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Authors: Howard Waldman

Tags: #suspense, #the nameless effacer, #war against disorder

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BOOK: The Seventh Candidate
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“The desserts are so awful here.”

“I’m not hungry. I’m very tired. I have an
appointment in a minute. Isn’t there a lot to do in the
office?”

“Business hasn’t picked up yet. I just get
in the way of the workmen.”

“Why don’t you take the day off and go
somewhere?”

“That’s what I do. I come here.”

“Go somewhere less depressing, the cinema,
the zoo.”

“I don’t mind keeping you company. You don’t
seem to have many visits.”

“I’m used to that. It doesn’t bother me. I
prefer it that way.”

He closed his eyes.

The boy’s face didn’t come.

 

A knock on the door. Silberman came in. To
relieve the pressure on him, Lorz understood, the doctor looked
with a comically hungry expression at the elaborate cake his
assistant had left on the formica wheeled table.

The three of them passed through the
leather-padded swinging-doors of the Life Support Unit into the
empty visitors’ lounge where the inspector was waiting for them. It
was painted a restful green and had neutral paintings and big green
plants. Lorz had to sit down in one of the chrome and leather
armchairs. He bent over to get the blood back in his head. Dr
Silberman placed his hand on his shoulder.

“I’ve been here before,” he whispered. “Yes,
for five weeks,” said the doctor.

“I recognize it,” he whispered.

“No. You were here but you never saw
it.”

“I recognize it.”

“It must have been in some other hospital.
From one hospital to another these units look pretty much the same.
If you don’t feel up to it we can call it off.” Lorz shook his head
and got up.

“It shouldn’t take more than a minute,” said
Dr Silberman as they walked over the fitted carpet toward the other
door. “You look at Teddy and say yes or no, that’s all he
wants.”

Teddy?

Silberman explained that the nurses had
first called him “Number Nine,” the number of his cubicle, but then
they saw that the tag of his sweatshirt bore the brand name “Teddy”
and they called him that. It was less anonymous than a number.

They passed through the second door. They
were in a corridor with a succession of big windows behind which
patients, tributary to machines, were lying on wheeled
stretchers.

Lorz halted. “I recognize this place,” he
said again.

Dr Silberman didn’t answer. The inspector in
the fore, they started going past the display-windows with their
prone dummies.

“Where was I?” he asked for the sake of a
pretext to stop. Silberman pointed to the next-to-the-last cubicle.
“Teddy” was in the last one, he said. The inspector was already
waiting for them there.

Lorz stopped before the ninth cubicle. He
felt the inspector staring into his face as he himself stared down
in confusion into the other face behind the glass.

Now the right face came back in his mind:
the tousled dark gold hair, freckles, dark blue eyes with black
flecks in the irises coalesced into a smiling face.

But the face on the other side of the glass
was all wrong. The chin was too massive. Or was this an illusion
created by the angle of the head, tilted back to leave free passage
for the tube in the right nostril? The closed waxy lids hid the
color of the eyes. And in that situation there was no question of a
smile. The hair, of whatever color, had been shaved off. The bare
skull, criss-crossed with stitches and shadowed by indeterminate
stubble, made the face ageless.

Lorz turned away abruptly even as he heard
the inspector’s blaring question.

He was already seated in the lounge in his
former position, bent forward, when Silberman and the inspector
joined him. Without looking up he told the inspector that he’d
never seen the man before. He tried to call up the right face but
it didn’t come. Not even the wall came.

 

***

 

5

 

The next day Dr Silberman asked him how he
was feeling after yesterday’s little adventure. He replied that the
unpleasantness with the wall didn’t bother him any more and how now
(he leaned slightly forward toward Silberman with a smile he meant
to be wry) he couldn’t even visualize the wall. It was almost
frustrating, not to be able to visualize the wall when he wanted
to.

“I can’t seem to do without misery of some
kind. Don’t you people have a word for that?”

“Is it really bothering you?”

“I wouldn’t call it anything …
melodramatic.”

“Melodramatic. Like …? What would be
melodramatic?”

“It’s not a feeling of, say, loss.”

Silberman nodded and waited. He was a great
listener.

“Or, say, amputation.”

“Amputation?”

“No, certainly not. Or void.” The director
smiled tightly again.

“What would you call it, then?”

He tried to find poetic similes. For some
reason he was always anxious to impress the doctor. Like a
fifth-magnitude star, he said, that you can make out in the
peripheral zone of vision, but which vanishes if you try to look at
it directly. Or music just beyond recall. He stopped and laughed
again to minimize the importance of what he’d said.

Anyhow it wasn’t actually like the star
business or a frustrating memory-blank. It was more like loss,
amputation, void.

Dr Silberman changed the subject. He started
sniffing about Lorz’s occupation. Lorz was on his guard. There was
nothing to be ashamed of but when people asked him what he did he
always spoke vaguely of being in advertising.

The doctor confessed that before Lorz’s
assistant had spoken to him about it he’d never suspected the
existence of that occupation. He didn’t remember ever having seen
Lorz’s employees on their peculiar ladders, but then he generally
traveled by bus. He said that he was fascinated by that occupation
of Lorz’s. A little jealous, even.

The director blinked rapidly, wavering
between gratification and suspicion.

Dr Silberman went on. In the course of his
work, he’d encountered representatives of a great variety of
professions: bankers, bakers, bricklayers (his globular eyes behind
the pince-nez searched the ceiling for another alliterative
professional), burglars (“Yes, no joke, once, a charming old man.”)
but never the
inventor
of
banking, baking, bricklaying, burglary. How had he, Lorz, come to
invent … What was the exact technical word for what Lorz
did?

“‘Poster cosmetics’,” said Lorz, flattered
at the doctor’s interest. “Or ‘poster rectification’. There is no
established term.”

“But you can invent that too. So your
employees are ‘cosmetizers’ or ‘rectifiers’.”

“I prefer the term ‘eradicators’.”

“‘Eradicators’. Ho. Splendidly sinister.
Like professional killers.”

“The idea had never occurred to me. They
eradicate what deserves to be eradicated. In any case I usually
refer to them simply as ‘operators’.”

As to the circumstances that had led to the
“invention” (Dr Silberman confessed to curiosity about it), the
director guardedly recounted the thing in the barest of outlines.
He was careful to omit anything that might be misconstrued as
obsession. They obsessively read obsession into everything,
supposedly. He also omitted any reference to his mother. The
mind-men, he had heard, had a fixation on other people’s
mothers.

 

True enough, his mother, by dying, was very
indirectly involved in his vocation. After the funeral, he hadn’t
wanted to return to the flat where the two of them had lived
together for twelve years – not counting her three institutional
sojourns – following the murder of his father. Guiltily, he resumed
job-hunting. He’d been discharged by the latest bookshop the week
before for excessive interest in the contents of the books he was
paid to shelve. It was the third such discharge for that
reason.

One afternoon in
Central Station
, returning from an unsuccessful interview
and deeply depressed, he saw a giant poster of a little girl
smiling radiantly. She was defaced with some of the same words that
had been scrawled on the walls of the gutted flat twenty years
before.

He saw his mother, distraught and exquisite,
seated in the middle of the room with the fragments of the vase,
those words on the wall behind her. He started weeping, for the
first time since she died.

At that time such words were still limited
to shameful confidential places. The two platforms were empty. He
rummaged in the depths of his worn briefcase and came up with an
eraser. He was vaguely aware that what he was doing was like his
mother’s absurd attempts to piece together the shattered Chinese
vase. The penciled obscenities yielded easily enough. But not the
ball-pointed ones.

When passengers appeared on the opposite
platform he stopped.

That night in the new solitude of the flat
the triumphant obscenity troubled him, distracting him from the
totality of his grief. The next morning he slipped white
ink-effacer into the briefcase and the girl – at that time he
hadn’t yet started calling her Helena – was restored to innocence.
He experienced a sense of restoration himself, a cleansing
almost.

Effacement became a necessary habit. Other
people collected stamps or coins or matchboxes or postcards, he
eliminated graffiti. Which was the most futile occupation? But
while those other hobbies were solitary, his was exercised in the
most public of places. Some (the elderly, mainly) applauded his
efforts, most (the young, mainly) quipped or jeered.

He soon overcame his sense of shame. The
graffiti had started up clandestinely in the last days of the
monarchy, in the service of subversion that was more than
political. He felt the connection between these new obscenities and
those earlier diagonal triple arrows and clenched fists. His
activity was less individual aberration, he felt, than moral
protest. Paradoxically, his major fear was to be taken for one of
the very vandals he was combating. His early technique of writing
over the obscenity with the effacing brush gave him a troubling
sense of duality, defacer and effacer at the same time.

When he got another of his senseless jobs
(stock-clerking, this time), what he regarded as his significant
activity didn’t stop. He pursued it very early in the morning
before work and late at night after work instead of returning home.
He spent as little time as possible in the empty apartment.

The turning point, the unsuspected social
justification of the most intimate of pursuits, came one day
in
Crossroads
when
a well-dressed fat man with an expensive pig-skin briefcase
congratulated him on his skill. That happened often enough. But
this time it wasn’t for the usual moral or political reasons. The
fat man had seen the capital to be derived from Lorz’s
disinterested efforts. He was an executive in a concern that
specialized in underground advertising posters. He offered him a
job and initiated him to the economic potentialities of poster
rectification.

For a year Lorz was paid for doing what he
liked best to do. Sometimes he felt a nagging sense of falling away
from the ragged purity of his initial efforts, shame at this
commercialization. His job was, by and large, what he now had his
operators do. He himself invented the wheeled stepladder. He
refined his techniques. In a year’s time he had established contact
with other poster concerns and was in a position to resign and set
up on his own.

 

That was the story as it happened. In the
modified version he recounted to Silberman he appeared as a
keen-eyed levelheaded entrepreneur, alive to business opportunities
in the most unlikely of places. He sidestepped certain of
Silberman’s questions. The doctor seemed satisfied with Lorz’s
version.

“If I find myself out of a job one day,” he
said, “would you consider hiring me as a – what is it again? – as
an eradicator? Ho. The marvelous word.”

 

***

 

6

 

Every day the volume of his white turban was
reduced. Strength was ebbing back to his left hand. Appetite
triumphed over the hospital fare, which he now ate alone. He put on
weight. Release from hospital was set for the beginning of the
following week. As the days passed the feeling of void and longing
faded. There was no return of the face of the seventh candidate and
no desire to return to it. He tried to puzzle it out. Hadn’t it
been some kind of hallucination? Hadn’t he imagined that face and
his emotional response to it after the event with a brain disturbed
by shock and drugs? He stopped thinking about it.

 

Nine days after the visit to the ninth
cubicle the director snapped his valise shut on the bed. Sunshine
flooded the room.

The electrical impulses of his brain now
jumped the right way on the screen. Pulse and blood pressure were
normal. All of the administrative details for release had been gone
through that morning.

He looked at his watch and then at the
doorway open on the corridor. On the phone he’d mentioned to his
assistant, as though in passing, that he would be leaving the
hospital today at three. It was quarter past now. He’d thought she
would want to give him a hand with the valise, purely a symbolic
hand. It was light. He took it and stepped out into the corridor.
She must be down in the lobby.

In the empty room opposite his he saw a
bunch of tulips left by the last patient. He made sure nobody could
see him, stepped inside and took them. They were practically
fresh.

He was aware that, after all, she must have
taken offence. With the end of his obsession with the wall, things
took on proper perspective. His assistant took on greater
importance. She was the only person he had steady contact with,
five days out of seven, anyhow. He’d been perhaps a trifle brusque
with her sometimes, understandable given the circumstances. Since
that incident just before the attempted identification of the
stranger, she’d come into his room twice for dictation, jangling
and tinkling with new bracelets and earrings. Although
expressionless and bearing no plants or pastry, she hadn’t failed
to inquire about his health and to comment on the unseasonably warm
weather, if minimally. She seemed different.

BOOK: The Seventh Candidate
11.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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