The Seventh Candidate (27 page)

Those flat black eyes were judging as though
he’d been posthumously deputized by the old doctor. What crudely
articulated tales of madness and orgy would he bear back to the
hospital?

Meekly Theo let himself be led away.

Holding their breath, the director and his
assistant traversed the roaring reeking glaring battlefield of the
office and retreated into the storeroom, shutting the door. They
collapsed into chairs. Wasn’t she crying?

“And it was all my idea,” she brought out.
“I persuaded you to hire him. You didn’t want to.”

“Yes I did,” he said to comfort her and
stave off breakdown (although her tears may have had a chemical
cause).

“We can’t go on like this,” she cried.
“We’ll go out of business. We’ll go out of our minds. He’s too
disruptive.”

“Yes, disruptive. Certainly disruptive.
Dangerous as well.”

It was imprinted on his brain. He suspected
it would be one of his permanent visions: the nearly nude figure
towering over her with the shining menace of those tensed
muscles.

She looked puzzled at the word
“dangerous.” Clearly she didn’t know what he was talking about. All
she’d retained from the scene was her exercise of authority
(“S
o
mebody had to
tell him to stop,” she said later) and the boy’s obedience. Those
five seconds of muscled crouch and harsh breathing had been
evacuated from her memory. The director made a vague gesture and
didn’t elaborate.

Dorothea went into the toilet and put her
damp blouse on. She reconstructed her hairdo and her face. When she
came out her employer hadn’t moved. His eyes were closed. She
stared into his face, went into the toilet again and came back with
a glass of water and the pills, saying that with all this craziness
she’d forgotten. She waited until he swallowed them. She struggled
into her coat and got his for him. He said he was staying a while.
The job had to be finished. They couldn’t have another day like
this Monday.

Dorothea took off her coat and slipped on
the work smock. She’d help him with the paint job, she brought out
between retching coughs.

At that, he put on his coat and said he’d
find someone to do the job over the weekend. He added that Basic
White and all the other paints would have to be kept under lock and
key. The Volunteer Worker had said that he didn’t know where to
stop. The storeroom would be next, of course. Then maybe the long
stretch of dingy corridor.

So the handling of the paints which he did
so expertly would have to be stricken off the dwindling list of his
chores, they agreed.

“Maybe they’ll be able to find some other job
for him,” she said as they walked slowly toward his underground
station and her bus stop. “We can’t keep him. You know that.”

“I don’t see how we can possibly keep him,”
he agreed.

He said goodbye and went down the
underground steps. She walked on to her bus stop. He halted at the
bottom of the stairs and waited. When he judged she was far enough
he cautiously climbed back to street level and returned to his
roaring office and started in on the job.

By 11:00pm the next day he had finished.
He’d vomited only twice. When he got home he threw open the
shutters and windows everywhere except in his mother’s room and the
two locked rooms where he never went. He took a hot bath, then a
shower, vomited again and went to bed. He was sure he’d sleep
through to Monday morning.

It seemed that he’d scarcely shut his eyes
when the phone rang. The luminous dial of his alarm clock showed
quarter past two. The open windows were black with night. It all
tumbled out breathlessly into his ear.

“Dorothea Ruda. I tried to reach you all day
Saturday. I thought something was the matter with you again. I
couldn’t sleep. I thought you couldn’t either because of what I
said. How can you possibly sleep after what I said? I said terrible
things about Teddy, about getting rid of him. And you agreed. Why
did you agree? We couldn’t do that. It simply isn’t possible. We’d
have that on our conscience all our lives. I would, anyhow. We can
handle him all right. He won’t be disruptive anymore. I have an
idea about that. First of all you have to be firm with him. You’re
not firm enough with the boy. Let me tell you about my idea.”

She went on and on. It didn’t get past his
eardrum. He said “Yes” at regular intervals. How long she went on
he couldn’t tell because when he woke up ten hours later he was
still holding the receiver. A long buzz had replaced her voice. He
spent the rest of the day in bed.

On Monday Lorz got up very early. The
windows were black with night again. His head still aching, he
stumbled into his study, sat down at the desk and stared dully at
the Commission’s progress report. Normally it was to be filled in
and mailed next Friday. There was a page for each of the four
weeks. Heavy print instructed the employer to give for each week
a
detailed
description of the work performance of: In No. 2
ball-pointed black was written the name “Teddy.”

The director unscrewed his fountain pen and
stared down at the page for the first week. Then he turned to the
second week, fingering his pen. Then the terrible third week. And
then the fourth week that faced them: what next? Could he wait that
long? Finally he turned to the last page entitled
“Conclusions”.

This was easier. It required no initiative,
just checks in the appropriate boxes. “On the whole and taking into
account the special features of the case, Teddy’s work can best be
described as: 1.Very Poor. 2. Poor. 3. Acceptable. 4. Satisfactory.
5. Fully Satisfactory. They had provided no category for Fully
Chaotic. The director decided to fill in the Report at the office
and send it out a week in advance. Even so it was more than likely
that they would have Teddy on their hands for the next few days.
How could more chaos be avoided?

They held a war council later that morning in
the ghastly white office. They had the strange feeling of being
plunged, effaced, in the dead center of a giant vat of Basic White.
The reek had subsided a bit. The director had lowered the
ventilator to Force Four. Conversation was possible now. They
glanced nervously at their watches. In four hours he would be
there. The thing was to break the fixation. Clearly he was on a
paint fixation. As agreed, they placed all of the paint in a locker
behind a stout padlock. Just as she was about to speak about her
idea, he asked what they were going to have Teddy do today. She
suggested cutouts.

“Theodore wouldn’t like that,” he objected.
“He’s basically constructive, not destructive. I’m speaking about
pictures. He likes to put pictures together not take them apart.
Remember the jig-saw puzzles.”

She suggested having him cosmetize
posters. He was so good at it. He wouldn’t be a disturbance doing
that. For want of a better idea Lorz agreed. Poster-cosmetizing was
sure to be less disastrous in its side effects in the few days he’d
remain with
Ideal.
She dug
up unused graffitied posters from four years of tests. “Maybe there
aren’t enough,” she said. “Maybe we’d better prepare more. He works
so fast.” She chose others. They began marring poster after
poster.

“
When I think that the aim of
Ideal
is to cosmetize, not to
deface,” said the director after a while. “A double waste of time:
our defacing and his cosmetizing.” He penciled a scowling face in a
cheese sky.

“At least if he cosmetized the posters in
one of the stations, instead of here,” she said, glancing quickly
at her employer. She felt-penciled a red arrow-pierced heart in a
soft-drink lawn.

As they worked on in silence he reminded
himself to fill in the progress report today if he had time. If
not, then tomorrow without fail.

They were still defacing posters when
Operator 7 phoned in from
Three Nuns
. A gang of suburban toughs had, he claimed, stripped him
at knifepoint of his wallet, trousers and shoes plus the ladder.
Things were getting too dangerous in the underground. He wanted a
substantial rise otherwise he’d quit.

The director suspected that the story was
pure fabrication to justify the demand for more money and the
disappearance of the ladder, which he must have sold for a fix. The
director refused and hung up. Untypically, his assistant approved
his decision. He’d expected her to support the man’s claims and
offer to bring trousers and shoes to his underground phone
booth.

“Who needs him now?” she said
mysteriously.

The director instructed her to ring up the
names on the applicant waiting list. No need for applicants with
her idea, she said. What idea? he asked.

“Don’t you remember? I told you about my
Idea over the phone last night when we couldn’t sleep, how we could
employ Teddy for real, not be disturbed one bit and make money in
the bargain. You agreed one hundred percent. You said “Yes” to
everything. Before you fell asleep, that is. It came to me like an
inspiration. Do you want me to tell you about it again?”

She took a sheet of paper out of her bag and
looked at it as though about to deliver a talk.

Lorz replied that he didn’t remember a thing
about her idea. He must have fallen asleep already. It had been
2:30 in the morning when she woke him up, he reminded her. But he
understood what the idea was from what she’d already said. “You
know what my position is on that subject. There’s no point even
discussing it.”

Still, he listened to her arguments. She
didn’t have to convince him of the advantages – all purely
theoretical, unfortunately – in having Teddy work as an operator in
the underground. First, as she said, it would keep him away from
the office, avoiding further disasters, allowing them to get on
with things. Then there was his incredible skill at restoring
posters. Predictably, he could do the work of two or three
operators. She looked down at her paper. She’d calculated the
savings to
Ideal
. She told
him what they would be.

Money wasn’t everything, he interrupted,
whatever she might imagine he thought. Did she have any idea how
many people had been killed in the underground so far this
year?

Dorothea relativized the violence. It was
like the number of people who died from bee stings or snakebites.
Practically negligible if you considered the number of bees and
snakes and people. Over the past twelve month period there’d been –
she glanced down at her paper – twenty-eight murders committed,
good enough, but negligible compared to the five hundred million
annual trips in the underground.

Six hundred million, seven hundred
thousand, in round figures, the director couldn’t help correcting.
She looked triumphant at this rectification which further diluted
the violence. Crossing the street every day, she said, was probably
more dangerous than traveling in the underground. But there was
another point. None of those twenty-eight murders had been
committed in
Crossroads
.
Probably not many assaults either. She had statistics on the
killings but not on the assaults, she said.

The director, who had statistics on
everything in his head, assented grudgingly.
Crossroads
was an important transfer station with a
direct entrance into the vast new Interior Building that housed the
Central Police Station. Policemen came and went at all hours. It
was the safest of all the stations. No murders had ever been
committed there unless you counted three years before when a
policeman had gone berserk and opened fire on the rush hour crowd,
killing five passengers and then himself. The crime rate was
probably the lowest of all the stations but not the graffiti rate.
At least one operator was assigned to
Crossroads
. He saw what she was driving at.

She hadn’t finished. She’d done her
homework on the subject. It wasn’t only a question of place. It was
also a question of time. Over a period of five years, she said,
glancing down at the paper again, eighty-five percent of the
physical violence against the
Ideal
operators had occurred during the night shift.

Now she came out with it. A special shift
could be created for Teddy in the
Crossroads
station, at the safest time, say from noon to
6:00pm. Anyhow, with that build of his, he could handle a whole
gang. The sight of those arms would send them running, she said.
Maybe not the women, she added as a joke.

Did she know – she must have – that the
creation of an afternoon shift had once been one of the director’s
dreams? The twelve operators on the night shift and then the
early-early shift barely managed to clean the posters for the
morning rush hour crowd in the stations where they worked. The
rectified posters gathered graffiti again in the afternoon hours.
They had to confront the evening rush crowd in that disgraced
state. It was one of the weak spots in
Ideal’s
services. But the creation of a third shift
assumed financial means the concern didn’t possess. In his
ambitious younger days Lorz used to indulge in fantasies of
grandeur. He’d imagine a complete coverage of the capital’s
underground network.
Ideal Poster
offered its services in only fifteen of the sixty-three
stations. To be sure, these were the biggest ones and accounted for
over thirty-five percent of all the underground advertising
posters. But in those intransigent days Lorz longed for a total war
against the vandals, even in their lesser fortresses, a war carried
out by an army of vigorous young operators. He often pictured them,
handsome and earnest, fitted out in distinctive blue and white
uniforms with
Ideal Poster
emblazoned on the back.