The Seventh Candidate (36 page)

“You shouldn’t be so brutal with him,” Lorz
said in a low voice.

She reached up for Theo’s shoulder and on
tiptoe kissed his cheek. “I’m not always brutal, he knows that,”
she said. The boy averted his face. She pushed him out, saying that
she had a letter to type. She said something else to him in the
hallway. Lorz couldn’t make it out.

She closed the door and went over to her
desk. Her typewriter began chattering, her bracelets clinking. At
such a time. She stopped and frowned at the sheet. She reached for
the ink-corrector. She rarely made typing errors.

“What are you doing?” the director asked,
taking advantage of the pause.

“
Typing the
New Dawn
invoice,” she said absently, applying the white
fluid.

“Can’t it wait?”

“For what?” She blew on the corrected
spot.

“Teddy’s posters, of course. They can’t
remain in that state.”

“
The night-shift’ll take care of it in two
hours. You can detail a couple of the operators to
Crossroads
.” She
went back typing, like machinegun fire.

“That’s not soon enough,” said the director,
forced to raise his voice. “They don’t know how to do surgicals
anyhow. I wonder if you could stop typing. Just for a few
seconds.”

“Damn, another mistake.” She yanked the
sheet out of the roller, crumpled it and shot it into the
wastepaper basket.

“You’ll have to tell me which of the posters
he censored and roughly how many,” said the director. “Our posters,
naturally. The others can wait. I have to know which ones to take
with me.”

“You’re going to do the job yourself?”

“Who else knows how to handle surgical jobs
except me?” He added pointedly: “Outside of you, that is.”

It was strange that she hadn’t instantly
volunteered, strange that in this supreme emergency she was
abandoning him. She took a new sheet of paper. He thought she was
going to insert it in the roller of her typewriter and go back to
the letter. Instead she took a pen and at intervals jotted things
down. She did it in silence. Finally she placed the sheet on the
corner of her desk. She took another sheet of paper and fed it into
the roller. “I think I have all of the posters. The ones I saw. I
didn’t see them all. He works fast.”

Lorz took the paper. He studied the list and
then went over to the stacks of posters that lined the walls. The
typewriter started chattering again, the bracelets clinking. He
hiked up his trousers, squatted and pulled out sheaves of posters.
The chattering stopped.

“How long is it going to take you?” she
asked, getting up. She brought the letter over to his desk for him
to sign.

“With one operator perhaps four hours. With
two, half as long.”

“I have things to do this evening. There’s
nothing in my contract that says I have to do overtime.”

He didn’t answer. There was nothing to
answer. She went into the storeroom and returned a few minutes
later, her mask heavily rejuvenated. She said good night curtly. He
said good night curtly too and added that she should try to be less
brutal with Theo. It wasn’t a wise way to behave with him.

He returned to the stacks and pulled out
more of the posters she’d listed. He hadn’t done a surgical in over
ten years. A total replacement over the censored posters would have
been technically easier but much longer than a surgical repair job:
wasn’t that the very selling point of
Ideal
? He chose the instruments and chemicals with great care:
pots of paste, cutters with sets of spares, numerous scissors of
different shapes and sizes, the instrument they called the
“scalpel” for the initial incision, liter bottles of water,
sponges. There wasn’t room for all that in a single
knapsack.

On his way to
Central Station
he glimpsed his own image in a full length
cinema-mirror. Under the weight of the rolls of posters and the two
bulging knapsacks plus the ladder he was nearly bent a twisted
double. He resembled an expressionistic picture of a saint or
criminal, ingeniously tortured. He was exhausted even before he set
to work in
Crossroads
.
Didn’t she realize how sick a man he was? What “things to do” could
be more important than relieving him of part of the
burden?

Thank God Theo hadn’t caught them all. There,
for instance: the Happy Felix cat food poster with the fluffy black
Persian in the low cut girl’s lap and the smirking man with the
legend, that legend. The verbal obscenities had escaped Theo. But
nothing that was visually offensive had got past him,
unfortunately.

Lorz started in on panels 54-101 covered by
the Airstream Bra ad. The woman now sported great white squares in
the place of the original naked breasts. She was reaching for a bra
presented by a kneeling angel with golden wings. “For when he’s not
around,” the legend ran. Somewhat blurred in the background a
bare-chested young man was contemplating dreamy-faced his cupped
hands. Grimly the director snipped and pasted and restored her to
nudity over and over again. Then he rolled on to the others and
others beyond those others. He penetrated deeper into the tiled
maze. Onlookers gathered behind him.

The chore turned out to be one of the
supreme humiliations in a life abundant in these. Lips compressed
to the thinnest of lines at the imposed role of obsessive saboteur
of decency, the director of
Ideal Poster
snipped out a thousand times the lustful faces, breasts, as
well as the parts judged by the censor as insufficiently shadowed.
A thousand times he applied the whitish fluid paste to their
neutral side, adjusting them over the white squares and rectangles
with the greatest of care to totally nullify the nullifications,
trimming, readjusting, restoring the objects.

In the past, of course, surgery had been the
other way round: the covering of obscenities by the original
decency. Particularly terrible now were the gutted posters after
his scissors had got to them: great holes in the place of breasts
and parts, even more obscene than the originals. He hastily stuffed
them into the trash-bins like a maniac getting rid of mutilated
victims.

The director tried to concentrate on the job
and exclude from his consciousness the comments and sounds of
derision behind his back. An old toothless derelict followed him
about for half an hour, driveling: “titsies, titsies, wooo, woooo”
and making coital sounds and meows. Lorz longed for some magic
fluid that would obliterate them all as easily as Theo had
obliterated what he, Lorz, was resurrecting.

He went on and on. The stream of
passengers began thinning out in the corridors. There were fewer
and fewer of the snickering onlookers. By eleven-thirty the
director found himself alone in the
East Gate
corridor.

His relief lasted no more than a minute. He
heard a faint echoing slap of leather soles. Two policemen were
marching down the corridor, tiny blue at the convergence of the
twin lines of Pilsober’s censored lovers that the director was
restoring to indecency. He mastered the blind urge to flee and
grimly busied himself with his task. The official sole slapping
stopped behind him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a club
poking about in the knapsack, uncovering the pre-cut breasts and
shadowed parts. He heard them muttering. He resisted the temptation
to volunteer information. When addressing what he tried earnestly
not to mentally formulate as his social inferiors he tended, he
knew, to careful even precious language, badly received. He limited
himself to: “Good evening, officers.” That archaic monarchical
title, “officer” was perhaps a mistake. He got no reply. The club
went on poking about in the knapsack.

In the old days as an active operator he’d
often had to cope with suspicious policemen. But explanations had
been easy then. They could see the obscenities he was obliterating.
Not, as now, imposing. His trembling hands botched the job. He had
to fish out another pair of breasts. His hand entered into
competition with the club. He muttered an apology. He feared
arrest. Fortunately the radio at the belt of one of the policemen
broke into unintelligible crackles. He growled into the apparatus.
The club stopped poking. They left. He went on.

It was already midnight when the director
gathered up his tools and chemicals and took the E Express
for
Central
Station
and
Ideal
. Had he
ever been as tired in his life? But at the same time he experienced
a rare satisfaction at having undone Theo’s suicidal corrections.
He felt that his message to the boy had got through, that analysis
had proved superior to brutal threats.

Shooting past the local station
May 23
he caught a glimpse of Theodore
on his ladder scratching away at another Pilsober poster, the left
breast. He had a knife now. He was whisked away and the train
window framed the gloom of the tunnel with red and green lamps
hurtling by.

The director stared at his watch. By the
time he reached the express stop and finally caught a local back
to
May
23
the boy might be
gone. In any case it would be very near to closing time. The
Underground Police would be clearing the stations of all the
passengers. Necessarily, the boy would return to his flat. Lorz had
to head him off, get there before him. He would have it out with
him, make real threats as his assistant hadn’t dared to do, threats
to inform the Commission of the true situation with
Ideal
if he didn’t stop.

Lorz arrived at Theo’s street at 1:10am and
posted himself at the corner opposite the building with its dark
windows. A broken reddish moon stood high above it.

It gradually sank behind the building.

By 3:00am he realized that Theo wouldn’t
be returning that night. Where could he be? The director had a
sudden vision of him still in the underground, now empty and
silent, scratching away, perhaps back in
Crossroads
, undoing the director’s work that had undone his
own earlier work. Lorz saw Theo going on endlessly from station to
station day and night, neither sleeping nor eating, like an
automate, correcting and undoing the corrections of
corrections.

Impossible. At 1:30am. synchronized
loudspeakers in all sixty-three of the capital’s underground
stations blared the message of eviction and the Underground Police
investigated the toilets (the moment most of the overdose victims
were discovered) and banged their clubs on the tiles over the heads
of the derelicts snoring on the benches and hustled them out and
sixty-three brass gates clashed shut barring the station entrances.
It hadn’t been that way at the beginning of his (Lorz’s) avocation
as poster-rectifier before the meeting with the fat executive with
the pigskin briefcase turned it into sensible vocation. Lorz (not
yet Director) recalled certain days when the prospect of return to
the empty flat had caused him to hide in the toilets and then work
a while longer in the blessed emptiness of the underground
corridors and sleep in the toilets. That was before drugs. Who
bothered searching the toilets then?

Anyhow Theo couldn’t keep it up endlessly.
He had to be sleeping at this time of night. But if not in the
underground and not in his flat, sleeping where? The obvious answer
finally came to Lorz.

He unlocked and pushed the door open very
slowly. The only sound in the office was the ventilator, whirring
tirelessly day and night. He didn’t turn on the ceiling mercury
lamps. He mustn’t be awakened brutally. So in the dark Lorz guided
himself along the wall until he reached the storeroom doorway. In
the absolute darkness (but the director knew the layout of his
office better than his own face) he tiptoed into the cubicle where
the cot was.

He thought he could hear breathing.
“Theodore?” he whispered. He got no reply. He ventured away from
the wall and approached the spot.

“Theo,” he whispered again. He stretched out
his hands over the cot and gradually lowered them. They encountered
cold sheets.

He felt his way out of the storeroom and
groped toward the wall opposite and the light switch. He tripped
over something heavy and metallic that had no business there and
pitched forward into more strangeness: fragments of musty-smelling
wood. His knee hurt. He slowly hobbled at a new angle toward the
wall. His feet encountered more wooden fragments. When he turned on
the overhead mercury lamps the light blinded him worse than the
darkness. He started weeping so hard that his lenses were streaming
wet.

When his eyes could finally focus he thought
at first that those wet lenses had created an optical illusion of
chaos. But the objects stayed there even after he’d wiped his
glasses dry: the deformed typewriter he’d stumbled over and his
assistant’s desk reduced to shambles as though someone had bashed
it with a sledge-hammer. Theo had been in the office, after all,
but not to sleep.

The director went back into the storeroom
and turned the lights on there too. Theo had worked over the big
locker too but not senselessly for the sake of destruction. The
stout brass padlock had resisted but had been bypassed. The heavy
sheet metal of the doors had been forced at the bottom and wrenched
up and back to gain access to the contents. It looked as though
explosives had gone off inside. The locker was empty.

How could he have taken all those drums?
Where did he stock them? How could he have had the strength with
his bare hands (Lorz guessed) to do what he’d done to the desk and
the locker?