***
8
It was in early August, at about the time law and order in the underground completely broke down and the first overtly pornographic posters appeared, that Theo started showing deceptive symptoms of improvement. He’d been installed in his new flat for a little over a month. There was a gnawing mystery surrounding that flat, but to all appearances the boy coped with independence satisfactorily. He seldom collapsed inwardly when he ran out of Basic White now. They’d find him easily enough in the corridors of National Library (it was a small station) waiting for one of them to pick him up and take him back to the Ideal office, the way it used to be. The first time it happened his assistant bought a cake and a half-bottle of sweet white wine to celebrate his return. She hadn’t realized that neither Teddy nor her employer could touch alcohol. She drank the wine all by herself with guilty pleasure.
Another victory: they finally convinced the boy to return to the (very relative) safety of Crossroads. All pretence of law enforcement had collapsed in the small stations like National Library. Muggings were round the clock. Old ladies had been knifed for foolishly defending their purses. Rape was committed, incredibly, at high noon. In the same week (out of bored sadism, one surmised) two beggars sleeping on benches were burned alive with petrol in the early morning hours. Pitched battles took place between teenage gangs, not just with the usual crowbars but with firearms. In one week there had been four deaths, one of them an uninvolved passenger. The police had abandoned the field, had retreated to the hub stations, beleaguered fortresses.
The director’s first reaction of morose satisfaction (the bloody harvest of what had been sown thirty years before) was followed by a return of his earlier fears for Theo. He became conscious again of his father’s ceremonial dagger in the depths of his briefcase. He had less confidence in its protective aura the morning he saw the headlines about the first of the charred beggars in Rose Garden. It was a small station too.
So he was vastly relieved when Theo started operating in Crossroads once again. Still, as he well knew, violence could explode there too when least expected. The director began progressively lengthening his protective lunch-hour visits (within more reasonable limits than before, though). Close to the ladder he scrutinized all the passersby. He held the briefcase tightly, at the ready.
By a significant concordance it was in the same month, August, that the posters started their descent into outright pornography. Symmetrical disorder above and below. With this difference: the law combated one sort of disorder (inefficiently), the other it protected. Let a scandalized passenger lacerate one of the pornographic posters (as many, not just the director, must have felt the urge to do) and the law, powerless against the laceraters of old ladies, would react instantly with fines and imprisonment.
Undisguised pornography could be dated quite precisely with the famous (infamous) Pilsober poster. Even his assistant noticed that one. She said, inadequately: “What will they think up next?” She’d been less observant with the Gulliver’s Travels poster a month before. There, incitement to the unnamable was insinuated rather than blatant as with Pilsober.
Still, it took a solid lack of discernment not to understand the implicit message. “They’re Waiting for You” was the title of that poster, one of sixteen his assistant had brought back from a client for previewing. In a week it was all over the underground. There was the cultural excuse of golden-domed temples among palms in the background. In the foreground, the real business was going on. Smiling children with black almond eyes not over ten years old surrounded a middle-aged tourist. Some had their arms about his neck, their cheeks against his. Their golden bodies were practically nude. One was actually feeding the tourist. His mouth, half-open, awaited the fruit. “They’re Waiting for You.” Forced to wait for you. A ring had just been broken up. The videocassettes. By charterfuls they came. There was no greater crime.
Sharing indignation helped. He’d said to his assistant as she was unrolling the other posters: “Did you see the Gulliver poster with the tourist and the children?”
“Yes, I did. Nice.”
“Nice. You found the poster nice.”
His tone made her suspect something shocking she hadn’t noticed. She smoothed the poster out again. He observed with displeasure the eager way she approached her face to it and scrutinized the background with parted lips as though seeking tiny copulations at the base of the temples. She’s changed, within as without, he thought, remembering her former innocence. “Miss Ruda” and her braided pigtails were like a faded sepia daguerreotype.
“I don’t see anything,” she said in a tone which he took for disappointment. The connection with her former self was totally severed.
“The foreground subject, perhaps?” he said.
She pulled her head back and stared at the whole poster. “Is something the matter with it? The children are beautiful.”
“The tourist seems to appreciate their beauty.”
“Well, why not? Don’t you?”
She didn’t understand. He dropped the subject. He wasn’t really annoyed. He was almost touched. Despite everything – neckline, cigarettes, perfume and forwardness – she’d preserved a sizable part of her basic innocence after all.
The epoch-marking Pilsober poster even attracted brief knots of passengers in the corridors that morning. How could one help not seeing the couple? Whole stretches of corridors displayed them in repetition. It was like those bordello mirrors and their multiple reflections that one had – purely accidentally – read about. Again and again one saw the couple, the lovers (lovers, one guessed, for such excesses seemed incompatible with legal union), naked on a rumpled bed. The man was on his back, eyes shut in abandon. His body was cut short well below the navel, at the extreme last moment, by the left-hand margin. She, propped up on an elbow, gleaming lips parted, was reaching for that margin. The legend was huge and red. “She must have it!! Next week she will have it!!” That was all. Nothing announced the product advertised.
One saw it constantly. And one thought of it.
One tried not to. But how couldn’t one? Think of it.
All of the underground passengers must have thought of it.
And then the following week there they were again, in the follow-up poster, indefatigable on their rumpled bed. As implicitly promised, the rest of the naked lover was totally revealed, from another angle. The strategically placed shadow, barely adequate, teased the gaze. The woman was still propped up on an elbow, now presenting her naked breasts to millions of onlookers. Her hand was reaching over and beyond her naked lover toward a foaming bottle of beer on the side-table. “Better than anything else: Pilsober!!” said the slogan.
That was the first one. The next were worse. More and more agencies were following suit. Everything was being sexualized, even cat-food. And the very slight distance between the director and these new scandalous posters vanished altogether when his assistant brought back the next batch of previews a few weeks later. Two more clients had gone over to the new trend.
The vandals practically ignored these new-style posters. If the trend toward indecency continued, Ideal Poster would soon be out of business. It confirmed the director’s solitary analysis a year before of the advertising industry’s takeover of (carefully defused) radical slogans and postures. Vandalism preyed on the ideal of course, he tried to explain to his assistant, and there was nothing, God knew, ideal about these. The obscenity was inscribed in the poster itself. Graffitied addition would have been absurdly pleonastic he said. He was certain she would ask for the definition of “pleonastic.” Instead, she wagged the foot of her crossed left leg. She hadn’t even taken out her agenda-book to note the word. She stifled a yawn and called attention to it by making exaggerated amends, saying, “excuse me,” leaning forward and blinking conscientiously, miming interest.
He didn’t continue. She’d changed after all.
Outdone by the new posters, the vandals concentrated on Helena. By th
e operation of some strange duality it was her summer as well as Pilsober’s. She posed everywhere else on the walls in elegiac icons of a world of beauty and decency. She was uncontaminated by the proximity of the new-style posters. She ran before poppied wheat fields, hair streaming out behind her. She was softly mirrored on shining sands not body-to-body but hand-in-hand. One heartbreakingly lovely scene lighted up the tiled tunnels for months. Wearing a high-buttoned tulle dress and a broad brimmed ribboned straw hat she throned high on a swing, suspended week after week at blue apogee. Head thrown back, she smiled up at the sky.
As though the violence and indecency weren’t disturbing enough, there was the mystery surrounding Theo’s flat. After the director finally succeeded in swallowing (without digesting) his anger at the senseless last-minute rejection of his room, he tried to find out where Teddy’s flat was located.
For some reason the Commission was evasive about the address. “Within walking distance of the hospital,” they’d told his assistant and nothing more, she claimed. He, Lorz, hadn’t even been given this information. He asked Theo a dozen times but the sheet of paper he placed before the boy remained blank.
At first this mystery was no more than a minor irritation. In the director’s mind, the ex-storage space he’d transformed at such great expense was still “Theo’s room.” Lorz was determined to justify the hauling and painting bills. He decided to invite the boy there that very first free weekend. It almost became an economic issue. He also found therapeutic reasons for the invitation.
The more he thought of their relationship the more he was convinced that their contact had had curative virtues for the two of them. He attributed Theo’s successive breakthroughs to what had gone on between them at the hospital: the talk, (even if one-way), the work on the newsmagazine, the chess games. He owed his own relative improvement, he felt, to his efforts to break free of unhealthy self-focus and reach out to another human being. But they had drifted apart. Weren’t they both suffering a relapse because of this?
For Teddy’s recent rally was short-lived. By late August the old symptoms began returning. He unplugged again spectacularly – it was like brutal withdrawal symptoms – when his ration of Basic White ran out. His assistant had been the first to note the boy’s growing haggardness. Did he eat regularly? she wondered. She plied him with cakes, which he usually ignored. Half the time he even refused the director’s thin dripping slices of raw beef. How was it the hospital people didn’t notice all that?
They did notice Lorz’s own problems, though. The young sharp-nosed doctor had frowned significantly during the last check-up. Lorz had confessed to sleeplessness, irritability, colored visual patterns, but not to what alarmed him most of all: growing awareness of his bowels. No burning, no pain as yet, but (the idea occurred to him one night) something like the uncomfortable awareness of one’s lungs brought about by a slight impoverishment of the oxygen of the air. This image gave the director breathing difficulties, which he attributed to the growing pollution of the capital’s atmosphere. The new concern with his lungs briefly relieved him of concentration on his bowels that sleepless night.
Of course there were the obvious immediate explanations for his health problems. There was the wear-and-tear of those evenings in the underground trying to coax Theo up and out. Plus the lengthening of the workday to make up for the time wasted – from a strictly business point of view – on Theo. Even his assistant seemed exhausted and more irritable. Altruism was taking a lot out of them.
More profoundly, the director blamed his declining state on the absence of the old contact. When had they been alone during the past months? Certainly they saw each other (he, at least, saw Theo) every workday. But this wasn’t contact. During the lunchtime visits – when he was able to locate the boy in the labyrinth of Crossroads – he was on guard-duty. Vigilance was essential. It got in the way of communication. And anyhow there was no way to hold – or even to gain – the boy’s attention there. The only reality for him in the underground was those marred faces and landscapes. In the office at 12:30pm and again at 6:50pm the director could hardly talk to the boy in the presence of his assistant. She monopolized the conversation in any case.
The director nostalgically recalled the Day of Giving when Theo had overwhelmed him with the contents of a room. Also the twelve gift-wrapped ticking rectangles. That was all long ago. Recently there’d only been that marvelous moment when the boy had carefully wiped the smear of Basic White from his face.
Theo was slipping away from him. He must absolutely talk to the boy undistracted, draw him out of the killing obsession with the posters, open him to other things. He imagined them together in the new white and yellow room, both looking at art albums (hadn’t Theo been an artist?). He’d win the boy’s attention and analyze the paintings. Or they could return to chess games or Chinese puzzles. After (or perhaps the next day if he stayed over) they could go for a drive in pursuit of the dwindling countryside. They could walk through surviving fields in the sunshine. It would do them both great good.
He repeated the invitation all week long whenever he could. A little celebration, he explained. In his flat at three o’clock. If you want to. The beef, as much as you like. Three o’clock at my place. Only if you want to. We might go for a ride in my car. A picnic. If you like. Unless you have other things to do. Do you understand me, Theo? Saturday, three o’clock, at my place.
Did the boy understand? The director printed his address on a slip of paper and gave it to him.
Afraid Theo may have lost the paper, the director gave him a new slip of paper with his address and the appointment date the next day.
He did this every day.
Three o’clock then four then five went by that Saturday afternoon. In the white and yellow room the director leafed through the Michelangelo album, careful not to get the spicy blood sauce on the powerful marble limbs. He told himself repeatedly that he hadn’t really believed that Theo would come.
That night he was awakened by incredibly loud thumps on the staircase, as though a marble statue were negotiating the steps. He sat upright in his bed. A full moon as blinding as the sun invaded the room. His eyes started to weep. The thumping came louder and louder. He looked at his alarm clock. It was exactly three. He hadn’t bothered saying 3:00pm to him, thinking it was obvious: daytime three. Theo had misunderstood.
The whole building seemed to echo with those thumps. Was the door locked? Frightened, Lorz got up and reached his door, breathing hard. He tested the bolts, all five of them. The door was locked. The thumps stopped. Was that breathing he heard on the other side of the door? The door was being tried. Or was it the wind?
After a long wait the clumping resumed, the sound slowly diminishing down the stairs. Lorz stood on his side of the door for a long time and then went back to bed.
When he woke the next morning he assumed he’d dreamed it all. He didn’t understand why he’d received the imagined (surely imagined) nocturnal visit in the form of a nightmare.
The Monday morning following the invitation fiasco the director’s assistant removed her diary from her drawer. She hadn’t touched it for months. She unlocked the golden clasp with the tiny key. She stared down at the page, then up at the bright wall, biting the pen, and then wrote furiously as she used to do in the old days when she’d seen Theo in the hospital the day before on Sunday. But Theo wasn’t in the hospital anymore.
That same day, early in the afternoon, the phone rang while she was in the storeroom. The director took the call and winced at the familiar inquisitorial voice. “Mysels, the Commission. Miss Ruda? Where is Teddy?” The director, still resentful at the room fiasco, replied coldly. “Lorz, Ideal. At this precise moment, 3:12pm? Working in the underground, in the Crossroads station. Doing his usual efficient job, I imagine.”
Mysels asked suspiciously why Teddy hadn’t shown up for the medical check-up as he was supposed to. It was the second straight check-up he’d missed. And how was it that he
was never in his flat after work or during the weekend?
“My relationship with my employees is strictly professional. What they do outside their six hours with Ideal is their business.”
“Our business too. Actually I didn’t expect you to know. I wanted to talk to Miss Ruda.”
She was back at her desk by now and the director pointed at her phone. He hung up and busied himself with a letter already disposed of with an air of total absorption as though her progressively shocked voice were going on miles away.
“Yes … Oh really? … How should I know? Why do you ask me, Mr Mysels? … What? … Why Mr Mysels, that’s no question to ask a … I’m surprised at you. I wouldn’t dream of asking you personal questions like that … You certainly cannot ‘draw conclusions …’ … All I can say is that I wouldn’t worry about Teddy. I’ll talk to him about the check-up, goodbye.”
She replaced the receiver, shrugging her shoulders. Still staring down at the letter, Lorz waited for clarification. After a few minutes he said that he could understand the Commission worrying if Theo didn’t show up for appointments and was never home.
“Maybe they don’t come around at the right times. Or maybe the El makes too much noise when they knock and he can’t hear.”
She blinked once, returned to her work for a few seconds, and then spoke about the latest batch of preview posters. Had he seen the new Pilsober? Funnier even than the last one.
So Lorz learned that she knew where Theo’s flat was located. How had she found out? Why hadn’t she told him? The information she let slip enabled him to narrow down the area of search. There was nothing obsessive about that search. An hour or so after work, sometimes after dark he followed the El.
At the end of the week, at a bit past ten in the evening, he found it, an old four-story building squeezed thin between larger, more modern apartment houses. In the cold white marble hall he saw the name Mr Tedd on letterbox 4a. A queer foreign-sounding name but not as queer, they must have thought, as Mr Teddy. Like all the other letterboxes, it was rusted as though disused for years. There was no mail inside any of the boxes. The other names, penciled, were nearly illegible. It was a strange place to have chosen for him. It was impossible to reach the staircase. You needed to press a code to open the hallway door.
He went outside and looked up just as the elevated train rumbled past, five meters away from the fourth-floor windows. He could well imagine that a knock on his door would have gone unheard. His assistant had drawn the same conclusion. Or had she been in a better position to know than on a street corner looking up at the windows? There was something else strange about Theo’s building. The neighboring buildings were crossword puzzles of lighted windows, some warm yellow, others ghostly flickering blue from the television screens. Dramatic music, mimed shots and the deep boom of theatrical voices came from those windows.
Theo’s building stood dark and silent. Not a single window was lighted. Not a ray of light came from the fourth floor. He could be out, of course. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock. He (Lorz) had come too early. But there were seven other flats in the building. Why were they dark too? Maybe they were inhabited by old people who went to bed early.
Lorz waited till 11:30pm for the boy to return or switch on the light. The building remained black and silent. The yellow and blue squares in the other buildings went out one by one. The voices and music thinned and then fell silent.
Lorz returned home.