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2
Dec 9. Saw the nurse. She was alone in the room with him when he opened his eyes and stared at her and spoke. “Base” she says she understood. Then a long pause, she says. Then: “It.” Then another long pause. Finally, she thinks, a question: “Why?”
The words had gnawed at Lorz for days. He grappled with them in the small hours of the night. He resorted to metaphysical exegesis to make sense of them. It: perhaps the mysterious unnamable Something that was at the Base of the universe. Why? The ultimate question, naturally. It sounded profound but did it make sense?
In the third day of the enigma, while brushing his teeth, the solution came to him in a flash. What the boy had said, slurred, wasn’t “Base, it, why?” but of course “Basic White”, the phrase that Lorz had half-jokingly employed at the beginning of the magazine sessions.
Despite the loss of the metaphysical dimension, he felt keen satisfaction at his solitary possession of the true meaning of the boy’s first communication. Satisfaction also that those first words were a repetition of what he, Lorz, had pronounced. Not even his assistant had been able to make sense of them.
But those two words weren’t followed by others. No one heard the boy say anything else.
One day, marked by the season’s first snow flurries, briefly whitening the park outside the window of Room 404, the director found the boy crouched over the previous week’s issue. That had been December 14, the log reminded him.
Theodore had begun rectifying the world on his own, with no need for guidance or prompts, page after page. Little found grace before his brush. His corrections were radical, sometimes disturbing. Why crab claws instead of hands here, why flames instead of hair there? One full-page photograph was completely effaced with Basic White. The worst of the photographs had salvageable details that normally his brush spared. But not here. And he’d drawn nothing on the void white surface. The director wondered what had merited total obliteration and had admitted no transformation.
Lorz grasped the full extent of Theodore’s progress only when he learned that for two months now the boy had been going outside regularly. The red asterisk before the entry for December 16 communicated the incredible information. Most of Teddy’s week-day activities now took place outside the hospital, his assistant informed him. She’d struck up an acquaintanceship with a Volunteer Worker who had told her all about it. The sad middle-aged woman had confided that her own son had died in the hospital at the age of nineteen three years before and now she did this. She allowed Dorothea to accompany them at a safe distance in order not to distract Teddy as they went shopping in a supermarket. There was also that squat attendant behind them. Teddy had wandered about with the shopping list and his cart like any other customer, unhesitatingly choosing, weighing, queuing up, unloading his purchases on the check-out belt, paying.
Lorz found it hard to imagine this radical transformation of his candidate, pushing his trivial cart from potatoes to tinned fruit salad after the miracles with puzzles, pictures and chessmen. There was bitter irony in the fact that Theodore was being forced to integrate that world of ugliness he obliterated in the magazine.
Lorz got to know the Volunteer Worker. In the hospital cafeteria she told him all about those exercises in normality that for some reason had been kept secret from him and his assistant. They, the professionals, she explained, had been preparing for this programmed stage for months. Teddy had first been placed in SIUS. At Lorz’s blank face she explained: “Simulations of Independent Urban Situations”: purchases, reading bus-route maps, going on errands within the hospital grounds, preparing simple meals for himself in the kitchens that were part of the rehabilitation equipment, etc. All of this was part of the “struggle for autonomy.”
The first outings beyond the hospital gates were exercises in STSA. “Short-Term Semi-Autonomy,” she added immediately. She was fond of the technical abbreviations. They allowed her to imagine, Lorz guessed, that she was a professional mender of the broken instead of a bereaved volunteer. She explained STSA: the sort of accompanied activities outside the hospital that Miss Ruda had witnessed. She called it “preparations for total autonomy.” She also called it “making do with what was left.” To Lorz the phrase sounded like a description of life, anybody’s, universally applicable.
One thing alarmed him in her account. Teddy had to learn to get about in the city on his own, she said, use the bus and the underground. Lorz objected that the underground had become “a hotbed of violence.” She laughed and said that she felt she had a bodyguard with Teddy next to her. Anyhow, someone else from the hospital always accompanied them wherever they went.
Finally she spoke of the two negative aspects of the situation to date.
She confirmed what his assistant had already found out. Outside of the nurse who claimed to have heard three slurred words, no one had heard Teddy speak. But one didn’t really have to open one’s mouth to manage in a city, the Volunteer Visitor added.
Lorz readily agreed. He thought of some of his own weekends when not a sound got past his lips for lack of necessity. He thought of the hordes of “guest-workers” who managed in the capital without any knowledge of the host language. The standard urban situations were self-explanatory. They dispensed with the need for words. Before the supermarket check-out one was defined as a payer and one wordlessly paid the electronically indicated sum. Before the bars of the underground teller one was defined as a purchaser of a ticket, the price of which was clearly printed. Before the underground teenage thug with the drawn knife one was defined as a victim and went down bleeding wordlessly. She shouldn’t take him there.
So his candidate was learning to manage in the outside world with no need for words, said the Volunteer Worker. More troubling was the employment problem, she said. Even if he was capable of the basic reflexes of urban survival, for them to envision an outpatient status and an independent flat he had to be employable. Not that money was anything of a problem for him, so far as the immediate future was concerned in any case. He too received compensation money, deposited monthly in a special account. It was managed for him by the “Tutelage Board.” But beyond financial considerations, work was the key to “relational integration.” It was the precondition for an end to institutional dependency.
For the present it was out of the question trying to employ Teddy in other than in “SPWS” (Subsidized Protected Work Situations). And even here the results had not been good, said the sad-faced woman. He’d already been tried out on the watch-repair job, for which he seemed ideally suited, but this “hadn’t been a hundred percent satisfactory.”
Lorz instantly understood: a fiasco. By this time he was adept at decoding. He wondered if once again the boy had insisted on keeping the repaired watches for renewed dissection and assemblage, an unending cycle, or even taking those of his work-mates. The director never found out. The Volunteer Worker didn’t know.
She had more details about the second job. The hospital authorities had agreed to try him out for a few hours a day in the garbage-collecting service. Teddy was strong as an ox and didn’t mind getting up at dawn. The first early morning collection round came to a practical halt because of the boy’s “perfectionism.” The slightest apple-paring, scrap of tin-foil, speck of coffee grounds unavoidably spilled during the transfer of the contents of the bins to the revolving maw of the garbage truck were the object of almost pedantic attention on his part. He wouldn’t allow the garbage truck to go on before everything had been cleaned. His work was thorough, so thorough that at the end of the week they congratulated him over and over, a way of discharging him.
He still didn’t know how to compromise. It had been hard to dissuade him from showing up for the dawn patrol. For the next week, before the compulsion wore off, he warred on scraps of paper and cigarette butts and pigeon droppings in the hospital park. Nobody dared flick away a smoked cigarette in his presence.
In a week or so they would try him out on a painti
ng job, again within the hospital. Perhaps it would go better than the garbage-collecting job.
The woman didn’t sound optimistic.
Then there was an abrupt end to Theodore’s outings, an end to the newsmagazine experiment, an end to the visits. The boy disappeared. The log entry under December 21 tersely recounted the reason.
The old foreign doctor had rung the director up for the last time and summoned him to his office. Lorz knocked and entered. With his usual calculated rudeness, Dr V didn’t look up from what he was reading behind his desk. Lorz’s presence was acknowledged only by a stabbing index finger assigning him to the chair opposite. The doctor was examining one of the newsmagazines the director and his candidate had corrected. Lorz sat down with a sinking feeling.
The old doctor’s harsh breathing, like reiterated expressions of exasperation, filled the office. He leafed through the magazine. His thin lips were pursed in distaste. At certain pages his oyster-gaze shot over the rims of his glasses at the director.
Finally he pronounced: “You do not like titties.”
The director was dumbfounded by the vulgar slang term, rendered even more grotesque by the foreign accent. Before he could express his indignation, the doctor pursued.
“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?”
Who could have told the doctor that he had taught the boy the new activity? He thought he knew. He was certain he knew.
Lorz tried to justify the procedure as a means of establishing contact with Teddy. He also mentioned his own occupation, which had almost been the boy’s.
“I know about your occupation,” said the old doctor. “Your peculiar occupation. But this, what you have done, or rather what you have taught Teddy to do, is not the removal of graffiti. This is the removal of the photograph itself. Part of the photograph. Mainly titties. Which is graffiti itself!” he cried, triumphantly for some reason. “Not additive but subtractive graffiti,” he added. He grinned on long yellowed skull teeth in satisfaction at his formulation.
“I’m not your patient,” the director muttered. “I’m nobody’s patient.”
The old doctor ignored the interruption. “What has given you such an idea? Talk to him, yes, show him flowers and mountains as does Miss Ruda, perhaps, if this makes you happy. But do not attempt therapy. Leave such things to us. You have done perhaps irreparable harm. What has given you such an idea? You are perhaps a doctor? You have made long and specialized studies in medicine? You have in your office your framed diploma?”
The old doctor formulated the accusation against Lorz.
There had been the obsessions with the Chinese puzzles, the chess games, the jigsaw puzzles, he said. Then months of gratifying progress. Now, because of Lorz, a relapse into obsession. An obsession with magazine corrections. More and more the magazines were monopolizing the boy’s daytime activities to the detriment of his rehabilitation sessions. It was the familiar worsening downward spiral. Teddy would even get up in the middle of the night and work over the magazine. He was getting less and less sleep. He had begun to refuse food. Finally, once again, they had had to inject soporifics, experiment with new drugs. All because of Lorz.
The old doctor halted and gasped harshly.
The relentless voice momentarily stilled, Lorz was able to reflect on the hopelessness of his candidate’s uncompromising efforts with the magazines. In any issue there were hundreds of news photographs, hundreds of advertisements. His candidate’s judgments were severe and a great proportion of these illustrations were rectified. Each averaged at least five minutes of work. The boy hadn’t finished one issue when the next came out with its inexhaustible imperfections demanding correction. Necessarily he lagged behind. To catch up he had to sacrifice rehabilitation activities, then sleep, finally food. And there were other newsmagazine titles that he was sure to discover. What then?
Lorz recalled his own beginnings with the posters. What his candidate was trying to do with the magazines was almost as hopeless as trying to achieve a definitive cleansing of the posters in the capital’s sixty-three underground stations, 9,369 of them at any given moment. And they changed every three weeks. Worse, unlike the newsmagazine photographs which, once rectified, stayed that way, the posters were no sooner cleansed than the vandals assaulted them again. An army of dedicated operators laboring day and night wouldn’t have coped. In the opening months of his underground activities, not yet a commercialized vocation, he, Lorz, had known this mad temptation to let nothing go by.
There was no end to it. You had to learn to compromise.
“You do more harm than good, finally,” resumed the old doctor. “Perhaps this will be the end of your association with Teddy. I will reflect on the question.”
Lorz stared for a moment into those magnified colorless eyes. He stood up and left without a word.
Two weeks went by.
On January 4, as the log recorded, his assistant was given permission to see Theodore. She told her employer about it the next day.
“You wouldn’t recognize him,” she said, her face illuminated. “I don’t want to spoil it for you. You’ll see tomorrow.”
Lorz wasn’t so sure. When he phoned the hospital to arrange the visit he steeled himself to hear in administratively neutral language that there were no more visits for him. However nothing had changed.
But the next day at five he found Room 416 empty. He was told that Teddy was with Dr V.
Two days later his assistant again recounted the extraordinary progress of his candidate. It was like describing a banquet to a starving man. The director rang up the hospital and complained bitterly of the mix-up on Monday. The anonymous woman’s voice expressed vague surprise. She wasn’t aware of the incident. Yes, of course he could see Teddy tomorrow at four.
The following day at four he came up against a locked door. He heard a slow unintelligible voice from inside. He knocked. There was no response. The voice continued. The director went on knocking, louder and louder. Behind the locked door the old doctor’s querulous voice, a second voice, asked who it was.
Lorz identified himself. He mentioned his appointment with Teddy.
The old doctor said that he was disturbing them, he should go away, he had already been told that there would be no more visits for him, ever.
Behind that hateful painfully gasping voice, the other voice went on. It could only be his candidate’s. What was he saying? The director raised his fist against the door but before he could pound and pound a nurse came and he was forced to leave.
Lorz visited Silberman’s office the next day for intercession on his behalf. At the very beginning of his plea, as soon as he mentioned the foreign doctor’s name, he learned that intercession wouldn’t be necessary.
Silberman made a small gesture of powerlessness and informed Lorz that Dr Vinovski had succumbed to a heart attack the day before. He had been suffering from a heart condition for years. He should have let up. The attack had occurred during a session with Teddy. It might have had a bad effect on the boy. As it was, even though he was staring at the dead man when the nurse opened up Teddy probably hadn’t even realized what had happened.
Dr Silberman paused a moment and added that it wasn’t the worst way to go, suddenly and peacefully, in the midst of what one liked best to do. Dr V had been fascinated by Teddy’s case. Just the day before he’d rung up Silberman. He’d told him that Teddy had spoken again, not incoherent words this time. He’d been greatly excited. Too excited, as it turned out.
“What words?” Lorz asked, trying to conceal his own excitement. Silberman didn’t know. “But he must have written it down somewhere,” Lorz protested. He no longer even tried to hide his excitement. “He must have a file. Maybe he recorded it on tape.”
Silberman agreed that it was more than possible that he had noted it all down. He had been an extremely methodical man. His papers, however, had
n’t been gone through yet. In any case, if Teddy spoke once he would speak again.
The phone in Lorz’s study rang again.
His assistant excused herself. Did he want her to ring him up early tomorrow morning? In case he overslept? He assured her that he wouldn’t oversleep, not on the morning of the interview with Silberman. It was unlikely he’d sleep at all, he felt like adding. He thanked her, said a definitive, “Good night,” and returned to the log and the January 17 entry that had given him the great idea.
On that day, he’d talked to the Volunteer Visitor again in the hospital cafeteria. Yes, she’d said, Teddy had overcome the crisis and was continuing to make progress. There was something negative, though. Teddy’s painting job hadn’t turned out well at all. He’d been very good at the preliminary work. He derived visible satisfaction from the cleaning of the dirty walls. The application of the paint too was successful as long as the paint was white.
“Why didn’t it work out then?”
“It was hard to make him stop,” she said cryptically.
Did that mean in terms of time or walls? Lorz wondered.
She repeated that ability to work was the precondition for an end to institutional dependency.
Jan 20. The obvious solution. Why did it take me so long? Think it over carefully. No precipitation. Try to persuade Doctor Silberman. Talk about it to DR?
The clock on his desk rang the end of that evening’s session.
With military discipline Lorz shut the log. Yawning, he placed the bottle and the two notebooks in the desk drawer. He took the alarm clock and the glass with him and turned the lights out in his study with the exception of the circle of light on the cacti. He washed out the glass in the kitchen, dried it and placed it in its former position in the cupboard. He washed his hands and face. He brushed his teeth meticulously for three minutes. He set the alarm clock for ten past six. He also set a second alarm clock for the same hour, for safety’s sake although he felt sure that his assistant would ring too. Before he went to bed he opened the closet and made his final choice of clothing for the interview.
As he’d suspected, he couldn’t sleep.