***
7
The director’s joy at Theo’s supposed gift gave way to perplexity that sleepless night. Then to humiliation. Finally to distress.
He’d cried out for Theo’s help but had his cry been heard beneath the thunder of the machines? Even if heard, was it his appeal that had motivated Theo’s punishing blow or the marring of the poster?
Objectively, in any case, Theo had protected him. This created a precious new bond between them, of course. Yet the total reversal of their presumed relationship was disturbing. He, the would-be protector, turned out to be the protected. He’d proved farcically unequal to his self-imposed task that afternoon. He recalled his dives into humiliation confronted with the machine. He hadn’t even been able to summon up the minimal heroism of standing stock still and smiling. It called in question his daily presence in Crossroads. If he couldn’t protect the boy what was the point of following him about?
He was still coping with this problem when another thought occurred to him which aggravated the consequences of his cowardice. Only the unexpected arrival of the police had prevented the two able-bodied Doom Riders from massacring the boy for what he’d done to their companion. They were sure to return to avenge the affront. Perhaps by the hundreds as with the police station that had gone up in flames.
Theo was a marked man now. He couldn’t possibly remain in the underground another day.
Again the director circled around the question of his own presence in Crossroads. He realized that, far from protecting Theo, he’d been the cause of the boy’s present predicament, assuming (as the director longed to) that Theo had consciously responded to his cry for help.
His fault then. Of course in a deeper sense one could say that it was his assistant’s fault. Whose idea had it been, in the first place, to banish the boy to Crossroads and its dangers? But why had he let himself be pressured into accepting her idea? He was the director, after all. He’d been letting her encroach on his prerogatives. This would have to stop.
In any case, tomorrow when he showed up at 12:30 Theo would have to remain in the office. At this thought the director remembered the boy on his ladder brightening the ceiling of that safe space and briefly experienced joy again. In a way, the dangerous incident in the underground had been a blessing in disguise. Theo would be present in the office again, five days a week as before, with now the golden bonus of two extra hours daily. It didn’t matter how much disorganization he caused. Let him apply a second coat of paint, a third, if he liked. Let the ventilator roar at Force Ten. Let Lorz’s eyes redden and gush.
Seconds later his lyric exaltation collapsed. He recalled the failure of his attempt to convince Theo to remain in the office on Fridays. How could he ever get the boy to give up the underground totally?
Bitter salvation lay perhaps in confessing the truth to the Commission, explaining the dangers the boy was exposed to in Crossroads with his predictable refusal to accept the safety of the office. A short-lived safety in any case, the director now realized. The boy’s daily disruptive presence in the office would spell bankruptcy for Ideal, his sole haven from commitment.
At best some institution or other seemed the only perspective for him. That or violent death. You gave me the gift of life. I give you too the gift of life, with the mad. The director rebelled against the monstrous alternative.
He slowly realized that his connection with the boy could be maintained (and his visits justified) only on one condition. He, Edmond Lorz, past forty and in failing health, must now fully assume the manly role of protector, in fact, not just in theory. He remembered the mad cowboy and his knife and how the machine had prudently swerved beyond the arc of the flailing steel.
It was 3:24am by the luminous green dial of his bedside alarm clock when Edmond Lorz finally resolved to go armed into the underground.
With this decision he fell asleep immediately.
The decision proved difficult to implement. To be sure, self-defense shops had become as common as sex shops in the capital. In their windows one found, alongside classics like black-jacks and brass-knuckles, a plethora of blinding and asphyxiating gas devices, walkingsticks producing 20,000-volt discharges, ear-piercing sirens, etc. But none of these objects, visibly non-lethal, seemed sufficiently dissuasive to the director. A pistol was out of the question even if his father’s service-arm (a Rocal 42) lay somewhere in his mother’s closet, wrapped up in oiled cloth, memorial to her grief. During the bad moments she would caress, kiss and weep over it. Lorz had no permit and wanted none. From early childhood he’d had deep fear of firearms, even of the cap pistols his father persisted in buying him.
Now, decades later, he considered purchasing such a toy. But thugs were by definition knowledgeable about guns. Their expert glance would pierce the pretence at once.
Then he thought of the long knife thrust in the psychotic cowboy’s belt. A publicly displayed knife with a 20-centimeter blade was dissuasive of course. But didn’t it testify to madness as much as spurred boots in the underground did? No, if a knife, it had to be concealed but instantly available for action. Purely dissuasive action, of course.
Lorz went into the kitchen and came up with the only thing with a blade long enough to conceivably inspire fear, a bread-knife. But with its yellow plastic handle it was absurdly utilitarian in the foreseen context. Still ill at ease in his role, he couldn’t help imagining the snickering thug countering such a brandished “weapon” with a pumpernickel loaf. Then he thought of his father’s ceremonial dagger received from the hands of the King himself long ago.
But why that dagger? Anything long and sharp would have done. And if, for obscure reasons, it had to be the ceremonial dagger, why his father’s? Not so long ago you found them in rummage shops by the thousands even if of late they’d gone up steeply in price what with the modish nostalgia for the monarchy and its trappings that was the sure sign of the irrevocable death of the old order. But if Lorz stubbornly persisted in his search for that particular dagger it was perhaps in the half-conscious hope that the dagger retained, over thirty years later, something of the potency of his father’s fatal courage in that older combat against disorder.
He found the ceremonial dagger in the closet in his mother’s bedroom. It lay among medals in a cardboard box secured by a faded blue ribbon. Hastening out of the unbreathable room, Lorz perceived himself as a ghostly daggered army in the mirrors she’d collected in her last years to raise the dead.
His first discouraging discovery was that the blade had to be naked. His best time at unsheathing was a fatal three seconds. The next problem was to find a hiding place. His briefcase, which nearly always accompanied him, was the obvious spot, but having to fumble with the clasp and grope in the depths was bureaucratically slow for successful intervention. The belt was, after all, the logical place for a dagger. It could be hidden by his jacket if thrust into the belt in the region of his left kidney.
But the unsheathed blade rendered body caches dangerous. It proved necessary to force a wine cork onto the point to avoid involuntary hara kiri each time he bent down. It hurt anyhow and gave him an unnatural military carriage hard to maintain all day long.
Finally the director returned to his first idea and placed the dagger in his briefcase. He would have to remember not to plunge his hand into it too quickly when seeking a paper or when confronted by danger.
But days and then weeks went by without confrontation. Lorz didn’t have to grope perilously in those depths for the dagger. The Doom Riders didn’t return. There were no more madmen, no more thugs, no more perverts gravitating about Theo.
The director sometimes attributed the changed atmosphere to the simple presence of the dagger. Even in the bureaucratic briefcase it seemed to irradiate the fearlessness of his father, to generate a force field of immunity about Theo and himself. It did more than bestow immunity. It instilled in him, he felt, latent courage. Sometimes he felt disappointment at his passive role as a mere bearer of po
tency in a briefcase. That suddenly implanted courage began craving outlet. He sometimes let himself imagine confrontation beyond dissuasion, the dagger, obedient to his will, dropping thugs, addicts, perverts and madmen. He had these fantasies not in the underground but in bed.
But what might happen when he wasn’t underground to mount guard over Theo with his father’s dagger? Lorz tried to reduce those dangerous hours by staying on in Crossroads till 4:00pm, sometimes till 4:30pm. This amounted to a 180-minute lunch-hour. When, unavoidably, he returned to the office his assistant was pointedly silent. He resented the guilt she made him feel.
This didn’t prevent him from leaving shortly after to pick Theo up at 6:30. They’d shared the job before. Now he relieved her of this “chore” as he phrased it. She frowned and assured him insistently that it was no chore. He pretended not to understand.
He left Ideal earlier and earlier for the 6:30pm return to Crossroads. Actually there was little point returning to the office at all in the afternoon for such a brief period but he insisted on doing it as some kind of obscure discipline.
Inevitably there was another unpleasant scene. She sat stiff-faced at her typewriter with folded arms when he returned one late afternoon. She didn’t unfold them even when the phone rang. She said that he could answer the phone, at least do that. She said that she couldn’t do everything all by herself. The business was suffering badly from his absences.
The director was certain she was on the presumptuous verge of asking him where he disappeared all afternoon long. He owed her no explanations. But what would happen if she quit again? He’d be imprisoned in the office, far from Theo.
The dilemma was partially solved when suddenly in the middle of the night the conviction came to him, as it had to, that somehow the potency of the dagger was such that it cast an aura of protection over Theo even when it wasn’t there.
He decided to shorten the lunch-hour to mollify his assistant and left a box of chocolates and flowers on her desk for safety’s sake.
A week later a new problem arose. It was his assistant who told him about it. As part of the tacit compromise that ended the unpleasantness, she’d once more taken over her share of the chore (no chore at all, she’d repeated) of picking Theo up at 6:30pm. The first thing she said after the boy left the Ideal office for the hospital was: “It’s getting hard to make him stop with the posters. I didn’t think he’d come back with me this time. I had to yell, practically. And there’s something else too.”
She paused and rubbed a speck of dust off her typewriter.
“He’s doing the wrong posters now, other people’s posters, not just ours. He’s doing all of the posters in Crossroads.”
The following afternoon Lorz observed his employee finishing the last of a contractual series (313 to 345). Without the slightest hesitation the boy pushed the wheeled ladder before a non-contractual poster (Greenfields) and started in.
“No, no!” the director cried, “Not Greenfields!”
Theo went on. It was as though the director didn’t exist. Theo went on and on in this alien territory, cosmetizing one non-contractual poster after another. Ideal’s services were being bestowed on a poster firm that hadn’t even had the courtesy to reply to a single one of Ideal’s annual solicitations.
At first the director was unable to define his profound alarm at the sight of what Theo was doing. It wasn’t the waste of time and chemicals. He had trouble formulating it.
To break into his employee’s field of vision Lorz slipped into the narrow space between the ladder and the poster and immediately received a brushful of Basic White on his right cheek, dangerously close to his eye.
Foolish thoughts flashed through his mind. Does he think I’m part of the poster? Where is the graffiti on my face? Or does he take my whole face for graffiti?
The boy blinked. The mechanism of his hands stalled. His eyes now focused on his employer’s rectified visage, as though trying to distinguish this real face from the paper ones.
“Look what you’ve done, Teddy!” Lorz scolded, gently.
He called him Teddy when he was irritated with him. That occasionally happened. As though reciprocating the gentleness of his employer’s voice, Theo (Theo now) took the cloth and carefully wiped the white off the director’s face. Lorz closed his eyes, perhaps to protect them against the Basic White. When he opened his eyes again Theo was staring obediently into his face. Was he smiling? Was it conceivable that he’d done it as a joke?
The director slipped away from the poster and coaxed Theo off the ladder. He started explaining the problem. He pointed at the numbers on the boy’s sheets. Then he pointed at the numbers on the panels he’d been doing.
“They’re not ours, Theo, they aren’t our concern. Not our concerns. Do you understand?”
The director explained and explained until he thought he made out an expression of comprehension on the boy’s face.
When the director finished Theo climbed back up the ladder and resumed rectifying the non-contractual posters.
That night the director was finally able to formulate his alarm. Theo’s correction of non-contractual posters was a grave symptom of refusal of bounds. The boy didn’t know where (or perhaps how) to stop. There had to be limits, frontiers, barriers, no-man’s-lands of indifference. Sanity, survival even, depended on recognition of that fact.
The director knew about the problem. It had already happened in the early days of Ideal that he too had rectified non-contractual posters bordering on the contractual ones. He did that when they bore particularly obscene graffiti sure to intrude on the visual field of the viewer of the contractual posters, contaminating the message of the advertiser, undoing what he, Lorz, had just painstakingly achieved. So he’d sometimes rectify them. But such non-contractual zeal never exceeded three or four posters, the establishment of a sort of buffer state between order and chaos.
It had got worse before the well-dressed fat man with the pigskin briefcase imposed commercial limits on his activities.
There had been a period when only the closing of the underground at 1:30am drove Lorz out into the street. He hadn’t been well during the weeks that followed his mother’s death. In those days he’d devised a strategy to create the illusion of total rectification. He’d limit himself to the smallest stations: just two platforms and a few short runs of corridor. The last poster cleansed, he won a brief feeling of plenitude, as though he’d purified the universe. It was an illusion of course. Even in those tiny stations newly rectified posters were constantly being graffitied again behind your back. If you returned to the starting point after finishing that supposedly last poster you saw that the graffiti had returned to the first ones, an endless cycle of futility.
So the fat man had, in a sense, saved him. He’d marked limits. There were the Company posters that had to be salvaged and the others. Lorz learned (or tried to learn) to look upon all those other mutilated but non-contractual posters as one did catastrophes in distant lands read about in the papers. And what happened to the rectified posters behind your back was a task for the following day. To each day its task. You couldn’t take on all the chaos of the world.
The director tried to explain all of this to Theo. Having to explain it clarified things in his own mind. What had slowly taken shape deep in your mind you found out, often to your surprise, only when circumstances forced you to articulate it. He articulated it now to the boy and to himself. One had to compromise, he said in effect. He’d once been like Theo, he said. He’d got out of it at the price of a certain loss of purity. But who could be absolutely pure in a soiled world? He explained it in simple words over and over again in the week that followed.
But Theo went on correcting the non-contractual posters. He went on methodically effacing the graffiti, unconcerned with commercial demarcations, touchingly pure in his dedication.
Three days later, at 6:30pm (it was his turn to pick him up) the director couldn’t find the boy anywhere in the West Gate
corridor. He searched for an hour in the other corridors and platforms. Then he rang up his assistant at the office on the off-chance that she was still waiting for both of them to return and maybe, miraculously, would tell him that Theo had come back to Ideal by himself.
She was there, still waiting for the two of them. The director imagined the three cups on her desk, the electric kettle, the three careful piles of biscuits.
She joined him in West Gate corridor before poster-site 354. Each one took half of the great station and agreed to return in an hour.
Lorz returned first and collapsed onto a bench. She came a minute later and sat down beside him without saying anything. Finally she tried to reassure him. Teddy must have returned to the hospital on his own. She said that but went on scrutinizing the passing crowd as he was doing. It was a symptom of self-reliance on Teddy’s part, she explained. Why should he wait in West Gate corridor at 6:30 for one of them to pick him up? He had nothing to leave at the Ideal office now that he took the ladder and the knapsack back with him to the hospital. The only thing he did in the office at the end of the day was have coffee with them. Maybe it didn’t matter to him any more. Maybe that too was a sign of self-reliance, she added sadly.
Lorz said that he agreed completely with her explanation. Theo must have returned on his own to the hospital. Of course it was impossible to check. Suppose (one chance out of a hundred they agreed) he wasn’t there, after all. What would the hospital people, the Commission people, say? They’d have naturally remarked the boy’s absence. They couldn’t push indifference so far as not to have. But in that improbable case, the hospital mustn’t learn that Ideal had lost track of Theo. His assistant, so quick-witted that way, could invent some plausible explanation for the boy’s absence.
Lorz accompanied her to her train. He told her that he was going home too. Of course Teddy had returned to the hospital. That’s for sure, she replied.
He explored Crossroads again.
Leaning against the white tiles, he shut his eyes and tried to project himself into the boy’s mind. Theo must have had the sudden conviction – an illusion, of course – that he’d finally rectified all of the Crossroads posters. He’d have taken a train and at the inevitable sight of the graffitied posters of the very first station would have got off with his equipment and started in.
The next station, then. But which one? Twelve lines radiated from Crossroads.
It was already past nine when the director started systematically exploring those lines. The first (Line 2) yielded nothing. He had to return to Crossroads, jog down endless corridors to a new line, travel to the next station where there was nothing, then back again to Crossroads, another maze of corridors, a new line, a new station, the same operation over and over, to and fro like a spider weaving futile threads, all for nothing.
An hour or so later, from his carriage window on Line 12, he saw his assistant walking out of a corridor onto the platform of the next station, Archives. It wasn’t her line home. She’d had the same idea. Her gaudy mask was set in severe lines. She turned left and went down the platform rapidly. The director quickly got off. Careful not to be seen, he returned to Crossroads.
He found Theo at 10:16pm, busy on the platform of National Library (Line 7). He’d burst the time bounds as well as the territorial bounds. His brush went on and on. The director darted glances right and left at the nearly empty platform and pleaded with him to stop. He had to return to the hospital. Did he know what time it was? They’d been sick with worry, both of them. The director wheedled, commanded, wheedled. The promise of unlimited quantities of raw beef in the spiced blood sauce had no effect. The boy went on and on.
It was almost eleven when Theo ran out of Basic White. He suddenly unplugged. He slumped down on a bench, arms dangling between his knees, eyes empty. What would have happened if the boy had gone on till closing time and the Underground Police had tried to force him out? He’d have offered resistance, passive but stubborn. They’d have arrested him. Notified, the Commission would have taken that final decision. The end of it all.
The director let himself down on the bench next to the boy. He felt drained.
Theo’s breathing became labored, then raucous. The director stared at his profile. His lips were moving soundlessly. Lorz leaned closer to gain a better view. He placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and asked at intervals: “What are you saying, Theo?” The movements of the boy’s lips went on, over and over, the same movements, but no sound came. Wasn’t he trying to say “Edmond” as he had (perhaps) that terrible time over the chessboard?
This time Lorz wasn’t frightened. Why had he been frightened that other time? He tightened his grip on the boy’s shoulder. He silently pronounced “Ed-mond” “Ed-mond,” over and over himself. He was attentive to the movements of his own lips, all the while keeping his eyes on the boy’s. Trying to fit “Ed-mond” onto the movements of those other lips produced the effect of a poorly dubbed film. Theo’s silent utterance began with compressed lips, unmistakably a labial. So not “Edmond.” Wasn’t it the boy’s own name – his real name – that he was trying to pronounce?
“Say it,” Lorz begged. “Try to say it.” He was careful to address the boy namelessly in the hope of getting that real name. He didn’t dare confuse him by calling him by any of his false names: “Theo” or “Theodore” or “Teddy,” not to mention “Number Nine” or “Seventh Candidate.”
Then he was able, he thought, to read the words the boy’s lips were forming. He was almost certain it was what the nurse had heard long ago and misinterpreted as “Base.” “It.” “Why?” Looking about quickly, the director slipped his arm over his employee’s shoulders and promised him the sliced meat in the spicy blood sauce that very night and tomorrow more Basic White. Even as he said it the director realized the meat was an impossible promise. It was in the fridge in his flat. Did they have time to go there? No time tonight. He had to be returned to the hospital (and in what state?). Perhaps some other evening.
We have to go, the director said again and again.
The boy didn’t move. Only his lips moved.
Lorz felt terrible fatigue. He closed his eyes, his arm still about Theo’s shoulders.
Now it was being reciprocated. He could feel Theo’s hand timidly on his own shoulder.
He opened his eyes and saw his assistant standing before them, one hand on Theo’s shoulder, the other on his.
“You look awful,” she said. The director didn’t know whether she was addressing Theo, himself, or both of them. He explained that the boy had run out of Basic White and had disconnected. She sat down on the other side of Teddy. She put her hand back on the boy’s shoulder.
“We can’t go on like this. He’s getting out of control. I’m tired. I must have walked twenty kilometers. A miracle I found the two of you.”
She spoke to Lorz past Theo’s face as though he couldn’t possibly understand. They remained there in silence for another five minutes. Between them the boy was immobile too except for his lips.
“We can’t stay here all night,” she said finally. “I’ll take him back to the hospital. I’ll know what to say to them.”
Words will do no good, he thought, however glib. They’ll be sure to notice the state he’s in. She didn’t understand the problem. He didn’t say it. He said that the hospital was much closer to his apartment than to hers. She’d miss the last bus. He’d take Theo back to the hospital himself. She didn’t argue. She yawned.
They managed to get through to the boy and convince him to get up. She said good night and started walking away toward the stairs. She stopped and turned about and told him what excuse to give. She also said: “I think I have an idea about Teddy. So that this won’t ever happen again.” She still didn’t understand the immediate problem. When he didn’t reply she added: “I’m too tired now. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”
The director took a taxi with the boy to the hospital. As they went past the indiffere
nt gatekeeper, the full moon was invaded by chaotic dark clouds chased by a strong wind. The leaves on the trees in the hospital grounds hissed. Lorz followed Theo. He realized that he didn’t even know where the boy’s room was. Surely no longer 416. He’d never thought of asking.
“Your room, Theo?” he said again. Like a giant mechanical toy, the boy started towards New Hospital. Most of the lights were out except for the corridors, long yellow strips that emphasized the darkness of the rest of the building. It was almost midnight. Theo didn’t turn in there. They had New Hospital behind them now. Up the path, past building after building, pools of light and stretches of gloom alternating. Where was he going? The director rehearsed the excuse his assistant had supplied him with. They’d celebrated something. They’d had dinner in a restaurant, the three of them. He’d told his assistant to ring up the hospital and the Commission to obtain permission. She’d forgotten.
The wind cleared the moon of the clouds. By the sudden light of the rectified full moon Old Hospital loomed with its inky pollution-streaks and white pigeon-droppings. The eroded statues half-sunk at angles in the lawn were like ghosts. The stiff-faced patients that had wandered about like automates in the company of white-uniformed attendants were gone. The director looked beyond Old Hospital. The main path skirted a modern five-story building, vaguely residential in appearance.
But Theo left the main path and started up the driveway leading to the entrance of Old Hospital. Lorz tried to hold him back, saying that he didn’t sleep here, that his room couldn’t possibly be in Old Hospital. But he had to follow the boy into the deserted hall, then right into a dingy corridor, more corridors and then in a poorly lighted stretch where a vast unmarked elevator waited with open doors. There was a smell of urine and ether. Theo stepped inside. He turned about. Behind him on the dirty padded wall was the sign “For Stretchers Only!” He stared at the director still standing in the corridor. His lips were still moving as in silent invitation.
“Not here,” Edmond Lorz said in dread and refused to follow. The doors slowly closed on the other’s abstracted face. The mechanism started up. Wasn’t it sinking toward the maze of flag-stoned passageways? How could his room possibly be down there in that dark windowless labyrinth?
As Lorz retraced his steps from Old Hospital toward the main entrance, the neighboring church bells began pealing midnight. They made a poorly synchronized clamor in the stillness of the park. Down below in the dark windowless labyrinth those church bells couldn’t be heard. All you could hear down there was the periodic roar of the trains of Line 18.
Lorz remembered the cluttered locked room in his apartment, the one with a large window that gave on the sky. He tried to imagine it emptied, scrubbed clean, painted white and yellow with a pink cumulous in the framed sky, church bells pealing and sunshine streaming in, Theo radiant in it.
But the image that persisted in the director’s mind was a real one. When the doors of the old elevator had jolted shut on Theo the boy’s lips had still been soundlessly forming the three syllables of the latest obsession, the old one. He was still in it. The mind-men would be sure to notice it next morning.
By half past eleven next morning the hospital still hadn’t rung up Ideal. The Commission either. Maybe the symptoms had worn off overnight. Or maybe the mind-men didn’t pay attention to Theo anymore.
The director dared to begin hoping, particularly after his assistant told him about her idea. If Teddy had disconnected because he’d run out of Basic White, the obvious solution, the one sure way of making him stop rectifying, was to ration him. He was easy enough to handle once he unplugged. At 12:30 they would give him just enough Basic White to last until about 5:30pm. If he still had bad symptoms they’d wear off by the time he got back to the hospital. They couldn’t stand another night like last night, she said.
Lorz was almost jealous of his assistant’s idea, the beautiful simplicity of it. He had only the briefest of misgivings. If Theo disconnected again in such a melodramatic way mightn’t the police or some Good Samaritan (if the species wasn’t extinct) take him in charge, have him transported to a hospital, perhaps to New Hospital itself? After a moment of reflection, though, Lorz realized that his fear was probably groundless. If all the disconnected people in the underground were sent to the hospital there wouldn’t be a single bed available for connected sick people. The underground would be depopulated. Who had hospitalized the psychotic cowboy wandering about the platforms with a knife? The universal indifference would save Theo.
Her idea worked but there were difficulties. You couldn’t calculate the precise quantity of Basic White that would run out at exactly 5:30. Often they had to wait until 7:00 before his hungry brush licked the jar spotless. Much worse were the days when he ran out of Basic White before the scheduled time. They’d come upon him in various postures of prostration. Even unplugged it wasn’t as easy to move him as she’d said it would be.
The first time there were the two of them. Theo was motionless between them on a bench in the National Library station, staring down at nothing. The usual lures and pleadings didn’t work.
The director’s assistant had been trying for half an hour. She stopped. She opened her mouth and gulped down air. Even in the poor light of the underground her make-up didn’t hide the lines on her face. She was exhausted, what was she doing here? she said acrimoniously to Lorz as though somehow he were to blame for the boy’s stubborn immobility.
She tried again. She told the boy it was dirty down here, it smelled. He should get up. The whole city was dirty and smelled. Some day she’d take him to the mountains with her. Tomorrow if he wanted to. Didn’t he want to? There were pine forests. You could breathe there. There were hundreds of lakes. You could swim in them. Wouldn’t he like to? The water looked brown but that was because of the peat, the water was clean. You could walk for hours on the heath, alongside streams and lakes and through stands of pines and not meet a soul except herons and, if you were lucky, otters. You had to be out of your mind to live here in the city, she said.
She stopped talking. As the peak hour crowd milled past, the images of pines and lakes lingered in the director’s mind. He felt like an intruder in them. After a while her guest emerged.
On the way back to the hospital Lorz reminded the boy that he was expecting him tomorrow at the office at 12:30. He’d give him more Basic White. He said it over and over. For an instant their lips were forming the same three syllables even if only one was articulating the words. They reached the hospital gates. The director said it again and watched Theo pass through the gates. He himself didn’t go any further this time.
The next evening at 6:30pm the director came alone for him. He found the boy sitting slumped forward on the filthy ground at the foot of his ladder, his head bent toward his raised knees. The peak hour crowd streamed past him. A woman stopped to one side and gave her little girl a coin. The girl stooped and placed the coin in the empty jar of Basic White. That charity was the worst of all. Their smug faces, major and minor. The director had to resist the urge to throw the coin at their backs, crying out that Theo was no beggar.
This is a terrible place to be in, he said, bending his face toward the boy’s bowed head. There are other things. There are other places. Edmond Lorz found himself trying to convince the boy that the graffiti didn’t matter. Didn’t matter because the posters didn’t matter. The posters were just pictures. Anyhow, whatever you did to the graffiti they returned. Let them. There were more important things than the posters. The director stopped. For the second time he discovered that you found out what you believed deep down only when you had to say it. There were more important things than the posters, the director repeated. There were better places to be than underground.
He tried to come up with places and things better than slices of raw beef in blood sauce, better than the return to the hospital and to that other, worse, underground maze with the flagstones and the dangling bulbs where the trains could still be heard. What
else had he to offer? He was no mountain-guide.
He tried to summon up the virtual radiant room in his flat. But his imagination failed him and he saw it as it must have actually been (the door had remained locked for three decades): dusty mutilated clutter.
By the time they reached the hospital gates at 9:45 Theo had started coming out of it. The director attributed the emergence to the therapeutic effect his own presence – far too rare – had on the boy. The thought then occurred to him that it worked both ways. Since his association with Theo, he realized, his intestines had been at peace, the Cycle was a thing of the past. They were mutually indispensable. Despite his immense fatigue the director felt joy at this thought.
The next morning Lorz rang up the Commission and spoke of the possibility of a salary-increase for Teddy. Mysels received this with the usual long silence. Finally he warned that any increase over the stipulated wage would have to come out of his, the director’s, pocket. No provision had been made for raises.
Lorz tried to sound disappointed. It wasn’t the real reason for his call. He thanked Mysels for the information. He injected dryness into his voice and asked (“by the way”) whether a definitive decision had been reached regarding a flat for Teddy.
The person responsible for that question was still shopping about, came the grudging reply. The market was tight for the rent they were ready to pay. Why did he ask?
It so happened, said Lorz, that he was in the market himself. He had a huge flat with a sunny, newly painted room. It was perfectly independent with its own bathroom. He mentioned the rent. It was well below the market price but not suspiciously so.
“I couldn’t settle for less. I’m not in the charity business after all.”
He gave proof of more hardheadedness. The lease would have to be a short one. He didn’t want to be saddled with Teddy if he proved unsatisfactory as a tenant. This was unlikely, he added, given the boy’s success on the job, the reason for the raise. But he couldn’t afford to take chances.
The longest of silences followed, so long that the director broke it by saying that of course if the Commission wasn’t interested it was no problem. He was trying to be helpful. And also, frankly, to economize on a classified ad and avoid the bother of all those visits. He was willing to wait a while but sooner or later that room, which he’d had painted a week ago at considerable expense, would have to be rented, if not to Teddy then to somebody else.
Mysels finally replied that the colleague responsible for outpatient lodgings would be informed of Lorz’s proposition but that of course the room would have to be inspected.
“Whatever flat you choose for him it’s certain to be an improvement over where he is now,” said Lorz. “I was surprised to learn that Teddy’s room is located in Old Hospital.”
“Who told you that?”
“I can’t recall. I just remember my surprise on hearing it. I thought Old Hospital was for the mad.”
“For the mentally ill? Not exclusively. Far from it. In any case you’re mistaken. I wonder who told you that? Teddy doesn’t sleep in Old Hospital. He receives treatment there during the weekend. More exactly, he received treatment there. I understand it’s over now.”
It was Lorz’s turn to retreat into silence. Finally he said: “You mean he can be visited on Saturdays and Sundays? This coming weekend, for example?”
More silence. Then inquisitorial: “Don’t you see enough of him as it is?”
“Oh, quite enough! Quite enough!” Lorz replied quickly. “I wasn’t talking about myself. I was thinking of my assistant. She hardly sees him at all during the weekdays …”
“You said ‘quite enough’ twice, in a certain tone,” Mysels interrupted. “Something has gone wrong with Teddy’s work.”
“Absolutely nothing has gone wrong with Teddy’s work. Teddy’s work is perfectly satisfactory, as I believe I already informed you orally and in writing.”
“Then I don’t understand your comment. I asked you, ‘Don’t you see enough of him as it is?’ and you answered, ‘Quite enough.’ Twice. And yet you are anxious to rent a room to him in your flat where necessarily you would see even more of him.”
“Excuse me,” Lorz stammered with contained rage. “Not ‘anxious’ at all, not one bit ‘anxious’. I don’t understand where this conversation is going. I rang up in all innocence about the salary raise which, I should think, is clear evidence that my employee’s work is satisfactory. As for the room I proposed …”
“What color did you have the room painted?”
The question took Lorz by surprise. He hadn’t seen the inside of the room for thirty years. He answered: “White.”
“Brilliant white, of course.”
“No. Dull ivory.”
“Ahh …” Mysels breathed. It was a sound of deep relief. Then briskly: “We’ll see about your offer. The room will have to be inspected of course. But the color and the rent sound good. Excellent, even. Naturally Teddy can be visited over the weekend. But why should your assistant visit him? He can go out. He can go to the cinema, to a restaurant, wherever she wants. Wherever, I said. He’s perfectly free. But how old is she?”
Lorz said he wasn’t sure. He thanked Mysels and hung up.
That was how the director learned that Theo would be free the following weekend and that the room might be visited any day now. After Mysels’ practical green light it was the only thing that could conceivably prevent Theo from occupying it. It was already Monday. He had to act very fast.
On Tuesday loud, burly men came. By evening the room was empty. It hadn’t been cheap. The three painters he consulted demanded a fortune to do the job that week. He was briefly tempted by the idea of having Theo himself paint the room he’d soon be living in. It would combine economy for himself, guaranteed satisfaction for Theo plus the mutually beneficial effect of the boy’s company that very first free weekend. But the weekend was three days away and the inspector could come any minute.
So reluctantly and at outrageous expense Lorz had the room painted by a professional.
The ink was hardly dry on the check and the furniture already ordered when the director learned from his assistant that the Commission had found a flat for Teddy in the Fourth District within walking distance of the hospital.