***
4
At exactly 2:30 in the afternoon, accurate to the second, the new member of staff bulked in the doorframe of Ideal Poster with his habitual expression of profound meditation or void. The dead doctor’s squat detached shadow was there too.
Instead of handing over his charge and leaving, the attendant followed Theodore into the office. He installed himself in a chair with his comic books.
Doctor Silberman had told Lorz that Theodore would be convoyed to and from the office but not that the convoyer would remain there. Later Lorz rang up the Commission number he’d been given “in case of problems.” He was informed that it was a last-minute arrangement. The attendant’s presence would cease at the end of the week “if all went well.”
Lorz didn’t dare ask what would happen if all didn’t go well. He could imagine that Theodore’s presence would cease too. And what did “not go well” mean exactly? Failure on the job? Or more than that?
With the squat shadow there all afternoon long they had to invent activities for the boy. He had to be meaningfully occupied every second now. The director and his assistant had suspected that he’d dispose of the day’s scheduled tasks too quickly to fill the three hours.
Sure enough, Theo instantly grasped what was expected of him. In less than an hour of dedicated toil he swept up, cleaned and oiled the wheeled ladders, fetched heavy bundles of posters, filled the hundred or so bottles with chemicals and wielded the 25-kilo paint cans like feathers without spilling a drop. They hadn’t really looked beyond those tasks. They’d vaguely imagined time-consuming activities like cutouts till 5:30pm.
But now it turned out that they weren’t alone with him. Maybe the Commission (wrongly) suspected that the job was a pretext, a last-chance refuge against permanent institutionalizing. Didn’t this explain why the attendant was there, looking up from garish heroes and monsters each time the new member of staff moved about? If Theodore just stood staring inward or beyond after he finished each of his fragmentary chores (as he was doing now: quick, find something, anything, but what?) wouldn’t the attendant report the fraud? He was a spy.
The director whispered his suspicions to his assistant. She handled the problem with her usual occupational efficiency.
“Oh Teddy, I forgot to show you around!” she exclaimed, smiling at him and placing her hand on his bare arm with a jingle of bracelets.
It was true. Rattled by those flat black eyes flicking up at them from the comic book at unpredictable intervals, they’d omitted the traditional introduction to new members of staff and had set the boy to work immediately. Showing a new operator about was normally a perfunctory ten minute operation. But she eked it out ingeniously to an hour.
She showed and explained everything, loudly. Coming after Theodore’s virtuosity sweeping up which one couldn’t help admiring (completely to the detriment of the director’s jobs at hand) it was another work disturbance, first of all for her. How could she perform her usual tasks during the showing-round stint? She hadn’t even an instant to open the early afternoon mail. Lorz did it in her place. He also had to answer the phone.
He had great trouble concentrating. Seated at his desk, trying to cope with the correspondence, he couldn’t help hearing her laughing invitation to “the private place.” He couldn’t help looking up as the squat shadow accompanied them to the storeroom as though he too was curious to learn about the operation of the toilet.
Now the phone rang. The director’s left ear, not engaged with the dissatisfied client took in the raging waterfall, the swirl and gurgle of the toilet bowl. She’d pulled the chain. She waited until the tank trickle finally ended: a minute to the good. The director heard her explaining to Theodore that she’d asked Mr Lorz for years to have the plumber in. She pulled the chain again. She did it three times and had Theodore do it four times. Her voice occupied the whole vast room as she distinguished between the hot and cold water of the washbasin as though the boy couldn’t see the self-explanatory blue and red of the taps.
Wasn’t she overdoing it? The director could hear her saying: “So remember, clock-wise to turn it on, counterclockwise to turn it off. Now you try.” She invented (or did they really happen?) stories of operators who had scalded themselves and mentioned traditional Central Mountain remedies against burns.
She took advantage of Theo’s fascination with the giant underground map and its numbered employee-pins. She rattled off their names and physical characteristics, neither of which the director could ever recall himself. She enumerated the transfer stations where the operators were active and the number of posters in each station. Some of her figures were accurate, others pure inventions. The director knew the figures by heart.
There were still forty-eight minutes to go when Theodore seceded from his surroundings. He stood there motionless, staring beyond or within. “Unplugged” was his assistant’s inelegant term for it.
She came up with another idea. She captured his attention and gave him a pile of blank labels. She asked him to change the perfectly legible labels on the chemical bottles. To slow down his frightening pace she stipulated Middle Gothic lettering and labored over a sample. It took her five minutes. Theodore accomplished the whole senseless task in thirty-seven minutes. The director judged that it would have taken anyone else two hours to do that many. Would the operators be able to make out the new labels? he wondered. In Middle Gothic they were barely legible.
When the door finally closed behind Teddy and his escort Lorz and his assistant both let themselves down in the nearest chairs. There was just the whir of the giant ventilator. They remained motionless and dumb for a few minutes, no more, because it was 5:30pm and their real day was just beginning. She went out and bought sandwiches.
They wound up at ten-thirty. He told her to be careful in the underground and bus returning home. Hers were among the worst lines. He also said that of course she’d be paid time-and-a-half for the overtime.
The director had trouble sleeping that night.
He got to the office the next morning an hour earlier than usual to get a little work done. He found his assistant at her desk, plunged in papers. She looked up red-eyed. She’d had trouble sleeping she said. She’d been there for an hour already. All of today’s work would have to be crammed into the morning if yesterday afternoon was a fair sample of what awaited them.
Had she thought of Teddy’s tasks for the afternoon? She’d thought of little else all night long, she replied. Lorz confided that he too had spent a good part of the night devising activities for the new member of staff. They compared tasks, analyzed their respective show of diligence, disagreed, compromised, made a final selection.
She tried to be cheerful. Next week “the spy” would be gone. It was the term she used. She accepted her employer’s interpretation of the attendant’s presence, amplified it, even.
Tuesday was like Monday.
Wednesday morning the director came up with an idea to save his business and his sanity. He phoned the special Commission number and explained to Mr Mysels – his exclusive channel of communication now for whatever concerned Theo – that something unexpected had come up, an urgent meeting requiring the presence of his assistant and himself. He wouldn’t be needing Teddy tomorrow afternoon. The boy would of course be paid for the three hours.
There was a long silence from the other end. Lorz was used to this by now. Mr Mysels had come across as a pathologically suspicious individual accepting no statement at face value, his parsimonious voice nagging for explicit confession. Whatever Lorz said was sniffed at, then worried as a dog did a bone.
Finally Mysels said: “What’s he done?”
“Teddy? Nothing at all.”
The other examined the director’s prompt answer for long seconds, turned it over, prodded it.
“He’s done nothing at all?” he finally echoed. “You mean he refuses to work?”
“He works when we ask him to, of course,” the director rep
lied, doing his best to keep irritation out of his voice.
Silence at the other end of the line.
At last: “You have to ask him all the time for him to keep at it, you mean?”
The director said with a certain testiness: “Theo’s work is fully satisfactory.”
Silence.
Now puzzled and suspicious: “Who are you talking about, exactly? Who is Theo?”
The director had to explain that he’d meant Teddy, of course. Teddy was Theodore. Theo was a shortened form of Theodore, just as Teddy was. Even to the director his explanation sounded confused, as though three distinct individuals were involved.
The pause was even longer. Hadn’t he understood? The director added that it was like the English name William which could be Will or Bill. “Or Billy,” he added. It sounded like a crowd now. The silence at the other end was even longer.
“Or Willy, even,” the director couldn’t help adding.
Finally Mysels asked curtly: “Who is this talking, please?”
He had to assure the other man that he was talking to Edmond Lorz, the director of Ideal Poster.
Lorz finally retreated out of the whole thing. He told Mysels that his assistant had just passed him a note saying tomorrow’s appointment had been cancelled. So of course Theo – Teddy – could come that afternoon as usual.
They staggered through that afternoon and the two following afternoons with Theo.
On Friday evening they weakly congratulated each other that they’d be alone with Teddy the following week. Mysels had confirmed a few hours earlier that the attendant would continue conveying Teddy to and from the Ideal Poster office but would no longer be in attendance.
The following week, however, there was the job inspector. Supposedly the job inspector was to visit the office once a week at an unspecified hour and day. Actually he showed up five times that week. He was a stout, balding young man with full red lips, slightly crossed eyes and flaring nostrils.
His first visit had surprised Theo unplugged, gazing at the giant underground map. The job inspector stared hard at him, frowning, while the director cast about for an explanation. At that moment his assistant emerged jingling from the storeroom, the waterfall raging behind her. She swiftly placed herself between the young job inspector and Teddy. She smiled and introduced herself. Her voice was musical.
The director thought he saw the young man’s wide nostrils quivering like a horse’s as in response to her scent. Although he seemed already to have lost interest in Teddy – her body masked him – she accounted for the boy’s apparent idleness. He had, she explained, just shifted about the hundreds of piles of posters for a solid hour and they insisted on his resting for ten minutes. There was no question exploiting him.
How did she manage to come up with plausible-sounding inventions off the bat like that, the director wondered. It was a gift, like absolute pitch. Meanwhile Theo had emerged.
She turned to him. “Don’t like to be a slave-driver, Teddy, but we’ve got more work for you.”
She had him do more labels, in New Gothic this time. She and the job inspector stood behind Theo looking at those hands. At least she did. The young man seemed indifferent to the boy’s miraculous proficiency and asked Dorothea question after question in a low voice. He seemed to be staring insistently down at her neckline although this may have been an illusion created by the faulty focus of his eyes. Why was she laughing now?
Finally the fat, cross-eyed job inspector went away.
He was back two hours later. The job inspector seemed to come mainly to inspect the director’s assistant. Still, he was obliged to show interest in the director’s new member of staff too. He tried to justify his return by questions supposedly forgotten that morning.
The next day he was back again, with no attempt at justification.
After his second visit they had to take emergency measures. It was doubtful after all, the director now acknowledged, that the squat attendant had been entrusted with spying functions. But espionage was explicit in the fat, cross-eyed young man’s very title. If the job inspector came upon Theodore during one of the boy’s frequent fazed-out periods he’d be sure to inform the autocratic life-and-death Commission people that the job was largely pretence (a fact that Lorz now allowed his mind to formulate in such bald terms for the first time). The job would be eliminated, along with Theodore.
The job inspector had accepted the first explanation for the boy’s idleness. But the excuse couldn’t be indefinitely repeated. After the job inspector’s second impromptu visit, during which fortunately Teddy had been busy with the broom, the director’s assistant came up with another good idea.
She trained Teddy to drop whatever he was doing (or, more frequently, snap out of what he wasn’t doing). At the command, “Teddy! The ladders! Clean and oil the ladders!” he went into action. The boy insisted on keeping all five of the spare ladders in the office itself, strictly aligned. Working over the contraptions with their strut-like rungs and their clumsy wheels they resembled archaic wingless flying machines and he a mechanic, land-bound but fanatically devoted, preparing the machines for some heroic dawn patrol. Sometimes he would climb up on one of them and then climb down.
So the third time the job inspector came, the signal was rapidly given and the man found Theodore busy over the ladders. The fourth time too. The job inspector ended by wondering about the necessity for such incessant cleaning and lubricating. “You have no idea of the wear and tear on them in the underground,” Dorothea explained.
During the man’s fifth visit Theodore started experimenting with the last of the superfluously oiled ladders. He kicked off powerfully, hoisting himself to the top step. His dark gold head skimmed the filthy ceiling as the machine jolted across the room at great speed. Despite his air of total abstraction he skillfully avoided the desks, the chairs and the filing cabinet at the very last moment by shifting his weight. The ladder swerved, teetering on two and sometimes one wheel.
“Why is he doing that?” the inspector asked, removing his eyes from the director’s assistant and following the evolution of the vehicle with alarm and wonder.
“He’s testing the wheels,” she said quickly. “They’re the weak spot. It’s part of the wear and tear I told you about.”
She recounted glib wry anecdotes to illustrate her point. She was a genius at inventions. She didn’t tense and blink and come out with her inventions too fast. The job inspector gazed at her with an expression of absolute belief.
“He seems to be having a good time, anyhow,” the man said, staring at the boy’s daring figures and then nervously pulling back as the ladder sailed a centimeter past him.
Did the job inspector mean that as a criticism? “Why should work be synonymous with boredom?” the director asked. He was pleased with his own invention even though the statement ran counter to his basic philosophy.
Lorz felt he was cracking under the tension of those visits. He almost rang up Mr Mysels of the Commission to ask about them. At the last moment he rang off, remembering his last conversation with the man. If the single weekly visit hadn’t in fact been modified and Mysels learned that in less than forty-eight hours the job inspector had inspected Theodore five times already wouldn’t he (Mysels) conclude that something was radically amiss with the new member of staff?
The director could hardly attribute those visits openly to his assistant’s perfume, neckline and manner. In self-defense the job inspector would be sure to justify his repeated presence by failings supposedly observed in Theodore. So the director hung up and went on worrying.
However, the problem was solved the next day. At eleven his assistant got a call. She laughed musically and returned from lunch half an hour late. “Peter invited me for lunch,” she explained. Lorz didn’t have to be told that Peter was the fat, cross-eyed job inspector. He said nothing.
After a while she explained: “It’s to keep him away from the office. You didn’t notice but he do
esn’t really come to inspect Teddy. If I see him outside he won’t come so often.”
Lorz thanked her for her self-sacrifice.
“Oh it’s no sacrifice. He’s a nice boy. A little dull, maybe.”
The director had another worry. What if Silberman visited them? The doctor had vaguely spoken of dropping in to see how Teddy was doing. In the course of his proposal to hire Teddy the director had foolishly mentioned new furniture and a paint job for his office. What would Silberman say when he saw the old shabbiness? Mightn’t he conclude that all the other statements of Lorz’s were misrepresentations too?
On Wednesday of the third week (as Theo sat staring at the giant map of the underground) the director asked his assistant how much she reckoned it would cost to hire painters to do the job on successive weekends.
“Here?”
Theo, roused by her alarm, followed her melodramatic gesture at the four walls. She objected that she was allergic to paint fumes. They gave her blinding headaches. She acted like a madwoman when that happened, she said.
No problem, Lorz replied. He went over to the panel next to the ventilator. It was permanently on Force One. But there were ten speeds. He touched a button and the blades blurred behind the protective wicker. The whir rose to a deafening roar for a few seconds. Papers on the desks took off. And that was only Speed Five, he shouted. He quickly returned to Force One. Imagine Speed Ten on all night Sunday, he said, now too loudly. In a matter of hours the paint fumes would be evacuated, he said, lowering his voice. Nothing could resist Force Ten.
She was unconvinced. He compromised. At least a washing, to brighten the room up. The walls were filthy.
The next day Theo came in with a bulky package under his arm.
“What’s that, Teddy? A present for me?” said Dorothea.
The boy went into the storeroom and a minute later emerged naked except for inadequate (or superfluous) briefs, a figure out of Greek mythology bearing anachronistic gifts: two pails, three sponges, folded plastic sheets.
“Teddy!” she exclaimed, staring at him as he transported her desk alongside the director’s. With dedicated purposeful gestures he unfolded the plastic sheets. Swiftly he placed them over the two desks and the filing cabinet.
The director said nothing. Powerless, he looked on without moving.
In accents of growing alarm his assistant said: “What’s that, Teddy?” then “What are you trying to do, Teddy?” Finally: “What are you doing, Teddy?” It was a pointless question since by then he’d rolled a ladder up to the two desks. Also pointless now, her faint wail: “You can’t do that now, we have to work!”
But he’d calculated everything. He secured the brake-device and climbed up and started in. It was another one of his magnetic performances.
Lorz stood stock still, staring. How could you not look? It was like being in the grip of some power.
The boy seemed endowed with more than the normal complement of arms, a near-naked Shiva, as he warred on the ceiling filth alternatively with the two sponges. The right-hand sponge skimmed and sipped the cleaning liquid in one pail and created a vast arc of brightness overhead. His great hand descended like a hawk, balled into a fist, expelling a dirty dribble into the second pail. At the same time his left hand dipped the second sponge into the third pail of clean water and mopped up the traces of cleaning liquid on the arc of cleanliness while the right hand prepared for the following assault.
Over and over, no respite, perfect synchronization. Now the right-hand sponge surged forward in broad thrusts as in a schematized military map: breakthroughs of cleanliness into the somber front, now the pockets of filth surrounded and annihilated.
He was operating above the two desks. The plastic sheets proved superfluous. Not a drop fell on them. Simply a trickle down his muscular upraised arm, disappearing in the dark gold tangle of his armpit. Or there, another trickle past the left nipple, down the arch of the rib cage, down the taut muscled abdomen and then vanishing into the broadening criss-cross of dark gold hair beneath the eye-like navel.
“He heard what you said about washing down the office,” Dorothea exclaimed reproachfully to the director. “We’ll have to watch what we say.”
Lorz looked on in silence. Abruptly he broke off and returned to his desk, which Theodore had freed of the plastic sheet. The ceiling above formed a light patch, almost white in contrast to the dinginess that surrounded it. He’d finished there. Business could go on. Business had to go on.
“Business can go on now,” he said, seating himself at his desk. They’d wasted too much time already. Dorothea sat down at hers. Head in hands Lorz plunged into the poster statistics, trying to abstract himself from what was going on in the room. His hands even covered his ears although the only sounds audible above the ticking wall clock and the whirring ventilator was the whisper of the sponge on the ceiling, the trickle of water in the pail from the squeezed sponge and Theodore’s hard breathing.
They were free to work now. Theo was banishing dirt at a safe distance from them. But Dorothea made no pretence at work. She stared at the boy, mesmerized, lips parted.
The director couldn’t help looking up. Theo’s activity was disruptive even at that distance. You couldn’t help looking in admiration of such virtuosity, wondering what he’d come up with next. Why, for example, was he now winding string about the axles of the wheels, in self-sabotage?
Everything had an answer. Now he didn’t even have to descend to advance the ladder. His arms stretched out and up in a kitsch gesture of welcome to a dawn figured by the mercury tubes. His great hands pressed up against the ceiling and started walking forward, pulling the unbraked ladder, its mobility safely tempered with the string that clogged the axles, into new virgin territories of filth.
The director broke off and plunged back into the figures. Unconquerable peripheral vision informed him that Theodore had finished with the ceiling and now was attacking the walls.
The director remained with the statistics until the squat shadow came and took the boy away.
She was saying something to him. His head ached. He was as exhausted as though he’d done the cleaning job himself. Finally he looked up to the strange luminosity of the office and listened to what she was saying.
They hadn’t got much work done that afternoon but they were getting used to that by now, weren’t they? Her employer didn’t answer. He was staring down at the statistics again with that same distraught or even tragic air, it seemed to her. She tried to console him by saying that at least this time the disturbance had paid off. Just look. It was like having the sun in the office now. Maybe it was a bit mottled and streaked here and there but that would disappear once the ceiling and walls dried completely.
So finally the disturbance had been worth it, she said. It was practically as good as a real paint job and at a fraction of the time and cost and trouble. They’d had a scare at the start but everything had worked out.