “Miss Ruda” of the past was fading in his
mind as was “Miss Ruda” herself, reduced to a black-and-white
photograph forgotten in his wallet.

At first, before the near-accident on the
hospital path, the director had to take her word for it that the
boy’s progress wasn’t limited to the sixty-four squares of the
chessboard. His assistant spoke of resurrection. She found subtle
expression in his face. There was also the way his drawings were
becoming “more human.” From her confused explanations, the director
understood that the painstaking geometrical figures tended now to
the figurative: vaguely human faces composed of tiny circles,
triangles, rectangles. And of course the vast improvement in
muscular coordination. And the fact that he could walk. She felt
sure that he was on the brink of speech.

There must have been even more progress than
what she said. She’d bought an expensive-looking diary with twining
pink flowers on blue linen covers. It had a tiny heart-shaped brass
lock with a microscopic brass key. “To keep track of his progress,”
she explained once, intercepting his curious gaze. She had it out
all the time on Mondays following her visit when lulls in office
activity permitted, but often enough the other days too. She would
stare sightless at the wall, biting her pen, leaving lipstick
smears on it and then, remembering, she would lower her head,
exposing her diligent neck-vertebras and scribble away. Finally,
she would place the diary carefully in her lower desk-drawer, which
she locked.

One day they disagreed about the date of a
minor progress. She took out her diary and proved she was right.
The director was troubled. Since the blast nine months before, his
memory had become unreliable. So he bought a school notebook to
record the boy’s progress. His fat old fashioned fountain-pen
remained suspended a moment over the white rectangle on the cover
marked “Subject.” What was he to call the subject? “Teddy”? “The
Boy”? “Number Nine”? “My Candidate”? He was tempted to inscribe
what all these had in common, the question mark. Finally he settled
for “The Log”. He too noted his candidate’s progress on Monday but
more quickly than his assistant, in the terms in which the director
encountered it: 1.
P-K4,
P-K4; 2. P-KB4, P x P; 3.
B-B4, P-QKt4.

Chess monopolized everything. There was no
other form of communication. Anyhow one didn’t talk over the board.
When he entered the old doctor’s office the boy’s only response to
Lorz’s greeting was to set up the black pieces. He didn’t accept
candied orange-peels or sugared almonds or salted nuts or pastry
any more than he had chocolates. He only accepted the game. His
candidate’s eyes never left the board. Glancing at him hurt, like
coming up against a wall. His expression was one of intense
abstraction. Lorz tried to recall the jargon term of the old
doctor’s concerning his patient’s problem, something like
“dissociation of the cognitive and affective.”

His assistant had claimed he could walk.
Lorz saw nothing of that. His candidate was always seated at the
table throughout the visit. So Lorz continued visiting the hospital
during his lunch hour in the hope of seeing the boy in his
rehabilitation activities. This happened only twice.

The first time was a week following the
initial visit. Through the closed glass doors of the hydrotherapy
pool Lorz briefly witnessed the boy’s somnambulist steps in the
abolished gravity of the water. It was the first time he’d ever
seen him erect, a dazzle of near-nudity in a beam of sunshine from
the bay window. Nearly nullifying that emotion was a shock. His
candidate seemed impossibly gigantic. The white-capped head of the
woman physiotherapist barely reached his massive chest. She held
her arms high in a parodical gesture of surrender in order to grasp
his outstretched sleepwalker hands. She retreated as though with
his towering bulk and empty brutal face he were forcing her back.
Lorz tried to remind himself that actually she was in command,
leading him forward toward the reduced buoyancy of shallower
water.

The boy’s alarming stature was rectified as
scale was provided. The white-capped therapist backed past a
colleague working over a patient’s knee-flexions and proved to be
small. The boy was very big but probably not monstrously so.

Two weeks later Lorz rounded a path in the
park and the boy, jogging in the dwarfed company of a
physiotherapist, was almost upon him, gigantically. The director
stood stock still and stared at his candidate’s looming abstracted
face. After this other miracle of recuperation, wouldn’t there be
another one, recognition? Contact at last? “Theodore!” he cried,
spontaneously finding at that instant a compromise name not devoid
of dignity like the shirt-tag one. “Get out of the way!” the
therapist cried. At the last moment Lorz shrank aside into the
thorny barberries. There’d been no sign of recognition. Even more
alarming, no sign of halting or swerving to avoid him. There’d
almost been contact, but the wrong kind. With the other’s hurtling
bulk he would have gone down smashed, as though hit by a
locomotive. Was it that the boy didn’t recognize him disassociated
from the chessboard? Had he even seen him?

The following Sunday, the fifth and last of
the visits in the old doctor’s office started like the others. By
this time Lorz no longer prefaced the games with the useless appeal
for recognition. He avoided questions altogether. The silence that
followed was too painful. What he said now was neutral. The sky was
a beautiful blue, he would say, imitating his assistant’s formulas,
the remaining leaves on the trees red and yellow. Often he tried
joking things like: “Well, you beat me last time, but wait and see,
it’ll be my turn now,” although he knew he’d never have the heart
to defeat Theodore.

This time, sitting down at the table, he
couldn’t help saying too, “I saw you jogging down the path, last
Tuesday. Do you remember? I was there.” Of course he got no answer.
The hands opposite went on placing the black pieces for the game.
Fear again overcame his impulse to reach out and touch. They
started playing.

From the start his opponent betrayed a
baffling loss of skill. His hand hovered hesitantly over the pieces
as Lorz’s had weeks ago during their first game. He made the same
purposeless moves. The game was only ten minutes old when his
candidate moved his rook, threatening the white queen but opening
himself to obvious checkmate in two moves.

Lorz passed up the opportunity. Deliberately
he exposed his king to checkmate. Anyone could see it, even a rank
beginner. The boy didn’t see it. Lorz passed up advantage after
advantage. He exposed himself to elementary checkmates that never
came. It was as though they’d invented a new negative chess-game
where to win was to lose, something like the boy’s own solitary
games.

The opportunity to defeat his candidate came
again a minute later, a glaring blunder. Checkmate was now a single
move away: the knight to 6B. How was this radical fall from
proficiency possible? His hand poised over the white knight, the
director couldn’t help looking up at his candidate even though he
knew he’d come up painfully against the usual blank wall.

No wall now. For the first time since the
visits started his candidate’s gaze met his. The intelligence of
those dark-blue eyes, unwavering and perfectly focused, was at such
total variance with the loss of chessboard intelligence that the
director reinterpreted everything in a jubilant instant. The
seemingly blind moves weren’t a symptom of weakness, after all.
Weakness? God alone knew the fantastic progress that his
candidate’s brain had realized in the week since the last visit,
like the powerful jogging strides days after the hesitant
water-buoyed steps in the pool. What else if not a parody of his
own incompetence weeks ago? His joking remark at the start of the
game, “It’ll be my turn now,” had been understood. His candidate
was forcing victory upon him. It was a gift, far subtler than his
own conventional chocolates and almonds.

Already in the earlier games, it was now
clear, the boy had deliberately offered him opportunities for
victory. He’d rejected them out of misplaced pity, rejecting at the
same time the offer of communication, contact, in the geometric
terms of the game. Now he was convinced that with the acceptance of
the gift of victory there would be a smile of complicity, a
transformation toward tenderness of those brutal features, perhaps
words of recognition.

So he accepted the gift of victory and
contact.

He moved his white knight to 6B and
announced checkmate.

His candidate stared down on the board,
absolutely immobile, in profound contemplation as though seeking a
countermove to checkmate. His lips moved silently.

A minute went by. The breathing became more
and more raucous. The director, conquering his fright, reached out
and touched the boy’s shoulder to calm him. The deltoids were
petrified as though tensed to snapping with some inconceivable
inward labor. His eyes rolled upwards into whiteness like a
statue’s.

The first sounds came from his open mouth.
Slowly, endlessly, he towered to his feet, upsetting the victory
into a confusion of chessmen on the floor.

The director cried out and fled the
room.

Before he reached the end of the corridor he
could hear the threatening voice of the attendant, a scuffle, an
upset chair, the inhuman sound, much louder. Wasn’t he trying to
pronounce his name? Wasn’t it a strangled “Edmond”? If so it was
his first utterance. It pursued Edmond Lorz well beyond
earshot.

***

3

He took the next day off. When he returned to
the office his assistant implicitly disallowed his pretext of fever
by repeating what Dr Silberman had told her. It was unfortunate
that it had happened at that moment, (“it,” she said, she didn’t
remember his name for it). It was sudden and unpredictable and, if
you weren’t accustomed to it, alarming. But it was over, he was
better now, he hadn’t hurt himself. Still, there would be no more
visits for them for two weeks.