The Seventh Candidate Read online



  THE SEVENTH CANDIDATE

  HOWARD WALDMAN

  Part One

  1

  Much later, caught up in the terror, Lorz would reflect on that queer coincidence in time and space. The vagina-in-the-cloud accident that triggered everything occurred both on and in February 26. February 26 was the day the republic had been proclaimed thirty years earlier. February 26 was the turncoat underground station (previously Royal Gardens) that celebrated the event. Lavish fireworks, cheered by millions, also celebrated it.

  To Edmond Lorz, director of Ideal Poster, the booming red bursts, like exploding heads, annually celebrated the massacre of the brave men--among them his father--who had defended the values, hopelessly archaic now, of the old order. Perhaps as a gesture of defiance toward the new disorder (an absurdly feeble gesture in comparison with his father’s), Lorz kept himself and his employees busy underground on that murderous holiday when only essential services like the telephone, burials and the underground itself operated.

  You couldn’t say that Ideal Poster was an essential service, at least not in purely economic terms, the only terms that counted now. There were only twelve Ideal Poster operators in the capital’s vast underground with its sixty-three stations strung like dingy beads on the tangled lines. One hundred and two kilometers of white-tiled surfaces bore an annual total of 303,508 advertising posters, a few of them, thanks to the Ideal operators, briefly free of graffiti, mostly obscene.

  Millions of passengers a year went past those rectified posters. But how many knew that Ideal Poster even existed? The firm’s employees (“eradicators” Lorz sometimes called them) were diluted in all that elongated space, hopping about like sand fleas on an endlessly filthy beach. Besides, they mostly operated during the slack periods of early morning and late evening. The odd passenger who did notice them fussing over the posters took them for the men who slapped up the joyful images and hadn’t time to wonder at the peculiarity of wheels on the Ideal Poster stepladders and the operator’s tiny labor of eradication.

  The operator who broke the pattern of virtual invisibility was Number Seven. Lorz knew his operators by number because they came and went so fast. This one, hired the month before, went very fast and in spectacular fashion. He’d already eradicated a penciled human phallus on a sheep and purged the meadow of a sticker that called for the overthrow of the government.

  Tiptoe on his peculiar stepladder on the Line 7 platform of the February 26 station, Operator Seven now reached up with his brush dipped in Basic White to eradicate a giant ball-pointed female organ. It intruded on a cloud like a romantically long-lashed upended eye. He lost his balance and shot his hand forward against the poster for support.

  He got none. Unexpected reaction followed his action. Operator Seven had forgotten one of the director’s repeated warnings: always pull the lever that immobilized the wheels of the stepladder before mounting it, always do that. Having to nag the operators into prudence was one of the many things that periodically tortured the director’s intestines.

  The peaceful landscape with its flock of Wool Delight sheep repelled the operator. Uneradicated, the giant eyelike organ in the cloud seemed to be gazing at the wheeled stepladder as it jolted backwards towards the edge of the platform.

  The rails below vibrated with the approaching train.

  At the moment that Operator Seven, foolishly hugging his stepladder, toppled over, Lorz was speaking indirectly to his assistant, his sole office employee, about untroubled times way back. When business was slack and her newspaper headlines particularly distasteful, he sometimes told his assistant, in impersonal terms, how things had once been. He did it apprehensively, though. He’d observed a correlation between his need to evoke that distant time of order and the cyclic intestinal burning.

  If he’d known that the accident at and on February 26 was setting in motion events destined to turn his existence upside down, fire would have burst out in his bowels then and there and dropped him to the floor as it did twice a year on average.

  Edmond Lorz was a thin, greyly handsome, taciturn man in his mid-forties. He dressed carefully in dark or neutral shades and wore tinted glasses even in the sunless Ideal Poster office located deep below street-level in a run-down Third District building.

  Conversation was difficult there. Every minute or so the muted roar of Line 8 which ran ten meters below filled the big shabby office. Also, the director had placed his assistant’s desk far from his own and he disliked having to raise his voice. So when he had something lengthy to say to her, as now, he would usually take a letter, any letter, and go over to the wooden filing-cabinet next to her desk and say it, fingering the files, face averted. Often, having said it, he would return to his desk with the letter still in his hand.

  Whenever she heard him heading for the filing cabinet his assistant would pause expectantly over her invoices. But most of the time when he visited the filing cabinet it really was to file something and he’d do it without saying anything.

  When he did have something to say that didn’t concern business, it wasn’t always partisan information about old times. Sometimes he would come out with information he’d read the night before in his father’s mutilated encyclopedia and wanted to share with someone. She was the only available person.

  In November she’d learned about Old Empire mummification techniques. In December he’d conducted a fast and incomplete tour of the solar system. It ended with Neptune because Pluto had been discovered in 1931 and he had the 24th 1928 edition of the encyclopedia. He was content with its fossilized information and had no desire to possess the catalogue of heavenly bodies and national disasters of a more recent edition.

  In January, he’d informed her that the Canary Islands were of volcanic origin, had black beaches and had been originally inhabited by a race of giants who communicated by whistling. (Nothing in the 1928 article spoke about charter flights dumping millions of tourists into concrete cubes thronging the shores.) Did she know why the Canary Islands were called the Canary Islands?

  She saw it intensely: melodious clouds of yellow birds over nude muscular giants on black beaches and herself there. For a few precious instants it had greater reality than the subterranean office. She answered: the Canary Islands because they’re surrounded by water on all sides and are full of canaries.

  Wrong. When the Romans discovered the islands they were full of wild dogs. Canes in Latin, hence Canaris.

  Disappointed at the loss of the birds, she consoled herself with the thought that maybe there’d once been millions of canaries in the Canaries before the wild dogs devoured them.

  Anyhow, she noted Canes in her agenda as she did for all the unfamiliar words she learned from him, hundreds by now, such as “ontological,” “tautology” and “reciprocity.” They weren’t easy to place in a conversation but she was grateful for the definitions and the spelling. She’d claimed two years of university studies in her letter of application but didn’t even have a high-school diploma. Her aloof omniscient employer corresponded perfectly to her idea of a university professor.

  Dorothea Ruda was a small, lonely, dark-eyed woman in her mid-thirties with a plain, eager face and a pronounced Central Mountains accent. Although she’d been in his employment for five years the director still addressed her as “Miss Ruda.” Naturally she addressed him as “Mr Lorz” or “Sir.”

  She brought left-leaning newspapers into work. That was why he sometimes told her about the inconceivable time back then when patriotism had been as spontaneous as breathing air, not yet polluted, the darkest alley as safe as a police-station, paralyzing strikes and demonstrations unknown. The dissuasive death penalty existed. The crime-rate in the kingdom was the lowest on the contine
nt. Discipline hadn’t been a vain word. Unruly pupils were birched in class. Prison-manufactured cat-o’-nine-tails hung thong-downward in bundles like leeks at most greengrocers’.

  Dorothea Ruda was too timid to express her feelings verbally (except three times a year) but she looked horrified. Encouraged by that, her employer would go on justifying rules and sanctions without telling her that as early as he could remember, even before he was able to read them, there had been rules and sanctions tacked on his bedroom wall. Three sheets in his father’s square-shouldered script enumerated forbidden acts. The earliest ones were: use of his mother’s perfume, bed-wetting and, out of fear of the dark and love of her, sleeping with his mother during his father’s long absences. These and later transgressions were ranked in an ascending scale of gravity from 1 to 5 with subdivisions a, b and c, and opposite, the appropriate punishments. Such conduct sheets weren’t rare in those days.

  That day, February 26, her headlines blared about alleged police violence against strikers. The director defended them (the police) to the filing cabinet in general terms, careful not to disclose whose memory he was defending in particular. He saw his father powerful in his black uniform and couldn’t help remembering the almost clandestine burial. To shake free of the image he changed the subject and spoke about the fabulous cleanliness of the capital in that law-abiding time. He was about to observe that Ideal Poster would have gone out of business in a week in those days, when the phone rang.

  His assistant answered it and Lorz went on thinking about the absence of graffiti then, not counting the shameless things you saw in public toilets. Or once, carved on a tree in Royal Park (now Liberty Park), the timid heart with no incriminating initials. Droplets of sap gleamed like pearls on the silver bark beneath the heart. The next time he passed by, the heart had been covered by a black square of antiseptic tar.

  But one day they were everywhere, on walls, fences and pavements: not timid hearts but subversive symbols like circled flames, clenched fists, hammers, oblique triple arrows, all with slogans inciting to the disorder weeks later of their sacked apartment, one of many. Lorz couldn’t help seeing, with the sharpness of the original vision thirty years before, the hacked furniture, political slogans and obscenities on the lacerated wallpaper and the spine-split volumes of the encyclopedia lying open everywhere like white-winged, massacred birds. Once again he saw his mother, widowed hours before, sitting on the stained carpet in the middle of a thousand fragments of the great Chinese vase. She was trying to piece together the precious heirloom with a flour-and-water paste as she’d once done for his cut-outs long before. She persisted in the impossible restoration until her death twelve years later.

  The director was rescued from those images when his assistant, white as paper and clutching the phone, stammered out the news concerning the accident at February 26.

  It could have been worse, though. Seconds before the train powered into the station Operator Seven had managed to hoist himself onto the platform despite (as it later turned out) a broken collarbone and five fractured ribs. The director didn’t ask about it of course but was practically certain that the expensive wheeled stepladder was a total loss.

  He guessed what had happened. How many times had he spoken to them about the brake-lever? A hundred times? The ex-operator must have senselessly clung on to the accelerating ladder instead of jumping off. Why hadn’t another passenger stopped it? Public-spirited individuals were a vanishing species. Nowadays cowardice and indifference reigned underground as they did at ground-level. He thought of those late-hour trains where juvenile thugs (“victims of society,” of course) beat old men to a jelly and violated young women in the presence of passengers masking themselves behind their newspapers. The next edition would relate the incident to them.

  The director went over to the big map of the capital’s underground network hanging on a dingy wall above piles of posters. It looked like a war-theater map. Twelve numbered pins were stuck in the red dots of major stations, marking the deployment of the firm’s employees. The director pulled pin seven out of February 26. His assistant, still badly shaken, agreed that they would have to advertise for a new operator.

  The director returned to his desk and the poster statistics. His assistant kept staring at the wall tragically. A few minutes later, the director sneezed six times in quick succession. His assistant looked away from the wall and repeatedly begged God to bless him. She timidly hoped that he wasn’t coming down with the flu. Everybody was. He sneezed again and asked her if a sore throat was one of the symptoms. She said that it probably was. She burrowed in her bag and came over with a tin of lemon-flavored vitamin C wafers which she placed on his desk gratefully.

  He thanked her and placed a wafer on his tongue and let it melt. If only a wafer, this or the sanctified one, could cure ailments more fundamental than a sore throat.

  At six the director called it a day. His assistant said that of course she would visit Jonas immediately. After a few seconds Lorz understood that she was referring to Operator Seven. He allotted a reasonable sum for flowers or chocolates at her discretion and reminded her to recover the office keys from the operator at the hospital. Tomorrow, first thing, she should insert a help-wanted advertisement in the usual newspaper. He would start preparing the test that very evening, he added.

  Leaving the office, Lorz nearly stepped on her sardines. He’d made frequent indirect references to the matter but she went on placing the saucer with sardines to one side of the staircase. They attracted hordes of scabby identical-looking cats. She had a distinct name for each one. The staircase reeked. Lorz avoided head-on confrontations because he knew he tended to overreact and suspected that she would too if he did and perhaps with tears. She was an emotional person. But one of these days he’d have to come out once and for all with a flat command for her to stop doing that. He tried to stifle his irritation. Negative reactions like that were bad for his condition.

  As he climbed up to surface level, Lorz recalled, as he did more and more often, an encyclopedia woodcut representing the present neighborhood three centuries before: a charcoal-burner’s hut among big leafy oaks with a stream and a deer drinking from it. Naturally he didn’t ask for that much coming up but dared to hope for blue sky. He got menacing clouds, the rush hour crowd, the blare of traffic and recent rain dripping from the bare branches of iron-corseted trees set at regular intervals alongside the curb. The oaks and the deer were mortal, but what had happened to the stream?

  Not for the first time, his assistant, who had caught up with him, cried, “O! O!” gazing up at the sky and pointing. “The bird, O look, the beautiful blue bird!” Not for the first time he looked. Who wouldn’t want to see a beautiful blue bird in the dark heart of the capital? All he saw up there in the habitual pollution-haze was a blue police helicopter hovering over another student demonstration in the Sixth District. “Gone,” she said.

  The beautiful blue bird business had happened three or four times already. Each time he looked it was supposedly too late. Her exclusive vision rankled. He decided there’d been no bird. It was trivial unmotivated mythomania, like the cheese-seller with his flock of belled goats she claimed to have seen near the Ideal building at an uncompromisingly urban intersection.

  Lorz was alarmed to note that his mind kept picking at his assistant’s shortcomings and peculiarities. It was one of the sure symptoms of approaching intestinal crisis. But he couldn’t help going on with it. Not just the left-leaning newspapers, the stubborn sardines and the fictitious birds or her endless nostalgic reminiscences of childhood on a farm in the Central Mountains. Above all, her peculiar periodic transformation. Wasn’t the next one about due?

  Three times a year she would march aggressively into the office, barely recognizable in a tight sweater and slacks. They emphasized the insufficiencies of her figure. Her hair, which she normally wore in two schoolgirl pigtails, would be unbecomingly upswept, denuding her irregular (if not positively unpleasant) features. M
ore irritating was her polemical sharpness when he commented on her newspaper headlines. He had trouble recognizing her at those times. He would think: “She’s not herself again. It won’t last long.” In fact it lasted no more than a few days each time. One morning, to his relief, she would slip into the office, back in pigtails and modest loose attire, looking as usual a faded sixteen, herself again, with an apologetic air for the dissipation. It was cyclic with her as the intestinal pains were with him. Luckily their cycles had never coincided.

  Before they separated at the corner, the director reminded his assistant about the keys and the advertisement. She said she wouldn’t forget. She seldom forgot things. Despite her peculiarities she was an efficient employee.

  When Lorz reached his underground station (Crossroads, Line 8), certain things he’d witnessed down below the other day came back powerfully and he couldn’t go under, fearing for his bowels if he again encountered child prostitutes of both sexes openly soliciting in the cars or the young beggar-woman defecating in the corridor, grinning at the passing legs of the rush hour crowd.

  What was the shield against that? Lorz, who had once yearned for priesthood, had read that the radical solution was love. Embrace them as saints had allegedly embraced lepers long ago. The other, much easier, solution was to be blind to it all, shielded by a newspaper. But in that case weren’t you part of it all, a leper yourself?

  Wondering, not for the first time, if he shouldn’t look about for a new doctor, Lorz turned away from the underground entrance and flagged down a taxi despite the expense. He cranked the window shut against the local disorder but couldn’t do anything against the radio detailing the world’s disorder at top volume. He didn’t dare tell the driver to turn the news off. Suppose the man refused?

  When the taxi mired down in traffic, Lorz paid and started walking to his apartment. It was still a long way off. He breathed shallow in the cancerous blue haze manufactured by thousands of stalled cars. Their horns blared discordantly like something out of Shostakovich.

  He marched on, trying to abstract himself from it all, eyes fixed on the pavement. A big soft man collided with him. “Oops,” the man said, clinging to Lorz. He had bright yellow hair and a doughy face. “Why hello! It’s been ages. Coming back to us after all that time? Oh, and still so slim! What’s your secret?”

  They were standing in front of the dingy place with the legend Turkish Delights. Steam Baths and Massages.

  “It’s a mistake, I don’t know you,” Lorz muttered, disengaging himself and walking rapidly away from the place he’d stopped frequenting long ago, ten years ago it must have been. Combating images out of that time, Lorz glanced at street signs and set his course homeward.

  He was close to his apartment when he thought he felt the faint onset of the burning. He halted in the middle of the pavement. Passersby jostled him. The only possible refuge, in purely physical terms, was the Church of the Holy Cross at the corner of the street. His mother had prayed there mornings and evenings to no avail and finally had been prayed over one rainy afternoon sixteen years before, to no avail either, Lorz imagined. He hadn’t entered the church, that or any other one, since the ceremony. If there’d been a public garden available he would have gladly gone there instead. It would have had to be gigantic, though, to fend off the city. He imagined himself, impossibly, on a green bench under great oaks, with a deer drinking at a nearby stream.

  The leather-padded door swung shut on him. He got the silence and immobility he craved, but with it gloom, dankness and the odor of rancid piety. The church was empty except for a shabby old woman with a big plastic shopping bag seated before the altar, head bowed. She was as motionless as the statues of the saints in their niches. Nothing had changed. He could believe that the old woman had been sitting there for sixteen years. The only sound was the whisper of his soles on the flagstones.

  Out of old habit he sat down on the side aisle seat he’d once occupied between his mother and father. To his left was the familiar sarcophagus with the eroded noseless effigy of the recumbent Warrior Bishop who had upheld authority with sword and gibbet in the time of the Child Kings.

  Soaring foreshortened above was the savage mutilated black Christ that had terrified Lorz long ago. He was three times life-size, stark and fissured, hewn out of indestructible heart-wood blackened with time, as black as his father’s uniform. The original polychrome was gone except for faded flecks of color in the grain of the wood. The gouts of blood that streamed from the barbed iron crown, the four nails, and the open-lipped flank-wound were very visible, having been periodically freshened up at later periods of weakening faith to assert the reality of redemption.

  He bore other wounds, bloodless axe wounds dealt by the Integral Iconoclasts during the late sixteenth-century Time of Disorders. His chin had been partly lopped off. The desecration had gone unrepaired except for the sectarians themselves: reparation by disembowelment and molten lead. His gaping chinless mouth was twisted in what seemed a mute cry for even greater vengeance.

  Below that Christ, to the left, hung the large oil painting of Jesus healing cripples. The two juxtaposed images left Lorz indifferent now as everything in the church did. He dimly recalled, though, his wonder, at perhaps five or six, on learning that they were the same Person. It was another Mystery, like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Three in One, but a Mystery the priest never talked about: how the beautiful figure in the painting with his gentle face and pure blue eyes and golden hair spilling over his immaculate gown could be the same Person as the black mutilated giant on His cross. Both were Jesus Christ, his mother had explained.

  But for a long time young Lorz had dissociated them in his mind. The gentle Person in the painting he knew as “Jesus,” the Other as “Christ” perhaps because “Christ” sounded like “cry,” not the cry of tears (tears were for blue-eyed Jesus) but the cry of fury. For the child, only Christ, exclusively that giant Christ, wielded power. He’d been secretly convinced that the black snarling figure was no mere representation of Christ, but Christ himself, so the only Christ, excluding the thousands of imposters bearing the name, like the one in the painting. With their blond hair and blue eyes they were pastel and powerless, even when depicted performing miracles as in the painting. They suffered meekly on the cross. They were jesus, not Christ.

  This one authentic Christ had repeatedly pursued him in dreams for transgressions that had escaped his father’s vigilance. Sometimes he’d prayed, without belief, to the healing blue-eyed jesus on the picture to intercede and make those dreams stop coming but the jesus never interceded although just a few meters separated him from Christ.

  So it couldn’t have been thanks to his intercession that one day the snarling Christ became his ally. He was sixteen. Shortly after the new Time of Disorder he fell gravely ill and had a fever vision of Christ wrenching Himself loose from the wood and stalking stiffly over the land scourging evil. Victim himself, and so not pursued, he prayed to Him for retribution for the smashed Chinese vase, the uniformed marionettes dangling from street lamps, one of them his father, retribution for the harm done to his mother.

  After, his black-clad mother told him that he’d nearly died and that she’d prayed to Jesus for him day and night and still did for his eyesight to recover completely. Light pained him terribly. She said that Jesus was Love, not Hate. She said that over and over. He must have babbled in his fever. She’d already begun filling her room with mottos proclaiming that Jesus was Love and haloed effigies of the beautiful young man. The terrible collection of mirrors came later.

  Lorz leaned forward in his seat and closed his eyes, concentrating on his bowels. The burning had withdrawn. It was still there of course, somewhere beneath the threshold of pain, vigilant, biding its time. He decided to look about for another doctor, the fourth one in as many years.

  He heard a dry shuffling sound and opened his eyes. The old woman with the plastic shopping bag was dragging herself up the aisle. She stopped and knel
t groaning before a plaster statue of the alleged Mother of God clad in classic blue and white. Even as a child Lorz had wondered how, with her insipid pretty porcelain face, she could have been mother to the giant black Christ.

  After a while, feeling a little better, Lorz got up and went home.

  He took out of the refrigerator the leftovers from yesterday’s dinner. He’d gone without lunch that day. Out of a sense of duty he started picking at the cold scraps when the phone in his study rang, a rare occurrence. He went on chewing. The phone refused to go away. Finally Lorz got up and, very slowly, to give it more time, walked into the study.

  “Lorz,” he muttered to the receiver.

  “Yes, I know,” said the voice. “I remembered. Edmond Lorz. We met a few hours ago, bumped into each other, ha ha. I’m Henry. You can’t have forgotten. How are you, Edmond? All that time.”

  “I don’t know who you are and how you found my name and number. Stop hounding me or I’ll take action.”

  Lorz hung up and returned to the kitchen. He sat before his plate for a minute and finally put the scraps of food back in the refrigerator for tomorrow’s dinner.

  He vacuum-cleaned the big apartment, except for three of the rooms. There were the two rooms filled with broken furniture, locked for thirty years. There was his mother’s bedroom with the mottos and the effigies and the mirrors to raise the dead, and the fragments of the Chinese vase she’d gone on trying to patch up to no avail. The room was unlocked but he never went there. Going past the closed door he tried to imagine the vase as it had been, that miniature childhood haven. All he captured was a heron, a misty mountain crag and a meditating sage. It was fragmented in his mind too.

  At ten o’clock he went into his study, tugged free a giant poster from a big stack and tacked it to the wall. He stepped back and stared at it for a few minutes. Then he selected his instruments, media and chemicals and worked over the lovely boyish girl until eleven.

  He washed his hands and face and brushed his teeth methodically. Before he went to bed he closed the iron shutters against the booming of their celebrant rockets and chose an encyclopedia volume at random. He read at random until church bells irregularly rang one o’clock. He placed the book and his glasses on the floor on the safe window side of the bed, within easy reach in case of insomnia, and switched off the reading lamp.

  In the darkness the images came, bad ones of course, but also, combating them, the images of the advertising posters he protected: laughing children, tender-eyed dogs, lakes, starry skies, seas, fondled cats, snow-capped mountains, summer forests, vineyards, gardens, hand-in-hand couples, weddings, close-knit smiling families, and, lingering longest on her, the lovely boyish girl he’d worked over a few hours before. The last of the poster images was a flock of sheep with a pure white cloud in the blue sky.

  He was looking for a new doctor. The young secretary in blue and white smiled insipidly and asked him when he wanted to consult Dr J. C. He protested that the name was wrong. Either it was Dr J. and he’d consulted four of those powerless quacks already, or it was Dr C., the potent one he wanted. It couldn’t be both. She said, oh no, it was Dr J. C., she was in a position to know. He could cure whatever was ailing him. She told him the office number. He wandered in a maze of corridors with blank doors which he tried. They were locked. He encountered a woman standing in an open doorway. To one side of it there was a dish with three silver fish. She was holding an open tin. She said that she knew about his problem and could cure it. But he knew the wafers simply relieved symptoms of minor ailments. He went past her, still looking for the number and trying all of the blank locked doors.