The Seventh Candidate (33 page)

“I couldn’t settle for less. I’m not in the
charity business after all.”

He gave proof of more hardheadedness. The
lease would have to be a short one. He didn’t want to be saddled
with Teddy if he proved unsatisfactory as a tenant. This was
unlikely, he added, given the boy’s success on the job, the reason
for the raise. But he couldn’t afford to take chances.

The longest of silences followed, so long
that the director broke it by saying that of course if the
Commission wasn’t interested it was no problem. He was trying to be
helpful. And also, frankly, to economize on a classified ad and
avoid the bother of all those visits. He was willing to wait a
while but sooner or later that room, which he’d had painted a week
ago at considerable expense, would have to be rented, if not to
Teddy then to somebody else.

Mysels finally replied that the colleague
responsible for outpatient lodgings would be informed of Lorz’s
proposition but that of course the room would have to be
inspected.

“Whatever flat you choose for him it’s
certain to be an improvement over where he is now,” said Lorz. “I
was surprised to learn that Teddy’s room is located in Old
Hospital.”

“Who told you that?”

“I can’t recall. I just remember my surprise
on hearing it. I thought Old Hospital was for the mad.”

“For the mentally ill? Not exclusively. Far
from it. In any case you’re mistaken. I wonder who told you that?
Teddy doesn’t sleep in Old Hospital. He receives treatment there
during the weekend. More exactly, he received treatment there. I
understand it’s over now.”

It was Lorz’s turn to retreat into silence.
Finally he said: “You mean he can be visited on Saturdays and
Sundays? This coming weekend, for example?”

More silence. Then inquisitorial: “Don’t you
see enough of him as it is?”

“Oh, quite enough! Quite enough!” Lorz
replied quickly. “I wasn’t talking about myself. I was thinking of
my assistant. She hardly sees him at all during the weekdays …”

“You said ‘quite enough’ twice, in a certain
tone,” Mysels interrupted. “Something has gone wrong with Teddy’s
work.”

“Absolutely nothing has gone wrong with
Teddy’s work. Teddy’s work is perfectly satisfactory, as I believe
I already informed you orally and in writing.”

“Then I don’t understand your comment. I
asked you, ‘Don’t you see enough of him as it is?’ and you
answered, ‘Quite enough.’ Twice. And yet you are anxious to rent a
room to him in your flat where necessarily you would see even more
of him.”

“Excuse me,” Lorz stammered with contained
rage. “Not ‘anxious’ at all, not one bit ‘anxious’. I don’t
understand where this conversation is going. I rang up in all
innocence about the salary raise which, I should think, is clear
evidence that my employee’s work is satisfactory. As for the room I
proposed …”

“What color did you have the room
painted?”

The question took Lorz by surprise. He
hadn’t seen the inside of the room for thirty years. He answered:
“White.”

“Brilliant white, of course.”

“No. Dull ivory.”

“
Ahh …” Mysels breathed. It was a sound of
deep relief. Then briskly: “We’ll see about your offer. The room
will have to be inspected of course. But the color and the rent
sound good. Excellent, even. Naturally Teddy can be visited over
the weekend. But why should your assistant visit him? He can go
out. He can go to the cinema, to a restaurant, wherever she
wants.
Wherever,
I
said. He’s perfectly free. But how old is she?”

Lorz said he wasn’t sure. He thanked Mysels
and hung up.

That was how the director learned that Theo
would be free the following weekend and that the room might be
visited any day now. After Mysels’ practical green light it was the
only thing that could conceivably prevent Theo from occupying it.
It was already Monday. He had to act very fast.

On Tuesday loud, burly men came. By evening
the room was empty. It hadn’t been cheap. The three painters he
consulted demanded a fortune to do the job that week. He was
briefly tempted by the idea of having Theo himself paint the room
he’d soon be living in. It would combine economy for himself,
guaranteed satisfaction for Theo plus the mutually beneficial
effect of the boy’s company that very first free weekend. But the
weekend was three days away and the inspector could come any
minute.

So reluctantly and at outrageous expense
Lorz had the room painted by a professional.

The ink was hardly dry on the check and the
furniture already ordered when the director learned from his
assistant that the Commission had found a flat for Teddy in the
Fourth District within walking distance of the hospital.

***

8

It was in early August, at about the time
law and order in the underground completely broke down and the
first overtly pornographic posters appeared, that Theo started
showing deceptive symptoms of improvement. He’d been installed in
his new flat for a little over a month. There was a gnawing mystery
surrounding that flat, but to all appearances the boy coped with
independence satisfactorily. He seldom collapsed inwardly when he
ran out of Basic White now. They’d find him easily enough in the
corridors of
National Library
(it was a small station) waiting for one of them to pick
him up and take him back to the
Ideal
office, the way it used to be. The first time it happened
his assistant bought a cake and a half-bottle of sweet white wine
to celebrate his return. She hadn’t realized that neither Teddy nor
her employer could touch alcohol. She drank the wine all by herself
with guilty pleasure.

Another victory: they finally convinced
the boy to return to the (very relative) safety of
Crossroads
. All
pretence of law enforcement had collapsed in the small stations
like
National
Library
. Muggings were
round the clock. Old ladies had been knifed for foolishly defending
their purses. Rape was committed, incredibly, at high noon. In the
same week (out of bored sadism, one surmised) two beggars sleeping
on benches were burned alive with petrol in the early morning
hours. Pitched battles took place between teenage gangs, not just
with the usual crowbars but with firearms. In one week there had
been four deaths, one of them an uninvolved passenger. The police
had abandoned the field, had retreated to the hub stations,
beleaguered fortresses.

The director’s first reaction of morose
satisfaction (the bloody harvest of what had been sown thirty years
before) was followed by a return of his earlier fears for Theo. He
became conscious again of his father’s ceremonial dagger in the
depths of his briefcase. He had less confidence in its protective
aura the morning he saw the headlines about the first of the
charred beggars in
Rose Garden
. It
was a small station too.

So he was vastly relieved when Theo
started operating in
Crossroads
once
again. Still, as he well knew, violence could explode there too
when least expected. The director began progressively lengthening
his protective lunch-hour visits (within more reasonable limits
than before, though). Close to the ladder he scrutinized all the
passersby. He held the briefcase tightly, at the ready.

By a significant concordance it was in the
same month, August, that the posters started their descent into
outright pornography. Symmetrical disorder above and below. With
this difference: the law combated one sort of disorder
(inefficiently), the other it protected. Let a scandalized
passenger lacerate one of the pornographic posters (as many, not
just the director, must have felt the urge to do) and the law,
powerless against the laceraters of old ladies, would react
instantly with fines and imprisonment.

Undisguised pornography could be dated
quite precisely with the famous (infamous) Pilsober poster. Even
his assistant noticed that one. She said, inadequately: “What will
they think up next?” She’d been less observant with the
Gulliver’s
Travels
poster a month
before. There, incitement to the unnamable was insinuated rather
than blatant as with Pilsober.

Still, it took a solid lack of discernment
not to understand the implicit message. “They’re Waiting for You”
was the title of that poster, one of sixteen his assistant had
brought back from a client for previewing. In a week it was all
over the underground. There was the cultural excuse of golden-domed
temples among palms in the background. In the foreground, the real
business was going on. Smiling children with black almond eyes not
over ten years old surrounded a middle-aged tourist. Some had their
arms about his neck, their cheeks against his. Their golden bodies
were practically nude. One was actually feeding the tourist. His
mouth, half-open, awaited the fruit. “They’re Waiting for You.”
Forced to wait for you. A ring had just been broken up. The
videocassettes. By charterfuls they came. There was no greater
crime.

Sharing indignation helped. He’d said to
his assistant as she was unrolling the other posters: “Did you see
the
Gulliver
poster
with the tourist and the children?”

“Yes, I did. Nice.”

“Nice. You found the poster nice.”

His tone made her suspect something shocking
she hadn’t noticed. She smoothed the poster out again. He observed
with displeasure the eager way she approached her face to it and
scrutinized the background with parted lips as though seeking tiny
copulations at the base of the temples. She’s changed, within as
without, he thought, remembering her former innocence. “Miss Ruda”
and her braided pigtails were like a faded sepia daguerreotype.

“I don’t see anything,” she said in a tone
which he took for disappointment. The connection with her former
self was totally severed.

“The foreground subject, perhaps?” he
said.

She pulled her head back and stared at the
whole poster. “Is something the matter with it? The children are
beautiful.”

“The tourist seems to appreciate their
beauty.”

“Well, why not? Don’t you?”

She didn’t understand. He dropped the
subject. He wasn’t really annoyed. He was almost touched. Despite
everything – neckline, cigarettes, perfume and forwardness – she’d
preserved a sizable part of her basic innocence after all.

The epoch-marking Pilsober poster even
attracted brief knots of passengers in the corridors that morning.
How could one help not seeing the couple? Whole stretches of
corridors displayed them in repetition. It was like those bordello
mirrors and their multiple reflections that one had – purely
accidentally – read about. Again and again one saw the
couple
, the
lovers (lovers, one guessed, for such excesses seemed incompatible
with legal union), naked on a rumpled bed. The man was on his back,
eyes shut in abandon. His body was cut short well below the navel,
at the extreme last moment, by the left-hand margin. She, propped
up on an elbow, gleaming lips parted, was reaching for that margin.
The legend was huge and red. “She
must
have it!! Next week she
will
have it!!” That was all. Nothing announced the product
advertised.

One saw it constantly. And one thought of
it.

One tried not to. But how couldn’t one?
Think of it.

All of the underground passengers must have
thought of it.

And then the following week there they were
again, in the follow-up poster, indefatigable on their rumpled bed.
As implicitly promised, the rest of the naked lover was totally
revealed, from another angle. The strategically placed shadow,
barely adequate, teased the gaze. The woman was still propped up on
an elbow, now presenting her naked breasts to millions of
onlookers. Her hand was reaching over and beyond her naked lover
toward a foaming bottle of beer on the side-table. “Better than
anything else: Pilsober!!” said the slogan.

That was the first one. The next were worse.
More and more agencies were following suit. Everything was being
sexualized, even cat-food. And the very slight distance between the
director and these new scandalous posters vanished altogether when
his assistant brought back the next batch of previews a few weeks
later. Two more clients had gone over to the new trend.

The vandals practically ignored these
new-style posters. If the trend toward indecency continued,
Ideal Poster
would soon be out of business.
It confirmed the director’s solitary analysis a year before of the
advertising industry’s takeover of (carefully defused) radical
slogans and postures. Vandalism preyed on the ideal of course, he
tried to explain to his assistant, and there was nothing, God knew,
ideal about these. The obscenity was inscribed in the poster
itself. Graffitied addition would have been absurdly pleonastic he
said. He was certain she would ask for the definition of
“pleonastic.” Instead, she wagged the foot of her crossed left leg.
She hadn’t even taken out her agenda-book to note the word. She
stifled a yawn and called attention to it by making exaggerated
amends, saying, “excuse me,” leaning forward and blinking
conscientiously, miming interest.

He didn’t continue. She’d changed after
all.

Outdone by the new posters, the vandals
concentrated on Helena. By the operation of some strange duality it
was her summer as well as Pilsober’s. She posed everywhere else on
the walls in elegiac icons of a world of beauty and decency. She
was uncontaminated by the proximity of the new-style posters. She
ran before poppied wheat fields, hair streaming out behind her. She
was softly mirrored on shining sands not body-to-body but
hand-in-hand. One heartbreakingly lovely scene lighted up the tiled
tunnels for months. Wearing a high-buttoned tulle dress and a broad
brimmed ribboned straw hat she throned high on a swing, suspended
week after week at blue apogee. Head thrown back, she smiled up at
the sky.