The Seventh Candidate (24 page)

But one day she said point-blank: “Why
don’t we try Teddy out on a part-time basis? Here in
Ideal
I mean.”

Lorz gazed across the office at his
assistant for a few seconds before replying dubiously: “I’d never
thought of that.” She found arguments. He persisted in his
skepticism. The boy’s first job attempts had been fiascoes, he
pointed out. Mightn’t he prove disruptive? She went to great
lengths to convince him. He said he’d think it over and if he
accepted her proposition would speak about it to Dr Silberman.

Lorz repeated with a slight deprecatory smile
that his assistant had suggested the move. Frankly he had, at
first, reacted negatively to it. He’d had “misgivings.”
(“Misgivings” was the soundest of terms. He repeated it). Then
after serious reflection he’d come round. At least to the extent of
being willing to give it a try. He’d drawn up the model contract.
But it was to be understood that strictly business considerations
would determine if the experiment was to be continued. Sentiments
had no place in business. He started reading it after a dry
cough.

1. He, Edmond Lorz, director of
Ideal
Poster
, agreed
conditionally to hire the individual known as Teddy on a part-time
basis for office work …

The doctor interrupted him. “I’m the wrong
person to be telling this to. I have very little to do with Teddy.
In any case, I find the idea strange to say the least. You propose
to hire Teddy in your office? In the very place where he was
injured? You can’t be serious.”

“Exactly my own reaction when my assistant
made the suggestion,” said Lorz with a slight smile of satisfaction
at their concordance of views. “But then I reflected on the matter.
After all I was injured there too. That didn’t prevent me from
returning. I also came to the conclusion that the office is, in a
sense, no longer the same office.”

Lorz paused and then explained untruthfully
that the office had been totally renovated following the
explosion.

“He wouldn’t recognize the place, I assure
you. The new wall is completely different from the old one. And the
other walls have been repainted a different color. The furniture
has been changed.”

The director realized, too late, that these
fabrications would oblige him at the very least to have the office
repainted. At what expense? It could be added to the long list of
expenditures on the boy’s behalf, like the ivory chess-set, the
watch and all those spurned delicacies. He drove the distracting
idea out of his mind and concentrated on the immediate task.

Moreover, he added (and he knew that this
would be a decisive argument), Teddy would be in the constant
presence of two individuals whom he knew and trusted. Lorz paused
to give additional weight to his point.

The doctor said nothing. But his willingness
to go on listening was an initial victory. Lorz peered down at the
interrupted typed sentence.

Agreed, then, conditionally to hire on a
part-time basis the individual known as Teddy for office work at
the prevailing rates for such work. Naturally there would be a
trial period of three weeks.

Silberman wanted to know what sort of office
work.

Transporting and pouring harmless chemicals,
paints for the most part, Lorz explained. Preparation of knapsacks.
Maintenance of the wheeled stepladders, largely cleaning and
oiling. Sorting posters. Sweeping up. Small errands. Lorz went on
and on with the enumeration. The catalogue of tasks to be
accomplished in three hours sounded like exploitation. Actually it
could all be disposed of in forty minutes.

Silberman came up with another objection.
Apparently he’d finally taken the underground early or late enough
to notice the “eradicators” as he called them. He found their job
highly dangerous. What if the ladder rolled off the platform onto
the rails? With the eradicator on it.

Lorz smiled politely at this almost comic
notion. He pointed out that the ladder was equipped with a
foolproof braking device. Such an accident was unthinkable. In any
case it was out of the question that Teddy would ever participate
in poster-rectification.

He shared Silberman’s disquiet but for
reasons which he’d already tried to explain to the Volunteer
Visitor and which he kept to himself now. The underground was
turning into a jungle. Still another of his operators was in
hospital, not stabbed, this one, but beaten bloody. It was out of
the question exposing the boy to such perils.

No, the only risks involved in the
proposition were purely commercial ones, he explained. For himself
if the experiment didn’t work. He felt confident that there were no
risks as regarded Teddy.

The director leaned back in his chair and
waited while the doctor abstracted himself from his surroundings.
His globular eyes blinked steadily behind the lenses of his
pince-nez and his forefinger tapped on his desk. Suddenly he was
back with Lorz.

“Teddy might very well prove to be …
difficult, let’s say. You would have to be prepared for that.”

The director said he was confident he could
deal with any problems that might arise.

Silberman glanced at his watch and got
up.

“The Commission meets on February 12,” he
said. “I’ll mention your proposal. That’s all I can do. I have no
power of decision. I promise nothing.”

Beneath his joy, which he carefully
concealed, Lorz wondered if the Commission in question was the same
Commission that decided to switch off patients judged hopelessly
comatose.

An alarming thought came to him.

Much more was at stake than permission for
his candidate to try out a new job. The Commission, he felt
certain, would rule on Theodore’s fate.

The job at
Ideal
had to succeed.

Two weeks later the Commission accepted the
proposal. Theodore was to start on Monday, February 24. He would be
inspected at weekly intervals. At the start he would be accompanied
to and from the job.

The director had lost one of his names for
the boy. Theodore was no longer a candidate.

***

4

At exactly 2:30 in the afternoon, accurate
to the second, the new member of staff bulked in the doorframe
of
Ideal
Poster
with his habitual
expression of profound meditation or void. The dead doctor’s squat
detached shadow was there too.

Instead of handing over his charge and
leaving, the attendant followed Theodore into the office. He
installed himself in a chair with his comic books.

Doctor Silberman had told Lorz that Theodore
would be convoyed to and from the office but not that the convoyer
would remain there. Later Lorz rang up the Commission number he’d
been given “in case of problems.” He was informed that it was a
last-minute arrangement. The attendant’s presence would cease at
the end of the week “if all went well.”

Lorz didn’t dare ask what would happen if
all didn’t go well. He could imagine that Theodore’s presence would
cease too. And what did “not go well” mean exactly? Failure on the
job? Or more than that?

With the squat shadow there all afternoon
long they had to invent activities for the boy. He had to be
meaningfully occupied every second now. The director and his
assistant had suspected that he’d dispose of the day’s scheduled
tasks too quickly to fill the three hours.

Sure enough, Theo instantly grasped what was
expected of him. In less than an hour of dedicated toil he swept
up, cleaned and oiled the wheeled ladders, fetched heavy bundles of
posters, filled the hundred or so bottles with chemicals and
wielded the 25-kilo paint cans like feathers without spilling a
drop. They hadn’t really looked beyond those tasks. They’d vaguely
imagined time-consuming activities like cutouts till 5:30pm.

But now it turned out that they weren’t
alone with him. Maybe the Commission (wrongly) suspected that the
job was a pretext, a last-chance refuge against permanent
institutionalizing. Didn’t this explain why the attendant was
there, looking up from garish heroes and monsters each time the new
member of staff moved about? If Theodore just stood staring inward
or beyond after he finished each of his fragmentary chores (as he
was doing now: quick, find something, anything, but what?) wouldn’t
the attendant report the fraud? He was a spy.

The director whispered his suspicions to his
assistant. She handled the problem with her usual occupational
efficiency.

“Oh Teddy, I forgot to show you around!” she
exclaimed, smiling at him and placing her hand on his bare arm with
a jingle of bracelets.

It was true. Rattled by those flat black
eyes flicking up at them from the comic book at unpredictable
intervals, they’d omitted the traditional introduction to new
members of staff and had set the boy to work immediately. Showing a
new operator about was normally a perfunctory ten minute operation.
But she eked it out ingeniously to an hour.

She showed and explained everything, loudly.
Coming after Theodore’s virtuosity sweeping up which one couldn’t
help admiring (completely to the detriment of the director’s jobs
at hand) it was another work disturbance, first of all for her. How
could she perform her usual tasks during the showing-round stint?
She hadn’t even an instant to open the early afternoon mail. Lorz
did it in her place. He also had to answer the phone.

He had great trouble concentrating. Seated
at his desk, trying to cope with the correspondence, he couldn’t
help hearing her laughing invitation to “the private place.” He
couldn’t help looking up as the squat shadow accompanied them to
the storeroom as though he too was curious to learn about the
operation of the toilet.

Now the phone rang. The director’s left ear,
not engaged with the dissatisfied client took in the raging
waterfall, the swirl and gurgle of the toilet bowl. She’d pulled
the chain. She waited until the tank trickle finally ended: a
minute to the good. The director heard her explaining to Theodore
that she’d asked Mr Lorz for years to have the plumber in. She
pulled the chain again. She did it three times and had Theodore do
it four times. Her voice occupied the whole vast room as she
distinguished between the hot and cold water of the washbasin as
though the boy couldn’t see the self-explanatory blue and red of
the taps.

Wasn’t she overdoing it? The director could
hear her saying: “So remember, clock-wise to turn it on,
counterclockwise to turn it off. Now you try.” She invented (or did
they really happen?) stories of operators who had scalded
themselves and mentioned traditional Central Mountain remedies
against burns.

She took advantage of Theo’s fascination
with the giant underground map and its numbered employee-pins. She
rattled off their names and physical characteristics, neither of
which the director could ever recall himself. She enumerated the
transfer stations where the operators were active and the number of
posters in each station. Some of her figures were accurate, others
pure inventions. The director knew the figures by heart.

There were still forty-eight minutes to go
when Theodore seceded from his surroundings. He stood there
motionless, staring beyond or within. “Unplugged” was his
assistant’s inelegant term for it.

She came up with another idea. She captured
his attention and gave him a pile of blank labels. She asked him to
change the perfectly legible labels on the chemical bottles. To
slow down his frightening pace she stipulated Middle Gothic
lettering and labored over a sample. It took her five minutes.
Theodore accomplished the whole senseless task in thirty-seven
minutes. The director judged that it would have taken anyone else
two hours to do that many. Would the operators be able to make out
the new labels? he wondered. In Middle Gothic they were barely
legible.

When the door finally closed behind Teddy and
his escort Lorz and his assistant both let themselves down in the
nearest chairs. There was just the whir of the giant ventilator.
They remained motionless and dumb for a few minutes, no more,
because it was 5:30pm and their real day was just beginning. She
went out and bought sandwiches.

They wound up at ten-thirty. He told her to
be careful in the underground and bus returning home. Hers were
among the worst lines. He also said that of course she’d be paid
time-and-a-half for the overtime.

The director had trouble sleeping that
night.

He got to the office the next morning an hour
earlier than usual to get a little work done. He found his
assistant at her desk, plunged in papers. She looked up red-eyed.
She’d had trouble sleeping she said. She’d been there for an hour
already. All of today’s work would have to be crammed into the
morning if yesterday afternoon was a fair sample of what awaited
them.

Had she thought of Teddy’s tasks for the
afternoon? She’d thought of little else all night long, she
replied. Lorz confided that he too had spent a good part of the
night devising activities for the new member of staff. They
compared tasks, analyzed their respective show of diligence,
disagreed, compromised, made a final selection.

She tried to be cheerful. Next week “the
spy” would be gone. It was the term she used. She accepted her
employer’s interpretation of the attendant’s presence, amplified
it, even.

Tuesday was like Monday.

Wednesday morning the director came up with
an idea to save his business and his sanity. He phoned the special
Commission number and explained to Mr Mysels – his exclusive
channel of communication now for whatever concerned Theo – that
something unexpected had come up, an urgent meeting requiring the
presence of his assistant and himself. He wouldn’t be needing Teddy
tomorrow afternoon. The boy would of course be paid for the three
hours.