The Seventh Candidate (34 page)

As though the violence and indecency weren’t
disturbing enough, there was the mystery surrounding Theo’s flat.
After the director finally succeeded in swallowing (without
digesting) his anger at the senseless last-minute rejection of his
room, he tried to find out where Teddy’s flat was located.

For some reason the Commission was evasive
about the address. “Within walking distance of the hospital,”
they’d told his assistant and nothing more, she claimed. He, Lorz,
hadn’t even been given this information. He asked Theo a dozen
times but the sheet of paper he placed before the boy remained
blank.

At first this mystery was no more than a
minor irritation. In the director’s mind, the ex-storage space he’d
transformed at such great expense was still “Theo’s room.” Lorz was
determined to justify the hauling and painting bills. He decided to
invite the boy there that very first free weekend. It almost became
an economic issue. He also found therapeutic reasons for the
invitation.

The more he thought of their relationship
the more he was convinced that their contact had had curative
virtues for the two of them. He attributed Theo’s successive
breakthroughs to what had gone on between them at the hospital: the
talk, (even if one-way), the work on the newsmagazine, the chess
games. He owed his own relative improvement, he felt, to his
efforts to break free of unhealthy self-focus and reach out to
another human being. But they had drifted apart. Weren’t they both
suffering a relapse because of this?

For Teddy’s recent rally was short-lived. By
late August the old symptoms began returning. He unplugged again
spectacularly – it was like brutal withdrawal symptoms – when his
ration of Basic White ran out. His assistant had been the first to
note the boy’s growing haggardness. Did he eat regularly? she
wondered. She plied him with cakes, which he usually ignored. Half
the time he even refused the director’s thin dripping slices of raw
beef. How was it the hospital people didn’t notice all that?

They did notice Lorz’s own problems, though.
The young sharp-nosed doctor had frowned significantly during the
last check-up. Lorz had confessed to sleeplessness, irritability,
colored visual patterns, but not to what alarmed him most of all:
growing awareness of his bowels. No burning, no pain as yet, but
(the idea occurred to him one night) something like the
uncomfortable awareness of one’s lungs brought about by a slight
impoverishment of the oxygen of the air. This image gave the
director breathing difficulties, which he attributed to the growing
pollution of the capital’s atmosphere. The new concern with his
lungs briefly relieved him of concentration on his bowels that
sleepless night.

Of course there were the obvious immediate
explanations for his health problems. There was the wear-and-tear
of those evenings in the underground trying to coax Theo up and
out. Plus the lengthening of the workday to make up for the time
wasted – from a strictly business point of view – on Theo. Even his
assistant seemed exhausted and more irritable. Altruism was taking
a lot out of them.

More profoundly, the director blamed his
declining state on the absence of the old contact. When had they
been alone during the past months? Certainly they saw each other
(he, at least, saw Theo) every workday. But this wasn’t contact.
During the lunchtime visits – when he was able to locate the boy in
the labyrinth of
Crossroads
– he
was on guard-duty. Vigilance was essential. It got in the way of
communication. And anyhow there was no way to hold – or even to
gain – the boy’s attention there. The only reality for him in the
underground was those marred faces and landscapes. In the office at
12:30pm and again at 6:50pm the director could hardly talk to the
boy in the presence of his assistant. She monopolized the
conversation in any case.

The director nostalgically recalled the Day
of Giving when Theo had overwhelmed him with the contents of a
room. Also the twelve gift-wrapped ticking rectangles. That was all
long ago. Recently there’d only been that marvelous moment when the
boy had carefully wiped the smear of Basic White from his face.

Theo was slipping away from him. He must
absolutely talk to the boy undistracted, draw him out of the
killing obsession with the posters, open him to other things. He
imagined them together in the new white and yellow room, both
looking at art albums (hadn’t Theo been an artist?). He’d win the
boy’s attention and analyze the paintings. Or they could return to
chess games or Chinese puzzles. After (or perhaps the next day if
he stayed over) they could go for a drive in pursuit of the
dwindling countryside. They could walk through surviving fields in
the sunshine. It would do them both great good.

He repeated the invitation all week long
whenever he could. A little celebration, he explained. In his flat
at three o’clock. If you want to. The beef, as much as you like.
Three o’clock at my place. Only if you want to. We might go for a
ride in my car. A picnic. If you like. Unless you have other things
to do. Do you understand me, Theo? Saturday, three o’clock, at my
place.

Did the boy understand? The director printed
his address on a slip of paper and gave it to him.

Afraid Theo may have lost the paper, the
director gave him a new slip of paper with his address and the
appointment date the next day.

He did this every day.

Three o’clock then four then five went by
that Saturday afternoon. In the white and yellow room the director
leafed through the Michelangelo album, careful not to get the spicy
blood sauce on the powerful marble limbs. He told himself
repeatedly that he hadn’t really believed that Theo would come.

That night he was awakened by incredibly loud
thumps on the staircase, as though a marble statue were negotiating
the steps. He sat upright in his bed. A full moon as blinding as
the sun invaded the room. His eyes started to weep. The thumping
came louder and louder. He looked at his alarm clock. It was
exactly three. He hadn’t bothered saying 3:00pm to him, thinking it
was obvious: daytime three. Theo had misunderstood.

The whole building seemed to echo with those
thumps. Was the door locked? Frightened, Lorz got up and reached
his door, breathing hard. He tested the bolts, all five of them.
The door was locked. The thumps stopped. Was that breathing he
heard on the other side of the door? The door was being tried. Or
was it the wind?

After a long wait the clumping resumed, the
sound slowly diminishing down the stairs. Lorz stood on his side of
the door for a long time and then went back to bed.

When he woke the next morning he assumed he’d
dreamed it all. He didn’t understand why he’d received the imagined
(surely imagined) nocturnal visit in the form of a nightmare.

The Monday morning following the invitation
fiasco the director’s assistant removed her diary from her drawer.
She hadn’t touched it for months. She unlocked the golden clasp
with the tiny key. She stared down at the page, then up at the
bright wall, biting the pen, and then wrote furiously as she used
to do in the old days when she’d seen Theo in the hospital the day
before on Sunday. But Theo wasn’t in the hospital anymore.

That same day, early in the afternoon, the
phone rang while she was in the storeroom. The director took the
call and winced at the familiar inquisitorial voice. “Mysels, the
Commission. Miss Ruda? Where is Teddy?” The director, still
resentful at the room fiasco, replied coldly. “Lorz,
Ideal
. At this
precise moment, 3:12pm? Working in the underground, in the
Crossroads
station. Doing his usual
efficient job, I imagine.”

Mysels asked suspiciously why Teddy hadn’t
shown up for the medical check-up as he was supposed to. It was the
second straight check-up he’d missed. And how was it that he was
never in his flat after work or during the weekend?

“
My relationship with my employees is
strictly professional. What they do outside their six hours
with
Ideal
is their
business.”

“Our business too. Actually I didn’t expect
you to know. I wanted to talk to Miss Ruda.”

She was back at her desk by now and the
director pointed at her phone. He hung up and busied himself with a
letter already disposed of with an air of total absorption as
though her progressively shocked voice were going on miles
away.

“
Yes … Oh really? … How should
I
know? Why do you ask
me
, Mr Mysels? … What? … Why Mr Mysels, that’s no
question to ask a … I’m surprised at you. I wouldn’t dream of
asking
you
personal
questions like that … You certainly cann
o
t ‘draw conclusions …’ … All I can say is that I wouldn’t
worry about Teddy. I’ll talk to him about the check-up,
goodbye.”

She replaced the receiver, shrugging her
shoulders. Still staring down at the letter, Lorz waited for
clarification. After a few minutes he said that he could understand
the Commission worrying if Theo didn’t show up for appointments and
was never home.

“Maybe they don’t come around at the right
times. Or maybe the El makes too much noise when they knock and he
can’t hear.”

She blinked once, returned to her work for a
few seconds, and then spoke about the latest batch of preview
posters. Had he seen the new Pilsober? Funnier even than the last
one.

So Lorz learned that she knew where Theo’s
flat was located. How had she found out? Why hadn’t she told him?
The information she let slip enabled him to narrow down the area of
search. There was nothing obsessive about that search. An hour or
so after work, sometimes after dark he followed the El.

At the end of the week, at a bit past ten in
the evening, he found it, an old four-story building squeezed thin
between larger, more modern apartment houses. In the cold white
marble hall he saw the name Mr Tedd on letterbox 4a. A queer
foreign-sounding name but not as queer, they must have thought, as
Mr Teddy. Like all the other letterboxes, it was rusted as though
disused for years. There was no mail inside any of the boxes. The
other names, penciled, were nearly illegible. It was a strange
place to have chosen for him. It was impossible to reach the
staircase. You needed to press a code to open the hallway door.

He went outside and looked up just as the
elevated train rumbled past, five meters away from the fourth-floor
windows. He could well imagine that a knock on his door would have
gone unheard. His assistant had drawn the same conclusion. Or had
she been in a better position to know than on a street corner
looking up at the windows? There was something else strange about
Theo’s building. The neighboring buildings were crossword puzzles
of lighted windows, some warm yellow, others ghostly flickering
blue from the television screens. Dramatic music, mimed shots and
the deep boom of theatrical voices came from those windows.

Theo’s building stood dark and silent. Not a
single window was lighted. Not a ray of light came from the fourth
floor. He could be out, of course. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock.
He (Lorz) had come too early. But there were seven other flats in
the building. Why were they dark too? Maybe they were inhabited by
old people who went to bed early.

Lorz waited till 11:30pm for the boy to
return or switch on the light. The building remained black and
silent. The yellow and blue squares in the other buildings went out
one by one. The voices and music thinned and then fell silent.

Lorz returned home.

***

9

At 6:30pm August 27 it was her turn to
pick Teddy up. As soon as she pushed through the
Crossroads
turnstile she saw what he’d
done right and left, everywhere. She broke into a run through a
maze of corridors. There were more and more of them. She finally
located him in the
East Gate
corridor. By then, he’d run out of Basic White. But instead
sitting slumped at the foot of his ladder, he was furiously
attacking the poster with a key. It was a miracle he hadn’t already
been arrested. With great difficulty she got him to stop and return
to the office, promising him unlimited quantities of
chemicals.

When they entered the
Ideal
office she made an imperious gesture to her
employer to say nothing, do nothing. Instead of preparing coffee
she roughly parked Theo in his usual corner with a heap of posters
and a carefully limited amount of chemicals, very little Basic
White. She beckoned to the director to come into the storeroom with
her.

She carefully closed the door and stood with
her back against it. She stared at him tight-lipped. It was Theo of
course, thought the director. God alone knew what he’d done now.
But by the way she was staring at him one could almost believe that
it was Lorz himself who had committed some unpardonable
misdeed.

“What is it now?”

“
Those posters you’re always talking about.
Your ‘obscene posters’
’
. All
of them. Ours, other peoples’. He’s put white rectangles
everywhere. Then he tried to use a key on them when the paint ran
out.”

His assistant whispered it with hostile
passion. And now, before he had time to cope with the news, realize
the full scope of its implications, she went on, practically
accusing him (Lorz, the director, her employer) of responsibility
for what Theo had done.