The Seventh Candidate (41 page)

The pain woke him up. It was 2:46. A train
roared by, situating the hour in the afternoon. He wasn’t sure of
the day. He looked at the pallet with no more than the imprint of a
body. He held his abdomen tightly. Finally he got up. He didn’t
bother with his knapsack and ladder. He switched off the light and
pushed open the door on the tracks.

He walked between the rails, back turned to
the station with the white squares, the last ones lopsided. He had
to flatten himself four times in niches before he emerged from the
tunnel. Someone was shouting in the station.

He levered himself up onto the platform,
went past a telephone booth with smashed glass and graffiti
inside.

The opposite platform stretched out like an
immensely elongated stage. At his end two young teenagers were
shouting. They pushed each other, then started shaking vending
machines for coins.

At the further end Theo was on his ladder
censoring a poster. It bore no resemblance to a square now. It was
a dripping blotch. He got down slowly and advanced the ladder to
the next poster. His body seemed wasted, his face skull-like and
white as the paint. Now he was doing a correction job on graffiti.
It was the wrong shade of green. Part of the graffiti was still
visible.

The director moved to the telephone booth as
fast as the pain allowed him to.

When she heard him say her name she started
making a great fuss, possibly crying even, and he had to answer her
question and say that yes, he was all right, but then he couldn’t
place another word. It was like a burst dam. She’d thought he was
dead, gone a whole week without a word or a simple phone call, had
thought he’d been killed in the underground, had phoned his flat a
hundred times, even gone there, had thought he was sick inside and
had almost gone to the police to ask them to force the door, the
business was going to pieces, their best client gone, she’d moved
into the office, slept there, ate there, he had no right to do that
to her.

When she stopped for breath a second, a
harsh intake of air, he told her he’d found Theo in the
underground, she should come quickly to … He looked through the
smashed glass of the booth at the blue-and-white station plaque.
She should come to
Trinity
station,
he said.

***

12

She ran out onto the platform but didn’t look
where he was pointing across the rails. She didn’t look at Theo. He
realized what he must look like from the expression on her face and
became aware of his torn and dirtied suit, the scuffed black shoes
gray with dust, the filth and blood on his hands from crawling in
the tunnel that led to the padlocked iron door. “What happened to
you?” her lips questioned without sound. “I’ve found him,” he said,
still pointing. Theo hadn’t left the platform. He hadn’t come close
to finishing the posters there. Since the phone call, twenty
minutes ago, he’d done no more than five of them. Each one had
taken longer to do. His performance had steadily worsened. His last
corrections now looked like clumsy graffiti themselves.

The two young adolescents, maybe thirteen
and clearly SubCons or Berbs, had noticed Theo and had strolled
over to examine his corrections. They laughed. The smaller and
darker of the two had very white even teeth. They imitated the
languorous postures of the models. They laughed. Then they made
squalling sounds before the baby and the diapers. They laughed
harder. The alarming blotches meant to be squares or rectangles
offered them a surface. They took out felt-pens and started
scrawling on them, purple and black, probably restoring in
aggravated form what was below the Basic White. The posters were
too far off to tell. They did poster after poster, drawing closer
to Theo. He had stopped trying to efface the graffiti on Helena’s
dress and was staring at them and at what they’d done to his
posters. Gobs of white from the number three brush fell on his
sweatshirt and bare forearms. He climbed down the ladder
stiffly.

“Go away!” she cried to them. “Keep away
from him!” Her voice was covered by a train pulling in at the other
platform. It masked what was going on. When it pulled out the
adolescents were much closer to Theo. He was moving toward them.
“Go away!” she cried again and once again a train came, this time
on their side, another express slowing down because of the curve.
They heard nothing but the roar of the train going by for a few
seconds, then long screams and then the train was gone. It was like
a horizontal curtain being pulled back.

One of the children was sprawled on the
ground. His head was at an impossible angle. Theo had the other
child by the neck and was banging his head against the tiled wall
at the foot of the poster. The methodical impact wasn’t covered by
his assistant’s screams. There was blood on the tiles and,
astonishingly high, on the posters.

Unable to bring it out in words or to act
(the skull on the sign spoke of imprisonment and fine and of 5,000
volts) Edmond Lorz stood stock still. He tried to summon up words
to communicate across the third rails again, as his assistant let
herself down onto the ballast and started across. What he wanted to
say was that it was all colored dots, no more than that. He tried
to utter the command to stop the logical consequence of that error,
what he was doing to the boy’s head against the tiles below the
poster where, maculated by his blood, she sat high in the swing
smiling up at the blue sky, but the impacts went on. They went on
and on and the words couldn’t come. He raced for the stairs.

His assistant leaped over the first third
rail. A train roared out of that other tunnel. The boy’s head was
being worked methodically. The blood on the tiles had dripped onto
the ground. She crossed the second third rail as the train started
braking and emitted a warning blare. She lifted herself up to the
platform just in time as the second express powered past, slowing
down in a squealing of brakes and furious showers of sparks.

The director stumbled up the flight of
stairs and suddenly recalled that for days now he’d been
frequenting the third rail and could have crossed over as she had
done. He ran on and then down the stairs to the other platform.

His assistant was behind Theo, her arms about
his neck, as in a kind of embrace, her hair wild, trying to pry him
away from the boy’s throat. She was biting his shoulder. The
director saw Theo release the boy who slumped to the ground. Theo
turned round and grabbed her by the throat with one hand. His fist
smashed her face. He lifted her up by the waist and hurled her
against the wall. She slumped to the ground her mouth and one eye
open. He returned to the boy, clearly dead, replaced his hands
about his throat, lifted him to operating posture and went on with
the methodical impacts.

The express train had finished braking. Half
of the carriages were in the tunnel. It started backing up. The
doors would open any second.

“Theo!” he cried. “Theo!”

On her back, paralyzed with pain, she could
see as in a mist the train doors opening, people emerging at the
far end of the platform, running toward them. There were cries. She
could see in a thickening mist how Teddy stopped suddenly. Still
holding the child by the throat he moved toward the director, the
boy’s sneakered heels dragging in the puddles of blood. It was like
an offering. “No,” said the director and shrank back. Released, the
boy pitched forward and sprawled on the pavement.

Something was broken inside. She choked on
blood that came up from deep within. Teddy was approaching her. His
forearms and hands were patterned with red and white.

“Edmond, help me. Help me, Edmond,” she
tried to cry.

Teddy broke into a trot. He loped past her
and reached the mouth of the tunnel. He leaped down onto the
tracks. She saw the director like a sleepwalker going past her,
past the corrected posters with the dead children’s graffiti of
lollipop trees, stick-men, suns. Now he broke into a run. He was
waving something.

“Theo, your pills, your pills!” she heard
him crying and saw him clumsily letting himself down on the tracks
and running toward the mouth of the tunnel where the other had gone
into the darkness. He vanished in turn there.

More blood came up. She too went into
darkness.

***

Part Four

1

The fourth day the inspector was allowed to
see her. He was a quiet gray man. He wanted her to tell the story
from the beginning. She shook her head as best she could. He wanted
at least certain information about her employer and the individual
called Teddy. Neither of them had been found yet, he said. She
didn’t react. Looking down at her he judged it was all the drugs
she’d been given because of the pain and the shock. He tried again.
He promised just a few questions and then he would go.

Why had her employer followed the individual
known as Teddy?

Didn’t know.

Hadn’t he tried to defend her?

No.

Or at least see if she was badly injured?
Try to get help?

No.

What did he do?

Went into the tunnel.

Why did he do that?

Didn’t know.

The inspector wished her a speedy recovery.
As soon as they located her employer of course they would inform
her.

Shouldn’t bother.

Dr Silberman came to see her every few days.
The first time he brought flowers and sweets. She said with
difficulty that he should eat the sweets himself. Each time there
was silence or a question she didn’t want to answer she told him to
take another sweet. Dr Silberman told her that no one knew where he
was. The police had gone to his flat five or six times to question
him about Teddy and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t at the office
either. Her employer hadn’t been a stable individual even before
the accident. It must have been a terrible shock for him. A
terrible shock for everyone naturally.

She wasn’t listening. She wanted the names
of the children’s parents. She wanted to send them money, write to
them when she’d be able to, tell them how it was her fault, her
idea, to hire him, something else was her fault and her fault also
what had happened long ago to her father.

Help me.

He answered that of course she would get
help. He, Silberman, would continue to visit her but for real help
she needed a specialist. Wasn’t he a specialist? Of course, but a
different specialty. He could recommend the sort of specialist she
needed.

The broken bone healed. The ugly bruises on
her wrist, thigh and neck yellowed and faded. Her eyes were still
badly discolored and the nurse suggested wearing dark glasses for
the first week or so outside. She replied that she’d prefer showing
her eyes, no matter what they looked like, to hiding them. She
stopped dying her hair. It was coming up real at the roots but it
wasn’t the old real brown, it was grayish-brown but maybe that was
the real color now. For a long time it looked strange, part
grayish-brown, part blonde. She had her hair cut short. Finally it
was all the old-new color. She stopped making up, using perfume. It
was too much work for nothing. She stopped wearing the costume
jewelry and the bracelets because of the effort and the jingling.
She didn’t wear the dresses that showed the discoloration of her
neck. Anyhow they didn’t go well with the growing gray of her hair
and the thinness of her neck and chest. She watched her words, said
what was necessary for the given situation and no more.

Dust grew deeper in the director’s
apartment. The bulb in the swivel lamp on the desk burned out. The
cacti stood in darkness and finally died.
Ideal Poster
ceased its obsessive activity. There was
no notable increase in the underground graffiti. The great
subterranean office was taken over by an electronics concern and
used as a storage-room while waiting for the building to be
razed.

She found a job as a secretary. It lasted two
months. She thought the specialist she saw once a week was
disappointed when she told him it hadn’t worked out, even though he
hid his feelings as usual. Then she found another job. The
specialist was pleased, but carefully. Also carefully pleased when
she told him she was taking driving lessons. She’d told him it had
always been one of her ambitions, she didn’t know why. “What for?”
she sometimes asked him. He preferred her to find the answer to
that question herself. Sometimes she thought of driving out to the
Central Mountains. She spoke to him about it. She’d already spoken
about the farm to him. The doctor asked her (he never told her
anything) if she thought it was wise to think about that.

To celebrate her driving license, which she
said she owed to him, she bought him a book of poetry. She
mentioned in passing that next week was her birthday, not saying
how old, and told herself she wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t
give her anything. Then she came across the business of “transfer”
(it sounded like the underground) in a book on popularized
psychiatry she took out of the library and learned that it was a
normal reaction.

She discussed makes of cars with him although
it was expensive to talk about cars with him, even for five
minutes. He gave a balanced judgment on the makes and later on she
couldn’t remember which make he’d inclined to. She bought a small
second hand car with too much mileage on it.

Sometimes on Sundays she drove with
concentration along the west motorway on the slow lane. The slowest
trucks passed her. She would go on till what she saw on either side
of the motorway railings was reasonably green and wooded. Then,
without leaving the motorway, she would turn into a rest area. If
the weather was acceptable she ate her sandwiches at one of the
green-painted concrete tables. If it was raining or too cold she
would eat in the car. After, she would stroll about the rest area,
looking at the trees and fields through the high wire fence. Then
she would drive back.