The Seventh Candidate

Part Three

  1

  Edmond Lorz edged with difficulty into his study. His overcoat was powdered with the first heavy snow of the new year. It was January 29, a Sunday evening, fourteen hours and eleven minutes removed from tomorrow’s decisive meeting with Dr Silberman.

  He squeezed past the low tables cluttered with the jigsaw puzzles and other trophies of his victory almost three months before, struggled out of his overcoat and sat down at the desk. He opened the top drawer and removed the two notebooks and a bottle shaped like a peasant-lass. Unscrewing her vapid head, he granted himself, exceptionally, a small glass of plum-alcohol.

  Sipping, he gazed at the pastoral jigsaw puzzle hanging on the wall. The golden landscape deserved more expert framing. But his candidate had given up that activity. Lorz himself had glued the puzzle to a rectangle of cardboard and mounted it under glass with clips. The job had taken him the better part of a day.

  He set the alarm clock to ring at nine for dinner. It had already happened that he’d gone past midnight without eating, his mind totally monopolized by the two notebooks devoted to the astonishing progress of his candidate. For the next two hours he’d pore over the pages, intervening with black, blue or red ink. Then, after the brief concession to dinner, he’d return to them till bedtime.

  The notebooks had replaced the encyclopedia. Each reading revealed subtle connections between apparently unrelated incidents and yielded new hypotheses. It was exciting, almost creative, fitting things together, shaping order and meaning out of the welter of chronologically noted happenings.

  The first of those notebooks had soon proved insufficient for all the things he’d had to record since the cascade of gifts on October 25. Before that date, as he could see, his impoverished notes huddled in the center of the pages, surrounded by white void like the arctic terra incognita of old globes. What had there been to record outside of the chess moves, the terse indication of new obsession, refused gifts or, for want of anything more significant, the boy’s clothing?

  Then with the memorable breakthrough – what Lorz thought of as the Day of Giving – the white wastes ended. The pages were now crowded with notes and illustrations of his candidate’s progress.

  If giving was the start of it all, logically he should have devoted pages of analysis to the twelve gift-wrapped packages weeks before instead of the pitiful complaint about the watches he would supposedly have to pay for. The true significance of the boy’s gesture had been obscured by his stupid reaction of outrage and apprehension. He recalled his initial perception of the twelve boxes as aftermath to massacre. That day was like a fine poster hopelessly overridden with indelible graffiti, beyond repair.

  The director flipped forward to November 11.

  Those eleven pages, which he started rereading for maybe the hundredth time, recounted total triumph. He’d omitted certain inappropriate reactions like imagining laughter behind his back as the ceaseless gifts spilled over his arms to the floor, his absurd concern with the technicalities of disposing of the gifts, the even more absurd fear that his candidate might have added the great table to the pile of gifts in his embrace, crushing every bone in his body.

  Also unrecorded were the rival claims. He couldn’t even recall the name of their drug, could only come up with an association with a female dog and so referred to it in his mind as “Bitchine.” He had no more than a faint memory of the feeling of exclusion he’d briefly experienced in the corridor, looking down behind glass at his assistant and his candidate on the bench below. What he felt now was a certain pity for her. Charitably, he’d refrained from recording her guilty look as she spirited his candidate’s drawings into her bag. A few days later, she’d transformed them into gifts to her from Teddy.

  The last paragraph of Lorz’s comments for that day began with the cautious remark that his candidate’s face seemed to be losing its habitual expression of brutality. Three question marks followed the observation. He was suspicious of subjectivity in the matter. But it was pointless to ask his assistant. She’d never recognized that expression of brutality in the first place. As for the doctors, they’d surely credit the change to the switchover to Bitchine. An obvious solution had came to him. His notes for that day ended with the underlined word, “camera.”

  The director was about to reach for the second log and the photographs when the phone rang. It was his assistant. She came up with more suggestions about what he should say to Dr Silberman tomorrow morning. He assented mechanically at regular intervals. When she finally rang off he sat motionless for an instant and then remembered what her call had interrupted: the photographs.

  He opened the second log, took off his glasses and placed his face inches from the first of the fifty-eight photographs of his candidate. They were pasted side by side and carefully dated. In theory they should have furnished objective proof of the transformation of the boy’s face, like a speeded-up film-sequence of a bud opening to flower.

  The problem was they’d been taken in the worst of circumstances, technically speaking. In the hospital park with his candidate, he found for some reason that he couldn’t take the camera out of his briefcase and lift it to his eye. People were constantly passing by. Or looking down at them from the glass-cliff of New Hospital. He couldn’t. It was a foolish feeling but unconquerable.

  So Lorz started taking the clandestine snapshots, clicking blind from his lap. They were invariably poorly centered, sometimes featuring shrubbery to the total exclusion of his candidate when they didn’t behead him. Often as not they were blurred because of miscalculation of distance. In the boy’s room they were alone and the director could use the range finder. But nearly always the available light was insufficient and the shutter-speed too slow for the hand-held camera. Blurs again. He could hardly lug in a tripod. The solution would have been flash-shots. But he feared the effect of explosive light on his candidate.

  The picture taking had come to an abrupt end on December 8, the event duly noted.

  That Wednesday afternoon in his candidate’s room he’d tried to stabilize the camera on the arm of a chair to compensate for the low shutter speed. The boy was drawing at his table. “Theodore, look!” he said. His candidate looked up. Lorz pushed the shutter release and the room exploded. He was blinded and paralyzed by the blue dazzle. Finally he was able to cry out, “Theodore! Theodore!”

  A nurse passing by in the corridor had heard his outcry. Imprinted on his retina, light and dark inverted like a photographic negative, the sun-burst and his seated candidate persisted, while against this static red backdrop the nurse and his candidate moved spectrally, approaching his chair. Both of them were now standing by his chair, looking down at him.

  He’s all right, I’m all right, he thought and then: it’s another breakthrough, he cares, he’s come to me. The nurse asked him if he was all right, what had happened? His candidate had taken the camera and was inspecting it to the total exclusion of anything else. The director pulled himself together and removed his glasses. He was weeping from the glare. He spoke of a defective flashcube that had spontaneously exploded.

  The obvious explanation – that he must have accidentally touched the flash-button while fumbling with the camera-controls – hadn’t at first occurred to him because, perhaps, of the violence of the light. The wall behind his candidate couldn’t have reflected the light with such force. It was as though he himself had received the exploding flash bulb full in the face.

  When the film was developed he understood what had happened. The bathroom door behind his candidate had been left half open. The mirror above the washbasin had hurled back the sunburst into the lens and his eyes. By some quirk of optics the bottom of the mirror had been spared along with a tiny fatigued middle-aged face at the bottom of that mirror, unspeakably ugly. After a few seconds he recognized it as his own face. All the rest of the photo was an explosion of light that obliterated his candidate. He tore up the photo and flushed it down the toilet.

  His assistant too e
xperimented. Lorz turned the pages of his log to November 17 and her story about Teddy and the atlas. She’d begun the experiment a week before. The way it had ended was a source of keen disappointment for her and secret satisfaction for the director. She couldn’t possibly suspect why.

  She’d shown Teddy her old school atlas. The binding was now in tatters, the pages dog-eared, torn and ink-stained. Her theory was that he must be a foreigner if no trace of family, friends or acquaintances could be found here. Seated alongside the boy she’d systematically introduced country after country, alert for an expression of recognition on his face. At first he’d shown complete indifference as she slowly leafed through the book, reciting the names of the lands.

  Then he’d stared hard at one particular badly torn page, mainly ocean, and prevented her from turning the page over. Hours after, her wrist still hurt from his grip, she said. He bent closer over the page and went on staring but responded to none of her questions. Still, she considered it an encouraging sign. And he’d refused to give her back the book when, on leaving, she wanted to put it away with the others in the closet. She’d felt joy at this sign of continued interest.

  All week long she’d tried to convince herself that the land of his birth was somewhere on that torn page with its blue vastness sprinkled with archipelagos of inkblots and islands. But how could he be a citizen of coral islets, once cannibal?

  When she returned to Room 343 the following Saturday, the book was lying on the table. She opened it and saw that he’d skillfully mended the torn page with fine slivers of scotch-tape. The black inkblots had been obliterated, the ones on the sea with blue paint, the ones in the margins with white ink-effacer.

  For her it was a defeat. Her experiment overlapped with his own, startlingly successful, which she wasn’t aware of. He hadn’t spoken to anybody about it. The comment in red ink at the bottom of the page devoted to her attempt referred him to that experiment, to November 11.

  That day he’d found Theodore in his room leafing through a copy of a newsmagazine which he must have picked up somewhere in the hospital. Normally Lorz avoided such periodicals just as he avoided television. Both were magnifying mirrors to the world as it had become. But the idea occurred to him that the photographs in the magazine might possibly offer the boy something to respond to, provide a link with the past. Maybe a woman who’d remind him of his mother. Or a house like his own lost one. There must be innocent photos somewhere in the magazine. Not all of the houses could be the sites of mass murders, not all of the middle-aged women serial poisoners.

  His candidate responded to none of the houses or middle-aged women. But the director made a fundamental discovery, flipping over those slick, horror-filled pages. They allowed him to communicate with his candidate. Certain photos, naturally, couldn’t be commented on. Could hardly be even glanced at.

  Example, page 126 with the cinema-starlet giving birth before TV and magazine cameras with her pigtailed “friend” grinning in the background in his sun-glasses and pineappled sport shirt opened to the navel on hairiness and she too grinning at the lens in her impeccable makeup and hairdo, despite what was going on below. Could hardly be thought of.

  The next hastily turned page featured the trial of the State (ex-Royal) Museum vandals. Unexpectedly it provided the opening.

  One of the accompanying photos showed the youths being hustled into a police van. The husky one with the shaved skull was making an obscene gesture with his middle finger at the lens, the thin one the V of victory for what they’d accomplished with the priceless Flemish primitive, reproduced before and after. Even after the fuel oil and excrement one could make out the perfect oval purity of the Virgin’s face contemplating the babe (wise and sad as though foreseeing his fate at barbarous hands five hundred years later). Both were haloed. Blotted out was the white doe in the background standing in a clearing with star-like flowers.

  Since it wasn’t sure that Theodore understood the text, nothing was more normal than that the director should read it aloud and comment on it, as anybody would have done, even to a stranger. What could be more normal than this spontaneous reaction to blatant abnormality? He could almost feel, physically, the boy’s dark blue gaze fixed on his lips as he asked the rhetorical question: why did they do it? Why do they do it? Millions of normal scandalized readers must have asked that question. The vandals’ sense of their own insignificance before the eternity of art? he hazarded. The duo had been sentenced to three months imprisonment (in private carpeted cells with hot and cold running water and TV, he guessed. They were somehow victims, after all).

  The director couldn’t help thinking of the Integral Iconoclasts, the lopped chin of the black Christ and what it had cost the desecrators. He mentioned this to the boy. If you could only see that painting as it once was, he said. But you know it. You were an artist yourself. Weren’t you? An artist? Maybe one day we’ll both go there and look at it again. If they’re ever able to repair the damage. And provided the others don’t set fire to the museum first. Not just museums and the Virgin, cemeteries as well, the innocent dead as well.

  What could be more natural in such a context than to attach private experience to the public event? With great but controlled emotion the director told the boy about the tombs of his parents which had undergone similar indignity, the smashed stone of the other man’s wife. The violated coffin and what followed was too terrible to tell but he did repeat what the other man had said: slow fire too good for them.

  His candidate listened gravely, staring at Lorz. Surely he understood what he was saying. Hadn’t they both been victims of disorder too, that fateful March morning? The director turned over page after page of chaos. Even his indignation at what was happening to the advertising posters could receive expression. A good many of the underground posters were reproduced in the magazine.

  He turned over the next page (129). It was like a door opening on grace, shutting out disorder. She was there, full-paged and in color, the exquisite long-necked girl, with the perfect oval purity of her face not unlike the Virgin on page 128 (if one could imagine the Mother of God in a sailor suit holding a pistachio ice-cream cone). She was there before them as at their beginning and end almost a year ago. They both looked at it for a long time in silence. Lorz felt the tears coming. He did nothing to hide them.

  Leaving the hospital, he felt dizzy and fatigued but disburdened. That night and the six nights that followed he slept deeply without dreams.

  One day, the November 14 (it was all down there in the log, painstakingly detailed), his candidate perceived a coffee stain in the margin of one of the pages. He attempted to efface it with his finger, then with the rubber. After a minute of this, Lorz tried to go on, turning the pages. But the boy clumsily turned the pages back to the stain, ripping them in the process. He resumed his useless rubbing, breath coming fast, a symptom that by then Lorz recognized as the beginning of agitation.

  “Wait,” he said, wanting to touch the boy’s shoulder therapeutically, but not daring to. “I’ll be back in a second.” He left the room. Part of the motive, he later recognized, may have been fear at what the boy’s agitation might culminate in again.

  He went over to the nurses’ office and borrowed white ink-effacer. He returned to the room, stood in the doorway, saw that things hadn’t worsened, entered and showed his candidate the tiny bottle. The scene seemed familiar to him. He smiled, wanting to relieve the tension.

  “Basic White,” he joked.

  That was another revelation. He could joke with his candidate. “Basic White,” he repeated. Then his mood became intensely serious. It was as if they were both together again in the subterranean room during the lesson before everything came to an end. But alone now, the other six candidates eliminated. Eliminated like the stain. He dipped the brush in the narrow neck and deftly obliterated it.

  Wasn’t that an expression of marvel in the boy’s face? Like a child marveling at a magician? He was achieving contact, dialogue almo
st, not through words but through images.

  There was a fat politician on the page. Lorz pointed at him and explained his long career of lies and betrayals. Look, Theodore, he said, obliterating the grafty face with an expert circular movement. The body had a full moon topping the shoulders now in the place of a visage. The fat demagogue looked better that way.

  The boy took the bottle and turned over the page. Full-paged, a man and a woman stood holding hands in profile, eye-locked and enraptured for a Swiss watch. Personally the director had no quarrel with the image. He would have spared the couple. But the boy transformed their faces into full moons. He turned over more pages and eradicated more faces as the director had done.

  He looked up at Lorz, as though for approval. He received it. Also, as a material reward, the slices of raw peppered meat he relished. The director ate one of them too. For the first time they were meshing (the director pictured the cogs and the pulsing mainspring of the recent watch-works). Their contact had never been so intimate.

  “We are Censors, Theodore,” he said as a joke with prim pinched lips, pronouncing the capital C by means of a theatrical tremolo. Their intimacy was such that he could joke with him.

  Lorz dipped the brush into the ink-effacer and warred on the most outrageous of the advertisements, distributing white rectangles strategically. Again his candidate imitated him, went perhaps too far. He started rectifying a perfume advertisement, abolishing the plum-colored nipples of the vaporous soft-focus denuded torso, actually in perfect taste. “I think we can spare her, it’s not pornography but art,” Lorz observed. “Pornography is always sharp-focused.” But his candidate paid no attention to his words.

  Lorz had another idea. “Look.” Explaining why, he eliminated another public face. He blew on the full moon that advantageously replaced that face. The white ink crusted. With the fine #3 ballpoint pen he drew eyes and a nose. “You draw the mouth, Theodore. It could only be an improvement.”

  It was a decisive moment. The boy did it. His fingers had forgotten none of their skill: an exquisite mouth, more feminine than masculine. In the space of five minutes they’d adumbrated the three stages of image-correction of the next month although Lorz didn’t realize this.

  The following visit, as the log testified, they remained within the limits of the first stage, simple effacement of graffiti. The coffee-stain incident had given the director the idea. Warring on disfigurement had been the boy’s last activity before the explosion. Mightn’t resumption of that activity pull him back to normality?

  So he minutely prepared the magazine for the visits, just as, nine months before, he’d disfigured Helena’s loveliness twenty-one times in view of later rectification. Except now the graffiti was ugliness on ugliness. He spent hours each evening in the uncomfortable vertiginous role of defiler. This disturbed the perfect sleep he’d been enjoying for a week, ever since the start of the newsmagazine experiment.

  More and more frequently he’d awaken in the middle of the night, stare up toward the ceiling and then get up and sit at his study desk alongside the cacti in the cone of light and prepare more of the photographs.

  Lorz often brought the magazine into the office, as he’d done earlier with the Chinese puzzles and the Schlechter and Moch volumes. He was careful to conceal his activities from his assistant although sometimes this wasn’t necessary since, during lulls, she’d often be plunged in her pink-and-blue diary with the flowers and brass clasp. They’d sit there, oblivious of one another, she sucking her pen and staring at the wall for inspiration and then scribbling away, he thinking up new graffiti for the photos. Then the phone would ring and, almost guiltily, they’d conceal their activity and turn back to business.

  Once, he forgot to lock up the magazine in his desk-drawer. When he returned to the office he found her standing alongside his desk leafing through his magazine as he’d done with hers months before. There were no intimate revelations in his. Still, not knowing the motive for what he did, she must have found his graffiti almost insane. Impassively, she closed the magazine and returned to her desk.

  Her silence was almost insulting. His immediate impulse was to explain his particular therapeutic approach. But he was offended at being placed on the defensive and he said nothing. Shortly after that incident the director gave up graffiti. He and his candidate had gone on to a new stage.

  By then he realized that most of the news-photos were already, in a sense, graffiti of the ideal, of what a man or a woman or a landscape or a city should be like. Those images contained their own distortion. For that reason the director no longer spent long ambiguous hours marring what was already essentially marred.

  And this was just as well. His interventions in the small hours of the night had multiplied. Often, he would nod off in the office and open his eyes on his assistant’s intensely serious stare which immediately shifted away. Later she’d sometimes say in the flat ungracious tone she adopted when commenting on his health: “You don’t look well at all,” and inquire if he was taking the pills regularly and urge him to go to the hospital for a check-up.

  So now Lorz and his candidate rectified the unaltered photographs. They systematically obliterated (with Basic White now) what deserved to be obliterated, usually faces but also elements of landscapes. At first Lorz guided his candidate, justifying his choice with anecdotes drawn from his personal experience.

  Soon Theo proved he didn’t need guidance. He eliminated the things Lorz himself would have himself eliminated. It was true that the boy didn’t indulge in fine distinctions. He reserved the same white fate to certain basically unobjectionable images as he’d done to the soft-focused perfume-torso. But the director regarded this excess of zeal as something minor.

  That was the second stage of correction.

  The third stage (which Lorz mistakenly thought was the last) occurred in early December. Unlike the first two it was fully creative and his log devoted long pages to it. The two of them recreated the ideal on the obliterated real. It was an extension of the initial operation weeks before: the exquisite mouth on the full moon that had replaced the grafty face of the politician. Now they did it systematically in intimate collaboration.

  He’d tell Theodore to blot out the cars in the street-scene and then the pedestrians. “Wouldn’t trees be nice in the middle of the street instead of the cars?” he’d ask his candidate, thinking of the encyclopedia woodcut of the Third District three centuries before: the charcoal-burner’s hut among big leafy oaks with a stream and a deer drinking from it.

  Silently as always, with a gravity that verged on severity, the boy bent over the magazine and with astonishing rapidity, one by one, the cars vanished in the whiteness flowing from his brush. Then, one by one, trees appeared, a forest where cars had been. The trees were red, but why not? The whiteness engulfed the pedestrians too. They were replaced by more red trees.

  That had been December 5, almost two months ago. Clearly connected with the magazine breakthrough was the spectacular verbal breakthrough the following day.

  Lorz finished the last drop of the plum-alcohol. He set down the glass and turned over the pages.

  The entry for that date, which he knew by heart, was dramatically understated.

  Dec 8. This morning learned (D.R.) that Theodore spoke. A nurse heard him pronounce words. What words? She (D.R.) doesn’t know.

  A day later the director found out but at first didn’t know what to make of the three words. Nobody did.

  At the very moment (9:00pm January 29) that the director reached the page that recorded those words, the alarm clock next to the cactus plants summoned him to dinner.

  After a quick cold meal the director went into his bedroom and opened the closet. He mustered his suits and ties for the best combination for tomorrow morning’s meeting with Dr Silberman. Details counted. He stood there for a moment rehearsing in his mind the alternate strategies for broaching the proposal. The old doctor wouldn’t be able to veto it now.

&nb
sp; He returned to his study and set the alarm clock for 11:30pm. His mind had to be clear tomorrow.

  Then he turned back to the second notebook, opened on the revelation of his candidate’s first words.