***
7
Lorz had expected difficulties but not the catastrophe that followed his assistant’s departure. The new client backed out the next day. He lost two of the oldest clients the following week. The operators, spottily surveyed now, loafed on the job. He was able to stall off the chemical suppliers he owed money to, but for how long? The bank was unsympathetic.
Only the compensation money could save him but it didn’t come. The newspapers didn’t even refer to it any more.
And the work was killing him. How could he bear up under the burden she’d dumped on his shoulders? For he hadn’t replaced his assistant. It wasn’t only to economize on a salary bound to be far higher than what Dorothea Ruda had been drawing, or the fact that a new employee, knowing nothing about poster-restoration, would have to be broken in. In a sense his former assistant was negatively present in the very predicaments her absence caused. Irrationally, he felt that filling the void would make her departure definitive, as though it weren’t already.
But beyond his assistant’s faithlessness, beyond even the disorganizing consequences of the “Events,” the crisis confronting his business had, he thought, deeper causes. Astonishing as it might seem after such a tidal-wave of disorder in March, there was now, in May, distinctly fewer graffiti than in past years and so less pressure on advertising agencies and poster firms to rectify.
He’d have liked an ear to analyze the phenomenon to. He’d have explained, for example, that perhaps the scale of transgressions had changed. How could someone who had experienced the joy of igniting expensive motorcars be bothered with scribbling obscenities? More seriously, he would wonder if the decline in graffiti couldn’t be explained by the change in the posters themselves.
He would have pointed out that the advertising agencies were now beginning to appropriate the symbols and slogans of the defeated March movement. Example: the new Sunglow poster with young women behind barricades, tricked out in the quasi-uniform of the March days, the peaked blue cap, the black sweater, the red scarf. They brandished bottles of Sunglow detergent like Molotov cocktails and militantly proclaimed their right to that brand. Or the scowling child, similarly attired, arms defiantly folded, warning that he was on strike, no more tasteless breakfast cereals for him, what he demanded was the brand whose image was reproduced on a poster behind him.
For a while, the director thought that even the delicious long-necked girl had been impressed into their ranks. Wasn’t that Helena, dressed in March red and black with the blue peaked cap at a heart-breakingly roguish angle? The camera had clumsily caught her in a movement of extreme torsion, her blurred hands reaching down toward a heap of paving stones. The caption, in imitation spray-canned graffiti, proclaimed new freedom thanks to a product which was a revolutionary breakthrough in feminine monthly protection. Then he’d peered at the poorly focused face and decided that the model couldn’t be Helena.
But here, he would have warned, was a paradox (and he imagined his ex-assistant’s expressive face obediently responding to the warning). Why should it be precisely such posters as these, miming and implicitly praising disorder, that real disorder tended to spare? They were strangely free of graffiti. The key, he would have told her, was the breakdown of that tension between Real and Ideal that underlay the conventional posters. For example, to sell powdered soups in plastic packets to the real world below, the archaic image above of an impossibly authentic goodwife stirring a pot-bellied cauldron. Or, in another register of contradiction, the disproportion between the intrinsic importance of the advertised item in real life and the joy it magically produced in the ideal universe of the posters, a joy (or tenderness or conviviality or whatever) endowed, moreover, with enviable duration: the three weeks the poster stayed up.
The world below was tortured by its incapacity to achieve such dedication. Who could be joyous or tender for three straight weeks? They struck back by defacing the image of the unattainable ideal. (Hadn’t he once explained that to her?) The new-style posters, however, didn’t offer tantalizing visions of the Ideal. They flung back a warped image of the real world with its imperfections and vices. Wasn’t the imitation of spray-canned graffiti in the sanitary-napkin poster deeply significant? Or the way the photograph of the false long-necked girl cleverly copied the hundreds of street-riot shots he’d seen in back-issues of news-weeklies: poorly centered and focused, the shutter-speed outstripped by the action. The March events had, in a sense, been one gigantic graffito. One didn’t graffiti graffiti itself.
Yes, he wished she were there to hear him formulate it. She would have scowled with concentration (not getting much, of course, but doing her best), her large dark eyes – her best feature – riveted to his lips. She’d been a good listener, a rare virtue nowadays.
Two weeks after his assistant left him Lorz stuffed two suitcases with essentials and moved into the subterranean office.
He hoped it would be a very temporary arrangement. For the moment it wasn’t possible to cope otherwise. With the insane workload she’d dumped on him, he was now averaging four hours of sleep a day. He’d gain an extra hour by eliminating the round-trip from his flat to the office. There was already a cot in the storeroom where the chemicals were kept, also a cubicle with a toilet and a tiny washbasin.
Lack of comfort proved less unpleasant than certain other things. For example the way time stood still in the perpetual cold noon of the mercury tubes. Even more troubling than the absence of natural light in the basement room was his dependence on a machine for air, the humming ventilator. It reminded him of what he’d seen in the Life Support Unit during his inspection of his candidate. There had been no natural light there either. But he tried not to think of that other space where he’d spent black weeks himself.
One day he cleaned out the drawers of her desk and came across an identity photo of her smiling timidly in black and white. He tossed it on the top of the desk. He got rid of the rest of the rubbish in the metal oil-drum. For months she looked up at him when he passed her former desk.
He tried not to think of the recumbent figure in cubicle nine. Except once, he didn’t even inquire about the man during his own semi-monthly check-ups at the hospital. He supposed that if there’d been any improvement in his candidate’s condition the doctors would have spoken about it. But there was no possibility of improvement. He learned that the one time he did inquire. Down in the lobby he saw one of the Life Support Unit doctors. He fought against the impulse but finally asked what the chances were of “Teddy” emerging from coma.
The doctor practically told him, in cold precise terms that somehow matched his perfectly trimmed pale moustache and pale eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, that there was no chance. But would he be indefinitely maintained like that in half-life by artificial means? Lorz asked. He was told that normally the family decided. But in this case there was no family. “One day the Commission will meet and the case will be examined. Finally permission will be given to switch him off.”
Lorz didn’t know there was such a commission. The expression “switch him off” angered him. “He’s a human being, not a machine,” he felt like retorting. It could so easily have been himself the doctor was talking about. He felt grief and dread. Alarmed at his excessive reaction, he drove the incident out of his mind.
The director ended by taking his meals in the office too. At first there was just the primitive alcohol-lamp she’d used to prepare coffee for both of them. One day he bought a twin-burner camping-stove with a cartridge of gas and a plastic tablecloth with a pattern of yellow smiling suns on a blue background. At dinnertime that same day he covered his desk with the suns and placed the camping-stove in the exact middle. He admired his acquisition, one hip jutting out, an ankle in graceful torsion, limp-wristed hands clasped, in the enraptured posture of the women on the posters before dream household-appliances. Then he plopped the contents of a tinned soup into the saucepan and, gnawing at his half-loaf, stirred and waited for it to simm
er, not boil, for maximum flavor.
Luckily Silberman, who had told him to resume work gradually and to avoid strain, couldn’t see him grappling with the pails of paint, squat 25-kilo brutes, pouring them unassisted now into cans and jars and stocking them in the lockers bearing the numbers of the operators who would pick them up at the start of their shift.
He was even tempted to work the illustrated corridors a few hours a day. One of the operators had thrown over the job and another he’d had to fire for gross shirking. Even though he hadn’t been in harness for ten years the director was confident that he could handle the job in a fraction of the time the two had required. But it would have been additional fatigue. What would Silberman have thought of that?
What made him finally shoulder knapsack and ladder was an alarming incident, which he attributed to the mental effects of confinement in the office.
Already he was suffering from splitting headaches. He decided that they came from sleeping in the storeroom, exposed to the chemical fumes, plus the disturbance of the operators on the 5:00am shift. They banged open their locker-doors and slammed them shut with a total lack of consideration for the sleeper. Lorz dragged the cot as far as possible from the fumes and noise. The headaches continued anyhow.
He apprehended a relapse and a return of the symptoms that had frightened him in the hospital: the craziness of the wall with the boy and his imagined face, the menace of cerebral explosion and the return to blackness.
The routine check-ups revealed no anomaly but he wasn’t reassured. His gaze, as so often, was inward. Except now it was directed at the brain instead of the bowels. The new organ was harder to picture. It was like an eye trying to see itself.
He was constantly testing his brain as he’d done with his lacerated sole that disastrous Monday morning in early March, gingerly putting weight on it, probing the limits of painless pressure. The theoretical source of fear was constantly with him even though the workmen had done their job. The wall at the end of the room was unpainted chipboard now and bore no resemblance to the plaster wall the blast had destroyed.
He tested himself by removing his glasses. The blur restored the wall to its former potentially menacing appearance. But, thank God, there were no symptoms.
He pushed the test further by placing a chair and a table close to it, and then a poster on the desk, the same poster.
Nothing.
One day he draped his jacket over the back of the chair. Without his glasses it could be taken, more or less, for a human form.
Nothing.
So he was cured, despite the headache. He didn’t bother removing the jacket from the chair. In the loneliness of the huge underground room it was company of sorts if he took his glasses off. Sometimes he even sat there, going over his accounts.
One day the alarming thing happened. He dozed off in that chair. Approaching footsteps awakened him. He’d removed his glasses and saw a blurred form drawing close. He – but who was he? – looked up smiling at the other whom he knew to be Edmond Lorz.
The crazy confusion lasted no more than a second. Then he saw that it was the skinny balding operator, Number Four, and recovered his own identity with that of the other.
He decided he was spending too much time in the office. The underground corridors were even further from the sun but he thought that a few hours of poster correction would be a change. If things didn’t improve he’d see Silberman about it.
So for the first time in a decade Lorz donned a grey smock, shouldered the telescoped wheeled stepladder and went down to the tiled corridors to eradicate graffiti. Just before he reached panels 302-334 of the Line 3 transfer tunnel of Central Station, he removed his glasses and breathed on the lenses. Polishing them with a handkerchief, he emerged out of the corridor onto the platform where teenagers were punishing vending machines while waiting for their train.
Looking at the first of the blurred posters he thought he saw Helena. She’d strangely disappeared from the underground panels since the explosion as though she too had been critically injured. But when he put his glasses back on he realized the grossness of his error. The sweet long-necked girl metamorphosed into one of their new skimpily clad smoldering brunettes. They were everywhere now.
Unslinging and developing his ladder effortlessly, he took in the poster (cork-tipped mentholated cigarettes) at a single expert glance. His mind leaped ahead, mapping out the intricate but economical gestures needed to clean her up. Twenty seconds, he judged. Swiftly, he placed the correct bottles and tools on the tray. In the back of his mind he was competing with his ex-assistant’s flawless performance that nearly fatal Monday morning.
He rose to eye-level with the brunette and reached over to efface the crayoned pudendum staring at him like an upended eye with romantic lashes from the upper left-hand corner. Was it lack of sleep or rustiness after so many years? Overcompensation for the residual weakness of his injured left arm? Or was he still shaken by the alarming incident an hour before? Whatever, his movement of suppression was too emphatic. He shot his other hand against the poster, near the region of her bosom, to regain balance. It was as though the brunette had repulsed him.
To his terror and humiliation he found himself jolting impotently backwards from her dwindling, contemptuous face. How could he have forgotten to secure the brake? He clung to the ladder, head swiveled backwards in the direction of his flight, which was toward the group of high school students now standing at the edge of the platform.
“Stop me! Stop me!” he cried. They turned around, gawked at the uncommon spectacle and parted ranks as though to allow him unimpeded junction with the train roaring into the station.
The ladder swerved.
An iron pillar jerked toward him.
It loomed.
He shielded his brain with an arm and cried, “No!”