The Seventh Candidate (11 page)

He rose to eye-level with the brunette and
reached over to efface the crayoned pudendum staring at him like an
upended eye with romantic lashes from the upper left-hand corner.
Was it lack of sleep or rustiness after so many years?
Overcompensation for the residual weakness of his injured left arm?
Or was he still shaken by the alarming incident an hour before?
Whatever, his movement of suppression was too emphatic. He shot his
other hand against the poster, near the region of her bosom, to
regain balance. It was as though the brunette had repulsed him.

To his terror and humiliation he found
himself jolting impotently backwards from her dwindling,
contemptuous face. How could he have forgotten to secure the brake?
He clung to the ladder, head swiveled backwards in the direction of
his flight, which was toward the group of high school students now
standing at the edge of the platform.

“Stop me! Stop me!” he cried. They turned
around, gawked at the uncommon spectacle and parted ranks as though
to allow him unimpeded junction with the train roaring into the
station.

The ladder swerved.

An iron pillar jerked toward him.

It loomed.

He shielded his brain with an arm and cried,
“No!”

***

8

He floated out of darkness into a body and
knew that he was attached by tubes and wires to machines again, a
wall separating him from the boy stretched out in his own exact
posture in the last of the glassed cubicles.

But when he opened his eyes he saw the bars
of the bed at his feet and the wheeled formica table and knew it
was a later stage. How many weeks this time? How many months? The
room was empty. She wasn’t there to tell him.

Now he saw his forearm with the paint
spatters and everything came back: the stunning impact against the
iron pillar; blackness for a few seconds and then return to the
guffaws of the teenagers and the mutilated ladder and his smashed
glasses; his bleeding forehead and great fear for his brain; the
taxi to the hospital; no cause for alarm, lie down here a few
minutes.

He squinted at the wall-clock. He’d dozed
off for half an hour.

He got up gingerly and went into the
bathroom. The mirror showed a contemptuously tiny adhesive plaster
on his forehead, almost a mark of shame, instead of the crown of
swathed gauze he thought the blow had merited along with
hospitalization and exhaustive tests.

“
What seems to be the trouble?” the
unfamiliar intern had asked, and the unfamiliar nurse: “It doesn’t
look very,
very
serious.”
Apparently his shoulder had taken the brunt of the impact. The
intern predicted a lovely purple and yellow bruise to go along with
the other colors all over him. The nurse had laughed, like the
teenagers. His once gray smock was like camouflage for some
impossibly gaudy Brazilian jungle. There were smears of Basic White
on his face with a sprinkling of red. He looked like a clown.
They’d taken him for a house painter.

He walked unsteadily down the corridor to
the elevators where red arrows pointed up and down to units on
other floors. He got in and pressed what he thought was the
ground-floor button, hazy like the others, but when the doors slid
open and he stepped out he found himself facing the leather-padded
swinging-doors of the Life Support Unit. He turned around to the
elevator. The doors slid shut in his face and numbered lights
showed its progress down to the ground floor.

He stood there for a few seconds and then
pushed past the swinging doors and sat down in the empty green
lounge with neutral paintings and big green plants. After a while
he pushed open the second door and walked slowly to the end of the
corridor.

He peered beyond the faint reflection of his
own clownish image in the glass of the last cubicle.

The cubicle was empty.

He remembered the words of the pale-eyed
doctor and felt loss, amputation, void, as though he’d been
switched off himself.

He left the Unit and went back to the fourth
floor where he recognized the mannish head-nurse with the choleric
face and short iron-gray hair hurrying down the corridor. He
stopped her. She frowned and looked at him queerly. She didn’t
recognize him beneath his splattered mask. He asked what had
happened to Teddy.

“Room 416,” she said and moved on.

“You mean he’s out of the coma?” he asked
her dwindling back.

“He’s out of the Life Support Unit,” she
said gruffly, not breaking her pace or turning around. She
disappeared around the corner.

Lorz went to Room 416. He stood before the
closed door for a while. Finally he pushed the door open.

Prone behind the glass of cubicle nine, his
candidate had had the dignity of total withdrawal, definitive
repose, like a recumbent tomb-figure. Now he was seated. It
aggravated his state. One sat to rise and he didn’t rise. He hulked
there gigantic and hopeless in the wheelchair, slack-jawed with
extinguished eyes. His hands had been placed palms open, idol-like,
on his lap. The minimal movement away from the state of statuary –
the hardly perceptible rise and fall of his chest beneath the green
polo shirt – measured the limits of his progress.

He was even further removed now from the
director’s suddenly recalled image of him seconds before the blast,
even though the boy had recuperated a few remembered items. His
eyes, though dead, were the right color. The dark iris-flecks were
there. His hair had grown back sufficiently to confirm the dark
gold. There was even the sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of
the nose. But he’d never been gigantic like that. And there was the
stunned brutality of his features, so unlike the gentleness the
director had seen, or imagined he’d seen.

He felt dizzy and sat down. He was too tired
even to make the useless attempt to get through to the statue.

The door opened. He squinted and made out a
small blonde woman with too much make-up and costume jewelry
standing on the threshold. She had a very short red skirt, a
low-cut yellow blouse and was holding a big bouquet of white
flowers. She stared at him.

“My God, I didn’t recognize you. What
happened to you?”

Her voice was unfamiliar and metallic. As
she approached she focused. She had chemically bleached hair full
of colored combs and gathered up in a tiny crowning shock held in
place by rubber bands. Her lips were fluorescent red. Her eyelids
were shiny with bluish grease. There was also mascara. But she
hadn’t been able to do anything to her eyes themselves, which
suddenly testified to the survival, somewhere below all that, of
his former assistant.

“I didn’t recognize you,” he echoed
stupidly.

He was confused by all these disguises, the
interplay of non-recognition. If it was just disguise, his own
accidental, hers purposeful, but true identity beneath it, wasn’t
his candidate somehow disguised too? Lorz bent over to get the
blood back in his head.

In an unconcerned voice, as if talking about
the weather, she said that if he wasn’t feeling well why didn’t he
lie down?

“I think I will. I had a little accident.”
It was an effort even to talk. He went over to the bed and
stretched out. She didn’t pay any attention to him. Smiling, she
bent down, her loose low-cut blouse falling away from unsupported
small freckled breasts, and showed the motionless figure the white
flowers. She got a vase and went into the bathroom.

Over the sound of the water filling the vase
she raised her unfamiliar metallic voice. “You look like you fell
off the ladder. How come you’re on ladder detail?”

She came out of the bathroom and arranged
the bouquet in the vase as Lorz explained that he’d had to fire two
operators.

“Why don’t you have your new assistant do
the job?” she asked and without waiting for an answer lifted the
vase in front of the statue. “Aren’t they beautiful, Teddy?” she
asked in her old unmetallic voice.

“I have no new assistant,” Lorz brought out
with an effort.

He wasn’t sure his reply had registered
because she started talking about flowers to the statue. Lorz could
smell the heavy scent. Or did it come from her? Finally he asked
her why she bothered talking to the man. Wasn’t it obvious he
couldn’t hear what she was saying?

Not looking at the director, still
addressing the statue, she said, “Teddy can hear me all right.
Can’t you, Teddy? And he’s going to get even better. Aren’t you,
Teddy?” She kissed his cheek. “Much much better, no matter what the
doctors say.”

Her voice went on and on. He closed his
eyes. Her voice stopped. He opened his eyes and saw her staring at
him intensely. She looked away quickly and went back talking to the
other.

He fell asleep. When the nurse came and woke
him up, the statue and his ex-assistant were gone.

Two days later he returned to the hospital
and asked the young sharp-nosed doctor about the outlook for the
patient they called Teddy. He learned that further progress
couldn’t be absolutely excluded. But given the extent of brain
damage, sequels were practically certain. Of what nature and how
incapacitating couldn’t be said yet. Lorz consoled himself with the
thought of their earlier hopeless diagnosis and went to Room
416.

She was already there, her back turned to
him, talking to the giant petrified figure in the wheelchair about
wild mushrooms and nettle-soup in the tone of voice she’d used with
the cats in the staircase. She was still unrecognizable except for
that voice and her eyes. Her clothes covered even less than the
last time.

She nodded to him and said in her
unrecognizable metallic voice that she felt Teddy had made great
progress. She glanced at her watch and got up. She’d have to go
now, she said, she’d taken off an hour from her job to see
Teddy.

Her job? He’d thought her husband didn’t
want her to work, Lorz said. She stared at him with those eyes
painted into an expression of permanent indignation. What husband?
Lorz apologized for the error. That day she’d notified him of her
resignation he’d understood her to say she was getting married.

“
Married? Me? Who to? Philip? Oh God, you
must mean M
a
x. Max is too
old, practically forty-five. And I don’t like being dominated. He
didn’t like my new friends or the way I dress. You don’t seem to
either.”

Lorz tried to mollify her by saying that he
didn’t actually know her friends but was sure they were very nice.
She retorted that she hadn’t meant her friends (he wouldn’t have
liked them either for that matter, she added) but like the way she
dressed. “You don’t seem to. Not that it matters.”

He was casting about for something placating
to say about her scandalous dress when she changed the subject and
asked him about his business. He nearly replied that the ship was
sinking. Then he remembered he’d already said that to her three
months before. No ship took that long to sink. Besides, the
expression had unfortunate associations, which she’d pounced upon
that last time. She’d become unpleasantly touchy, completely
unrecognizable. Talking to her was like picking your way across an
unmapped minefield. He said that she’d be surprised to learn he
hadn’t gone bankrupt yet.

Oh she knew he was still in business, she
said, opening the door on the corridor. When she changed at
Crossroads
early in the morning she often
saw the operators working. Or not working. (She didn’t add that
when it happened sometimes she concealed herself as though she were
still invested with power, as though she were on “surveillance
detail” as they’d called it in mock-military style. She’d observe
the man’s technique for a minute and mentally grade him on the
usual scale of twenty as she’d done when it had
counted).

Leaving the room, she advised him (“although
it’s none of my business”) to hire an assistant. He couldn’t handle
the work all by himself.

“I can manage,” he said as she closed the
door behind her.

Lorz sat down before the man in the
wheelchair and tried to intercept his gaze. There was no focus to
it. A few times he addressed him self-consciously, mainly repeating
his own name and saying, “Do you remember me?” Doing it, he thought
of the red-faced peasant women long ago in his mother’s church who
talked to stone effigies. He got no more answer than they had.

He removed his brand-new glasses. Mastering
his fear, he slowly approached the seated figure as he’d done that
Monday morning in early March. Then he slowly retreated, still
facing the other, and began the approach again from a new
angle.

He repeated the operation over and over,
each time methodically changing the angle by a few degrees as
though spinning out the spokes of a half-web. The angles changed
but not the face of the motionless figure.

He was backing up for another try when he
heard someone breathing behind him. He turned around guiltily. She
stood on the threshold staring at him with grave intensity. How
long had she been standing there watching him? She said she’d
forgotten her bag. She took it and left.

A week later in the
Central Station
transfer tunnel of
Crossroads
, she
saw an operator perched on his ladder, rectifying children running
on a green lawn for an insurance company. This had to be a new one.
She frowned at the job he was botching. Mentally corrected the
correction. Decided on 7/20, a charitable mark for the wrong shade
of lawn-green, the wrong brush and the exaggerated palsy-line,
almost as though the operator couldn’t control a real tremble. It
used to be, when her marks were meaningful, that three such poor
marks and the man was out: the part she hated, but necessary. How
had this one ever got hired in the first place? The operator slowly
let himself down and leaned motionless against the ladder for far
too long. 6/20. Then he stooped down to undo the wheel-locking
device, half turning his face towards her.