The Seventh Candidate (19 page)

“Institution, he says? What institution?” As
far as her mask allowed him to judge she seemed on the point of
tears.

“Some institution or other,” he replied.

Lorz suspected that the story of being
summoned to “tip the balance” was another of her inventions. But
when he got to Room 307 the next day, holding his latest gift
carefully horizontal (it had started dripping), the story was
implicitly confirmed. The old doctor and his squat shadow were
seated in the corridor outside the door along with his assistant
who had arrived a few minutes before her employer. She was staring
down at the floor, her lips moving silently. Lorz guessed that she
was praying again.

Apparently the old doctor didn’t want to
enter the room. Or didn’t dare? They – he and Miss Ruda – were to
go in, he ordered. They were to talk to Teddy, try to convince him
to eat, to leave the room, to go outside in the park. He would be
more receptive this time. There had been encouraging signs. They
should leave the door ajar and not be afraid.

Lorz pushed open the door against the
symbolic resistance of the chair. His assistant followed him into
the room. They greeted the boy and sat down side by side facing
him. He was working at the great table, crouched over a jigsaw
puzzle. He didn’t look up. Teddy hadn’t eaten or slept for
twenty-four hours now, she whispered.

Lorz observed him for a while. His hands
froze a second above the chaos of colored fragments spread out
before him, then struck like snakes, chose and fitted, then froze,
then struck, chose and fitted. Already he’d created a great number
of islets of fitted fragments on a large rectangle of plywood.

On the table, vast enough for a monastery
refectory, there were maybe two dozen watch-works, coiled hearts
pulsing, next to the open cases and the miniscule watch-repairing
tools; piles of unopened jig-saw puzzles, some in their original
unbroken cellophane wrapping; a scrap-heap of Chinese puzzles,
solved and undone, all of them; seven chess-sets with the pieces in
the position of his triumph over himself; boxes of crayons and
pencils; reams of typewriting paper and everywhere those drawings
with geometric figures. There were so many of them that they’d also
been placed on the floor in strict, complicated, incomprehensible
order.

Also on the floor was a completed jigsaw
puzzle (a prancing white horse) glued to a rectangle of plywood.
Next to it lay a sprinkling of fine nails, a tiny-headed hammer, a
pot of glue, joining-tools and a picture-frame in clamps. The
frame, once completed, would presumably receive the white horse and
be promoted to the wall, joining some twenty other framed jigsaw
puzzles, hanging in another strange private order which
contradicted the banality of seascapes, autumnal woods, cascades,
famed chutes and ornamental fountains. All these too had been
definitively glued to rectangles of plywood. Lorz thought briefly
of the bearded director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit.

The hands stopped. The boy pulled out of his
absorbed crouch.

“Oh, lovely, Teddy, just lovely,” his
assistant breathed.

The completed jigsaw puzzle was a
reproduction of an 18th century pastoral painting. In the
foreground, from the vantage-point of a grassy flower-spangled
eminence, a wigged gentleman in jacket and breeches of a blue
imitated by the sky leaned on a walking stick, hands clasped on the
golden pommel, admiring the harmony of the scene laid out before
him. Pink evening clouds, imprinted with birds, arched above a
landscape bathed in ideal golden light. A thatched farmhouse stood
in the middle of tidy fields where rustics labored decoratively
between shocks of wheat. A wagon heaped high with hay raised golden
dust on a road skirting the shores of a lake where a boy was
angling from a boat with shipped oars. In the distance mountains
stood hazy blue and received the setting sun.

The director could understand his
candidate’s yearning to preserve the scene with glue and plywood,
to oppose the lines of fracture, the break-up of exquisite order
into chaos.

Theodore was staring down at the golden
landscape. His hands lay still on the table. Taking advantage of
that moment of suspended activity, Lorz’s assistant got up, quickly
rounded the table and came up behind the boy.

“No,” said the old doctor, but no urgency to
it.

Absorbed by his candidate, Lorz hadn’t
noticed that the doctor had slipped into the room with the
attendant. The two of them were seated in a corner, next to five
empty chairs placed in a row as if awaiting further spectators for
some intimate performance.

The old doctor said “no” again – but again
with no conviction – as the director’s assistant touched the boy’s
massive shoulder, saying, “Teddy, Teddy.” Now she put her arm
lightly about his shoulder (“Don’t do that,” said the old doctor,
perfunctorily). She bent her smiling illuminated face toward his.
From where Lorz sat, the spout of hair clasped by rubber bands
looked like a bleached caricature of one of the shocks of wheat in
the landscape.

She started whispering to him. “It’s
beautiful, Teddy. Lovely. But it’s finished now. Come on out. Take
a walk with me in the park.”

It was the long-ago voice she used to
produce when talking to one of the mangy cats that haunted
the
Ideal
staircase
or to filthy Subcon beggar-children on the street-corner. A voice
somehow pathetic in the disproportion between its total offering
and the minimal response of the recipient of the sardine or the
coin. She got even less response now.

She repeated her invitation, saying that the
park was even more beautiful than the picture and it was real. This
thing was beautiful but it was just a photograph. A photograph of a
painting. And the painter probably imagined it all. They pasted it
on cardboard and then they cut it up. It’s not real. It’s a
beautiful day outside, real sunshine.

Her voice went on and on without pause.
She’d seized the initiative and held on to it. Her voice had an
almost hypnotic effect on Lorz. Teddy was still staring down at the
puzzle. The director, cocking his head, also stared down at it. She
was saying the things that had to be said to the boy. But it wasn’t
true and one could believe that if her words penetrated his mind
(which wasn’t at all certain) he was rejecting what she said about
the superiority of the park outside, with its funereal bedding
flowers and cripples, to the golden perfection on the table. One
could almost understand his refusal to leave it.

“First you have to eat,” she was now saying.
“You must be terribly hungry, Teddy. Look what I brought you.”

She removed from her shoulder bag something
wrapped in expensive-looking tissue paper. She unveiled a great
bunch of violet grapes. “It’s for you. But leave a few for me.” She
dangled it before his face, revolved it slowly, all the while
praising the fruit. Turning, the grapes reflected the overhead
mercury lamps as a multitude of tiny rectangular suns. The boy
continued staring down at the bird-imprinted pink clouds. Finally
she placed the bunch of grapes on the corner of the table.

“Don’t you like grapes?” she asked,
blinking. “Aren’t you hungry?”

She paused, lips parted, staring at him,
visibly trying to think up a new approach. Finally she picked up
the bunch of grapes again. It resumed its slow useless
revolutions.

Wasn’t he hungry? Her question aroused the
director out of inertia. He reached for his own gift, the new one,
lying on the corner of the table. He undid the string and removed
the stained paper and the plastic prong. He opened the flap of the
waxed cardboard box gingerly. His mouth, unaffected by his growing
despair, watered at the liberated fragrance of the expensive
fine-sliced raw beef bathing in spiced blood sauce. He’d bought it
as an alternate gift to the watch, sure it too would be rejected,
but at least it was something he, Lorz, had a taste for, unlike the
nauseous self-sacrificing sweets and nuts piling up in his
study.

“You have to eat,” he said, weakly echoing
her words and imploring tone.

Muscles tensed for recoil, he reached out
toward the boy’s bare arm. At the last moment his hand stopped
short. Contact would have changed things, he felt, but he
couldn’t.

“Look what I brought you,” he said.

He harpooned a slice of the meat with the
prong. Accompanying it with the box to catch the drippings, he
approached the meat to the other’s absorbed averted face. He got no
more reaction with his offering than his assistant had with
hers.

Lorz heard footsteps behind him, low voices,
the scrape of chairs. The seats were being occupied as in a chamber
theatre. Silberman was there now, also the young sharp-nosed doctor
and two unknown men who looked like administrators with
alphabetically filed features. They glanced with professional
impassivity at the simultaneous offerings of revolving grapes and
bloody meat to an averted contemplative face.

The director withdrew the proffered slice
and replaced it in the box, which he set down on the table again.
He leaned back in defeat, now understanding the purpose of this
gathering. All of the concerned doctors and administrators
(concerned in no humane sense) had been summoned to note and
certify the hopelessness of Number Nine’s case and later to select
the appropriate institution.

Everything would happen very rapidly now.
This was the last time he would ever see his candidate. Very soon,
perhaps tomorrow or this very day, Theodore would vanish. All of
the objects of present and past obsession would be returned to
their rightful square-bearded proprietor, the chess sets, the
Chinese puzzles, the (unglued) jigsaw puzzles, including the golden
landscape, broken up into chaos. But not the watches. The watches
he, Lorz, would keep, at whatever price, at least that as a memory,
a memorial. For Theodore would be displaced too, only much further,
locked up safely somewhere like the puzzles and chessmen.

Where? Lorz would never find out. The
baffling secrecy that surrounded the boy would be maintained. They
would never tell him the name of the institution, just as they’d
already refused to divulge his candidate’s whereabouts for a whole
month. To locate him it had taken Lorz weeks in a maze of corridors
within the limited area of the hospital complex. “Some institution
or other” could be located anywhere. How could he visit all of the
cities and towns in the land? A lifetime wouldn’t suffice.

The boy should flee. But hadn’t he already
fled into linked bits of metal, chessboard squares, cogs and
springs, and now the golden landscape? That kind of flight was the
reason for his presence here, for his imminent and definitive
incarceration somewhere else. If he (Theodore) were able to know
why they were all gathered here, he’d flee physically. Who could
oppose that power? But of course if he could realize, there’d be no
necessity for being locked up.

Anyhow, flee where? The director’s mind
sought theoretical places of refuge and solitude in the city
outside the hospital walls. He saw the underground in the dawn
hours, silent except for the escalators rolling on and on in the
white emptiness. He saw the dripping walls of the sewer.

Then he imagined the two disused rooms in
his flat, unopened for decades now, crammed with hacked furniture.
For an instant the director pictured him there concealed amid the
broken furniture in the musty darkness, safe behind that lock, the
latched shutters and windows, the quadruple bolts of the front
door, like something precious secured against thieves. Now Lorz’s
mind rejected the assimilation of his candidate to the broken inert
things he’d so long resembled.

He imagined that room emptied of the old
furniture, three walls painted white, the fourth yellow, shutters
and windows flung open, sunshine streaming in on him. He touched
the boy’s bare arm. He gripped it. The muscles beneath his fingers
stiffened into rock hardness. The director’s fingers answered that
response.

“Look!” he commanded.

The boy obeyed.

The director at last possessed the deep blue
eyes with the flecked irises.

“You’ve got to eat,” he said again, but not
her way, this time not imploringly. It was a command. He took the
waxed cardboard box, held it out to him and the victory was almost
too easy. Had his ambition been too limited? he would later wonder.
Couldn’t he have commanded the other to speak and say his name?

His candidate leaned forward and accepted
the offering. He disengaged his arm from the director’s grasp and
took the cardboard box. He took all of the meat with his fingers
and crammed the dripping mass into his mouth. He bolted it down. He
tilted the box and drank up the blood sauce. His throat worked
powerfully. A few drops fell on the golden evening sky.

“Yes,” said the old doctor in an oddly
triumphant voice. “You see.”

Yes, they saw. And would see more. Were
seeing more.

The director scolded the boy. The immensity
of his joy and glory received spontaneous expression not in praise
for the boy’s docility but in gentle scolding. Again he gripped his
arm, reestablishing the essential physical contact.

“You haven’t left me a single slice,
Theodore. I thought we’d share it. I gave you all that. Now what
are you going to give me? Why don’t you give me the puzzle?”

Lorz immediately amended the suggestion to
command, leaving no room for refusal.

“Give me the puzzle,” he said and couldn’t
wait for the message to be processed for fear of losing initiative
and momentum. So when the boy’s hand failed to respond
instantaneously, the director reached across the table with his
free hand and summoned the strength to lift the rectangle of
plywood with the puzzle and set it down in front of himself.