The Seventh Candidate (10 page)

The question didn’t matter anymore, no more
than the candidate himself did. Yet the director moved forward
toward the stairs, eyes fixed on the door she was opening above
him.

There was a sickening crunch underfoot and
he nearly slipped and fell.

The door above closed on her back and a
sliver of sunlit tree.

The director removed his shoe, hopped back
into his now empty office and methodically removed the oily scraps
of sardine-skins from the sole. Then he dumped the fragments of the
dish into the metal oil-drum.

No more of that, anyhow.

***

7

Lorz had expected difficulties but not the
catastrophe that followed his assistant’s departure. The new client
backed out the next day. He lost two of the oldest clients the
following week. The operators, spottily surveyed now, loafed on the
job. He was able to stall off the chemical suppliers he owed money
to, but for how long? The bank was unsympathetic.

Only the compensation money could save him
but it didn’t come. The newspapers didn’t even refer to it any
more.

And the work was killing him. How could he
bear up under the burden she’d dumped on his shoulders? For he
hadn’t replaced his assistant. It wasn’t only to economize on a
salary bound to be far higher than what Dorothea Ruda had been
drawing, or the fact that a new employee, knowing nothing about
poster-restoration, would have to be broken in. In a sense his
former assistant was negatively present in the very predicaments
her absence caused. Irrationally, he felt that filling the void
would make her departure definitive, as though it weren’t
already.

But beyond his assistant’s faithlessness,
beyond even the disorganizing consequences of the “Events,” the
crisis confronting his business had, he thought, deeper causes.
Astonishing as it might seem after such a tidal-wave of disorder in
March, there was now, in May, distinctly fewer graffiti than in
past years and so less pressure on advertising agencies and poster
firms to rectify.

He’d have liked an ear to analyze the
phenomenon to. He’d have explained, for example, that perhaps the
scale of transgressions had changed. How could someone who had
experienced the joy of igniting expensive motorcars be bothered
with scribbling obscenities? More seriously, he would wonder if the
decline in graffiti couldn’t be explained by the change in the
posters themselves.

He would have pointed out that the
advertising agencies were now beginning to appropriate the symbols
and slogans of the defeated March movement. Example: the new
Sunglow poster with young women behind barricades, tricked out in
the quasi-uniform of the March days, the peaked blue cap, the black
sweater, the red scarf. They brandished bottles of Sunglow
detergent like Molotov cocktails and militantly proclaimed their
right to that brand. Or the scowling child, similarly attired, arms
defiantly folded, warning that he was on strike, no more tasteless
breakfast cereals for him, what he demanded was the brand whose
image was reproduced on a poster behind him.

For a while, the director thought that even
the delicious long-necked girl had been impressed into their ranks.
Wasn’t that Helena, dressed in March red and black with the blue
peaked cap at a heart-breakingly roguish angle? The camera had
clumsily caught her in a movement of extreme torsion, her blurred
hands reaching down toward a heap of paving stones. The caption, in
imitation spray-canned graffiti, proclaimed new freedom thanks to a
product which was a revolutionary breakthrough in feminine monthly
protection. Then he’d peered at the poorly focused face and decided
that the model couldn’t be Helena.

But here, he would have warned, was a
paradox (and he imagined his ex-assistant’s expressive face
obediently responding to the warning). Why should it be precisely
such posters as these, miming and implicitly praising disorder,
that real disorder tended to spare? They were strangely free of
graffiti. The key, he would have told her, was the breakdown of
that tension between Real and Ideal that underlay the conventional
posters. For example, to sell powdered soups in plastic packets to
the real world below, the archaic image above of an impossibly
authentic goodwife stirring a pot-bellied cauldron. Or, in another
register of contradiction, the disproportion between the intrinsic
importance of the advertised item in real life and the joy it
magically produced in the ideal universe of the posters, a joy (or
tenderness or conviviality or whatever) endowed, moreover, with
enviable duration: the three weeks the poster stayed up.

The world below was tortured by its
incapacity to achieve such dedication. Who could be joyous or
tender for three straight weeks? They struck back by defacing the
image of the unattainable ideal. (Hadn’t he once explained that to
her?) The new-style posters, however, didn’t offer tantalizing
visions of the Ideal. They flung back a warped image of the real
world with its imperfections and vices. Wasn’t the imitation of
spray-canned graffiti in the sanitary-napkin poster deeply
significant? Or the way the photograph of the false long-necked
girl cleverly copied the hundreds of street-riot shots he’d seen in
back-issues of news-weeklies: poorly centered and focused, the
shutter-speed outstripped by the action. The March events had, in a
sense, been one gigantic graffito. One didn’t graffiti graffiti
itself.

Yes, he wished she were there to hear him
formulate it. She would have scowled with concentration (not
getting much, of course, but doing her best), her large dark eyes –
her best feature – riveted to his lips. She’d been a good listener,
a rare virtue nowadays.

Two weeks after his assistant left him Lorz
stuffed two suitcases with essentials and moved into the
subterranean office.

He hoped it would be a very temporary
arrangement. For the moment it wasn’t possible to cope otherwise.
With the insane workload she’d dumped on him, he was now averaging
four hours of sleep a day. He’d gain an extra hour by eliminating
the round-trip from his flat to the office. There was already a cot
in the storeroom where the chemicals were kept, also a cubicle with
a toilet and a tiny washbasin.

Lack of comfort proved less unpleasant than
certain other things. For example the way time stood still in the
perpetual cold noon of the mercury tubes. Even more troubling than
the absence of natural light in the basement room was his
dependence on a machine for air, the humming ventilator. It
reminded him of what he’d seen in the Life Support Unit during his
inspection of his candidate. There had been no natural light there
either. But he tried not to think of that other space where he’d
spent black weeks himself.

One day he cleaned out the drawers of her
desk and came across an identity photo of her smiling timidly in
black and white. He tossed it on the top of the desk. He got rid of
the rest of the rubbish in the metal oil-drum. For months she
looked up at him when he passed her former desk.

He tried not to think of the recumbent figure
in cubicle nine. Except once, he didn’t even inquire about the man
during his own semi-monthly check-ups at the hospital. He supposed
that if there’d been any improvement in his candidate’s condition
the doctors would have spoken about it. But there was no
possibility of improvement. He learned that the one time he did
inquire. Down in the lobby he saw one of the Life Support Unit
doctors. He fought against the impulse but finally asked what the
chances were of “Teddy” emerging from coma.

The doctor practically told him, in cold
precise terms that somehow matched his perfectly trimmed pale
moustache and pale eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, that
there was no chance. But would he be indefinitely maintained like
that in half-life by artificial means? Lorz asked. He was told that
normally the family decided. But in this case there was no family.
“One day the Commission will meet and the case will be examined.
Finally permission will be given to switch him off.”

Lorz didn’t know there was such a
commission. The expression “switch him off” angered him. “He’s a
human being, not a machine,” he felt like retorting. It could so
easily have been himself the doctor was talking about. He felt
grief and dread. Alarmed at his excessive reaction, he drove the
incident out of his mind.

The director ended by taking his meals in the
office too. At first there was just the primitive alcohol-lamp
she’d used to prepare coffee for both of them. One day he bought a
twin-burner camping-stove with a cartridge of gas and a plastic
tablecloth with a pattern of yellow smiling suns on a blue
background. At dinnertime that same day he covered his desk with
the suns and placed the camping-stove in the exact middle. He
admired his acquisition, one hip jutting out, an ankle in graceful
torsion, limp-wristed hands clasped, in the enraptured posture of
the women on the posters before dream household-appliances. Then he
plopped the contents of a tinned soup into the saucepan and,
gnawing at his half-loaf, stirred and waited for it to simmer, not
boil, for maximum flavor.

Luckily Silberman, who had told him to resume
work gradually and to avoid strain, couldn’t see him grappling with
the pails of paint, squat 25-kilo brutes, pouring them unassisted
now into cans and jars and stocking them in the lockers bearing the
numbers of the operators who would pick them up at the start of
their shift.

He was even tempted to work the illustrated
corridors a few hours a day. One of the operators had thrown over
the job and another he’d had to fire for gross shirking. Even
though he hadn’t been in harness for ten years the director was
confident that he could handle the job in a fraction of the time
the two had required. But it would have been additional fatigue.
What would Silberman have thought of that?

What made him finally shoulder knapsack and
ladder was an alarming incident, which he attributed to the mental
effects of confinement in the office.

Already he was suffering from splitting
headaches. He decided that they came from sleeping in the
storeroom, exposed to the chemical fumes, plus the disturbance of
the operators on the 5:00am shift. They banged open their
locker-doors and slammed them shut with a total lack of
consideration for the sleeper. Lorz dragged the cot as far as
possible from the fumes and noise. The headaches continued
anyhow.

He apprehended a relapse and a return of the
symptoms that had frightened him in the hospital: the craziness of
the wall with the boy and his imagined face, the menace of cerebral
explosion and the return to blackness.

The routine check-ups revealed no anomaly
but he wasn’t reassured. His gaze, as so often, was inward. Except
now it was directed at the brain instead of the bowels. The new
organ was harder to picture. It was like an eye trying to see
itself.

He was constantly testing his brain as he’d
done with his lacerated sole that disastrous Monday morning in
early March, gingerly putting weight on it, probing the limits of
painless pressure. The theoretical source of fear was constantly
with him even though the workmen had done their job. The wall at
the end of the room was unpainted chipboard now and bore no
resemblance to the plaster wall the blast had destroyed.

He tested himself by removing his glasses.
The blur restored the wall to its former potentially menacing
appearance. But, thank God, there were no symptoms.

He pushed the test further by placing a
chair and a table close to it, and then a poster on the desk, the
same poster.

Nothing.

One day he draped his jacket over the back
of the chair. Without his glasses it could be taken, more or less,
for a human form.

Nothing.

So he was cured, despite the headache. He
didn’t bother removing the jacket from the chair. In the loneliness
of the huge underground room it was company of sorts if he took his
glasses off. Sometimes he even sat there, going over his
accounts.

One day the alarming thing happened. He dozed
off in that chair. Approaching footsteps awakened him. He’d removed
his glasses and saw a blurred form drawing close. He – but who was
he? – looked up smiling at the other whom he knew to be Edmond
Lorz.

The crazy confusion lasted no more than a
second. Then he saw that it was the skinny balding operator, Number
Four, and recovered his own identity with that of the other.

He decided he was spending too much time in
the office. The underground corridors were even further from the
sun but he thought that a few hours of poster correction would be a
change. If things didn’t improve he’d see Silberman about it.

So for the first time in a decade Lorz
donned a grey smock, shouldered the telescoped wheeled stepladder
and went down to the tiled corridors to eradicate graffiti. Just
before he reached panels 302-334 of the Line 3 transfer tunnel
of
Central
Station
, he removed his
glasses and breathed on the lenses. Polishing them with a
handkerchief, he emerged out of the corridor onto the platform
where teenagers were punishing vending machines while waiting for
their train.

Looking at the first of the blurred posters
he thought he saw Helena. She’d strangely disappeared from the
underground panels since the explosion as though she too had been
critically injured. But when he put his glasses back on he realized
the grossness of his error. The sweet long-necked girl
metamorphosed into one of their new skimpily clad smoldering
brunettes. They were everywhere now.

Unslinging and developing his ladder
effortlessly, he took in the poster (cork-tipped mentholated
cigarettes) at a single expert glance. His mind leaped ahead,
mapping out the intricate but economical gestures needed to clean
her up. Twenty seconds, he judged. Swiftly, he placed the correct
bottles and tools on the tray. In the back of his mind he was
competing with his ex-assistant’s flawless performance that nearly
fatal Monday morning.