The Seventh Candidate (28 page)

The director came up with more counter
arguments.

Finally she asked him if he wanted Teddy to
be sent to an institution.

He didn’t answer for a while. Then he said,
no, he didn’t want that.

He reached for the progress report and
uncapped his fountain pen. She got up and looked over his shoulder
as he turned to the last page.

“On the whole and taking into account the
special features of the case, Teddy’s work can best be described
as: 1.Very Poor. 2. Poor. 3. Acceptable. 4. Satisfactory. 5. Fully
Satisfactory.”

He checked Fully Satisfactory.

“Everything’ll work out,” she said. “You’ll
see.”

***

6

So after all, the seventh candidate
(originally the thirteenth) went down to the illustrated tunnels
with his own knapsack and wheeled ladder as if the blast the year
before at 9:00am March 12 had never occurred and he’d been chosen
that first time.

At the beginning, the move seemed to be
turning out as Lorz’s assistant had promised it would. The economy
was appreciable. Operator 7 wasn’t replaced. Peace had returned to
the
Ideal
office.
And the danger to his new employee hadn’t materialized.

Still, the director was uneasy. He
accompanied the boy the first few times. He told him that
Crossroads
was his territory, totally, but
that under no circumstances should he ever try to operate in any
other station. He told him this over and over. He added that in
case of trouble he shouldn’t hesitate to abandon the equipment and
run for the nearest exit. Finally, that if the police asked him
what he was doing to the posters he should show them his
Ideal
ID card with his new color
photo and point at the phone number. With an ounce of brains they’d
ring up the office for confirmation. All of the
Ideal
men had such cards. In the early days the
operators had often been taken for super-equipped vandals or
madmen.

The routine training session for new
operators proved unnecessary. Even though it had ended disastrously
for him, Theodore (or his hands) hadn’t forgotten that introductory
collective lesson more than a year before. No more than he’d
forgotten the long sessions in the hospital with the newsmagazines.
The rapidity and perfection of his underground corrections exceeded
anything the director had ever seen or imagined.

There was a problem, though. The boy never
fully grasped their repeated injunctions that at 6:30pm he should
wait in the
West Gate
corridor in front of poster-site 354 where in turn the
director or his assistant would pick him up and accompany him back
to the office. He’d always be in that corridor, somewhere, but on
his stepladder, eradicating. It wasn’t easy to convince Theodore to
break off working. The promise of the thin-sliced raw beef in the
spiced blood sauce proved effective most of the time. What lure his
assistant used the director didn’t know. The ladder and knapsack
stowed away in his
Ideal
locker,
Theodore left for the hospital.

The director expected to be immediately
bombarded with calls from the hospital and the Commission, surely
anxious to know how the new arrangement was turning out. Instead,
it was the director who had to ring up at the end of the first
week.

After finicky obsessive year-long concern
about Theodore they were now totally indifferent. One of the
doctors even asked Lorz to make sure that the boy took his pills,
dumping their most elementary duties on him. They could take them
together, the doctor added, perhaps as a joke. They were the same
pills, supposedly. He hinted that the boy might even be freed from
the mysterious “special treatment” he received over the
weekends.

The director tried to see the positive side
of their indifference. Despite the boy’s continued silence and the
persistence of what Lorz referred to as “otherwhereness,” maybe the
mind-men had observed encouraging signs not visible to the director
and his assistant.

“Have you noticed changes for the better?”
he inquired one day during his own check-up. The sharp-nosed young
doctor answered that yes, of course, there’d been progress. At this
the director’s heart started up. Could it be that he’d already
pronounced words? Decisive progress one could even say, added the
doctor.

“What exactly?”

He, the director, was the best-placed person
to know that, the doctor replied. The fact that Teddy was doing so
well on his new job, of course. They’d all read the director’s
job-report with great satisfaction. There was even talk about
outpatient status for Teddy with a flat of his own.

The new arrangement went smoothly for the
first two weeks. At exactly 12:30pm Theo would show up at
the
Ideal
office. He
would take the stepladder and the knapsack and leave for
Crossroads
accompanied by the director the
first three days, then by himself. The director had succeeded, not
without difficulty, in persuading his new employee to take a bus to
the
Crossroads
station. The other stations were forbidden territory for
him, even as a passenger.

When the boy returned to
Ideal
in the evening he was reluctant
to surrender his knapsack and ladder. They had to coax them off his
back. “Put them in your locker, Teddy (Theodore),” they would say.
“No one else will touch them.” The director had assigned him an
empty locker with a blank name-card. He’d said with studied
casualness: “It’s yours. Put your name on it.” Lorz hadn’t really
had much hope. And in fact what “Theodore” had written on the
cardboard was an ornately scrolled figure seven. It wasn’t that he
was the seventh candidate any more. But he’d replaced Operator 7
and had inherited the man’s numbered pin on the underground
map.

Another part of the arrangement was that
Theo would spend four days in the
Crossroads
station and the fifth, Friday, in the office. The
first Friday, on arriving, Theo went into the storeroom and headed
for his locker and the ladder and knapsack.

Smiling, Dorothea stepped in front of the
locker. “Today’s Friday, Teddy. Fridays you stay with us in the
office.”

Theodore stood motionless staring past her
at the locker. The director came and led him away, hoping he’d do
cutouts and poster corrections while they talked to him during
lulls. They’d agreed that it was essential to try to communicate
with him. Who talked to him underground? It was a major reason for
keeping him in the office that one day.

She did most of the talking on Fridays,
pronouncing more words on that single day than she had in a whole
month alone with her employer. She invited Teddy to visit her “some
day” in the mountains for a week, a month, for as long as he
liked.

The director learned in that indirect way
that the farm, which apparently was hers now, covered twenty-seven
acres, that there was no running water but a well twenty-five
meters deep, the water ice-cold on the hottest day, that spring
frosts came so late there, nine hundred meters high, that apples
were the only fruit they could grow. Maybe she’d already told him
all that in the old days but he hadn’t really listened.

Ending the inevitable silence that followed
her invitation, the director asked about electricity. No
electricity, she said. Kerosene-lamps. It was the first information
about the farm she’d given him since the old days, and not really
volunteered this time. No television either then, he said, trying
to keep the subject alive. How can you survive? She took his remark
seriously and said she never looked at television.

The boy paid no attention to them. He was
plugged off most of the time. Immobile in his favorite chair he
would stare at the underground map. Sometimes he’d get up, approach
his face to the maze of lines and not move as though memorizing the
order of the stations. He’d clean and oil his impeccably cleaned
and oiled ladder every hour. He refused the cutouts. He even
refused what he did best of all, the poster corrections, as though
he now understood it wasn’t for real in the office. So he hardly
moved or touched anything. This caused the director and his
assistant such anxiety that his static presence turned out to be as
obstructive of work as his former fanatic activity with the
paintbrush.

The third Friday, Theo showed up at 12:30pm
as usual. He immediately went into the storeroom and his locker,
which was secured by a huge padlock. He was the only one of the
operators who did that. He came out wearing the knapsack and the
folded stepladder as he did on the other days.

“Where are you going?” they asked
helplessly. “It’s Friday today, Teddy.” “Friday is the day you stay
here with us, Theodore.” “No, don’t go, Teddy.” “Theodore, don’t
leave.”

He left.

It was impossible to head him off on the
stairs, out in the street either. The director gave up.

All week long they tried to persuade him to
stay with them on Fridays but the following Friday he left
again.

So now the “arrangement” was that Theo spent
all five days underground. “Like any other operator,” his assistant
consoled. When the director didn’t reply, she observed:
“Financially it’s better, that’s sure.”

Things remained that way in uneasy
equilibrium for two weeks.

One day Theo didn’t show up at 12:30. By one
o’clock Lorz wanted to ring up the hospital but Dorothea pointed
out that they should avoid alerting the hospital to a problem. If
it really was a problem. His bus may have been caught in a
traffic-snarl.

“Something’s happened to him,” said the
director over and over. “He must have taken the underground. I told
him a hundred times not to do that. A thousand times.”

At two his assistant said that she’d have a
look in the hospital.

An hour later she was back. Teddy was
working in
Crossroads
as
usual.

Impossible, the director objected. How could
he cosmetize without the equipment? When she replied that Teddy had
the ladder and the knapsack, he looked in the boy’s locker.
Theodore’s knapsack and ladder were gone.

“He must have taken them back to the
hospital last evening when he disappeared,” she said.

The evening before she’d called Lorz into
the storeroom because the new electric kettle was producing sparks.
It had become a pleasant ritual that when the boy returned to the
office in the evening, the three of them had coffee and biscuits
together at her desk. When the director stepped back in the office
Teddy had gone. They hadn’t noticed that the ladder and knapsack
were gone too.

“I gave him a good scolding when I found
him,” she said. “I told him over and over to come here first. I
hope he understood. When he’s working on the posters he hardly
knows you exist.”

When she brought him back to the
Ideal
office that evening he refused
to give back his ladder and knapsack. He tried to get at the paints
and chemicals. Dorothea stood in front of the two big
lockers.

“No, Teddy. Tomorrow at 12:30.”

He stood there for a long moment looking
past her at the lockers.

“No,” she said.

He finally left for the hospital. He took
the ladder and the knapsack with him. It didn’t really matter. He
was sure to return for the paints and chemicals the next day. He
had none left.

It was ironic. Now that Theodore was working
almost full-time for him Lorz saw less of the boy than when he’d
been a jealously guarded patient in the hospital. A few minutes at
noon. A few minutes in the evening. And despite what the
sharp-nosed young doctor had said, there was still no possibility
of seeing him in the hospital over the weekend. Not for the first
time, the director wondered about the “treatment” that took him out
of circulation for two whole days.

The director worried endlessly about
Theodore down there in his station. Hadn’t he exposed him to
terrible dangers by listening, in a moment of weakness, to his
assistant? He found his gaze dwelling on Theo’s favorite chair, now
empty, in front of the underground map. The boy had been
transformed from flesh and blood presence into a numbered pin
(seven) stuck into the great red dot of
Crossroads
. The new brightness of the walls and ceiling were
the only reminders of his brief presence in the
Ideal
office. The so-called obstruction, the adventure
with the washing and painting, took on legendary stature in
retrospect. Lorz saw him again towering above them both like a nude
god in his single-minded battle against filth, disregarding
secondary considerations, heroically proof against the fumes to
which the lesser mortals below succumbed. Instead of reward it
seemed like senseless punishment to send him to that underworld of
unconquerable dirt and disorder.

For the director soon discovered
that
Crossroads
, the
imagined haven secured by blue-clad guardians of the law, was no
different from the other stations. It turned out that their
presence was no deterrent. There were the same gangs of teenagers
with their boisterous potential for violence. As in the other
stations, broken syringes glittered like diamonds on the
toilet-floors. Twice he saw great-eyed tiny-breasted Subcontinental
children, surely no more than eleven, soliciting in the corridors,
once before the indifferent eyes of a pair of joking policemen.
Another time the director saw two drunks battering each other
bloody, filling the passageway with their bellows. A passing
policeman didn’t even break his stride.