The Seventh Candidate (32 page)

This time Lorz wasn’t frightened. Why had he
been frightened that other time? He tightened his grip on the boy’s
shoulder. He silently pronounced “Ed-mond” “Ed-mond,” over and over
himself. He was attentive to the movements of his own lips, all the
while keeping his eyes on the boy’s. Trying to fit “Ed-mond” onto
the movements of those other lips produced the effect of a poorly
dubbed film. Theo’s silent utterance began with compressed lips,
unmistakably a labial. So not “Edmond.” Wasn’t it the boy’s own
name – his real name – that he was trying to pronounce?

“Say it,” Lorz begged. “Try to say it.” He
was careful to address the boy namelessly in the hope of getting
that real name. He didn’t dare confuse him by calling him by any of
his false names: “Theo” or “Theodore” or “Teddy,” not to mention
“Number Nine” or “Seventh Candidate.”

Then he was able, he thought, to read the
words the boy’s lips were forming. He was almost certain it was
what the nurse had heard long ago and misinterpreted as “Base.”
“It.” “Why?” Looking about quickly, the director slipped his arm
over his employee’s shoulders and promised him the sliced meat in
the spicy blood sauce that very night and tomorrow more Basic
White. Even as he said it the director realized the meat was an
impossible promise. It was in the fridge in his flat. Did they have
time to go there? No time tonight. He had to be returned to the
hospital (and in what state?). Perhaps some other evening.

We have to go, the director said again and
again.

The boy didn’t move. Only his lips
moved.

Lorz felt
terrible fatigue.
He closed his
eyes, his arm still about Theo’s shoulders.

Now it was being reciprocated. He could feel
Theo’s hand timidly on his own shoulder.

He opened his eyes and saw his assistant
standing before them, one hand on Theo’s shoulder, the other on
his.

“You look awful,” she said. The director
didn’t know whether she was addressing Theo, himself, or both of
them. He explained that the boy had run out of Basic White and had
disconnected. She sat down on the other side of Teddy. She put her
hand back on the boy’s shoulder.

“We can’t go on like this. He’s getting out
of control. I’m tired. I must have walked twenty kilometers. A
miracle I found the two of you.”

She spoke to Lorz past Theo’s face as though
he couldn’t possibly understand. They remained there in silence for
another five minutes. Between them the boy was immobile too except
for his lips.

“We can’t stay here all night,” she said
finally. “I’ll take him back to the hospital. I’ll know what to say
to them.”

Words will do no good, he thought, however
glib. They’ll be sure to notice the state he’s in. She didn’t
understand the problem. He didn’t say it. He said that the hospital
was much closer to his apartment than to hers. She’d miss the last
bus. He’d take Theo back to the hospital himself. She didn’t argue.
She yawned.

They managed to get through to the boy and
convince him to get up. She said good night and started walking
away toward the stairs. She stopped and turned about and told him
what excuse to give. She also said: “I think I have an idea about
Teddy. So that this won’t ever happen again.” She still didn’t
understand the immediate problem. When he didn’t reply she added:
“I’m too tired now. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

The director took a taxi with the boy to the
hospital. As they went past the indifferent gatekeeper, the full
moon was invaded by chaotic dark clouds chased by a strong wind.
The leaves on the trees in the hospital grounds hissed. Lorz
followed Theo. He realized that he didn’t even know where the boy’s
room was. Surely no longer 416. He’d never thought of asking.

“Your room, Theo?” he said again. Like a
giant mechanical toy, the boy started towards New Hospital. Most of
the lights were out except for the corridors, long yellow strips
that emphasized the darkness of the rest of the building. It was
almost midnight. Theo didn’t turn in there. They had New Hospital
behind them now. Up the path, past building after building, pools
of light and stretches of gloom alternating. Where was he going?
The director rehearsed the excuse his assistant had supplied him
with. They’d celebrated something. They’d had dinner in a
restaurant, the three of them. He’d told his assistant to ring up
the hospital and the Commission to obtain permission. She’d
forgotten.

The wind cleared the moon of the clouds. By
the sudden light of the rectified full moon Old Hospital loomed
with its inky pollution-streaks and white pigeon-droppings. The
eroded statues half-sunk at angles in the lawn were like ghosts.
The stiff-faced patients that had wandered about like automates in
the company of white-uniformed attendants were gone. The director
looked beyond Old Hospital. The main path skirted a modern
five-story building, vaguely residential in appearance.

But Theo left the main path and started up
the driveway leading to the entrance of Old Hospital. Lorz tried to
hold him back, saying that he didn’t sleep here, that his room
couldn’t possibly be in Old Hospital. But he had to follow the boy
into the deserted hall, then right into a dingy corridor, more
corridors and then in a poorly lighted stretch where a vast
unmarked elevator waited with open doors. There was a smell of
urine and ether. Theo stepped inside. He turned about. Behind him
on the dirty padded wall was the sign “For Stretchers Only!” He
stared at the director still standing in the corridor. His lips
were still moving as in silent invitation.

“Not here,” Edmond Lorz said in dread and
refused to follow. The doors slowly closed on the other’s
abstracted face. The mechanism started up. Wasn’t it sinking toward
the maze of flag-stoned passageways? How could his room possibly be
down there in that dark windowless labyrinth?

As Lorz retraced his steps from Old Hospital
toward the main entrance, the neighboring church bells began
pealing midnight. They made a poorly synchronized clamor in the
stillness of the park. Down below in the dark windowless labyrinth
those church bells couldn’t be heard. All you could hear down there
was the periodic roar of the trains of Line 18.

Lorz remembered the cluttered locked room in
his apartment, the one with a large window that gave on the sky. He
tried to imagine it emptied, scrubbed clean, painted white and
yellow with a pink cumulous in the framed sky, church bells pealing
and sunshine streaming in, Theo radiant in it.

But the image that persisted in the
director’s mind was a real one. When the doors of the old elevator
had jolted shut on Theo the boy’s lips had still been soundlessly
forming the three syllables of the latest obsession, the old one.
He was still in it. The mind-men would be sure to notice it next
morning.

By half past eleven next morning the
hospital still hadn’t rung up
Ideal
.
The Commission either. Maybe the symptoms had worn off overnight.
Or maybe the mind-men didn’t pay attention to Theo
anymore.

The director dared to begin hoping,
particularly after his assistant told him about her idea. If Teddy
had disconnected because he’d run out of Basic White, the obvious
solution, the one sure way of making him stop rectifying, was to
ration him. He was easy enough to handle once he unplugged. At
12:30 they would give him just enough Basic White to last until
about 5:30pm. If he still had bad symptoms they’d wear off by the
time he got back to the hospital. They couldn’t stand another night
like last night, she said.

Lorz was almost jealous of his assistant’s
idea, the beautiful simplicity of it. He had only the briefest of
misgivings. If Theo disconnected again in such a melodramatic way
mightn’t the police or some Good Samaritan (if the species wasn’t
extinct) take him in charge, have him transported to a hospital,
perhaps to New Hospital itself? After a moment of reflection,
though, Lorz realized that his fear was probably groundless. If all
the disconnected people in the underground were sent to the
hospital there wouldn’t be a single bed available for connected
sick people. The underground would be depopulated. Who had
hospitalized the psychotic cowboy wandering about the platforms
with a knife? The universal indifference would save Theo.

Her idea worked but there were difficulties.
You couldn’t calculate the precise quantity of Basic White that
would run out at exactly 5:30. Often they had to wait until 7:00
before his hungry brush licked the jar spotless. Much worse were
the days when he ran out of Basic White before the scheduled time.
They’d come upon him in various postures of prostration. Even
unplugged it wasn’t as easy to move him as she’d said it would
be.

The first time there were the two of them.
Theo was motionless between them on a bench in the
National
Library
station, staring
down at nothing. The usual lures and pleadings didn’t
work.

The director’s assistant had been trying for
half an hour. She stopped. She opened her mouth and gulped down
air. Even in the poor light of the underground her make-up didn’t
hide the lines on her face. She was exhausted, what was she doing
here? she said acrimoniously to Lorz as though somehow he were to
blame for the boy’s stubborn immobility.

She tried again. She told the boy it was
dirty down here, it smelled. He should get up. The whole city was
dirty and smelled. Some day she’d take him to the mountains with
her. Tomorrow if he wanted to. Didn’t he want to? There were pine
forests. You could breathe there. There were hundreds of lakes. You
could swim in them. Wouldn’t he like to? The water looked brown but
that was because of the peat, the water was clean. You could walk
for hours on the heath, alongside streams and lakes and through
stands of pines and not meet a soul except herons and, if you were
lucky, otters. You had to be out of your mind to live here in the
city, she said.

She stopped talking. As the peak hour crowd
milled past, the images of pines and lakes lingered in the
director’s mind. He felt like an intruder in them. After a while
her guest emerged.

On the way back to the hospital Lorz
reminded the boy that he was expecting him tomorrow at the office
at 12:30. He’d give him more Basic White. He said it over and over.
For an instant their lips were forming the same three syllables
even if only one was articulating the words. They reached the
hospital gates. The director said it again and watched Theo pass
through the gates. He himself didn’t go any further this time.

The next evening at 6:30pm the director came
alone for him. He found the boy sitting slumped forward on the
filthy ground at the foot of his ladder, his head bent toward his
raised knees. The peak hour crowd streamed past him. A woman
stopped to one side and gave her little girl a coin. The girl
stooped and placed the coin in the empty jar of Basic White. That
charity was the worst of all. Their smug faces, major and minor.
The director had to resist the urge to throw the coin at their
backs, crying out that Theo was no beggar.

This is a terrible place to be in, he said,
bending his face toward the boy’s bowed head. There are other
things. There are other places. Edmond Lorz found himself trying to
convince the boy that the graffiti didn’t matter. Didn’t matter
because the posters didn’t matter. The posters were just pictures.
Anyhow, whatever you did to the graffiti they returned. Let them.
There were more important things than the posters. The director
stopped. For the second time he discovered that you found out what
you believed deep down only when you had to say it. There were more
important things than the posters, the director repeated. There
were better places to be than underground.

He tried to come up with places and things
better than slices of raw beef in blood sauce, better than the
return to the hospital and to that other, worse, underground maze
with the flagstones and the dangling bulbs where the trains could
still be heard. What else had he to offer? He was no
mountain-guide.

He tried to summon up the virtual radiant
room in his flat. But his imagination failed him and he saw it as
it must have actually been (the door had remained locked for three
decades): dusty mutilated clutter.

By the time they reached the hospital gates
at 9:45 Theo had started coming out of it. The director attributed
the emergence to the therapeutic effect his own presence – far too
rare – had on the boy. The thought then occurred to him that it
worked both ways. Since his association with Theo, he realized, his
intestines had been at peace, the Cycle was a thing of the past.
They were mutually indispensable. Despite his immense fatigue the
director felt joy at this thought.

The next morning Lorz rang up the Commission
and spoke of the possibility of a salary-increase for Teddy. Mysels
received this with the usual long silence. Finally he warned that
any increase over the stipulated wage would have to come out of
his, the director’s, pocket. No provision had been made for
raises.

Lorz tried to sound disappointed. It wasn’t
the real reason for his call. He thanked Mysels for the
information. He injected dryness into his voice and asked (“by the
way”) whether a definitive decision had been reached regarding a
flat for Teddy.

The person responsible for that question was
still shopping about, came the grudging reply. The market was tight
for the rent they were ready to pay. Why did he ask?

It so happened, said Lorz, that he was in
the market himself. He had a huge flat with a sunny, newly painted
room. It was perfectly independent with its own bathroom. He
mentioned the rent. It was well below the market price but not
suspiciously so.