The Seventh Candidate Page 2

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  2

  At 8:05am, ten days following the February 26 accident, Dorothea Ruda was standing on a makeshift podium in the Ideal Poster office. She was alarmed at the director’s tardiness but tried not to show it to the thirteen sleepy candidates slouched behind their tables before her. One of the candidates, for want of anything better to do, started assessing her from neck to ankles and quickly gave it up.

  Flushing, she looked around the office once again to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything for the test. In her first years with Ideal she had recurrent nightmares in which she’d overlooked something vital. In one it had turned out to be her clothing. She’d found herself standing stark naked on the podium before the candidates and her disapproving employer.

  She checked the table next to the lectern. The five bottles of chemicals and the six jars of paint stood strictly aligned, each identified by a label. There were the erasers, spatulas, sponges, cutters, scissors and paste-pots. And of course the brushes, of various sizes. She’d placed them head-up in a jam-jar in such a way that they looked like a stylized dried bouquet in a modernistic etching, even though she knew the director disliked modern art.

  A wet roar filled the room. Two of the candidates jerked awake. The toilet of a minor sub-ministry was situated just behind the flimsy rear wall of the Ideal office. It flushed like an asthmatic waterfall. As it gurgled into silence Dorothea Ruda critically examined the giant poster she’d tacked up (maybe a little crookedly?) on the wall facing the candidates.

  The boyish long-necked girl in a sailor suit was on the point of deriving intense pleasure from an Eskimo’s Delight pistachio ice-cream cone. Her loveliness survived what the director had done to her: the lacerations, the political stickers, the swarm of graffiti and slogans, all perfectly proper of course, nothing at all like the real ones that covered her on the underground walls. Next to her was tacked a very large sheet of blank paper, maybe a little crooked too. Too late to straighten it. The wheeled aluminum stepladder, whose braking system she’d carefully inspected, stood to the right of the girl.

  The director’s assistant checked the candidates’ big folding tables again. No oversight there either. She’d laid out the same bottles and tools as on the director’s table, also a much smaller format of the girl with the cone, covered with exactly the same graffiti as the big one on the wall. It had taken the director, she knew, whole evenings to copy them twenty-one times. Lots of work for nothing, as all those unoccupied tables proved. Eight of the applicants, informed by return mail that employment was contingent on passing an early morning test, hadn’t shown up.

  But then the director hadn’t either. Normally he was punctual to the second. She wouldn’t be able to handle the test all by herself, she thought as the big subterranean office slowly filled with the muted roar of Line 8. If you closed your eyes (as she did now) you could try to imagine it was strong wind in the pines of the Central Mountains. Dorothea Ruda lived by herself in a two-room flat in an industrial suburb of the capital. Some days she was very homesick.

  When the office-door opened at 8:16am she thought it was a tardy candidate. She didn’t recognize her employer at first because of his limp and his strangely naked face. Then her body stiffened into a posture of respectful welcome that tentatively formulated breasts against her loose blouse. She thought anxiously: what’s the matter with his leg? What’s happened to his glasses? And why is he smiling? Things must be bad if he’s smiling.

  As her employer approached the podium she saw his eyes for the first time in the ten thousand hours of their association. His dark lenses had always intercepted her glances in that direction, throwing her own image back at her distorted and belittled. She’d frequently imagined her employer’s eyes powerfully dark or luminous gray. They proved to be red-rimmed blue and full of inconceivable tears.

  “Sir, is something wrong?” She held out her arm to help him onto the podium. The director ignored her question and also her arm. It was possible he didn’t even see it. His gaze, only partially outward in the best of cases, was totally inward now. What did I do? she thought anxiously, what didn’t I do? She repossessed her arm.

  Her employer limped painfully onto the podium and up to the lectern, dabbing at his eyes with a silk handkerchief. Without his strongly tinted glasses his eyes wept at light. He peered at the thirteen applicants, squinting the myopic blur into semi-focus. He couldn’t help finding them a particularly unsightly lot. Twelve of the thirteen at any rate, the ones seated at their folding tables in the front rows. The thirteenth (soon to be the seventh) candidate, seated in the rear of the big office, was no more than a blob to his sabotaged vision. The director felt like ordering him to join the others up front, but finally didn’t.

  It would have been better for both of them if he had.

  A week and a half after the February 26 accident, the director’s condition (unlike Operator Seven’s) hadn’t improved. On the contrary. The world was a blur, his right sole badly lacerated and the fire in his bowels, he felt, imminent. Limp and blur – and maybe the fire to come too – had a common cause. He’d got up on the wrong side of the bed. The wrong side was the window-side, where, for decades now, he placed encyclopedia and glasses on the floor before switching off his reading-lamp.

  In the middle of that night he’d been awakened by chanted slogans from the street below, the tail end of another one of their demonstrations. They also kicked over stinking garbage cans, unattended for a week. The sanitary workers were on strike too. Like the bus-drivers, the miners, the railroad workers and the teachers, to mention just a few.

  The underground employees were sure to rally the movement and then Ideal Poster would go bankrupt, and where would he be then, failing in health and over forty? Practically everybody in the land was on strike except for the vandals outside, tirelessly screaming and smashing cars at all hours, day and night, three shifts.

  Lorz’s horoscope had announced the day as “perilous” for himself and his possessions. Worried about his car parked below, he thoughtlessly got up on the window-side of the bed, bare-foot naturally, and was instantly lacerated by fine optical glass. One of fate’s typical ruses.

  He removed the lens slivers from his right sole and daubed the wounds, as best he could see them, with tincture of iodine. This elementary surgery took him a good hour, for at irregular intervals the lights stuttered and went out, leaving him crouched blind over his foot. The power-workers too had joined in. He’d hopped into the bathroom on his good foot for the iodine, risking splinters, but it was out of the question hopping in the dark all the way to the kitchen for a candle. Lorz got no sleep the rest of the night.

  In the morning, the radio spoke of fifty-odd cars smashed or burned in the capital. Naturally no mention was made of his glasses, for the destruction of which, however, the young rowdies were in a sense equally guilty. And it might well be that one of them was now seated before him, expecting to be hired by the very man he’d victimized.

  Vaguely making them out, slumped in the Ideal chairs, unkempt, unshaven, tieless, with stained corrugated trousers, the director welcomed the candidates to Ideal Poster. He briefly defined the firm’s activity: the restoration of vandalized advertising posters. They would shortly be receiving instructions on poster cosmetic techniques. They would be judged on their success in restoring the defaced poster on their tables to its original state. On the basis of the test the most successful candidate would be taken on.

  At this point the director had to raise his voice to dominate their surly murmurs. Had they really expected that all thirteen of them would be hired? He assured them that the runners-up would be placed on a waiting list and would be taken on at the first opening. He added that Ideal Poster was an expanding concern and that there were many openings.

  This wasn’t a total untruth. The concern, though unexpanding, was plagued by a high turnover. Even when you screened out the obvious defectives among the applicants – the needlers, the sniffers
, the alcoholics, the witless – the hired operators remained an unstable lot. There was a high proportion among them of border-liners and drifters. It was months before the new men mastered even the fundamentals and started earning their keep. And then without warning they threw the job over or had accidents and you found yourself having to cajole new candidates such as these.

  The director went on to the salary, excellent for eight hours as he was sure they would agree. He named the sum. It was received in dead silence. In his own days as a job seeker, such an announcement would have elicited, if only out of politeness, an appreciative murmur.

  “But please note that this generous salary is being paid not for eight but for six hours of work per day. Six.” More dead silence. They suspected a catch. Now came the difficult part.

  “The work, which you will find both challenging and rewarding, is divided into two three-hour shifts.” He paused. “The first shift is from five to eight.” He paused again, then added, as if an after-thought: “A.M.” Raising his voice to dominate their reaction, the director went on quickly. “The second shift is from nine to twelve. P.M.”

  Three of the candidates gathered up their things and left. Another candidate, who looked like a sniffer, wanted to know if they could do just the second shift at half the pay. When the director replied that such an arrangement was impossible, the sniffer got up and, followed by two other young men, departed.

  This left seven candidates, including the blur in the rear. The mathematical chances of one of them being hired, which at 8:28am had stood at seven percent, had now, at 8:34am, increased to fifteen percent. One could hope that this improved prospect would stimulate them to maximum effort. It was only much later that the director reflected on the possible significance of the fateful numbers the blurred candidate in the rear bore, counting left to right, front to back: first thirteen then seven.

  “Good!” he said heartily, as the door banged shut behind the last of the ex-applicants. “We require serious, motivated men.”

  He nodded at his assistant. She fetched a knapsack from a corner and approached the ladder, prepared to synchronize her gestures to his words. The knapsack, the director explained, contained exactly what was visible on his table. The bottles and jars, however, were smaller, like those on their tables. The purpose of his large bottles and jars was purely pedagogical. When he said “White 2”, for example, he would point to it on his table. The director’s pointer touched the empty jar. It gave out a crystalline whine.

  “I hope that the candidate in the rear has good eyesight,” he added waspishly.

  His assistant laughed warmly at this, not only to get back in the good graces of her employer after what she had or hadn’t done, but also to take the edge off his implicit criticism of the thirteenth – now seventh – candidate’s seating choice. She was good-hearted to a fault. A new worry occurred to her. Wasn’t her employer’s remark indirectly aimed at her? Shouldn’t she have asked the candidate to sit up front with the others?

  At that moment the director turned whitish-green. He clutched his stomach. His assistant hastily set down the knapsack. She hurried over and touched his arm. “Sir, is there something wrong?” she said for the second time that morning. “Can I help you?”

  Unable to summon breath for speech, he shook his head fiercely. She remained there for what seemed ages. His pain seemed aggravated by that close intrusive brown gaze into his unshielded eyes. Her hand was on his arm. He pulled away. “Let’s get on with it, for holy Christ’s sake, woman,” the director managed to articulate between clenched teeth. He waved her back to her knapsack. The burning slowly subsided.

  It was replaced by distress at his loss of self-control. Clearly the Cycle was worsening. He’d never insulted her before. It was the first time he’d ever called her “woman.” She took things to heart. When it was all over he must remember to make amends, ask about her cat and her childhood farm. Her face always lit up at questions like that. She was efficient, unassertive, eager to please, a respectful listener most of the time and she lived for the concern. And also basically good, he felt. The director was very sensitive to manifestations of goodness. He saw so little of it without and within.

  The candidates shifted about restlessly in their chairs. Still very pale, the director returned to his introduction. He explained that the knapsack could be worn on the back of the operator. To make sure they grasped the point, he signaled to his assistant. She struggled into the straps. He told them that the aluminum stepladder telescoped into manageable dimensions and could be easily carried on either shoulder thanks to the broad canvas strap. He had her illustrate that too. On arriving at the underground tunnel from the street, he said, the operator must immediately set it up. The director’s assistant hurriedly shrugged off the telescoped ladder and developed it. She was beginning to perspire.

  Her employer explained the necessity of the stepladder. Graffiti could be scrawled at a height well above the head but successful effacement required at least eye-level intervention. He called their attention to the ladder’s tray with hollows to hold five of the bottles.

  His assistant knelt and extracted five bottles from the knapsack. She fitted them into the hollows with slow pedagogical movements. She was still blinking from the blow but smiled bravely for the candidates.

  Once set up, the director went on, the ladder was rolled down the underground corridor from poster to poster as rapidly as possible. Rapidity was essential to cosmetic intervention. But it must never, never be at the cost of security, he warned, never. He stressed the importance of locking the wheels before each intervention. He had his assistant repeat the locking operation twice.

  In very simple language the director now tried to explain the matter-of-fact economics that underlay poster cosmetics. The advertisers were at the mercy of the vandals, he said in effect. Their message was subverted by the intrusion of graffiti, often of an obscene nature. At best, the graffiti distracted attention from that message. At worst, it created a disastrous connection between the brand and the scrawled obscenity in the mind of the potential customer. The vandalized poster couldn’t be left in that state. In a great number of cases Ideal could repair the poster in a fraction of the time required by the traditional method of total replacement. But not always.

  The first task of an operator was, therefore, to be able to recognize at a glance if it paid to restore a given poster. Naturally if the repair job took as long as the classical method of total replacement, nothing was to be gained by utilizing cosmetic techniques. Hence the constant question posed to the operator by a defaced poster: feasible or not feasible?

  “In the case of this particular poster,” said the director, pointing over his shoulder at the sailor-suited girl on the wall behind him, “the answer is immediate: feasible.”

  Feasible, he explained, because of the localization of the aggression and because of the chemical composition of the graffiti media utilized. The center of attraction, the young lady’s face, was fortunately unscathed. Facial repair-work, while not impossible, was a highly skilled operation. In extreme cases, the cutout technique could be utilized. From another identical poster the whole head or even individual features could be substituted. This was demanding work which, the director reassured the candidates, they would not, at first, be called upon to perform.

  “As for the chemical properties of the graffiti substances employed on posters, I have seen blood used as a vehicle for graffiti and worse than blood …”

  The candidates snapped alert at that. Some snickered. The director rapped on the lectern and went on. He explained that ninety-eight percent of all graffiti was produced by: 1. the pencil, 2. the ballpoint pen, 3. the felt-tip pen, 4. the crayon, 5. the redoubtable spray-can. Some of these graffiti vehicles required an application of sizing-fluid such as XL 54. His pointer touched a bottle on his table. Half a minute to dry. An expenditure of precious time. Nothing of the sort here. Ball-pointed, felt-tipped graffis, not to mention simple sticker
s and lacerations. A run-of-the-mill case.

  The director turned toward Miss Ruda. Step by step, he explained, his assistant would illustrate the techniques of restoring the vandalized poster to its original state.

  Dorothea Ruda clambered up into hopeless competition with the girl’s giant loveliness. Her plain but expressive face was painfully concentrated. She must make no mistake, nothing that would add to her error or oversight or whatever it was that had aroused her employer’s discontent. Normally she loved these pedagogical sessions like everything else about her job. After the art-school fiasco and then the acting-school super-fiasco and then the screaming boredom of a secretarial school, she’d answered the Ideal ad. Her test-performance had been brilliant and she’d been hired, reluctantly.

  But despite her sex, Dorothea Ruda had turned out to be the most expert and dependable of all the operators. She’d risen from the ranks and now took care of the correspondence, the book-keeping and canvassed clients. Concealed behind pillars and vending-machines, she shared in turn with the director the all-important task of surveying the operators, for the most part an untrustworthy lot. She also swept up and prepared coffee. The business was no more conceivable without her than without Basic White Stock, 00 emery paper and E 34 wetting agent.

  The director introduced the chemicals and tools to the candidates. He showed them via his assistant, who translated his words onto the sheet tacked alongside the sailor-suited girl, the gamut of shades obtainable by the addition of Basic White or Basic Black. Next, the range of brushes, the choice dependent on the thickness of the graffiti line. Finally, how to produce a trembling effect (in their jargon, the “palsy line”) in order to avoid too clear a demarcation between corrected and uncorrected areas.

  The director paused as his assistant chose the correct items to cleanse the boyish sailor-suited girl of his own graffis. She was his favorite among the female poster-models. For years he’d followed her growth on the posters from childhood into touchingly gawky adolescence and then into the radiance of young unemphatic womanhood. He knew her as “Helena.” He didn’t know her real name.

  In the sixty-three stations of the capital’s underground network she’d stood exposed for days, delicately holding that cone inches from her parted lips, her sky-blue eyes shining with anticipatory pleasure, only it was no cone after the vandals had finished with it. None of them had chosen the director’s own innocent transformation of the cone into a child’s man with stick arms and legs.

  How was it possible to desecrate certain things? The director had a theory about that. He’d once tried to convey it to his assistant, in simple language. Despite her claims to college, he doubted she had more than a high-school diploma.

  In those endless windings of vaulted tunnels, from Central Station to East Gate, from Victory Square to Three Nuns, from Armory to Crossroads, windows had been opened for them in the grimy tiles, he’d said more or less. Windows on a world where the dirt and disorder, the meanness and vulgarity of their real world were banished. In a sense, weren’t the posters, beneath the surface mercantile inspiration, metaphors of a desired state of being? Wasn’t it out of secret despair that the world below vented its destructive rage on those ideal images of beauty, harmony, affection and love? His assistant had asked him to explain “mercantile” and “metaphor.”

  The director started with the easiest operations. First, the mending of the lacerations: a quick application of paste followed by a sweep of the moistened sponge. Next, the removal of the political stickers. These were black on red and called for a general strike and the overthrow of the government. They infested all the walls of the capital. His assistant’s hands, like an extension of his will, instantaneously illustrated his words. A quick touch of 00 emery paper to abrade the impermeable gloss, a daub of E 34 wetting agent, a number 3 spatula and off it slipped. The micro-sponge dipped in alcohol removed the residual gummy rectangle.

  Six seconds, announced the director triumphantly, looking up from his watch. Joyous at the implied compliment, Dorothea Ruda barely had time to lean back and glance at the negative evidence of her brio and clap her hands once with loud satisfaction like an Italian. With her large dark eyes and mobile face, the director suspected she had southern blood.

  Now, without giving either of them a moment’s rest (although stiff and motionless at the lectern, he was sweating even harder than his assistant), the director introduced another elementary problem: the eradication of graffiti applied to a solid-color background free of surcharged detail. This was fortunately the most common configuration. Sweeps of white and blue, the traditional hues of purity, he reminded them, irresistibly attracted the vandals. Obviously the masking medium must be of the same shade as the background. The ball-pointed slogan to eradicate was “Long live disorder!” The director had trouble thinking up authentic-sounding slogans for the tests. “My assistant,” he said, “will now demonstrate the result of using Basic White, that is, pure white, on an off-color white background such as this.”

  Deftly her no. 4 brush dipped into the pure white and obliterated the appeal to disorder. A rectangle paler than the background betrayed its former position. “Still there, as you can see,” commented the director. With a certain tenseness in his voice he ordered his assistant to repeat the operation, but this time with White Stock 1, a shade darker.

  As the sub-ministry toilet cascaded again behind the rear wall, she performed the task in pure virtuoso style. It was almost a single uninterrupted movement: a quick dip of the brush into the bottle of water, a squeezed passage through a cloth on the way to a redip into White 1 and then a second rectangle over the first. It had taken three seconds. There was an expanse of pure white now.

  She glanced at the director for more approbation. His face was set in hard lines as he stared at what she’d done. She blinked and looked back at the poster. A perfect expanse of pure white.

  She looked at the director again, in alarm now. In the big windowless room the only sound was the whirring of the giant ventilator and the ticking of the wall-clock which marked thirteen minutes to nine.

  He stood there, Basic White himself, sweat pouring down his face. Then he staggered off the podium and collapsed into an empty chair. One of the bottles on the table before him teetered dangerously and a brush fell to the floor.

  His assistant dropped her aching arms. She checked her impulse to abandon her ladder and rush to his side. She feared a second rebuff. The candidates stared at the director. He sat doubled up, clutching his stomach. They started whispering. One of them reached back for his leather jacket. She saved the situation by clapping sharply and regaining their attention. She continued the lesson where the director had broken off, but at a slower pace.

  Finally she climbed down the ladder and told them that they had half an hour to apply their newly acquired skills to the poster on their table. She approached the director, knelt and picked up the brush. With a discreet cough she replaced it in the glass. She made sure it tinkled. Motionless, eyes shut, he paid no attention to her. “Sir,” she finally ventured, “if you need me, I’ll be here, of course, monitoring them.”

  He heard her murmur from far off. He’d given up trying to localize the burning: duodenum, ascending colon, jejunum, sigmoid flexure, transverse colon, ileum (he knew the convolutions of the human intestine as well as he did those of the capital’s underground lines to which it bore a remarkable resemblance). The fire was everywhere.

  The burning spells had started four years before and had steadily worsened. Painful and humiliating examinations revealed no intestinal lesions. Drugs provided no relief. The prescription of his first doctor was purely verbal. “You overreact. You must learn to relax, to untense,” he was fond of saying as he pocketed his fee.

  There was no question of letting a mind-charlatan pry into his brain but he did follow his first doctor’s advice more or less. At the slightest sign of negative thoughts he would censor himself. When he felt like bellowing he would smile. On
e of his later doctors had commented on the smile maintained while Lorz was clutching his abdomen. “Let it out! Don’t keep it bottled up. When you’re alone try kicking things, try yelling.” Lorz’s smile unconsciously broadened with anger at hearing, once again, the implicit localization of the trouble not in his intestines but in his brain and at the dangerous stupidity of the advice. If you let all the accumulated rage out wouldn’t you run amok?

  If this attack didn’t prove fatal he’d return home and spend the next two days in bed, biting his arm to blood during the worst times. It had all happened before. His assistant saw things through. When he returned to the subterranean office, pale and weak, there was always a bouquet of flowers on his desk, for which he thanked her. For months the posters would remain mere advertising devices and the graffiti represent no more than technical problems. He would find himself again in precarious possession of a less driven, less inward-focused self. The world was still oppressive in its ugliness, but he’d got out from under it a little. Occasionally in his striving for outwardness and contact he’d pet the least mangy of the cats on the stairs leading down to the sardines or ask his assistant about childhood on a mountain farm. Then things would gradually build up again: the Cycle.

  There was a crash to the left of the director, a vulgar curse, laughter. He opened his eyes. Maybe it was a little better? He saw that a candidate a few feet away had upset a jar of red paint on the floor. Amid the fragments a sticky pool was widening. A very little bit better. But dizziness now.

  His assistant swiftly opened a locker and took out a scoop, a sweep, a quantity of rags, old newspapers, a tin of turpentine and a new bottle of paint. She slipped on loose rubber gloves. With the same virtuosity she’d displayed on the ladder she removed the fragments, mopped up the paint and scrubbed the spot with turpentine.

  She looked at her employer and mimed exasperation. Actually, she was glad the accident had happened. It had allowed her to establish contact of sorts with the director. His weeping gaze now shifted away. Why wasn’t he wearing his glasses today? She spread four thicknesses of newspaper on the moist floor, placed the fresh bottle on the candidate’s table, dumped the rags and fragments into a metal oil-drum, stripped off the rubber gloves and resumed her normal duties.

  For the third time she passed behind the struggling candidates, whispering words of encouragement. Their efforts were hopeless. It had to be admitted, though, that the lesson hadn’t been perfect. Every few seconds she glanced at her employer, fearfully. Something like this had happened last year. But not as bad, not nearly.

  In her concern, she almost forgot the seventh – originally the thirteenth – candidate seated in the rear. Careful not to disturb him, she made a wide circuit and came up to him from behind, her back practically against the wall. The toilet behind it erupted again.

  She opened her mouth to offer encouragement even before she saw his poster.

  Seeing it, she closed her mouth, bent closer and stared and went on staring.

  She hurried back to her employer where he sat motionless in his chair, staring at the blank wall. She hesitated and then whispered urgently: “Sir, the candidate in the back, you should see what he’s done. It’s miraculous. Don’t you want to look?”

  He accepted diversion this time and even let her help him to his feet. Frowning with concentration, flushed and lips slightly parted, she guided him towards the rear. In half a decade of association it was the first physical contact between them exceeding a fraction of a second. She wouldn’t easily be able to forget it.

  He freed his arm from her supporting grasp. There was another crash from up front, even louder laughter.

  “What a lot. I’ll be right back,” she whispered, her exasperation genuine now. She returned to the front of the room, abandoning him. She wouldn’t easily be able to forget that either.

  He continued alone toward the wall and the seventh candidate. The burning seemed to be letting up a bit. Not the dizziness though. It was another lull. How would he be able to withstand the next onslaught?

  The overhead mercury-tubes stuttered and went out, leaving him in premonitory darkness. The power-workers again. He groped forward.

  When the lights stuttered back on he found himself alongside the seventh candidate. The director looked down at the poster. His assistant had made a bad mistake in setting up the tables for the test. This was unlike her. She’d placed a perfect ungraffitied poster on this table.

  Aware of his slight myopic focus, he bent down closer. Despite the aggravation of his dizziness, his practiced eye could now see the rectifications the seventh candidate had made on the girl.

  The lacerations had been seamlessly mended. His brush had banished the appeals to disorder and all the other disfigurements. Helena lay there in unmarred loveliness. It was a masterpiece of restorative art that he thought only he himself was capable of creating. A miracle, as she’d said.

  Now at twenty-three seconds to 9:00 in the morning of March 7, he peered into the face of the seventh candidate smiling up at him.

  He might have been the brother of the girl on the poster. His features possessed the same archaic virtues of gentleness, candor and affection. His smile was one of complicity, an invitation to counter-recognition.

  “He knows me,” was perhaps the director’s first thought and the second, “I know him.”

  Much later, on the other side of disaster, he remembered (when he dared to) their meeting this way. But sometimes he had doubts. There’d been the distortion of myopia and how sure could he be of his memory after what happened?

  Groping for his identity, the director looked into those fine wide-pitched eyes. It was as if everything else were being effaced: the pain, the dizziness, the windowless office and beneath it the tangle of underground corridors with their marred posters and marred passengers. For a second he had a passing impulse to hold on to all that. As early as that brief meeting he experienced a fear which, though, like so much else, may have been a later contamination of the original scene.

  Then he let go and there was just the two of them. Welling up from obscure regions of authenticity – what, in defiance of his time, he wasn’t ashamed to call his soul – was music, near-tears, exaltation.

  That’s how he was to remember it, fearfully, when memory returned.

  He reached out for the contact that was sure to unlock memory. Did he actually touch the boy’s shoulder? Even if he did there was no recognition, for it was exactly 9:00am and giant hands brutally clapped his ears, the boy vanished in a roar, and on the rectified poster red drops and streaks vandalized the girl once more.

  The lights went out again, for much longer.

  This time it wasn’t the power-workers.