The Seventh Candidate by Howard Waldman
***
8
He floated out of darkness into a body and knew that he was attached by tubes and wires to machines again, a wall separating him from the boy stretched out in his own exact posture in the last of the glassed cubicles.
But when he opened his eyes he saw the bars of the bed at his feet and the wheeled formica table and knew it was a later stage. How many weeks this time? How many months? The room was empty. She wasn’t there to tell him.
Now he saw his forearm with the paint spatters and everything came back: the stunning impact against the iron pillar; blackness for a few seconds and then return to the guffaws of the teenagers and the mutilated ladder and his smashed glasses; his bleeding forehead and great fear for his brain; the taxi to the hospital; no cause for alarm, lie down here a few minutes.
He squinted at the wall-clock. He’d dozed off for half an hour.
He got up gingerly and went into the bathroom. The mirror showed a contemptuously tiny adhesive plaster on his forehead, almost a mark of shame, instead of the crown of swathed gauze he thought the blow had merited along with hospitalization and exhaustive tests.
“What seems to be the trouble?” the unfamiliar intern had asked, and the unfamiliar nurse: “It doesn’t look very, very serious.” Apparently his shoulder had taken the brunt of the impact. The intern predicted a lovely purple and yellow bruise to go along with the other colors all over him. The nurse had laughed, like the teenagers. His once gray smock was like camouflage for some impossibly gaudy Brazilian jungle. There were smears of Basic White on his face with a sprinkling of red. He looked like a clown. They’d taken him for a house painter.
He walked unsteadily down the corridor to the elevators where red arrows pointed up and down to units on other floors. He got in and pressed what he thought was the ground-floor button, hazy like the others, but when the doors slid open and he stepped out he found himself facing the leather-padded swinging-doors of the Life Support Unit. He turned around to the elevator. The doors slid shut in his face and numbered lights showed its progress down to the ground floor.
He stood there for a few seconds and then pushed past the swinging doors and sat down in the empty green lounge with neutral paintings and big green plants. After a while he pushed open the second door and walked slowly to the end of the corridor.
He peered beyond the faint reflection of his own clownish image in the glass of the last cubicle.
The cubicle was empty.
He remembered the words of the pale-eyed doctor and felt loss, amputation, void, as though he’d been switched off himself.
He left the Unit and went back to the fourth floor where he recognized the mannish head-nurse with the choleric face and short iron-gray hair hurrying down the corridor. He stopped her. She frowned and looked at him queerly. She didn’t recognize him beneath his splattered mask. He asked what had happened to Teddy.
“Room 416,” she said and moved on.
“You mean he’s out of the coma?” he asked her dwindling back.
“He’s out of the Life Support Unit,” she said gruffly, not breaking her pace or turning around. She disappeared around the corner.
Lorz went to Room 416. He stood before the closed door for a while. Finally he pushed the door open.
Prone behind the glass of cubicle nine, his candidate had had the dignity of total withdrawal, definitive repose, like a recumbent tomb-figure. Now he was seated. It aggravated his state. One sat to rise and he didn’t rise. He hulked there gigantic and hopeless in the wheelchair, slack-jawed with extinguished eyes. His hands had been placed palms open, idol-like, on his lap. The minimal movement away from the state of statuary – the hardly perceptible rise and fall of his chest beneath the green polo shirt – measured the limits of his progress.
He was even further removed now from the director’s suddenly recalled image of him seconds before the blast, even though the boy had recuperated a few remembered items. His eyes, though dead, were the right color. The dark iris-flecks were there. His hair had grown back sufficiently to confirm the dark gold. There was even the sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of the nose. But he’d never been gigantic like that. And there was the stunned brutality of his features, so unlike the gentleness the director had seen, or imagined he’d seen.
He felt dizzy and sat down. He was too tired even to make the useless attempt to get through to the statue.
The door opened. He squinted and made out a small blonde woman with too much make-up and costume jewelry standing on the threshold. She had a very short red skirt, a low-cut yellow blouse and was holding a big bouquet of white flowers. She stared at him.
“My God, I didn’t recognize you. What happened to you?”
Her voice was unfamiliar and metallic. As she approached she focused. She had chemically bleached hair full of colored combs and gathered up in a tiny crowning shock held in place by rubber bands. Her lips were fluorescent red. Her eyelids were shiny with bluish grease. There was also mascara. But she hadn’t been able to do anything to her eyes themselves, which suddenly testified to the survival, somewhere below all that, of his former assistant.
“I didn’t recognize you,” he echoed stupidly.
He was confused by all these disguises, the interplay of non-recognition. If it was just disguise, his own accidental, hers purposeful, but true identity beneath it, wasn’t his candidate somehow disguised too? Lorz bent over to get the blood back in his head.
In an unconcerned voice, as if talking about the weather, she said that if he wasn’t feeling well why didn’t he lie down?
“I think I will. I had a little accident.” It was an effort even to talk. He went over to the bed and stretched out. She didn’t pay any attention to him. Smiling, she bent down, her loose low-cut blouse falling away from unsupported small freckled breasts, and showed the motionless figure the white flowers. She got a vase and went into the bathroom.
Over the sound of the water filling the vase she raised her unfamiliar metallic voice. “You look like you fell off the ladder. How come you’re on ladder detail?”
She came out of the bathroom and arranged the bouquet in the vase as Lorz explained that he’d had to fire two operators.
“Why don’t you have your new assistant do the job?” she asked and without waiting for an answer lifted the vase in front of the statue. “Aren’t they beautiful, Teddy?” she asked in her old unmetallic voice.
“I have no new assistant,” Lorz brought out with an effort.
He wasn’t sure his reply had registered because she started talking about flowers to the statue. Lorz could smell the heavy scent. Or did it come from her? Finally he asked her why she bothered talking to the man. Wasn’t it obvious he couldn’t hear what she was saying?
Not looking at the director, still addressing the statue, she said, “Teddy can hear me all right. Can’t you, Teddy? And he’s going to get even better. Aren’t you, Teddy?” She kissed his cheek. “Much much better, no matter what the doctors say.”
Her voice went on and on. He closed his eyes. Her voice stopped. He opened his eyes and saw her staring at him intensely. She looked away quickly and went back talking to the other.
He fell asleep. When the nurse came and woke him up, the statue and his ex-assistant were gone.
Two days later he returned to the hospital and asked the young sharp-nosed doctor about the outlook for the patient they called Teddy. He learned that further progress couldn’t be absolutely excluded. But given the extent of brain damage, sequels were practically certain. Of what nature and how incapacitating couldn’t be said yet. Lorz consoled himself with the thought of their earlier hopeless diagnosis and went to Room 416.
She was already there, her back turned to him, talking to the giant petrified figure in the wheelchair about wild mushrooms and nettle-soup in the tone of voice she’d used with the cats in the staircase. She was still unrecognizable except for that voice and her eyes. Her clothes covered even le
She nodded to him and said in her unrecognizable metallic voice that she felt Teddy had made great progress. She glanced at her watch and got up. She’d have to go now, she said, she’d taken off an hour from her job to see Teddy.
Her job? He’d thought her husband didn’t want her to work, Lorz said. She stared at him with those eyes painted into an expression of permanent indignation. What husband? Lorz apologized for the error. That day she’d notified him of her resignation he’d understood her to say she was getting married.
“Married? Me? Who to? Philip? Oh God, you must mean Max. Max is too old, practically forty-five. And I don’t like being dominated. He didn’t like my new friends or the way I dress. You don’t seem to either.”
Lorz tried to mollify her by saying that he didn’t actually know her friends but was sure they were very nice. She retorted that she hadn’t meant her friends (he wouldn’t have liked them either for that matter, she added) but like the way she dressed. “You don’t seem to. Not that it matters.”
He was casting about for something placating to say about her scandalous dress when she changed the subject and asked him about his business. He nearly replied that the ship was sinking. Then he remembered he’d already said that to her three months before. No ship took that long to sink. Besides, the expression had unfortunate associations, which she’d pounced upon that last time. She’d become unpleasantly touchy, completely unrecognizable. Talking to her was like picking your way across an unmapped minefield. He said that she’d be surprised to learn he hadn’t gone bankrupt yet.
Oh she knew he was still in business, she said, opening the door on the corridor. When she changed at Crossroads early in the morning she often saw the operators working. Or not working. (She didn’t add that when it happened sometimes she concealed herself as though she were still invested with power, as though she were on “surveillance detail” as they’d called it in mock-military style. She’d observe the man’s technique for a minute and mentally grade him on the usual scale of twenty as she’d done when it had counted).
Leaving the room, she advised him (“although it’s none of my business”) to hire an assistant. He couldn’t handle the work all by himself.
“I can manage,” he said as she closed the door behind her.
Lorz sat down before the man in the wheelchair and tried to intercept his gaze. There was no focus to it. A few times he addressed him self-consciously, mainly repeating his own name and saying, “Do you remember me?” Doing it, he thought of the red-faced peasant women long ago in his mother’s church who talked to stone effigies. He got no more answer than they had.
He removed his brand-new glasses. Mastering his fear, he slowly approached the seated figure as he’d done that Monday morning in early March. Then he slowly retreated, still facing the other, and began the approach again from a new angle.
He repeated the operation over and over, each time methodically changing the angle by a few degrees as though spinning out the spokes of a half-web. The angles changed but not the face of the motionless figure.
He was backing up for another try when he heard someone breathing behind him. He turned around guiltily. She stood on the threshold staring at him with grave intensity. How long had she been standing there watching him? She said she’d forgotten her bag. She took it and left.
A week later in the Central Station transfer tunnel of Crossroads, she saw an operator perched on his ladder, rectifying children running on a green lawn for an insurance company. This had to be a new one. She frowned at the job he was botching. Mentally corrected the correction. Decided on 7/20, a charitable mark for the wrong shade of lawn-green, the wrong brush and the exaggerated palsy-line, almost as though the operator couldn’t control a real tremble. It used to be, when her marks were meaningful, that three such poor marks and the man was out: the part she hated, but necessary. How had this one ever got hired in the first place? The operator slowly let himself down and leaned motionless against the ladder for far too long. 6/20. Then he stooped down to undo the wheel-locking device, half turning his face towards her.
They met again a few days after in Room 416. Again she spoke of Teddy’s progress. For Lorz there’d been no change whatever and he said so. That was because he wasn’t close enough to him, she said. She told him to look closely at the pupils of Teddy’s eyes while she talked to him. With a certain fear, Lorz drew his chair closer to the other and stared into his eyes. She said he wasn’t close enough.
He drew an inch closer while she leaned over and told Teddy that she was going to take him with her to the mountains as soon as he got better and she’d show him this and that. She went on and on with the familiar things.
Then she stopped and asked: “Did you see?”
Lorz finally broke away and leaned back in his chair.
“Didn’t you see how his pupils sort of shrink when I say things like that to him? It’s his way of saying he understands.”
Lorz said: “Perhaps.”
He hadn’t been close enough to see it, she said.
She broke the long silence by asking him how his business was doing. She’d already asked that question the last time.
“Everything went to pieces the moment you left,” he said.
He stopped apprehensively. His last statement could have been taken as a reproach. He’d meant it largely as a compliment. He quickly changed the subject. He asked about her health, which had always been good. She’d never missed a day at Ideal. Normally one would have expected her to return the courtesy, asking about his health, which, notoriously, had always been bad. Instead, she returned to the bad health of the business. She asked precise questions about clients, operators, suppliers, credits, debits. She hadn’t forgotten a thing.
He started explaining, apologetically, for some reason. She widened her painted eyes in an elaborate mimicry of disbelief at certain things done or not done. It was quite rude, he thought. Whatever his errors of commission or omission, wasn’t she, to a degree, responsible for it all?
“Wait,” she said, “Tell me about it over a cup of coffee.” Didn’t the remark mean that she couldn’t take what he was saying without a fortifier? She added: “Unless you’re in a hurry. Personally I don’t care one way or another. I’ve already had a cup of coffee.” He assured her he was in no hurry.
As the elevator sank to the cafeteria floor he hoped she didn’t notice his effort not to breathe in her musky perfume, like the glandular emission of some nocturnal carnivore.
He offered to pay for her coffee, sure she’d refuse pointedly. She refused pointedly and resumed the cross-examination even before they sat down. Again her painted eyes, fixed elsewhere, widened offensively. She finished her coffee, lit up a cigarette (another disagreeable novelty) and glanced at her watch.
“A minute more. I have a job-interview.”
“Didn’t I understand you to say that you were working?”
“Till the end of the week. I have half a day off to look for a new job. I resigned. The salary and hours were all right. Much better than the job before, God knows.” She paused, apparently to let this sink in. “But the work was dry as dust. No creativity. And I don’t accept interference in my private life,” she added obscurely. Her voice was very loud. She was like an amateur actress trying to project her voice to the indifferent audience of the patients and staff at the other tables.
She stood up. So did he.
She didn’t move. She stared at him out of her expressionless mask for what seemed a minute and then said in her needlessly projective voice that she had a proposition. Unless he wasn’t interested. Strictly business. Since in any case she was looking for work she’d maybe consider coming back to Ideal for a strictly limited period while waiting for something better to come up. A week or two. Or three at the most. That was, if he agreed to certain conditions.
Lorz blurted out unconditional acceptance. He saw bankruptcy staved off, saw her back there in the vast, windo
She sat down again. He sat down too.
Braving the cigarette-smoke, he leaned toward her and asked her when she could begin. This week? Tomorrow? She ignored his question and enumerated the conditions.
Strictly forty hours a week. The legal rate for overtime. An hour off for lunch. No need to give two weeks’ notice. A twenty percent raise …
“More!” he broke in. “I offered you a twenty-five percent raise, if you remember. That still stands.”
She stood up. If he was still interested he had her phone number, she said. She told him to sit there for a while and rest. She went and got another cup of coffee for him and refused his money pointedly.
He cleaned up the office that weekend. Then he packed his suitcases and moved back into his apartment. He took a long, hot bath and slept twenty hours.