***
9
At 6:30pm August 27 it was her turn to pick Teddy up. As soon as she pushed through the Crossroads turnstile she saw what he’d done right and left, everywhere. She broke into a run through a maze of corridors. There were more and more of them. She finally located him in the East Gate corridor. By then, he’d run out of Basic White. But instead sitting slumped at the foot of his ladder, he was furiously attacking the poster with a key. It was a miracle he hadn’t already been arrested. With great difficulty she got him to stop and return to the office, promising him unlimited quantities of chemicals.
When they entered the Ideal office she made an imperious gesture to her employer to say nothing, do nothing. Instead of preparing coffee she roughly parked Theo in his usual corner with a heap of posters and a carefully limited amount of chemicals, very little Basic White. She beckoned to the director to come into the storeroom with her.
She carefully closed the door and stood with her back against it. She stared at him tight-lipped. It was Theo of course, thought the director. God alone knew what he’d done now. But by the way she was staring at him one could almost believe that it was Lorz himself who had committed some unpardonable misdeed.
“What is it now?”
“Those posters you’re always talking about. Your ‘obscene posters’’. All of them. Ours, other peoples’. He’s put white rectangles everywhere. Then he tried to use a key on them when the paint ran out.”
His assistant whispered it with hostile passion. And now, before he had time to cope with the news, realize the full scope of its implications, she went on, practically accusing him (Lorz, the director, her employer) of responsibility for what Theo had done.
“Who gave him that idea? When you pick him up is that what you talk to him about, how awful the new posters are? Do you realize what this means?”
He realized, better than she did, what it meant. It meant that unless prompt painful measures were taken (and they would be but wasn’t it already too late?) it was an end to Ideal Poster. He saw it all: the outbreak of the scandal, “humorous” articles in the press, lawsuits hurled at him like a lapidation, disgrace, bankruptcy. What would become of him at his age, in failing health?
Objectively, whatever Theo’s intentions, his interventions were graffiti. He’d madly reversed the normal roles. An Ideal operator was being paid to deface posters belonging to Ideal clients. Other Ideal operators would be paid to rectify his defacements. It was like a serpent eating its own tail. And all those witnesses, millions of them. At any moment a client would see it or learn about it. It spelled the disgraceful end of Ideal.
“Do you realize what this means?” she repeated, offensively insistent as though addressing a small dull-witted child.
“That we’ll both be looking for a job very soon,” replied the director tight-lipped himself now. “Easier for you than for me. If Ideal goes out of business you won’t stay unemployed very long. What about me, though? What can I do at my age, with my health problems?”
“Who’s talking about Ideal or a new job?” she whispered vehemently. A vein stood out in her neck. I’m not talking about you or me. I’m talking about Teddy. What’s going to become of Teddy?”
The director had to accept the humiliation of self-defense. He told her that he’d never said a word about those posters in front of Theo. He’d been on his guard about what he said and did ever since the painting episode.
This was true. But something else was true too, he realized. Didn’t she know, having leafed through the magazine carelessly left on his desk once, about those experiments or games or attempts at contact via the newsmagazines long ago in the hospital? How already he’d perhaps set the example half-humorously with ink-effacer disguised as Basic White. Those corrupt faces eclipsed by white full moons. And already then, the strategic distribution of white rectangles on the most outrageous of the advertisements and the boy’s quick imitation. He recalled the exaggerated attack on the soft-focus perfume nude with the plum-colored nipples. He recalled the words of the dead doctor: “Why like a child do you scribble over the photographs? Or cover them up with white paint? What is this madness of teaching Teddy such things?” He recalled: “You have made perhaps irreparable harm. What has given you such an idea?”
“Who gave him the crazy idea, then?” said his assistant, not knowing she was echoing a dead man’s unanswered question. “The only ideas he has are the ones you put in his head.”
The director asked her to use a different tone of voice when speaking to him and to moderate her vocabulary. Her hysterical accusations were monstrous.
Her painted eyes widened. Hysterical, had he said?
The exchange went on, worsened, sometimes rose from whispers to levels audible in the next room and then one or the other would make a gesture toward that room and they would lower their voices, defining the limits of their quarrel, defining the quarrel itself, perhaps, as a device to stave off contemplation of the disaster.
But then she went too far. She said that without her, Ideal would have gone out of business years ago. She did all of the work. She got nothing but insults for her pains. He didn’t seem to realize how much he owed her.
At that he couldn’t help countering: “Whose idea was it in the first place to hire him? Also God knows it wasn’t my idea to get up and look at his poster that morning, either. First my health, now my business, I owe you so much.”
He heard her breathe, lower than a whisper, “Oh,” and he quickly added that it wasn’t doing any good saying stupid things to each other, things they didn’t really mean, at least he didn’t and he was sure she didn’t either. She knew he wasn’t to blame for what had just happened. They had a problem to solve, he said. They had to convince Theo to stop the crazy censorship. Maybe it wasn’t too late. He would speak to the boy first. He touched her arm as he went past her into the office.
Theo was crouched over the poster with the indefatigable white-tipped brush. It was hard to gain his attention, impossible to keep it. Perhaps it was because of the director’s confused groping for the right words, his false starts and stammerings. Theo’s gaze slipped past his employer’s face and rested on the giant map of the underground with pin number seven still (for the moment) stuck in the big red dot of Crossroads.
Finally Lorz coaxed the boy to his feet and guided him away from the poster and the map into the storeroom. He sat the boy down and drew up a chair. His assistant left the storeroom.
Where Theo was now seated the light was unkind. His face took it badly. For the first time the director saw what his assistant had so often talked about. The contour of his skull was visible. His cheekbones had emerged alarmingly. Below were shadowed wastes. His skin was peculiarly pale, white almost. He’s dying, the director thought. Why hadn’t he seen it before? The posters are killing him. Theo was drowning in the posters. He was going under.
The director sensed confusedly that all this was the consequence of the boy’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the posters. He had to bring it out into the open, articulate it in simple repetitious words for Theo to grasp it.
He started with the physical nature of the posters. He told Theo that the posters were rectangles of paper, of such and such a size, thickness and grade. Basically they were paper-pulp, once pungent trees, now dead supports for photographs, most of them taken in studios with paid models who smiled on command. They were representations of representations. Not to be confused with reality. The posters were nothing but thousands of differently tinted dots. Yes, there were certain real things represented by the colored dots – say, mountains or sunrises or skies – but those real things weren’t down in the underground. Granted, the individuals who graffitied the decent posters with indecencies were despicable or sick. But – listen carefully – it wasn’t as if they were mutilating a real landscape or face. You had to make that essential distinction. If you didn’t, anything was possible, all levels of reality were mixed up and colored
dots and a real granite mountain were the same. That was madness, to deny hierarchies of reality.
Those colored dots, then, weren’t real like real smiles or skies. Essentially the colored dots were chemical dyes with long formulas. They were configured into an illusion of smiles and skies (and the original smiles themselves were artificial and sometimes the skies too, just a cloth backdrop in the studio). All of which meant this: that nothing essential was being soiled when the poster was graffitied. This being so, one had to look upon poster correction as a job, like street cleaning. Infinitely more skilled, of course, but a job anyhow, a source of income, not a mission in life, not something to which you sacrificed life and reason as Theo was doing. A simple job. So as a job he, Theo, must limit himself to contractual posters and limit his corrections to six hours. Not a minute more. And not think about them until the next day at 1:00pm, not a minute before.
Lorz paused for breath. He was sweating, his glasses steaming up as though he were wrestling with boulders instead of concepts.
So much for the decent posters, he said. Out of the corner of his eye, as he dabbed his forehead with his silk handkerchief, he perceived his assistant standing in the doorway looking down at the floor, listening. He raised his voice slightly. The pornographic posters, granted, were in a separate category. They were a public offense against decency, polluting innocent gazes. He’d always believed that even though he had never told him (Theo) that, never. A less lax society wouldn’t tolerate such things. And yet these posters must not be censored. Do you understand? Must not. Yes, granted, in issuing this stern injunction his employer, he, Edmond Lorz, the director of Ideal Poster, was party to the spiritual pollution. He was paid to protect the pornographic posters against graffiti as he was for the other, decent, posters and he accepted the payment, with all the implications of that acceptance. Theo mustn’t think, not for a fraction of an instant, that he, the director, wasn’t cognizant of his objective complicity.
But one had to compromise, Lorz went on. Refusal to compromise was madness. It could even happen – this might seem inconceivable, nevertheless it was true – that one’s understandable reaction to such horrors might have consequences even worse than the (after all pictured) horrors themselves. What Theo had done to the pornographic posters was absolutely unacceptable, monstrous. It endangered Ideal. It endangered Theo himself. Do you understand the danger, Theo? What would become of him if he continued? There were policemen to uphold laws however lax and unfair these laws might be. He could be arrested. There would be no more legitimate poster correction then. All the graffiti that he’d removed would accumulate again. And what would become of him then outside of Ideal? There was no place to flee. From tomorrow on, then, he must turn over a new leaf. Do you hear, Theo? Five hours of work, not a minute more. Only contractual posters, strictly Ideal posters, do you understand? And you do not, do not, touch the indecent posters except to remove graffiti! And you must eat and get sleep and not think of the posters after work. Think of whatever you like, anything else. Mountains, fields, stars, soccer-matches, other people, real people, whatever, but not posters. Anything except posters.
The director leaned back in his seat with a curious feeling of lightness and exaltation. He got up, dizzy, and went to the doorway where she was standing. He looked at her. Her face remained shut on him.
“I hope he understands now,” he said.
“He didn’t understand a single word,” she said. “I didn’t either.”
It was her turn. She sat down stiffly in the chair facing the boy. Lorz moved away into the office and stopped not far from the doorway.
Teddy, listen to me, she said. Look at me. I’m going to talk to you again about what you did to the posters today, the paint you put on those posters. I’m going to say it in simple language that anybody can understand. You did something very bad. You’re going to be punished for it. I’m going to punish you so the others won’t punish you worse. You’ll see how pretty soon. I won’t be nice with you any more. Look at me. You like it when I’m nice, don’t you? Well, no more, never again if you ever do that again. I don’t like to punish you, Teddy. But if you do that again to the posters the others are going to punish you too but much worse because they don’t love you at all.
Look at me. You want to stay here with us, don’t you? Here in Ideal, I mean. It’s not much, I know, but it’s all we’ve got. If you make trouble they’ll take you away. They’ll lock you up. They’ll put you in a straitjacket, squirt you full of drugs to keep you calm, don’t you understand that? Put you with the loonies. You don’t want that, Ted. I wouldn’t be able to stand that. Mr Lorz wouldn’t want that either, I think. We’re your only friends. You wouldn’t see us again. You wouldn’t see me any more. That wouldn’t matter to you if you didn’t see me any more?
Her voice stopped a moment.
I’ll give you something else Teddy if you do as I say. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. She was whispering something unintelligible in the office where Lorz stood near the door. Then louder: “Would you like that, Ted? Look at me when I talk to you. No, sit down!”
A chair clattered to the floor. A second later the director was in the storeroom. Theo had got up and was making for the big locker where the huge cans of Basic White were stored, secured by a stout brass padlock, ever since the painting incident. She retreated in front of the locker with her arms outspread, barring access. She said, “No!” sharply. “You’re not getting that paint now or tomorrow. That’s your punishment for what you did. Tomorrow you’re not getting any paints or chemicals either. Tomorrow you’re staying here in the office with us like you were supposed to, one day a week. Because of what you did today to those posters. After, we’ll see.”
Theo was almost upon her, towering over her.
“No,” she said again and wasn’t afraid to push at him. He remained there as motionless as a ten-ton statue being pushed.
Lorz stepped between them. “Be reasonable, Theo,” he soothed, pulling the boy away from the locker and his assistant. They went into the office and toward the door. She tried to help Theo with the ladder. He moved away and slung it over his shoulder by himself.
“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, strang
e 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 ove
r 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?
The director felt a brief flare in his bowels. He slumped into a chair.
After a while he nodded off.