***
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.
Worse, when he scrutinized the “upholders of order” he became aware that something had happened to them too. Some policemen wore no tie. Others sported beards and long hair. One was actually smoking a thin cigarette that stank like smoldering hay. Again he remembered the great impeccable black-uniformed figure of his father.
Lorz began visiting Crossroads every day.
The idea, he told himself, was to protect Theo in case of trouble. The form this protection would take, given the director’s slight build and fear of overt violence, wasn’t clear in his mind. In any case, he dedicated his lunch-break to his new employee. It was a little like that mad month-long pursuit in the hospital corridors, he sometimes thought. He’d stride stiff-legged down these other, subterranean, corridors or jog at tremendous speed up and down the escalators. Sometimes he encountered Theo on one of the numerous platforms of the giant station. More often, unfortunately, in the corridors. There was less danger, Lorz thought, when Theo worked on the platforms. They were never empty even in the afternoon. It was different in the maze of the corridors. The director couldn’t help picturing his employee in the comparative solitude of those white-tiled tunnels, an easy prey for teenage thugs.
Actually the boy was seldom alone there. There was nearly always a knot of bystanders about him as about the underground musicians or jugglers or sword-swallowers. In terms of pure virtuosity Theo outdid these. No poster went uncorrected, even ones that to the director’s trained eyes seemed unmarred. The boy also undertook the rectification of posters vandalized, in the director’s opinion, beyond cosmetic repair.
Nothing found grace in his eyes. Nothing put him off. Nothing distracted him. No sooner had he finished with one poster than his gaze fastened on the next one as he leaped down from the ladder. Without looking away he’d squat before the knapsack and his keen-sighted hands would choose the correct bottles for the new task.
Lorz was careful to keep on the outskirts of the small crowd. He didn’t want to distract Theo, he told himself. Actually there was little danger of this happening. The boy was wholly dedicated to the war on the graffiti. He saw nothing but the posters, the afflicted thighs, arms, smiles, forests, breaking seas, skies. The only faces he seemed aware of were the giant printed ones and what marred them.
Lorz would stand there at an angle that allowed him an unimpeded view of the boy’s profile and hands. He would watch Theo and move with him down the corridor, as in a museum, pursuing masterpieces. He would go on watching and then suddenly remember to look about and scrutinize the spectators about him for dangerous faces. That was the reason, after all, he was there. Then he would return his attention to Theodore.
At first, from one visit to another there was a complete turnover of the bystanders. But in the second week of his visits, the director became aware of a soft ageless man with a lumpish face and curious long yellow hair. Hadn’t he already been watching Theodore last week in some other corridor? But where else had the director seen him? He had a memory block
The fifth time Lorz joined Theodore, in the corridor leading to the West Gate terminus trains now, the man was there again and sent the director a long-lashed gaze and a smile of recognition. “We meet again, Edmond,” he murmured. Stiff-featured, the director didn’t acknowledge the greeting. Didn’t he work? Didn’t he have other things to do than to follow the director’s employee about? Lorz strode away.
The next day, the director joined the knot of spectators about Theodore’s ladder before panel 169 in the Summer Hill corridor. At the same moment that Lorz perceived the man again, Theo broke free of the images and recognized the director. The boy stood immobile on the top step, staring at his employer, clearly awaiting instructions. Their roles were reversed. Now it was Lorz who was being obstructive. For of course he had no instructions to give. The boy’s performance was almost frightening in its perfection and by his presence Lorz had interrupted it.
&nb
sp; The small crowd was looking at both of them. Lorz went into long and perfectly superfluous observations regarding the brush-size and shade of green for the poster, clearly establishing the nature of their relationship. He ended with dry praise for the work accomplished.
The lumpy-faced man with the long yellow hair sidled up. “O marvelous, Edmond, you’re a friend of his. Why don’t you introduce me?” The director looked away from that unbearable face, muttering: “He’s my employee. Go away, I don’t know you.”
“Of course you do, Edmond,” the man persisted, placing his hand on Lorz’s chest.
“Go away!” Everybody was looking at them. Had he shouted?
The director shoved the man away. He retreated, eyes wide with fear. Lorz advanced on him and shoved harder, not really a violent shove, but the man lost his balance. He staggered backward and his head thudded against the sheep of the poster. The man slumped to a squat. A blood stain was visible on the illusory softness of the fleece above him. He shook his head in a daze, touched his head, stared at his red fingers and, moaning, struggled to his feet.
“You murderer!” he shouted, choked by sobs. “I’m bleeding to death, you murderer, Edmond Lorz, you murderer you!”
All that blood as the consequence of a little shove. There was an absurd disproportion between cause and effect, like flicking a pebble down a rocky slope and unleashing a landslide. Lorz was aware that Theo high on his ladder was staring at the two of them or perhaps at the red stain on the sheep he would have to cosmetize in a few minutes.
“Help me! I’m bleeding to death! Murderer! Murderer!”
Three passing youths stared at them both and grinned broadly. The director turned his back on the knot of spectators (spectators now of himself and the other) and rapidly left the corridor.
The other was still shouting, “Murderer! Murderer!” to his back.
The image of the bloody sheep was still in Lorz’s mind as emerged from the corridor onto the platform and hurried into the waiting train.
But in a few minutes Theo’s expert brush would efface the evidence of Lorz’s first act of violence outside of persistent fantasy. The thought of the blood stain vanishing beneath the flow of Basic White calmed him.
After that incident Lorz found it impossible to mount guard over his employee in the passageways. His new strategy was to locate Theo in a corridor – when this was possible – and wait at a distance until he emerged onto a train platform. Then he would survey the boy from the opposite platform.
But he was often frustrated and returned to the office without having really seen Theodore. Sometimes he came upon the boy (attended by his court) rectifying the beginning of a corridor so enormously long that there was no hope his employee would ever reach a platform during Lorz’s long lunch-break (1:30pm-3:00pm).
Even worse were the days when the director couldn’t locate the boy at all. Theodore had the list of Ideal panel numbers but never cosmetized the posters in methodical order. This meant – assuming his employee hadn’t been taken bleeding to a hospital – that he could be working anywhere in the giant station. Lorz was exhausted from the start at the thought of the twenty-four train platforms and the labyrinth of corridors and stairs awaiting him.
Days went by without the director catching sight of the boy during the lunch time visits. It was more and more like that month’s hopeless search for him in the hospital corridors.
When he was able to, he surveyed his new employee from a non-distracting distance on the opposite platform, often from behind a vending machine. It wasn’t really a satisfactory arrangement. Half the time the trains pulling in and out from opposite directions concealed Theodore. And in case of an emergency how would he be able to get over to other platform in time?
One day from his vantage point behind the vending machine he saw the lumpy-faced yellow-haired man on the other platform, looking about fearfully and then slipping onto a bench near Theodore on his ladder. He pretended to be reading a newspaper. Lorz was certain he was staring at Theo above the paper screen. With a show of indifference, the man changed his position on the bench as Theo pushed his wheeled ladder further off to another poster. Now he got up and contemplated his image in the mirror of a vending machine directly behind Theodore.
The director stepped out from behind his own vending machine. He was practically by himself on the platform. The man’s hands froze in the gesture of primping his hair. He’d seen Lorz.
A train roared in, masking Theodore’s platform.
When it slid away the man was gone.
This victory seemed to justify Lorz’s presence. So far, it was true, nothing really serious had materialized. The nearest thing to violence in any way involving Theodore was the violence – if the word wasn’t too strong for a couple of pushes – exercised by the director himself against the lumpy-faced individual.
But at any moment violence could erupt. He guarded Theodore for three hours at best out of the twenty-five hours a week the boy worked in the underground. There was another problem too. What exactly would he do if violence broke out when he was present? It wasn’t until June 15 – Theodore had been down in the underground for almost three months by then – that the director was forced to cope with that situation.
That afternoon on the East Gate platform, half-concealed behind a peppermint vending machine, he observed a dangerous looking duo in iron-studded leather jackets staring at his employee busy on his ladder. His vulnerable back was turned to them.
One of the toughs said something to him. The boy went on with his correction. He didn’t know they existed. The two drew closer and started rocking the ladder. Theodore’s hand stopped. He seemed to be emerging from a trance. He turned around and looked down at them.
The director was helpless. No question of jumping down from his platform and negotiating the third rails to reach Theo’s platform. A sign with a skull warned: Five Thousand Volts!
A train pulled in, concealing them. The director had to take the long unheroic way across. He raced down his platform, up a flight of stairs, across to the second flight of stairs and down.
When he ran out gasping onto the platform the two toughs had vanished. There was a spattering of red paint on the pavement. Teddy was back rectifying the poster. Lorz collapsed on a bench near him and decided that from now on he’d stay on Theo’s platform. He couldn’t even recall the reason (if it existed) why he’d maintained such great distance between himself and his employee.
The second incident was far more serious. It occurred a week later on the Riverside Terminus platform at 3:10pm. The director was sitting on a bench close to his employee. At regular intervals he looked up from the magazine on his lap to scan the passersby and admire Theodore’s performance. Then he returned very briefly to the magazine whose contents hardly registered on his mind. Now Theo finished cleaning up the bra ad and pushed the ladder to the next panel. The director looked about and changed his position on the bench, maintaining the same careful distance from his employee.
A middle-aged cowboy with a seamed gnawed face drew close to Theodore’s ladder. He was perhaps the fifth madman the director had seen in an hour. The underground swarmed with them as never before. This one wore a Stetson, a deerskin vest and decorated varnished boots with spurs. He had a long naked knife thrust in his silver-buckled belt. He was arguing bitterly with himself. Now he started arguing with Theodore’s back.
Theo was rectifying Helena. She was high on a swing in an old fashioned white dress and a broad brimmed hat. It was the first of five identical posters. The director got up quietly and stood behind the madman. He fixed his gaze on the man’s right hand and the knife.
The underground exploded. There were cries and screams all about him, quickly covered by the thunder. Everybody on the platform except the director, the cowboy and Theo scrambled up on the benches. The director bolted the wrong way toward the edge of the platform.
The first of the roaring motorcycles sailed down over the stairs, s
kimming the tiled vault overhead, followed by a second, and then a third.
The riders were in black leather. They wore enormous goggles. Their skulls were naked. They were crouched nearly flat over the handlebars. The machines briefly touched down on the middle steps of the flight and leaped up again prodigiously and then arced down toward the platform.
In the split second before the front wheel of the first motorcycle touched down on the platform the director recognized them from the cover of an issue of the newsmagazine he and Theo had corrected. The title Doom Riders! had blared forth in red above one of them on his vast machine bearing down on the reader. He had the celebrated oiled bare skull – they scorned crash helmets – and a ferocious Samurai scowl.
Petrified at the edge of the platform, the director experienced the split-second total recall of a man facing imminent destruction (not the traditional total recall of his life but total recall of the Doom Rider article).
Flashing through his mind: their incursions in singular places like cemeteries, porcelain shops, fashion shows and, as now, the underground. How they braked, sometimes unsuccessfully, on the brink of precipices. Roared a hundred kilometers the wrong way down motorways in half an hour. Enjoyed practical impunity thanks to the solidarity of the vast motorcycle clan. How a policeman had shot one of the Doom Riders who was terrorizing a convent. How minutes later three hundred machines had roared round and round the nearest police station which had gone up in flames along with part of a suburb.
As the front wheels touched down and the machine bounded forward directly toward the director total recall went on.
Ten Commandments for Survival. No. 6: if they bore down on you as they might well do anywhere, any time: Don’t Budge! Stock Still! Smile! No murderous intention. Would avoid the immobile target at the last hundredth of a second. Preferred the challenge of a panicking obstacle diving to the left or the right like a goalkeeper just before a penalty kick. The rider succeeded in evading the mobile obstacle most of the time. But sometimes not. So stock still with a disarming smile was the safest tactic.
The director bolted anyhow, without choice to the right since to the left lay the rails. He sprawled out on the ground. Thunder blasted his eardrums; grit whipped his face; exhaust gas burned his scalp. Then it was past and when he opened his eyes the three machines were almost at the other end of the long platform.
Incredibly, Theodore was still on his ladder, back turned to all this, his No. 5 brush abolishing the obscenity in Helena’s lap. The cowboy stood in the middle of the platform, arguing furiously. He had the knife out and was staring down the platform at the three motorcycles.
Instead of roaring up the opposite stairs at an impossible angle and vanishing in a cloud of blue exhaust gas the riders braked at the foot of the flight. They responded to the challenge of the drawn knife.
Their torsos arced back violently. Their machines bucked and swiveled about on their rear wheels, nearly vertical like prehistoric monsters sniffing out prey. Then the front wheels jolted down, the riders revved up and bore down on the cowboy, bore down on Theodore, bore down again on the director.
The cowboy joyously stood his ground and made flailing stabs in the direction of the oncoming machine, the first of the three. The rider swerved about him.
It was the director’s turn.
He should have joined the others cowering on the bench where two girls shrieked with terrified pleasure. Instead, he moved closer to Theodore. To protect or to be protected?
Hot thunder. The displaced air or the noise almost knocked him down. Now the third machine. Again Lorz broke the Sixth Commandment for Survival by diving, this time to the right. He was certain, too late, that he’d chosen the wrong direction.
“Theo!” he cried as the third motorcycle blasted past between them.
From where he lay on the platform the director saw Theo’s hand with the brush jerk, saw a long dribble of Basic Black heading for Helena’s sky-offered face, saw a jar of red paint smashed on the pavement. Hadn’t the machine jostled the ladder? Or perhaps the rider had shot out his gauntleted hand in the small of Theo’s back, more defiant in its unresponsiveness than the drawn knife.
The boy turned about on his trembling ladder. He stared at the end of the platform where the three machines were regrouping. There was the familiar intense expression on his face as before an arduous chess problem. The first of the motorcycles had wheeled about again and roared past. Now the second. The third was bearing down on them again. Again Lorz cried out to Theo for help.
Theo’s fist shot out, blurred with speed, a marvel of coordination. It struck flesh or metal.
The rider lost control of his machine. It zigzagged diagonally across the platform, smashed into a vending machine which burst into a shower of candy-bars, cogs, coins and mirror-splinters. The rider’s face was covered with blood. The motorcycle wobbled toward the edge of the platform. A train was pulling in. A fraction of a second earlier and the machine would have leaped off the platform into destruction. As it was it wobbled into the moving wall of the slowing train.
Miraculously, the rider remained in the saddle as the machine recoiled and swerved across the platform, nearly maiming the flailing cowboy, then banged against a bench.
A shrill whistle came from the end of the platform. Three policemen were trotting toward the disorder. They had their hands on their holsters. The two other machines returned and flanked the wounded one. The trio wobbled away from the policemen. They halted at the foot of the opposite flight as though recovering new force. Then they roared up and away.
Theo saw none of this real chaos. He’d returned to the important chaos, the spoiled poster, a terrifying problem of restoration. The paint had attacked Helena’s radiant face.
Still prostrate in the filth of the pavement the director looked up at Theo. He saved my life, he thought joyously. What gift of his own could match that gift?