***
5
“Oh no, not that, Teddy, you’re not going to do that!”
Nearly naked again, a surreal fisherman, he held the sheet by two corners and cast it out like a net over the desk. It billowed and settled softly, precisely, over her desk, covering the papers, the files, the typewriter, the telephone.
It was the next day, Friday. Minutes before, the squat attendant had deposited Theodore with another, bigger, package beneath his arm. He must have stolen the sheets from the hospital, maybe from his own bed. The name of the hospital was stitched in red in the corner. Fortunately the attendant was no longer there to witness and later testify.
“Oh no, Teddy, I couldn’t stand it, I break out in rashes,” she went on pleading.
She turned toward her employer. Why didn’t he back her up, assert his authority instead of standing there stock still, staring and silent? She was about to appeal for support when her phone began ringing, muffled beneath the sheet.
She thrust her arm under it, groped for the phone, got hopelessly entangled in the coiled wire. With the other hand she grabbed at the vague outline and pressed the sheet-wrapped receiver against her ear.
“I can’t hear you,” she yelled in reply to the faint gagged sounds.
“Wait,” she commanded, exasperated at the caller, at herself for not having thought of the director’s phone, at the director for not having answered it himself. Couldn’t he see what was happening? She raced over to her employer’s desk, nearly tripping over the plastic sheet Teddy had scotched to the floor, too late to rescue the phone from the downward floating sheet. When she finally unshrouded the phone the party had hung up.
By this time Teddy had come out of the storeroom carrying the squat 25-kilo tin of Basic White like a feather, plus brushes, rags, a tin of turpentine, a can. The wheeled ladder was already in place next to the director’s desk. He poured Basic White thickly into a two-liter can. He had the same expression of rapt dedication as with the jigsaw puzzles. Of course he didn’t spill a drop. He climbed up and started in on the ceiling.
What they’d taken for whiteness after the washing-job was denounced as dinginess by the radiance pouring from his brush. Her eyes started weeping. She broke out coughing.
She cried: “The ventilator! The ventilator!”
Lorz snapped out of his trance and went over to the panel. The sound of the ventilator built up into a tropical hurricane, an airliner taking off. Now it out-decibelled these. It was the mythical Force Ten.
But the fumes went on attacking her eyes and lungs and now her ears and brain were being attacked as well, unbearably. She couldn’t stay there. She thought of the storeroom, a possible sanctuary, with its door closed and if this didn’t work, the toilet would provide another closed door.
She grabbed up letters and files and trotted distraught toward the storeroom. The phone started ringing again. By the time she picked up the receiver the party had hung up again. The same party as before? How many clients or suppliers had already phoned them? The suppliers didn’t matter, but absolutely she had to ring up the twelve clients to make sure.
There it went again on the other desk. The director stood two meters away weeping and watching Theo’s performance. He indistinctly heard her yelling at the receiver to speak up, she couldn’t hear. She lost the connection.
“And you’re paying for all this,” she cried to her employer. “You’ll have to do something. We can’t go on like this. I can’t, anyhow.” She banged down the receiver and went into the storeroom. She came out struggling into her coat.
He went up to her and shouted, centimeters from her ear: “You can’t leave me. Not now.”
“Then talk to him,” she yelled. “He listens to you. Tell him to stop. What good am I doing here?”
But both of them knew that it was too late to undo the harm. How long would it take for the Basic White to dry? He went over anyhow and clicked the ventilator down to Force One. She protested. She’d choke to death. But otherwise how could he talk to him? he said. She couldn’t have it both ways.
In the thunderous near-silence Lorz coaxed the boy down from the ladder. He took him by the arm and sat him down at the spot his assistant pointed to near the phone on the floor at her feet. She didn’t realize at first that with the ventilator down to Force One she didn’t need to mount her close guard over the phone.
The director sat down opposite Theo. His assistant stood over them, coughing. Tears spouted from her bloodshot eyes. She begged him to turn the ventilator back up. Lorz ignored her and tried to reason with Theo. He interpreted the boy’s look as that of a great child or a dog questing approval. How much could he understand? Lorz assembled his ideas.
First of all, he said (touching his new employee’s bare thigh to soften what he was about to say) he wanted Theo to understand that his work was perfectly satisfactory, in itself. In itself yesterday’s washing job had been a flawless performance. As was, in a sense, today’s painting job, even if the choice of paint was perhaps debatable. Unorthodox, in any case. In itself, yes, flawless.
But perhaps, in the greater context, the weekend would have been a more appropriate time for both operations. As he, the director, would have told him, Theodore, had he known of his intention. In the future it would be wise not to undertake any project without, in some way or another, informing Miss Ruda or himself.
The director glanced up at her face with the streaming mascara. She was frowning intensely. Pain or discontent? He addressed himself to the boy again with considerable force.
“In other words, Theodore, do nothing, nothing, nothing without specific instructions on our part!”
Wasn’t this too harsh? The director feared he’d unduly stressed his point at the risk of discouraging the boy. He could hear inside his head where the old doctor triumphantly survived: “You must not discourage him, this would make irreparable harm, this you must not do.”
He smiled, touched the boy’s massive nude shoulder, slippery with perspiration, and added: “But in themselves bravo for the washing and the paint job, oh, bravo!”
The boy returned to the ladder and resumed his paint job.
The director stared at him helplessly. Then he went over and switched the ventilator back on Force Eight. It drowned out his assistant’s angry, “Oh bravo, bravo!” and the phone which started ringing. He hastened to her side to mollify her. He came in time to hear her yelling into the receiver: “There’s something the matter with this line. The phone people warned us about this. They’re tearing up the street outside. They’re almost down to our level. I’ll phone you back from another line in a few minutes.” Even in her distraught state her inventions had the accents of plausibility if you didn’t analyze them too closely.
She grabbed up files, paper, pens, her packet of cigarettes. “I can’t get any work done here. I’m going to break out in rashes all over any second. I’ll phone from outside.”
The director too started coughing and weeping. Would it ever dry? It wasn’t the new fast-drying odorless paints he’d talked to his assistant about, but Basic White intended for micro-applications on paper, which the operator left in a minute for new defaced posters. Only the rectified ideal figures on the posters could go on imperturbably with their activities in the presence of the stuff. They and Theo.
His assistant instructed Lorz to mount a strict guard over the phone. She left the Ideal office and struggled up the stairs for the fresh air and quiet of a street corner public phone booth.
She returned to the roaring dazzling room twenty minutes later. Teddy had made enormous progress. The air was utterly unbreathable now. The phone was untended. Her employer must have sought refuge in the storeroom. She stepped inside, blinded by tears, and gasped out: “People were queuing up at the booth. They started hammering. You owe me for twelve calls.”
He wasn’t there. He was in the toilet kneeling before the bowl and vomiting. She closed the door and sat down in the storeroom. Whe
n he tottered out she said in a strangely calm voice: “It’s much worse than I’d thought. We can’t keep him. He’s killing you.” She rose, clamping her head between her hands and cried out in registers of hysteria well beyond Force Eight: “My head’s exploding. He’s killing the two of us.”
She ran across the office and clicked off the ventilator. As the noise collapsed she marched up to Theo on his ladder. He was sweeping dazzle onto the ceiling, unaffected by the fumes and their agitation below. Alarmed, Lorz followed her unsteadily. She threw her head back to look up into his face.
“You stop that. You stop that immediately. You do what we tell you to do.”
She reached up on tiptoe (“No!” the director cried) and wrenched the paintbrush out of his hand. Slobs of dripping whiteness flew on her blouse. Some of it flew in Theo’s hair. “My new blouse,” she mourned.
In the silence of the room the director could hear the boy’s breath coming fast, faster now. He crouched stock still, then leaped down. He towered tensely over her. His eyes were fixed on the dripping brush in her hand. Every muscle in his body stood out in unforgettable deadly beauty.
“Leave the room, quickly!” the director whispered sharply.
He sidled toward the phone on the floor, trying to remember the number of the Commission. But Theo sat down in a chair. He’d broken off contact. He was unplugged. The director stood in front of him to make sure he stayed that way. His assistant disappeared into the storeroom.
A few minutes later Lorz went there to see how she was reacting. He returned quickly, frowning. Suddenly he remembered the dead doctor’s squat detached shadow and looked at the wall clock.
In five minutes the attendant would be there in the middle of the madhouse, the fumes, the vomit, and what would he think at the sight of half-naked Theo and his assistant in a similar state, as he’d just seen? The door of the wash-up cubicle was half open and he’d involuntary glimpsed her in the mirror. She’d removed her blouse and was rubbing away at the fabric furiously, her small freckled bare breasts shaking like fists. The paint stain seemed, madly, to be her only concern.
He called her for help and she ran out of the storeroom in a work smock, buttoning herself up wrongly, her bleached vertical pigtail undone, her ruined mask set for new catastrophe till he told her it was nearly 5:30. She gasped with relief and this triggered a fit of coughing.
They gestured and beckoned, all smiles, and miraculously established contact. They pointed at their watches and persuaded Theodore to accompany them into the storeroom. They handed him his discarded clothing piece by piece, no time for him to wash up, both smiling broadly till it hurt, saying soothing things, congratulating him on his paint job.
They hustled him out of the office just as the squat shadow came down the stairs.
Too late, the director noted the white paint splashes in the boy’s hair as though this day had aged him, rather than the director and his assistant, by twenty years. Expressionless, the attendant stared at this and at the boy’s hastily donned trousers unbuttoned and yawning, then at the director’s assistant with her wrongly-buttoned smock loopholed with bare flesh, the disorder of her hair and running mask, then insistently at the director for reasons the director could only guess at for he’d eluded the gaze of the mirror. The attendant’s nostrils widened to fully sample the reek of turpentine and paint and, possibly, vomit.
Those flat black eyes were judging as though he’d been posthumously deputized by the old doctor. What crudely articulated tales of madness and orgy would he bear back to the hospital?
Meekly Theo let himself be led away.
Holding their breath, the director and his assistant traversed the roaring reeking glaring battlefield of the office and retreated into the storeroom, shutting the door. They collapsed into chairs. Wasn’t she crying?
“And it was all my idea,” she brought out. “I persuaded you to hire him. You didn’t want to.”
“Yes I did,” he said to comfort her and stave off breakdown (although her tears may have had a chemical cause).
“We can’t go on like this,” she cried. “We’ll go out of business. We’ll go out of our minds. He’s too disruptive.”
“Yes, disruptive. Certainly disruptive. Dangerous as well.”
It was imprinted on his brain. He suspected it would be one of his permanent visions: the nearly nude figure towering over her with the shining menace of those tensed muscles.
She looked puzzled at the word “dangerous.” Clearly she didn’t know what he was talking about. All she’d retained from the scene was her exercise of authority (“Somebody had to tell him to stop,” she said later) and the boy’s obedience. Those five seconds of muscled crouch and harsh breathing had been evacuated from her memory. The director made a vague gesture and didn’t elaborate.
Dorothea went into the toilet and put her damp blouse on. She reconstructed her hairdo and her face. When she came out her employer hadn’t moved. His eyes were closed. She stared into his face, went into the toilet again and came back with a glass of water and the pills, saying that with all this craziness she’d forgotten. She waited until he swallowed them. She struggled into her coat and got his for him. He said he was staying a while. The job had to be finished. They couldn’t have another day like this Monday.
Dorothea took off her coat and slipped on the work smock. She’d help him with the paint job, she brought out between retching coughs.
At that, he put on his coat and said he’d find someone to do the job over the weekend. He added that Basic White and all the other paints would have to be kept under lock and key. The Volunteer Worker had said that he didn’t know where to stop. The storeroom would be next, of course. Then maybe the long stretch of dingy corridor.
So the handling of the paints which he did so expertly would have to be stricken off the dwindling list of his chores, they agreed.
“Maybe they’ll be able to find some other job for him,” she said as they walked slowly toward his underground station and her bus stop. “We can’t keep him. You know that.”
“I don’t see how we can possibly keep him,” he agreed.
He said goodbye and went down the underground steps. She walked on to her bus stop. He halted at the bottom of the stairs and waited. When he judged she was far enough he cautiously climbed back to street level and returned to his roaring office and started in on the job.
By 11:00pm the next day he had finished. He’d vomited only twice. When he got home he threw open the shutters and windows everywhere except in his mother’s room and the two locked rooms where he never went. He took a hot bath, then a shower, vomited again and went to bed. He was sure he’d sleep through to Monday morning.
It seemed that he’d scarcely shut his eyes when the phone rang. The luminous dial of his alarm clock showed quarter past two. The open windows were black with night. It all tumbled out breathlessly into his ear.
“Dorothea Ruda. I tried to reach you all day Saturday. I thought something was the matter with you again. I couldn’t sleep. I thought you couldn’t either because of what I said. How can you possibly sleep after what I said? I said terrible things about Teddy, about getting rid of him. And you agreed. Why did you agree? We couldn’t do that. It simply isn’t possible. We’d have that on our conscience all our lives. I would, anyhow. We can handle him all right. He won’t be disruptive anymore. I have an idea about that. First of all you have to be firm with him. You’re not firm enough with the boy. Let me tell you about my idea.”
She went on and on. It didn’t get past his eardrum. He said “Yes” at regular intervals. How long she went on he couldn’t tell because when he woke up ten hours later he was still holding the receiver. A long buzz had replaced her voice. He spent the rest of the day in bed.
On Monday Lorz got up very early. The windows were black with night again. His head still aching, he stumbled into his study, sat down at the desk and stared dully at the Commission’s progress report. Normally it was to be f
illed in and mailed next Friday. There was a page for each of the four weeks. Heavy print instructed the employer to give for each week a detailed description of the work performance of: In No. 2 ball-pointed black was written the name “Teddy.”
The director unscrewed his fountain pen and stared down at the page for the first week. Then he turned to the second week, fingering his pen. Then the terrible third week. And then the fourth week that faced them: what next? Could he wait that long? Finally he turned to the last page entitled “Conclusions”.
This was easier. It required no initiative, just checks in the appropriate boxes. “On the whole and taking into account the special features of the case, Teddy’s work can best be described as: 1.Very Poor. 2. Poor. 3. Acceptable. 4. Satisfactory. 5. Fully Satisfactory. They had provided no category for Fully Chaotic. The director decided to fill in the Report at the office and send it out a week in advance. Even so it was more than likely that they would have Teddy on their hands for the next few days. How could more chaos be avoided?
They held a war council later that morning in the ghastly white office. They had the strange feeling of being plunged, effaced, in the dead center of a giant vat of Basic White. The reek had subsided a bit. The director had lowered the ventilator to Force Four. Conversation was possible now. They glanced nervously at their watches. In four hours he would be there. The thing was to break the fixation. Clearly he was on a paint fixation. As agreed, they placed all of the paint in a locker behind a stout padlock. Just as she was about to speak about her idea, he asked what they were going to have Teddy do today. She suggested cutouts.
“Theodore wouldn’t like that,” he objected. “He’s basically constructive, not destructive. I’m speaking about pictures. He likes to put pictures together not take them apart. Remember the jig-saw puzzles.”
She suggested having him cosmetize posters. He was so good at it. He wouldn’t be a disturbance doing that. For want of a better idea Lorz agreed. Poster-cosmetizing was sure to be less disastrous in its side effects in the few days he’d remain with Ideal. She dug up unused graffitied posters from four years of tests. “Maybe there aren’t enough,” she said. “Maybe we’d better prepare more. He works so fast.” She chose others. They began marring poster after poster.
“When I think that the aim of Ideal is to cosmetize, not to deface,” said the director after a while. “A double waste of time: our defacing and his cosmetizing.” He penciled a scowling face in a cheese sky.
“At least if he cosmetized the posters in one of the stations, instead of here,” she said, glancing quickly at her employer. She felt-penciled a red arrow-pierced heart in a soft-drink lawn.
As they worked on in silence he reminded himself to fill in the progress report today if he had time. If not, then tomorrow without fail.
They were still defacing posters when Operator 7 phoned in from Three Nuns. A gang of suburban toughs had, he claimed, stripped him at knifepoint of his wallet, trousers and shoes plus the ladder. Things were getting too dangerous in the underground. He wanted a substantial rise otherwise he’d quit.
The director suspected that the story was pure fabrication to justify the demand for more money and the disappearance of the ladder, which he must have sold for a fix. The director refused and hung up. Untypically, his assistant approved his decision. He’d expected her to support the man’s claims and offer to bring trousers and shoes to his underground phone booth.
“Who needs him now?” she said mysteriously.
The director instructed her to ring up the names on the applicant waiting list. No need for applicants with her idea, she said. What idea? he asked.
“Don’t you remember? I told you about my Idea over the phone last night when we couldn’t sleep, how we could employ Teddy for real, not be disturbed one bit and make money in the bargain. You agreed one hundred percent. You said “Yes” to everything. Before you fell asleep, that is. It came to me like an inspiration. Do you want me to tell you about it again?”
She took a sheet of paper out of her bag and looked at it as though about to deliver a talk.
Lorz replied that he didn’t remember a thing about her idea. He must have fallen asleep already. It had been 2:30 in the morning when she woke him up, he reminded her. But he understood what the idea was from what she’d already said. “You know what my position is on that subject. There’s no point even discussing it.”
Still, he listened to her arguments. She didn’t have to convince him of the advantages – all purely theoretical, unfortunately – in having Teddy work as an operator in the underground. First, as she said, it would keep him away from the office, avoiding further disasters, allowing them to get on with things. Then there was his incredible skill at restoring posters. Predictably, he could do the work of two or three operators. She looked down at her paper. She’d calculated the savings to Ideal. She told him what they would be.
Money wasn’t everything, he interrupted, whatever she might imagine he thought. Did she have any idea how many people had been killed in the underground so far this year?
Dorothea relativized the violence. It was like the number of people who died from bee stings or snakebites. Practically negligible if you considered the number of bees and snakes and people. Over the past twelve month period there’d been – she glanced down at her paper – twenty-eight murders committed, good enough, but negligible compared to the five hundred million annual trips in the underground.
Six hundred million, seven hundred thousand, in round figures, the director couldn’t help correcting. She looked triumphant at this rectification which further diluted the violence. Crossing the street every day, she said, was probably more dangerous than traveling in the underground. But there was another point. None of those twenty-eight murders had been committed in Crossroads. Probably not many assaults either. She had statistics on the killings but not on the assaults, she said.
The director, who had statistics on everything in his head, assented grudgingly. Crossroads was an important transfer station with a direct entrance into the vast new Interior Building that housed the Central Police Station. Policemen came and went at all hours. It was the safest of all the stations. No murders had ever been committed there unless you counted three years before when a policeman had gone berserk and opened fire on the rush hour crowd, killing five passengers and then himself. The crime rate was probably the lowest of all the stations but not the graffiti rate. At least one operator was assigned to Crossroads. He saw what she was driving at.
She hadn’t finished. She’d done her homework on the subject. It wasn’t only a question of place. It was also a question of time. Over a period of five years, she said, glancing down at the paper again, eighty-five percent of the physical violence against the Ideal operators had occurred during the night shift.
Now she came out with it. A special shift could be created for Teddy in the Crossroads station, at the safest time, say from noon to 6:00pm. Anyhow, with that build of his, he could handle a whole gang. The sight of those arms would send them running, she said. Maybe not the women, she added as a joke.
Did she know – she must have – that the creation of an afternoon shift had once been one of the director’s dreams? The twelve operators on the night shift and then the early-early shift barely managed to clean the posters for the morning rush hour crowd in the stations where they worked. The rectified posters gathered graffiti again in the afternoon hours. They had to confront the evening rush crowd in that disgraced state. It was one of the weak spots in Ideal’s services. But the creation of a third shift assumed financial means the concern didn’t possess. In his ambitious younger days Lorz used to indulge in fantasies of grandeur. He’d imagine a complete coverage of the capital’s underground network. Ideal Poster offered its services in only fifteen of the sixty-three stations. To be sure, these were the biggest ones and accounted for over thirty-five percent of all the underground advertising posters. But in those intransigent days Lorz longed for a to
tal war against the vandals, even in their lesser fortresses, a war carried out by an army of vigorous young operators. He often pictured them, handsome and earnest, fitted out in distinctive blue and white uniforms with Ideal Poster emblazoned on the back.
The director came up with more counter arguments.
Finally she asked him if he wanted Teddy to be sent to an institution.
He didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, no, he didn’t want that.
He reached for the progress report and uncapped his fountain pen. She got up and looked over his shoulder as he turned to the last page.
“On the whole and taking into account the special features of the case, Teddy’s work can best be described as: 1.Very Poor. 2. Poor. 3. Acceptable. 4. Satisfactory. 5. Fully Satisfactory.”
He checked Fully Satisfactory.
“Everything’ll work out,” she said. “You’ll see.”