The Seventh Candidate (7 page)

The image started up. To break free he
turned to the other wall and began studying the ten maze-like floor
plans. Superimposing in his mind the fifth-floor chart on the
fourth-floor one, he saw that the Life Support Unit was situated
above his room (412). It might be that at night he lay directly
beneath the other, separated only by the thickness of the ceiling,
a horizontal wall.

Dizziness overcame him and he collapsed into
a chair. A nurse had to help him back to his room. She scolded him
like a child for overdoing things.

That night he dreamed that he undertook the
same long journey down the deserted corridor. He pulled himself up
the staircase to the fifth floor. He passed through the
leather-padded swinging-doors of the Life Support Unit into the
empty visitors’ lounge. It was painted a restful green and had
neutral paintings and big green plants. A second door opened on a
corridor with a succession of big windows. Behind them, tributary
to machines, patients were lying on wheeled stretchers. He was
approaching the last window when the nurse came again and scolded
him severely and then he opened his eyes on the ceiling in the
pallid early morning light of his room.

So day and night he was assailed by that
image. Sometimes he surprised himself trying to wring humor out of
his tribulations – a cosmopolite approach to suffering, he’d read –
by toting up his incredible accumulation of woes over the past few
weeks. There was his lacerated right sole (healed, true, during the
coma) with the attendant loss of his glasses; the intestinal fire
(for the moment back to latency); the wrecking of his office;
possible bankruptcy; the blasting of his brain; his half-paralyzed
left arm; and now hounded day and night by an image he couldn’t
cosmetize.

While waiting for Silberman’s pills to take
effect, he tried to fight the syndrome on his own. The trick, he
thought, was to concentrate on quantifiable worries. His assistant
brought over plenty of these in the form of bills, dunning letters
and balance sheets in growing unbalance. One day the radio
announced the government’s decision to compensate uninsured victims
of the bombing outrages. It had to come soon. But no date was
mentioned.

So the prospect of bankruptcy did afford a
certain relief from the image. But concern about money matters
couldn’t be indefinitely kept up. In the interstices of disastrous
calculations, without warning, wall and face would loom. This even
happened during one of his assistant’s visits.

She came often and stayed long, even after
business matters had been disposed of. On the fourth day of his
return to the world, at what they called “dinner-time” (five
o’clock) the new nurse, mistaking their relationship, had offered
her a tray. She’d eagerly accepted it, a deadly precedent. When
bed-ridden he’d had the space of the bed as a buffer. Now he had to
sit at angles at the narrow wheeled formica table like a crazy
modern painting, his legs jack-knifed out of harm’s way, his torso
twisted to make room for their foreheads when they leaned forward
for soup.

For the first time he understood the
expression
tête-à-tête
.
Since the death of his mother, he’d lost the habit of being in a
confined space with another person. In addition, she never failed
to bring flowers and potted plants. He always thanked her. But
didn’t they compete for oxygen or emit dangerous gas at night? He
didn’t remember which. Perhaps both?

He didn’t realize it but he had a reason for
being thankful to her. She proved to be a counter-fire to the
obsessive image, not just because of the alarming things she
brought over to the hospital from the office but because his mind
was kept busy combating the irritation her presence frequently
caused.

However, on the eighth day of his return, in
the very middle of a dictated sentence, the boy and the wall came
back with such force that he broke off helplessly. He tried the
trick of staring at her latest flowers. When that didn’t work he
again pictured her ferreting in his apartment. Since the death of
his mother, nobody had entered his flat except, once, a plumber,
strictly confined to the flooded bathroom, and, twice, a doctor,
not the same one. He imagined her using his toilet. He banished the
absurd, scandalous image. The wall and the boy returned. He blurted
out: “You had no business in my apartment.”

That worked. Now he was out of it but into
the consequences of his words as he could see by her face. Ever
since the inspector had told him about her intrusion, he’d been
trying to find the right approach to the subject: something firm
but certainly not brutal like that. She took things to heart as he
could see.

She flushed, sat up stiffly and began the
justification for perhaps the twentieth time. But now it was no
solitary rehearsal.

She’d managed to salvage his overcoat, she
explained. It had been in tatters. Naturally she’d emptied the
pockets. There’d been a few coins (she named the exact sum) and
three underground tickets and the keys. She immediately put them
all in an envelope, which she sealed. But the inspector was very
insistent about the missing letters of application. He wanted her
to give him the keys. She thought it would be better if she looked
herself. He might have broken things. The police hadn’t always
behaved well during the Events.

She’d spent no more than five minutes in his
apartment. She’d have seen it right away: a purple folder. “It
wasn’t there so I left. I was careful to lock up.”

This was largely the truth. She’d felt sure
the inspector would become nastily insistent if she didn’t
volunteer to have a look. Besides, there were probable plants to
water, a possible cat to feed, although by the way he reacted to
the cats in the building this was unlikely. She came with a tin of
sardines anyway.

She’d touched practically nothing there
unless you counted the closed windows and metal shutters of the
first room as part of the flat. In the musty darkness she hadn’t
been able to find the light-switch. The shutters had resisted as
though undisturbed for years. They cried painfully and let in only
a diffused distant light absorbed by the somber carpet and
wallpaper, the massive, badly marred mahogany furniture. The
windows gave on an airshaft. You had to lean out and crane your
neck, as she did, to see a fragment of blue sky. The living room
had an unlived-in smell. The only sound in the room was the slow
tocking of a grandfather clock in a corner and occasional
wing-bursts of pigeons from the airshaft. The worn carpet muffled
her footsteps.

In the corridor she opened a door on
blackness and groped for the switch. A multitude of bulbs burst
forth. They illuminated a repetitious chaotic space: hundreds of
beds with frilly yellowed covers, a forest of crucifixes, endless
heads of Jesus, framed bleeding hearts, mottoes in reversed
lettering, “Jesus is Love!” and fragments of a vase.

After a second she understood that it was a
room with a single overhead bulb but enlarged and repeated by the
mirrors lying on the bed, the floor, propped against the furniture,
hanging from the walls, countless mirrors of all sizes and shapes.
The mustiness was unbreathable.

Coughing, she’d closed the door and
continued her exploration. Two other doors in the corridor were
locked. She was proud not to have opened them with the other keys.
She passed into a small bedroom, a kitchen and a study. She found
no cat and no vulnerable plants in the flat. Not counting the
bouquet that almost fooled her, there was only, in his study, a
green enameled dish full of pebbles and sandy soil and thumb-high
cacti. The dish stood on an old desk beneath a swivel-lamp, in the
exact center of a cone of light. The cacti, which had barbed
needles, were of the same mineral hue as the pebbles. They needed
no watering.

Also on the desk were two leather-framed
black-and-white photos. One was a bust portrait of a strong-chinned
man in a black uniform with old fashioned royal insignia on the
collar. The other was of a very pretty woman in artistic soft-focus
with short fluffy blonde hair back lighted to incandescence. She
wore a big crucifix around her slender neck. Her eyes were strange;
great and transparent as water.

In a blue vase in front of her photograph
was a bunch of perfect flowers. She was ready to water them when
she realized they were plastic.

She opened the desk drawers but didn’t find
the letters of application. So with the exception of the doorknobs
and the drawers she hadn’t touched anything. She’d been prepared to
tidy up but there was nothing to tidy up. There was rigorous order
everywhere, even in the kitchen, the focal point of masculine
disorder, she’d read. She had no personal experience. It was true
that she couldn’t withstand a sudden urge to urinate. But,
technically, could this be considered “touching”?

She returned to his study and sat there
until the grandfather clock in the living room boomed tremulously
once.

She showed up breathless at the restaurant,
half an hour late as usual, foolishly holding the tin of sardines.
Vera’s thin face was discontented. She’d spoiled her appetite with
salted almonds and mineral water. She asked where she’d been – not
at the hospital again? Vera found that it was a waste of time to
visit somebody who was unconscious and who scandalously underpaid
and exploited her.

As usual, Vera had a gift for her. She had
to close her eyes and hold out her arm. She felt something cold on
her wrist that clicked: a modernistic silver chain-bracelet Vera
had made for her.

In the middle of the night she remembered
that she’d switched off the swivel lamp on his desk. The cactus
plants were sure to die. The next day she returned to his apartment
and switched the lamp back on. She opened the windows and shutters
in all the rooms except the two locked ones and the one filled with
dusty mirrors. She gave the cacti a few drops, most of which rolled
off the refractory soil. Then she sat in his study perfectly still
for a half-hour before leaving.

She ended by visiting the flat nearly every
day during his coma.

She burrowed in her bag, came up with his
keys and placed them on the table. There was a long silence. He
fingered his book, never far from his reach during her visits, but
not insistently this time. He still felt faintly guilty at his
outburst. Instead of leaving, she sat there with an air of
triumphant mystery.

Finally she came out with her big news. Her
brother had just decided to give up the farm but of course couldn’t
sell it. Still fingering the book, he heard her out. Who wanted to
buy a tiny run-down farm in the rocky middle of nowhere? she said.
So it was practically hers now. One day she’d say goodbye to the
city, goodbye, goodbye, retire there and live on practically
nothing. There was wood for the fireplace in the woods behind the
house, and water from a well. No food problem either: a kitchen
garden, a chicken or two, snared rabbits, nettles for soup,
dandelion salad, wild asparagus and mushrooms and chestnuts in
season, you could make wine from blackberries. Maybe she’d live
there with a friend. And if people she didn’t care to see came to
see her she’d wait in those woods till they were gone.

Finally she left and Lorz was able to return
to his book.

***

4

Three days later it was suddenly three
o’clock, an hour before the scheduled identification of the boy.
His heart alarmed him. He went into the library. Another patient
tried to strike up a conversation. He fled. He couldn’t go to the
encounter with his mind confused by futile conversations with
strangers. He needed these last minutes to prepare his mind in
solitude, to win back calm.

Lorz returned to his room, lay down on the
hard bed and closed his eyes. For the first time he tried to let
the dangerous image come instead of resisting it. He had the
confused idea that if he couldn’t recall the boy’s face now he’d
never be able to identify him twenty minutes from now. All he had
otherwise was that abstract knowledge of piece-meal features that
refused to coalesce into a face apart from the moment of the
explosion. One part of his mind wanted to go back to that moment.
It strained against the leash of the fearful part of his mind.

Lorz called up the wall again and again
without fear but with growing despair because he couldn’t call up
the face. The leash was too tight. He relaxed it. Relaxed it more
and more. Now the leash was gone and all of his mind strained
forward. It was like pushing against a flimsy barrier guarding a
chasm and which could yield any second. He felt dizzy and could
taste his sweat.

It was coming, he was coming, he could hear
his breathing, feel his breath on his face, how was that
possible?

He opened his eyes on a totally wrong face
that filled his entire field of vision. The wrong face asked
anxiously if something was wrong.

He said that nothing was wrong. But the
wall-clock gave him only ten minutes to find the right face.

“I was going to call the nurse,” she said.
“I thought something had happened, you were so pale and sweating.
You still are. Shall I call the nurse?”

“Nothing is wrong. I have an appointment in
ten minutes. You can leave the correspondence on the table.” She
was holding the plastic shopping-bag she brought the correspondence
over in.

“It’s not correspondence,” she said. He
closed his eyes and tried again. Nothing came.

He heard the rustling of paper. He opened
his eyes. She was still there, standing in the middle of the room,
burrowing in the plastic bag. He closed his eyes again. The
rustling of paper went on. “Look!” she said as to a child and
exhibited the cake. It was crowned with candied cherries and
dripped with honey.