The Seventh Candidate (35 page)

“Who gave him that idea? When you pick him
up is that what you talk to him about, how awful the new posters
are? Do you realize what this means?”

He realized, better than she did, what it
meant. It meant that unless prompt painful measures were taken (and
they would be but wasn’t it already too late?) it was an end
to
Ideal
Poster
. He saw it all:
the outbreak of the scandal, “humorous” articles in the press,
lawsuits hurled at him like a lapidation, disgrace, bankruptcy.
What would become of him at his age, in failing health?

Objectively, whatever Theo’s intentions,
his interventions were graffiti. He’d madly reversed the normal
roles. An
Ideal
operator
was being paid to deface posters belonging to
Ideal
clients. Other
Ideal
operators would be paid to rectify his defacements. It was
like a serpent eating its own tail. And all those witnesses,
millions of them. At any moment a client would see it or learn
about it. It spelled the disgraceful end of
Ideal
.

“
Do you realize what this
means
?” she
repeated, offensively insistent as though addressing a small
dull-witted child.

“
That we’ll both be looking for a job very
soon,” replied the director tight-lipped himself now. “Easier for
you than for me. If
Ideal
goes out
of business you won’t stay unemployed very long. What about me,
though? What can I do at my age, with my health
problems?”

“
Who’s talking about
Ideal
or a new job?” she whispered vehemently. A vein
stood out in her neck. I’m not talking about you or me. I’m talking
about Teddy. What’s going to become of Teddy?”

The director had to accept the humiliation
of self-defense. He told her that he’d never said a word about
those posters in front of Theo. He’d been on his guard about what
he said and did ever since the painting episode.

This was true. But something else was true
too, he realized. Didn’t she know, having leafed through the
magazine carelessly left on his desk once, about those experiments
or games or attempts at contact via the newsmagazines long ago in
the hospital? How already he’d perhaps set the example
half-humorously with ink-effacer disguised as Basic White. Those
corrupt faces eclipsed by white full moons. And already then, the
strategic distribution of white rectangles on the most outrageous
of the advertisements and the boy’s quick imitation. He recalled
the exaggerated attack on the soft-focus perfume nude with the
plum-colored nipples. He recalled the words of the dead doctor:
“Why like a child do you scribble over the photographs? Or cover
them up with white paint? What is this madness of teaching Teddy
such things?” He recalled: “You have made perhaps irreparable harm.
What has given you such an idea?”

“Who gave him the crazy idea, then?” said
his assistant, not knowing she was echoing a dead man’s unanswered
question. “The only ideas he has are the ones you put in his
head.”

The director asked her to use a different
tone of voice when speaking to him and to moderate her vocabulary.
Her hysterical accusations were monstrous.

Her painted eyes widened. Hysterical, had he
said?

The exchange went on, worsened, sometimes
rose from whispers to levels audible in the next room and then one
or the other would make a gesture toward that room and they would
lower their voices, defining the limits of their quarrel, defining
the quarrel itself, perhaps, as a device to stave off contemplation
of the disaster.

But then she went too far. She said that
without her,
Ideal
would have
gone out of business years ago. She did all of the work. She got
nothing but insults for her pains. He didn’t seem to realize how
much he owed her.

At that he couldn’t help countering: “Whose
idea was it in the first place to hire him? Also God knows it
wasn’t my idea to get up and look at his poster that morning,
either. First my health, now my business, I owe you so much.”

He heard her breathe, lower than a whisper,
“Oh,” and he quickly added that it wasn’t doing any good saying
stupid things to each other, things they didn’t really mean, at
least he didn’t and he was sure she didn’t either. She knew he
wasn’t to blame for what had just happened. They had a problem to
solve, he said. They had to convince Theo to stop the crazy
censorship. Maybe it wasn’t too late. He would speak to the boy
first. He touched her arm as he went past her into the office.

Theo was crouched over the poster with the
indefatigable white-tipped brush. It was hard to gain his
attention, impossible to keep it. Perhaps it was because of the
director’s confused groping for the right words, his false starts
and stammerings. Theo’s gaze slipped past his employer’s face and
rested on the giant map of the underground with pin number seven
still (for the moment) stuck in the big red dot of
Crossroads
.

Finally Lorz coaxed the boy to his feet and
guided him away from the poster and the map into the storeroom. He
sat the boy down and drew up a chair. His assistant left the
storeroom.

Where Theo was now seated the light was
unkind. His face took it badly. For the first time the director saw
what his assistant had so often talked about. The contour of his
skull was visible. His cheekbones had emerged alarmingly. Below
were shadowed wastes. His skin was peculiarly pale, white almost.
He’s dying, the director thought. Why hadn’t he seen it before? The
posters are killing him. Theo was drowning in the posters. He was
going under.

The director sensed confusedly that all this
was the consequence of the boy’s fundamental misunderstanding of
the nature of the posters. He had to bring it out into the open,
articulate it in simple repetitious words for Theo to grasp it.

He started with the physical nature of the
posters. He told Theo that the posters were rectangles of paper, of
such and such a size, thickness and grade. Basically they were
paper-pulp, once pungent trees, now dead supports for photographs,
most of them taken in studios with paid models who smiled on
command. They were representations of representations. Not to be
confused with reality. The posters were nothing but thousands of
differently tinted dots. Yes, there were certain real things
represented by the colored dots – say, mountains or sunrises or
skies – but those real things weren’t down in the underground.
Granted, the individuals who graffitied the decent posters with
indecencies were despicable or sick. But – listen carefully – it
wasn’t as if they were mutilating a real landscape or face. You had
to make that essential distinction. If you didn’t, anything was
possible, all levels of reality were mixed up and colored dots and
a real granite mountain were the same. That was madness, to deny
hierarchies of reality.

Those colored dots, then, weren’t real
like real smiles or skies.
Essentially
the colored dots were chemical dyes with long formulas.
They were configured into an illusion of smiles and skies (and the
original smiles themselves were artificial and sometimes the skies
too, just a cloth backdrop in the studio). All of which meant this:
that nothing essential was being soiled when the poster was
graffitied. This being so, one had to look upon poster correction
as a job, like street cleaning. Infinitely more skilled, of course,
but a job anyhow, a source of income, not a mission in life, not
something to which you sacrificed life and reason as Theo was
doing. A simple job. So as a job he, Theo, must limit himself to
contractual posters and limit his corrections to six hours. Not a
minute more. And not think about them until the next day at 1:00pm,
not a minute before.

Lorz paused for breath. He was sweating, his
glasses steaming up as though he were wrestling with boulders
instead of concepts.

So much for the decent posters, he said.
Out of the corner of his eye, as he dabbed his forehead with his
silk handkerchief, he perceived his assistant standing in the
doorway looking down at the floor, listening. He raised his voice
slightly. The pornographic posters, granted, were in a separate
category. They were a public offense against decency, polluting
innocent gazes. He’d always believed that even though he had never
told him (Theo) that, never. A less lax society wouldn’t tolerate
such things. And yet these posters must not be censored. Do you
understand? Must not. Yes, granted, in issuing this stern
injunction his employer, he, Edmond Lorz, the director of
Ideal Poster,
was party to the spiritual
pollution. He was paid to protect the pornographic posters against
graffiti as he was for the other, decent, posters and he accepted
the payment, with all the implications of that acceptance. Theo
mustn’t think, not for a fraction of an instant, that he, the
director, wasn’t cognizant of his objective complicity.

But one had to compromise, Lorz went on.
Refusal to compromise was madness. It could even happen – this
might seem inconceivable, nevertheless it was true – that one’s
understandable reaction to such horrors might have consequences
even worse than the (after all
pictured
) horrors themselves. What Theo had done to the
pornographic posters was absolutely unacceptable, monstrous. It
endangered
Ideal
. It
endangered Theo himself. Do you understand the danger, Theo? What
would become of him if he continued? There were policemen to uphold
laws however lax and unfair these laws might be. He could be
arrested. There would be no more legitimate poster correction then.
All the graffiti that he’d removed would accumulate again. And what
would become of him then outside of
Ideal
? There was no place to flee. From tomorrow on, then, he
must turn over a new leaf. Do you hear, Theo? Five hours of work,
not a minute more. Only contractual posters, strictly
Ideal
posters, do you
understand?
And you do not, do not, touch the indecent posters except
to remove graffiti!
And
you must eat and get sleep and not think of the posters after work.
Think of whatever you like, anything else. Mountains, fields,
stars, soccer-matches, other people, real people, whatever, but not
posters. Anything except posters.

The director leaned back in his seat with a
curious feeling of lightness and exaltation. He got up, dizzy, and
went to the doorway where she was standing. He looked at her. Her
face remained shut on him.

“I hope he understands now,” he said.

“He didn’t understand a single word,” she
said. “I didn’t either.”

It was her turn. She sat down stiffly in the
chair facing the boy. Lorz moved away into the office and stopped
not far from the doorway.

Teddy, listen to me, she said. Look at me.
I’m going to talk to you again about what you did to the posters
today, the paint you put on those posters. I’m going to say it in
simple language that anybody can understand. You did something very
bad. You’re going to be punished for it. I’m going to punish you so
the others won’t punish you worse. You’ll see how pretty soon. I
won’t be nice with you any more. Look at me. You like it when I’m
nice, don’t you? Well, no more, never again if you ever do that
again. I don’t like to punish you, Teddy. But if you do that again
to the posters the others are going to punish you too but much
worse because they don’t love you at all.

Look at me. You want to stay here with us,
don’t you? Here in
Ideal
, I mean.
It’s not much, I know, but it’s all we’ve got. If you make trouble
they’ll take you away. They’ll lock you up. They’ll put you in a
straitjacket, squirt you full of drugs to keep you calm, don’t you
understand that? Put you with the loonies. You don’t want that,
Ted. I wouldn’t be able to stand that. Mr Lorz wouldn’t want that
either, I think. We’re your only friends. You wouldn’t see us
again. You wouldn’t see me any more. That wouldn’t matter to you if
you didn’t see me any more?

Her voice stopped a moment.

I’ll give you something else Teddy if you do
as I say. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. She was
whispering something unintelligible in the office where Lorz stood
near the door. Then louder: “Would you like that, Ted? Look at me
when I talk to you. No, sit down!”

A chair clattered to the floor. A second
later the director was in the storeroom. Theo had got up and was
making for the big locker where the huge cans of Basic White were
stored, secured by a stout brass padlock, ever since the painting
incident. She retreated in front of the locker with her arms
outspread, barring access. She said, “No!” sharply. “You’re not
getting that paint now or tomorrow. That’s your punishment for what
you did. Tomorrow you’re not getting any paints or chemicals
either. Tomorrow you’re staying here in the office with us like you
were supposed to, one day a week. Because of what you did today to
those posters. After, we’ll see.”

Theo was almost upon her, towering over
her.

“No,” she said again and wasn’t afraid to
push at him. He remained there as motionless as a ten-ton statue
being pushed.

Lorz stepped between them. “Be reasonable,
Theo,” he soothed, pulling the boy away from the locker and his
assistant. They went into the office and toward the door. She tried
to help Theo with the ladder. He moved away and slung it over his
shoulder by himself.