Part Two
1
How could you hope to explore all the corridors and rooms of what they called “The Hospital”? It was actually a jumble of buildings of all styles and original destinations, from moldering medieval stone to steel and glass, dumped down any which way by the centuries within a long circular wall. During the month that followed the great news the director went down miles of corridors. He opened hundreds of doors on startled, ravaged, terminal, uninhabited faces, all the wrong ones. And there were so many more miles of unvisited corridors, so many hundreds of untried doors. In the course of his daily explorations he found himself in places devoted to states of distress where his candidate couldn’t possibly be: stumped torsos, bald children like giant celluloid dolls, the chemically rigid masks of the insane, hastily glimpsed and fled. It sometimes happened that he’d halt in the middle of a strange corridor, wipe the sweat from his face and wonder in painful lucidity what he was doing there.
Weeks before, in the late afternoon of September 4, half an hour after the phone conversation with his assistant, the director had arrived, half-running, down the familiar corridor. At the last moment he slowed his pace to deceive the vigilance – maybe imagined – of the nurses and doctors and stood before Room 416. When he finally opened the door he saw a ruined middle-aged man in a wheelchair. Room 416 was occupied by a hemiplegic mason, he later learned. He wasn’t aware that the incident would prefigure hundreds of similar frustrations in the weeks to come.
Nobody knew where he was, they’d said. The director stood voided in the corridor. He started wandering about, opening doors here and there until an irritated doctor stopped him. Teddy, as he’d already been told, wasn’t here anymore and in any case couldn’t be visited wherever he might be.
He slowly spiraled down the staircase out into the hospital grounds. An ambulance rolled up the driveway, skirted the main hospital and stopped before the small dingy building that housed the radiography unit. The director stopped and stared as two attendants rolled out a wheeled stretcher with, he was almost certain, his candidate, rigid and unconscious.
The director broke into a run. By the time he reached the unit the ambulance had pulled away and the wheeled stretcher with the two attendants had vanished into the building. He looked everywhere, for hours it must have been, on all five floors. That was how it started.
Day after day, for weeks, the director asked what had become of his candidate. The doctors disclaimed knowledge of his whereabouts. Some exchanged knowing glances, it seemed to him, before coming out with the senseless official version. There would be no visits for a week. They said it week after week. He gained brief access to the nurses’ office on futile pretexts and stole quick glances at the wall planning-chart. He didn’t see his candidate’s name. Opposite 1:15 he did see a card with a penciled scrawl T OH B3. Or was it P3? Or F3? Could “T” possibly stand for the (false) name of his candidate? But the cryptic code that followed discouraged the director. He could hardly ask.
The nurses were curiously reluctant to speak about his candidate. It was as though they’d been given strict instructions. By whom? And why? Some, insistently questioned, ended by telling him hesitantly where, “they thought,” his candidate might possibly be found. They sent him to empty rooms, dead-end corridors, non-existent room-numbers.
He was being deliberately misled. Why?
Only the gruff mannish head-nurse with the choleric neck and hacked iron hair came out with a blunt phrase: “He can’t be seen.”
Lorz brooded over the ambiguity of her words. Was the correct decoding: “It’s forbidden to see him?” Or: “He’s in no state to be seen?” Why the mystery?
It was a temporary decision, Silberman said soothingly and disclaimed responsibility. Teddy wasn’t his patient after all. If his colleagues kept the boy in relative isolation they must have valid reasons. If one were to believe him (but one didn’t), Silberman had no knowledge of the boy’s whereabouts.
Silberman seemed more interested in Lorz’s own condition than in his candidate’s. His fat face remained bland throughout their conversations, but the director suspected his mind was processing his daily presence in the hospital. By now it was probably a subject of talk among the staff. Lorz was careful to justify his insistent interest in locating the boy. Justification was a constant concern during those weeks.
By the third week there developed an ideal short-term justification for his daily presence.
He was suffering, he explained truthfully to the young sharp-nosed doctor, from intermittent but severe headaches, also insomnia, irritability and occasional visual disturbances in the form of colored patterns. Invited to undergo various tests – which all proved negative – he was no interloper and could, with studied casualness, pose his questions about his candidate’s whereabouts.
But before that medical justification for his presence, he found others for Silberman. There was the curious parallel, he explained. There but for the grace of God, so to speak. Above all, his keen sense of responsibility toward the boy. He’d unwittingly lured the boy to disaster with his advertisement, he said. He added that he’d felt like asking him to sit up front but hadn’t.
Lorz knew the doctor would translate “responsibility” to “guilt,” a potently operative concept with the mind-men and a run-of-the-mill syndrome: not really an obsession at all, nothing alarmingly abnormal about it.
The director feared abnormal obsession. If he continued visiting the hospital every day, he made sure it was within strict limits. Theoretically the search could have gone faster. But he was careful not to go beyond a very rapid stiff-legged walk down the sterile corridors, as though hastening to an encounter or fleeing one, but still preserving dignity, never breaking into a trot. A broken stride, to his mind, would have marked obsession instead of legitimate deep concern.
Just as he was careful never to exceed an hour a day in his search, taken out of lunchtime, like a leisurely walk after dessert. It involved lengthening his mid-day break by just thirty minutes. He refused to let his quest encroach on his business activities although his assistant could have handled things. Abiding by that inflexible timetable (gone at exactly one and back at exactly two-thirty) was a kind of barrier against chaos. If a minute longer, why not five minutes longer, five hours longer, the whole day, days and nights in the maze of corridors? Anyhow he doubted that even a round-the-clock search would have proved more productive than the actual hurried visits.
One day he encountered a young nurse-in-training. She answered his automatic hopeless question. “Teddy? He’s in Old Hospital.” She bit her lip. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.” The director probed her last remark for hours. Was “you” simply an impersonal pronoun meaning “anybody” or did it apply to himself, to “you,” Edmond Lorz? By now they must all be talking about him.
Then he made the connection with what he’d seen on the planning-chart. O H: Old Hospital.
T stood for Teddy after all.
The ancient building with inky pollution-streaks and white pigeon-droppings looked familiar. Hadn’t he already visited it? Among eroded medieval statues half-sunk at angles in the shabby lawn, stiff-faced patients wandered about like automatons in the company of white-uniformed attendants. At this sight the director recognized it as the place of the chemically nullified insane where his mother had once sojourned for a few months. Why had they placed his candidate here?
He wandered about dingy corridors trying to make sense of the progression of the room numbers. Turning a corner, he was almost knocked down by a uniformed black Subcontinental running wild-eyed with an empty wheeled stretcher. The Subcon didn’t stop his lunatic running when the director posed his question in his back. He had to run alongside the man.
“P 3, please?” he repeated, gasping. The man shook his head. Badly winded, the director came out with: “T 3? Tee, Tee three?” The man shook his head. Did he understand the language? Lorz shouted: “B 3, B 3, Bee, Bee, Bee Three.”
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Getting no answer, he stopped, panting. The attendant, never slowing his pace, reached the end of the corridor. Then, turning, he sing-songed, “T’ird floor basement,” and vanished.
A floor, then, not a room. Lorz found it odd that there was no room-number.
He looked about for an elevator and found only a caged red bulb signaling a staircase. Gripping the sticky railing, he descended cautiously step by step in the gloom emitted by other tiny wide-spaced red bulbs. He went down three littered flights and came up against a padlocked iron door.
He retraced his steps. Finally, in a poorly lighted corridor, what seemed to be more wall revealed itself as a big unmarked elevator. He would have missed it if the doors hadn’t shuddered open as he went by.
It was an old service-elevator with dirty padded walls. It was empty and unlighted. He made out a sign: “For Stretchers Only!” The control-panel was an upright rectangle of tarnished brass. In the gloom the floor-numbers were illegible. A third-floor basement seemed inconceivably deep so he pressed the bottom button. The doors groaned shut and he stood in darkness, breathing through his mouth because of the reek of ether and urine. Nothing happened. He tried to hold back panic. The motor started up wearily.
The elevator began to tremble and then shudder. What if the cables snapped? A minute went by. There was absolutely no sensation of movement in spite of the vibrations. It couldn’t be moving. Even at the slowest pace the elevator would be in the bowels of the earth by this time.
When the doors started opening again the director squeezed through. He expected to find himself back in the grimy ground-floor corridor. Instead, he was in an ancient passageway with rough-hewn walls. A succession of anachronistic naked bulbs dangled from a vaulted ceiling.
The doors groaned shut in his back and the mechanism started up. Left and right offered an identical dwindling perspective of stretches of gloom alternating with pools of dirty yellow light on irregular flagstones. He turned left and explored the passageway. The only movement was his own shifting shadow as he passed beneath the bulbs. The scuffing of his soles was the only sound. Solid stone on both sides, no doors anywhere. It was obvious that he’d pressed the wrong button. His candidate couldn’t be here.
He was about to return and summon back the disquieting elevator when he heard a muffled swelling roar from somewhere far ahead. He tried to picture the medical apparatus capable of making such a powerful noise. It meant activity of some sort, people, staircases, operative elevators, safe ways out of what seemed to be, after the padded elevator, another prison.
Prison: hadn’t he read somewhere of Old Hospital and its dungeons used in medieval times for criminals, prostitutes and (already) lunatics thrown together in total promiscuity? Lorz started walking faster in pursuit of the sound. He tripped occasionally on the irregular flagstones. The sound slowly died away. Now there was nothing but silence. It started up again. Again it died away. This time the silence seemed permanent. The passageway curved and forked. He took the left fork. The new passageway was identical to the first, empty and doorless.
He had decided to return to the elevator when the deep vibration started up again. He began trotting toward it. The sound lured him into a maze of passageways. Again it died away, started up seconds later, no closer, and died away for long minutes. He stood still and waited for it to begin. The vaguely familiar sound was playing cat and mouse with him. Now again.
In pursuit of that erratic elusive sound he discovered the inexplicable vastness of the subterranean windings. He reassured himself that there was no possibility of getting lost, for the building wasn’t gigantic like New Hospital. Yet he did get lost. Peculiarly, the tangle of corridors seemed to cover an area far greater than the visible surface part of the building itself. He couldn’t orient himself. Over and over the passageway forked. Some of his choices were wrong. They degenerated into unlighted dead-ends, where the flagstones underfoot gave way to earth and pot-holes and he backtracked, wiping his sweating face free of cauls of spider-webs.
How long had he been wandering about? For some reason he couldn’t recall, it was essential that he return to the office by 2:30, not a minute later, to that other subterranean space. He halted in the middle of a dim yellow pool of light and looked at his watch. It had stopped at 3:07. He resisted the urge to run, to shout for help in those underground corridors of the institution for the insane. He did try an interrogative “hello”, absurdly low and well-bred, then a little louder, but in tight control. Then much louder.
Voices babbled back at him. The echoes died away.
In the silence he became aware that the medical apparatus had apparently stopped operating. How long had it been since he last heard that distant swelling then dying roar? It was as though its malevolent function had been accomplished now that it had lured him into the heart of the maze.
Lorz spread his handkerchief on the flagstones, hiked up his trouser legs and sat down in the dead center of the dim pool of yellow light. He hunched forward, clasping his knees, surrounded by darkness. Somebody would come. Somebody necessarily came to change the burned-out electric light bulbs. Why the bulbs? Why did they feebly shine on in the empty corridors?
The sound awoke him. It had started up again. This time it was a violent roar, tantalizingly familiar, very close, coming from beyond the turn in the passageway, perhaps fifty meters away. He rose to his feet, jubilant. Beyond that curve the machine promised clean well-lighted corridors, a bustle of staff, the sound of voices other than the echoes of his own, arrows everywhere pointing to the way out through the lobby, past the ancient blunted statues sunk like tombstones in the lawn, arrows pointing to the way out of the hospital complex, for good, no return ever to the senseless perilous quest.
Now a few steps removed from deliverance he allowed his mind to acknowledge the vastness of the fear he had felt, lost in that maze.
He broke into his habitual controlled stiff-legged stride. The roar died away as he rounded the bend. Immediately to his left, right-angled to the main passage, was another passage, far narrower, like a tomb-cleft. It ran no more than ten meters and ended with a low massive bolted iron door. Badly corroded, it was secured by a huge padlock, itself reduced to a mass of rust. The director stood staring at it in bewilderment.
After a while, very faintly, the sound, unmistakable now, started up behind the iron door, grew in intensity. The director instantly pictured it. He was more familiar with the map of the underground than with his own face. Was it conceivable that the two mazes touched each other, communicated? The uproar died away and the director knew the train was pulling into the station a little beyond. The line, judging by the violence of the noise, must run a scant dozen meters from the walls of the old hospital. A thick precipitation of door-rust lay on the cement floor from the reiterated vibrations of the eighty-odd years of the run, perhaps two hundred passages a day (and night). It formed a strange pattern, like cryptic graffiti. Line 12, of course. And now the noise started up again. The train was pulling out of the station. Circus Place? Trinity Square?
The roar swelled and then diminished. He stood in silence in the gloom between two overhead bulbs which generated opposed shadows of himself on the flagstones.
He began running blindly down the main passageway, fleeing the echoes his soles raised on the flagstones. Once he sprawled full length, bruising a knee and skinning his palms. The passageway swung right and its aspect changed.
There were doors in the walls.
At the far end of the corridor a line of light came from under one of those doors. He stopped running and tried to master his breath and heart. He slowly approached the door with the crack of light. He heard nothing inside at first. Then he made out a faint jingle. He turned the knob and slowly pushed the door open.
He was there, finally, in the white room, seated at a plain wood table under a powerful cone of light, totally absorbed in a Chinese puzzle. Life had returned to his hands. They were much larger than the director ha
d remembered. His fingers ceaselessly interrogated the interlocked elements, the steel spirals, pierced triangles, loops, linked rings. The revived muscles worked in bunched knots beneath the pale skin of his forearms, astonishingly massive now, like his shoulders. Also astonishing was the vigorous growth of the dark gold hair, which almost concealed the criss-cross of stitches in his skull. A click and jingle and his candidate removed a steel spiral from the construction. He placed it accurately alongside the other detached pieces of the Chinese puzzle.
Lorz drew closer and squinted against the glare. He made out on the table things he himself had had to confront and puzzle out months before, among others, Silberman’s cards with their whorls and dots and zigzags and bull’s-eyes; the familiar pictures of a stylized apple-tree, a woman, a sun, waves; plastic blocks of varied shapes and colors. But there were also things he didn’t recall: a chessboard with rigorously centered pieces on the wrong squares; jacks and marbles; other complex steel Chinese puzzles, dozens of them. His candidate undid a tortured twist of steel and then the interlocking spirals. The rest of the puzzle came apart like the petals of a metallic flower.
Suddenly his candidate looked up. Their gaze didn’t mesh. There was a strange failure of focus somewhere: his own dazzled eyes or something wrong with the blue gaze?
Before the director could determine the source of the block, a sharp foreign voice in his back challenged: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
The director turned about and was confronted by an elderly thin-lipped doctor emerging from the gloom of the corner. Silver strands of hair were plastered back on his ruddy skull. Thick lenses magnified his oyster-colored eyes.
“Who are you?” he repeated. “Leave this room immediately.” He was holding a notebook in one hand, a fountain pen in the other. A squat white-uniformed attendant seated next to the doctor’s chair got up and moved forward. The director shrank back. The attendant stopped between the seated candidate and Lorz. The boy paid no attention to the scene. He was now engaged with the chessboard. He was moving the pieces about, sometimes the right way.
It was a mistake, the director stammered, he’d pressed the wrong button, he was lost, what was the way out?
The doctor told him.
When the director turned in the corridor as instructed and pushed the right door there was again sudden illumination: functional mercury-tubes that brought tears to his eyes despite his dark lenses, cleanliness, hurrying interns and nurses. A shiny modern elevator efficiently let him out on the desired ground floor, into the lobby of gay colored plastic.
The incident, by a strange coincidence, marked the end of Lorz’s month-long wanderings.
He learned the following day, 30 September, at 1:30, that Teddy could be visited during the weekend. It was as though the director had been rewarded for his success in the subterranean maze. They evaded his immediate questions: “How is he?” “Who is he?” He also learned that there would be, at best, only one visit a week for him, on Sunday. And, at best, one visit a week for his assistant, on Saturday. Moreover the visit would last no more than a few minutes. However this first visit, “if successful”, might be repeated and the length of the visit lengthened.
He wondered what they meant by a “successful” visit?
Above all, there was the unanswered question: Who is he?