The Seventh Candidate (26 page)

They were free to work now. Theo was
banishing dirt at a safe distance from them. But Dorothea made no
pretence at work. She stared at the boy, mesmerized, lips
parted.

The director couldn’t help looking up.
Theo’s activity was disruptive even at that distance. You couldn’t
help looking in admiration of such virtuosity, wondering what he’d
come up with next. Why, for example, was he now winding string
about the axles of the wheels, in self-sabotage?

Everything had an answer. Now he didn’t even
have to descend to advance the ladder. His arms stretched out and
up in a kitsch gesture of welcome to a dawn figured by the mercury
tubes. His great hands pressed up against the ceiling and started
walking forward, pulling the unbraked ladder, its mobility safely
tempered with the string that clogged the axles, into new virgin
territories of filth.

The director broke off and plunged back into
the figures. Unconquerable peripheral vision informed him that
Theodore had finished with the ceiling and now was attacking the
walls.

The director remained with the statistics
until the squat shadow came and took the boy away.

She was saying something to him. His head
ached. He was as exhausted as though he’d done the cleaning job
himself. Finally he looked up to the strange luminosity of the
office and listened to what she was saying.

They hadn’t got much work done that
afternoon but they were getting used to that by now, weren’t they?
Her employer didn’t answer. He was staring down at the statistics
again with that same distraught or even tragic air, it seemed to
her. She tried to console him by saying that at least this time the
disturbance had paid off. Just look. It was like having the sun in
the office now. Maybe it was a bit mottled and streaked here and
there but that would disappear once the ceiling and walls dried
completely.

So finally the disturbance had been worth
it, she said. It was practically as good as a real paint job and at
a fraction of the time and cost and trouble. They’d had a scare at
the start but everything had worked out.

***

5

“Oh no, not that, Teddy, you’re not going to
do that!”

Nearly naked again, a surreal fisherman, he
held the sheet by two corners and cast it out like a net over the
desk. It billowed and settled softly, precisely, over her desk,
covering the papers, the files, the typewriter, the telephone.

It was the next day, Friday. Minutes before,
the squat attendant had deposited Theodore with another, bigger,
package beneath his arm. He must have stolen the sheets from the
hospital, maybe from his own bed. The name of the hospital was
stitched in red in the corner. Fortunately the attendant was no
longer there to witness and later testify.

“Oh no, Teddy, I couldn’t stand it, I break
out in rashes,” she went on pleading.

She turned toward her employer. Why didn’t
he back her up, assert his authority instead of standing there
stock still, staring and silent? She was about to appeal for
support when her phone began ringing, muffled beneath the
sheet.

She thrust her arm under it, groped for the
phone, got hopelessly entangled in the coiled wire. With the other
hand she grabbed at the vague outline and pressed the sheet-wrapped
receiver against her ear.

“I can’t hear you,” she yelled in reply to
the faint gagged sounds.

“Wait,” she commanded, exasperated at the
caller, at herself for not having thought of the director’s phone,
at the director for not having answered it himself. Couldn’t he see
what was happening? She raced over to her employer’s desk, nearly
tripping over the plastic sheet Teddy had scotched to the floor,
too late to rescue the phone from the downward floating sheet. When
she finally unshrouded the phone the party had hung up.

By this time Teddy had come out of the
storeroom carrying the squat 25-kilo tin of Basic White like a
feather, plus brushes, rags, a tin of turpentine, a can. The
wheeled ladder was already in place next to the director’s desk. He
poured Basic White thickly into a two-liter can. He had the same
expression of rapt dedication as with the jigsaw puzzles. Of course
he didn’t spill a drop. He climbed up and started in on the
ceiling.

What they’d taken for whiteness after the
washing-job was denounced as dinginess by the radiance pouring from
his brush. Her eyes started weeping. She broke out coughing.

She cried: “The ventilator! The
ventilator!”

Lorz snapped out of his trance and went over
to the panel. The sound of the ventilator built up into a tropical
hurricane, an airliner taking off. Now it out-decibelled these. It
was the mythical Force Ten.

But the fumes went on attacking her eyes and
lungs and now her ears and brain were being attacked as well,
unbearably. She couldn’t stay there. She thought of the storeroom,
a possible sanctuary, with its door closed and if this didn’t work,
the toilet would provide another closed door.

She grabbed up letters and files and trotted
distraught toward the storeroom. The phone started ringing again.
By the time she picked up the receiver the party had hung up again.
The same party as before? How many clients or suppliers had already
phoned them? The suppliers didn’t matter, but absolutely she had to
ring up the twelve clients to make sure.

There it went again on the other desk. The
director stood two meters away weeping and watching Theo’s
performance. He indistinctly heard her yelling at the receiver to
speak up, she couldn’t hear. She lost the connection.

“And you’re paying for all this,” she cried
to her employer. “You’ll have to do something. We can’t go on like
this. I can’t, anyhow.” She banged down the receiver and went into
the storeroom. She came out struggling into her coat.

He went up to her and shouted, centimeters
from her ear: “You can’t leave me. Not now.”

“Then talk to him,” she yelled. “He listens
to you. Tell him to stop. What good am I doing here?”

But both of them knew that it was too late
to undo the harm. How long would it take for the Basic White to
dry? He went over anyhow and clicked the ventilator down to Force
One. She protested. She’d choke to death. But otherwise how could
he talk to him? he said. She couldn’t have it both ways.

In the thunderous near-silence Lorz coaxed
the boy down from the ladder. He took him by the arm and sat him
down at the spot his assistant pointed to near the phone on the
floor at her feet. She didn’t realize at first that with the
ventilator down to Force One she didn’t need to mount her close
guard over the phone.

The director sat down opposite Theo. His
assistant stood over them, coughing. Tears spouted from her
bloodshot eyes. She begged him to turn the ventilator back up. Lorz
ignored her and tried to reason with Theo. He interpreted the boy’s
look as that of a great child or a dog questing approval. How much
could he understand? Lorz assembled his ideas.

First of all, he said (touching his new
employee’s bare thigh to soften what he was about to say) he wanted
Theo to understand that his work was perfectly satisfactory, in
itself.
In
itself
yesterday’s
washing job had been a flawless performance. As was, in a sense,
today’s painting job, even if the choice of paint was perhaps
debatable. Unorthodox, in any case.
In itself
, yes, flawless.

But perhaps, in the greater context, the
weekend would have been a more appropriate time for both
operations. As he, the director, would have told him, Theodore, had
he known of his intention. In the future it would be wise not to
undertake any project without, in some way or another, informing
Miss Ruda or himself.

The director glanced up at her face with the
streaming mascara. She was frowning intensely. Pain or discontent?
He addressed himself to the boy again with considerable force.

“
In other words, Theodore, do
nothing, nothing, nothing without specific instructions on our
part
!”

Wasn’t this too harsh? The director feared
he’d unduly stressed his point at the risk of discouraging the boy.
He could hear inside his head where the old doctor triumphantly
survived: “You must not discourage him, this would make irreparable
harm, this you must not do.”

He smiled, touched the boy’s massive nude
shoulder, slippery with perspiration, and added: “But
in themselves
bravo for the washing and the
paint job, oh, bravo!”

The boy returned to the ladder and resumed
his paint job.

The director stared at him helplessly.
Then he went over and switched the ventilator back on Force Eight.
It drowned out his assistant’s angry, “Oh bravo, bravo!” and the
phone which started ringing.
He hastened to her side to mollify her. He came in time to
hear her yelling into the receiver: “There’s something the matter
with this line. The phone people warned us about this. They’re
tearing up the street outside. They’re almost down to our level.
I’ll phone you back from another line in a few minutes.” Even in
her distraught state her inventions had the accents of plausibility
if you didn’t analyze them too closely.

She grabbed up files, paper, pens, her
packet of cigarettes. “I can’t get any work done here. I’m going to
break out in rashes all over any second. I’ll phone from
outside.”

The director too started coughing and
weeping. Would it ever dry? It wasn’t the new fast-drying odorless
paints he’d talked to his assistant about, but Basic White intended
for micro-applications on paper, which the operator left in a
minute for new defaced posters. Only the rectified ideal figures on
the posters could go on imperturbably with their activities in the
presence of the stuff. They and Theo.

His assistant instructed Lorz to mount a
strict guard over the phone. She left the
Ideal
office and struggled up the stairs for the fresh
air and quiet of a street corner public phone booth.

She returned to the roaring dazzling room
twenty minutes later. Teddy had made enormous progress. The air was
utterly unbreathable now. The phone was untended. Her employer must
have sought refuge in the storeroom. She stepped inside, blinded by
tears, and gasped out: “People were queuing up at the booth. They
started hammering. You owe me for twelve calls.”

He wasn’t there. He was in the toilet
kneeling before the bowl and vomiting. She closed the door and sat
down in the storeroom. When he tottered out she said in a strangely
calm voice: “It’s much worse than I’d thought. We can’t keep him.
He’s killing you.” She rose, clamping her head between her hands
and cried out in registers of hysteria well beyond Force Eight: “My
head’s exploding. He’s killing the two of us.”

She ran across the office and clicked off
the ventilator. As the noise collapsed she marched up to Theo on
his ladder. He was sweeping dazzle onto the ceiling, unaffected by
the fumes and their agitation below. Alarmed, Lorz followed her
unsteadily. She threw her head back to look up into his face.

“You stop that. You stop that immediately.
You do what we tell you to do.”

She reached up on tiptoe (“No!” the director
cried) and wrenched the paintbrush out of his hand. Slobs of
dripping whiteness flew on her blouse. Some of it flew in Theo’s
hair. “My new blouse,” she mourned.

In the silence of the room the director
could hear the boy’s breath coming fast, faster now. He crouched
stock still, then leaped down. He towered tensely over her. His
eyes were fixed on the dripping brush in her hand. Every muscle in
his body stood out in unforgettable deadly beauty.

“Leave the room, quickly!” the director
whispered sharply.

He sidled toward the phone on the floor,
trying to remember the number of the Commission. But Theo sat down
in a chair. He’d broken off contact. He was unplugged. The director
stood in front of him to make sure he stayed that way. His
assistant disappeared into the storeroom.

A few minutes later Lorz went there to see
how she was reacting. He returned quickly, frowning. Suddenly he
remembered the dead doctor’s squat detached shadow and looked at
the wall clock.

In five minutes the attendant would be there
in the middle of the madhouse, the fumes, the vomit, and what would
he think at the sight of half-naked Theo and his assistant in a
similar state, as he’d just seen? The door of the wash-up cubicle
was half open and he’d involuntary glimpsed her in the mirror.
She’d removed her blouse and was rubbing away at the fabric
furiously, her small freckled bare breasts shaking like fists. The
paint stain seemed, madly, to be her only concern.

He called her for help and she ran out of
the storeroom in a work smock, buttoning herself up wrongly, her
bleached vertical pigtail undone, her ruined mask set for new
catastrophe till he told her it was nearly 5:30. She gasped with
relief and this triggered a fit of coughing.

They gestured and beckoned, all smiles, and
miraculously established contact. They pointed at their watches and
persuaded Theodore to accompany them into the storeroom. They
handed him his discarded clothing piece by piece, no time for him
to wash up, both smiling broadly till it hurt, saying soothing
things, congratulating him on his paint job.

They hustled him out of the office just as
the squat shadow came down the stairs.

Too late, the director noted the white paint
splashes in the boy’s hair as though this day had aged him, rather
than the director and his assistant, by twenty years.
Expressionless, the attendant stared at this and at the boy’s
hastily donned trousers unbuttoned and yawning, then at the
director’s assistant with her wrongly-buttoned smock loopholed with
bare flesh, the disorder of her hair and running mask, then
insistently at the director for reasons the director could only
guess at for he’d eluded the gaze of the mirror. The attendant’s
nostrils widened to fully sample the reek of turpentine and paint
and, possibly, vomit.