***
3
He took the next day off. When he returned to the office his assistant implicitly disallowed his pretext of fever by repeating what Dr Silberman had told her. It was unfortunate that it had happened at that moment, (“it,” she said, she didn’t remember his name for it). It was sudden and unpredictable and, if you weren’t accustomed to it, alarming. But it was over, he was better now, he hadn’t hurt himself. Still, there would be no more visits for them for two weeks.
Visits? The decision unconsciously reached the day before focused sharply in Lorz’s mind. He felt a kind of liberation. She assumed he was concerned by the news from the hospital. In fact, he wasn’t involved. He was determined never again to see “his candidate” (why “his”? how was he “his” candidate?), Number Nine, Teddy.
Whatever his name, he was inseparable from disaster and obsession. He saw himself, that first time, walking toward the boy and the wall with the bomb ticking away behind it. He saw himself wandering in the subterranean maze of the place of the insane, saw himself shrinking aside from the path into the thorny barberries before the hurtling blind bulk of the other. He remembered the climax of the last visit, the scuffle, the squat power of the attendant, his grunts punctuating those other inhuman sounds.
The director had already freed himself of responsibility for that last incident. Of course the move to 6B had nothing to do with what had followed. He’d read mad things into the sudden weakness of “his candidate’s” game. He’d read intimate message, ironic intention into what was simply a symptom of the crisis which was following its course, building up to frightening outbreak, no connection at all with the checkmate and the touch.
Lorz dismissed the matter from his mind. He asked his assistant if she’d seen his watch in the office. When he woke up that morning it was missing from his bruised left wrist. He’d searched everywhere for the precious watch. It had belonged to his father. She hadn’t seen it.
The void of the following two weeks underscored the degree to which he’d allowed the short Sunday visits to monopolize his life. They’d supplanted or contaminated all his normal activities. He imagined the tombs of his parents, neglected for two months now, plastered with wet dead leaves, his last gift of potted flowers now black skeletons. Instead of applying himself to intellectual improvement he’d spent his Saturdays window shopping, searching for the impossible gift that would finally be accepted. He’d spent the week-days preparing the visit, thinking up impossible strategies of communication, perfecting himself in the other man’s monstrous skills, first with the interlinked metal puzzles then with the chess problems. In his office he’d gone through the empty motions of his professional activities, his mind occupied by the last visit and the visit to come. His assistant had done the real work.
That Sunday he tried to return to the pattern of his former weekends. Once a month, before the intrusion of the weekly visits to Teddy, he would make sandwiches and drive out to the cemetery. There he would sweep and flower his parents’ graves, a painstaking operation. For many years the custom had been, afterwards, to drive out even further to semi-wooded country. Once he had seen a deer. But that was long ago. The woods and fields had been swallowed up by building lots, new motorways, aerodromes. Day after day the city wrote indelible graffiti on the countryside.
As soon as he passed through the gates Lorz realized that the cemetery had been desecrated.
Why was he stunned? One read about it every day in the newspapers. There were no more sanctuaries, not even this one. It had happened the night before, a visitor to a neighboring lot informed him. He was in his early fifties. Somehow the set of his shoulders, the cut of his mustache, the quality of his blue gaze indicated that they shared the same archaic values.
Holding two of the smaller fragments of his wife’s stone, unconsciously trying to fit them together, he said that worse had happened to another grave, the coffin smashed, the body … Lorz tried not to listen. Eyes brimming, the man said: “Nobody is safe from them anywhere, not even the dead. They deserve the death penalty, sir, and slow fire would be too kind.”
Glancing at the big fragment lying on the gravel Lorz saw that the man’s wife had died three months before at the age of thirty-nine. They must have used sledgehammers on the man’s lot. Three of the other stones had been smashed and the railing bashed in three spots.
Lorz was luckier. The stones in his lot were unbroken but desecrated with meaningless tarred graffiti. Even the plastic-coated photographs fastened to the granite, the same as the ones on his desk in the apartment, were covered with the insane graffiti. Or maybe not graffiti, maybe just tar splashes. It reminded the director of the inkblot tests Silberman had administered to him, full of objects one couldn’t confess to seeing. He scratched at the tar over his mother’s face till his fingertips were sore and bleeding. He should have come with his professional equipment on his back to pay his respects to his mother and father.
The old doctor phoned the director the following Friday. He informed him that Teddy was better. The visits could resume that coming weekend. The nagging foreign authoritarian voice didn’t inquire whether he, the director, was coming, whether he was able to, whether he wanted to. For some reason, Lorz didn’t flatly announce his intention never again to see the doctor’s patient. He gave an evasive answer in a distinctly unenthusiastic voice. He assumed the doctor, a mind-man after all, had decoded.
The following Sunday afternoon Lorz drove out to the cemetery again with two large expensive potted briars for them in the car-trunk along with the knapsack. Naturally there was no need for the ladder at that height. But when he got there he saw that the cemetery management had done the job, on the whole satisfactorily. He felt deprived of the cleansing gestures, penitential for his long neglect of his parents. He placed the plants at the foot of the two tombs. He shifted them about for long minutes to get the best effect. He nervously consulted his bare left wrist and wondered what had happened to his watch.
The next day, the old doctor rang him up at the office. He hadn’t decoded after all. He was furious. Why hadn’t the director come? Teddy had been waiting for him, staring at the door, waiting for it to open, said the doctor. He had left his room with no resistance at all this time, with a chess set under his arm and had positioned the pieces, white as well as black. He had waited. And waited. It was the best of signs, the first time he had shown interest in people instead of things. It had been a brief window of opportunity, the first and perhaps the last one, quickly shut. He, the director, had spoiled everything. Hadn’t come. Had not come! Teddy had shown symptoms of upset.
At this information the director, vividly remembering his candidate’s last, spectacular, symptom of upset, told the doctor that he’d decided not to come anymore. Teddy was no relative, he explained, no friend, not even an acquaintance. There was too much mystery. Why was his presence indispensable? He didn’t feel like risking his life again in the interest of science.
Risking his life? The old doctor barked, perhaps a laugh. No, noo, nooo. His harsh voice tried to be soothing as at a child’s boogieman terrors. There was no danger. They were hiding nothing. Teddy needed human presence, people he could accept. They, the director and Miss Ruda, were the last people he had seen, a link to normality, so to speak. He tolerated them. And who else wanted to visit him?
And so forth and so forth, said the old doctor, in sudden irritation. He had things to do. So next Sunday, without fail.
All week long Lorz felt like ringing the old doctor back and informing him of his irrevocable decision. But the following Sunday he stood on the other side of that closed door, the gift clamped firmly beneath his right arm. He hesitated for long seconds. Then he knocked and opened the door.
His candidate didn’t look up from what he was doing. He hadn’t changed. The objects on the table had changed. With a pair of tweezers he was systematically displacing the contents of a disemboweled watch from one green velvet square to another. There must h
ave been a dozen other watches on the table, in various stages of disembowelment. The tweezers deposited a ratchet wheel alongside other wheels. There were pinions, the setting-lever screw, dial-screws, return arms, barrel and barrel arbor, etc. The director was surprised that he was able to recognize and name so many of the parts.
He watched his absorbed candidate for a minute and then said: “Theodore.” No reaction. He said it four or five times, louder each time. After a while, he called him, six or seven times, by his usual name: “Teddy.” He still got no reaction.
Lorz undid the gift-wrapping with a flourish that filled the silence with a joyous Christmas crackling, like a log-fire, and placed the rosewood inlaid board on the table between them. He caressed it with his fingertips. “Look, Teddy,” he said. “It’s for you.” He began removing the ivory and ebony chessmen from the box. “Theodore, look, it’s yours.”
“Too late,” said the old doctor behind him. “Chess is over. It is something else again. Another phase. Watches, as you can see.”
Lorz ignored the sarcastic foreign voice. He went on positioning the white pieces, the exquisite fine-carved ivory, on his side of the board. Then he looked up at his candidate.
The boy was totally absorbed in his task. The tweezers set down the mainspring. It looked like a spiral galaxy. He could have been light-years distant.
Lorz started positioning his candidate’s ebony pieces. He set them down vigorously, for the sound they made. He wondered now for the first time why his candidate had always played black. The tweezers worked on. All of the pieces were positioned. The director waited.
He waited. He saw the price-label still on the box and displaced his anger onto the old doctor.
“Why did you tell me he was waiting for me with a chess set last Sunday?”
“That is the way it was last Sunday. It is not that way this Sunday. It may be yet another way next Sunday. Perhaps something easier in which to participate than watch repairing. We can hope, yes?”
“I doubt very much that you’ll see me here again next Sunday. Or any other Sunday, for that matter. Why do you insist on my presence?”
“Why do you ask the same question always? He accepts you. When he notices you. Don’t sulk. Perhaps next Sunday he will notice you.”
Lorz flushed and was on the point of asking the foreign doctor if he fully appreciated the meaning and implications of the verb “sulk” when suddenly he saw it among the other watches, the empty gold shell at least, with the old leather strap, burst, and the dial with the old fashioned roman-numerals.
He’d lost it at that moment of flight from this same room two weeks before, he understood. It could only be that, the strap caught by the corner of the table, it must have been, which explained the bruise on his wrist. But how had it come into the possession of the other? There was something monstrously insulting about it: all those costly spurned gifts and then this virtual theft.
Why had he taken it apart? The works with the boasted 18 jewels were heaped on another green velvet rectangle. The image of the probing tweezers in the opened watchcase reminded him, first, of a brain operation. Then of his assistant prying in his flat. Then of his mother’s desecrated tombstone.
He turned to the old doctor and stammered: “That’s my watch! He’s ruined my watch! He’s taken it apart!”
Beneath the sense of outrage, he felt faint shame: a schoolboy denouncing a classmate to the teacher. It aggravated his angry reaction. So did the doctor’s alien pedantic sound of denial, tongue clacking three times quick against the roof of his mouth and his reply: “All of the watches are loans from the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. Somewhat involuntary loans, this is true.” He smiled thinly.
Lorz ignored the old doctor now, turned his back to him. He leaned forward toward the other, pointing toward the hollow shell, the heap of parts, and pronounced the words loudly and brutally as so often happened when he felt frustrated.
“That’s my watch you’ve taken apart. I want it back.” He broke off in confusion. “No I don’t, not in a hundred pieces like that I don’t.”
The other didn’t notice the contradictory commands. He didn’t notice anything except the cogs and wheels.
Lorz turned to the old doctor, stammering again out of frustration:
“It’s your responsibility. Take it away from him and give it to the Vocational Rehabilitation people and tell them to repair it. I want it back as it was, put together and keeping correct time. Tell them to phone me when it’s ready. Wednesday at the latest.”
He marched out of the office without looking back at either of them.
The following Wednesday his assistant told him that the old doctor had rung up. Something of the greatest importance had happened. They would be expecting him next Sunday. His presence was indispensable.
Lorz entered the office and immediately saw on the table before his waiting chair twelve tiny packages, obviously watches, all gift-wrapped meticulously. They lay three abreast in four rows, distanced identically to the millimeter. They looked like miniature flag-wrapped coffins after a massacre. “This is important,” breathed the old doctor.
“Which one is mine?” Lorz asked, not realizing the greatness of the thing, unable to check the momentum of his latest preoccupation. “I just want mine.”
Lorz started opening one of the packages. It wasn’t his watch. He was about to put it in the center of the table when the old doctor snapped: “Take them all. He means them for you, gifts. You must reject nothing. You are spoiling things. And you haven’t thanked him. Thank him profusely.”
Lorz obeyed. But his candidate had returned to his latest disemboweled watch.
“Where is your present today?” the old doctor went on nagging. “You have no presents this time? You come empty-handed? No cho-co-lates, no salted nuts, nothing? No reciprocity. You specialize in lost opportunities.”
Lorz stayed with his candidate for another half-hour. He thanked him again, six or seven times, profusely. He commented on the weather. He congratulated him on his skill at watch repairing.
His candidate never looked up a single time.
Before Lorz left, his hands encumbered with the undesired gifts, the old doctor told him that the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit would probably bill him for the eleven watches.
Lorz nearly dropped them. He protested vehemently. What could he do with twelve watches? He didn’t want those watches, except for his own of course. He would return them to the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit.
The doctor overruled him. No, it was necessary that he keep the watches. Teddy was always in the Unit. He would be sure to recognize them. He had a sixth sense for such things. They would be refused gifts for him. Affectively disastrous. It would be advisable during Lorz’s forthcoming visits always to bring the watches in. Teddy might want them back, who knew? His reactions were not invariably predictable.
That happened on Sunday. By Monday morning Lorz had begun to realize the tremendous significance of Theodore’s multiple gifts. He brought the watches, still in their rigorous wrappings, into the office. Normally he avoided discussing his visits to his candidate with his assistant. He’d been discouraged by her undisguised lack of interest in the breakthrough he’d achieved with the chess game. Somewhat offended as well, actually. As for her own visits, usually she made a mystery of went on in the office between her and Teddy on Saturday afternoons, alluding in the vaguest way to “genuine communication.” Lorz suspected that this was an invention.
Lorz couldn’t resist showing her the watches. She glanced at the packages with visible indifference, produced her mysterious tolerant smile and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk where she kept her pink-flowered diary.
She showed him one of Teddy’s geometric drawings. “That was two weeks ago,” she said. “A present from Teddy. I have lots of others at home.” She claimed to make out a face in the drawing. Lorz saw no face and wondered if she hadn’t filched the drawing.
Whether or
not she acknowledged it, the twelve packages represented a second, even more significant, breakthrough. Still, the idea of having to pay for the watches (as though he’d had to purchase Theodore’s gesture) bothered him so much that he decided to go to the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit and discuss the matter. First, he opened the packages and recovered his own watch, whole again and keeping reasonable time.
The Vocational Rehabilitation Unit consisted of four big rooms on either side of a basement corridor. Through the glassed door of the woodworking sub-unit Lorz saw patients producing blond curls from whirring accident proof lathes. A paralytic was daubing glue on joints. In a corner stood unconvincing bare chairs, awaiting varnish. In the game-room two patients with partly paralyzed hands were trying to cope with the counters of a checker-game. Others were elaborating obscure constructions with tiny red-and-white plastic bricks. Lorz saw no chess games going on. All of the sets must have been in the possession of his candidate. In the third room women in wheelchairs with impeccable hair-dos pecked away at typewriters. Behind them was a blackboard with what looked like graffiti but which the director supposed were shorthand symbols.
The fourth room was the watch-repairing sub-unit. There was a long workbench with miniature lathes, vices, green velvet rectangles, watch-parts, lots of Lilliputian calibrated tools. Wheel chaired paraplegics with wasted braced legs and heroic overcompensated torsos bent over the watch-works, faces screwed about the jeweler’s glass in their right eye.
The director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit, seated behind his desk, was a bearish man with an old fashioned square beard. His bushy eyebrows, over eyes like burning coals, accentuated his baldness. His mouth was thin, down-curled, clamped shut, promising ill-natured taciturnity. He looked like an early silent-movie villain or a Gallic serial wife-killer.
Lorz produced the eleven watches and explained his business. As Lorz went on, the man’s face grew dark, a thundercloud, and then without warning he burst into curiously high-pitched laughter. He laughed and laughed and suddenly stopped.
“Why am I laughing?” he said in an almost falsetto voice. “He’s killing me, your Teddy. Driving me insane. Nothing’s safe from him. What will it be next?”
The bearded director turned out to be very loquacious. The presence of what he took to be a fellow-sufferer acted upon him as a stimulant. That was how Lorz learned the facts in the case of the patient they called Teddy. Not, of course, the ultimate facts (would he ever learn those?), but the surface facts concerning the genesis of his obsessions, the clinical symptoms that accompanied them, the reasons for his periodic eclipses. The bearded director seemed surprised at Lorz’s ignorance. Apparently everybody knew about it in the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. They were, it was true, in a privileged position to know.
The first public revelation of the unknown boy’s powers occurred in the Unit with the Chinese puzzles, said the bearded director. He was wrong. He couldn’t know that those powers had already been displayed to Lorz and his assistant seconds before the explosion in the Ideal office.
The bearded director went on. From the start Teddy displayed incredible proficiency. He hardly looked down at puzzles. They flew apart. Gradually a semi-circle of therapists and patients gathered about him. His very virtuosity was disruptive. But the real problems started when it was time for him to leave at noon. He refused to go. He refused to give up the puzzles. Finally nurses and doctors were called in and they found a compromise. He let himself be led away but in possession of all of the Chinese puzzles. The doctors had assured the bearded director that the puzzles would be returned to the Unit that afternoon. Months had gone by and they were still in the boy’s possession.
Later, it was the same for the chess sets. And then the watches. What could the hospital staff do? Remove the “borrowed” objects during his sleep? This was tried, it appeared. When he awoke and found them gone he had “negative reactions.” Among other things, apparently, he refused food. It was true that he also refused food at the height of involvement with his craze. He hardly slept either. So the director of the Unit had heard.
The problem was to break him from the obsessional activity. First the Chinese puzzles. Then chess. Now the watches. What next? It was a pattern. He’d refuse his rehabilitation sessions as well as food and sleep. It was “counter-productive” (the term they used) to interrupt the activity. To save him they administrated massive injections of soporifics and new experimental drugs. He’d fall into deep sleep. Normally this treatment put an end to the particular obsession but at the price of a profound lethargy on awakening. At least he ate, though. Or let himself be fed? They then let up on the drugs and he won back his former energy and found another obsession, found it here in the Vocational Obsession Center unfortunately.
The bearded director broke into peals of soprano laughter and then returned to his real concern. The Unit was being plundered. What would it be next? Good thing the woodworking lathes weighed a ton and were bolted down. The annual budget hadn’t made allowances for such happenings.
That was what Lorz learned in the Unit. As for the eleven watches, the talk of having to pay for them turned out to be more of the old doctor’s sadistic humor. In a month or so Lorz would be able to return the watches, said the director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. Teddy would probably be gone by then.
“Gone?” Lorz asked. “Gone where?”
The bearded director, smiling slightly, opened his large hands wide and empty in a gesture confessing ignorance.
“Some institution or other,” he said.
His twin derelictions deeply troubled Lorz. Theodore, according to the old doctor, had twice been receptive and twice he, Lorz, had unforgivably, criminally even – was the word too strong? – botched things. He’d abandoned him one Sunday. The following Sunday he’d been unable to reciprocate his candidate’s gift. Either gesture, he felt, might have triggered a breakthrough toward normality. The director pictured the gray dank walls of “some institution or another.” He decided to make amends the following Sunday.
But how could he capture the other’s attention? How could he recreate the intimacy of the chess games? By this time, bitter about it, he thought he knew an infallible way to get his candidate out of his exclusive dialogue with cogs and springs. On his way to the hospital for a routine check-up, Lorz bought the cheapest watch he could find (not as cheap as all that) and had it gift-wrapped. He was sure that because of the money and the yearning it had cost him it would be ignored, sure his candidate would be on to something else by the next visit.
This was half a sour joke. But an hour after he purchased the watch, Lorz encountered the director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit in the hospital cafeteria and learned that, sure enough, his intended gift had exercised its negative charm.
“More of the same,” the director confided, brushing cake-crumbs off his square beard. “Except worse.”
Teddy had shown up again, a sure sign he was off watches now and would be on to something new. He’d wandered about the Unit with that familiar empty pre-obsessional expression the bearded director had got to know so well. Finally the boy stopped before an abandoned jigsaw puzzle a patient had been working on and had broken up. It could have been a worse fixation. He’d stared down at the heap of pieces for a few minutes, not moving. Then he sat down and began assembling the pieces at incredible speed. Granted, he had the model to go by on the box-cover, the Spanish Beauty with the combs and castanets. But to have pieced her together in seven minutes when the box gave forty minutes as par! Before he’d finished, all activity in the sub-unit had halted and they were grouped about him, therapists and patients. Disruption again.
“Oh, he’s a case, all right,” said the bearded director, with grudging admiration. He pursued his account. The trouble started after the performance, the final piece set in place. For then, of course, the normal procedure was to break up the puzzle and to dump the pieces back in the box, ready for the next patient. But Teddy resiste
d any approach to the assembled Spanish Beauty. He seized the wrist of the therapist who tried to take it away from him. His grip had even left a bruise. So they let him keep it. What else could they do? Overpower him? The old story.
Early next morning, instead of going to the hydrotherapy pool Teddy had returned to the Unit and gone straight to the locker where the other puzzles were kept. There was no reasoning with him. And he was “strong as an ox.” He took all of the puzzles away. It was funny, from one point of view. It was sad, basically. His condition, clearly, was worsening. How long could they keep him here?
The question was rhetorical. Neither the bearded director nor Lorz could know that a decision was imminent.
On Friday the old doctor phoned Ideal and commanded Lorz to come, not to the familiar office, but to Room 307, and not on Sunday, but tomorrow, Saturday, 25 October at 3:30pm, punctually. His presence as well as Miss Ruda’s was indispensable. Had he carefully marked down the time, the day, the room?
Lorz hung up and spoke to his assistant about it. She knew all about the forthcoming visit. The fact that it was taking place in Room 307 was a very positive thing, the old foreign doctor had told her. Teddy continued to eat and sleep, when he did eat and sleep, in Room 416. Since Teddy insisted on keeping the things he’d worked on, space problems had developed. So he’d been given a disused storage room, Room 307, to work and keep his things in. They’d removed the lock, otherwise he might have locked himself in. He had to be coaxed out for the rehabilitation sessions. As it was, he placed a chair against the door. It was his fortress. Till last week he hadn’t tolerated the presence of others there.
But last Saturday she’d sneaked into that room and had stayed there for twenty minutes with him, much more than tolerated, until a nurse raised a fuss and made her leave. The old doctor scolded her until she told him what had happened during those twenty minutes. She’d talked to Teddy. A few times he’d actually stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. And finally he’d offered her another drawing and a pencil and maybe had smiled at her, his first smile. The old doctor had said it was the new drug, “Tex-something,” but she knew it wasn’t just that. The doctor had phoned her yesterday evening and had said that maybe their presence might tip the balance. The thing was to get Teddy to give up the jigsaw puzzles, to get him to eat and to leave the room. He’d sounded almost optimistic. She was sure it was going to be a turning point.
“Let’s hope so,” Lorz said and told her what the director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit had said about Theodore’s probable future.
“Institution, he says? What institution?” As far as her mask allowed him to judge she seemed on the point of tears.
“Some institution or other,” he replied.
Lorz suspected that the story of being summoned to “tip the balance” was another of her inventions. But when he got to Room 307 the next day, holding his latest gift carefully horizontal (it had started dripping), the story was implicitly confirmed. The old doctor and his squat shadow were seated in the corridor outside the door along with his assistant who had arrived a few minutes before her employer. She was staring down at the floor, her lips moving silently. Lorz guessed that she was praying again.
Apparently the old doctor didn’t want to enter the room. Or didn’t dare? They – he and Miss Ruda – were to go in, he ordered. They were to talk to Teddy, try to convince him to eat, to leave the room, to go outside in the park. He would be more receptive this time. There had been encouraging signs. They should leave the door ajar and not be afraid.
Lorz pushed open the door against the symbolic resistance of the chair. His assistant followed him into the room. They greeted the boy and sat down side by side facing him. He was working at the great table, crouched over a jigsaw puzzle. He didn’t look up. Teddy hadn’t eaten or slept for twenty-four hours now, she whispered.
Lorz observed him for a while. His hands froze a second above the chaos of colored fragments spread out before him, then struck like snakes, chose and fitted, then froze, then struck, chose and fitted. Already he’d created a great number of islets of fitted fragments on a large rectangle of plywood.
On the table, vast enough for a monastery refectory, there were maybe two dozen watch-works, coiled hearts pulsing, next to the open cases and the miniscule watch-repairing tools; piles of unopened jig-saw puzzles, some in their original unbroken cellophane wrapping; a scrap-heap of Chinese puzzles, solved and undone, all of them; seven chess-sets with the pieces in the position of his triumph over himself; boxes of crayons and pencils; reams of typewriting paper and everywhere those drawings with geometric figures. There were so many of them that they’d also been placed on the floor in strict, complicated, incomprehensible order.
Also on the floor was a completed jigsaw puzzle (a prancing white horse) glued to a rectangle of plywood. Next to it lay a sprinkling of fine nails, a tiny-headed hammer, a pot of glue, joining-tools and a picture-frame in clamps. The frame, once completed, would presumably receive the white horse and be promoted to the wall, joining some twenty other framed jigsaw puzzles, hanging in another strange private order which contradicted the banality of seascapes, autumnal woods, cascades, famed chutes and ornamental fountains. All these too had been definitively glued to rectangles of plywood. Lorz thought briefly of the bearded director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit.
The hands stopped. The boy pulled out of his absorbed crouch.
“Oh, lovely, Teddy, just lovely,” his assistant breathed.
The completed jigsaw puzzle was a reproduction of an 18th century pastoral painting. In the foreground, from the vantage-point of a grassy flower-spangled eminence, a wigged gentleman in jacket and breeches of a blue imitated by the sky leaned on a walking stick, hands clasped on the golden pommel, admiring the harmony of the scene laid out before him. Pink evening clouds, imprinted with birds, arched above a landscape bathed in ideal golden light. A thatched farmhouse stood in the middle of tidy fields where rustics labored decoratively between shocks of wheat. A wagon heaped high with hay raised golden dust on a road skirting the shores of a lake where a boy was angling from a boat with shipped oars. In the distance mountains stood hazy blue and received the setting sun.
The director could understand his candidate’s yearning to preserve the scene with glue and plywood, to oppose the lines of fracture, the break-up of exquisite order into chaos.
Theodore was staring down at the golden landscape. His hands lay still on the table. Taking advantage of that moment of suspended activity, Lorz’s assistant got up, quickly rounded the table and came up behind the boy.
“No,” said the old doctor, but no urgency to it.
Absorbed by his candidate, Lorz hadn’t noticed that the doctor had slipped into the room with the attendant. The two of them were seated in a corner, next to five empty chairs placed in a row as if awaiting further spectators for some intimate performance.
The old doctor said “no” again – but again with no conviction – as the director’s assistant touched the boy’s massive shoulder, saying, “Teddy, Teddy.” Now she put her arm lightly about his shoulder (“Don’t do that,” said the old doctor, perfunctorily). She bent her smiling illuminated face toward his. From where Lorz sat, the spout of hair clasped by rubber bands looked like a bleached caricature of one of the shocks of wheat in the landscape.
She started whispering to him. “It’s beautiful, Teddy. Lovely. But it’s finished now. Come on out. Take a walk with me in the park.”
It was the long-ago voice she used to produce when talking to one of the mangy cats that haunted the Ideal staircase or to filthy Subcon beggar-children on the street-corner. A voice somehow pathetic in the disproportion between its total offering and the minimal response of the recipient of the sardine or the coin. She got even less response now.
She repeated her invitation, saying that the park was even more beautiful than the picture and it was real. This thing was beautiful but it was just a photograph.
A photograph of a painting. And the painter probably imagined it all. They pasted it on cardboard and then they cut it up. It’s not real. It’s a beautiful day outside, real sunshine.
Her voice went on and on without pause. She’d seized the initiative and held on to it. Her voice had an almost hypnotic effect on Lorz. Teddy was still staring down at the puzzle. The director, cocking his head, also stared down at it. She was saying the things that had to be said to the boy. But it wasn’t true and one could believe that if her words penetrated his mind (which wasn’t at all certain) he was rejecting what she said about the superiority of the park outside, with its funereal bedding flowers and cripples, to the golden perfection on the table. One could almost understand his refusal to leave it.
“First you have to eat,” she was now saying. “You must be terribly hungry, Teddy. Look what I brought you.”
She removed from her shoulder bag something wrapped in expensive-looking tissue paper. She unveiled a great bunch of violet grapes. “It’s for you. But leave a few for me.” She dangled it before his face, revolved it slowly, all the while praising the fruit. Turning, the grapes reflected the overhead mercury lamps as a multitude of tiny rectangular suns. The boy continued staring down at the bird-imprinted pink clouds. Finally she placed the bunch of grapes on the corner of the table.
“Don’t you like grapes?” she asked, blinking. “Aren’t you hungry?”
She paused, lips parted, staring at him, visibly trying to think up a new approach. Finally she picked up the bunch of grapes again. It resumed its slow useless revolutions.
Wasn’t he hungry? Her question aroused the director out of inertia. He reached for his own gift, the new one, lying on the corner of the table. He undid the string and removed the stained paper and the plastic prong. He opened the flap of the waxed cardboard box gingerly. His mouth, unaffected by his growing despair, watered at the liberated fragrance of the expensive fine-sliced raw beef bathing in spiced blood sauce. He’d bought it as an alternate gift to the watch, sure it too would be rejected, but at least it was something he, Lorz, had a taste for, unlike the nauseous self-sacrificing sweets and nuts piling up in his study.
“You have to eat,” he said, weakly echoing her words and imploring tone.
Muscles tensed for recoil, he reached out toward the boy’s bare arm. At the last moment his hand stopped short. Contact would have changed things, he felt, but he couldn’t.
“Look what I brought you,” he said.
He harpooned a slice of the meat with the prong. Accompanying it with the box to catch the drippings, he approached the meat to the other’s absorbed averted face. He got no more reaction with his offering than his assistant had with hers.
Lorz heard footsteps behind him, low voices, the scrape of chairs. The seats were being occupied as in a chamber theatre. Silberman was there now, also the young sharp-nosed doctor and two unknown men who looked like administrators with alphabetically filed features. They glanced with professional impassivity at the simultaneous offerings of revolving grapes and bloody meat to an averted contemplative face.
The director withdrew the proffered slice and replaced it in the box, which he set down on the table again. He leaned back in defeat, now understanding the purpose of this gathering. All of the concerned doctors and administrators (concerned in no humane sense) had been summoned to note and certify the hopelessness of Number Nine’s case and later to select the appropriate institution.
Everything would happen very rapidly now. This was the last time he would ever see his candidate. Very soon, perhaps tomorrow or this very day, Theodore would vanish. All of the objects of present and past obsession would be returned to their rightful square-bearded proprietor, the chess sets, the Chinese puzzles, the (unglued) jigsaw puzzles, including the golden landscape, broken up into chaos. But not the watches. The watches he, Lorz, would keep, at whatever price, at least that as a memory, a memorial. For Theodore would be displaced too, only much further, locked up safely somewhere like the puzzles and chessmen.
Where? Lorz would never find out. The baffling secrecy that surrounded the boy would be maintained. They would never tell him the name of the institution, just as they’d already refused to divulge his candidate’s whereabouts for a whole month. To locate him it had taken Lorz weeks in a maze of corridors within the limited area of the hospital complex. “Some institution or other” could be located anywhere. How could he visit all of the cities and towns in the land? A lifetime wouldn’t suffice.
The boy should flee. But hadn’t he already fled into linked bits of metal, chessboard squares, cogs and springs, and now the golden landscape? That kind of flight was the reason for his presence here, for his imminent and definitive incarceration somewhere else. If he (Theodore) were able to know why they were all gathered here, he’d flee physically. Who could oppose that power? But of course if he could realize, there’d be no necessity for being locked up.
Anyhow, flee where? The director’s mind sought theoretical places of refuge and solitude in the city outside the hospital walls. He saw the underground in the dawn hours, silent except for the escalators rolling on and on in the white emptiness. He saw the dripping walls of the sewer.
Then he imagined the two disused rooms in his flat, unopened for decades now, crammed with hacked furniture. For an instant the director pictured him there concealed amid the broken furniture in the musty darkness, safe behind that lock, the latched shutters and windows, the quadruple bolts of the front door, like something precious secured against thieves. Now Lorz’s mind rejected the assimilation of his candidate to the broken inert things he’d so long resembled.
He imagined that room emptied of the old furniture, three walls painted white, the fourth yellow, shutters and windows flung open, sunshine streaming in on him. He touched the boy’s bare arm. He gripped it. The muscles beneath his fingers stiffened into rock hardness. The director’s fingers answered that response.
“Look!” he commanded.
The boy obeyed.
The director at last possessed the deep blue eyes with the flecked irises.
“You’ve got to eat,” he said again, but not her way, this time not imploringly. It was a command. He took the waxed cardboard box, held it out to him and the victory was almost too easy. Had his ambition been too limited? he would later wonder. Couldn’t he have commanded the other to speak and say his name?
His candidate leaned forward and accepted the offering. He disengaged his arm from the director’s grasp and took the cardboard box. He took all of the meat with his fingers and crammed the dripping mass into his mouth. He bolted it down. He tilted the box and drank up the blood sauce. His throat worked powerfully. A few drops fell on the golden evening sky.
“Yes,” said the old doctor in an oddly triumphant voice. “You see.”
Yes, they saw. And would see more. Were seeing more.
The director scolded the boy. The immensity of his joy and glory received spontaneous expression not in praise for the boy’s docility but in gentle scolding. Again he gripped his arm, reestablishing the essential physical contact.
“You haven’t left me a single slice, Theodore. I thought we’d share it. I gave you all that. Now what are you going to give me? Why don’t you give me the puzzle?”
Lorz immediately amended the suggestion to command, leaving no room for refusal.
“Give me the puzzle,” he said and couldn’t wait for the message to be processed for fear of losing initiative and momentum. So when the boy’s hand failed to respond instantaneously, the director reached across the table with his free hand and summoned the strength to lift the rectangle of plywood with the puzzle and set it down in front of himself.
“Like that,” he said. “Now you do it. Give me another puzzle.”
This time there was no processing. The boy instantly took the topmost puzzle on the pile, a cathedral, and offered it to the director who stiffened his face against tears. Perhaps this gave his features a
stern or even a ferocious expression. But if he tried to smile it would all burst out.
The boy kept gazing at him. Wasn’t Theodore expecting something in return? Lorz calculated. He had two puzzles, the boy one box of meat, now empty. The count was unequal. He felt the contact loosening, perhaps because his hand was no longer gripping his candidate’s arm. He had to act quickly.
He fumbled at the strap of the watch, removed it and ordered the boy to take it. The boy took it. “It’s yours, Theodore, we’re even now. I shouldn’t have taken it back. Don’t take it apart this time,” he added apprehensively, seeing the boy examining the dial closely. “Wear it.” His candidate continued studying the dial.
The director took the watch back with one hand, as gently as he could, and with the other seized his candidate’s muscular forearm. He strapped the watch on the boy’s wrist, inserting the buckle-prong in the first of the strap-holes, careful not to catch the golden hairs.
“It’s yours now,” he said, trying to keep the jubilation out of his voice. “I gave it to you. Give me something in return. Give me another puzzle,” he ordered.
Instantly the powerful hands offered him another puzzle-box. The director took it and placed it on top of the cathedral puzzle on the table before him.
“Give me another,” he ordered.
Theodore did. And then, no need for command, another and another. And still more. Now the last of the puzzles crowned the swaying pile in front of the director. His candidate continued with the watches, the works and cases, the green felt rectangles, the miniature tools.
“Take them!” the hateful foreign voice commanded behind him. “In your hands, in your arms! Everything!”
The director obeyed as best he could. But the trouble was, his candidate didn’t stop. Now he gave Lorz the tiny-headed hammer, joining tools, the prancing horse. It seemed to be a new obsession: giving.
The boy gave. He gave and gave. Didn’t stop giving. Now got up and went over, with perfect coordination, to the wall. Craning his neck and peering over the top boxed puzzle which reached his nostrils, the director saw his candidate stripping the wall bare of the framed puzzles. He gathered them in with the same incredible rapidity with which he’d assembled the pieces of the golden landscape.
He came over and placed the framed puzzles on top of the boxed puzzles and watches, progressively immuring the director whose arms trembled beneath the weight.
In a few seconds he heard the boy approaching again. “Oh, that’s nice, but don’t you want to keep some of them, Theodore?” he murmured fearfully, wondering if the old doctor had overheard him. Now a great handful of the pieces of the Chinese puzzles (he guessed by the sound, unable to see) joined the rest with a merry Christmas jingle. Would his candidate stop with his own things? Suppose the idea occurred to him to add the chairs or – he had the strength for it – the gigantic table?
He saw himself crushed by his own success. His arms trembled. The gifts started spilling over on to the floor. He squatted rigidly to gather them up and lost more.
Could that be laughter he heard from behind him? Surely not laughter, not at this moment.
His assistant hurried over. She picked the things up and relieved him of some of the framed puzzles. She kept it all in her arms. She thanked Teddy as though she’d been the recipient of the gifts. The old doctor whispered something to the squat attendant who left the room and seconds later returned pushing a wheeled stretcher. With the help of the attendant Lorz transferred the remaining armful of gifts onto it. His assistant kept hers.
The boy ignored the stretcher. He continued bringing the things to the director, much lighter things now, the nails, the pot of glue, more joining tools, the cryptic geometric drawings. The director placed them on the stretcher alongside the great jumble.
He tried to combat a stupidly trivial worry. How would he carry it away? What would he do with it all? The old doctor was sure to make him keep these new things as he’d made him keep the eleven watches. He couldn’t help thinking of the taxi, the fare, the killing trips up and down the five flights carting the stuff into his flat.
Then he was angry with himself for dwelling on the secondary negative aspects of his immense victory, just as he’d stupidly done with the watches. What did it matter anyhow if they were all piled up in his study? It wouldn’t be a radical change. On entering Room 307 he’d been struck by the way it resembled his own study, chaotic with objects that had corresponded to his candidate’s passing crazes, necessarily his own too: the three chess-sets, his old one, the pocket-set, the expensive rose-wood inlayed refused set; the two volumes of Schlechter and Moch and the other books on the game he’d bought; the scores of Chinese puzzles; the spurned boxes of chocolates, pralines, nuts, etc.
But would there be room for the new lot? Wouldn’t it block the doorway? Unless he could persuade his assistant to take it all. He’d tell her that they were almost as much for her as for him he thought, with a rare touch of pity for her. He’d just seen her placing “her” gifts on the table and, believing herself unobserved, picking up three of the geometric drawings and secreting them into her bag.
He heard them talking behind him.
They’d at last emerged from their stupor. He caught only one word, totally unfamiliar, in the babble. “Dexitrine,” he thought. It sounded like the name of a female dog. Or a drug? Surely a drug. Why were they talking of such things at such a moment?
He turned toward the two administrators, the three doctors, the audience of his afternoon performance. He disciplined his face into an expression of moderate but ironic triumph.
Excellent, said the old silver-haired doctor with an expression of grudging satisfaction to Silberman, ignoring Lorz altogether. He said, in a low voice, things about dosage. He looked at Lorz.
“You get on quite well with him,” his old thin lips conceded. “Both of you,” he added, looking past Lorz. The others were looking in the same direction.
Lorz turned about. His assistant was guiding his candidate, like a blind man, toward the door. Absurdly small alongside his muscular bulk, she had her hand on his shoulder, her arm uplifted in a gesture that for some reason reminded Lorz of the female physiotherapist’s gesture in the pool that other day, guiding him out of artificial buoyancy into the reality of gravity. Her face was uplifted toward his and she was whispering unintelligible things.
They disappeared into the corridor. Lorz wanted to follow.
The old doctor sharply whispered: “No.”
There was no disobeying that voice. Lorz stood confused amid the plethora of presents, empty shells of overcome obsessions, his possessions, all his now. There was silence in the room for a while. His fingers felt sticky from his candidate’s glue-pot. No one was looking at him and his possessions piled up on the wheeled stretcher.
The young doctor whispered something. The spectators got up with a scrape of chair legs. They went over to the window. Lorz followed them. Their backs blocked his vision. They were perfectly immobile and silent, waiting.
The director stood still a moment and then went out of the room into the corridor. He stopped before a small window. He pressed his forehead against the cold pane to gain a maximum view. Down below to the left was the main entrance, the winding graveled drive, skirted by flowerbeds, now muted chrysanthemums. It seemed like yesterday, the primroses and daisies, when he himself had been a hospital inmate. Time was going by very fast.
They came out together, her face uplifted toward his and talking. He could see her lips moving but couldn’t guess at the words. They advanced out of the shade of the building into the sunshine. The boy flung up his arm and covered his eyes against so much sky. The late October day was already declining. It was the softest of reddish sunshine, but after those months of darkness and artificial light it must have been a dazzle to his eyes. He, Edmond Lorz, remembered how it had been. She was holding his arm, guiding him with great care, concentrating on their steps now, her lips parted, frowning
with the immensity of her responsibility. It was somehow familiar. Before they reached the bench the boy removed his arm from his eyes. She kept her hand on his shoulder and went on talking to him. He looked down at her, unblinking, attentive. Already his eyes must have become accustomed to the light of the sky.
***