The Seventh Candidate (18 page)

Lorz obeyed. But his candidate had returned
to his latest disemboweled watch.

“Where is your present today?” the old
doctor went on nagging. “You have no presents this time? You come
empty-handed? No cho-co-lates, no salted nuts, nothing? No
reciprocity. You specialize in lost opportunities.”

Lorz stayed with his candidate for another
half-hour. He thanked him again, six or seven times, profusely. He
commented on the weather. He congratulated him on his skill at
watch repairing.

His candidate never looked up a single
time.

Before Lorz left, his hands encumbered with
the undesired gifts, the old doctor told him that the Vocational
Rehabilitation Unit would probably bill him for the eleven
watches.

Lorz nearly dropped them. He protested
vehemently. What could he do with twelve watches? He didn’t want
those watches, except for his own of course. He would return them
to the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit.

The doctor overruled him. No, it was
necessary that he keep the watches. Teddy was always in the Unit.
He would be sure to recognize them. He had a sixth sense for such
things. They would be refused gifts for him. Affectively
disastrous. It would be advisable during Lorz’s forthcoming visits
always to bring the watches in. Teddy might want them back, who
knew? His reactions were not invariably predictable.

That happened on Sunday. By Monday morning
Lorz had begun to realize the tremendous significance of Theodore’s
multiple gifts. He brought the watches, still in their rigorous
wrappings, into the office. Normally he avoided discussing his
visits to his candidate with his assistant. He’d been discouraged
by her undisguised lack of interest in the breakthrough he’d
achieved with the chess game. Somewhat offended as well, actually.
As for her own visits, usually she made a mystery of went on in the
office between her and Teddy on Saturday afternoons, alluding in
the vaguest way to “genuine communication.” Lorz suspected that
this was an invention.

Lorz couldn’t resist showing her the
watches. She glanced at the packages with visible indifference,
produced her mysterious tolerant smile and unlocked the bottom
drawer of her desk where she kept her pink-flowered diary.

She showed him one of Teddy’s geometric
drawings. “That was two weeks ago,” she said. “A present from
Teddy. I have lots of others at home.” She claimed to make out a
face in the drawing. Lorz saw no face and wondered if she hadn’t
filched the drawing.

Whether or not she acknowledged it, the
twelve packages represented a second, even more significant,
breakthrough. Still, the idea of having to pay for the watches (as
though he’d had to purchase Theodore’s gesture) bothered him so
much that he decided to go to the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit
and discuss the matter. First, he opened the packages and recovered
his own watch, whole again and keeping reasonable time.

The Vocational Rehabilitation Unit consisted
of four big rooms on either side of a basement corridor. Through
the glassed door of the woodworking sub-unit Lorz saw patients
producing blond curls from whirring accident proof lathes. A
paralytic was daubing glue on joints. In a corner stood
unconvincing bare chairs, awaiting varnish. In the game-room two
patients with partly paralyzed hands were trying to cope with the
counters of a checker-game. Others were elaborating obscure
constructions with tiny red-and-white plastic bricks. Lorz saw no
chess games going on. All of the sets must have been in the
possession of his candidate. In the third room women in wheelchairs
with impeccable hair-dos pecked away at typewriters. Behind them
was a blackboard with what looked like graffiti but which the
director supposed were shorthand symbols.

The fourth room was the watch-repairing
sub-unit. There was a long workbench with miniature lathes, vices,
green velvet rectangles, watch-parts, lots of Lilliputian
calibrated tools. Wheel chaired paraplegics with wasted braced legs
and heroic overcompensated torsos bent over the watch-works, faces
screwed about the jeweler’s glass in their right eye.

The director of the Vocational
Rehabilitation Unit, seated behind his desk, was a bearish man with
an old fashioned square beard. His bushy eyebrows, over eyes like
burning coals, accentuated his baldness. His mouth was thin,
down-curled, clamped shut, promising ill-natured taciturnity. He
looked like an early silent-movie villain or a Gallic serial
wife-killer.

Lorz produced the eleven watches and
explained his business. As Lorz went on, the man’s face grew dark,
a thundercloud, and then without warning he burst into curiously
high-pitched laughter. He laughed and laughed and suddenly
stopped.

“Why am I laughing?” he said in an almost
falsetto voice. “He’s killing me, your Teddy. Driving me insane.
Nothing’s safe from him. What will it be next?”

The bearded director turned out to be very
loquacious. The presence of what he took to be a fellow-sufferer
acted upon him as a stimulant. That was how Lorz learned the facts
in the case of the patient they called Teddy. Not, of course, the
ultimate facts (would he ever learn those?), but the surface facts
concerning the genesis of his obsessions, the clinical symptoms
that accompanied them, the reasons for his periodic eclipses. The
bearded director seemed surprised at Lorz’s ignorance. Apparently
everybody knew about it in the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. They
were, it was true, in a privileged position to know.

The first public revelation of the unknown
boy’s powers occurred in the Unit with the Chinese puzzles, said
the bearded director. He was wrong. He couldn’t know that those
powers had already been displayed to Lorz and his assistant seconds
before the explosion in the
Ideal
office.

The bearded director went on. From the start
Teddy displayed incredible proficiency. He hardly looked down at
puzzles. They flew apart. Gradually a semi-circle of therapists and
patients gathered about him. His very virtuosity was disruptive.
But the real problems started when it was time for him to leave at
noon. He refused to go. He refused to give up the puzzles. Finally
nurses and doctors were called in and they found a compromise. He
let himself be led away but in possession of all of the Chinese
puzzles. The doctors had assured the bearded director that the
puzzles would be returned to the Unit that afternoon. Months had
gone by and they were still in the boy’s possession.

Later, it was the same for the chess sets.
And then the watches. What could the hospital staff do? Remove the
“borrowed” objects during his sleep? This was tried, it appeared.
When he awoke and found them gone he had “negative reactions.”
Among other things, apparently, he refused food. It was true that
he also refused food at the height of involvement with his craze.
He hardly slept either. So the director of the Unit had heard.

The problem was to break him from the
obsessional activity. First the Chinese puzzles. Then chess. Now
the watches. What next? It was a pattern. He’d refuse his
rehabilitation sessions as well as food and sleep. It was
“counter-productive” (the term they used) to interrupt the
activity. To save him they administrated massive injections of
soporifics and new experimental drugs. He’d fall into deep sleep.
Normally this treatment put an end to the particular obsession but
at the price of a profound lethargy on awakening. At least he ate,
though. Or let himself be fed? They then let up on the drugs and he
won back his former energy and found another obsession, found it
here in the Vocational Obsession Center unfortunately.

The bearded director broke into peals of
soprano laughter and then returned to his real concern. The Unit
was being plundered. What would it be next? Good thing the
woodworking lathes weighed a ton and were bolted down. The annual
budget hadn’t made allowances for such happenings.

That was what Lorz learned in the Unit. As
for the eleven watches, the talk of having to pay for them turned
out to be more of the old doctor’s sadistic humor. In a month or so
Lorz would be able to return the watches, said the director of the
Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. Teddy would probably be gone by
then.

“Gone?” Lorz asked. “Gone where?”

The bearded director, smiling slightly,
opened his large hands wide and empty in a gesture confessing
ignorance.

“Some institution or other,” he said.

His twin derelictions deeply troubled Lorz.
Theodore, according to the old doctor, had twice been receptive and
twice he, Lorz, had unforgivably, criminally even – was the word
too strong? – botched things. He’d abandoned him one Sunday. The
following Sunday he’d been unable to reciprocate his candidate’s
gift. Either gesture, he felt, might have triggered a breakthrough
toward normality. The director pictured the gray dank walls of
“some institution or another.” He decided to make amends the
following Sunday.

But how could he capture the other’s
attention? How could he recreate the intimacy of the chess games?
By this time, bitter about it, he thought he knew an infallible way
to get his candidate out of his exclusive dialogue with cogs and
springs. On his way to the hospital for a routine check-up, Lorz
bought the cheapest watch he could find (not as cheap as all that)
and had it gift-wrapped. He was sure that because of the money and
the yearning it had cost him it would be ignored, sure his
candidate would be on to something else by the next visit.

This was half a sour joke. But an hour after
he purchased the watch, Lorz encountered the director of the
Vocational Rehabilitation Unit in the hospital cafeteria and
learned that, sure enough, his intended gift had exercised its
negative charm.

“More of the same,” the director confided,
brushing cake-crumbs off his square beard. “Except worse.”

Teddy had shown up again, a sure sign he was
off watches now and would be on to something new. He’d wandered
about the Unit with that familiar empty pre-obsessional expression
the bearded director had got to know so well. Finally the boy
stopped before an abandoned jigsaw puzzle a patient had been
working on and had broken up. It could have been a worse fixation.
He’d stared down at the heap of pieces for a few minutes, not
moving. Then he sat down and began assembling the pieces at
incredible speed. Granted, he had the model to go by on the
box-cover, the Spanish Beauty with the combs and castanets. But to
have pieced her together in seven minutes when the box gave forty
minutes as par! Before he’d finished, all activity in the sub-unit
had halted and they were grouped about him, therapists and
patients. Disruption again.

“Oh, he’s a case, all right,” said the
bearded director, with grudging admiration. He pursued his account.
The trouble started after the performance, the final piece set in
place. For then, of course, the normal procedure was to break up
the puzzle and to dump the pieces back in the box, ready for the
next patient. But Teddy resisted any approach to the assembled
Spanish Beauty. He seized the wrist of the therapist who tried to
take it away from him. His grip had even left a bruise. So they let
him keep it. What else could they do? Overpower him? The old
story.

Early next morning, instead of going to the
hydrotherapy pool Teddy had returned to the Unit and gone straight
to the locker where the other puzzles were kept. There was no
reasoning with him. And he was “strong as an ox.” He took all of
the puzzles away. It was funny, from one point of view. It was sad,
basically. His condition, clearly, was worsening. How long could
they keep him here?

The question was rhetorical. Neither the
bearded director nor Lorz could know that a decision was
imminent.

On Friday the old doctor phoned
Ideal
and commanded Lorz to come, not
to the familiar office, but to Room 307, and not on Sunday, but
tomorrow, Saturday, 25 October at 3:30pm, punctually. His presence
as well as Miss Ruda’s was indispensable. Had he carefully marked
down the time, the day, the room?

Lorz hung up and spoke to his assistant
about it. She knew all about the forthcoming visit. The fact that
it was taking place in Room 307 was a very positive thing, the old
foreign doctor had told her. Teddy continued to eat and sleep, when
he did eat and sleep, in Room 416. Since Teddy insisted on keeping
the things he’d worked on, space problems had developed. So he’d
been given a disused storage room, Room 307, to work and keep his
things in. They’d removed the lock, otherwise he might have locked
himself in. He had to be coaxed out for the rehabilitation
sessions. As it was, he placed a chair against the door. It was his
fortress. Till last week he hadn’t tolerated the presence of others
there.

But last Saturday she’d sneaked into that
room and had stayed there for twenty minutes with him, much more
than tolerated, until a nurse raised a fuss and made her leave. The
old doctor scolded her until she told him what had happened during
those twenty minutes. She’d talked to Teddy. A few times he’d
actually stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. And
finally he’d offered her another drawing and a pencil and maybe had
smiled at her, his first smile. The old doctor had said it was the
new drug, “Tex-something,” but she knew it wasn’t just that. The
doctor had phoned her yesterday evening and had said that maybe
their presence might tip the balance. The thing was to get Teddy to
give up the jigsaw puzzles, to get him to eat and to leave the
room. He’d sounded almost optimistic. She was sure it was going to
be a turning point.

“Let’s hope so,” Lorz said and told her what
the director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit had said about
Theodore’s probable future.