The Seventh Candidate (2 page)

The director went over to the big map of
the capital’s underground network hanging on a dingy wall above
piles of posters. It looked like a war-theater map. Twelve numbered
pins were stuck in the red dots of major stations, marking the
deployment of the firm’s employees. The director pulled pin seven
out of
February 26
. His
assistant, still badly shaken, agreed that they would have to
advertise for a new operator.

The director returned to his desk and the
poster statistics. His assistant kept staring at the wall
tragically. A few minutes later, the director sneezed six times in
quick succession. His assistant looked away from the wall and
repeatedly begged God to bless him. She timidly hoped that he
wasn’t coming down with the flu. Everybody was. He sneezed again
and asked her if a sore throat was one of the symptoms. She said
that it probably was. She burrowed in her bag and came over with a
tin of lemon-flavored vitamin C wafers which she placed on his desk
gratefully.

He thanked her and placed a wafer on his
tongue and let it melt. If only a wafer, this or the sanctified
one, could cure ailments more fundamental than a sore throat.

At six the director called it a day. His
assistant said that of course she would visit Jonas immediately.
After a few seconds Lorz understood that she was referring to
Operator Seven. He allotted a reasonable sum for flowers or
chocolates at her discretion and reminded her to recover the office
keys from the operator at the hospital. Tomorrow, first thing, she
should insert a help-wanted advertisement in the usual newspaper.
He would start preparing the test that very evening, he added.

Leaving the office, Lorz nearly stepped on
her sardines. He’d made frequent indirect references to the matter
but she went on placing the saucer with sardines to one side of the
staircase. They attracted hordes of scabby identical-looking cats.
She had a distinct name for each one. The staircase reeked. Lorz
avoided head-on confrontations because he knew he tended to
overreact and suspected that she would too if he did and perhaps
with tears. She was an emotional person. But one of these days he’d
have to come out once and for all with a flat command for her to
stop doing that. He tried to stifle his irritation. Negative
reactions like that were bad for his condition.

As he climbed up to surface level, Lorz
recalled, as he did more and more often, an encyclopedia woodcut
representing the present neighborhood three centuries before: a
charcoal-burner’s hut among big leafy oaks with a stream and a deer
drinking from it. Naturally he didn’t ask for that much coming up
but dared to hope for blue sky. He got menacing clouds, the rush
hour crowd, the blare of traffic and recent rain dripping from the
bare branches of iron-corseted trees set at regular intervals
alongside the curb. The oaks and the deer were mortal, but what had
happened to the stream?

Not for the first time, his assistant, who
had caught up with him, cried, “O! O!” gazing up at the sky and
pointing. “The bird, O look, the beautiful blue bird!” Not for the
first time he looked. Who wouldn’t want to see a beautiful blue
bird in the dark heart of the capital? All he saw up there in the
habitual pollution-haze was a blue police helicopter hovering over
another student demonstration in the Sixth District. “Gone,” she
said.

The beautiful blue bird business had
happened three or four times already. Each time he looked it was
supposedly too late. Her exclusive vision rankled. He decided
there’d been no bird. It was trivial unmotivated mythomania, like
the cheese-seller with his flock of belled goats she claimed to
have seen near the
Ideal
building
at an uncompromisingly urban intersection.

Lorz was alarmed to note that his mind kept
picking at his assistant’s shortcomings and peculiarities. It was
one of the sure symptoms of approaching intestinal crisis. But he
couldn’t help going on with it. Not just the left-leaning
newspapers, the stubborn sardines and the fictitious birds or her
endless nostalgic reminiscences of childhood on a farm in the
Central Mountains. Above all, her peculiar periodic transformation.
Wasn’t the next one about due?

Three times a year she would march
aggressively into the office, barely recognizable in a tight
sweater and slacks. They emphasized the insufficiencies of her
figure. Her hair, which she normally wore in two schoolgirl
pigtails, would be unbecomingly upswept, denuding her irregular (if
not positively unpleasant) features. More irritating was her
polemical sharpness when he commented on her newspaper headlines.
He had trouble recognizing her at those times. He would think:
“She’s not herself again. It won’t last long.” In fact it lasted no
more than a few days each time. One morning, to his relief, she
would slip into the office, back in pigtails and modest loose
attire, looking as usual a faded sixteen, herself again, with an
apologetic air for the dissipation. It was cyclic with her as the
intestinal pains were with him. Luckily their cycles had never
coincided.

Before they separated at the corner, the
director reminded his assistant about the keys and the
advertisement. She said she wouldn’t forget. She seldom forgot
things. Despite her peculiarities she was an efficient
employee.

When Lorz reached his underground station
(
Crossroads
, Line
8), certain things he’d witnessed down below the other day came
back powerfully and he couldn’t go under, fearing for his bowels if
he again encountered child prostitutes of both sexes openly
soliciting in the cars or the young beggar-woman defecating in the
corridor, grinning at the passing legs of the rush hour
crowd.

What was the shield against that? Lorz, who
had once yearned for priesthood, had read that the radical solution
was love. Embrace them as saints had allegedly embraced lepers long
ago. The other, much easier, solution was to be blind to it all,
shielded by a newspaper. But in that case weren’t you part of it
all, a leper yourself?

Wondering, not for the first time, if he
shouldn’t look about for a new doctor, Lorz turned away from the
underground entrance and flagged down a taxi despite the expense.
He cranked the window shut against the local disorder but couldn’t
do anything against the radio detailing the world’s disorder at top
volume. He didn’t dare tell the driver to turn the news off.
Suppose the man refused?

When the taxi mired down in traffic, Lorz
paid and started walking to his apartment. It was still a long way
off. He breathed shallow in the cancerous blue haze manufactured by
thousands of stalled cars. Their horns blared discordantly like
something out of Shostakovich.

He marched on, trying to abstract himself
from it all, eyes fixed on the pavement. A big soft man collided
with him. “Oops,” the man said, clinging to Lorz. He had bright
yellow hair and a doughy face. “Why hell
o
! It’s been ages. Coming back to us after all that time?
Oh, and still so slim! What’s your secret?”

They were standing in front of the dingy
place with the legend
Turkish Delights. Steam Baths and
Massages
.

“It’s a mistake, I don’t know you,” Lorz
muttered, disengaging himself and walking rapidly away from the
place he’d stopped frequenting long ago, ten years ago it must have
been. Combating images out of that time, Lorz glanced at street
signs and set his course homeward.

He was close to his apartment when he thought
he felt the faint onset of the burning. He halted in the middle of
the pavement. Passersby jostled him. The only possible refuge, in
purely physical terms, was the Church of the Holy Cross at the
corner of the street. His mother had prayed there mornings and
evenings to no avail and finally had been prayed over one rainy
afternoon sixteen years before, to no avail either, Lorz imagined.
He hadn’t entered the church, that or any other one, since the
ceremony. If there’d been a public garden available he would have
gladly gone there instead. It would have had to be gigantic,
though, to fend off the city. He imagined himself, impossibly, on a
green bench under great oaks, with a deer drinking at a nearby
stream.

The leather-padded door swung shut on him. He
got the silence and immobility he craved, but with it gloom,
dankness and the odor of rancid piety. The church was empty except
for a shabby old woman with a big plastic shopping bag seated
before the altar, head bowed. She was as motionless as the statues
of the saints in their niches. Nothing had changed. He could
believe that the old woman had been sitting there for sixteen
years. The only sound was the whisper of his soles on the
flagstones.

Out of old habit he sat down on the side
aisle seat he’d once occupied between his mother and father. To his
left was the familiar sarcophagus with the eroded noseless effigy
of the recumbent Warrior Bishop who had upheld authority with sword
and gibbet in the time of the Child Kings.

Soaring foreshortened above was the savage
mutilated black Christ that had terrified Lorz long ago. He was
three times life-size, stark and fissured, hewn out of
indestructible heart-wood blackened with time, as black as his
father’s uniform. The original polychrome was gone except for faded
flecks of color in the grain of the wood. The gouts of blood that
streamed from the barbed iron crown, the four nails, and the
open-lipped flank-wound were very visible, having been periodically
freshened up at later periods of weakening faith to assert the
reality of redemption.

He bore other wounds, bloodless axe wounds
dealt by the Integral Iconoclasts during the late sixteenth-century
Time of Disorders. His chin had been partly lopped off. The
desecration had gone unrepaired except for the sectarians
themselves: reparation by disembowelment and molten lead. His
gaping chinless mouth was twisted in what seemed a mute cry for
even greater vengeance.

Below that Christ, to the left, hung the
large oil painting of Jesus healing cripples. The two juxtaposed
images left Lorz indifferent now as everything in the church did.
He dimly recalled, though, his wonder, at perhaps five or six, on
learning that they were the same Person. It was another Mystery,
like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Three in One, but a
Mystery the priest never talked about: how the beautiful figure in
the painting with his gentle face and pure blue eyes and golden
hair spilling over his immaculate gown could be the same Person as
the black mutilated giant on His cross. Both were Jesus Christ, his
mother had explained.

But for a long time young Lorz had
dissociated them in his mind. The gentle Person in the painting he
knew as “Jesus,” the Other as “Christ” perhaps because “Christ”
sounded like “cry,” not the cry of tears (tears were for blue-eyed
Jesus) but the cry of fury. For the child, only Christ, exclusively
that giant Christ, wielded power. He’d been secretly convinced that
the black snarling figure was no mere representation of Christ, but
Christ himself, so the only Christ, excluding the thousands of
imposters bearing the name, like the one in the painting. With
their blond hair and blue eyes they were pastel and powerless, even
when depicted performing miracles as in the painting. They suffered
meekly on the cross. They were jesus, not Christ.

This one authentic Christ had repeatedly
pursued him in dreams for transgressions that had escaped his
father’s vigilance. Sometimes he’d prayed, without belief, to the
healing blue-eyed jesus on the picture to intercede and make those
dreams stop coming but the jesus never interceded although just a
few meters separated him from Christ.

So it couldn’t have been thanks to his
intercession that one day the snarling Christ became his ally. He
was sixteen. Shortly after the new Time of Disorder he fell gravely
ill and had a fever vision of Christ wrenching Himself loose from
the wood and stalking stiffly over the land scourging evil. Victim
himself, and so not pursued, he prayed to Him for retribution for
the smashed Chinese vase, the uniformed marionettes dangling from
street lamps, one of them his father, retribution for the harm done
to his mother.

After, his black-clad mother told him that
he’d nearly died and that she’d prayed to Jesus for him day and
night and still did for his eyesight to recover completely. Light
pained him terribly. She said that Jesus was Love, not Hate. She
said that over and over. He must have babbled in his fever. She’d
already begun filling her room with mottos proclaiming that Jesus
was Love and haloed effigies of the beautiful young man. The
terrible collection of mirrors came later.

Lorz leaned forward in his seat and closed
his eyes, concentrating on his bowels. The burning had withdrawn.
It was still there of course, somewhere beneath the threshold of
pain, vigilant, biding its time. He decided to look about for
another doctor, the fourth one in as many years.

He heard a dry shuffling sound and opened
his eyes. The old woman with the plastic shopping bag was dragging
herself up the aisle. She stopped and knelt groaning before a
plaster statue of the alleged Mother of God clad in classic blue
and white. Even as a child Lorz had wondered how, with her insipid
pretty porcelain face, she could have been mother to the giant
black Christ.

After a while, feeling a little better, Lorz
got up and went home.

He took out of the refrigerator the leftovers
from yesterday’s dinner. He’d gone without lunch that day. Out of a
sense of duty he started picking at the cold scraps when the phone
in his study rang, a rare occurrence. He went on chewing. The phone
refused to go away. Finally Lorz got up and, very slowly, to give
it more time, walked into the study.