

### 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 continent. 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. More 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 knelt 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.

***

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 stickers 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. One 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.

***

3

White walls, a white ceiling, a white enamel bed, an arm swathed in white which he realized was his own (the meaningless term "Basic White" filled his mind for a second) and standing at the foot of the bed, contradicting all that whiteness, a woman he knew, the name didn't matter, wearing a red dress. He didn't know the name for the place but knew that the place was for distress. The woman's eyes were wet. Her mouth made funny movements. The foot of the bed had bars. The whiteness hurt his eyes. He closed them and returned to darkness.

He opened his eyes again. The woman (his employee, Dorothea Ruda) was still there but in a blue dress and next to her was a stout red-haired woman in a white dress, a uniform. She smiled down and said "Welcome back" and then the nurse did things to the bottle suspended above him with the tube that ran into the bruised crook of his unbandaged arm. She bent down and did things to other tubes that ran under the sheet. A young doctor came in. He had a sharp nose. He was cheerful like the nurse. He shined a light in his eyes. It hurt. He scratched the soles of his feet. That didn't hurt. He asked him questions he should answer by yes or no if he could. If not, shake his head or nod. He answered and forgot the questions immediately. It didn't matter. He closed his eyes and forgot the young sharp-nosed doctor and the two women and returned to the darkness.

This time he woke up to the white room with a feeling of familiarity. There was the bandage on his left arm, white flowers on a Formica table, his assistant seated by the side of the bed. Her dress was gray now. He tried to anchor himself to these things by staring at them. Something terrible had happened to him but he feared return to the darkness if he thought about it. His mind leaped back before the darkness, giving it finitude in that direction too, turning it into a parenthesis. He saw the six applicants in the big windowless Ideal Poster office. He saw the rear of the office and seemed to be slowly walking towards a seated figure and the wall. His mind shied away in panic and concentrated on the thought: if she's here then who's taking care of the business?

"So we can thank God it was a small bomb that exploded that morning," she was saying, as though she'd been talking to him for a long time. Hadn't she already said that? "A small home-made bomb, thank God. Otherwise we'd all be dead. It was in the ministry toilet."

Something in what she'd said vaguely disturbed him, he didn't know what it was. It wasn't the words "bomb" and "exploded." He didn't even think of the probable damage to the office. What was it? And what had happened to the sunshine? A minute or so ago it had been strong and glaring on the wall. Now it was huddled weakly red in a corner. Knowledge of time too was an anchorage against return to darkness. He heard a faint slow voice asking about it.

"Five twenty-five," she answered.

His mind was clearer. The test, of course. It had started early that morning. Five twenty-five now. The whole day had gone by. And he was here and she too. What was she doing here? Why wasn't she in the office? "I've been... unconscious...for... eight hours?" the slow faint voice, his own, asked. He was childishly proud of the accuracy of his calculation. She looked down, shrugged her shoulders slightly, made a helpless gesture.

Slowly suspicious, he asked, "What day... is it?"

"Monday," she said promptly.

He felt relief. The test had taken place, as usual, on Monday morning.

He looked out of the window, squinting against his myopia. His glasses: the night of the rowdies. Those trees outside. Time was suddenly lost, calculations upset at the sight of those trees.

That morning – which morning? – on the way from his flat to Ideal, the trees had been black and bare. Now they were covered with sinister young green leaves. Sometimes in late February there was a spell of warm weather. But it took a good week of such warmth to coax leaves out. A week.

"How long... have I... been here? You said... today... was Monday." His mind was alert. "It is Monday," she replied, looking down at the floor again. Alert. What she'd said a minute ago was, "It was a bomb that morning." 'That' was the potent word. "What Monday?" he demanded.

She started crying. "I told you to go to the rear and look at his poster. I should have stayed there myself. It should have happened to me. But they say you're all right now, practically."

"What Monday?"

"It's April 13 today," she said, looking down at the floor. "I prayed for both of you all the time. You're practically all right now they say. I keep on praying for him."

He closed his eyes. Had someone else been injured in the explosion?

She stared at his white frozen profile beneath the bandaged head. His eyes remained shut. Alarmed, she prepared to call the nurse. Then his lips moved. Faintly, slowly, he said: "And the... business? I'm in a coma... for five weeks... and you... spend all your time here... changing dresses... and crying. Who's taking care... of the business?"

She was still crying a little but laughing now too. He was himself again, hopelessly, the same as before, but thank God for that. She stopped laughing and then stopped crying. She blew her nose.

There was no business for the time being, she explained. Hadn't been since the Events. The underground had been shut down for two weeks. And even now he wouldn't recognize the stations. Rubbish knee-deep, the trains themselves covered with giant graffiti, spray-canned. The original posters had vanished completely beneath layer after layer of political posters, stickers and inscriptions. The agencies had stopped producing posters. It would take another week before the mess was cleaned up. Until then there was no question of protecting posters. There was nothing left to protect. It had been a crazy exciting month.

On the morning of March 7 (she could be certain of that date, she said) there occurred a number of explosions in public buildings and ministries including the one next to Ideal Poster. Thirty or so innocent people had been killed or at the very least injured. In any case it was certain there had been deaths too. The government, which hadn't resigned yet (that was later), ordered the arrest of extremist leaders of the left. Or of the right? Probably both, actually. Then there were strikes everywhere. And demonstration after demonstration, the avenues black with demonstrators, the weather glorious for that time of year, tear-gas and arrests because of the smashed shop-windows and the burning cars and more demonstrations to have them freed, the arrested demonstrators, that was.

She herself got caught in one of them and was saved from a clubbing (by a policeman! she!) by such a nice girl who'd shoved her out of harm's way into a doorway. She was sometimes a little bit extremist, her new friend (it depended on what you were talking about), but full of ideas, not that she agreed with all of them, but some of them made you think. She wrote poetry and made beautiful jewelry. Vera – that was her name – thought she was dreadfully backward, a "noodle" she said, and maybe she was. Anyhow the factories and the universities were occupied. People started hoarding, there'd been a shortage of sugar, cooking-oil and petrol ("and lemon-soap, too, for some strange reason"). Black and red flags everywhere. "Total strangers would speak to each other in the street," she added, as though this was a central point of those historic days along with the scarcity of lemon-soap.

"So we are... now living under... a collectivist... dictatorship. They shouldn't... have troubled... waking me up." He said that, but he didn't really care. Saying that staved off the image of the nearing rear wall and the seated figure. When he reached them the terrible thing would happen again.

No, it was all over, she said. The provinces hadn't followed. There'd been too much looting by uncontrolled elements, too many cars burned. They'd held legislative elections last week and the government parties had won all the seats, or at least most of them. A majority, for certain. So everything was the same as before. There was cooking-oil and sugar in the shops, petrol in the pumps, and strangers didn't speak to each other in the street anymore.

The nurse came in and said that it was time. She could return tomorrow afternoon. His assistant put on her coat and fussed with the flowers. She waved good-bye with timid eagerness from the threshold. Her face was lit and her eyes wet again.

The director asked the nurse to put the flowers somewhere else, not so close to the bed. They gave off a heavy sickening scent.

The night was very bad.

Early next morning he was disconnected from his tubes. He was cranked up to a sitting position and his turban of bandages was unwound. His skull, which felt cold and itchy, elicited murmurs of satisfaction. They ignored his bandaged arm, although he had trouble making a fist, also the painfully inflamed right nostril where the tube had run. He was given a quantity of differently colored pills, then cranked flat and underwent the humiliation of a brief but intimate toilette, the last, the nurse assured him. Then he was cranked up again and encouraged to eat tasteless porridge accompanied by weak tea.

That afternoon he received the visit of a portly man of about fifty, his upper half dressed elegantly in a checkered jacket, a pinstriped shirt and a bow tie. On the lower half he wore faded blue jeans and unlaced track-shoes. He had a fat face, a balding skull, a triple chin and wore a pince-nez. From the peculiarity of his dress the director guessed that he specialized in mental health.

"Welcome back," said his visitor cheerfully. It seemed to be the formula in such cases. "My name is Doctor Silberman. Yours should be Patient Lazarus." He laughed at his own joke. "I've come to bother you a little, if I may."

He too shined a light in his eyes, all the while humming tunelessly with his hand gently posed on his patient's shoulder. Then he sat down and made notes on a clipboard with an optimistic air. He looked up and asked Lorz if he played cards. It was another joke. Without waiting for a reply he took a deck out of his jacket pocket and asked Lorz to describe card after card. There were bull's-eyes, patterns of zigzags, whirls, dots and circles, a great number of multicolored labyrinths. Dr Silberman put the cards back in his pocket, sat down and scribbled more notes.

He looked up, beaming. "Well, you won the game. You beat me. It's a game I like to lose. That's good, that's very good. You're a lucky man. How do you feel?"

Lorz minutely enumerated all of his symptoms except the major one. "Normal, perfectly normal," said Dr Silberman at each of them. He stood up, prepared to go and leave him alone with that major symptom.

Timidly, because he was afraid talking about it would bring it back, Lorz referred to the recurrent image of the wall that had exploded. He omitted the boy who was of no clinical interest. He didn't want to use melodramatic words like "panic" in describing his reaction to the image so he simply said: "It's a bit unpleasant." Silberman nodded, unimpressed.

He'd absurdly understated it. He amended: "Very unpleasant. And I dream about it too."

The doctor assured him that in such trauma this phenomenon was classic. With the medicine he was taking it would disappear in a few days. He went over to the door.

"How is he?" asked Lorz.

"Who?"

"The other man."

"The other man?"

"The other man who was injured in the explosion, I don't know his name."

"Oh, of course. The boy. His name. No one seems to know the boy's name, actually. A police-inspector should be coming to ask you a few questions about that. If you feel tired, send him away. You may find him tiring, particularly in your condition. I did, without being in your condition." He laughed. It was another joke, apparently. "He was hoping you'd know the boy's name, I gathered. But you say you don't."

The director explained that he'd been one of over twenty applicants. How could he remember? The police would learn his name when he came out of it. He would come out of it, wouldn't he? He, the director, had.

"It's by no means absolutely excluded," said Dr Silberman. "He was even more severely injured than you, though. But you never can tell in such cases."

The next afternoon, the inspector bulled into his room without knocking. The director was resting on his bed, kneading a lump of clay the Physical Therapy Department had given him for his numb left hand. Several times he'd found himself fashioning a human head and had quickly squeezed it back to formlessness with the help of his good hand.

The inspector, a squat red-faced man of about forty in an ill-fitting blue suit, introduced himself pugnaciously in a rasping voice. The director made no effort to remember his name. He couldn't help comparing him with his father, impressive in his black uniform. The inspector remained standing, ignoring Lorz's invitation to sit down. There were no time-wasting preliminaries, like asking about the state of his health.

What the police wanted to know was the name of the other man who had been hurt in the explosion, the one still in coma. No identity papers had been found in what was left of his clothing. The inspector surmised that one of the other candidates had taken advantage of the confusion to steal the man's wallet. Second nature for this generation. Example: the Events, the looting that went on in broad daylight. What had happened to values?

The director was irritated at hearing his own ideas in the mouth of an ungrammatical vulgarian. He said that he didn't know the man's name. He went on kneading the clay.

"You have to know his name. Your secretary says you got letters of application. She couldn't find them in the office. What was left of it. And she couldn't find them in your apartment either. They must be somewhere."

Lorz stopped kneading and stared. "You actually forced my assistant to search my apartment?"

"Her idea. She had the keys. So where are those letters? There was a wooden filing cabinet in the office. It burned. Were they there? You don't remember? What do you mean, you don't remember? Don't you remember anything about the man?"

"He corrected a poster like a professional. That's all I know about him."

He saw the wall again and felt the rise of panic.

"Had you ever seen him before?"

He should have been prepared for the question but it caught him off guard. For the first time on this side of the darkness, he saw the boy's face. It was inseparable from imminent disaster. He tried concentrating on his assistant's white flowers in the corner. Then on the image of her ferreting in his flat. The boy's face persisted. It grew tremendous with peril.

The inspector snapped him out of it by exclaiming: "You knew him!"

Back in the white room, Lorz looked past the inspector's triumphant red face at a hazy tree in leaf framed by the window like a captionless poster. He must remember to have new glasses made up.

"I didn't say that."

"Say it one way or the other. You knew him or you didn't know him. It looked like you knew him."

"I don't remember if I knew him."

The inspector stared down at him and asked what that meant: he didn't remember if he knew him.

Before he could try to explain what that meant, the door opened. The sharp-nosed young doctor who had tickled his soles greeted both of them. Excusing the interruption, he squatted and examined the chart at the foot of the bed. He started taking notes. The inspector ignored him and kept on staring at Lorz.

What did that mean? Lorz reflected a second.

"That means... that perhaps when I saw him I thought I knew him, but now... I can't be sure if that's what I thought."

The inspector stared down at him again in longer silence. Visibly he was turning Lorz's phrase about, examining it from all possible angles. Finally he said that his statement didn't make sense. But it didn't matter. The man was here in the hospital in the Life Support Unit. Lorz could try to identify him.

"Now?" the director asked, badly frightened.

"They can push you there in a wheel-chair, can't they?"

Without looking away from the chart, the young doctor vetoed the idea. Certainly not today. Perhaps in two or three days. In any case the medical staff, not the police, decided such matters. He went on with his notes.

"I'll contact you in two days, then," said the inspector, impassive. He moved massively towards the door. "Or three days," said the doctor to his back. "But it's not sure," he added. Without answering, the inspector left the room.

The doctor left the room too and the image started up again for the hundredth time, the way it always did, without warning.

Without warning the wall would loom. The boy would smile up at him, expecting recognition. There was no recognition. And the strange thing was, Lorz couldn't picture his face abstracted from the encounter. At best he was able to snatch an isolated feature, like a piece of a jig-saw puzzle, and flee in dread that the wall would burst and release a flood of blackness from which, this time, he would never emerge, as the other hadn't emerged.

What he retrieved, then, wasn't an image of the other's face but curiously abstract and piece-meal knowledge of a generous mouth, wide-pitched dark blue eyes with black flecks in the irises, a faint constellation of freckles over the bridge of his nose, tousled dark gold hair. When Lorz allowed the features to coalesce into a face the wall came back and with it terror. The director would return or be returned to the scene again, endlessly.

Sometimes he didn't know whether the image of the boy was imposed on him or whether it was a temptation irresistibly yielded to.

Some situations were safe. The image didn't come during Dr Silberman's daily visits with their therapeutic jokes. In the rehabilitation pool his mind was too busy coping with nearly nude amputees and paralytics. In the physical-therapy room there was the steady chatter of the buxom therapist while he monotonously overcame the springs of the hand-exerciser or statically pedaled. But other situations were predictably bad, sure to trigger the syndrome: bare white walls and any brutal extinguishing of light. Also clock-hands at 9:00, it didn't matter whether a.m. or p.m., with the minute hand right-angled to the other like a wall.

The worst moment came on the seventh day of his emergence, at the climax of a long tottering walk down the fourth-floor corridor. It was his own idea. He was still unsteady on his feet. Something would be proved, he felt, by reaching the end of the corridor where the staircase and the elevators were. But when he finally got there, gasping for breath, he saw on the wall arrows pointing up and down next to the names of the various units on the other floors. That's how he learned that the Life Support Unit – where he'd been, where the other still lay – was located on the floor above.

The image started up. To break free he turned to the other wall and began studying the ten maze-like floor plans. Superimposing in his mind the fifth-floor chart on the fourth-floor one, he saw that the Life Support Unit was situated above his room (412). It might be that at night he lay directly beneath the other, separated only by the thickness of the ceiling, a horizontal wall.

Dizziness overcame him and he collapsed into a chair. A nurse had to help him back to his room. She scolded him like a child for overdoing things.

That night he dreamed that he undertook the same long journey down the deserted corridor. He pulled himself up the staircase to the fifth floor. He passed through the leather-padded swinging-doors of the Life Support Unit into the empty visitors' lounge. It was painted a restful green and had neutral paintings and big green plants. A second door opened on a corridor with a succession of big windows. Behind them, tributary to machines, patients were lying on wheeled stretchers. He was approaching the last window when the nurse came again and scolded him severely and then he opened his eyes on the ceiling in the pallid early morning light of his room.

So day and night he was assailed by that image. Sometimes he surprised himself trying to wring humor out of his tribulations – a cosmopolite approach to suffering, he'd read – by toting up his incredible accumulation of woes over the past few weeks. There was his lacerated right sole (healed, true, during the coma) with the attendant loss of his glasses; the intestinal fire (for the moment back to latency); the wrecking of his office; possible bankruptcy; the blasting of his brain; his half-paralyzed left arm; and now hounded day and night by an image he couldn't cosmetize.

While waiting for Silberman's pills to take effect, he tried to fight the syndrome on his own. The trick, he thought, was to concentrate on quantifiable worries. His assistant brought over plenty of these in the form of bills, dunning letters and balance sheets in growing unbalance. One day the radio announced the government's decision to compensate uninsured victims of the bombing outrages. It had to come soon. But no date was mentioned.

So the prospect of bankruptcy did afford a certain relief from the image. But concern about money matters couldn't be indefinitely kept up. In the interstices of disastrous calculations, without warning, wall and face would loom. This even happened during one of his assistant's visits.

She came often and stayed long, even after business matters had been disposed of. On the fourth day of his return to the world, at what they called "dinner-time" (five o'clock) the new nurse, mistaking their relationship, had offered her a tray. She'd eagerly accepted it, a deadly precedent. When bed-ridden he'd had the space of the bed as a buffer. Now he had to sit at angles at the narrow wheeled formica table like a crazy modern painting, his legs jack-knifed out of harm's way, his torso twisted to make room for their foreheads when they leaned forward for soup.

For the first time he understood the expression tête-à-tête. Since the death of his mother, he'd lost the habit of being in a confined space with another person. In addition, she never failed to bring flowers and potted plants. He always thanked her. But didn't they compete for oxygen or emit dangerous gas at night? He didn't remember which. Perhaps both?

He didn't realize it but he had a reason for being thankful to her. She proved to be a counter-fire to the obsessive image, not just because of the alarming things she brought over to the hospital from the office but because his mind was kept busy combating the irritation her presence frequently caused.

However, on the eighth day of his return, in the very middle of a dictated sentence, the boy and the wall came back with such force that he broke off helplessly. He tried the trick of staring at her latest flowers. When that didn't work he again pictured her ferreting in his apartment. Since the death of his mother, nobody had entered his flat except, once, a plumber, strictly confined to the flooded bathroom, and, twice, a doctor, not the same one. He imagined her using his toilet. He banished the absurd, scandalous image. The wall and the boy returned. He blurted out: "You had no business in my apartment."

That worked. Now he was out of it but into the consequences of his words as he could see by her face. Ever since the inspector had told him about her intrusion, he'd been trying to find the right approach to the subject: something firm but certainly not brutal like that. She took things to heart as he could see.

She flushed, sat up stiffly and began the justification for perhaps the twentieth time. But now it was no solitary rehearsal.

She'd managed to salvage his overcoat, she explained. It had been in tatters. Naturally she'd emptied the pockets. There'd been a few coins (she named the exact sum) and three underground tickets and the keys. She immediately put them all in an envelope, which she sealed. But the inspector was very insistent about the missing letters of application. He wanted her to give him the keys. She thought it would be better if she looked herself. He might have broken things. The police hadn't always behaved well during the Events.

She'd spent no more than five minutes in his apartment. She'd have seen it right away: a purple folder. "It wasn't there so I left. I was careful to lock up."

This was largely the truth. She'd felt sure the inspector would become nastily insistent if she didn't volunteer to have a look. Besides, there were probable plants to water, a possible cat to feed, although by the way he reacted to the cats in the building this was unlikely. She came with a tin of sardines anyway.

She'd touched practically nothing there unless you counted the closed windows and metal shutters of the first room as part of the flat. In the musty darkness she hadn't been able to find the light-switch. The shutters had resisted as though undisturbed for years. They cried painfully and let in only a diffused distant light absorbed by the somber carpet and wallpaper, the massive, badly marred mahogany furniture. The windows gave on an airshaft. You had to lean out and crane your neck, as she did, to see a fragment of blue sky. The living room had an unlived-in smell. The only sound in the room was the slow tocking of a grandfather clock in a corner and occasional wing-bursts of pigeons from the airshaft. The worn carpet muffled her footsteps.

In the corridor she opened a door on blackness and groped for the switch. A multitude of bulbs burst forth. They illuminated a repetitious chaotic space: hundreds of beds with frilly yellowed covers, a forest of crucifixes, endless heads of Jesus, framed bleeding hearts, mottoes in reversed lettering, "Jesus is Love!" and fragments of a vase.

After a second she understood that it was a room with a single overhead bulb but enlarged and repeated by the mirrors lying on the bed, the floor, propped against the furniture, hanging from the walls, countless mirrors of all sizes and shapes. The mustiness was unbreathable.

Coughing, she'd closed the door and continued her exploration. Two other doors in the corridor were locked. She was proud not to have opened them with the other keys. She passed into a small bedroom, a kitchen and a study. She found no cat and no vulnerable plants in the flat. Not counting the bouquet that almost fooled her, there was only, in his study, a green enameled dish full of pebbles and sandy soil and thumb-high cacti. The dish stood on an old desk beneath a swivel-lamp, in the exact center of a cone of light. The cacti, which had barbed needles, were of the same mineral hue as the pebbles. They needed no watering.

Also on the desk were two leather-framed black-and-white photos. One was a bust portrait of a strong-chinned man in a black uniform with old fashioned royal insignia on the collar. The other was of a very pretty woman in artistic soft-focus with short fluffy blonde hair back lighted to incandescence. She wore a big crucifix around her slender neck. Her eyes were strange; great and transparent as water.

In a blue vase in front of her photograph was a bunch of perfect flowers. She was ready to water them when she realized they were plastic.

She opened the desk drawers but didn't find the letters of application. So with the exception of the doorknobs and the drawers she hadn't touched anything. She'd been prepared to tidy up but there was nothing to tidy up. There was rigorous order everywhere, even in the kitchen, the focal point of masculine disorder, she'd read. She had no personal experience. It was true that she couldn't withstand a sudden urge to urinate. But, technically, could this be considered "touching"?

She returned to his study and sat there until the grandfather clock in the living room boomed tremulously once.

She showed up breathless at the restaurant, half an hour late as usual, foolishly holding the tin of sardines. Vera's thin face was discontented. She'd spoiled her appetite with salted almonds and mineral water. She asked where she'd been – not at the hospital again? Vera found that it was a waste of time to visit somebody who was unconscious and who scandalously underpaid and exploited her.

As usual, Vera had a gift for her. She had to close her eyes and hold out her arm. She felt something cold on her wrist that clicked: a modernistic silver chain-bracelet Vera had made for her.

In the middle of the night she remembered that she'd switched off the swivel lamp on his desk. The cactus plants were sure to die. The next day she returned to his apartment and switched the lamp back on. She opened the windows and shutters in all the rooms except the two locked ones and the one filled with dusty mirrors. She gave the cacti a few drops, most of which rolled off the refractory soil. Then she sat in his study perfectly still for a half-hour before leaving.

She ended by visiting the flat nearly every day during his coma.

She burrowed in her bag, came up with his keys and placed them on the table. There was a long silence. He fingered his book, never far from his reach during her visits, but not insistently this time. He still felt faintly guilty at his outburst. Instead of leaving, she sat there with an air of triumphant mystery.

Finally she came out with her big news. Her brother had just decided to give up the farm but of course couldn't sell it. Still fingering the book, he heard her out. Who wanted to buy a tiny run-down farm in the rocky middle of nowhere? she said. So it was practically hers now. One day she'd say goodbye to the city, goodbye, goodbye, retire there and live on practically nothing. There was wood for the fireplace in the woods behind the house, and water from a well. No food problem either: a kitchen garden, a chicken or two, snared rabbits, nettles for soup, dandelion salad, wild asparagus and mushrooms and chestnuts in season, you could make wine from blackberries. Maybe she'd live there with a friend. And if people she didn't care to see came to see her she'd wait in those woods till they were gone.

Finally she left and Lorz was able to return to his book.

***

4

Three days later it was suddenly three o'clock, an hour before the scheduled identification of the boy. His heart alarmed him. He went into the library. Another patient tried to strike up a conversation. He fled. He couldn't go to the encounter with his mind confused by futile conversations with strangers. He needed these last minutes to prepare his mind in solitude, to win back calm.

Lorz returned to his room, lay down on the hard bed and closed his eyes. For the first time he tried to let the dangerous image come instead of resisting it. He had the confused idea that if he couldn't recall the boy's face now he'd never be able to identify him twenty minutes from now. All he had otherwise was that abstract knowledge of piece-meal features that refused to coalesce into a face apart from the moment of the explosion. One part of his mind wanted to go back to that moment. It strained against the leash of the fearful part of his mind.

Lorz called up the wall again and again without fear but with growing despair because he couldn't call up the face. The leash was too tight. He relaxed it. Relaxed it more and more. Now the leash was gone and all of his mind strained forward. It was like pushing against a flimsy barrier guarding a chasm and which could yield any second. He felt dizzy and could taste his sweat.

It was coming, he was coming, he could hear his breathing, feel his breath on his face, how was that possible?

He opened his eyes on a totally wrong face that filled his entire field of vision. The wrong face asked anxiously if something was wrong.

He said that nothing was wrong. But the wall-clock gave him only ten minutes to find the right face.

"I was going to call the nurse," she said. "I thought something had happened, you were so pale and sweating. You still are. Shall I call the nurse?"

"Nothing is wrong. I have an appointment in ten minutes. You can leave the correspondence on the table." She was holding the plastic shopping-bag she brought the correspondence over in.

"It's not correspondence," she said. He closed his eyes and tried again. Nothing came.

He heard the rustling of paper. He opened his eyes. She was still there, standing in the middle of the room, burrowing in the plastic bag. He closed his eyes again. The rustling of paper went on. "Look!" she said as to a child and exhibited the cake. It was crowned with candied cherries and dripped with honey.

"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.

The last visit had been a week before. When she left he'd gone over to the window and a few minutes later saw her emerging from the entrance. She walked briskly toward a black car, its battered obsolescence dissenting among the other shiny cars. The front passenger-door opened like a trap. A thin bare arm covered with barbaric bracelets like hers reached out and his assistant was snatched within. The door had slammed shut and the car jerked off.

As the elevator sank toward the ground floor the director toyed with the idea of inviting her to an inexpensive restaurant that very evening to celebrate his survival. After all, she'd been with the concern for – how long? – four years, it must be.

She wasn't in the lobby. He sat down and rested for a quarter of an hour. Finally he decided that she must be with a client. He got up and walked out of the hospital.

In the sudden mid-May sunshine and ether-free air he felt a well-being he hadn't experienced for months, years perhaps. It was good to be free of walls for a few minutes. His new glasses firmly straddled his nose and he saw the world clearly, the sane reality of green trees and yellow butterflies flitting over the hospital flower beds, and in the blue sky a pinkish piled-up cumulous cloud. His brain was purged completely of the nonsense with Number Nine. His bowels were at peace. The young visitors going up and down the steps aroused no hostile feelings in him.

As for the business, there might be a few problems in the immediate, but the newspapers said that compensation for the blast-victims was impending. Finally, he would make a peace-gesture toward his assistant, a good restaurant that very evening.

Physically there was little change as far as Lorz could make out through the taxi window. In certain stark avenues, once leafy, he saw the stumps of chestnut trees cut down to make symbolic barricades. In many streets the picturesque cobblestones, often pried up for missiles against the riot-police, had been covered over with asphalt. The smashed shop-windows had long since been replaced. On certain walls tattered posters and spray-canned slogans lingered with a defeated air, but nearly all the graffiti had been steamed and sand-blasted off the main public edifices. Only the facades of the high-rise university summoned retroactively to long-dispersed demonstrations. Occasional dark rectangles alongside the curbs commemorated the burning of cars. New militant titles blared in the newspaper stands.

At a red light a young woman with long blowing hair slapped the hood of the taxi, which encroached a few centimeters on the zebra crossing. She had bare thighs and a yellow blouse that seemed to have been sprayed on her naked torso. How could styles have changed so completely in a matter of weeks? Another woman with a minimal skirt and a radical neckline slapped the hood.

"Bitches," muttered the old driver. He backed up.

When the director stepped inside his office his assistant looked up from a file and spoke about difficulties with an old client as though he'd been absent for no more than half an hour instead of nearly two months. She called his attention to the partially renovated office. She was partially renovated herself with her hair chopped short and stark, pale lipstick, even more jewelry, an acidulous green dress ending close to her knee-joints. The newspaper lying on her desk was one of the new radical titles.

Lorz didn't dare offer her the tulips he'd taken from the hospital room. They'd wilted badly. He placed them on his desk, a present to himself, then. There were no other flowers there for his return. How much did a bouquet cost?

But true to his resolution, he did invite her to a restaurant, an expensive one (he named it), that very evening. To celebrate survival, he said, fond of his formulation, and to thank her for all she'd done.

She wasn't free. She thanked him. She wasn't free the day after and thanked him. She didn't know when she would be free and thanked him again.

Conversation on her part was limited to business now. Once, to break a long silence, he asked her about her farm. She replied, "Oh the farm..." without looking up from what she was doing.

Another time, he made a rare attempt at confidence. "Sometimes I wish I lived on a farm myself. When I was about fifteen I wanted to live in South America. Instead, here I am down here."

"South America," she said. "That's like the farm. That's escapism." The word didn't fit her, wasn't hers. It was like the jewelry and the hairdo.

She received private phone calls now, unthinkable before. Her voice was almost a whisper. Once, he overheard: "I will, I will, I promise you I will."

She no longer had lunch in the office. For years the custom had been that each brought sandwiches and munched away, often while working, at their respective desks. Now at precisely one she left and returned at precisely two, like an ordinary employee.

During one of those absences he picked up the woman's magazine she'd left on her desk. It was a post-event title called New Eve. The cover-photo was no longer the habitual wholesome smiling blonde but a low-cut brunette with rebellious hair. Sullen-lipped, she glowered at the viewer as though measuring his sexual capacity, clearly judged deficient on sight alone. Lorz's experience with women's magazines was limited to what he leafed through in doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms. He seemed to recall a cackle of diets, knitting-codes, recipes, child-rearing techniques, dress-patterns, occasional moralizing pieces on marital infidelity, supposedly true-life dramas of intimate transgression.

Things had changed. On every other page in this magazine he saw bare breasts, detailed maps of "pleasure-zones," seduction techniques, apologies for license, the proclamation of the right to orgasm and abortion. Was this the sort of thing his assistant read?

His attention was caught by a self-evaluation test entitled, "Are You in a Rut?" because his assistant had visibly evaluated herself (with a violet-inked No. 3 ballpoint pen). There were twenty questions with a choice of answers. The reader was invited to identify herself spontaneously with one of four animals. His assistant saw herself not as cat (a), swan (c), tigress (d) but as mouse (b). She let herself be trampled upon. She daydreamed not often but constantly. She cried "far too often." Etc. Etc. She'd totaled up her results, slightly better than Lorz's, and found herself objectively in the profoundest depths of rut. The comment spoke of self-amendment through positive thinking and urged reading the article on page 87. Lorz put the magazine back on her desk in its original position.

Then he picked it up again and turned to page 87. She had conscientiously checked the article paragraph by paragraph. It was entitled: "Yes, You Too Can Change!" Lorz found nothing helpful. It was easier for women what with their fundamental exteriority. Diets, perfume, bolder hair-dos, brighter and scantier clothing were enough to pull the trick for them, apparently. There was a before-and-after photo. "Before" in dumpy depressed black-and-white. "After" in color, the woman leaping lithe with explosive breasts. But wasn't it obvious that they were two different models? It was gross cheating. Feeling contempt (but also residual jealousy) for the gullible readers of such periodicals, the director placed the magazine back on his assistant's desk.

Another day she came back from lunch twenty minutes late. She'd never been as much as a minute late before. She wasn't flustered or even apologetic. She explained that she'd been at the hospital.

"The hospital? I'm back."

"I still go there once a week."

"Oh yes, Number Nine."

When she didn't react, he amended: "Teddy."

She nodded, sat down at her desk and examined the typewriter keys. She reached for the brush. He asked her if she'd been praying again. It was just to break the silence but after he said it he realized it could be interpreted as an indiscreet question. Also, it sounded sarcastic as well as ungrateful since he himself had been the subject of her prayers according to what she'd once said. Naturally, he hadn't meant it that way. She nodded again and started cleaning the typewriter keys.

Again to break the silence, he asked her if she thought that it did "Teddy" any good.

Without looking up from the typewriter keys, she said:

"It does me good, anyhow. When he sat down in the back of the office that morning I wanted to tell him to join the others up front and I didn't."

This gave the director the opportunity to say something generous, to make up for his unfortunate remark about her prayers.

"I wouldn't blame myself for that any more than for calling me to the back to look at his poster."

She went on cleaning the keys in silence.

Three weeks following his release from hospital Lorz received a letter which she placed unopened on his desk with the other, opened, mail. It announced her resignation, effective in two weeks following receipt of the present.

He received the news with the echo of the last hammer-strokes of the workmen on the chipboard partition which replaced the demolished plaster wall. The damage to the ceiling and the floor had already been repaired. She'd also seen the old clients and persuaded most of them to continue with Ideal. She'd even picked up a new one. The ship was still off-keel and leaking badly but the pumps were operating at top speed. It was as though she were determined to efface all of the sequels of the explosion before leaving.

He stared down at her letter. It was as if the walls of his office had announced their resignation. He got up, took his chair, placed it alongside hers and sat down.

"What's this, Dorothea?" he asked gently, calling an almost compassionate smile to his lips, as though dealing with somebody who had just announced her intention to leave for a distant galaxy. It was the first time he'd ever called her by her first name.

"My resignation, sir. I'm getting married. Probably."

Married, Miss Ruda? Why "probably"? One did or one didn't. Why did she always call him "sir"? He had a name.

"Why is it 'sir' all the time, Dorothea? That's all I've ever heard from you for four years."

"Five, sir," she corrected.

Suppressing anger, Lorz pointed out that they'd been collaborators for five years, more than a third of their lives together during that time, and it was still "sir". He was beginning to realize the enormity of the impending loss: the bookkeeping, the telephone, the correspondence, the lessons for the applicants, the surveillance of the operators, the canvassing which she did so well. But beyond this, how could she, Dorothea Ruda, do this to him, Edmond Lorz? There was the human dimension. And at such a moment, with debts piling up and clients dwindling. It was the coup de grace as much by what it betokened as by its predictably disastrous consequences.

The ship was sinking.

"I know you must think the ship is sinking," he said.

"I'm not a rat," she retorted.

It was the first time she'd ever retorted, not counting what happened, briefly, three times a year. Lorz felt great relief at the thought that, of course, this was another of her episodic disguises, only much longer than the others. Tomorrow or the day after, she'd be back without jangling costume jewelry and in loose attire, contrite, her true self again.

"I intended quitting for a long time," she added.

He cast about for arguments.

"Married women work too, don't they, in this century? A married woman has the right to choose."

It sounded, he knew, like the rhetoric of old-style waiting-room women's magazines, but he couldn't come up with anything better.

"We'll be leaving the city. I'm sick of the city."

He stared at her mournfully. "If it's a raise you want, Dorothea, it's granted. On the spot."

"It's true my salary wasn't very generous for all the work I did," she replied, offensively, he thought. The use of the preterit wasn't a good sign either. "But it's not money. It's what I said. I need a change. I'm tired."

"A twenty percent increase. As of today. Long overdue, I'll admit."

He waited for a reply. What did her silence signify? Was it a bargaining tactic?

"I might see my way to twenty-five percent," he proposed after a while. God alone knew where the money was going to come from. "Retroactive to January," he added.

She'd returned to the customer-file. Now she reached over for a marker. In the process she swiveled her chair in that direction. She maintained the chair in its new position, her back to her employer, presenting him with her hair hacked short over her neck vertebras, an unknown part of her.

After a minute's silence he offered her double her present salary, also retroactive to January.

She went on with the marker.

Two weeks later Dorothea Ruda was gone. On leaving she placed the slipcover, like a gray shroud, over her typewriter. She went over to his desk and gave him back the keys. She shook hands with him like a man and wished him continued good health and good luck. She renewed the proposal she'd already made in her letter of resignation to introduce an acquaintance of hers, a very competent lady, to replace her.

Her extremist girl friend, the one with the battered car and the barbaric bracelets? Lorz thanked her coldly but did accompany her to the door. He stood there watching her climbing up the gloomy staircase past mewing cats towards the daylight beyond the door. At that moment he recalled the question he'd wanted to ask her about the injured candidate: what he had looked like to her.

The question didn't matter anymore, no more than the candidate himself did. Yet the director moved forward toward the stairs, eyes fixed on the door she was opening above him.

There was a sickening crunch underfoot and he nearly slipped and fell.

The door above closed on her back and a sliver of sunlit tree.

The director removed his shoe, hopped back into his now empty office and methodically removed the oily scraps of sardine-skins from the sole. Then he dumped the fragments of the dish into the metal oil-drum.

No more of that, anyhow.

***

7

Lorz had expected difficulties but not the catastrophe that followed his assistant's departure. The new client backed out the next day. He lost two of the oldest clients the following week. The operators, spottily surveyed now, loafed on the job. He was able to stall off the chemical suppliers he owed money to, but for how long? The bank was unsympathetic.

Only the compensation money could save him but it didn't come. The newspapers didn't even refer to it any more.

And the work was killing him. How could he bear up under the burden she'd dumped on his shoulders? For he hadn't replaced his assistant. It wasn't only to economize on a salary bound to be far higher than what Dorothea Ruda had been drawing, or the fact that a new employee, knowing nothing about poster-restoration, would have to be broken in. In a sense his former assistant was negatively present in the very predicaments her absence caused. Irrationally, he felt that filling the void would make her departure definitive, as though it weren't already.

But beyond his assistant's faithlessness, beyond even the disorganizing consequences of the "Events," the crisis confronting his business had, he thought, deeper causes. Astonishing as it might seem after such a tidal-wave of disorder in March, there was now, in May, distinctly fewer graffiti than in past years and so less pressure on advertising agencies and poster firms to rectify.

He'd have liked an ear to analyze the phenomenon to. He'd have explained, for example, that perhaps the scale of transgressions had changed. How could someone who had experienced the joy of igniting expensive motorcars be bothered with scribbling obscenities? More seriously, he would wonder if the decline in graffiti couldn't be explained by the change in the posters themselves.

He would have pointed out that the advertising agencies were now beginning to appropriate the symbols and slogans of the defeated March movement. Example: the new Sunglow poster with young women behind barricades, tricked out in the quasi-uniform of the March days, the peaked blue cap, the black sweater, the red scarf. They brandished bottles of Sunglow detergent like Molotov cocktails and militantly proclaimed their right to that brand. Or the scowling child, similarly attired, arms defiantly folded, warning that he was on strike, no more tasteless breakfast cereals for him, what he demanded was the brand whose image was reproduced on a poster behind him.

For a while, the director thought that even the delicious long-necked girl had been impressed into their ranks. Wasn't that Helena, dressed in March red and black with the blue peaked cap at a heart-breakingly roguish angle? The camera had clumsily caught her in a movement of extreme torsion, her blurred hands reaching down toward a heap of paving stones. The caption, in imitation spray-canned graffiti, proclaimed new freedom thanks to a product which was a revolutionary breakthrough in feminine monthly protection. Then he'd peered at the poorly focused face and decided that the model couldn't be Helena.

But here, he would have warned, was a paradox (and he imagined his ex-assistant's expressive face obediently responding to the warning). Why should it be precisely such posters as these, miming and implicitly praising disorder, that real disorder tended to spare? They were strangely free of graffiti. The key, he would have told her, was the breakdown of that tension between Real and Ideal that underlay the conventional posters. For example, to sell powdered soups in plastic packets to the real world below, the archaic image above of an impossibly authentic goodwife stirring a pot-bellied cauldron. Or, in another register of contradiction, the disproportion between the intrinsic importance of the advertised item in real life and the joy it magically produced in the ideal universe of the posters, a joy (or tenderness or conviviality or whatever) endowed, moreover, with enviable duration: the three weeks the poster stayed up.

The world below was tortured by its incapacity to achieve such dedication. Who could be joyous or tender for three straight weeks? They struck back by defacing the image of the unattainable ideal. (Hadn't he once explained that to her?) The new-style posters, however, didn't offer tantalizing visions of the Ideal. They flung back a warped image of the real world with its imperfections and vices. Wasn't the imitation of spray-canned graffiti in the sanitary-napkin poster deeply significant? Or the way the photograph of the false long-necked girl cleverly copied the hundreds of street-riot shots he'd seen in back-issues of news-weeklies: poorly centered and focused, the shutter-speed outstripped by the action. The March events had, in a sense, been one gigantic graffito. One didn't graffiti graffiti itself.

Yes, he wished she were there to hear him formulate it. She would have scowled with concentration (not getting much, of course, but doing her best), her large dark eyes – her best feature – riveted to his lips. She'd been a good listener, a rare virtue nowadays.

Two weeks after his assistant left him Lorz stuffed two suitcases with essentials and moved into the subterranean office.

He hoped it would be a very temporary arrangement. For the moment it wasn't possible to cope otherwise. With the insane workload she'd dumped on him, he was now averaging four hours of sleep a day. He'd gain an extra hour by eliminating the round-trip from his flat to the office. There was already a cot in the storeroom where the chemicals were kept, also a cubicle with a toilet and a tiny washbasin.

Lack of comfort proved less unpleasant than certain other things. For example the way time stood still in the perpetual cold noon of the mercury tubes. Even more troubling than the absence of natural light in the basement room was his dependence on a machine for air, the humming ventilator. It reminded him of what he'd seen in the Life Support Unit during his inspection of his candidate. There had been no natural light there either. But he tried not to think of that other space where he'd spent black weeks himself.

One day he cleaned out the drawers of her desk and came across an identity photo of her smiling timidly in black and white. He tossed it on the top of the desk. He got rid of the rest of the rubbish in the metal oil-drum. For months she looked up at him when he passed her former desk.

He tried not to think of the recumbent figure in cubicle nine. Except once, he didn't even inquire about the man during his own semi-monthly check-ups at the hospital. He supposed that if there'd been any improvement in his candidate's condition the doctors would have spoken about it. But there was no possibility of improvement. He learned that the one time he did inquire. Down in the lobby he saw one of the Life Support Unit doctors. He fought against the impulse but finally asked what the chances were of "Teddy" emerging from coma.

The doctor practically told him, in cold precise terms that somehow matched his perfectly trimmed pale moustache and pale eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, that there was no chance. But would he be indefinitely maintained like that in half-life by artificial means? Lorz asked. He was told that normally the family decided. But in this case there was no family. "One day the Commission will meet and the case will be examined. Finally permission will be given to switch him off."

Lorz didn't know there was such a commission. The expression "switch him off" angered him. "He's a human being, not a machine," he felt like retorting. It could so easily have been himself the doctor was talking about. He felt grief and dread. Alarmed at his excessive reaction, he drove the incident out of his mind.

The director ended by taking his meals in the office too. At first there was just the primitive alcohol-lamp she'd used to prepare coffee for both of them. One day he bought a twin-burner camping-stove with a cartridge of gas and a plastic tablecloth with a pattern of yellow smiling suns on a blue background. At dinnertime that same day he covered his desk with the suns and placed the camping-stove in the exact middle. He admired his acquisition, one hip jutting out, an ankle in graceful torsion, limp-wristed hands clasped, in the enraptured posture of the women on the posters before dream household-appliances. Then he plopped the contents of a tinned soup into the saucepan and, gnawing at his half-loaf, stirred and waited for it to simmer, not boil, for maximum flavor.

Luckily Silberman, who had told him to resume work gradually and to avoid strain, couldn't see him grappling with the pails of paint, squat 25-kilo brutes, pouring them unassisted now into cans and jars and stocking them in the lockers bearing the numbers of the operators who would pick them up at the start of their shift.

He was even tempted to work the illustrated corridors a few hours a day. One of the operators had thrown over the job and another he'd had to fire for gross shirking. Even though he hadn't been in harness for ten years the director was confident that he could handle the job in a fraction of the time the two had required. But it would have been additional fatigue. What would Silberman have thought of that?

What made him finally shoulder knapsack and ladder was an alarming incident, which he attributed to the mental effects of confinement in the office.

Already he was suffering from splitting headaches. He decided that they came from sleeping in the storeroom, exposed to the chemical fumes, plus the disturbance of the operators on the 5:00am shift. They banged open their locker-doors and slammed them shut with a total lack of consideration for the sleeper. Lorz dragged the cot as far as possible from the fumes and noise. The headaches continued anyhow.

He apprehended a relapse and a return of the symptoms that had frightened him in the hospital: the craziness of the wall with the boy and his imagined face, the menace of cerebral explosion and the return to blackness.

The routine check-ups revealed no anomaly but he wasn't reassured. His gaze, as so often, was inward. Except now it was directed at the brain instead of the bowels. The new organ was harder to picture. It was like an eye trying to see itself.

He was constantly testing his brain as he'd done with his lacerated sole that disastrous Monday morning in early March, gingerly putting weight on it, probing the limits of painless pressure. The theoretical source of fear was constantly with him even though the workmen had done their job. The wall at the end of the room was unpainted chipboard now and bore no resemblance to the plaster wall the blast had destroyed.

He tested himself by removing his glasses. The blur restored the wall to its former potentially menacing appearance. But, thank God, there were no symptoms.

He pushed the test further by placing a chair and a table close to it, and then a poster on the desk, the same poster.

Nothing.

One day he draped his jacket over the back of the chair. Without his glasses it could be taken, more or less, for a human form.

Nothing.

So he was cured, despite the headache. He didn't bother removing the jacket from the chair. In the loneliness of the huge underground room it was company of sorts if he took his glasses off. Sometimes he even sat there, going over his accounts.

One day the alarming thing happened. He dozed off in that chair. Approaching footsteps awakened him. He'd removed his glasses and saw a blurred form drawing close. He – but who was he? – looked up smiling at the other whom he knew to be Edmond Lorz.

The crazy confusion lasted no more than a second. Then he saw that it was the skinny balding operator, Number Four, and recovered his own identity with that of the other.

He decided he was spending too much time in the office. The underground corridors were even further from the sun but he thought that a few hours of poster correction would be a change. If things didn't improve he'd see Silberman about it.

So for the first time in a decade Lorz donned a grey smock, shouldered the telescoped wheeled stepladder and went down to the tiled corridors to eradicate graffiti. Just before he reached panels 302-334 of the Line 3 transfer tunnel of Central Station, he removed his glasses and breathed on the lenses. Polishing them with a handkerchief, he emerged out of the corridor onto the platform where teenagers were punishing vending machines while waiting for their train.

Looking at the first of the blurred posters he thought he saw Helena. She'd strangely disappeared from the underground panels since the explosion as though she too had been critically injured. But when he put his glasses back on he realized the grossness of his error. The sweet long-necked girl metamorphosed into one of their new skimpily clad smoldering brunettes. They were everywhere now.

Unslinging and developing his ladder effortlessly, he took in the poster (cork-tipped mentholated cigarettes) at a single expert glance. His mind leaped ahead, mapping out the intricate but economical gestures needed to clean her up. Twenty seconds, he judged. Swiftly, he placed the correct bottles and tools on the tray. In the back of his mind he was competing with his ex-assistant's flawless performance that nearly fatal Monday morning.

He rose to eye-level with the brunette and reached over to efface the crayoned pudendum staring at him like an upended eye with romantic lashes from the upper left-hand corner. Was it lack of sleep or rustiness after so many years? Overcompensation for the residual weakness of his injured left arm? Or was he still shaken by the alarming incident an hour before? Whatever, his movement of suppression was too emphatic. He shot his other hand against the poster, near the region of her bosom, to regain balance. It was as though the brunette had repulsed him.

To his terror and humiliation he found himself jolting impotently backwards from her dwindling, contemptuous face. How could he have forgotten to secure the brake? He clung to the ladder, head swiveled backwards in the direction of his flight, which was toward the group of high school students now standing at the edge of the platform.

"Stop me! Stop me!" he cried. They turned around, gawked at the uncommon spectacle and parted ranks as though to allow him unimpeded junction with the train roaring into the station.

The ladder swerved.

An iron pillar jerked toward him.

It loomed.

He shielded his brain with an arm and cried, "No!"

***

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 less than the last time.

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, windowless office, saw her in fast-motion superimposed activity, simultaneously sweeping, typing, phoning, pouring out chemicals, concealing herself behind pillars. He saw her as she'd been on that identity-photo, for of course – if only for the sake of the clients – she'd wear something less extreme, tone down the make-up, omit perfume, junk most of the jewelry, inject a little of the old sweetness into her discourse.

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.

***

9

So she returned to Ideal. But his gaudy new assistant had nothing in common with the black-and-white timidly smiling identity-photo that he'd removed from her desk an hour before her return and had placed, for want of a better place, in his wallet. At the beginning, each time he pushed open the door of Ideal in the morning, he half expected to see his familiar assistant there, the crisis over, her old self again, free of the absurd disguise, timidly smiling as before.

But there was no return to the old relationship between them. Her face was still radically done up and she'd made no concessions regarding dress, costume-jewelry and perfume. She continued to generate cancerous clouds of cigarette-smoke. Even the position of her desk had changed. It was the first thing she'd demanded on returning. She refused to let him help her move it. She waited for a husky operator to come back from his shift and did it with him. Lorz looked on, faintly humiliated.

Before, their desks had faced, even though from opposite ends of the office. Now she had hers moved to a spot where he could see her only out of the corner of his eye. She commanded an effortless view of his profile. He also discovered after a week that a wall-mirror, hanging askew alongside old calendars and a bulletin board, provided her with a second view of him. He felt constantly spied on, thanks to that mediating rectangular surface. Their gazes sometimes met and fled on it. At such times he thought he read in her face incompatible things, sometimes what he took for distaste, sometimes concern. But you couldn't really tell with that painted mask of hers.

The term he finally found for her attitude toward him was "cold solicitude," something he'd never encountered outside of hospitals. She missed nothing from her strategic position with her ally, the mirror that outflanked him. It seemed to him that each time he initiated a movement to get up from his desk (for example, to go to the toilet) he would hear her new incisive voice: "What is it you want? I'll get it for you." She never said "Sir" or "Mr Lorz" now.

Apart from business matters and his candidate, their longest conversations concerned his pills which he was supposed to take at three. He was lax about it. "It's five past three," she would announce. After he understood what the announcement was about he would say, "Good" or "Yes" or "Really?" or nothing at all. A few minutes later she was sure to say: "Don't you take your pills at three?" He would reply: "Five minutes more or less don't matter." Never looking up from whatever she was doing, quick hands never pausing, she would announce the time at regular intervals. Once she said she wasn't his nurse.

Most of the time, to avoid the implicit nagging, he took his pills before three. Sometimes, to provoke the nagging, which was a kind of exchange anyhow, he'd let three go by.

On sunny days she suggested he should take a walk in the square, she'd take care of things. After lunch she urged the cot upon him. She'd take care of things. Once, he said: "I'm not an invalid. Do I look that bad?" He was careful to counterbalance his irritation – which he felt to be the querulousness of an invalid – with a slight smile. He got no answer in any case.

Mainly as a gesture of good will he once inquired about her farm, intending to ask about soup out of stinging nettles, a trivial enigma which in the solitary months following her resignation had sometimes briefly occupied his mind. Once again she used the word "escapism."

Sometimes he found her attitude almost insulting. But he was careful to say nothing that risked imperiling his business. It was convalescent and needed her care. She could quit the job any moment. She made that clear by often leaving her new extremist paper on her desk, open on the help-wanted section. Certain ads were underlined. It even happened that she openly made calls in answer to them. She scrupulously placed coins in the cash-box for these as well as for other more private calls, signaled by a swivel of her chair, which gave him a mirror-view of the back of her absurd hairdo, by a lowered voice and sometimes by soft exclusive laughter. All he overheard was, once, "It's not forever. I'm still looking," and, another time, "Jobs aren't that easy to find. But soon, I promise."

He knew who it was, of course. Her new extremist woman-friend called her up at least once a day. When it was the director who picked up the receiver he was able to identify her by the click and buzz that cut his "hello" in two. Once, the matter must have been too urgent and she condescended to communicate with him. Without the bourgeois hypocrisy of "hello" or "please", her metallic voice commanded: "Dorothea." The director obeyed. He didn't dare make an issue of it. Any more than he dared make an issue of the extremist literature that invaded the office. Twice he even found a leaflet on his desk. This was going too far and on both occasions he didn't hesitate, during her absence, to ball the hysterical thing up and shoot it into the wastepaper basket.

They went on visiting his candidate, separately. One Sunday afternoon he stood in the corridor before the closed door and caught fragments of what she was saying to the other. He pieced them together into the things she'd told him, Lorz, for years but not anymore. He guessed she was inches from his candidate's face, looking into his eyes and imagining miniscule acknowledgement of three blue peaks, beech woods, the pond and the orchard.

He himself had much less to say to his candidate. He'd sit down facing him, not nearly as close, and sometimes observe that the boy's polo shirt was a different color. That was the only change he ever noticed in him until his last visit there.

At first there was no basic change either in what Lorz said to him. He would say his name and say that they'd known each other and ask him what his name was. He said it over and over monotonously. Sometimes he'd switch the sentences around or rephrase them.

After a few weeks he realized that it was absurd to hope for words. He reduced his expectations and asked him over and over to make a sign with his hand. His candidate's hands remained palms upward and limp on his lap. It was absurd to hope for movement. Lorz would also take his glasses off and repeat the irrational weaving approach and retreat. What sharpened into focus with approach was always the stunned brutality of his candidate's present face.

Lorz didn't dare imitate his assistant and peer for signs of comprehension in the boy's eyes until 3:10 in the afternoon of September 2 which (but he didn't know it at the time) was his last visit before his candidate vanished again.

He glanced at the door to make sure it was closed. He took the pillow off the bed and placed it alongside the wheelchair, then tugged his trousers up slightly to spare the crease and kneeled. He took his glasses off, reached across his candidate's torso and gripped the further armrest for support.

With the microscopic vision of uncorrected myopia, he was able to approach his face toward the dark blue eyes far closer than she'd done. The boy's eyes filled his field of vision completely. He could hear his shallow irregular breathing. He became aware of the odor of his body beneath her flowers.

He recited the formula over and over. Who are you? Do you remember me? He found himself imploring response.

Suddenly he got response, not a tiny shrinking of the pupil but a tremendous sign of recognition, which, for a second he reacted to with joy. The dead eyes awoke with intelligence and the boy's face pressed against his.

But now fear as the great torso toppled forward like a wall against him. His hands fended off the heavy weight and he was thrown off balance.

He fell on his back and saw the other foreshortened above him, slumped forward in the armchair. His eyes, empty again, stared down at him. He was still slack-jawed. In his lap his left hand was still limp but his right hand was clenched into a fist now.

The mannish head-nurse with the hacked iron hair was filling out sheets in her office. She looked up briefly as he told her about the sudden movement, intelligence in his eyes, the fist. He imposed calm on his voice.

"Spasms," she said gruffly, returning to her sheets.

"Spasms?"

"Involuntary muscular contractions," she said, without looking up.

He insisted. Impatiently she got up and accompanied Lorz to the room. She raised his candidate upright against the backrest and examined him for a moment.

"Spasms," she said and went back to the office and her sheets.

By the time Lorz reached his office he had doubts about what had happened. He'd been holding onto the armrest. He may have shifted his weight and transferred the movement to the armchair, jolting his candidate forward on to him. Or it may have been spasms. He tried to drive out of his mind the fear he'd experienced as the other's body had pressed down on him.

Two days later, a Saturday, he received a blue official-looking envelope, which he instantly assumed contained bad news.

He read the letter a dozen times and then dialed his assistant's home number. The line was busy. He tried over and over. Who could she be talking to that long?

When she finally answered he said he'd been trying to reach her for a quarter of an hour. So had she, she said, been trying to reach him for a quarter of an hour, dialing and dialing. He told her he had news, the greatest of news. So had she, she said, greater than the greatest. Not as great as mine, he replied and told her that the compensation money had at last been cleared and would be paid into their bank account before the end of the month. They were saved. He named the sum and said he'd counted the zeros five times to make sure. A miracle, he said. She asked if it was a miracle he'd prayed for and told him she'd just come from the hospital. On her way back she'd bought a bottle of white wine. He shouldn't pay attention to anything she might say except this: after five months and twenty-five days Teddy had come out of the coma. He was going to be all right, as she'd always said.

***

Part Two

1

How could you hope to explore all the corridors and rooms of what they called "The Hospital"? It was actually a jumble of buildings of all styles and original destinations, from moldering medieval stone to steel and glass, dumped down any which way by the centuries within a long circular wall. During the month that followed the great news the director went down miles of corridors. He opened hundreds of doors on startled, ravaged, terminal, uninhabited faces, all the wrong ones. And there were so many more miles of unvisited corridors, so many hundreds of untried doors. In the course of his daily explorations he found himself in places devoted to states of distress where his candidate couldn't possibly be: stumped torsos, bald children like giant celluloid dolls, the chemically rigid masks of the insane, hastily glimpsed and fled. It sometimes happened that he'd halt in the middle of a strange corridor, wipe the sweat from his face and wonder in painful lucidity what he was doing there.

Weeks before, in the late afternoon of September 4, half an hour after the phone conversation with his assistant, the director had arrived, half-running, down the familiar corridor. At the last moment he slowed his pace to deceive the vigilance – maybe imagined – of the nurses and doctors and stood before Room 416. When he finally opened the door he saw a ruined middle-aged man in a wheelchair. Room 416 was occupied by a hemiplegic mason, he later learned. He wasn't aware that the incident would prefigure hundreds of similar frustrations in the weeks to come.

Nobody knew where he was, they'd said. The director stood voided in the corridor. He started wandering about, opening doors here and there until an irritated doctor stopped him. Teddy, as he'd already been told, wasn't here anymore and in any case couldn't be visited wherever he might be.

He slowly spiraled down the staircase out into the hospital grounds. An ambulance rolled up the driveway, skirted the main hospital and stopped before the small dingy building that housed the radiography unit. The director stopped and stared as two attendants rolled out a wheeled stretcher with, he was almost certain, his candidate, rigid and unconscious.

The director broke into a run. By the time he reached the unit the ambulance had pulled away and the wheeled stretcher with the two attendants had vanished into the building. He looked everywhere, for hours it must have been, on all five floors. That was how it started.

Day after day, for weeks, the director asked what had become of his candidate. The doctors disclaimed knowledge of his whereabouts. Some exchanged knowing glances, it seemed to him, before coming out with the senseless official version. There would be no visits for a week. They said it week after week. He gained brief access to the nurses' office on futile pretexts and stole quick glances at the wall planning-chart. He didn't see his candidate's name. Opposite 1:15 he did see a card with a penciled scrawl T OH B3. Or was it P3? Or F3? Could "T" possibly stand for the (false) name of his candidate? But the cryptic code that followed discouraged the director. He could hardly ask.

The nurses were curiously reluctant to speak about his candidate. It was as though they'd been given strict instructions. By whom? And why? Some, insistently questioned, ended by telling him hesitantly where, "they thought," his candidate might possibly be found. They sent him to empty rooms, dead-end corridors, non-existent room-numbers.

He was being deliberately misled. Why?

Only the gruff mannish head-nurse with the choleric neck and hacked iron hair came out with a blunt phrase: "He can't be seen."

Lorz brooded over the ambiguity of her words. Was the correct decoding: "It's forbidden to see him?" Or: "He's in no state to be seen?" Why the mystery?

It was a temporary decision, Silberman said soothingly and disclaimed responsibility. Teddy wasn't his patient after all. If his colleagues kept the boy in relative isolation they must have valid reasons. If one were to believe him (but one didn't), Silberman had no knowledge of the boy's whereabouts.

Silberman seemed more interested in Lorz's own condition than in his candidate's. His fat face remained bland throughout their conversations, but the director suspected his mind was processing his daily presence in the hospital. By now it was probably a subject of talk among the staff. Lorz was careful to justify his insistent interest in locating the boy. Justification was a constant concern during those weeks.

By the third week there developed an ideal short-term justification for his daily presence.

He was suffering, he explained truthfully to the young sharp-nosed doctor, from intermittent but severe headaches, also insomnia, irritability and occasional visual disturbances in the form of colored patterns. Invited to undergo various tests – which all proved negative – he was no interloper and could, with studied casualness, pose his questions about his candidate's whereabouts.

But before that medical justification for his presence, he found others for Silberman. There was the curious parallel, he explained. There but for the grace of God, so to speak. Above all, his keen sense of responsibility toward the boy. He'd unwittingly lured the boy to disaster with his advertisement, he said. He added that he'd felt like asking him to sit up front but hadn't.

Lorz knew the doctor would translate "responsibility" to "guilt," a potently operative concept with the mind-men and a run-of-the-mill syndrome: not really an obsession at all, nothing alarmingly abnormal about it.

The director feared abnormal obsession. If he continued visiting the hospital every day, he made sure it was within strict limits. Theoretically the search could have gone faster. But he was careful not to go beyond a very rapid stiff-legged walk down the sterile corridors, as though hastening to an encounter or fleeing one, but still preserving dignity, never breaking into a trot. A broken stride, to his mind, would have marked obsession instead of legitimate deep concern.

Just as he was careful never to exceed an hour a day in his search, taken out of lunchtime, like a leisurely walk after dessert. It involved lengthening his mid-day break by just thirty minutes. He refused to let his quest encroach on his business activities although his assistant could have handled things. Abiding by that inflexible timetable (gone at exactly one and back at exactly two-thirty) was a kind of barrier against chaos. If a minute longer, why not five minutes longer, five hours longer, the whole day, days and nights in the maze of corridors? Anyhow he doubted that even a round-the-clock search would have proved more productive than the actual hurried visits.

One day he encountered a young nurse-in-training. She answered his automatic hopeless question. "Teddy? He's in Old Hospital." She bit her lip. "I wasn't supposed to tell you that." The director probed her last remark for hours. Was "you" simply an impersonal pronoun meaning "anybody" or did it apply to himself, to "you," Edmond Lorz? By now they must all be talking about him.

Then he made the connection with what he'd seen on the planning-chart. O H: Old Hospital.

T stood for Teddy after all.

The ancient building with inky pollution-streaks and white pigeon-droppings looked familiar. Hadn't he already visited it? Among eroded medieval statues half-sunk at angles in the shabby lawn, stiff-faced patients wandered about like automatons in the company of white-uniformed attendants. At this sight the director recognized it as the place of the chemically nullified insane where his mother had once sojourned for a few months. Why had they placed his candidate here?

He wandered about dingy corridors trying to make sense of the progression of the room numbers. Turning a corner, he was almost knocked down by a uniformed black Subcontinental running wild-eyed with an empty wheeled stretcher. The Subcon didn't stop his lunatic running when the director posed his question in his back. He had to run alongside the man.

"P 3, please?" he repeated, gasping. The man shook his head. Badly winded, the director came out with: "T 3? Tee, Tee three?" The man shook his head. Did he understand the language? Lorz shouted: "B 3, B 3, Bee, Bee, Bee Three."

Getting no answer, he stopped, panting. The attendant, never slowing his pace, reached the end of the corridor. Then, turning, he sing-songed, "T'ird floor basement," and vanished.

A floor, then, not a room. Lorz found it odd that there was no room-number.

He looked about for an elevator and found only a caged red bulb signaling a staircase. Gripping the sticky railing, he descended cautiously step by step in the gloom emitted by other tiny wide-spaced red bulbs. He went down three littered flights and came up against a padlocked iron door.

He retraced his steps. Finally, in a poorly lighted corridor, what seemed to be more wall revealed itself as a big unmarked elevator. He would have missed it if the doors hadn't shuddered open as he went by.

It was an old service-elevator with dirty padded walls. It was empty and unlighted. He made out a sign: "For Stretchers Only!" The control-panel was an upright rectangle of tarnished brass. In the gloom the floor-numbers were illegible. A third-floor basement seemed inconceivably deep so he pressed the bottom button. The doors groaned shut and he stood in darkness, breathing through his mouth because of the reek of ether and urine. Nothing happened. He tried to hold back panic. The motor started up wearily.

The elevator began to tremble and then shudder. What if the cables snapped? A minute went by. There was absolutely no sensation of movement in spite of the vibrations. It couldn't be moving. Even at the slowest pace the elevator would be in the bowels of the earth by this time.

When the doors started opening again the director squeezed through. He expected to find himself back in the grimy ground-floor corridor. Instead, he was in an ancient passageway with rough-hewn walls. A succession of anachronistic naked bulbs dangled from a vaulted ceiling.

The doors groaned shut in his back and the mechanism started up. Left and right offered an identical dwindling perspective of stretches of gloom alternating with pools of dirty yellow light on irregular flagstones. He turned left and explored the passageway. The only movement was his own shifting shadow as he passed beneath the bulbs. The scuffing of his soles was the only sound. Solid stone on both sides, no doors anywhere. It was obvious that he'd pressed the wrong button. His candidate couldn't be here.

He was about to return and summon back the disquieting elevator when he heard a muffled swelling roar from somewhere far ahead. He tried to picture the medical apparatus capable of making such a powerful noise. It meant activity of some sort, people, staircases, operative elevators, safe ways out of what seemed to be, after the padded elevator, another prison.

Prison: hadn't he read somewhere of Old Hospital and its dungeons used in medieval times for criminals, prostitutes and (already) lunatics thrown together in total promiscuity? Lorz started walking faster in pursuit of the sound. He tripped occasionally on the irregular flagstones. The sound slowly died away. Now there was nothing but silence. It started up again. Again it died away. This time the silence seemed permanent. The passageway curved and forked. He took the left fork. The new passageway was identical to the first, empty and doorless.

He had decided to return to the elevator when the deep vibration started up again. He began trotting toward it. The sound lured him into a maze of passageways. Again it died away, started up seconds later, no closer, and died away for long minutes. He stood still and waited for it to begin. The vaguely familiar sound was playing cat and mouse with him. Now again.

In pursuit of that erratic elusive sound he discovered the inexplicable vastness of the subterranean windings. He reassured himself that there was no possibility of getting lost, for the building wasn't gigantic like New Hospital. Yet he did get lost. Peculiarly, the tangle of corridors seemed to cover an area far greater than the visible surface part of the building itself. He couldn't orient himself. Over and over the passageway forked. Some of his choices were wrong. They degenerated into unlighted dead-ends, where the flagstones underfoot gave way to earth and pot-holes and he backtracked, wiping his sweating face free of cauls of spider-webs.

How long had he been wandering about? For some reason he couldn't recall, it was essential that he return to the office by 2:30, not a minute later, to that other subterranean space. He halted in the middle of a dim yellow pool of light and looked at his watch. It had stopped at 3:07. He resisted the urge to run, to shout for help in those underground corridors of the institution for the insane. He did try an interrogative "hello", absurdly low and well-bred, then a little louder, but in tight control. Then much louder.

Voices babbled back at him. The echoes died away.

In the silence he became aware that the medical apparatus had apparently stopped operating. How long had it been since he last heard that distant swelling then dying roar? It was as though its malevolent function had been accomplished now that it had lured him into the heart of the maze.

Lorz spread his handkerchief on the flagstones, hiked up his trouser legs and sat down in the dead center of the dim pool of yellow light. He hunched forward, clasping his knees, surrounded by darkness. Somebody would come. Somebody necessarily came to change the burned-out electric light bulbs. Why the bulbs? Why did they feebly shine on in the empty corridors?

The sound awoke him. It had started up again. This time it was a violent roar, tantalizingly familiar, very close, coming from beyond the turn in the passageway, perhaps fifty meters away. He rose to his feet, jubilant. Beyond that curve the machine promised clean well-lighted corridors, a bustle of staff, the sound of voices other than the echoes of his own, arrows everywhere pointing to the way out through the lobby, past the ancient blunted statues sunk like tombstones in the lawn, arrows pointing to the way out of the hospital complex, for good, no return ever to the senseless perilous quest.

Now a few steps removed from deliverance he allowed his mind to acknowledge the vastness of the fear he had felt, lost in that maze.

He broke into his habitual controlled stiff-legged stride. The roar died away as he rounded the bend. Immediately to his left, right-angled to the main passage, was another passage, far narrower, like a tomb-cleft. It ran no more than ten meters and ended with a low massive bolted iron door. Badly corroded, it was secured by a huge padlock, itself reduced to a mass of rust. The director stood staring at it in bewilderment.

After a while, very faintly, the sound, unmistakable now, started up behind the iron door, grew in intensity. The director instantly pictured it. He was more familiar with the map of the underground than with his own face. Was it conceivable that the two mazes touched each other, communicated? The uproar died away and the director knew the train was pulling into the station a little beyond. The line, judging by the violence of the noise, must run a scant dozen meters from the walls of the old hospital. A thick precipitation of door-rust lay on the cement floor from the reiterated vibrations of the eighty-odd years of the run, perhaps two hundred passages a day (and night). It formed a strange pattern, like cryptic graffiti. Line 12, of course. And now the noise started up again. The train was pulling out of the station. Circus Place? Trinity Square?

The roar swelled and then diminished. He stood in silence in the gloom between two overhead bulbs which generated opposed shadows of himself on the flagstones.

He began running blindly down the main passageway, fleeing the echoes his soles raised on the flagstones. Once he sprawled full length, bruising a knee and skinning his palms. The passageway swung right and its aspect changed.

There were doors in the walls.

At the far end of the corridor a line of light came from under one of those doors. He stopped running and tried to master his breath and heart. He slowly approached the door with the crack of light. He heard nothing inside at first. Then he made out a faint jingle. He turned the knob and slowly pushed the door open.

He was there, finally, in the white room, seated at a plain wood table under a powerful cone of light, totally absorbed in a Chinese puzzle. Life had returned to his hands. They were much larger than the director had remembered. His fingers ceaselessly interrogated the interlocked elements, the steel spirals, pierced triangles, loops, linked rings. The revived muscles worked in bunched knots beneath the pale skin of his forearms, astonishingly massive now, like his shoulders. Also astonishing was the vigorous growth of the dark gold hair, which almost concealed the criss-cross of stitches in his skull. A click and jingle and his candidate removed a steel spiral from the construction. He placed it accurately alongside the other detached pieces of the Chinese puzzle.

Lorz drew closer and squinted against the glare. He made out on the table things he himself had had to confront and puzzle out months before, among others, Silberman's cards with their whorls and dots and zigzags and bull's-eyes; the familiar pictures of a stylized apple-tree, a woman, a sun, waves; plastic blocks of varied shapes and colors. But there were also things he didn't recall: a chessboard with rigorously centered pieces on the wrong squares; jacks and marbles; other complex steel Chinese puzzles, dozens of them. His candidate undid a tortured twist of steel and then the interlocking spirals. The rest of the puzzle came apart like the petals of a metallic flower.

Suddenly his candidate looked up. Their gaze didn't mesh. There was a strange failure of focus somewhere: his own dazzled eyes or something wrong with the blue gaze?

Before the director could determine the source of the block, a sharp foreign voice in his back challenged: "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The director turned about and was confronted by an elderly thin-lipped doctor emerging from the gloom of the corner. Silver strands of hair were plastered back on his ruddy skull. Thick lenses magnified his oyster-colored eyes.

"Who are you?" he repeated. "Leave this room immediately." He was holding a notebook in one hand, a fountain pen in the other. A squat white-uniformed attendant seated next to the doctor's chair got up and moved forward. The director shrank back. The attendant stopped between the seated candidate and Lorz. The boy paid no attention to the scene. He was now engaged with the chessboard. He was moving the pieces about, sometimes the right way.

It was a mistake, the director stammered, he'd pressed the wrong button, he was lost, what was the way out?

The doctor told him.

When the director turned in the corridor as instructed and pushed the right door there was again sudden illumination: functional mercury-tubes that brought tears to his eyes despite his dark lenses, cleanliness, hurrying interns and nurses. A shiny modern elevator efficiently let him out on the desired ground floor, into the lobby of gay colored plastic.

The incident, by a strange coincidence, marked the end of Lorz's month-long wanderings.

He learned the following day, 30 September, at 1:30, that Teddy could be visited during the weekend. It was as though the director had been rewarded for his success in the subterranean maze. They evaded his immediate questions: "How is he?" "Who is he?" He also learned that there would be, at best, only one visit a week for him, on Sunday. And, at best, one visit a week for his assistant, on Saturday. Moreover the visit would last no more than a few minutes. However this first visit, "if successful", might be repeated and the length of the visit lengthened.

He wondered what they meant by a "successful" visit?

Above all, there was the unanswered question: Who is he?

***

2

The visit took place in a large impersonal office. The elderly harsh-breathing doctor with the magnified oyster-eyes was there along with his massive shadow, the expressionless attendant. They didn't seem to recognize him as the filthy scared interloper in the subterranean room a week before.

His candidate was again seated before a crowded wooden table. Dozens of the Chinese puzzles of the week before formed miniature scrap heaps in a corner. There was the chessboard too. Now the pieces were correctly positioned as for a game. His candidate was crouched over a sheet of paper absorbed in a sketch. It made no sense viewed upside down. Did it make sense viewed the right way?

The foreign doctor, seated in the corner, exuded authority like a force field. He dispensed with amenities. First a command: "Sit down opposite to him. No, not that close. Push your chair to the left. Further." Then a warning: "Don't touch him. Don't touch his things." Lorz asked why. Impatiently the doctor replied as though to an inquisitive child: "He doesn't like that people touch him. Nor his things." A moment of silence.

"Talk to him," the doctor ordered.

That was what Lorz longed to do. Accumulated for a whole month, the longing was painfully pent up. But there was no question of talking to the boy in the presence of the doctor and his shadow. The room was heavily silent.

"Talk to him, please," repeated the doctor. The please added asperity to the command.

The director went through the familiar powerless formula. Self-consciously he said his name was Edmond Lorz, director of Ideal Poster. His candidate didn't look up. "Louder, please," the doctor ordered, almost as if he, Lorz, were the patient. The doctor was leaning slightly forward in his chair looking at them both. His fountain pen was poised over the sheet of paper ready to note intimate revelations.

The director repeated his identity. He said that they both had been injured in the explosion. What's your real name? Don't you remember me? Lorz tried to believe it was in response to this last question that the boy looked up at him. The dark blue eyes were fixed on his face but something was wrong. The focus was unsteady. It wavered between the extremes of inward and beyond. He, Lorz, was somewhere between. Did the boy even see him? Did his questions even reach him?

In the silence that followed the useless words Lorz had an impulse to try another way, to brave the doctor's prohibition and reach out and touch his candidate. He'd felt the weight of the boy's body against his once but he'd never touched him. His one attempt had been long ago at the climax of their first meeting. It had been forestalled by the explosion. Sometimes, when pursued by the image months ago, the director's mind had given to those parallel phenomena an absurd relationship of cause and effect. It was absurd to think that the movement of his hand toward the other had triggered the explosion.

Lorz was summoning up courage to reach out when the old doctor dismissed him. "That will be all. You can go now."

Had he been there for three minutes? The old doctor, still seated in the corner, was going through his papers. He assumed the director had gone. But Lorz lingered humbly like a student at the end of an oral examination felt to be disastrous. Did I pass? Finally the doctor looked up. He frowned on seeing him still there.

"It wasn't very successful," Lorz stated rather than asked, as though hoping that the use of the declarative form to such an authoritarian person as the old doctor would elicit a contradictory affirmation.

"What was not successful?"

"The visit, I mean."

"He looked at you, he heard you. What more did you expect?"

Was that the measure of success now, after the second "recovery," like autonomous breathing, after the first?

"He seems to tolerate you quite well," the doctor added in reluctant concession.

Lorz found the word "tolerate" wounding. Didn't he tolerate everybody? he asked.

No, was the unelaborated reply.

On Monday the director and his assistant exchanged impressions. She considered that her visit had been an unqualified success. "There wasn't much communication," Lorz objected, referring to his own visit, meaning hers too, understating what he regarded as a second fiasco after so much hope. "No?" she said with her mysterious smile, as if in possession of a secret she wanted him to ask about. He didn't ask. After a few seconds, she said: "You don't always need words to communicate." He didn't answer. She must have reached out.

The director's second visit the following Sunday was a spectacular success in certain respects.

It began inauspiciously. Lorz came with costly chocolates and Chinese puzzles. The aim was interaction. He imagined his candidate's hand reaching out for the proffered chocolates and then both of them communing in the same bittersweet taste. He imagined himself expertly unlinking the puzzle before his candidate's gaze, then assembling it, handing it to the boy who would repeat his gestures.

These gifts, as it turned out, were useless. They cost him, moreover, frustration, humiliation and a great deal of money. The imported chocolates, of course, but why were the Chinese puzzles – mere twists of metal – so outrageously dear too? He'd spent all of Saturday morning selecting them in toyshops. They were fiendishly difficult. There were no instructions, not even in Chinese. For hours the director sat on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, scowling down at the defiant lunatic imbrications in his lap. He wasn't gifted. A consolation was a feeling of closeness to his candidate who, at that precise moment, perhaps, was engaged, far more efficiently, in the same activity.

The director worked the puzzles even in the underground, at first openly. Then, irritated by the stares of other passengers, behind the barricade of his briefcase. Once he looked up and surprised an elderly female, lips compressed with scandal, wattled neck craned, trying to view the activity of his hands busy in his lap.

In the office, when his assistant left on errands, he took them out of his briefcase. On her return, hearing her hand turning the knob, he would sweep them back jingling into his briefcase. Finally he learned to disassemble one of the Chinese puzzles in less than two minutes. He timed himself.

When he entered the hospital office for the second time the director immediately opened the gift-wrapped package and took out the puzzle he'd finally mastered. "Too late," said the doctor. There were no more puzzles on the table. "Look!" said Lorz anyhow, jingling the construction to capture his candidate's attention. He started working on it. In his eagerness he got it wrong. "Wait," he said. He said "wait" a dozen more times before a triumphant "There!"

His candidate wasn't looking. His candidate couldn't care less. And the chocolates were ignored. "He doesn't accept sweets," said the old doctor. "And the puzzle phase is over. It is the chess phase now. He operates by phases."

The director took in the setup of the chessboard, the confusion of pieces. Wasn't it regression? Two weeks before, in the subterranean maze, his candidate had been in the stage of rehearsing the moves, some correct, even if most were mistaken. He recalled the rook forced into diagonal movement, the knight advancing hobbled square by square, like a pawn. A week ago the boy had learned to place the pieces, progress. Now this chaos.

Suddenly the director realized the logic of the seemingly haphazard pattern of the pieces. It was a game, an end game, the white king done to death by a black knight and bishop. Was it conceivable that his candidate, a week before ignorant of the basic moves, could have played a game? Or if he played, was unable to respond to the director's greetings and gifts?

"He didn't play, he can't have played," the director exclaimed incredulously, turning toward the old doctor.

"Yes, he played," said the doctor. The attendant was watching the director and the boy seated on either side of the wooden table with the chessboard between them.

"Who won?"

"He. He also lost."

The director instantly understood the true sense of the ambiguous statement. "How is that possible? How can you play against yourself?"

"He refuses any other opponent."

The director turned back to the table and encountered the boy's eyes staring beyond and before him and in despair, isolated somewhere in between, knowing that words were useless, reached out toward him.

At the last moment his hand took fright and deviated to the left and downward and took a chess piece.

"Touch nothing on the table, nothing that belongs to him!" the old doctor snapped, as though an invisible thread attached the piece, a white bishop, to high explosives.

The director's hand froze. Long seconds passed. The boy hadn't moved. He was staring down at the chessboard.

Lorz took another piece. The doctor said nothing. Lorz took a third piece.

The boy took a black rook and placed it on its square.

"Do you play chess?" the doctor inquired in a low voice.

"Years ago."

"Play," the doctor ordered. "Ask him first."

The director stared at his candidate's expressionless face. "Let me play a game with you," Lorz said as gently as he could. The doctor leaned over and whispered something in the ear of the attendant who got up and sat down next to the director. The doctor drew his chair closer to get a better view of the board.

Lorz took the other white pieces and started placing them on their squares. In adolescence he had played a good game.

The first surprise came from the rapidity with which the hands opposite his placed the black pieces. Then greater surprise at the rapidity of the black counter-moves after the laborious cogitation that preceded his own white moves. The boy's face was empty but it was as though his hands had independent intelligence, as though each contained a miniature intact brain.

The surprise grew steadily during the game, culminating with the twenty-seventh move twenty minutes later when his candidate's knight side-winded and uncovered at 5C the black bishop's diagonal penetration of the white king at 1E.

The director stared down at the checkmate. He laughed in incredulous joy and leaned back in his chair. His candidate also leaned back and immobilized, still staring down at the pieces, like a chess-playing automaton. Lorz turned to the doctor.

"He beat me. Incredible!" He laughed again.

"You did bad mistakes, elementary mistakes," said the doctor.

The director tried to conceal his irritation at the doctor's words. They minimized both his patient's exploit and his own skill at the game, which had been considerable twenty-five years before.

"And he is of only average competence," said the doctor. "For the moment."

He paused and then added as if in consolation:

"Perhaps it was better you have lost."

Before the director could ask what he meant, the doctor went on.

"You are the first person he has accepted to play with."

"How do you explain that?" inquired the director with a show of perplexity, not really needing an explanation.

He got it anyhow: an upward phase, plus the right medicine with a correct dosage.

The director told his assistant about the chess game. She nodded but said nothing. Didn't she realize what a fantastic breakthrough this represented? He asked her if she had tried to play chess with him on Saturday. She replied that she didn't play chess, hadn't the brains, that anyhow she didn't need chess to get through to him. There were other ways.

The director had only chess. That evening he rummaged about and came up with his old chess set and the two worn volumes of Schlechter and Moch's Handbuch des Schachspiels (8th edition, Berlin, 1914-1929). He replayed certain classic tournament and problem games, black and white, puzzling out the comments move by move. It afforded blessed abstraction. The world vanished. Why had he given up chess? In imitation of his candidate he even tried to play against himself but couldn't achieve the necessary mind-split.

The following day he bought a miniature pocket chess-board with pegged pieces and sat in the train on the way to Ideal, the chessboard on one knee, volume two of Schlechter and Moch on the other. He almost missed his stop. He would have been oblivious to massacres in the carriage.

His sudden craze – the other's, actually – even invaded the office. It was hard to concentrate on business with that elegant mobile geometry in his mind. He found himself glancing uneasily at his assistant out of the corner of his eye and concealing the massive book beneath papers like something clandestine. Once she saw what he was doing but said nothing. The toilet was a refuge, as for some secret guilty activity.

"Is there something the matter?" he once heard her voice, infinitely distant, on the other side of the locked door, intruding into Anderson vs. Kiesseritzky, London, 1851. He'd been there half an hour.

It all came back, the forgotten language. Even his window-shopping was monopolized by the game. He returned again and again to a nearby specialized shop. He gazed briefly at the ultra-modern sets, the stylized spun-aluminum pieces, and then for a long time at an exquisite old set, the board inlaid rosewood, the pieces intricate ivory and ebony. The price was outrageous.

Following the success of the second visit the director was allowed two hours now, but still only once a week, still on Sunday. He asked why the visits were so limited but received no explanation. At least he was practically alone with his candidate now. The irascible old doctor left after the first five minutes or so and returned a few minutes before the end of the visit. The attendant sat outside in the corridor reading a comic book. The door was left ajar.

When the director entered the office that third time he saw that six chessboards occupied nearly the entire surface of the table. His candidate was staring down at one of the boards. He didn't look up or respond to Lorz's greeting. The director turned toward the old doctor and received the latter's permission in the form of a slow magnified blink.

He started placing his white pieces on the board opposite his chair. The sound activated the automaton who turned to the board and started placing the black pieces. They played again. Both had made tremendous progress since last week's game, the director perhaps a little less than the boy who again defeated him. But Lorz had narrowed the gap.

The old doctor came back toward the end of the second game at the precise moment the boy fell into a trap by accepting the black rook/white queen exchange. The doctor looked down at the board.

"Do not defeat him," he said in a scarcely audible voice.

There was no question of Lorz's doing that. He wouldn't have been able to. So he passed over the bishop sacrifice with mate four moves removed and shortly after, deprived of the queen, was checkmated.

"You have improved," said the doctor, as though the vast improvement of his candidate was something minor.

"Not as much as he has," said the director. "He must play a great deal."

"He does little else," the doctor replied.

"With other players?"

"With himself. Except when you come."

It went on that way for another month.

Later Lorz would look back at the period, for all its frustrations, as one of the happiest of his life. At last his activities outside the office had purpose. The Cycle was distant. Evaluating strategies of approach to the boy or analyzing chess moves on his knee in the train, he hardly gave a thought to the worsening situation in the underground (an average of two murders a week) or to the alarming things happening to the posters even before the vandals got to them.

There was also an improved atmosphere in the office that contributed to the changed quality of his life. The help-wanted section of her paper had vanished from his assistant's desk. She made no more phone calls in answer to ads or calls of a personal nature. She received none. He was no longer concerned about a possible resignation, not since what he regarded as the final unpleasantness between them.

During the second week of October she'd started commenting on how much better he was looking, how much better the business was doing. Her remarks surprised him. He began glancing in mirrors. He scrutinized the accounts. He saw no radical improvement in himself or Ideal. He wondered at her diagnoses until one morning when she told him that the coming week would be her last at Ideal.

She was at the filing cabinet, her back turned to him, when she said it. She added that she'd finally found something else.

He didn't react. That morning at Central Station, months ago, she said, she'd told him that her return to Ideal would be just for a week or so. They'd agreed then that she wouldn't have to give notice but she was giving a week's notice anyhow. There was still that efficient person she'd already told him about to replace her.

She went on filing the invoices in the continuing silence. Finally she shoved the drawer shut and turned around. He was reading a letter and making notes. She returned to her desk saying that she'd drop in now and then to see how things were going. He nodded, absorbed in his work. After a while she added that she'd drop in once a week. They could have lunch together if he liked. He said, "Why not?" and asked her if she'd filed the Prospects letter they'd received the day before.

Three o'clock came round, then five past. At 3:22 she reminded him of the pills. He paid no attention to her remark. He was plunged in paper work. She reminded him at five-minute intervals. He didn't answer until 4:05 when he cut her short.

"It'll be a relief anyhow not to be nagged anymore. I'm not a child. I'll take the pills if I want to. If I don't want to I won't. And I don't want to, now or ever. This is what I do with your bloody pills."

He yanked the vial out of his pocket, snapped the plastic stopper free with his thumbnail and with the gesture of a sower, created a brief blue spray. The pills pattered to the floor, rolling about.

"And keep your competent lady. I can do everything you do and just as well. I already did once, the first time you left."

They weren't her bloody pills, she said, picking two of them from her lap and placing them on her desk. She picked up three more under her desk and placed them alongside the two on her desk and looked around for the others.

He didn't show up at the office the next day, which was a Friday. She rang him at 10:00am and asked if he wasn't well. "Not well at all," he replied with no elaboration. She asked if he wanted her to pick something up for him after work: food or medicine. He replied that it wouldn't be necessary. She advised him to rest over the weekend.

The following week neither referred to her forthcoming departure Friday evening. Friday morning she asked him if he had advertised the job. He said he hadn't. She commented on the weather and then said goodbye.

"Monday," she added as usual.

On Monday evening they left the office. Normally they walked together toward his underground and her bus stop. But when they got out of the building she halted, staring across the street, and abruptly said goodbye to him there. Lorz went his way alone for a few seconds, then turned around.

His assistant was dangerously weaving through traffic toward an antiquated battered black car double-parked opposite the Ideal building. She went up to the car and tried to open the front passenger-door. It was locked. The director could see within a thin arm with bracelets reaching over. The forearm muscles worked and the window jerked down. His assistant tried to open the door again. It remained locked. She remained there in a crouch, talking, her hands eloquent. After a few minutes the thin arm reached over and the window jerked up. The car started down the street slowly. His assistant broke into a trot alongside it, her hands even more active. Again the car stopped. Cars behind honked angrily. Again the car started up but fast, gear after gear, no possibility of pursuit. His assistant stopped running. The car picked up speed and went through a traffic light turning red, turned a corner and disappeared.

The next day it was her turn to ring up and say she was ill. She missed two days. When she came back, pale and drawn, she was doggedly mute. Five past three went by without a word on her part. By 4:00 she still had said nothing.

He took the pills finally. He'd almost forgotten them, perhaps he'd got used to her reminding him, he said. He'd forgotten to take them yesterday, he added.

He didn't expect her to ring him up to remind him did he? she said. She'd been sick herself.

"What's this for?" his assistant asked the next day, as though what her employer was holding out to her was a dead cat instead of flowers. She'd just hung up hurriedly as he entered. Without that ungracious remark and expression he might have said, "For you, of course." Instead, he said, "To brighten the place up," and the gesture of offering the flowers became a demand for her to find a vase, fill it with water, place the flowers in the vase and the vase on a suitable surface, which she did in silence. A few minutes later (as though disposing of flowers were a non-contractual imposition) she said that she wasn't getting enough money for the work she did and demanded a ten percent raise. He should have thought of it before she did.

Then one day the atmosphere in the office changed. Her stance of confrontation was gone. It coincided with her first claims of non-verbal communication with Teddy and with the director's first chess games with the boy. He no longer encountered her painted gaze in the spy-mirror. One day she removed the tarnished mirror for good along with the old calendars. She called it "autumn-cleaning."

Now she paid as little attention to him as he did to her. It was as though their investment were outside the windowless subterranean office, their mutually disengaged gaze convergent on what was going on in the hospital. They started relaxing into an indifferent familiarity that had never existed between them in the five and a half years of their relationship, marked by an unequal balance of power, first one way then the other. Her appearance no longer shocked him. Her modish political opinions wouldn't have bothered him anymore even if she'd gone on expressing them, which she didn't.

Communication was no longer a problem. He'd swivel about in his chair toward her desk and say whatever he had to say without fearful preliminary censorship, she answering politely enough. And then he would swivel back to his affairs. She was no more than his assistant, almost a new, not a rehired, one. Her connection with the "Miss Ruda" of the past was fading in his mind as was "Miss Ruda" herself, reduced to a black-and-white photograph forgotten in his wallet.

At first, before the near-accident on the hospital path, the director had to take her word for it that the boy's progress wasn't limited to the sixty-four squares of the chessboard. His assistant spoke of resurrection. She found subtle expression in his face. There was also the way his drawings were becoming "more human." From her confused explanations, the director understood that the painstaking geometrical figures tended now to the figurative: vaguely human faces composed of tiny circles, triangles, rectangles. And of course the vast improvement in muscular coordination. And the fact that he could walk. She felt sure that he was on the brink of speech.

There must have been even more progress than what she said. She'd bought an expensive-looking diary with twining pink flowers on blue linen covers. It had a tiny heart-shaped brass lock with a microscopic brass key. "To keep track of his progress," she explained once, intercepting his curious gaze. She had it out all the time on Mondays following her visit when lulls in office activity permitted, but often enough the other days too. She would stare sightless at the wall, biting her pen, leaving lipstick smears on it and then, remembering, she would lower her head, exposing her diligent neck-vertebras and scribble away. Finally, she would place the diary carefully in her lower desk-drawer, which she locked.

One day they disagreed about the date of a minor progress. She took out her diary and proved she was right. The director was troubled. Since the blast nine months before, his memory had become unreliable. So he bought a school notebook to record the boy's progress. His fat old fashioned fountain-pen remained suspended a moment over the white rectangle on the cover marked "Subject." What was he to call the subject? "Teddy"? "The Boy"? "Number Nine"? "My Candidate"? He was tempted to inscribe what all these had in common, the question mark. Finally he settled for "The Log". He too noted his candidate's progress on Monday but more quickly than his assistant, in the terms in which the director encountered it: 1. P-K4, P-K4; 2. P-KB4, P x P; 3. B-B4, P-QKt4.

Chess monopolized everything. There was no other form of communication. Anyhow one didn't talk over the board. When he entered the old doctor's office the boy's only response to Lorz's greeting was to set up the black pieces. He didn't accept candied orange-peels or sugared almonds or salted nuts or pastry any more than he had chocolates. He only accepted the game. His candidate's eyes never left the board. Glancing at him hurt, like coming up against a wall. His expression was one of intense abstraction. Lorz tried to recall the jargon term of the old doctor's concerning his patient's problem, something like "dissociation of the cognitive and affective."

His assistant had claimed he could walk. Lorz saw nothing of that. His candidate was always seated at the table throughout the visit. So Lorz continued visiting the hospital during his lunch hour in the hope of seeing the boy in his rehabilitation activities. This happened only twice.

The first time was a week following the initial visit. Through the closed glass doors of the hydrotherapy pool Lorz briefly witnessed the boy's somnambulist steps in the abolished gravity of the water. It was the first time he'd ever seen him erect, a dazzle of near-nudity in a beam of sunshine from the bay window. Nearly nullifying that emotion was a shock. His candidate seemed impossibly gigantic. The white-capped head of the woman physiotherapist barely reached his massive chest. She held her arms high in a parodical gesture of surrender in order to grasp his outstretched sleepwalker hands. She retreated as though with his towering bulk and empty brutal face he were forcing her back. Lorz tried to remind himself that actually she was in command, leading him forward toward the reduced buoyancy of shallower water.

The boy's alarming stature was rectified as scale was provided. The white-capped therapist backed past a colleague working over a patient's knee-flexions and proved to be small. The boy was very big but probably not monstrously so.

Two weeks later Lorz rounded a path in the park and the boy, jogging in the dwarfed company of a physiotherapist, was almost upon him, gigantically. The director stood stock still and stared at his candidate's looming abstracted face. After this other miracle of recuperation, wouldn't there be another one, recognition? Contact at last? "Theodore!" he cried, spontaneously finding at that instant a compromise name not devoid of dignity like the shirt-tag one. "Get out of the way!" the therapist cried. At the last moment Lorz shrank aside into the thorny barberries. There'd been no sign of recognition. Even more alarming, no sign of halting or swerving to avoid him. There'd almost been contact, but the wrong kind. With the other's hurtling bulk he would have gone down smashed, as though hit by a locomotive. Was it that the boy didn't recognize him disassociated from the chessboard? Had he even seen him?

The following Sunday, the fifth and last of the visits in the old doctor's office started like the others. By this time Lorz no longer prefaced the games with the useless appeal for recognition. He avoided questions altogether. The silence that followed was too painful. What he said now was neutral. The sky was a beautiful blue, he would say, imitating his assistant's formulas, the remaining leaves on the trees red and yellow. Often he tried joking things like: "Well, you beat me last time, but wait and see, it'll be my turn now," although he knew he'd never have the heart to defeat Theodore.

This time, sitting down at the table, he couldn't help saying too, "I saw you jogging down the path, last Tuesday. Do you remember? I was there." Of course he got no answer. The hands opposite went on placing the black pieces for the game. Fear again overcame his impulse to reach out and touch. They started playing.

From the start his opponent betrayed a baffling loss of skill. His hand hovered hesitantly over the pieces as Lorz's had weeks ago during their first game. He made the same purposeless moves. The game was only ten minutes old when his candidate moved his rook, threatening the white queen but opening himself to obvious checkmate in two moves.

Lorz passed up the opportunity. Deliberately he exposed his king to checkmate. Anyone could see it, even a rank beginner. The boy didn't see it. Lorz passed up advantage after advantage. He exposed himself to elementary checkmates that never came. It was as though they'd invented a new negative chess-game where to win was to lose, something like the boy's own solitary games.

The opportunity to defeat his candidate came again a minute later, a glaring blunder. Checkmate was now a single move away: the knight to 6B. How was this radical fall from proficiency possible? His hand poised over the white knight, the director couldn't help looking up at his candidate even though he knew he'd come up painfully against the usual blank wall.

No wall now. For the first time since the visits started his candidate's gaze met his. The intelligence of those dark-blue eyes, unwavering and perfectly focused, was at such total variance with the loss of chessboard intelligence that the director reinterpreted everything in a jubilant instant. The seemingly blind moves weren't a symptom of weakness, after all. Weakness? God alone knew the fantastic progress that his candidate's brain had realized in the week since the last visit, like the powerful jogging strides days after the hesitant water-buoyed steps in the pool. What else if not a parody of his own incompetence weeks ago? His joking remark at the start of the game, "It'll be my turn now," had been understood. His candidate was forcing victory upon him. It was a gift, far subtler than his own conventional chocolates and almonds.

Already in the earlier games, it was now clear, the boy had deliberately offered him opportunities for victory. He'd rejected them out of misplaced pity, rejecting at the same time the offer of communication, contact, in the geometric terms of the game. Now he was convinced that with the acceptance of the gift of victory there would be a smile of complicity, a transformation toward tenderness of those brutal features, perhaps words of recognition.

So he accepted the gift of victory and contact.

He moved his white knight to 6B and announced checkmate.

His candidate stared down on the board, absolutely immobile, in profound contemplation as though seeking a countermove to checkmate. His lips moved silently.

A minute went by. The breathing became more and more raucous. The director, conquering his fright, reached out and touched the boy's shoulder to calm him. The deltoids were petrified as though tensed to snapping with some inconceivable inward labor. His eyes rolled upwards into whiteness like a statue's.

The first sounds came from his open mouth. Slowly, endlessly, he towered to his feet, upsetting the victory into a confusion of chessmen on the floor.

The director cried out and fled the room.

Before he reached the end of the corridor he could hear the threatening voice of the attendant, a scuffle, an upset chair, the inhuman sound, much louder. Wasn't he trying to pronounce his name? Wasn't it a strangled "Edmond"? If so it was his first utterance. It pursued Edmond Lorz well beyond earshot.

***

3

He took the next day off. When he returned to the office his assistant implicitly disallowed his pretext of fever by repeating what Dr Silberman had told her. It was unfortunate that it had happened at that moment, ("it," she said, she didn't remember his name for it). It was sudden and unpredictable and, if you weren't accustomed to it, alarming. But it was over, he was better now, he hadn't hurt himself. Still, there would be no more visits for them for two weeks.

Visits? The decision unconsciously reached the day before focused sharply in Lorz's mind. He felt a kind of liberation. She assumed he was concerned by the news from the hospital. In fact, he wasn't involved. He was determined never again to see "his candidate" (why "his"? how was he "his" candidate?), Number Nine, Teddy.

Whatever his name, he was inseparable from disaster and obsession. He saw himself, that first time, walking toward the boy and the wall with the bomb ticking away behind it. He saw himself wandering in the subterranean maze of the place of the insane, saw himself shrinking aside from the path into the thorny barberries before the hurtling blind bulk of the other. He remembered the climax of the last visit, the scuffle, the squat power of the attendant, his grunts punctuating those other inhuman sounds.

The director had already freed himself of responsibility for that last incident. Of course the move to 6B had nothing to do with what had followed. He'd read mad things into the sudden weakness of "his candidate's" game. He'd read intimate message, ironic intention into what was simply a symptom of the crisis which was following its course, building up to frightening outbreak, no connection at all with the checkmate and the touch.

Lorz dismissed the matter from his mind. He asked his assistant if she'd seen his watch in the office. When he woke up that morning it was missing from his bruised left wrist. He'd searched everywhere for the precious watch. It had belonged to his father. She hadn't seen it.

The void of the following two weeks underscored the degree to which he'd allowed the short Sunday visits to monopolize his life. They'd supplanted or contaminated all his normal activities. He imagined the tombs of his parents, neglected for two months now, plastered with wet dead leaves, his last gift of potted flowers now black skeletons. Instead of applying himself to intellectual improvement he'd spent his Saturdays window shopping, searching for the impossible gift that would finally be accepted. He'd spent the week-days preparing the visit, thinking up impossible strategies of communication, perfecting himself in the other man's monstrous skills, first with the interlinked metal puzzles then with the chess problems. In his office he'd gone through the empty motions of his professional activities, his mind occupied by the last visit and the visit to come. His assistant had done the real work.

That Sunday he tried to return to the pattern of his former weekends. Once a month, before the intrusion of the weekly visits to Teddy, he would make sandwiches and drive out to the cemetery. There he would sweep and flower his parents' graves, a painstaking operation. For many years the custom had been, afterwards, to drive out even further to semi-wooded country. Once he had seen a deer. But that was long ago. The woods and fields had been swallowed up by building lots, new motorways, aerodromes. Day after day the city wrote indelible graffiti on the countryside.

As soon as he passed through the gates Lorz realized that the cemetery had been desecrated.

Why was he stunned? One read about it every day in the newspapers. There were no more sanctuaries, not even this one. It had happened the night before, a visitor to a neighboring lot informed him. He was in his early fifties. Somehow the set of his shoulders, the cut of his mustache, the quality of his blue gaze indicated that they shared the same archaic values.

Holding two of the smaller fragments of his wife's stone, unconsciously trying to fit them together, he said that worse had happened to another grave, the coffin smashed, the body... Lorz tried not to listen. Eyes brimming, the man said: "Nobody is safe from them anywhere, not even the dead. They deserve the death penalty, sir, and slow fire would be too kind."

Glancing at the big fragment lying on the gravel Lorz saw that the man's wife had died three months before at the age of thirty-nine. They must have used sledgehammers on the man's lot. Three of the other stones had been smashed and the railing bashed in three spots.

Lorz was luckier. The stones in his lot were unbroken but desecrated with meaningless tarred graffiti. Even the plastic-coated photographs fastened to the granite, the same as the ones on his desk in the apartment, were covered with the insane graffiti. Or maybe not graffiti, maybe just tar splashes. It reminded the director of the inkblot tests Silberman had administered to him, full of objects one couldn't confess to seeing. He scratched at the tar over his mother's face till his fingertips were sore and bleeding. He should have come with his professional equipment on his back to pay his respects to his mother and father.

The old doctor phoned the director the following Friday. He informed him that Teddy was better. The visits could resume that coming weekend. The nagging foreign authoritarian voice didn't inquire whether he, the director, was coming, whether he was able to, whether he wanted to. For some reason, Lorz didn't flatly announce his intention never again to see the doctor's patient. He gave an evasive answer in a distinctly unenthusiastic voice. He assumed the doctor, a mind-man after all, had decoded.

The following Sunday afternoon Lorz drove out to the cemetery again with two large expensive potted briars for them in the car-trunk along with the knapsack. Naturally there was no need for the ladder at that height. But when he got there he saw that the cemetery management had done the job, on the whole satisfactorily. He felt deprived of the cleansing gestures, penitential for his long neglect of his parents. He placed the plants at the foot of the two tombs. He shifted them about for long minutes to get the best effect. He nervously consulted his bare left wrist and wondered what had happened to his watch.

The next day, the old doctor rang him up at the office. He hadn't decoded after all. He was furious. Why hadn't the director come? Teddy had been waiting for him, staring at the door, waiting for it to open, said the doctor. He had left his room with no resistance at all this time, with a chess set under his arm and had positioned the pieces, white as well as black. He had waited. And waited. It was the best of signs, the first time he had shown interest in people instead of things. It had been a brief window of opportunity, the first and perhaps the last one, quickly shut. He, the director, had spoiled everything. Hadn't come. Had not come! Teddy had shown symptoms of upset.

At this information the director, vividly remembering his candidate's last, spectacular, symptom of upset, told the doctor that he'd decided not to come anymore. Teddy was no relative, he explained, no friend, not even an acquaintance. There was too much mystery. Why was his presence indispensable? He didn't feel like risking his life again in the interest of science.

Risking his life? The old doctor barked, perhaps a laugh. No, noo, nooo. His harsh voice tried to be soothing as at a child's boogieman terrors. There was no danger. They were hiding nothing. Teddy needed human presence, people he could accept. They, the director and Miss Ruda, were the last people he had seen, a link to normality, so to speak. He tolerated them. And who else wanted to visit him?

And so forth and so forth, said the old doctor, in sudden irritation. He had things to do. So next Sunday, without fail.

All week long Lorz felt like ringing the old doctor back and informing him of his irrevocable decision. But the following Sunday he stood on the other side of that closed door, the gift clamped firmly beneath his right arm. He hesitated for long seconds. Then he knocked and opened the door.

His candidate didn't look up from what he was doing. He hadn't changed. The objects on the table had changed. With a pair of tweezers he was systematically displacing the contents of a disemboweled watch from one green velvet square to another. There must have been a dozen other watches on the table, in various stages of disembowelment. The tweezers deposited a ratchet wheel alongside other wheels. There were pinions, the setting-lever screw, dial-screws, return arms, barrel and barrel arbor, etc. The director was surprised that he was able to recognize and name so many of the parts.

He watched his absorbed candidate for a minute and then said: "Theodore." No reaction. He said it four or five times, louder each time. After a while, he called him, six or seven times, by his usual name: "Teddy." He still got no reaction.

Lorz undid the gift-wrapping with a flourish that filled the silence with a joyous Christmas crackling, like a log-fire, and placed the rosewood inlaid board on the table between them. He caressed it with his fingertips. "Look, Teddy," he said. "It's for you." He began removing the ivory and ebony chessmen from the box. "Theodore, look, it's yours."

"Too late," said the old doctor behind him. "Chess is over. It is something else again. Another phase. Watches, as you can see."

Lorz ignored the sarcastic foreign voice. He went on positioning the white pieces, the exquisite fine-carved ivory, on his side of the board. Then he looked up at his candidate.

The boy was totally absorbed in his task. The tweezers set down the mainspring. It looked like a spiral galaxy. He could have been light-years distant.

Lorz started positioning his candidate's ebony pieces. He set them down vigorously, for the sound they made. He wondered now for the first time why his candidate had always played black. The tweezers worked on. All of the pieces were positioned. The director waited.

He waited. He saw the price-label still on the box and displaced his anger onto the old doctor.

"Why did you tell me he was waiting for me with a chess set last Sunday?"

"That is the way it was last Sunday. It is not that way this Sunday. It may be yet another way next Sunday. Perhaps something easier in which to participate than watch repairing. We can hope, yes?"

"I doubt very much that you'll see me here again next Sunday. Or any other Sunday, for that matter. Why do you insist on my presence?"

"Why do you ask the same question always? He accepts you. When he notices you. Don't sulk. Perhaps next Sunday he will notice you."

Lorz flushed and was on the point of asking the foreign doctor if he fully appreciated the meaning and implications of the verb "sulk" when suddenly he saw it among the other watches, the empty gold shell at least, with the old leather strap, burst, and the dial with the old fashioned roman-numerals.

He'd lost it at that moment of flight from this same room two weeks before, he understood. It could only be that, the strap caught by the corner of the table, it must have been, which explained the bruise on his wrist. But how had it come into the possession of the other? There was something monstrously insulting about it: all those costly spurned gifts and then this virtual theft.

Why had he taken it apart? The works with the boasted 18 jewels were heaped on another green velvet rectangle. The image of the probing tweezers in the opened watchcase reminded him, first, of a brain operation. Then of his assistant prying in his flat. Then of his mother's desecrated tombstone.

He turned to the old doctor and stammered: "That's my watch! He's ruined my watch! He's taken it apart!"

Beneath the sense of outrage, he felt faint shame: a schoolboy denouncing a classmate to the teacher. It aggravated his angry reaction. So did the doctor's alien pedantic sound of denial, tongue clacking three times quick against the roof of his mouth and his reply: "All of the watches are loans from the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. Somewhat involuntary loans, this is true." He smiled thinly.

Lorz ignored the old doctor now, turned his back to him. He leaned forward toward the other, pointing toward the hollow shell, the heap of parts, and pronounced the words loudly and brutally as so often happened when he felt frustrated.

"That's my watch you've taken apart. I want it back." He broke off in confusion. "No I don't, not in a hundred pieces like that I don't."

The other didn't notice the contradictory commands. He didn't notice anything except the cogs and wheels.

Lorz turned to the old doctor, stammering again out of frustration:

"It's your responsibility. Take it away from him and give it to the Vocational Rehabilitation people and tell them to repair it. I want it back as it was, put together and keeping correct time. Tell them to phone me when it's ready. Wednesday at the latest."

He marched out of the office without looking back at either of them.

The following Wednesday his assistant told him that the old doctor had rung up. Something of the greatest importance had happened. They would be expecting him next Sunday. His presence was indispensable.

Lorz entered the office and immediately saw on the table before his waiting chair twelve tiny packages, obviously watches, all gift-wrapped meticulously. They lay three abreast in four rows, distanced identically to the millimeter. They looked like miniature flag-wrapped coffins after a massacre. "This is important," breathed the old doctor.

"Which one is mine?" Lorz asked, not realizing the greatness of the thing, unable to check the momentum of his latest preoccupation. "I just want mine."

Lorz started opening one of the packages. It wasn't his watch. He was about to put it in the center of the table when the old doctor snapped: "Take them all. He means them for you, gifts. You must reject nothing. You are spoiling things. And you haven't thanked him. Thank him profusely."

Lorz obeyed. But his candidate had returned to his latest disemboweled watch.

"Where is your present today?" the old doctor went on nagging. "You have no presents this time? You come empty-handed? No cho-co-lates, no salted nuts, nothing? No reciprocity. You specialize in lost opportunities."

Lorz stayed with his candidate for another half-hour. He thanked him again, six or seven times, profusely. He commented on the weather. He congratulated him on his skill at watch repairing.

His candidate never looked up a single time.

Before Lorz left, his hands encumbered with the undesired gifts, the old doctor told him that the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit would probably bill him for the eleven watches.

Lorz nearly dropped them. He protested vehemently. What could he do with twelve watches? He didn't want those watches, except for his own of course. He would return them to the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit.

The doctor overruled him. No, it was necessary that he keep the watches. Teddy was always in the Unit. He would be sure to recognize them. He had a sixth sense for such things. They would be refused gifts for him. Affectively disastrous. It would be advisable during Lorz's forthcoming visits always to bring the watches in. Teddy might want them back, who knew? His reactions were not invariably predictable.

That happened on Sunday. By Monday morning Lorz had begun to realize the tremendous significance of Theodore's multiple gifts. He brought the watches, still in their rigorous wrappings, into the office. Normally he avoided discussing his visits to his candidate with his assistant. He'd been discouraged by her undisguised lack of interest in the breakthrough he'd achieved with the chess game. Somewhat offended as well, actually. As for her own visits, usually she made a mystery of went on in the office between her and Teddy on Saturday afternoons, alluding in the vaguest way to "genuine communication." Lorz suspected that this was an invention.

Lorz couldn't resist showing her the watches. She glanced at the packages with visible indifference, produced her mysterious tolerant smile and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk where she kept her pink-flowered diary.

She showed him one of Teddy's geometric drawings. "That was two weeks ago," she said. "A present from Teddy. I have lots of others at home." She claimed to make out a face in the drawing. Lorz saw no face and wondered if she hadn't filched the drawing.

Whether or not she acknowledged it, the twelve packages represented a second, even more significant, breakthrough. Still, the idea of having to pay for the watches (as though he'd had to purchase Theodore's gesture) bothered him so much that he decided to go to the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit and discuss the matter. First, he opened the packages and recovered his own watch, whole again and keeping reasonable time.

The Vocational Rehabilitation Unit consisted of four big rooms on either side of a basement corridor. Through the glassed door of the woodworking sub-unit Lorz saw patients producing blond curls from whirring accident proof lathes. A paralytic was daubing glue on joints. In a corner stood unconvincing bare chairs, awaiting varnish. In the game-room two patients with partly paralyzed hands were trying to cope with the counters of a checker-game. Others were elaborating obscure constructions with tiny red-and-white plastic bricks. Lorz saw no chess games going on. All of the sets must have been in the possession of his candidate. In the third room women in wheelchairs with impeccable hair-dos pecked away at typewriters. Behind them was a blackboard with what looked like graffiti but which the director supposed were shorthand symbols.

The fourth room was the watch-repairing sub-unit. There was a long workbench with miniature lathes, vices, green velvet rectangles, watch-parts, lots of Lilliputian calibrated tools. Wheel chaired paraplegics with wasted braced legs and heroic overcompensated torsos bent over the watch-works, faces screwed about the jeweler's glass in their right eye.

The director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit, seated behind his desk, was a bearish man with an old fashioned square beard. His bushy eyebrows, over eyes like burning coals, accentuated his baldness. His mouth was thin, down-curled, clamped shut, promising ill-natured taciturnity. He looked like an early silent-movie villain or a Gallic serial wife-killer.

Lorz produced the eleven watches and explained his business. As Lorz went on, the man's face grew dark, a thundercloud, and then without warning he burst into curiously high-pitched laughter. He laughed and laughed and suddenly stopped.

"Why am I laughing?" he said in an almost falsetto voice. "He's killing me, your Teddy. Driving me insane. Nothing's safe from him. What will it be next?"

The bearded director turned out to be very loquacious. The presence of what he took to be a fellow-sufferer acted upon him as a stimulant. That was how Lorz learned the facts in the case of the patient they called Teddy. Not, of course, the ultimate facts (would he ever learn those?), but the surface facts concerning the genesis of his obsessions, the clinical symptoms that accompanied them, the reasons for his periodic eclipses. The bearded director seemed surprised at Lorz's ignorance. Apparently everybody knew about it in the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. They were, it was true, in a privileged position to know.

The first public revelation of the unknown boy's powers occurred in the Unit with the Chinese puzzles, said the bearded director. He was wrong. He couldn't know that those powers had already been displayed to Lorz and his assistant seconds before the explosion in the Ideal office.

The bearded director went on. From the start Teddy displayed incredible proficiency. He hardly looked down at puzzles. They flew apart. Gradually a semi-circle of therapists and patients gathered about him. His very virtuosity was disruptive. But the real problems started when it was time for him to leave at noon. He refused to go. He refused to give up the puzzles. Finally nurses and doctors were called in and they found a compromise. He let himself be led away but in possession of all of the Chinese puzzles. The doctors had assured the bearded director that the puzzles would be returned to the Unit that afternoon. Months had gone by and they were still in the boy's possession.

Later, it was the same for the chess sets. And then the watches. What could the hospital staff do? Remove the "borrowed" objects during his sleep? This was tried, it appeared. When he awoke and found them gone he had "negative reactions." Among other things, apparently, he refused food. It was true that he also refused food at the height of involvement with his craze. He hardly slept either. So the director of the Unit had heard.

The problem was to break him from the obsessional activity. First the Chinese puzzles. Then chess. Now the watches. What next? It was a pattern. He'd refuse his rehabilitation sessions as well as food and sleep. It was "counter-productive" (the term they used) to interrupt the activity. To save him they administrated massive injections of soporifics and new experimental drugs. He'd fall into deep sleep. Normally this treatment put an end to the particular obsession but at the price of a profound lethargy on awakening. At least he ate, though. Or let himself be fed? They then let up on the drugs and he won back his former energy and found another obsession, found it here in the Vocational Obsession Center unfortunately.

The bearded director broke into peals of soprano laughter and then returned to his real concern. The Unit was being plundered. What would it be next? Good thing the woodworking lathes weighed a ton and were bolted down. The annual budget hadn't made allowances for such happenings.

That was what Lorz learned in the Unit. As for the eleven watches, the talk of having to pay for them turned out to be more of the old doctor's sadistic humor. In a month or so Lorz would be able to return the watches, said the director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit. Teddy would probably be gone by then.

"Gone?" Lorz asked. "Gone where?"

The bearded director, smiling slightly, opened his large hands wide and empty in a gesture confessing ignorance.

"Some institution or other," he said.

His twin derelictions deeply troubled Lorz. Theodore, according to the old doctor, had twice been receptive and twice he, Lorz, had unforgivably, criminally even – was the word too strong? – botched things. He'd abandoned him one Sunday. The following Sunday he'd been unable to reciprocate his candidate's gift. Either gesture, he felt, might have triggered a breakthrough toward normality. The director pictured the gray dank walls of "some institution or another." He decided to make amends the following Sunday.

But how could he capture the other's attention? How could he recreate the intimacy of the chess games? By this time, bitter about it, he thought he knew an infallible way to get his candidate out of his exclusive dialogue with cogs and springs. On his way to the hospital for a routine check-up, Lorz bought the cheapest watch he could find (not as cheap as all that) and had it gift-wrapped. He was sure that because of the money and the yearning it had cost him it would be ignored, sure his candidate would be on to something else by the next visit.

This was half a sour joke. But an hour after he purchased the watch, Lorz encountered the director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit in the hospital cafeteria and learned that, sure enough, his intended gift had exercised its negative charm.

"More of the same," the director confided, brushing cake-crumbs off his square beard. "Except worse."

Teddy had shown up again, a sure sign he was off watches now and would be on to something new. He'd wandered about the Unit with that familiar empty pre-obsessional expression the bearded director had got to know so well. Finally the boy stopped before an abandoned jigsaw puzzle a patient had been working on and had broken up. It could have been a worse fixation. He'd stared down at the heap of pieces for a few minutes, not moving. Then he sat down and began assembling the pieces at incredible speed. Granted, he had the model to go by on the box-cover, the Spanish Beauty with the combs and castanets. But to have pieced her together in seven minutes when the box gave forty minutes as par! Before he'd finished, all activity in the sub-unit had halted and they were grouped about him, therapists and patients. Disruption again.

"Oh, he's a case, all right," said the bearded director, with grudging admiration. He pursued his account. The trouble started after the performance, the final piece set in place. For then, of course, the normal procedure was to break up the puzzle and to dump the pieces back in the box, ready for the next patient. But Teddy resisted any approach to the assembled Spanish Beauty. He seized the wrist of the therapist who tried to take it away from him. His grip had even left a bruise. So they let him keep it. What else could they do? Overpower him? The old story.

Early next morning, instead of going to the hydrotherapy pool Teddy had returned to the Unit and gone straight to the locker where the other puzzles were kept. There was no reasoning with him. And he was "strong as an ox." He took all of the puzzles away. It was funny, from one point of view. It was sad, basically. His condition, clearly, was worsening. How long could they keep him here?

The question was rhetorical. Neither the bearded director nor Lorz could know that a decision was imminent.

On Friday the old doctor phoned Ideal and commanded Lorz to come, not to the familiar office, but to Room 307, and not on Sunday, but tomorrow, Saturday, 25 October at 3:30pm, punctually. His presence as well as Miss Ruda's was indispensable. Had he carefully marked down the time, the day, the room?

Lorz hung up and spoke to his assistant about it. She knew all about the forthcoming visit. The fact that it was taking place in Room 307 was a very positive thing, the old foreign doctor had told her. Teddy continued to eat and sleep, when he did eat and sleep, in Room 416. Since Teddy insisted on keeping the things he'd worked on, space problems had developed. So he'd been given a disused storage room, Room 307, to work and keep his things in. They'd removed the lock, otherwise he might have locked himself in. He had to be coaxed out for the rehabilitation sessions. As it was, he placed a chair against the door. It was his fortress. Till last week he hadn't tolerated the presence of others there.

But last Saturday she'd sneaked into that room and had stayed there for twenty minutes with him, much more than tolerated, until a nurse raised a fuss and made her leave. The old doctor scolded her until she told him what had happened during those twenty minutes. She'd talked to Teddy. A few times he'd actually stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. And finally he'd offered her another drawing and a pencil and maybe had smiled at her, his first smile. The old doctor had said it was the new drug, "Tex-something," but she knew it wasn't just that. The doctor had phoned her yesterday evening and had said that maybe their presence might tip the balance. The thing was to get Teddy to give up the jigsaw puzzles, to get him to eat and to leave the room. He'd sounded almost optimistic. She was sure it was going to be a turning point.

"Let's hope so," Lorz said and told her what the director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit had said about Theodore's probable future.

"Institution, he says? What institution?" As far as her mask allowed him to judge she seemed on the point of tears.

"Some institution or other," he replied.

Lorz suspected that the story of being summoned to "tip the balance" was another of her inventions. But when he got to Room 307 the next day, holding his latest gift carefully horizontal (it had started dripping), the story was implicitly confirmed. The old doctor and his squat shadow were seated in the corridor outside the door along with his assistant who had arrived a few minutes before her employer. She was staring down at the floor, her lips moving silently. Lorz guessed that she was praying again.

Apparently the old doctor didn't want to enter the room. Or didn't dare? They – he and Miss Ruda – were to go in, he ordered. They were to talk to Teddy, try to convince him to eat, to leave the room, to go outside in the park. He would be more receptive this time. There had been encouraging signs. They should leave the door ajar and not be afraid.

Lorz pushed open the door against the symbolic resistance of the chair. His assistant followed him into the room. They greeted the boy and sat down side by side facing him. He was working at the great table, crouched over a jigsaw puzzle. He didn't look up. Teddy hadn't eaten or slept for twenty-four hours now, she whispered.

Lorz observed him for a while. His hands froze a second above the chaos of colored fragments spread out before him, then struck like snakes, chose and fitted, then froze, then struck, chose and fitted. Already he'd created a great number of islets of fitted fragments on a large rectangle of plywood.

On the table, vast enough for a monastery refectory, there were maybe two dozen watch-works, coiled hearts pulsing, next to the open cases and the miniscule watch-repairing tools; piles of unopened jig-saw puzzles, some in their original unbroken cellophane wrapping; a scrap-heap of Chinese puzzles, solved and undone, all of them; seven chess-sets with the pieces in the position of his triumph over himself; boxes of crayons and pencils; reams of typewriting paper and everywhere those drawings with geometric figures. There were so many of them that they'd also been placed on the floor in strict, complicated, incomprehensible order.

Also on the floor was a completed jigsaw puzzle (a prancing white horse) glued to a rectangle of plywood. Next to it lay a sprinkling of fine nails, a tiny-headed hammer, a pot of glue, joining-tools and a picture-frame in clamps. The frame, once completed, would presumably receive the white horse and be promoted to the wall, joining some twenty other framed jigsaw puzzles, hanging in another strange private order which contradicted the banality of seascapes, autumnal woods, cascades, famed chutes and ornamental fountains. All these too had been definitively glued to rectangles of plywood. Lorz thought briefly of the bearded director of the Vocational Rehabilitation Unit.

The hands stopped. The boy pulled out of his absorbed crouch.

"Oh, lovely, Teddy, just lovely," his assistant breathed.

The completed jigsaw puzzle was a reproduction of an 18th century pastoral painting. In the foreground, from the vantage-point of a grassy flower-spangled eminence, a wigged gentleman in jacket and breeches of a blue imitated by the sky leaned on a walking stick, hands clasped on the golden pommel, admiring the harmony of the scene laid out before him. Pink evening clouds, imprinted with birds, arched above a landscape bathed in ideal golden light. A thatched farmhouse stood in the middle of tidy fields where rustics labored decoratively between shocks of wheat. A wagon heaped high with hay raised golden dust on a road skirting the shores of a lake where a boy was angling from a boat with shipped oars. In the distance mountains stood hazy blue and received the setting sun.

The director could understand his candidate's yearning to preserve the scene with glue and plywood, to oppose the lines of fracture, the break-up of exquisite order into chaos.

Theodore was staring down at the golden landscape. His hands lay still on the table. Taking advantage of that moment of suspended activity, Lorz's assistant got up, quickly rounded the table and came up behind the boy.

"No," said the old doctor, but no urgency to it.

Absorbed by his candidate, Lorz hadn't noticed that the doctor had slipped into the room with the attendant. The two of them were seated in a corner, next to five empty chairs placed in a row as if awaiting further spectators for some intimate performance.

The old doctor said "no" again – but again with no conviction – as the director's assistant touched the boy's massive shoulder, saying, "Teddy, Teddy." Now she put her arm lightly about his shoulder ("Don't do that," said the old doctor, perfunctorily). She bent her smiling illuminated face toward his. From where Lorz sat, the spout of hair clasped by rubber bands looked like a bleached caricature of one of the shocks of wheat in the landscape.

She started whispering to him. "It's beautiful, Teddy. Lovely. But it's finished now. Come on out. Take a walk with me in the park."

It was the long-ago voice she used to produce when talking to one of the mangy cats that haunted the Ideal staircase or to filthy Subcon beggar-children on the street-corner. A voice somehow pathetic in the disproportion between its total offering and the minimal response of the recipient of the sardine or the coin. She got even less response now.

She repeated her invitation, saying that the park was even more beautiful than the picture and it was real. This thing was beautiful but it was just a photograph. A photograph of a painting. And the painter probably imagined it all. They pasted it on cardboard and then they cut it up. It's not real. It's a beautiful day outside, real sunshine.

Her voice went on and on without pause. She'd seized the initiative and held on to it. Her voice had an almost hypnotic effect on Lorz. Teddy was still staring down at the puzzle. The director, cocking his head, also stared down at it. She was saying the things that had to be said to the boy. But it wasn't true and one could believe that if her words penetrated his mind (which wasn't at all certain) he was rejecting what she said about the superiority of the park outside, with its funereal bedding flowers and cripples, to the golden perfection on the table. One could almost understand his refusal to leave it.

"First you have to eat," she was now saying. "You must be terribly hungry, Teddy. Look what I brought you."

She removed from her shoulder bag something wrapped in expensive-looking tissue paper. She unveiled a great bunch of violet grapes. "It's for you. But leave a few for me." She dangled it before his face, revolved it slowly, all the while praising the fruit. Turning, the grapes reflected the overhead mercury lamps as a multitude of tiny rectangular suns. The boy continued staring down at the bird-imprinted pink clouds. Finally she placed the bunch of grapes on the corner of the table.

"Don't you like grapes?" she asked, blinking. "Aren't you hungry?"

She paused, lips parted, staring at him, visibly trying to think up a new approach. Finally she picked up the bunch of grapes again. It resumed its slow useless revolutions.

Wasn't he hungry? Her question aroused the director out of inertia. He reached for his own gift, the new one, lying on the corner of the table. He undid the string and removed the stained paper and the plastic prong. He opened the flap of the waxed cardboard box gingerly. His mouth, unaffected by his growing despair, watered at the liberated fragrance of the expensive fine-sliced raw beef bathing in spiced blood sauce. He'd bought it as an alternate gift to the watch, sure it too would be rejected, but at least it was something he, Lorz, had a taste for, unlike the nauseous self-sacrificing sweets and nuts piling up in his study.

"You have to eat," he said, weakly echoing her words and imploring tone.

Muscles tensed for recoil, he reached out toward the boy's bare arm. At the last moment his hand stopped short. Contact would have changed things, he felt, but he couldn't.

"Look what I brought you," he said.

He harpooned a slice of the meat with the prong. Accompanying it with the box to catch the drippings, he approached the meat to the other's absorbed averted face. He got no more reaction with his offering than his assistant had with hers.

Lorz heard footsteps behind him, low voices, the scrape of chairs. The seats were being occupied as in a chamber theatre. Silberman was there now, also the young sharp-nosed doctor and two unknown men who looked like administrators with alphabetically filed features. They glanced with professional impassivity at the simultaneous offerings of revolving grapes and bloody meat to an averted contemplative face.

The director withdrew the proffered slice and replaced it in the box, which he set down on the table again. He leaned back in defeat, now understanding the purpose of this gathering. All of the concerned doctors and administrators (concerned in no humane sense) had been summoned to note and certify the hopelessness of Number Nine's case and later to select the appropriate institution.

Everything would happen very rapidly now. This was the last time he would ever see his candidate. Very soon, perhaps tomorrow or this very day, Theodore would vanish. All of the objects of present and past obsession would be returned to their rightful square-bearded proprietor, the chess sets, the Chinese puzzles, the (unglued) jigsaw puzzles, including the golden landscape, broken up into chaos. But not the watches. The watches he, Lorz, would keep, at whatever price, at least that as a memory, a memorial. For Theodore would be displaced too, only much further, locked up safely somewhere like the puzzles and chessmen.

Where? Lorz would never find out. The baffling secrecy that surrounded the boy would be maintained. They would never tell him the name of the institution, just as they'd already refused to divulge his candidate's whereabouts for a whole month. To locate him it had taken Lorz weeks in a maze of corridors within the limited area of the hospital complex. "Some institution or other" could be located anywhere. How could he visit all of the cities and towns in the land? A lifetime wouldn't suffice.

The boy should flee. But hadn't he already fled into linked bits of metal, chessboard squares, cogs and springs, and now the golden landscape? That kind of flight was the reason for his presence here, for his imminent and definitive incarceration somewhere else. If he (Theodore) were able to know why they were all gathered here, he'd flee physically. Who could oppose that power? But of course if he could realize, there'd be no necessity for being locked up.

Anyhow, flee where? The director's mind sought theoretical places of refuge and solitude in the city outside the hospital walls. He saw the underground in the dawn hours, silent except for the escalators rolling on and on in the white emptiness. He saw the dripping walls of the sewer.

Then he imagined the two disused rooms in his flat, unopened for decades now, crammed with hacked furniture. For an instant the director pictured him there concealed amid the broken furniture in the musty darkness, safe behind that lock, the latched shutters and windows, the quadruple bolts of the front door, like something precious secured against thieves. Now Lorz's mind rejected the assimilation of his candidate to the broken inert things he'd so long resembled.

He imagined that room emptied of the old furniture, three walls painted white, the fourth yellow, shutters and windows flung open, sunshine streaming in on him. He touched the boy's bare arm. He gripped it. The muscles beneath his fingers stiffened into rock hardness. The director's fingers answered that response.

"Look!" he commanded.

The boy obeyed.

The director at last possessed the deep blue eyes with the flecked irises.

"You've got to eat," he said again, but not her way, this time not imploringly. It was a command. He took the waxed cardboard box, held it out to him and the victory was almost too easy. Had his ambition been too limited? he would later wonder. Couldn't he have commanded the other to speak and say his name?

His candidate leaned forward and accepted the offering. He disengaged his arm from the director's grasp and took the cardboard box. He took all of the meat with his fingers and crammed the dripping mass into his mouth. He bolted it down. He tilted the box and drank up the blood sauce. His throat worked powerfully. A few drops fell on the golden evening sky.

"Yes," said the old doctor in an oddly triumphant voice. "You see."

Yes, they saw. And would see more. Were seeing more.

The director scolded the boy. The immensity of his joy and glory received spontaneous expression not in praise for the boy's docility but in gentle scolding. Again he gripped his arm, reestablishing the essential physical contact.

"You haven't left me a single slice, Theodore. I thought we'd share it. I gave you all that. Now what are you going to give me? Why don't you give me the puzzle?"

Lorz immediately amended the suggestion to command, leaving no room for refusal.

"Give me the puzzle," he said and couldn't wait for the message to be processed for fear of losing initiative and momentum. So when the boy's hand failed to respond instantaneously, the director reached across the table with his free hand and summoned the strength to lift the rectangle of plywood with the puzzle and set it down in front of himself.

"Like that," he said. "Now you do it. Give me another puzzle."

This time there was no processing. The boy instantly took the topmost puzzle on the pile, a cathedral, and offered it to the director who stiffened his face against tears. Perhaps this gave his features a stern or even a ferocious expression. But if he tried to smile it would all burst out.

The boy kept gazing at him. Wasn't Theodore expecting something in return? Lorz calculated. He had two puzzles, the boy one box of meat, now empty. The count was unequal. He felt the contact loosening, perhaps because his hand was no longer gripping his candidate's arm. He had to act quickly.

He fumbled at the strap of the watch, removed it and ordered the boy to take it. The boy took it. "It's yours, Theodore, we're even now. I shouldn't have taken it back. Don't take it apart this time," he added apprehensively, seeing the boy examining the dial closely. "Wear it." His candidate continued studying the dial.

The director took the watch back with one hand, as gently as he could, and with the other seized his candidate's muscular forearm. He strapped the watch on the boy's wrist, inserting the buckle-prong in the first of the strap-holes, careful not to catch the golden hairs.

"It's yours now," he said, trying to keep the jubilation out of his voice. "I gave it to you. Give me something in return. Give me another puzzle," he ordered.

Instantly the powerful hands offered him another puzzle-box. The director took it and placed it on top of the cathedral puzzle on the table before him.

"Give me another," he ordered.

Theodore did. And then, no need for command, another and another. And still more. Now the last of the puzzles crowned the swaying pile in front of the director. His candidate continued with the watches, the works and cases, the green felt rectangles, the miniature tools.

"Take them!" the hateful foreign voice commanded behind him. "In your hands, in your arms! Everything!"

The director obeyed as best he could. But the trouble was, his candidate didn't stop. Now he gave Lorz the tiny-headed hammer, joining tools, the prancing horse. It seemed to be a new obsession: giving.

The boy gave. He gave and gave. Didn't stop giving. Now got up and went over, with perfect coordination, to the wall. Craning his neck and peering over the top boxed puzzle which reached his nostrils, the director saw his candidate stripping the wall bare of the framed puzzles. He gathered them in with the same incredible rapidity with which he'd assembled the pieces of the golden landscape.

He came over and placed the framed puzzles on top of the boxed puzzles and watches, progressively immuring the director whose arms trembled beneath the weight.

In a few seconds he heard the boy approaching again. "Oh, that's nice, but don't you want to keep some of them, Theodore?" he murmured fearfully, wondering if the old doctor had overheard him. Now a great handful of the pieces of the Chinese puzzles (he guessed by the sound, unable to see) joined the rest with a merry Christmas jingle. Would his candidate stop with his own things? Suppose the idea occurred to him to add the chairs or – he had the strength for it – the gigantic table?

He saw himself crushed by his own success. His arms trembled. The gifts started spilling over on to the floor. He squatted rigidly to gather them up and lost more.

Could that be laughter he heard from behind him? Surely not laughter, not at this moment.

His assistant hurried over. She picked the things up and relieved him of some of the framed puzzles. She kept it all in her arms. She thanked Teddy as though she'd been the recipient of the gifts. The old doctor whispered something to the squat attendant who left the room and seconds later returned pushing a wheeled stretcher. With the help of the attendant Lorz transferred the remaining armful of gifts onto it. His assistant kept hers.

The boy ignored the stretcher. He continued bringing the things to the director, much lighter things now, the nails, the pot of glue, more joining tools, the cryptic geometric drawings. The director placed them on the stretcher alongside the great jumble.

He tried to combat a stupidly trivial worry. How would he carry it away? What would he do with it all? The old doctor was sure to make him keep these new things as he'd made him keep the eleven watches. He couldn't help thinking of the taxi, the fare, the killing trips up and down the five flights carting the stuff into his flat.

Then he was angry with himself for dwelling on the secondary negative aspects of his immense victory, just as he'd stupidly done with the watches. What did it matter anyhow if they were all piled up in his study? It wouldn't be a radical change. On entering Room 307 he'd been struck by the way it resembled his own study, chaotic with objects that had corresponded to his candidate's passing crazes, necessarily his own too: the three chess-sets, his old one, the pocket-set, the expensive rose-wood inlayed refused set; the two volumes of Schlechter and Moch and the other books on the game he'd bought; the scores of Chinese puzzles; the spurned boxes of chocolates, pralines, nuts, etc.

But would there be room for the new lot? Wouldn't it block the doorway? Unless he could persuade his assistant to take it all. He'd tell her that they were almost as much for her as for him he thought, with a rare touch of pity for her. He'd just seen her placing "her" gifts on the table and, believing herself unobserved, picking up three of the geometric drawings and secreting them into her bag.

He heard them talking behind him.

They'd at last emerged from their stupor. He caught only one word, totally unfamiliar, in the babble. "Dexitrine," he thought. It sounded like the name of a female dog. Or a drug? Surely a drug. Why were they talking of such things at such a moment?

He turned toward the two administrators, the three doctors, the audience of his afternoon performance. He disciplined his face into an expression of moderate but ironic triumph.

Excellent, said the old silver-haired doctor with an expression of grudging satisfaction to Silberman, ignoring Lorz altogether. He said, in a low voice, things about dosage. He looked at Lorz.

"You get on quite well with him," his old thin lips conceded. "Both of you," he added, looking past Lorz. The others were looking in the same direction.

Lorz turned about. His assistant was guiding his candidate, like a blind man, toward the door. Absurdly small alongside his muscular bulk, she had her hand on his shoulder, her arm uplifted in a gesture that for some reason reminded Lorz of the female physiotherapist's gesture in the pool that other day, guiding him out of artificial buoyancy into the reality of gravity. Her face was uplifted toward his and she was whispering unintelligible things.

They disappeared into the corridor. Lorz wanted to follow.

The old doctor sharply whispered: "No."

There was no disobeying that voice. Lorz stood confused amid the plethora of presents, empty shells of overcome obsessions, his possessions, all his now. There was silence in the room for a while. His fingers felt sticky from his candidate's glue-pot. No one was looking at him and his possessions piled up on the wheeled stretcher.

The young doctor whispered something. The spectators got up with a scrape of chair legs. They went over to the window. Lorz followed them. Their backs blocked his vision. They were perfectly immobile and silent, waiting.

The director stood still a moment and then went out of the room into the corridor. He stopped before a small window. He pressed his forehead against the cold pane to gain a maximum view. Down below to the left was the main entrance, the winding graveled drive, skirted by flowerbeds, now muted chrysanthemums. It seemed like yesterday, the primroses and daisies, when he himself had been a hospital inmate. Time was going by very fast.

They came out together, her face uplifted toward his and talking. He could see her lips moving but couldn't guess at the words. They advanced out of the shade of the building into the sunshine. The boy flung up his arm and covered his eyes against so much sky. The late October day was already declining. It was the softest of reddish sunshine, but after those months of darkness and artificial light it must have been a dazzle to his eyes. He, Edmond Lorz, remembered how it had been. She was holding his arm, guiding him with great care, concentrating on their steps now, her lips parted, frowning with the immensity of her responsibility. It was somehow familiar. Before they reached the bench the boy removed his arm from his eyes. She kept her hand on his shoulder and went on talking to him. He looked down at her, unblinking, attentive. Already his eyes must have become accustomed to the light of the sky.

***

Part Three

1

Edmond Lorz edged with difficulty into his study. His overcoat was powdered with the first heavy snow of the new year. It was January 29, a Sunday evening, fourteen hours and eleven minutes removed from tomorrow's decisive meeting with Dr Silberman.

He squeezed past the low tables cluttered with the jigsaw puzzles and other trophies of his victory almost three months before, struggled out of his overcoat and sat down at the desk. He opened the top drawer and removed the two notebooks and a bottle shaped like a peasant-lass. Unscrewing her vapid head, he granted himself, exceptionally, a small glass of plum-alcohol.

Sipping, he gazed at the pastoral jigsaw puzzle hanging on the wall. The golden landscape deserved more expert framing. But his candidate had given up that activity. Lorz himself had glued the puzzle to a rectangle of cardboard and mounted it under glass with clips. The job had taken him the better part of a day.

He set the alarm clock to ring at nine for dinner. It had already happened that he'd gone past midnight without eating, his mind totally monopolized by the two notebooks devoted to the astonishing progress of his candidate. For the next two hours he'd pore over the pages, intervening with black, blue or red ink. Then, after the brief concession to dinner, he'd return to them till bedtime.

The notebooks had replaced the encyclopedia. Each reading revealed subtle connections between apparently unrelated incidents and yielded new hypotheses. It was exciting, almost creative, fitting things together, shaping order and meaning out of the welter of chronologically noted happenings.

The first of those notebooks had soon proved insufficient for all the things he'd had to record since the cascade of gifts on October 25. Before that date, as he could see, his impoverished notes huddled in the center of the pages, surrounded by white void like the arctic terra incognita of old globes. What had there been to record outside of the chess moves, the terse indication of new obsession, refused gifts or, for want of anything more significant, the boy's clothing?

Then with the memorable breakthrough – what Lorz thought of as the Day of Giving – the white wastes ended. The pages were now crowded with notes and illustrations of his candidate's progress.

If giving was the start of it all, logically he should have devoted pages of analysis to the twelve gift-wrapped packages weeks before instead of the pitiful complaint about the watches he would supposedly have to pay for. The true significance of the boy's gesture had been obscured by his stupid reaction of outrage and apprehension. He recalled his initial perception of the twelve boxes as aftermath to massacre. That day was like a fine poster hopelessly overridden with indelible graffiti, beyond repair.

The director flipped forward to November 11.

Those eleven pages, which he started rereading for maybe the hundredth time, recounted total triumph. He'd omitted certain inappropriate reactions like imagining laughter behind his back as the ceaseless gifts spilled over his arms to the floor, his absurd concern with the technicalities of disposing of the gifts, the even more absurd fear that his candidate might have added the great table to the pile of gifts in his embrace, crushing every bone in his body.

Also unrecorded were the rival claims. He couldn't even recall the name of their drug, could only come up with an association with a female dog and so referred to it in his mind as "Bitchine." He had no more than a faint memory of the feeling of exclusion he'd briefly experienced in the corridor, looking down behind glass at his assistant and his candidate on the bench below. What he felt now was a certain pity for her. Charitably, he'd refrained from recording her guilty look as she spirited his candidate's drawings into her bag. A few days later, she'd transformed them into gifts to her from Teddy.

The last paragraph of Lorz's comments for that day began with the cautious remark that his candidate's face seemed to be losing its habitual expression of brutality. Three question marks followed the observation. He was suspicious of subjectivity in the matter. But it was pointless to ask his assistant. She'd never recognized that expression of brutality in the first place. As for the doctors, they'd surely credit the change to the switchover to Bitchine. An obvious solution had came to him. His notes for that day ended with the underlined word, "camera."

The director was about to reach for the second log and the photographs when the phone rang. It was his assistant. She came up with more suggestions about what he should say to Dr Silberman tomorrow morning. He assented mechanically at regular intervals. When she finally rang off he sat motionless for an instant and then remembered what her call had interrupted: the photographs.

He opened the second log, took off his glasses and placed his face inches from the first of the fifty-eight photographs of his candidate. They were pasted side by side and carefully dated. In theory they should have furnished objective proof of the transformation of the boy's face, like a speeded-up film-sequence of a bud opening to flower.

The problem was they'd been taken in the worst of circumstances, technically speaking. In the hospital park with his candidate, he found for some reason that he couldn't take the camera out of his briefcase and lift it to his eye. People were constantly passing by. Or looking down at them from the glass-cliff of New Hospital. He couldn't. It was a foolish feeling but unconquerable.

So Lorz started taking the clandestine snapshots, clicking blind from his lap. They were invariably poorly centered, sometimes featuring shrubbery to the total exclusion of his candidate when they didn't behead him. Often as not they were blurred because of miscalculation of distance. In the boy's room they were alone and the director could use the range finder. But nearly always the available light was insufficient and the shutter-speed too slow for the hand-held camera. Blurs again. He could hardly lug in a tripod. The solution would have been flash-shots. But he feared the effect of explosive light on his candidate.

The picture taking had come to an abrupt end on December 8, the event duly noted.

That Wednesday afternoon in his candidate's room he'd tried to stabilize the camera on the arm of a chair to compensate for the low shutter speed. The boy was drawing at his table. "Theodore, look!" he said. His candidate looked up. Lorz pushed the shutter release and the room exploded. He was blinded and paralyzed by the blue dazzle. Finally he was able to cry out, "Theodore! Theodore!"

A nurse passing by in the corridor had heard his outcry. Imprinted on his retina, light and dark inverted like a photographic negative, the sun-burst and his seated candidate persisted, while against this static red backdrop the nurse and his candidate moved spectrally, approaching his chair. Both of them were now standing by his chair, looking down at him.

He's all right, I'm all right, he thought and then: it's another breakthrough, he cares, he's come to me. The nurse asked him if he was all right, what had happened? His candidate had taken the camera and was inspecting it to the total exclusion of anything else. The director pulled himself together and removed his glasses. He was weeping from the glare. He spoke of a defective flashcube that had spontaneously exploded.

The obvious explanation – that he must have accidentally touched the flash-button while fumbling with the camera-controls – hadn't at first occurred to him because, perhaps, of the violence of the light. The wall behind his candidate couldn't have reflected the light with such force. It was as though he himself had received the exploding flash bulb full in the face.

When the film was developed he understood what had happened. The bathroom door behind his candidate had been left half open. The mirror above the washbasin had hurled back the sunburst into the lens and his eyes. By some quirk of optics the bottom of the mirror had been spared along with a tiny fatigued middle-aged face at the bottom of that mirror, unspeakably ugly. After a few seconds he recognized it as his own face. All the rest of the photo was an explosion of light that obliterated his candidate. He tore up the photo and flushed it down the toilet.

His assistant too experimented. Lorz turned the pages of his log to November 17 and her story about Teddy and the atlas. She'd begun the experiment a week before. The way it had ended was a source of keen disappointment for her and secret satisfaction for the director. She couldn't possibly suspect why.

She'd shown Teddy her old school atlas. The binding was now in tatters, the pages dog-eared, torn and ink-stained. Her theory was that he must be a foreigner if no trace of family, friends or acquaintances could be found here. Seated alongside the boy she'd systematically introduced country after country, alert for an expression of recognition on his face. At first he'd shown complete indifference as she slowly leafed through the book, reciting the names of the lands.

Then he'd stared hard at one particular badly torn page, mainly ocean, and prevented her from turning the page over. Hours after, her wrist still hurt from his grip, she said. He bent closer over the page and went on staring but responded to none of her questions. Still, she considered it an encouraging sign. And he'd refused to give her back the book when, on leaving, she wanted to put it away with the others in the closet. She'd felt joy at this sign of continued interest.

All week long she'd tried to convince herself that the land of his birth was somewhere on that torn page with its blue vastness sprinkled with archipelagos of inkblots and islands. But how could he be a citizen of coral islets, once cannibal?

When she returned to Room 343 the following Saturday, the book was lying on the table. She opened it and saw that he'd skillfully mended the torn page with fine slivers of scotch-tape. The black inkblots had been obliterated, the ones on the sea with blue paint, the ones in the margins with white ink-effacer.

For her it was a defeat. Her experiment overlapped with his own, startlingly successful, which she wasn't aware of. He hadn't spoken to anybody about it. The comment in red ink at the bottom of the page devoted to her attempt referred him to that experiment, to November 11.

That day he'd found Theodore in his room leafing through a copy of a newsmagazine which he must have picked up somewhere in the hospital. Normally Lorz avoided such periodicals just as he avoided television. Both were magnifying mirrors to the world as it had become. But the idea occurred to him that the photographs in the magazine might possibly offer the boy something to respond to, provide a link with the past. Maybe a woman who'd remind him of his mother. Or a house like his own lost one. There must be innocent photos somewhere in the magazine. Not all of the houses could be the sites of mass murders, not all of the middle-aged women serial poisoners.

His candidate responded to none of the houses or middle-aged women. But the director made a fundamental discovery, flipping over those slick, horror-filled pages. They allowed him to communicate with his candidate. Certain photos, naturally, couldn't be commented on. Could hardly be even glanced at.

Example, page 126 with the cinema-starlet giving birth before TV and magazine cameras with her pigtailed "friend" grinning in the background in his sun-glasses and pineappled sport shirt opened to the navel on hairiness and she too grinning at the lens in her impeccable makeup and hairdo, despite what was going on below. Could hardly be thought of.

The next hastily turned page featured the trial of the State (ex-Royal) Museum vandals. Unexpectedly it provided the opening.

One of the accompanying photos showed the youths being hustled into a police van. The husky one with the shaved skull was making an obscene gesture with his middle finger at the lens, the thin one the V of victory for what they'd accomplished with the priceless Flemish primitive, reproduced before and after. Even after the fuel oil and excrement one could make out the perfect oval purity of the Virgin's face contemplating the babe (wise and sad as though foreseeing his fate at barbarous hands five hundred years later). Both were haloed. Blotted out was the white doe in the background standing in a clearing with star-like flowers.

Since it wasn't sure that Theodore understood the text, nothing was more normal than that the director should read it aloud and comment on it, as anybody would have done, even to a stranger. What could be more normal than this spontaneous reaction to blatant abnormality? He could almost feel, physically, the boy's dark blue gaze fixed on his lips as he asked the rhetorical question: why did they do it? Why do they do it? Millions of normal scandalized readers must have asked that question. The vandals' sense of their own insignificance before the eternity of art? he hazarded. The duo had been sentenced to three months imprisonment (in private carpeted cells with hot and cold running water and TV, he guessed. They were somehow victims, after all).

The director couldn't help thinking of the Integral Iconoclasts, the lopped chin of the black Christ and what it had cost the desecrators. He mentioned this to the boy. If you could only see that painting as it once was, he said. But you know it. You were an artist yourself. Weren't you? An artist? Maybe one day we'll both go there and look at it again. If they're ever able to repair the damage. And provided the others don't set fire to the museum first. Not just museums and the Virgin, cemeteries as well, the innocent dead as well.

What could be more natural in such a context than to attach private experience to the public event? With great but controlled emotion the director told the boy about the tombs of his parents which had undergone similar indignity, the smashed stone of the other man's wife. The violated coffin and what followed was too terrible to tell but he did repeat what the other man had said: slow fire too good for them.

His candidate listened gravely, staring at Lorz. Surely he understood what he was saying. Hadn't they both been victims of disorder too, that fateful March morning? The director turned over page after page of chaos. Even his indignation at what was happening to the advertising posters could receive expression. A good many of the underground posters were reproduced in the magazine.

He turned over the next page (129). It was like a door opening on grace, shutting out disorder. She was there, full-paged and in color, the exquisite long-necked girl, with the perfect oval purity of her face not unlike the Virgin on page 128 (if one could imagine the Mother of God in a sailor suit holding a pistachio ice-cream cone). She was there before them as at their beginning and end almost a year ago. They both looked at it for a long time in silence. Lorz felt the tears coming. He did nothing to hide them.

Leaving the hospital, he felt dizzy and fatigued but disburdened. That night and the six nights that followed he slept deeply without dreams.

One day, the November 14 (it was all down there in the log, painstakingly detailed), his candidate perceived a coffee stain in the margin of one of the pages. He attempted to efface it with his finger, then with the rubber. After a minute of this, Lorz tried to go on, turning the pages. But the boy clumsily turned the pages back to the stain, ripping them in the process. He resumed his useless rubbing, breath coming fast, a symptom that by then Lorz recognized as the beginning of agitation.

"Wait," he said, wanting to touch the boy's shoulder therapeutically, but not daring to. "I'll be back in a second." He left the room. Part of the motive, he later recognized, may have been fear at what the boy's agitation might culminate in again.

He went over to the nurses' office and borrowed white ink-effacer. He returned to the room, stood in the doorway, saw that things hadn't worsened, entered and showed his candidate the tiny bottle. The scene seemed familiar to him. He smiled, wanting to relieve the tension.

"Basic White," he joked.

That was another revelation. He could joke with his candidate. "Basic White," he repeated. Then his mood became intensely serious. It was as if they were both together again in the subterranean room during the lesson before everything came to an end. But alone now, the other six candidates eliminated. Eliminated like the stain. He dipped the brush in the narrow neck and deftly obliterated it.

Wasn't that an expression of marvel in the boy's face? Like a child marveling at a magician? He was achieving contact, dialogue almost, not through words but through images.

There was a fat politician on the page. Lorz pointed at him and explained his long career of lies and betrayals. Look, Theodore, he said, obliterating the grafty face with an expert circular movement. The body had a full moon topping the shoulders now in the place of a visage. The fat demagogue looked better that way.

The boy took the bottle and turned over the page. Full-paged, a man and a woman stood holding hands in profile, eye-locked and enraptured for a Swiss watch. Personally the director had no quarrel with the image. He would have spared the couple. But the boy transformed their faces into full moons. He turned over more pages and eradicated more faces as the director had done.

He looked up at Lorz, as though for approval. He received it. Also, as a material reward, the slices of raw peppered meat he relished. The director ate one of them too. For the first time they were meshing (the director pictured the cogs and the pulsing mainspring of the recent watch-works). Their contact had never been so intimate.

"We are Censors, Theodore," he said as a joke with prim pinched lips, pronouncing the capital C by means of a theatrical tremolo. Their intimacy was such that he could joke with him.

Lorz dipped the brush into the ink-effacer and warred on the most outrageous of the advertisements, distributing white rectangles strategically. Again his candidate imitated him, went perhaps too far. He started rectifying a perfume advertisement, abolishing the plum-colored nipples of the vaporous soft-focus denuded torso, actually in perfect taste. "I think we can spare her, it's not pornography but art," Lorz observed. "Pornography is always sharp-focused." But his candidate paid no attention to his words.

Lorz had another idea. "Look." Explaining why, he eliminated another public face. He blew on the full moon that advantageously replaced that face. The white ink crusted. With the fine #3 ballpoint pen he drew eyes and a nose. "You draw the mouth, Theodore. It could only be an improvement."

It was a decisive moment. The boy did it. His fingers had forgotten none of their skill: an exquisite mouth, more feminine than masculine. In the space of five minutes they'd adumbrated the three stages of image-correction of the next month although Lorz didn't realize this.

The following visit, as the log testified, they remained within the limits of the first stage, simple effacement of graffiti. The coffee-stain incident had given the director the idea. Warring on disfigurement had been the boy's last activity before the explosion. Mightn't resumption of that activity pull him back to normality?

So he minutely prepared the magazine for the visits, just as, nine months before, he'd disfigured Helena's loveliness twenty-one times in view of later rectification. Except now the graffiti was ugliness on ugliness. He spent hours each evening in the uncomfortable vertiginous role of defiler. This disturbed the perfect sleep he'd been enjoying for a week, ever since the start of the newsmagazine experiment.

More and more frequently he'd awaken in the middle of the night, stare up toward the ceiling and then get up and sit at his study desk alongside the cacti in the cone of light and prepare more of the photographs.

Lorz often brought the magazine into the office, as he'd done earlier with the Chinese puzzles and the Schlechter and Moch volumes. He was careful to conceal his activities from his assistant although sometimes this wasn't necessary since, during lulls, she'd often be plunged in her pink-and-blue diary with the flowers and brass clasp. They'd sit there, oblivious of one another, she sucking her pen and staring at the wall for inspiration and then scribbling away, he thinking up new graffiti for the photos. Then the phone would ring and, almost guiltily, they'd conceal their activity and turn back to business.

Once, he forgot to lock up the magazine in his desk-drawer. When he returned to the office he found her standing alongside his desk leafing through his magazine as he'd done with hers months before. There were no intimate revelations in his. Still, not knowing the motive for what he did, she must have found his graffiti almost insane. Impassively, she closed the magazine and returned to her desk.

Her silence was almost insulting. His immediate impulse was to explain his particular therapeutic approach. But he was offended at being placed on the defensive and he said nothing. Shortly after that incident the director gave up graffiti. He and his candidate had gone on to a new stage.

By then he realized that most of the news-photos were already, in a sense, graffiti of the ideal, of what a man or a woman or a landscape or a city should be like. Those images contained their own distortion. For that reason the director no longer spent long ambiguous hours marring what was already essentially marred.

And this was just as well. His interventions in the small hours of the night had multiplied. Often, he would nod off in the office and open his eyes on his assistant's intensely serious stare which immediately shifted away. Later she'd sometimes say in the flat ungracious tone she adopted when commenting on his health: "You don't look well at all," and inquire if he was taking the pills regularly and urge him to go to the hospital for a check-up.

So now Lorz and his candidate rectified the unaltered photographs. They systematically obliterated (with Basic White now) what deserved to be obliterated, usually faces but also elements of landscapes. At first Lorz guided his candidate, justifying his choice with anecdotes drawn from his personal experience.

Soon Theo proved he didn't need guidance. He eliminated the things Lorz himself would have himself eliminated. It was true that the boy didn't indulge in fine distinctions. He reserved the same white fate to certain basically unobjectionable images as he'd done to the soft-focused perfume-torso. But the director regarded this excess of zeal as something minor.

That was the second stage of correction.

The third stage (which Lorz mistakenly thought was the last) occurred in early December. Unlike the first two it was fully creative and his log devoted long pages to it. The two of them recreated the ideal on the obliterated real. It was an extension of the initial operation weeks before: the exquisite mouth on the full moon that had replaced the grafty face of the politician. Now they did it systematically in intimate collaboration.

He'd tell Theodore to blot out the cars in the street-scene and then the pedestrians. "Wouldn't trees be nice in the middle of the street instead of the cars?" he'd ask his candidate, thinking of the encyclopedia woodcut of the Third District three centuries before: the charcoal-burner's hut among big leafy oaks with a stream and a deer drinking from it.

Silently as always, with a gravity that verged on severity, the boy bent over the magazine and with astonishing rapidity, one by one, the cars vanished in the whiteness flowing from his brush. Then, one by one, trees appeared, a forest where cars had been. The trees were red, but why not? The whiteness engulfed the pedestrians too. They were replaced by more red trees.

That had been December 5, almost two months ago. Clearly connected with the magazine breakthrough was the spectacular verbal breakthrough the following day.

Lorz finished the last drop of the plum-alcohol. He set down the glass and turned over the pages.

The entry for that date, which he knew by heart, was dramatically understated.

Dec 8. This morning learned (D.R.) that Theodore spoke. A nurse heard him pronounce words. What words? She (D.R.) doesn't know.

A day later the director found out but at first didn't know what to make of the three words. Nobody did.

At the very moment (9:00pm January 29) that the director reached the page that recorded those words, the alarm clock next to the cactus plants summoned him to dinner.

After a quick cold meal the director went into his bedroom and opened the closet. He mustered his suits and ties for the best combination for tomorrow morning's meeting with Dr Silberman. Details counted. He stood there for a moment rehearsing in his mind the alternate strategies for broaching the proposal. The old doctor wouldn't be able to veto it now.

He returned to his study and set the alarm clock for 11:30pm. His mind had to be clear tomorrow.

Then he turned back to the second notebook, opened on the revelation of his candidate's first words.

***

2

Dec 9. Saw the nurse. She was alone in the room with him when he opened his eyes and stared at her and spoke. "Base" she says she understood. Then a long pause, she says. Then: "It." Then another long pause. Finally, she thinks, a question: "Why?"

The words had gnawed at Lorz for days. He grappled with them in the small hours of the night. He resorted to metaphysical exegesis to make sense of them. It: perhaps the mysterious unnamable Something that was at the Base of the universe. Why? The ultimate question, naturally. It sounded profound but did it make sense?

In the third day of the enigma, while brushing his teeth, the solution came to him in a flash. What the boy had said, slurred, wasn't "Base, it, why?" but of course "Basic White", the phrase that Lorz had half-jokingly employed at the beginning of the magazine sessions.

Despite the loss of the metaphysical dimension, he felt keen satisfaction at his solitary possession of the true meaning of the boy's first communication. Satisfaction also that those first words were a repetition of what he, Lorz, had pronounced. Not even his assistant had been able to make sense of them.

But those two words weren't followed by others. No one heard the boy say anything else.

One day, marked by the season's first snow flurries, briefly whitening the park outside the window of Room 404, the director found the boy crouched over the previous week's issue. That had been December 14, the log reminded him.

Theodore had begun rectifying the world on his own, with no need for guidance or prompts, page after page. Little found grace before his brush. His corrections were radical, sometimes disturbing. Why crab claws instead of hands here, why flames instead of hair there? One full-page photograph was completely effaced with Basic White. The worst of the photographs had salvageable details that normally his brush spared. But not here. And he'd drawn nothing on the void white surface. The director wondered what had merited total obliteration and had admitted no transformation.

Lorz grasped the full extent of Theodore's progress only when he learned that for two months now the boy had been going outside regularly. The red asterisk before the entry for December 16 communicated the incredible information. Most of Teddy's week-day activities now took place outside the hospital, his assistant informed him. She'd struck up an acquaintanceship with a Volunteer Worker who had told her all about it. The sad middle-aged woman had confided that her own son had died in the hospital at the age of nineteen three years before and now she did this. She allowed Dorothea to accompany them at a safe distance in order not to distract Teddy as they went shopping in a supermarket. There was also that squat attendant behind them. Teddy had wandered about with the shopping list and his cart like any other customer, unhesitatingly choosing, weighing, queuing up, unloading his purchases on the check-out belt, paying.

Lorz found it hard to imagine this radical transformation of his candidate, pushing his trivial cart from potatoes to tinned fruit salad after the miracles with puzzles, pictures and chessmen. There was bitter irony in the fact that Theodore was being forced to integrate that world of ugliness he obliterated in the magazine.

Lorz got to know the Volunteer Worker. In the hospital cafeteria she told him all about those exercises in normality that for some reason had been kept secret from him and his assistant. They, the professionals, she explained, had been preparing for this programmed stage for months. Teddy had first been placed in SIUS. At Lorz's blank face she explained: "Simulations of Independent Urban Situations": purchases, reading bus-route maps, going on errands within the hospital grounds, preparing simple meals for himself in the kitchens that were part of the rehabilitation equipment, etc. All of this was part of the "struggle for autonomy."

The first outings beyond the hospital gates were exercises in STSA. "Short-Term Semi-Autonomy," she added immediately. She was fond of the technical abbreviations. They allowed her to imagine, Lorz guessed, that she was a professional mender of the broken instead of a bereaved volunteer. She explained STSA: the sort of accompanied activities outside the hospital that Miss Ruda had witnessed. She called it "preparations for total autonomy." She also called it "making do with what was left." To Lorz the phrase sounded like a description of life, anybody's, universally applicable.

One thing alarmed him in her account. Teddy had to learn to get about in the city on his own, she said, use the bus and the underground. Lorz objected that the underground had become "a hotbed of violence." She laughed and said that she felt she had a bodyguard with Teddy next to her. Anyhow, someone else from the hospital always accompanied them wherever they went.

Finally she spoke of the two negative aspects of the situation to date.

She confirmed what his assistant had already found out. Outside of the nurse who claimed to have heard three slurred words, no one had heard Teddy speak. But one didn't really have to open one's mouth to manage in a city, the Volunteer Visitor added.

Lorz readily agreed. He thought of some of his own weekends when not a sound got past his lips for lack of necessity. He thought of the hordes of "guest-workers" who managed in the capital without any knowledge of the host language. The standard urban situations were self-explanatory. They dispensed with the need for words. Before the supermarket check-out one was defined as a payer and one wordlessly paid the electronically indicated sum. Before the bars of the underground teller one was defined as a purchaser of a ticket, the price of which was clearly printed. Before the underground teenage thug with the drawn knife one was defined as a victim and went down bleeding wordlessly. She shouldn't take him there.

So his candidate was learning to manage in the outside world with no need for words, said the Volunteer Worker. More troubling was the employment problem, she said. Even if he was capable of the basic reflexes of urban survival, for them to envision an outpatient status and an independent flat he had to be employable. Not that money was anything of a problem for him, so far as the immediate future was concerned in any case. He too received compensation money, deposited monthly in a special account. It was managed for him by the "Tutelage Board." But beyond financial considerations, work was the key to "relational integration." It was the precondition for an end to institutional dependency.

For the present it was out of the question trying to employ Teddy in other than in "SPWS" (Subsidized Protected Work Situations). And even here the results had not been good, said the sad-faced woman. He'd already been tried out on the watch-repair job, for which he seemed ideally suited, but this "hadn't been a hundred percent satisfactory."

Lorz instantly understood: a fiasco. By this time he was adept at decoding. He wondered if once again the boy had insisted on keeping the repaired watches for renewed dissection and assemblage, an unending cycle, or even taking those of his work-mates. The director never found out. The Volunteer Worker didn't know.

She had more details about the second job. The hospital authorities had agreed to try him out for a few hours a day in the garbage-collecting service. Teddy was strong as an ox and didn't mind getting up at dawn. The first early morning collection round came to a practical halt because of the boy's "perfectionism." The slightest apple-paring, scrap of tin-foil, speck of coffee grounds unavoidably spilled during the transfer of the contents of the bins to the revolving maw of the garbage truck were the object of almost pedantic attention on his part. He wouldn't allow the garbage truck to go on before everything had been cleaned. His work was thorough, so thorough that at the end of the week they congratulated him over and over, a way of discharging him.

He still didn't know how to compromise. It had been hard to dissuade him from showing up for the dawn patrol. For the next week, before the compulsion wore off, he warred on scraps of paper and cigarette butts and pigeon droppings in the hospital park. Nobody dared flick away a smoked cigarette in his presence.

In a week or so they would try him out on a painting job, again within the hospital. Perhaps it would go better than the garbage-collecting job.

The woman didn't sound optimistic.

Then there was an abrupt end to Theodore's outings, an end to the newsmagazine experiment, an end to the visits. The boy disappeared. The log entry under December 21 tersely recounted the reason.

The old foreign doctor had rung the director up for the last time and summoned him to his office. Lorz knocked and entered. With his usual calculated rudeness, Dr V didn't look up from what he was reading behind his desk. Lorz's presence was acknowledged only by a stabbing index finger assigning him to the chair opposite. The doctor was examining one of the newsmagazines the director and his candidate had corrected. Lorz sat down with a sinking feeling.

The old doctor's harsh breathing, like reiterated expressions of exasperation, filled the office. He leafed through the magazine. His thin lips were pursed in distaste. At certain pages his oyster-gaze shot over the rims of his glasses at the director.

Finally he pronounced: "You do not like titties."

The director was dumbfounded by the vulgar slang term, rendered even more grotesque by the foreign accent. Before he could express his indignation, the doctor pursued.

"Why like a child do you scribble over the photographs? Or cover them up with white paint? What is this madness of teaching Teddy such things?"

Who could have told the doctor that he had taught the boy the new activity? He thought he knew. He was certain he knew.

Lorz tried to justify the procedure as a means of establishing contact with Teddy. He also mentioned his own occupation, which had almost been the boy's.

"I know about your occupation," said the old doctor. "Your peculiar occupation. But this, what you have done, or rather what you have taught Teddy to do, is not the removal of graffiti. This is the removal of the photograph itself. Part of the photograph. Mainly titties. Which is graffiti itself!" he cried, triumphantly for some reason. "Not additive but subtractive graffiti," he added. He grinned on long yellowed skull teeth in satisfaction at his formulation.

"I'm not your patient," the director muttered. "I'm nobody's patient."

The old doctor ignored the interruption. "What has given you such an idea? Talk to him, yes, show him flowers and mountains as does Miss Ruda, perhaps, if this makes you happy. But do not attempt therapy. Leave such things to us. You have done perhaps irreparable harm. What has given you such an idea? You are perhaps a doctor? You have made long and specialized studies in medicine? You have in your office your framed diploma?"

The old doctor formulated the accusation against Lorz.

There had been the obsessions with the Chinese puzzles, the chess games, the jigsaw puzzles, he said. Then months of gratifying progress. Now, because of Lorz, a relapse into obsession. An obsession with magazine corrections. More and more the magazines were monopolizing the boy's daytime activities to the detriment of his rehabilitation sessions. It was the familiar worsening downward spiral. Teddy would even get up in the middle of the night and work over the magazine. He was getting less and less sleep. He had begun to refuse food. Finally, once again, they had had to inject soporifics, experiment with new drugs. All because of Lorz.

The old doctor halted and gasped harshly.

The relentless voice momentarily stilled, Lorz was able to reflect on the hopelessness of his candidate's uncompromising efforts with the magazines. In any issue there were hundreds of news photographs, hundreds of advertisements. His candidate's judgments were severe and a great proportion of these illustrations were rectified. Each averaged at least five minutes of work. The boy hadn't finished one issue when the next came out with its inexhaustible imperfections demanding correction. Necessarily he lagged behind. To catch up he had to sacrifice rehabilitation activities, then sleep, finally food. And there were other newsmagazine titles that he was sure to discover. What then?

Lorz recalled his own beginnings with the posters. What his candidate was trying to do with the magazines was almost as hopeless as trying to achieve a definitive cleansing of the posters in the capital's sixty-three underground stations, 9,369 of them at any given moment. And they changed every three weeks. Worse, unlike the newsmagazine photographs which, once rectified, stayed that way, the posters were no sooner cleansed than the vandals assaulted them again. An army of dedicated operators laboring day and night wouldn't have coped. In the opening months of his underground activities, not yet a commercialized vocation, he, Lorz, had known this mad temptation to let nothing go by.

There was no end to it. You had to learn to compromise.

"You do more harm than good, finally," resumed the old doctor. "Perhaps this will be the end of your association with Teddy. I will reflect on the question."

Lorz stared for a moment into those magnified colorless eyes. He stood up and left without a word.

Two weeks went by.

On January 4, as the log recorded, his assistant was given permission to see Theodore. She told her employer about it the next day.

"You wouldn't recognize him," she said, her face illuminated. "I don't want to spoil it for you. You'll see tomorrow."

Lorz wasn't so sure. When he phoned the hospital to arrange the visit he steeled himself to hear in administratively neutral language that there were no more visits for him. However nothing had changed.

But the next day at five he found Room 416 empty. He was told that Teddy was with Dr V.

Two days later his assistant again recounted the extraordinary progress of his candidate. It was like describing a banquet to a starving man. The director rang up the hospital and complained bitterly of the mix-up on Monday. The anonymous woman's voice expressed vague surprise. She wasn't aware of the incident. Yes, of course he could see Teddy tomorrow at four.

The following day at four he came up against a locked door. He heard a slow unintelligible voice from inside. He knocked. There was no response. The voice continued. The director went on knocking, louder and louder. Behind the locked door the old doctor's querulous voice, a second voice, asked who it was.

Lorz identified himself. He mentioned his appointment with Teddy.

The old doctor said that he was disturbing them, he should go away, he had already been told that there would be no more visits for him, ever.

Behind that hateful painfully gasping voice, the other voice went on. It could only be his candidate's. What was he saying? The director raised his fist against the door but before he could pound and pound a nurse came and he was forced to leave.

Lorz visited Silberman's office the next day for intercession on his behalf. At the very beginning of his plea, as soon as he mentioned the foreign doctor's name, he learned that intercession wouldn't be necessary.

Silberman made a small gesture of powerlessness and informed Lorz that Dr Vinovski had succumbed to a heart attack the day before. He had been suffering from a heart condition for years. He should have let up. The attack had occurred during a session with Teddy. It might have had a bad effect on the boy. As it was, even though he was staring at the dead man when the nurse opened up Teddy probably hadn't even realized what had happened.

Dr Silberman paused a moment and added that it wasn't the worst way to go, suddenly and peacefully, in the midst of what one liked best to do. Dr V had been fascinated by Teddy's case. Just the day before he'd rung up Silberman. He'd told him that Teddy had spoken again, not incoherent words this time. He'd been greatly excited. Too excited, as it turned out.

"What words?" Lorz asked, trying to conceal his own excitement. Silberman didn't know. "But he must have written it down somewhere," Lorz protested. He no longer even tried to hide his excitement. "He must have a file. Maybe he recorded it on tape."

Silberman agreed that it was more than possible that he had noted it all down. He had been an extremely methodical man. His papers, however, hadn't been gone through yet. In any case, if Teddy spoke once he would speak again.

The phone in Lorz's study rang again.

His assistant excused herself. Did he want her to ring him up early tomorrow morning? In case he overslept? He assured her that he wouldn't oversleep, not on the morning of the interview with Silberman. It was unlikely he'd sleep at all, he felt like adding. He thanked her, said a definitive, "Good night," and returned to the log and the January 17 entry that had given him the great idea.

On that day, he'd talked to the Volunteer Visitor again in the hospital cafeteria. Yes, she'd said, Teddy had overcome the crisis and was continuing to make progress. There was something negative, though. Teddy's painting job hadn't turned out well at all. He'd been very good at the preliminary work. He derived visible satisfaction from the cleaning of the dirty walls. The application of the paint too was successful as long as the paint was white.

"Why didn't it work out then?"

"It was hard to make him stop," she said cryptically.

Did that mean in terms of time or walls? Lorz wondered.

She repeated that ability to work was the precondition for an end to institutional dependency.

Jan 20. The obvious solution. Why did it take me so long? Think it over carefully. No precipitation. Try to persuade Doctor Silberman. Talk about it to DR?

The clock on his desk rang the end of that evening's session.

With military discipline Lorz shut the log. Yawning, he placed the bottle and the two notebooks in the desk drawer. He took the alarm clock and the glass with him and turned the lights out in his study with the exception of the circle of light on the cacti. He washed out the glass in the kitchen, dried it and placed it in its former position in the cupboard. He washed his hands and face. He brushed his teeth meticulously for three minutes. He set the alarm clock for ten past six. He also set a second alarm clock for the same hour, for safety's sake although he felt sure that his assistant would ring too. Before he went to bed he opened the closet and made his final choice of clothing for the interview.

As he'd suspected, he couldn't sleep.

***

3

Lorz wore the most subdued of his ties, none of which were exclamatory, also his most sober jacket, an almost funereal charcoal gray. He surveyed his voice, not allowing it to escape into registers other than those of dryness and matter-of-factness. He felt that he projected soundness, a quality he set great and envious store by. The black leather briefcase provided assistance here with the competent click of the brass clasp as he freed the flap and took out the typed pages of his proposition (Silberman might ask to see it and weren't the mind-men graphology experts too?). This too was for show, for he had it all within him, rehearsed in the small hours a hundred times.

He sat down and explained with a purposeful touch of pedantry in vocabulary and syntax that the idea had not originated with him. His assistant, Miss D Ruda – with whom the doctor, he believed, was acquainted – had suggested the move.

Technically this was true. But it was also true that the idea had come to Lorz a week earlier, an idea so bold that he'd kept it to himself, not daring to broach the subject to Silberman. He polished it in his mind. He rounded the edges, experimented with cunning formulations and time went by. He decided to talk it over with his assistant but kept putting it off. He was certain that she would point out all the dangers involved. She was always right about whatever concerned Ideal.

But one day she said point-blank: "Why don't we try Teddy out on a part-time basis? Here in Ideal I mean."

Lorz gazed across the office at his assistant for a few seconds before replying dubiously: "I'd never thought of that." She found arguments. He persisted in his skepticism. The boy's first job attempts had been fiascoes, he pointed out. Mightn't he prove disruptive? She went to great lengths to convince him. He said he'd think it over and if he accepted her proposition would speak about it to Dr Silberman.

Lorz repeated with a slight deprecatory smile that his assistant had suggested the move. Frankly he had, at first, reacted negatively to it. He'd had "misgivings." ("Misgivings" was the soundest of terms. He repeated it). Then after serious reflection he'd come round. At least to the extent of being willing to give it a try. He'd drawn up the model contract. But it was to be understood that strictly business considerations would determine if the experiment was to be continued. Sentiments had no place in business. He started reading it after a dry cough.

1. He, Edmond Lorz, director of Ideal Poster, agreed conditionally to hire the individual known as Teddy on a part-time basis for office work...

The doctor interrupted him. "I'm the wrong person to be telling this to. I have very little to do with Teddy. In any case, I find the idea strange to say the least. You propose to hire Teddy in your office? In the very place where he was injured? You can't be serious."

"Exactly my own reaction when my assistant made the suggestion," said Lorz with a slight smile of satisfaction at their concordance of views. "But then I reflected on the matter. After all I was injured there too. That didn't prevent me from returning. I also came to the conclusion that the office is, in a sense, no longer the same office."

Lorz paused and then explained untruthfully that the office had been totally renovated following the explosion.

"He wouldn't recognize the place, I assure you. The new wall is completely different from the old one. And the other walls have been repainted a different color. The furniture has been changed."

The director realized, too late, that these fabrications would oblige him at the very least to have the office repainted. At what expense? It could be added to the long list of expenditures on the boy's behalf, like the ivory chess-set, the watch and all those spurned delicacies. He drove the distracting idea out of his mind and concentrated on the immediate task.

Moreover, he added (and he knew that this would be a decisive argument), Teddy would be in the constant presence of two individuals whom he knew and trusted. Lorz paused to give additional weight to his point.

The doctor said nothing. But his willingness to go on listening was an initial victory. Lorz peered down at the interrupted typed sentence.

Agreed, then, conditionally to hire on a part-time basis the individual known as Teddy for office work at the prevailing rates for such work. Naturally there would be a trial period of three weeks.

Silberman wanted to know what sort of office work.

Transporting and pouring harmless chemicals, paints for the most part, Lorz explained. Preparation of knapsacks. Maintenance of the wheeled stepladders, largely cleaning and oiling. Sorting posters. Sweeping up. Small errands. Lorz went on and on with the enumeration. The catalogue of tasks to be accomplished in three hours sounded like exploitation. Actually it could all be disposed of in forty minutes.

Silberman came up with another objection. Apparently he'd finally taken the underground early or late enough to notice the "eradicators" as he called them. He found their job highly dangerous. What if the ladder rolled off the platform onto the rails? With the eradicator on it.

Lorz smiled politely at this almost comic notion. He pointed out that the ladder was equipped with a foolproof braking device. Such an accident was unthinkable. In any case it was out of the question that Teddy would ever participate in poster-rectification.

He shared Silberman's disquiet but for reasons which he'd already tried to explain to the Volunteer Visitor and which he kept to himself now. The underground was turning into a jungle. Still another of his operators was in hospital, not stabbed, this one, but beaten bloody. It was out of the question exposing the boy to such perils.

No, the only risks involved in the proposition were purely commercial ones, he explained. For himself if the experiment didn't work. He felt confident that there were no risks as regarded Teddy.

The director leaned back in his chair and waited while the doctor abstracted himself from his surroundings. His globular eyes blinked steadily behind the lenses of his pince-nez and his forefinger tapped on his desk. Suddenly he was back with Lorz.

"Teddy might very well prove to be... difficult, let's say. You would have to be prepared for that."

The director said he was confident he could deal with any problems that might arise.

Silberman glanced at his watch and got up.

"The Commission meets on February 12," he said. "I'll mention your proposal. That's all I can do. I have no power of decision. I promise nothing."

Beneath his joy, which he carefully concealed, Lorz wondered if the Commission in question was the same Commission that decided to switch off patients judged hopelessly comatose.

An alarming thought came to him.

Much more was at stake than permission for his candidate to try out a new job. The Commission, he felt certain, would rule on Theodore's fate.

The job at Ideal had to succeed.

Two weeks later the Commission accepted the proposal. Theodore was to start on Monday, February 24. He would be inspected at weekly intervals. At the start he would be accompanied to and from the job.

The director had lost one of his names for the boy. Theodore was no longer a candidate.

***

4

At exactly 2:30 in the afternoon, accurate to the second, the new member of staff bulked in the doorframe of Ideal Poster with his habitual expression of profound meditation or void. The dead doctor's squat detached shadow was there too.

Instead of handing over his charge and leaving, the attendant followed Theodore into the office. He installed himself in a chair with his comic books.

Doctor Silberman had told Lorz that Theodore would be convoyed to and from the office but not that the convoyer would remain there. Later Lorz rang up the Commission number he'd been given "in case of problems." He was informed that it was a last-minute arrangement. The attendant's presence would cease at the end of the week "if all went well."

Lorz didn't dare ask what would happen if all didn't go well. He could imagine that Theodore's presence would cease too. And what did "not go well" mean exactly? Failure on the job? Or more than that?

With the squat shadow there all afternoon long they had to invent activities for the boy. He had to be meaningfully occupied every second now. The director and his assistant had suspected that he'd dispose of the day's scheduled tasks too quickly to fill the three hours.

Sure enough, Theo instantly grasped what was expected of him. In less than an hour of dedicated toil he swept up, cleaned and oiled the wheeled ladders, fetched heavy bundles of posters, filled the hundred or so bottles with chemicals and wielded the 25-kilo paint cans like feathers without spilling a drop. They hadn't really looked beyond those tasks. They'd vaguely imagined time-consuming activities like cutouts till 5:30pm.

But now it turned out that they weren't alone with him. Maybe the Commission (wrongly) suspected that the job was a pretext, a last-chance refuge against permanent institutionalizing. Didn't this explain why the attendant was there, looking up from garish heroes and monsters each time the new member of staff moved about? If Theodore just stood staring inward or beyond after he finished each of his fragmentary chores (as he was doing now: quick, find something, anything, but what?) wouldn't the attendant report the fraud? He was a spy.

The director whispered his suspicions to his assistant. She handled the problem with her usual occupational efficiency.

"Oh Teddy, I forgot to show you around!" she exclaimed, smiling at him and placing her hand on his bare arm with a jingle of bracelets.

It was true. Rattled by those flat black eyes flicking up at them from the comic book at unpredictable intervals, they'd omitted the traditional introduction to new members of staff and had set the boy to work immediately. Showing a new operator about was normally a perfunctory ten minute operation. But she eked it out ingeniously to an hour.

She showed and explained everything, loudly. Coming after Theodore's virtuosity sweeping up which one couldn't help admiring (completely to the detriment of the director's jobs at hand) it was another work disturbance, first of all for her. How could she perform her usual tasks during the showing-round stint? She hadn't even an instant to open the early afternoon mail. Lorz did it in her place. He also had to answer the phone.

He had great trouble concentrating. Seated at his desk, trying to cope with the correspondence, he couldn't help hearing her laughing invitation to "the private place." He couldn't help looking up as the squat shadow accompanied them to the storeroom as though he too was curious to learn about the operation of the toilet.

Now the phone rang. The director's left ear, not engaged with the dissatisfied client took in the raging waterfall, the swirl and gurgle of the toilet bowl. She'd pulled the chain. She waited until the tank trickle finally ended: a minute to the good. The director heard her explaining to Theodore that she'd asked Mr Lorz for years to have the plumber in. She pulled the chain again. She did it three times and had Theodore do it four times. Her voice occupied the whole vast room as she distinguished between the hot and cold water of the washbasin as though the boy couldn't see the self-explanatory blue and red of the taps.

Wasn't she overdoing it? The director could hear her saying: "So remember, clock-wise to turn it on, counterclockwise to turn it off. Now you try." She invented (or did they really happen?) stories of operators who had scalded themselves and mentioned traditional Central Mountain remedies against burns.

She took advantage of Theo's fascination with the giant underground map and its numbered employee-pins. She rattled off their names and physical characteristics, neither of which the director could ever recall himself. She enumerated the transfer stations where the operators were active and the number of posters in each station. Some of her figures were accurate, others pure inventions. The director knew the figures by heart.

There were still forty-eight minutes to go when Theodore seceded from his surroundings. He stood there motionless, staring beyond or within. "Unplugged" was his assistant's inelegant term for it.

She came up with another idea. She captured his attention and gave him a pile of blank labels. She asked him to change the perfectly legible labels on the chemical bottles. To slow down his frightening pace she stipulated Middle Gothic lettering and labored over a sample. It took her five minutes. Theodore accomplished the whole senseless task in thirty-seven minutes. The director judged that it would have taken anyone else two hours to do that many. Would the operators be able to make out the new labels? he wondered. In Middle Gothic they were barely legible.

When the door finally closed behind Teddy and his escort Lorz and his assistant both let themselves down in the nearest chairs. There was just the whir of the giant ventilator. They remained motionless and dumb for a few minutes, no more, because it was 5:30pm and their real day was just beginning. She went out and bought sandwiches.

They wound up at ten-thirty. He told her to be careful in the underground and bus returning home. Hers were among the worst lines. He also said that of course she'd be paid time-and-a-half for the overtime.

The director had trouble sleeping that night.

He got to the office the next morning an hour earlier than usual to get a little work done. He found his assistant at her desk, plunged in papers. She looked up red-eyed. She'd had trouble sleeping she said. She'd been there for an hour already. All of today's work would have to be crammed into the morning if yesterday afternoon was a fair sample of what awaited them.

Had she thought of Teddy's tasks for the afternoon? She'd thought of little else all night long, she replied. Lorz confided that he too had spent a good part of the night devising activities for the new member of staff. They compared tasks, analyzed their respective show of diligence, disagreed, compromised, made a final selection.

She tried to be cheerful. Next week "the spy" would be gone. It was the term she used. She accepted her employer's interpretation of the attendant's presence, amplified it, even.

Tuesday was like Monday.

Wednesday morning the director came up with an idea to save his business and his sanity. He phoned the special Commission number and explained to Mr Mysels – his exclusive channel of communication now for whatever concerned Theo – that something unexpected had come up, an urgent meeting requiring the presence of his assistant and himself. He wouldn't be needing Teddy tomorrow afternoon. The boy would of course be paid for the three hours.

There was a long silence from the other end. Lorz was used to this by now. Mr Mysels had come across as a pathologically suspicious individual accepting no statement at face value, his parsimonious voice nagging for explicit confession. Whatever Lorz said was sniffed at, then worried as a dog did a bone.

Finally Mysels said: "What's he done?"

"Teddy? Nothing at all."

The other examined the director's prompt answer for long seconds, turned it over, prodded it.

"He's done nothing at all?" he finally echoed. "You mean he refuses to work?"

"He works when we ask him to, of course," the director replied, doing his best to keep irritation out of his voice.

Silence at the other end of the line.

At last: "You have to ask him all the time for him to keep at it, you mean?"

The director said with a certain testiness: "Theo's work is fully satisfactory."

Silence.

Now puzzled and suspicious: "Who are you talking about, exactly? Who is Theo?"

The director had to explain that he'd meant Teddy, of course. Teddy was Theodore. Theo was a shortened form of Theodore, just as Teddy was. Even to the director his explanation sounded confused, as though three distinct individuals were involved.

The pause was even longer. Hadn't he understood? The director added that it was like the English name William which could be Will or Bill. "Or Billy," he added. It sounded like a crowd now. The silence at the other end was even longer.

"Or Willy, even," the director couldn't help adding.

Finally Mysels asked curtly: "Who is this talking, please?"

He had to assure the other man that he was talking to Edmond Lorz, the director of Ideal Poster.

Lorz finally retreated out of the whole thing. He told Mysels that his assistant had just passed him a note saying tomorrow's appointment had been cancelled. So of course Theo – Teddy – could come that afternoon as usual.

They staggered through that afternoon and the two following afternoons with Theo.

On Friday evening they weakly congratulated each other that they'd be alone with Teddy the following week. Mysels had confirmed a few hours earlier that the attendant would continue conveying Teddy to and from the Ideal Poster office but would no longer be in attendance.

The following week, however, there was the job inspector. Supposedly the job inspector was to visit the office once a week at an unspecified hour and day. Actually he showed up five times that week. He was a stout, balding young man with full red lips, slightly crossed eyes and flaring nostrils.

His first visit had surprised Theo unplugged, gazing at the giant underground map. The job inspector stared hard at him, frowning, while the director cast about for an explanation. At that moment his assistant emerged jingling from the storeroom, the waterfall raging behind her. She swiftly placed herself between the young job inspector and Teddy. She smiled and introduced herself. Her voice was musical.

The director thought he saw the young man's wide nostrils quivering like a horse's as in response to her scent. Although he seemed already to have lost interest in Teddy – her body masked him – she accounted for the boy's apparent idleness. He had, she explained, just shifted about the hundreds of piles of posters for a solid hour and they insisted on his resting for ten minutes. There was no question exploiting him.

How did she manage to come up with plausible-sounding inventions off the bat like that, the director wondered. It was a gift, like absolute pitch. Meanwhile Theo had emerged.

She turned to him. "Don't like to be a slave-driver, Teddy, but we've got more work for you."

She had him do more labels, in New Gothic this time. She and the job inspector stood behind Theo looking at those hands. At least she did. The young man seemed indifferent to the boy's miraculous proficiency and asked Dorothea question after question in a low voice. He seemed to be staring insistently down at her neckline although this may have been an illusion created by the faulty focus of his eyes. Why was she laughing now?

Finally the fat, cross-eyed job inspector went away.

He was back two hours later. The job inspector seemed to come mainly to inspect the director's assistant. Still, he was obliged to show interest in the director's new member of staff too. He tried to justify his return by questions supposedly forgotten that morning.

The next day he was back again, with no attempt at justification.

After his second visit they had to take emergency measures. It was doubtful after all, the director now acknowledged, that the squat attendant had been entrusted with spying functions. But espionage was explicit in the fat, cross-eyed young man's very title. If the job inspector came upon Theodore during one of the boy's frequent fazed-out periods he'd be sure to inform the autocratic life-and-death Commission people that the job was largely pretence (a fact that Lorz now allowed his mind to formulate in such bald terms for the first time). The job would be eliminated, along with Theodore.

The job inspector had accepted the first explanation for the boy's idleness. But the excuse couldn't be indefinitely repeated. After the job inspector's second impromptu visit, during which fortunately Teddy had been busy with the broom, the director's assistant came up with another good idea.

She trained Teddy to drop whatever he was doing (or, more frequently, snap out of what he wasn't doing). At the command, "Teddy! The ladders! Clean and oil the ladders!" he went into action. The boy insisted on keeping all five of the spare ladders in the office itself, strictly aligned. Working over the contraptions with their strut-like rungs and their clumsy wheels they resembled archaic wingless flying machines and he a mechanic, land-bound but fanatically devoted, preparing the machines for some heroic dawn patrol. Sometimes he would climb up on one of them and then climb down.

So the third time the job inspector came, the signal was rapidly given and the man found Theodore busy over the ladders. The fourth time too. The job inspector ended by wondering about the necessity for such incessant cleaning and lubricating. "You have no idea of the wear and tear on them in the underground," Dorothea explained.

During the man's fifth visit Theodore started experimenting with the last of the superfluously oiled ladders. He kicked off powerfully, hoisting himself to the top step. His dark gold head skimmed the filthy ceiling as the machine jolted across the room at great speed. Despite his air of total abstraction he skillfully avoided the desks, the chairs and the filing cabinet at the very last moment by shifting his weight. The ladder swerved, teetering on two and sometimes one wheel.

"Why is he doing that?" the inspector asked, removing his eyes from the director's assistant and following the evolution of the vehicle with alarm and wonder.

"He's testing the wheels," she said quickly. "They're the weak spot. It's part of the wear and tear I told you about."

She recounted glib wry anecdotes to illustrate her point. She was a genius at inventions. She didn't tense and blink and come out with her inventions too fast. The job inspector gazed at her with an expression of absolute belief.

"He seems to be having a good time, anyhow," the man said, staring at the boy's daring figures and then nervously pulling back as the ladder sailed a centimeter past him.

Did the job inspector mean that as a criticism? "Why should work be synonymous with boredom?" the director asked. He was pleased with his own invention even though the statement ran counter to his basic philosophy.

Lorz felt he was cracking under the tension of those visits. He almost rang up Mr Mysels of the Commission to ask about them. At the last moment he rang off, remembering his last conversation with the man. If the single weekly visit hadn't in fact been modified and Mysels learned that in less than forty-eight hours the job inspector had inspected Theodore five times already wouldn't he (Mysels) conclude that something was radically amiss with the new member of staff?

The director could hardly attribute those visits openly to his assistant's perfume, neckline and manner. In self-defense the job inspector would be sure to justify his repeated presence by failings supposedly observed in Theodore. So the director hung up and went on worrying.

However, the problem was solved the next day. At eleven his assistant got a call. She laughed musically and returned from lunch half an hour late. "Peter invited me for lunch," she explained. Lorz didn't have to be told that Peter was the fat, cross-eyed job inspector. He said nothing.

After a while she explained: "It's to keep him away from the office. You didn't notice but he doesn't really come to inspect Teddy. If I see him outside he won't come so often."

Lorz thanked her for her self-sacrifice.

"Oh it's no sacrifice. He's a nice boy. A little dull, maybe."

The director had another worry. What if Silberman visited them? The doctor had vaguely spoken of dropping in to see how Teddy was doing. In the course of his proposal to hire Teddy the director had foolishly mentioned new furniture and a paint job for his office. What would Silberman say when he saw the old shabbiness? Mightn't he conclude that all the other statements of Lorz's were misrepresentations too?

On Wednesday of the third week (as Theo sat staring at the giant map of the underground) the director asked his assistant how much she reckoned it would cost to hire painters to do the job on successive weekends.

"Here?"

Theo, roused by her alarm, followed her melodramatic gesture at the four walls. She objected that she was allergic to paint fumes. They gave her blinding headaches. She acted like a madwoman when that happened, she said.

No problem, Lorz replied. He went over to the panel next to the ventilator. It was permanently on Force One. But there were ten speeds. He touched a button and the blades blurred behind the protective wicker. The whir rose to a deafening roar for a few seconds. Papers on the desks took off. And that was only Speed Five, he shouted. He quickly returned to Force One. Imagine Speed Ten on all night Sunday, he said, now too loudly. In a matter of hours the paint fumes would be evacuated, he said, lowering his voice. Nothing could resist Force Ten.

She was unconvinced. He compromised. At least a washing, to brighten the room up. The walls were filthy.

The next day Theo came in with a bulky package under his arm.

"What's that, Teddy? A present for me?" said Dorothea.

The boy went into the storeroom and a minute later emerged naked except for inadequate (or superfluous) briefs, a figure out of Greek mythology bearing anachronistic gifts: two pails, three sponges, folded plastic sheets.

"Teddy!" she exclaimed, staring at him as he transported her desk alongside the director's. With dedicated purposeful gestures he unfolded the plastic sheets. Swiftly he placed them over the two desks and the filing cabinet.

The director said nothing. Powerless, he looked on without moving.

In accents of growing alarm his assistant said: "What's that, Teddy?" then "What are you trying to do, Teddy?" Finally: "What are you doing, Teddy?" It was a pointless question since by then he'd rolled a ladder up to the two desks. Also pointless now, her faint wail: "You can't do that now, we have to work!"

But he'd calculated everything. He secured the brake-device and climbed up and started in. It was another one of his magnetic performances.

Lorz stood stock still, staring. How could you not look? It was like being in the grip of some power.

The boy seemed endowed with more than the normal complement of arms, a near-naked Shiva, as he warred on the ceiling filth alternatively with the two sponges. The right-hand sponge skimmed and sipped the cleaning liquid in one pail and created a vast arc of brightness overhead. His great hand descended like a hawk, balled into a fist, expelling a dirty dribble into the second pail. At the same time his left hand dipped the second sponge into the third pail of clean water and mopped up the traces of cleaning liquid on the arc of cleanliness while the right hand prepared for the following assault.

Over and over, no respite, perfect synchronization. Now the right-hand sponge surged forward in broad thrusts as in a schematized military map: breakthroughs of cleanliness into the somber front, now the pockets of filth surrounded and annihilated.

He was operating above the two desks. The plastic sheets proved superfluous. Not a drop fell on them. Simply a trickle down his muscular upraised arm, disappearing in the dark gold tangle of his armpit. Or there, another trickle past the left nipple, down the arch of the rib cage, down the taut muscled abdomen and then vanishing into the broadening criss-cross of dark gold hair beneath the eye-like navel.

"He heard what you said about washing down the office," Dorothea exclaimed reproachfully to the director. "We'll have to watch what we say."

Lorz looked on in silence. Abruptly he broke off and returned to his desk, which Theodore had freed of the plastic sheet. The ceiling above formed a light patch, almost white in contrast to the dinginess that surrounded it. He'd finished there. Business could go on. Business had to go on.

"Business can go on now," he said, seating himself at his desk. They'd wasted too much time already. Dorothea sat down at hers. Head in hands Lorz plunged into the poster statistics, trying to abstract himself from what was going on in the room. His hands even covered his ears although the only sounds audible above the ticking wall clock and the whirring ventilator was the whisper of the sponge on the ceiling, the trickle of water in the pail from the squeezed sponge and Theodore's hard breathing.

They were free to work now. Theo was banishing dirt at a safe distance from them. But Dorothea made no pretence at work. She stared at the boy, mesmerized, lips parted.

The director couldn't help looking up. Theo's activity was disruptive even at that distance. You couldn't help looking in admiration of such virtuosity, wondering what he'd come up with next. Why, for example, was he now winding string about the axles of the wheels, in self-sabotage?

Everything had an answer. Now he didn't even have to descend to advance the ladder. His arms stretched out and up in a kitsch gesture of welcome to a dawn figured by the mercury tubes. His great hands pressed up against the ceiling and started walking forward, pulling the unbraked ladder, its mobility safely tempered with the string that clogged the axles, into new virgin territories of filth.

The director broke off and plunged back into the figures. Unconquerable peripheral vision informed him that Theodore had finished with the ceiling and now was attacking the walls.

The director remained with the statistics until the squat shadow came and took the boy away.

She was saying something to him. His head ached. He was as exhausted as though he'd done the cleaning job himself. Finally he looked up to the strange luminosity of the office and listened to what she was saying.

They hadn't got much work done that afternoon but they were getting used to that by now, weren't they? Her employer didn't answer. He was staring down at the statistics again with that same distraught or even tragic air, it seemed to her. She tried to console him by saying that at least this time the disturbance had paid off. Just look. It was like having the sun in the office now. Maybe it was a bit mottled and streaked here and there but that would disappear once the ceiling and walls dried completely.

So finally the disturbance had been worth it, she said. It was practically as good as a real paint job and at a fraction of the time and cost and trouble. They'd had a scare at the start but everything had worked out.

***

5

"Oh no, not that, Teddy, you're not going to do that!"

Nearly naked again, a surreal fisherman, he held the sheet by two corners and cast it out like a net over the desk. It billowed and settled softly, precisely, over her desk, covering the papers, the files, the typewriter, the telephone.

It was the next day, Friday. Minutes before, the squat attendant had deposited Theodore with another, bigger, package beneath his arm. He must have stolen the sheets from the hospital, maybe from his own bed. The name of the hospital was stitched in red in the corner. Fortunately the attendant was no longer there to witness and later testify.

"Oh no, Teddy, I couldn't stand it, I break out in rashes," she went on pleading.

She turned toward her employer. Why didn't he back her up, assert his authority instead of standing there stock still, staring and silent? She was about to appeal for support when her phone began ringing, muffled beneath the sheet.

She thrust her arm under it, groped for the phone, got hopelessly entangled in the coiled wire. With the other hand she grabbed at the vague outline and pressed the sheet-wrapped receiver against her ear.

"I can't hear you," she yelled in reply to the faint gagged sounds.

"Wait," she commanded, exasperated at the caller, at herself for not having thought of the director's phone, at the director for not having answered it himself. Couldn't he see what was happening? She raced over to her employer's desk, nearly tripping over the plastic sheet Teddy had scotched to the floor, too late to rescue the phone from the downward floating sheet. When she finally unshrouded the phone the party had hung up.

By this time Teddy had come out of the storeroom carrying the squat 25-kilo tin of Basic White like a feather, plus brushes, rags, a tin of turpentine, a can. The wheeled ladder was already in place next to the director's desk. He poured Basic White thickly into a two-liter can. He had the same expression of rapt dedication as with the jigsaw puzzles. Of course he didn't spill a drop. He climbed up and started in on the ceiling.

What they'd taken for whiteness after the washing-job was denounced as dinginess by the radiance pouring from his brush. Her eyes started weeping. She broke out coughing.

She cried: "The ventilator! The ventilator!"

Lorz snapped out of his trance and went over to the panel. The sound of the ventilator built up into a tropical hurricane, an airliner taking off. Now it out-decibelled these. It was the mythical Force Ten.

But the fumes went on attacking her eyes and lungs and now her ears and brain were being attacked as well, unbearably. She couldn't stay there. She thought of the storeroom, a possible sanctuary, with its door closed and if this didn't work, the toilet would provide another closed door.

She grabbed up letters and files and trotted distraught toward the storeroom. The phone started ringing again. By the time she picked up the receiver the party had hung up again. The same party as before? How many clients or suppliers had already phoned them? The suppliers didn't matter, but absolutely she had to ring up the twelve clients to make sure.

There it went again on the other desk. The director stood two meters away weeping and watching Theo's performance. He indistinctly heard her yelling at the receiver to speak up, she couldn't hear. She lost the connection.

"And you're paying for all this," she cried to her employer. "You'll have to do something. We can't go on like this. I can't, anyhow." She banged down the receiver and went into the storeroom. She came out struggling into her coat.

He went up to her and shouted, centimeters from her ear: "You can't leave me. Not now."

"Then talk to him," she yelled. "He listens to you. Tell him to stop. What good am I doing here?"

But both of them knew that it was too late to undo the harm. How long would it take for the Basic White to dry? He went over anyhow and clicked the ventilator down to Force One. She protested. She'd choke to death. But otherwise how could he talk to him? he said. She couldn't have it both ways.

In the thunderous near-silence Lorz coaxed the boy down from the ladder. He took him by the arm and sat him down at the spot his assistant pointed to near the phone on the floor at her feet. She didn't realize at first that with the ventilator down to Force One she didn't need to mount her close guard over the phone.

The director sat down opposite Theo. His assistant stood over them, coughing. Tears spouted from her bloodshot eyes. She begged him to turn the ventilator back up. Lorz ignored her and tried to reason with Theo. He interpreted the boy's look as that of a great child or a dog questing approval. How much could he understand? Lorz assembled his ideas.

First of all, he said (touching his new employee's bare thigh to soften what he was about to say) he wanted Theo to understand that his work was perfectly satisfactory, in itself. In itself yesterday's washing job had been a flawless performance. As was, in a sense, today's painting job, even if the choice of paint was perhaps debatable. Unorthodox, in any case. In itself, yes, flawless.

But perhaps, in the greater context, the weekend would have been a more appropriate time for both operations. As he, the director, would have told him, Theodore, had he known of his intention. In the future it would be wise not to undertake any project without, in some way or another, informing Miss Ruda or himself.

The director glanced up at her face with the streaming mascara. She was frowning intensely. Pain or discontent? He addressed himself to the boy again with considerable force.

"In other words, Theodore, do nothing, nothing, nothing without specific instructions on our part!"

Wasn't this too harsh? The director feared he'd unduly stressed his point at the risk of discouraging the boy. He could hear inside his head where the old doctor triumphantly survived: "You must not discourage him, this would make irreparable harm, this you must not do."

He smiled, touched the boy's massive nude shoulder, slippery with perspiration, and added: "But in themselves bravo for the washing and the paint job, oh, bravo!"

The boy returned to the ladder and resumed his paint job.

The director stared at him helplessly. Then he went over and switched the ventilator back on Force Eight. It drowned out his assistant's angry, "Oh bravo, bravo!" and the phone which started ringing. He hastened to her side to mollify her. He came in time to hear her yelling into the receiver: "There's something the matter with this line. The phone people warned us about this. They're tearing up the street outside. They're almost down to our level. I'll phone you back from another line in a few minutes." Even in her distraught state her inventions had the accents of plausibility if you didn't analyze them too closely.

She grabbed up files, paper, pens, her packet of cigarettes. "I can't get any work done here. I'm going to break out in rashes all over any second. I'll phone from outside."

The director too started coughing and weeping. Would it ever dry? It wasn't the new fast-drying odorless paints he'd talked to his assistant about, but Basic White intended for micro-applications on paper, which the operator left in a minute for new defaced posters. Only the rectified ideal figures on the posters could go on imperturbably with their activities in the presence of the stuff. They and Theo.

His assistant instructed Lorz to mount a strict guard over the phone. She left the Ideal office and struggled up the stairs for the fresh air and quiet of a street corner public phone booth.

She returned to the roaring dazzling room twenty minutes later. Teddy had made enormous progress. The air was utterly unbreathable now. The phone was untended. Her employer must have sought refuge in the storeroom. She stepped inside, blinded by tears, and gasped out: "People were queuing up at the booth. They started hammering. You owe me for twelve calls."

He wasn't there. He was in the toilet kneeling before the bowl and vomiting. She closed the door and sat down in the storeroom. When he tottered out she said in a strangely calm voice: "It's much worse than I'd thought. We can't keep him. He's killing you." She rose, clamping her head between her hands and cried out in registers of hysteria well beyond Force Eight: "My head's exploding. He's killing the two of us."

She ran across the office and clicked off the ventilator. As the noise collapsed she marched up to Theo on his ladder. He was sweeping dazzle onto the ceiling, unaffected by the fumes and their agitation below. Alarmed, Lorz followed her unsteadily. She threw her head back to look up into his face.

"You stop that. You stop that immediately. You do what we tell you to do."

She reached up on tiptoe ("No!" the director cried) and wrenched the paintbrush out of his hand. Slobs of dripping whiteness flew on her blouse. Some of it flew in Theo's hair. "My new blouse," she mourned.

In the silence of the room the director could hear the boy's breath coming fast, faster now. He crouched stock still, then leaped down. He towered tensely over her. His eyes were fixed on the dripping brush in her hand. Every muscle in his body stood out in unforgettable deadly beauty.

"Leave the room, quickly!" the director whispered sharply.

He sidled toward the phone on the floor, trying to remember the number of the Commission. But Theo sat down in a chair. He'd broken off contact. He was unplugged. The director stood in front of him to make sure he stayed that way. His assistant disappeared into the storeroom.

A few minutes later Lorz went there to see how she was reacting. He returned quickly, frowning. Suddenly he remembered the dead doctor's squat detached shadow and looked at the wall clock.

In five minutes the attendant would be there in the middle of the madhouse, the fumes, the vomit, and what would he think at the sight of half-naked Theo and his assistant in a similar state, as he'd just seen? The door of the wash-up cubicle was half open and he'd involuntary glimpsed her in the mirror. She'd removed her blouse and was rubbing away at the fabric furiously, her small freckled bare breasts shaking like fists. The paint stain seemed, madly, to be her only concern.

He called her for help and she ran out of the storeroom in a work smock, buttoning herself up wrongly, her bleached vertical pigtail undone, her ruined mask set for new catastrophe till he told her it was nearly 5:30. She gasped with relief and this triggered a fit of coughing.

They gestured and beckoned, all smiles, and miraculously established contact. They pointed at their watches and persuaded Theodore to accompany them into the storeroom. They handed him his discarded clothing piece by piece, no time for him to wash up, both smiling broadly till it hurt, saying soothing things, congratulating him on his paint job.

They hustled him out of the office just as the squat shadow came down the stairs.

Too late, the director noted the white paint splashes in the boy's hair as though this day had aged him, rather than the director and his assistant, by twenty years. Expressionless, the attendant stared at this and at the boy's hastily donned trousers unbuttoned and yawning, then at the director's assistant with her wrongly-buttoned smock loopholed with bare flesh, the disorder of her hair and running mask, then insistently at the director for reasons the director could only guess at for he'd eluded the gaze of the mirror. The attendant's nostrils widened to fully sample the reek of turpentine and paint and, possibly, vomit.

Those flat black eyes were judging as though he'd been posthumously deputized by the old doctor. What crudely articulated tales of madness and orgy would he bear back to the hospital?

Meekly Theo let himself be led away.

Holding their breath, the director and his assistant traversed the roaring reeking glaring battlefield of the office and retreated into the storeroom, shutting the door. They collapsed into chairs. Wasn't she crying?

"And it was all my idea," she brought out. "I persuaded you to hire him. You didn't want to."

"Yes I did," he said to comfort her and stave off breakdown (although her tears may have had a chemical cause).

"We can't go on like this," she cried. "We'll go out of business. We'll go out of our minds. He's too disruptive."

"Yes, disruptive. Certainly disruptive. Dangerous as well."

It was imprinted on his brain. He suspected it would be one of his permanent visions: the nearly nude figure towering over her with the shining menace of those tensed muscles.

She looked puzzled at the word "dangerous." Clearly she didn't know what he was talking about. All she'd retained from the scene was her exercise of authority ("Somebody had to tell him to stop," she said later) and the boy's obedience. Those five seconds of muscled crouch and harsh breathing had been evacuated from her memory. The director made a vague gesture and didn't elaborate.

Dorothea went into the toilet and put her damp blouse on. She reconstructed her hairdo and her face. When she came out her employer hadn't moved. His eyes were closed. She stared into his face, went into the toilet again and came back with a glass of water and the pills, saying that with all this craziness she'd forgotten. She waited until he swallowed them. She struggled into her coat and got his for him. He said he was staying a while. The job had to be finished. They couldn't have another day like this Monday.

Dorothea took off her coat and slipped on the work smock. She'd help him with the paint job, she brought out between retching coughs.

At that, he put on his coat and said he'd find someone to do the job over the weekend. He added that Basic White and all the other paints would have to be kept under lock and key. The Volunteer Worker had said that he didn't know where to stop. The storeroom would be next, of course. Then maybe the long stretch of dingy corridor.

So the handling of the paints which he did so expertly would have to be stricken off the dwindling list of his chores, they agreed.

"Maybe they'll be able to find some other job for him," she said as they walked slowly toward his underground station and her bus stop. "We can't keep him. You know that."

"I don't see how we can possibly keep him," he agreed.

He said goodbye and went down the underground steps. She walked on to her bus stop. He halted at the bottom of the stairs and waited. When he judged she was far enough he cautiously climbed back to street level and returned to his roaring office and started in on the job.

By 11:00pm the next day he had finished. He'd vomited only twice. When he got home he threw open the shutters and windows everywhere except in his mother's room and the two locked rooms where he never went. He took a hot bath, then a shower, vomited again and went to bed. He was sure he'd sleep through to Monday morning.

It seemed that he'd scarcely shut his eyes when the phone rang. The luminous dial of his alarm clock showed quarter past two. The open windows were black with night. It all tumbled out breathlessly into his ear.

"Dorothea Ruda. I tried to reach you all day Saturday. I thought something was the matter with you again. I couldn't sleep. I thought you couldn't either because of what I said. How can you possibly sleep after what I said? I said terrible things about Teddy, about getting rid of him. And you agreed. Why did you agree? We couldn't do that. It simply isn't possible. We'd have that on our conscience all our lives. I would, anyhow. We can handle him all right. He won't be disruptive anymore. I have an idea about that. First of all you have to be firm with him. You're not firm enough with the boy. Let me tell you about my idea."

She went on and on. It didn't get past his eardrum. He said "Yes" at regular intervals. How long she went on he couldn't tell because when he woke up ten hours later he was still holding the receiver. A long buzz had replaced her voice. He spent the rest of the day in bed.

On Monday Lorz got up very early. The windows were black with night again. His head still aching, he stumbled into his study, sat down at the desk and stared dully at the Commission's progress report. Normally it was to be filled in and mailed next Friday. There was a page for each of the four weeks. Heavy print instructed the employer to give for each week a detailed description of the work performance of: In No. 2 ball-pointed black was written the name "Teddy."

The director unscrewed his fountain pen and stared down at the page for the first week. Then he turned to the second week, fingering his pen. Then the terrible third week. And then the fourth week that faced them: what next? Could he wait that long? Finally he turned to the last page entitled "Conclusions".

This was easier. It required no initiative, just checks in the appropriate boxes. "On the whole and taking into account the special features of the case, Teddy's work can best be described as: 1.Very Poor. 2. Poor. 3. Acceptable. 4. Satisfactory. 5. Fully Satisfactory. They had provided no category for Fully Chaotic. The director decided to fill in the Report at the office and send it out a week in advance. Even so it was more than likely that they would have Teddy on their hands for the next few days. How could more chaos be avoided?

They held a war council later that morning in the ghastly white office. They had the strange feeling of being plunged, effaced, in the dead center of a giant vat of Basic White. The reek had subsided a bit. The director had lowered the ventilator to Force Four. Conversation was possible now. They glanced nervously at their watches. In four hours he would be there. The thing was to break the fixation. Clearly he was on a paint fixation. As agreed, they placed all of the paint in a locker behind a stout padlock. Just as she was about to speak about her idea, he asked what they were going to have Teddy do today. She suggested cutouts.

"Theodore wouldn't like that," he objected. "He's basically constructive, not destructive. I'm speaking about pictures. He likes to put pictures together not take them apart. Remember the jig-saw puzzles."

She suggested having him cosmetize posters. He was so good at it. He wouldn't be a disturbance doing that. For want of a better idea Lorz agreed. Poster-cosmetizing was sure to be less disastrous in its side effects in the few days he'd remain with Ideal. She dug up unused graffitied posters from four years of tests. "Maybe there aren't enough," she said. "Maybe we'd better prepare more. He works so fast." She chose others. They began marring poster after poster.

"When I think that the aim of Ideal is to cosmetize, not to deface," said the director after a while. "A double waste of time: our defacing and his cosmetizing." He penciled a scowling face in a cheese sky.

"At least if he cosmetized the posters in one of the stations, instead of here," she said, glancing quickly at her employer. She felt-penciled a red arrow-pierced heart in a soft-drink lawn.

As they worked on in silence he reminded himself to fill in the progress report today if he had time. If not, then tomorrow without fail.

They were still defacing posters when Operator 7 phoned in from Three Nuns. A gang of suburban toughs had, he claimed, stripped him at knifepoint of his wallet, trousers and shoes plus the ladder. Things were getting too dangerous in the underground. He wanted a substantial rise otherwise he'd quit.

The director suspected that the story was pure fabrication to justify the demand for more money and the disappearance of the ladder, which he must have sold for a fix. The director refused and hung up. Untypically, his assistant approved his decision. He'd expected her to support the man's claims and offer to bring trousers and shoes to his underground phone booth.

"Who needs him now?" she said mysteriously.

The director instructed her to ring up the names on the applicant waiting list. No need for applicants with her idea, she said. What idea? he asked.

"Don't you remember? I told you about my Idea over the phone last night when we couldn't sleep, how we could employ Teddy for real, not be disturbed one bit and make money in the bargain. You agreed one hundred percent. You said "Yes" to everything. Before you fell asleep, that is. It came to me like an inspiration. Do you want me to tell you about it again?"

She took a sheet of paper out of her bag and looked at it as though about to deliver a talk.

Lorz replied that he didn't remember a thing about her idea. He must have fallen asleep already. It had been 2:30 in the morning when she woke him up, he reminded her. But he understood what the idea was from what she'd already said. "You know what my position is on that subject. There's no point even discussing it."

Still, he listened to her arguments. She didn't have to convince him of the advantages – all purely theoretical, unfortunately – in having Teddy work as an operator in the underground. First, as she said, it would keep him away from the office, avoiding further disasters, allowing them to get on with things. Then there was his incredible skill at restoring posters. Predictably, he could do the work of two or three operators. She looked down at her paper. She'd calculated the savings to Ideal. She told him what they would be.

Money wasn't everything, he interrupted, whatever she might imagine he thought. Did she have any idea how many people had been killed in the underground so far this year?

Dorothea relativized the violence. It was like the number of people who died from bee stings or snakebites. Practically negligible if you considered the number of bees and snakes and people. Over the past twelve month period there'd been – she glanced down at her paper – twenty-eight murders committed, good enough, but negligible compared to the five hundred million annual trips in the underground.

Six hundred million, seven hundred thousand, in round figures, the director couldn't help correcting. She looked triumphant at this rectification which further diluted the violence. Crossing the street every day, she said, was probably more dangerous than traveling in the underground. But there was another point. None of those twenty-eight murders had been committed in Crossroads. Probably not many assaults either. She had statistics on the killings but not on the assaults, she said.

The director, who had statistics on everything in his head, assented grudgingly. Crossroads was an important transfer station with a direct entrance into the vast new Interior Building that housed the Central Police Station. Policemen came and went at all hours. It was the safest of all the stations. No murders had ever been committed there unless you counted three years before when a policeman had gone berserk and opened fire on the rush hour crowd, killing five passengers and then himself. The crime rate was probably the lowest of all the stations but not the graffiti rate. At least one operator was assigned to Crossroads. He saw what she was driving at.

She hadn't finished. She'd done her homework on the subject. It wasn't only a question of place. It was also a question of time. Over a period of five years, she said, glancing down at the paper again, eighty-five percent of the physical violence against the Ideal operators had occurred during the night shift.

Now she came out with it. A special shift could be created for Teddy in the Crossroads station, at the safest time, say from noon to 6:00pm. Anyhow, with that build of his, he could handle a whole gang. The sight of those arms would send them running, she said. Maybe not the women, she added as a joke.

Did she know – she must have – that the creation of an afternoon shift had once been one of the director's dreams? The twelve operators on the night shift and then the early-early shift barely managed to clean the posters for the morning rush hour crowd in the stations where they worked. The rectified posters gathered graffiti again in the afternoon hours. They had to confront the evening rush crowd in that disgraced state. It was one of the weak spots in Ideal's services. But the creation of a third shift assumed financial means the concern didn't possess. In his ambitious younger days Lorz used to indulge in fantasies of grandeur. He'd imagine a complete coverage of the capital's underground network. Ideal Poster offered its services in only fifteen of the sixty-three stations. To be sure, these were the biggest ones and accounted for over thirty-five percent of all the underground advertising posters. But in those intransigent days Lorz longed for a total war against the vandals, even in their lesser fortresses, a war carried out by an army of vigorous young operators. He often pictured them, handsome and earnest, fitted out in distinctive blue and white uniforms with Ideal Poster emblazoned on the back.

The director came up with more counter arguments.

Finally she asked him if he wanted Teddy to be sent to an institution.

He didn't answer for a while. Then he said, no, he didn't want that.

He reached for the progress report and uncapped his fountain pen. She got up and looked over his shoulder as he turned to the last page.

"On the whole and taking into account the special features of the case, Teddy's work can best be described as: 1.Very Poor. 2. Poor. 3. Acceptable. 4. Satisfactory. 5. Fully Satisfactory."

He checked Fully Satisfactory.

"Everything'll work out," she said. "You'll see."

***

6

So after all, the seventh candidate (originally the thirteenth) went down to the illustrated tunnels with his own knapsack and wheeled ladder as if the blast the year before at 9:00am March 12 had never occurred and he'd been chosen that first time.

At the beginning, the move seemed to be turning out as Lorz's assistant had promised it would. The economy was appreciable. Operator 7 wasn't replaced. Peace had returned to the Ideal office. And the danger to his new employee hadn't materialized.

Still, the director was uneasy. He accompanied the boy the first few times. He told him that Crossroads was his territory, totally, but that under no circumstances should he ever try to operate in any other station. He told him this over and over. He added that in case of trouble he shouldn't hesitate to abandon the equipment and run for the nearest exit. Finally, that if the police asked him what he was doing to the posters he should show them his Ideal ID card with his new color photo and point at the phone number. With an ounce of brains they'd ring up the office for confirmation. All of the Ideal men had such cards. In the early days the operators had often been taken for super-equipped vandals or madmen.

The routine training session for new operators proved unnecessary. Even though it had ended disastrously for him, Theodore (or his hands) hadn't forgotten that introductory collective lesson more than a year before. No more than he'd forgotten the long sessions in the hospital with the newsmagazines. The rapidity and perfection of his underground corrections exceeded anything the director had ever seen or imagined.

There was a problem, though. The boy never fully grasped their repeated injunctions that at 6:30pm he should wait in the West Gate corridor in front of poster-site 354 where in turn the director or his assistant would pick him up and accompany him back to the office. He'd always be in that corridor, somewhere, but on his stepladder, eradicating. It wasn't easy to convince Theodore to break off working. The promise of the thin-sliced raw beef in the spiced blood sauce proved effective most of the time. What lure his assistant used the director didn't know. The ladder and knapsack stowed away in his Ideal locker, Theodore left for the hospital.

The director expected to be immediately bombarded with calls from the hospital and the Commission, surely anxious to know how the new arrangement was turning out. Instead, it was the director who had to ring up at the end of the first week.

After finicky obsessive year-long concern about Theodore they were now totally indifferent. One of the doctors even asked Lorz to make sure that the boy took his pills, dumping their most elementary duties on him. They could take them together, the doctor added, perhaps as a joke. They were the same pills, supposedly. He hinted that the boy might even be freed from the mysterious "special treatment" he received over the weekends.

The director tried to see the positive side of their indifference. Despite the boy's continued silence and the persistence of what Lorz referred to as "otherwhereness," maybe the mind-men had observed encouraging signs not visible to the director and his assistant.

"Have you noticed changes for the better?" he inquired one day during his own check-up. The sharp-nosed young doctor answered that yes, of course, there'd been progress. At this the director's heart started up. Could it be that he'd already pronounced words? Decisive progress one could even say, added the doctor.

"What exactly?"

He, the director, was the best-placed person to know that, the doctor replied. The fact that Teddy was doing so well on his new job, of course. They'd all read the director's job-report with great satisfaction. There was even talk about outpatient status for Teddy with a flat of his own.

The new arrangement went smoothly for the first two weeks. At exactly 12:30pm Theo would show up at the Ideal office. He would take the stepladder and the knapsack and leave for Crossroads accompanied by the director the first three days, then by himself. The director had succeeded, not without difficulty, in persuading his new employee to take a bus to the Crossroads station. The other stations were forbidden territory for him, even as a passenger.

When the boy returned to Ideal in the evening he was reluctant to surrender his knapsack and ladder. They had to coax them off his back. "Put them in your locker, Teddy (Theodore)," they would say. "No one else will touch them." The director had assigned him an empty locker with a blank name-card. He'd said with studied casualness: "It's yours. Put your name on it." Lorz hadn't really had much hope. And in fact what "Theodore" had written on the cardboard was an ornately scrolled figure seven. It wasn't that he was the seventh candidate any more. But he'd replaced Operator 7 and had inherited the man's numbered pin on the underground map.

Another part of the arrangement was that Theo would spend four days in the Crossroads station and the fifth, Friday, in the office. The first Friday, on arriving, Theo went into the storeroom and headed for his locker and the ladder and knapsack.

Smiling, Dorothea stepped in front of the locker. "Today's Friday, Teddy. Fridays you stay with us in the office."

Theodore stood motionless staring past her at the locker. The director came and led him away, hoping he'd do cutouts and poster corrections while they talked to him during lulls. They'd agreed that it was essential to try to communicate with him. Who talked to him underground? It was a major reason for keeping him in the office that one day.

She did most of the talking on Fridays, pronouncing more words on that single day than she had in a whole month alone with her employer. She invited Teddy to visit her "some day" in the mountains for a week, a month, for as long as he liked.

The director learned in that indirect way that the farm, which apparently was hers now, covered twenty-seven acres, that there was no running water but a well twenty-five meters deep, the water ice-cold on the hottest day, that spring frosts came so late there, nine hundred meters high, that apples were the only fruit they could grow. Maybe she'd already told him all that in the old days but he hadn't really listened.

Ending the inevitable silence that followed her invitation, the director asked about electricity. No electricity, she said. Kerosene-lamps. It was the first information about the farm she'd given him since the old days, and not really volunteered this time. No television either then, he said, trying to keep the subject alive. How can you survive? She took his remark seriously and said she never looked at television.

The boy paid no attention to them. He was plugged off most of the time. Immobile in his favorite chair he would stare at the underground map. Sometimes he'd get up, approach his face to the maze of lines and not move as though memorizing the order of the stations. He'd clean and oil his impeccably cleaned and oiled ladder every hour. He refused the cutouts. He even refused what he did best of all, the poster corrections, as though he now understood it wasn't for real in the office. So he hardly moved or touched anything. This caused the director and his assistant such anxiety that his static presence turned out to be as obstructive of work as his former fanatic activity with the paintbrush.

The third Friday, Theo showed up at 12:30pm as usual. He immediately went into the storeroom and his locker, which was secured by a huge padlock. He was the only one of the operators who did that. He came out wearing the knapsack and the folded stepladder as he did on the other days.

"Where are you going?" they asked helplessly. "It's Friday today, Teddy." "Friday is the day you stay here with us, Theodore." "No, don't go, Teddy." "Theodore, don't leave."

He left.

It was impossible to head him off on the stairs, out in the street either. The director gave up.

All week long they tried to persuade him to stay with them on Fridays but the following Friday he left again.

So now the "arrangement" was that Theo spent all five days underground. "Like any other operator," his assistant consoled. When the director didn't reply, she observed: "Financially it's better, that's sure."

Things remained that way in uneasy equilibrium for two weeks.

One day Theo didn't show up at 12:30. By one o'clock Lorz wanted to ring up the hospital but Dorothea pointed out that they should avoid alerting the hospital to a problem. If it really was a problem. His bus may have been caught in a traffic-snarl.

"Something's happened to him," said the director over and over. "He must have taken the underground. I told him a hundred times not to do that. A thousand times."

At two his assistant said that she'd have a look in the hospital.

An hour later she was back. Teddy was working in Crossroads as usual.

Impossible, the director objected. How could he cosmetize without the equipment? When she replied that Teddy had the ladder and the knapsack, he looked in the boy's locker. Theodore's knapsack and ladder were gone.

"He must have taken them back to the hospital last evening when he disappeared," she said.

The evening before she'd called Lorz into the storeroom because the new electric kettle was producing sparks. It had become a pleasant ritual that when the boy returned to the office in the evening, the three of them had coffee and biscuits together at her desk. When the director stepped back in the office Teddy had gone. They hadn't noticed that the ladder and knapsack were gone too.

"I gave him a good scolding when I found him," she said. "I told him over and over to come here first. I hope he understood. When he's working on the posters he hardly knows you exist."

When she brought him back to the Ideal office that evening he refused to give back his ladder and knapsack. He tried to get at the paints and chemicals. Dorothea stood in front of the two big lockers.

"No, Teddy. Tomorrow at 12:30."

He stood there for a long moment looking past her at the lockers.

"No," she said.

He finally left for the hospital. He took the ladder and the knapsack with him. It didn't really matter. He was sure to return for the paints and chemicals the next day. He had none left.

It was ironic. Now that Theodore was working almost full-time for him Lorz saw less of the boy than when he'd been a jealously guarded patient in the hospital. A few minutes at noon. A few minutes in the evening. And despite what the sharp-nosed young doctor had said, there was still no possibility of seeing him in the hospital over the weekend. Not for the first time, the director wondered about the "treatment" that took him out of circulation for two whole days.

The director worried endlessly about Theodore down there in his station. Hadn't he exposed him to terrible dangers by listening, in a moment of weakness, to his assistant? He found his gaze dwelling on Theo's favorite chair, now empty, in front of the underground map. The boy had been transformed from flesh and blood presence into a numbered pin (seven) stuck into the great red dot of Crossroads. The new brightness of the walls and ceiling were the only reminders of his brief presence in the Ideal office. The so-called obstruction, the adventure with the washing and painting, took on legendary stature in retrospect. Lorz saw him again towering above them both like a nude god in his single-minded battle against filth, disregarding secondary considerations, heroically proof against the fumes to which the lesser mortals below succumbed. Instead of reward it seemed like senseless punishment to send him to that underworld of unconquerable dirt and disorder.

For the director soon discovered that Crossroads, the imagined haven secured by blue-clad guardians of the law, was no different from the other stations. It turned out that their presence was no deterrent. There were the same gangs of teenagers with their boisterous potential for violence. As in the other stations, broken syringes glittered like diamonds on the toilet-floors. Twice he saw great-eyed tiny-breasted Subcontinental children, surely no more than eleven, soliciting in the corridors, once before the indifferent eyes of a pair of joking policemen. Another time the director saw two drunks battering each other bloody, filling the passageway with their bellows. A passing policeman didn't even break his stride.

Worse, when he scrutinized the "upholders of order" he became aware that something had happened to them too. Some policemen wore no tie. Others sported beards and long hair. One was actually smoking a thin cigarette that stank like smoldering hay. Again he remembered the great impeccable black-uniformed figure of his father.

Lorz began visiting Crossroads every day.

The idea, he told himself, was to protect Theo in case of trouble. The form this protection would take, given the director's slight build and fear of overt violence, wasn't clear in his mind. In any case, he dedicated his lunch-break to his new employee. It was a little like that mad month-long pursuit in the hospital corridors, he sometimes thought. He'd stride stiff-legged down these other, subterranean, corridors or jog at tremendous speed up and down the escalators. Sometimes he encountered Theo on one of the numerous platforms of the giant station. More often, unfortunately, in the corridors. There was less danger, Lorz thought, when Theo worked on the platforms. They were never empty even in the afternoon. It was different in the maze of the corridors. The director couldn't help picturing his employee in the comparative solitude of those white-tiled tunnels, an easy prey for teenage thugs.

Actually the boy was seldom alone there. There was nearly always a knot of bystanders about him as about the underground musicians or jugglers or sword-swallowers. In terms of pure virtuosity Theo outdid these. No poster went uncorrected, even ones that to the director's trained eyes seemed unmarred. The boy also undertook the rectification of posters vandalized, in the director's opinion, beyond cosmetic repair.

Nothing found grace in his eyes. Nothing put him off. Nothing distracted him. No sooner had he finished with one poster than his gaze fastened on the next one as he leaped down from the ladder. Without looking away he'd squat before the knapsack and his keen-sighted hands would choose the correct bottles for the new task.

Lorz was careful to keep on the outskirts of the small crowd. He didn't want to distract Theo, he told himself. Actually there was little danger of this happening. The boy was wholly dedicated to the war on the graffiti. He saw nothing but the posters, the afflicted thighs, arms, smiles, forests, breaking seas, skies. The only faces he seemed aware of were the giant printed ones and what marred them.

Lorz would stand there at an angle that allowed him an unimpeded view of the boy's profile and hands. He would watch Theo and move with him down the corridor, as in a museum, pursuing masterpieces. He would go on watching and then suddenly remember to look about and scrutinize the spectators about him for dangerous faces. That was the reason, after all, he was there. Then he would return his attention to Theodore.

At first, from one visit to another there was a complete turnover of the bystanders. But in the second week of his visits, the director became aware of a soft ageless man with a lumpish face and curious long yellow hair. Hadn't he already been watching Theodore last week in some other corridor? But where else had the director seen him? He had a memory block

The fifth time Lorz joined Theodore, in the corridor leading to the West Gate terminus trains now, the man was there again and sent the director a long-lashed gaze and a smile of recognition. "We meet again, Edmond," he murmured. Stiff-featured, the director didn't acknowledge the greeting. Didn't he work? Didn't he have other things to do than to follow the director's employee about? Lorz strode away.

The next day, the director joined the knot of spectators about Theodore's ladder before panel 169 in the Summer Hill corridor. At the same moment that Lorz perceived the man again, Theo broke free of the images and recognized the director. The boy stood immobile on the top step, staring at his employer, clearly awaiting instructions. Their roles were reversed. Now it was Lorz who was being obstructive. For of course he had no instructions to give. The boy's performance was almost frightening in its perfection and by his presence Lorz had interrupted it.

The small crowd was looking at both of them. Lorz went into long and perfectly superfluous observations regarding the brush-size and shade of green for the poster, clearly establishing the nature of their relationship. He ended with dry praise for the work accomplished.

The lumpy-faced man with the long yellow hair sidled up. "O marvelous, Edmond, you're a friend of his. Why don't you introduce me?" The director looked away from that unbearable face, muttering: "He's my employee. Go away, I don't know you."

"Of course you do, Edmond," the man persisted, placing his hand on Lorz's chest.

"Go away!" Everybody was looking at them. Had he shouted?

The director shoved the man away. He retreated, eyes wide with fear. Lorz advanced on him and shoved harder, not really a violent shove, but the man lost his balance. He staggered backward and his head thudded against the sheep of the poster. The man slumped to a squat. A blood stain was visible on the illusory softness of the fleece above him. He shook his head in a daze, touched his head, stared at his red fingers and, moaning, struggled to his feet.

"You murderer!" he shouted, choked by sobs. "I'm bleeding to death, you murderer, Edmond Lorz, you murderer you!"

All that blood as the consequence of a little shove. There was an absurd disproportion between cause and effect, like flicking a pebble down a rocky slope and unleashing a landslide. Lorz was aware that Theo high on his ladder was staring at the two of them or perhaps at the red stain on the sheep he would have to cosmetize in a few minutes.

"Help me! I'm bleeding to death! Murderer! Murderer!"

Three passing youths stared at them both and grinned broadly. The director turned his back on the knot of spectators (spectators now of himself and the other) and rapidly left the corridor.

The other was still shouting, "Murderer! Murderer!" to his back.

The image of the bloody sheep was still in Lorz's mind as emerged from the corridor onto the platform and hurried into the waiting train.

But in a few minutes Theo's expert brush would efface the evidence of Lorz's first act of violence outside of persistent fantasy. The thought of the blood stain vanishing beneath the flow of Basic White calmed him.

After that incident Lorz found it impossible to mount guard over his employee in the passageways. His new strategy was to locate Theo in a corridor – when this was possible – and wait at a distance until he emerged onto a train platform. Then he would survey the boy from the opposite platform.

But he was often frustrated and returned to the office without having really seen Theodore. Sometimes he came upon the boy (attended by his court) rectifying the beginning of a corridor so enormously long that there was no hope his employee would ever reach a platform during Lorz's long lunch-break (1:30pm-3:00pm).

Even worse were the days when the director couldn't locate the boy at all. Theodore had the list of Ideal panel numbers but never cosmetized the posters in methodical order. This meant – assuming his employee hadn't been taken bleeding to a hospital – that he could be working anywhere in the giant station. Lorz was exhausted from the start at the thought of the twenty-four train platforms and the labyrinth of corridors and stairs awaiting him.

Days went by without the director catching sight of the boy during the lunch time visits. It was more and more like that month's hopeless search for him in the hospital corridors.

When he was able to, he surveyed his new employee from a non-distracting distance on the opposite platform, often from behind a vending machine. It wasn't really a satisfactory arrangement. Half the time the trains pulling in and out from opposite directions concealed Theodore. And in case of an emergency how would he be able to get over to other platform in time?

One day from his vantage point behind the vending machine he saw the lumpy-faced yellow-haired man on the other platform, looking about fearfully and then slipping onto a bench near Theodore on his ladder. He pretended to be reading a newspaper. Lorz was certain he was staring at Theo above the paper screen. With a show of indifference, the man changed his position on the bench as Theo pushed his wheeled ladder further off to another poster. Now he got up and contemplated his image in the mirror of a vending machine directly behind Theodore.

The director stepped out from behind his own vending machine. He was practically by himself on the platform. The man's hands froze in the gesture of primping his hair. He'd seen Lorz.

A train roared in, masking Theodore's platform.

When it slid away the man was gone.

This victory seemed to justify Lorz's presence. So far, it was true, nothing really serious had materialized. The nearest thing to violence in any way involving Theodore was the violence – if the word wasn't too strong for a couple of pushes – exercised by the director himself against the lumpy-faced individual.

But at any moment violence could erupt. He guarded Theodore for three hours at best out of the twenty-five hours a week the boy worked in the underground. There was another problem too. What exactly would he do if violence broke out when he was present? It wasn't until June 15 – Theodore had been down in the underground for almost three months by then – that the director was forced to cope with that situation.

That afternoon on the East Gate platform, half-concealed behind a peppermint vending machine, he observed a dangerous looking duo in iron-studded leather jackets staring at his employee busy on his ladder. His vulnerable back was turned to them.

One of the toughs said something to him. The boy went on with his correction. He didn't know they existed. The two drew closer and started rocking the ladder. Theodore's hand stopped. He seemed to be emerging from a trance. He turned around and looked down at them.

The director was helpless. No question of jumping down from his platform and negotiating the third rails to reach Theo's platform. A sign with a skull warned: Five Thousand Volts!

A train pulled in, concealing them. The director had to take the long unheroic way across. He raced down his platform, up a flight of stairs, across to the second flight of stairs and down.

When he ran out gasping onto the platform the two toughs had vanished. There was a spattering of red paint on the pavement. Teddy was back rectifying the poster. Lorz collapsed on a bench near him and decided that from now on he'd stay on Theo's platform. He couldn't even recall the reason (if it existed) why he'd maintained such great distance between himself and his employee.

The second incident was far more serious. It occurred a week later on the Riverside Terminus platform at 3:10pm. The director was sitting on a bench close to his employee. At regular intervals he looked up from the magazine on his lap to scan the passersby and admire Theodore's performance. Then he returned very briefly to the magazine whose contents hardly registered on his mind. Now Theo finished cleaning up the bra ad and pushed the ladder to the next panel. The director looked about and changed his position on the bench, maintaining the same careful distance from his employee.

A middle-aged cowboy with a seamed gnawed face drew close to Theodore's ladder. He was perhaps the fifth madman the director had seen in an hour. The underground swarmed with them as never before. This one wore a Stetson, a deerskin vest and decorated varnished boots with spurs. He had a long naked knife thrust in his silver-buckled belt. He was arguing bitterly with himself. Now he started arguing with Theodore's back.

Theo was rectifying Helena. She was high on a swing in an old fashioned white dress and a broad brimmed hat. It was the first of five identical posters. The director got up quietly and stood behind the madman. He fixed his gaze on the man's right hand and the knife.

The underground exploded. There were cries and screams all about him, quickly covered by the thunder. Everybody on the platform except the director, the cowboy and Theo scrambled up on the benches. The director bolted the wrong way toward the edge of the platform.

The first of the roaring motorcycles sailed down over the stairs, skimming the tiled vault overhead, followed by a second, and then a third.

The riders were in black leather. They wore enormous goggles. Their skulls were naked. They were crouched nearly flat over the handlebars. The machines briefly touched down on the middle steps of the flight and leaped up again prodigiously and then arced down toward the platform.

In the split second before the front wheel of the first motorcycle touched down on the platform the director recognized them from the cover of an issue of the newsmagazine he and Theo had corrected. The title Doom Riders! had blared forth in red above one of them on his vast machine bearing down on the reader. He had the celebrated oiled bare skull – they scorned crash helmets – and a ferocious Samurai scowl.

Petrified at the edge of the platform, the director experienced the split-second total recall of a man facing imminent destruction (not the traditional total recall of his life but total recall of the Doom Rider article).

Flashing through his mind: their incursions in singular places like cemeteries, porcelain shops, fashion shows and, as now, the underground. How they braked, sometimes unsuccessfully, on the brink of precipices. Roared a hundred kilometers the wrong way down motorways in half an hour. Enjoyed practical impunity thanks to the solidarity of the vast motorcycle clan. How a policeman had shot one of the Doom Riders who was terrorizing a convent. How minutes later three hundred machines had roared round and round the nearest police station which had gone up in flames along with part of a suburb.

As the front wheels touched down and the machine bounded forward directly toward the director total recall went on.

Ten Commandments for Survival. No. 6: if they bore down on you as they might well do anywhere, any time: Don't Budge! Stock Still! Smile! No murderous intention. Would avoid the immobile target at the last hundredth of a second. Preferred the challenge of a panicking obstacle diving to the left or the right like a goalkeeper just before a penalty kick. The rider succeeded in evading the mobile obstacle most of the time. But sometimes not. So stock still with a disarming smile was the safest tactic.

The director bolted anyhow, without choice to the right since to the left lay the rails. He sprawled out on the ground. Thunder blasted his eardrums; grit whipped his face; exhaust gas burned his scalp. Then it was past and when he opened his eyes the three machines were almost at the other end of the long platform.

Incredibly, Theodore was still on his ladder, back turned to all this, his No. 5 brush abolishing the obscenity in Helena's lap. The cowboy stood in the middle of the platform, arguing furiously. He had the knife out and was staring down the platform at the three motorcycles.

Instead of roaring up the opposite stairs at an impossible angle and vanishing in a cloud of blue exhaust gas the riders braked at the foot of the flight. They responded to the challenge of the drawn knife.

Their torsos arced back violently. Their machines bucked and swiveled about on their rear wheels, nearly vertical like prehistoric monsters sniffing out prey. Then the front wheels jolted down, the riders revved up and bore down on the cowboy, bore down on Theodore, bore down again on the director.

The cowboy joyously stood his ground and made flailing stabs in the direction of the oncoming machine, the first of the three. The rider swerved about him.

It was the director's turn.

He should have joined the others cowering on the bench where two girls shrieked with terrified pleasure. Instead, he moved closer to Theodore. To protect or to be protected?

Hot thunder. The displaced air or the noise almost knocked him down. Now the third machine. Again Lorz broke the Sixth Commandment for Survival by diving, this time to the right. He was certain, too late, that he'd chosen the wrong direction.

"Theo!" he cried as the third motorcycle blasted past between them.

From where he lay on the platform the director saw Theo's hand with the brush jerk, saw a long dribble of Basic Black heading for Helena's sky-offered face, saw a jar of red paint smashed on the pavement. Hadn't the machine jostled the ladder? Or perhaps the rider had shot out his gauntleted hand in the small of Theo's back, more defiant in its unresponsiveness than the drawn knife.

The boy turned about on his trembling ladder. He stared at the end of the platform where the three machines were regrouping. There was the familiar intense expression on his face as before an arduous chess problem. The first of the motorcycles had wheeled about again and roared past. Now the second. The third was bearing down on them again. Again Lorz cried out to Theo for help.

Theo's fist shot out, blurred with speed, a marvel of coordination. It struck flesh or metal.

The rider lost control of his machine. It zigzagged diagonally across the platform, smashed into a vending machine which burst into a shower of candy-bars, cogs, coins and mirror-splinters. The rider's face was covered with blood. The motorcycle wobbled toward the edge of the platform. A train was pulling in. A fraction of a second earlier and the machine would have leaped off the platform into destruction. As it was it wobbled into the moving wall of the slowing train.

Miraculously, the rider remained in the saddle as the machine recoiled and swerved across the platform, nearly maiming the flailing cowboy, then banged against a bench.

A shrill whistle came from the end of the platform. Three policemen were trotting toward the disorder. They had their hands on their holsters. The two other machines returned and flanked the wounded one. The trio wobbled away from the policemen. They halted at the foot of the opposite flight as though recovering new force. Then they roared up and away.

Theo saw none of this real chaos. He'd returned to the important chaos, the spoiled poster, a terrifying problem of restoration. The paint had attacked Helena's radiant face.

Still prostrate in the filth of the pavement the director looked up at Theo. He saved my life, he thought joyously. What gift of his own could match that gift?

***

7

The director's joy at Theo's supposed gift gave way to perplexity that sleepless night. Then to humiliation. Finally to distress.

He'd cried out for Theo's help but had his cry been heard beneath the thunder of the machines? Even if heard, was it his appeal that had motivated Theo's punishing blow or the marring of the poster?

Objectively, in any case, Theo had protected him. This created a precious new bond between them, of course. Yet the total reversal of their presumed relationship was disturbing. He, the would-be protector, turned out to be the protected. He'd proved farcically unequal to his self-imposed task that afternoon. He recalled his dives into humiliation confronted with the machine. He hadn't even been able to summon up the minimal heroism of standing stock still and smiling. It called in question his daily presence in Crossroads. If he couldn't protect the boy what was the point of following him about?

He was still coping with this problem when another thought occurred to him which aggravated the consequences of his cowardice. Only the unexpected arrival of the police had prevented the two able-bodied Doom Riders from massacring the boy for what he'd done to their companion. They were sure to return to avenge the affront. Perhaps by the hundreds as with the police station that had gone up in flames.

Theo was a marked man now. He couldn't possibly remain in the underground another day.

Again the director circled around the question of his own presence in Crossroads. He realized that, far from protecting Theo, he'd been the cause of the boy's present predicament, assuming (as the director longed to) that Theo had consciously responded to his cry for help.

His fault then. Of course in a deeper sense one could say that it was his assistant's fault. Whose idea had it been, in the first place, to banish the boy to Crossroads and its dangers? But why had he let himself be pressured into accepting her idea? He was the director, after all. He'd been letting her encroach on his prerogatives. This would have to stop.

In any case, tomorrow when he showed up at 12:30 Theo would have to remain in the office. At this thought the director remembered the boy on his ladder brightening the ceiling of that safe space and briefly experienced joy again. In a way, the dangerous incident in the underground had been a blessing in disguise. Theo would be present in the office again, five days a week as before, with now the golden bonus of two extra hours daily. It didn't matter how much disorganization he caused. Let him apply a second coat of paint, a third, if he liked. Let the ventilator roar at Force Ten. Let Lorz's eyes redden and gush.
Seconds later his lyric exaltation collapsed. He recalled the failure of his attempt to convince Theo to remain in the office on Fridays. How could he ever get the boy to give up the underground totally?

Bitter salvation lay perhaps in confessing the truth to the Commission, explaining the dangers the boy was exposed to in Crossroads with his predictable refusal to accept the safety of the office. A short-lived safety in any case, the director now realized. The boy's daily disruptive presence in the office would spell bankruptcy for Ideal, his sole haven from commitment.

At best some institution or other seemed the only perspective for him. That or violent death. You gave me the gift of life. I give you too the gift of life, with the mad. The director rebelled against the monstrous alternative.

He slowly realized that his connection with the boy could be maintained (and his visits justified) only on one condition. He, Edmond Lorz, past forty and in failing health, must now fully assume the manly role of protector, in fact, not just in theory. He remembered the mad cowboy and his knife and how the machine had prudently swerved beyond the arc of the flailing steel.

It was 3:24am by the luminous green dial of his bedside alarm clock when Edmond Lorz finally resolved to go armed into the underground.

With this decision he fell asleep immediately.

The decision proved difficult to implement. To be sure, self-defense shops had become as common as sex shops in the capital. In their windows one found, alongside classics like black-jacks and brass-knuckles, a plethora of blinding and asphyxiating gas devices, walkingsticks producing 20,000-volt discharges, ear-piercing sirens, etc. But none of these objects, visibly non-lethal, seemed sufficiently dissuasive to the director. A pistol was out of the question even if his father's service-arm (a Rocal 42) lay somewhere in his mother's closet, wrapped up in oiled cloth, memorial to her grief. During the bad moments she would caress, kiss and weep over it. Lorz had no permit and wanted none. From early childhood he'd had deep fear of firearms, even of the cap pistols his father persisted in buying him.

Now, decades later, he considered purchasing such a toy. But thugs were by definition knowledgeable about guns. Their expert glance would pierce the pretence at once.

Then he thought of the long knife thrust in the psychotic cowboy's belt. A publicly displayed knife with a 20-centimeter blade was dissuasive of course. But didn't it testify to madness as much as spurred boots in the underground did? No, if a knife, it had to be concealed but instantly available for action. Purely dissuasive action, of course.

Lorz went into the kitchen and came up with the only thing with a blade long enough to conceivably inspire fear, a bread-knife. But with its yellow plastic handle it was absurdly utilitarian in the foreseen context. Still ill at ease in his role, he couldn't help imagining the snickering thug countering such a brandished "weapon" with a pumpernickel loaf. Then he thought of his father's ceremonial dagger received from the hands of the King himself long ago.

But why that dagger? Anything long and sharp would have done. And if, for obscure reasons, it had to be the ceremonial dagger, why his father's? Not so long ago you found them in rummage shops by the thousands even if of late they'd gone up steeply in price what with the modish nostalgia for the monarchy and its trappings that was the sure sign of the irrevocable death of the old order. But if Lorz stubbornly persisted in his search for that particular dagger it was perhaps in the half-conscious hope that the dagger retained, over thirty years later, something of the potency of his father's fatal courage in that older combat against disorder.

He found the ceremonial dagger in the closet in his mother's bedroom. It lay among medals in a cardboard box secured by a faded blue ribbon. Hastening out of the unbreathable room, Lorz perceived himself as a ghostly daggered army in the mirrors she'd collected in her last years to raise the dead.

His first discouraging discovery was that the blade had to be naked. His best time at unsheathing was a fatal three seconds. The next problem was to find a hiding place. His briefcase, which nearly always accompanied him, was the obvious spot, but having to fumble with the clasp and grope in the depths was bureaucratically slow for successful intervention. The belt was, after all, the logical place for a dagger. It could be hidden by his jacket if thrust into the belt in the region of his left kidney.

But the unsheathed blade rendered body caches dangerous. It proved necessary to force a wine cork onto the point to avoid involuntary hara kiri each time he bent down. It hurt anyhow and gave him an unnatural military carriage hard to maintain all day long.

Finally the director returned to his first idea and placed the dagger in his briefcase. He would have to remember not to plunge his hand into it too quickly when seeking a paper or when confronted by danger.

But days and then weeks went by without confrontation. Lorz didn't have to grope perilously in those depths for the dagger. The Doom Riders didn't return. There were no more madmen, no more thugs, no more perverts gravitating about Theo.

The director sometimes attributed the changed atmosphere to the simple presence of the dagger. Even in the bureaucratic briefcase it seemed to irradiate the fearlessness of his father, to generate a force field of immunity about Theo and himself. It did more than bestow immunity. It instilled in him, he felt, latent courage. Sometimes he felt disappointment at his passive role as a mere bearer of potency in a briefcase. That suddenly implanted courage began craving outlet. He sometimes let himself imagine confrontation beyond dissuasion, the dagger, obedient to his will, dropping thugs, addicts, perverts and madmen. He had these fantasies not in the underground but in bed.

But what might happen when he wasn't underground to mount guard over Theo with his father's dagger? Lorz tried to reduce those dangerous hours by staying on in Crossroads till 4:00pm, sometimes till 4:30pm. This amounted to a 180-minute lunch-hour. When, unavoidably, he returned to the office his assistant was pointedly silent. He resented the guilt she made him feel.

This didn't prevent him from leaving shortly after to pick Theo up at 6:30. They'd shared the job before. Now he relieved her of this "chore" as he phrased it. She frowned and assured him insistently that it was no chore. He pretended not to understand.

He left Ideal earlier and earlier for the 6:30pm return to Crossroads. Actually there was little point returning to the office at all in the afternoon for such a brief period but he insisted on doing it as some kind of obscure discipline.

Inevitably there was another unpleasant scene. She sat stiff-faced at her typewriter with folded arms when he returned one late afternoon. She didn't unfold them even when the phone rang. She said that he could answer the phone, at least do that. She said that she couldn't do everything all by herself. The business was suffering badly from his absences.

The director was certain she was on the presumptuous verge of asking him where he disappeared all afternoon long. He owed her no explanations. But what would happen if she quit again? He'd be imprisoned in the office, far from Theo.

The dilemma was partially solved when suddenly in the middle of the night the conviction came to him, as it had to, that somehow the potency of the dagger was such that it cast an aura of protection over Theo even when it wasn't there.

He decided to shorten the lunch-hour to mollify his assistant and left a box of chocolates and flowers on her desk for safety's sake.

A week later a new problem arose. It was his assistant who told him about it. As part of the tacit compromise that ended the unpleasantness, she'd once more taken over her share of the chore (no chore at all, she'd repeated) of picking Theo up at 6:30pm. The first thing she said after the boy left the Ideal office for the hospital was: "It's getting hard to make him stop with the posters. I didn't think he'd come back with me this time. I had to yell, practically. And there's something else too."

She paused and rubbed a speck of dust off her typewriter.

"He's doing the wrong posters now, other people's posters, not just ours. He's doing all of the posters in Crossroads."

The following afternoon Lorz observed his employee finishing the last of a contractual series (313 to 345). Without the slightest hesitation the boy pushed the wheeled ladder before a non-contractual poster (Greenfields) and started in.

"No, no!" the director cried, "Not Greenfields!"

Theo went on. It was as though the director didn't exist. Theo went on and on in this alien territory, cosmetizing one non-contractual poster after another. Ideal's services were being bestowed on a poster firm that hadn't even had the courtesy to reply to a single one of Ideal's annual solicitations.

At first the director was unable to define his profound alarm at the sight of what Theo was doing. It wasn't the waste of time and chemicals. He had trouble formulating it.

To break into his employee's field of vision Lorz slipped into the narrow space between the ladder and the poster and immediately received a brushful of Basic White on his right cheek, dangerously close to his eye.

Foolish thoughts flashed through his mind. Does he think I'm part of the poster? Where is the graffiti on my face? Or does he take my whole face for graffiti?

The boy blinked. The mechanism of his hands stalled. His eyes now focused on his employer's rectified visage, as though trying to distinguish this real face from the paper ones.

"Look what you've done, Teddy!" Lorz scolded, gently.

He called him Teddy when he was irritated with him. That occasionally happened. As though reciprocating the gentleness of his employer's voice, Theo (Theo now) took the cloth and carefully wiped the white off the director's face. Lorz closed his eyes, perhaps to protect them against the Basic White. When he opened his eyes again Theo was staring obediently into his face. Was he smiling? Was it conceivable that he'd done it as a joke?

The director slipped away from the poster and coaxed Theo off the ladder. He started explaining the problem. He pointed at the numbers on the boy's sheets. Then he pointed at the numbers on the panels he'd been doing.

"They're not ours, Theo, they aren't our concern. Not our concerns. Do you understand?"

The director explained and explained until he thought he made out an expression of comprehension on the boy's face.

When the director finished Theo climbed back up the ladder and resumed rectifying the non-contractual posters.

That night the director was finally able to formulate his alarm. Theo's correction of non-contractual posters was a grave symptom of refusal of bounds. The boy didn't know where (or perhaps how) to stop. There had to be limits, frontiers, barriers, no-man's-lands of indifference. Sanity, survival even, depended on recognition of that fact.

The director knew about the problem. It had already happened in the early days of Ideal that he too had rectified non-contractual posters bordering on the contractual ones. He did that when they bore particularly obscene graffiti sure to intrude on the visual field of the viewer of the contractual posters, contaminating the message of the advertiser, undoing what he, Lorz, had just painstakingly achieved. So he'd sometimes rectify them. But such non-contractual zeal never exceeded three or four posters, the establishment of a sort of buffer state between order and chaos.

It had got worse before the well-dressed fat man with the pigskin briefcase imposed commercial limits on his activities.

There had been a period when only the closing of the underground at 1:30am drove Lorz out into the street. He hadn't been well during the weeks that followed his mother's death. In those days he'd devised a strategy to create the illusion of total rectification. He'd limit himself to the smallest stations: just two platforms and a few short runs of corridor. The last poster cleansed, he won a brief feeling of plenitude, as though he'd purified the universe. It was an illusion of course. Even in those tiny stations newly rectified posters were constantly being graffitied again behind your back. If you returned to the starting point after finishing that supposedly last poster you saw that the graffiti had returned to the first ones, an endless cycle of futility.

So the fat man had, in a sense, saved him. He'd marked limits. There were the Company posters that had to be salvaged and the others. Lorz learned (or tried to learn) to look upon all those other mutilated but non-contractual posters as one did catastrophes in distant lands read about in the papers. And what happened to the rectified posters behind your back was a task for the following day. To each day its task. You couldn't take on all the chaos of the world.

The director tried to explain all of this to Theo. Having to explain it clarified things in his own mind. What had slowly taken shape deep in your mind you found out, often to your surprise, only when circumstances forced you to articulate it. He articulated it now to the boy and to himself. One had to compromise, he said in effect. He'd once been like Theo, he said. He'd got out of it at the price of a certain loss of purity. But who could be absolutely pure in a soiled world? He explained it in simple words over and over again in the week that followed.

But Theo went on correcting the non-contractual posters. He went on methodically effacing the graffiti, unconcerned with commercial demarcations, touchingly pure in his dedication.

Three days later, at 6:30pm (it was his turn to pick him up) the director couldn't find the boy anywhere in the West Gate corridor. He searched for an hour in the other corridors and platforms. Then he rang up his assistant at the office on the off-chance that she was still waiting for both of them to return and maybe, miraculously, would tell him that Theo had come back to Ideal by himself.

She was there, still waiting for the two of them. The director imagined the three cups on her desk, the electric kettle, the three careful piles of biscuits.

She joined him in West Gate corridor before poster-site 354. Each one took half of the great station and agreed to return in an hour.

Lorz returned first and collapsed onto a bench. She came a minute later and sat down beside him without saying anything. Finally she tried to reassure him. Teddy must have returned to the hospital on his own. She said that but went on scrutinizing the passing crowd as he was doing. It was a symptom of self-reliance on Teddy's part, she explained. Why should he wait in West Gate corridor at 6:30 for one of them to pick him up? He had nothing to leave at the Ideal office now that he took the ladder and the knapsack back with him to the hospital. The only thing he did in the office at the end of the day was have coffee with them. Maybe it didn't matter to him any more. Maybe that too was a sign of self-reliance, she added sadly.

Lorz said that he agreed completely with her explanation. Theo must have returned on his own to the hospital. Of course it was impossible to check. Suppose (one chance out of a hundred they agreed) he wasn't there, after all. What would the hospital people, the Commission people, say? They'd have naturally remarked the boy's absence. They couldn't push indifference so far as not to have. But in that improbable case, the hospital mustn't learn that Ideal had lost track of Theo. His assistant, so quick-witted that way, could invent some plausible explanation for the boy's absence.

Lorz accompanied her to her train. He told her that he was going home too. Of course Teddy had returned to the hospital. That's for sure, she replied.

He explored Crossroads again.

Leaning against the white tiles, he shut his eyes and tried to project himself into the boy's mind. Theo must have had the sudden conviction – an illusion, of course – that he'd finally rectified all of the Crossroads posters. He'd have taken a train and at the inevitable sight of the graffitied posters of the very first station would have got off with his equipment and started in.

The next station, then. But which one? Twelve lines radiated from Crossroads.

It was already past nine when the director started systematically exploring those lines. The first (Line 2) yielded nothing. He had to return to Crossroads, jog down endless corridors to a new line, travel to the next station where there was nothing, then back again to Crossroads, another maze of corridors, a new line, a new station, the same operation over and over, to and fro like a spider weaving futile threads, all for nothing.

An hour or so later, from his carriage window on Line 12, he saw his assistant walking out of a corridor onto the platform of the next station, Archives. It wasn't her line home. She'd had the same idea. Her gaudy mask was set in severe lines. She turned left and went down the platform rapidly. The director quickly got off. Careful not to be seen, he returned to Crossroads.

He found Theo at 10:16pm, busy on the platform of National Library (Line 7). He'd burst the time bounds as well as the territorial bounds. His brush went on and on. The director darted glances right and left at the nearly empty platform and pleaded with him to stop. He had to return to the hospital. Did he know what time it was? They'd been sick with worry, both of them. The director wheedled, commanded, wheedled. The promise of unlimited quantities of raw beef in the spiced blood sauce had no effect. The boy went on and on.

It was almost eleven when Theo ran out of Basic White. He suddenly unplugged. He slumped down on a bench, arms dangling between his knees, eyes empty. What would have happened if the boy had gone on till closing time and the Underground Police had tried to force him out? He'd have offered resistance, passive but stubborn. They'd have arrested him. Notified, the Commission would have taken that final decision. The end of it all.

The director let himself down on the bench next to the boy. He felt drained.

Theo's breathing became labored, then raucous. The director stared at his profile. His lips were moving soundlessly. Lorz leaned closer to gain a better view. He placed his hand on the boy's shoulder and asked at intervals: "What are you saying, Theo?" The movements of the boy's lips went on, over and over, the same movements, but no sound came. Wasn't he trying to say "Edmond" as he had (perhaps) that terrible time over the chessboard?

This time Lorz wasn't frightened. Why had he been frightened that other time? He tightened his grip on the boy's shoulder. He silently pronounced "Ed-mond" "Ed-mond," over and over himself. He was attentive to the movements of his own lips, all the while keeping his eyes on the boy's. Trying to fit "Ed-mond" onto the movements of those other lips produced the effect of a poorly dubbed film. Theo's silent utterance began with compressed lips, unmistakably a labial. So not "Edmond." Wasn't it the boy's own name – his real name – that he was trying to pronounce?

"Say it," Lorz begged. "Try to say it." He was careful to address the boy namelessly in the hope of getting that real name. He didn't dare confuse him by calling him by any of his false names: "Theo" or "Theodore" or "Teddy," not to mention "Number Nine" or "Seventh Candidate."

Then he was able, he thought, to read the words the boy's lips were forming. He was almost certain it was what the nurse had heard long ago and misinterpreted as "Base." "It." "Why?" Looking about quickly, the director slipped his arm over his employee's shoulders and promised him the sliced meat in the spicy blood sauce that very night and tomorrow more Basic White. Even as he said it the director realized the meat was an impossible promise. It was in the fridge in his flat. Did they have time to go there? No time tonight. He had to be returned to the hospital (and in what state?). Perhaps some other evening.

We have to go, the director said again and again.

The boy didn't move. Only his lips moved.

Lorz felt terrible fatigue. He closed his eyes, his arm still about Theo's shoulders.

Now it was being reciprocated. He could feel Theo's hand timidly on his own shoulder.

He opened his eyes and saw his assistant standing before them, one hand on Theo's shoulder, the other on his.

"You look awful," she said. The director didn't know whether she was addressing Theo, himself, or both of them. He explained that the boy had run out of Basic White and had disconnected. She sat down on the other side of Teddy. She put her hand back on the boy's shoulder.

"We can't go on like this. He's getting out of control. I'm tired. I must have walked twenty kilometers. A miracle I found the two of you."

She spoke to Lorz past Theo's face as though he couldn't possibly understand. They remained there in silence for another five minutes. Between them the boy was immobile too except for his lips.

"We can't stay here all night," she said finally. "I'll take him back to the hospital. I'll know what to say to them."

Words will do no good, he thought, however glib. They'll be sure to notice the state he's in. She didn't understand the problem. He didn't say it. He said that the hospital was much closer to his apartment than to hers. She'd miss the last bus. He'd take Theo back to the hospital himself. She didn't argue. She yawned.

They managed to get through to the boy and convince him to get up. She said good night and started walking away toward the stairs. She stopped and turned about and told him what excuse to give. She also said: "I think I have an idea about Teddy. So that this won't ever happen again." She still didn't understand the immediate problem. When he didn't reply she added: "I'm too tired now. I'll tell you about it tomorrow."

The director took a taxi with the boy to the hospital. As they went past the indifferent gatekeeper, the full moon was invaded by chaotic dark clouds chased by a strong wind. The leaves on the trees in the hospital grounds hissed. Lorz followed Theo. He realized that he didn't even know where the boy's room was. Surely no longer 416. He'd never thought of asking.

"Your room, Theo?" he said again. Like a giant mechanical toy, the boy started towards New Hospital. Most of the lights were out except for the corridors, long yellow strips that emphasized the darkness of the rest of the building. It was almost midnight. Theo didn't turn in there. They had New Hospital behind them now. Up the path, past building after building, pools of light and stretches of gloom alternating. Where was he going? The director rehearsed the excuse his assistant had supplied him with. They'd celebrated something. They'd had dinner in a restaurant, the three of them. He'd told his assistant to ring up the hospital and the Commission to obtain permission. She'd forgotten.

The wind cleared the moon of the clouds. By the sudden light of the rectified full moon Old Hospital loomed with its inky pollution-streaks and white pigeon-droppings. The eroded statues half-sunk at angles in the lawn were like ghosts. The stiff-faced patients that had wandered about like automates in the company of white-uniformed attendants were gone. The director looked beyond Old Hospital. The main path skirted a modern five-story building, vaguely residential in appearance.

But Theo left the main path and started up the driveway leading to the entrance of Old Hospital. Lorz tried to hold him back, saying that he didn't sleep here, that his room couldn't possibly be in Old Hospital. But he had to follow the boy into the deserted hall, then right into a dingy corridor, more corridors and then in a poorly lighted stretch where a vast unmarked elevator waited with open doors. There was a smell of urine and ether. Theo stepped inside. He turned about. Behind him on the dirty padded wall was the sign "For Stretchers Only!" He stared at the director still standing in the corridor. His lips were still moving as in silent invitation.

"Not here," Edmond Lorz said in dread and refused to follow. The doors slowly closed on the other's abstracted face. The mechanism started up. Wasn't it sinking toward the maze of flag-stoned passageways? How could his room possibly be down there in that dark windowless labyrinth?

As Lorz retraced his steps from Old Hospital toward the main entrance, the neighboring church bells began pealing midnight. They made a poorly synchronized clamor in the stillness of the park. Down below in the dark windowless labyrinth those church bells couldn't be heard. All you could hear down there was the periodic roar of the trains of Line 18.

Lorz remembered the cluttered locked room in his apartment, the one with a large window that gave on the sky. He tried to imagine it emptied, scrubbed clean, painted white and yellow with a pink cumulous in the framed sky, church bells pealing and sunshine streaming in, Theo radiant in it.

But the image that persisted in the director's mind was a real one. When the doors of the old elevator had jolted shut on Theo the boy's lips had still been soundlessly forming the three syllables of the latest obsession, the old one. He was still in it. The mind-men would be sure to notice it next morning.

By half past eleven next morning the hospital still hadn't rung up Ideal. The Commission either. Maybe the symptoms had worn off overnight. Or maybe the mind-men didn't pay attention to Theo anymore.

The director dared to begin hoping, particularly after his assistant told him about her idea. If Teddy had disconnected because he'd run out of Basic White, the obvious solution, the one sure way of making him stop rectifying, was to ration him. He was easy enough to handle once he unplugged. At 12:30 they would give him just enough Basic White to last until about 5:30pm. If he still had bad symptoms they'd wear off by the time he got back to the hospital. They couldn't stand another night like last night, she said.

Lorz was almost jealous of his assistant's idea, the beautiful simplicity of it. He had only the briefest of misgivings. If Theo disconnected again in such a melodramatic way mightn't the police or some Good Samaritan (if the species wasn't extinct) take him in charge, have him transported to a hospital, perhaps to New Hospital itself? After a moment of reflection, though, Lorz realized that his fear was probably groundless. If all the disconnected people in the underground were sent to the hospital there wouldn't be a single bed available for connected sick people. The underground would be depopulated. Who had hospitalized the psychotic cowboy wandering about the platforms with a knife? The universal indifference would save Theo.

Her idea worked but there were difficulties. You couldn't calculate the precise quantity of Basic White that would run out at exactly 5:30. Often they had to wait until 7:00 before his hungry brush licked the jar spotless. Much worse were the days when he ran out of Basic White before the scheduled time. They'd come upon him in various postures of prostration. Even unplugged it wasn't as easy to move him as she'd said it would be.

The first time there were the two of them. Theo was motionless between them on a bench in the National Library station, staring down at nothing. The usual lures and pleadings didn't work.

The director's assistant had been trying for half an hour. She stopped. She opened her mouth and gulped down air. Even in the poor light of the underground her make-up didn't hide the lines on her face. She was exhausted, what was she doing here? she said acrimoniously to Lorz as though somehow he were to blame for the boy's stubborn immobility.

She tried again. She told the boy it was dirty down here, it smelled. He should get up. The whole city was dirty and smelled. Some day she'd take him to the mountains with her. Tomorrow if he wanted to. Didn't he want to? There were pine forests. You could breathe there. There were hundreds of lakes. You could swim in them. Wouldn't he like to? The water looked brown but that was because of the peat, the water was clean. You could walk for hours on the heath, alongside streams and lakes and through stands of pines and not meet a soul except herons and, if you were lucky, otters. You had to be out of your mind to live here in the city, she said.

She stopped talking. As the peak hour crowd milled past, the images of pines and lakes lingered in the director's mind. He felt like an intruder in them. After a while her guest emerged.

On the way back to the hospital Lorz reminded the boy that he was expecting him tomorrow at the office at 12:30. He'd give him more Basic White. He said it over and over. For an instant their lips were forming the same three syllables even if only one was articulating the words. They reached the hospital gates. The director said it again and watched Theo pass through the gates. He himself didn't go any further this time.

The next evening at 6:30pm the director came alone for him. He found the boy sitting slumped forward on the filthy ground at the foot of his ladder, his head bent toward his raised knees. The peak hour crowd streamed past him. A woman stopped to one side and gave her little girl a coin. The girl stooped and placed the coin in the empty jar of Basic White. That charity was the worst of all. Their smug faces, major and minor. The director had to resist the urge to throw the coin at their backs, crying out that Theo was no beggar.

This is a terrible place to be in, he said, bending his face toward the boy's bowed head. There are other things. There are other places. Edmond Lorz found himself trying to convince the boy that the graffiti didn't matter. Didn't matter because the posters didn't matter. The posters were just pictures. Anyhow, whatever you did to the graffiti they returned. Let them. There were more important things than the posters. The director stopped. For the second time he discovered that you found out what you believed deep down only when you had to say it. There were more important things than the posters, the director repeated. There were better places to be than underground.

He tried to come up with places and things better than slices of raw beef in blood sauce, better than the return to the hospital and to that other, worse, underground maze with the flagstones and the dangling bulbs where the trains could still be heard. What else had he to offer? He was no mountain-guide.

He tried to summon up the virtual radiant room in his flat. But his imagination failed him and he saw it as it must have actually been (the door had remained locked for three decades): dusty mutilated clutter.

By the time they reached the hospital gates at 9:45 Theo had started coming out of it. The director attributed the emergence to the therapeutic effect his own presence – far too rare – had on the boy. The thought then occurred to him that it worked both ways. Since his association with Theo, he realized, his intestines had been at peace, the Cycle was a thing of the past. They were mutually indispensable. Despite his immense fatigue the director felt joy at this thought.

The next morning Lorz rang up the Commission and spoke of the possibility of a salary-increase for Teddy. Mysels received this with the usual long silence. Finally he warned that any increase over the stipulated wage would have to come out of his, the director's, pocket. No provision had been made for raises.

Lorz tried to sound disappointed. It wasn't the real reason for his call. He thanked Mysels for the information. He injected dryness into his voice and asked ("by the way") whether a definitive decision had been reached regarding a flat for Teddy.

The person responsible for that question was still shopping about, came the grudging reply. The market was tight for the rent they were ready to pay. Why did he ask?

It so happened, said Lorz, that he was in the market himself. He had a huge flat with a sunny, newly painted room. It was perfectly independent with its own bathroom. He mentioned the rent. It was well below the market price but not suspiciously so.

"I couldn't settle for less. I'm not in the charity business after all."

He gave proof of more hardheadedness. The lease would have to be a short one. He didn't want to be saddled with Teddy if he proved unsatisfactory as a tenant. This was unlikely, he added, given the boy's success on the job, the reason for the raise. But he couldn't afford to take chances.

The longest of silences followed, so long that the director broke it by saying that of course if the Commission wasn't interested it was no problem. He was trying to be helpful. And also, frankly, to economize on a classified ad and avoid the bother of all those visits. He was willing to wait a while but sooner or later that room, which he'd had painted a week ago at considerable expense, would have to be rented, if not to Teddy then to somebody else.

Mysels finally replied that the colleague responsible for outpatient lodgings would be informed of Lorz's proposition but that of course the room would have to be inspected.

"Whatever flat you choose for him it's certain to be an improvement over where he is now," said Lorz. "I was surprised to learn that Teddy's room is located in Old Hospital."

"Who told you that?"

"I can't recall. I just remember my surprise on hearing it. I thought Old Hospital was for the mad."

"For the mentally ill? Not exclusively. Far from it. In any case you're mistaken. I wonder who told you that? Teddy doesn't sleep in Old Hospital. He receives treatment there during the weekend. More exactly, he received treatment there. I understand it's over now."

It was Lorz's turn to retreat into silence. Finally he said: "You mean he can be visited on Saturdays and Sundays? This coming weekend, for example?"

More silence. Then inquisitorial: "Don't you see enough of him as it is?"

"Oh, quite enough! Quite enough!" Lorz replied quickly. "I wasn't talking about myself. I was thinking of my assistant. She hardly sees him at all during the weekdays..."

"You said 'quite enough' twice, in a certain tone," Mysels interrupted. "Something has gone wrong with Teddy's work."

"Absolutely nothing has gone wrong with Teddy's work. Teddy's work is perfectly satisfactory, as I believe I already informed you orally and in writing."

"Then I don't understand your comment. I asked you, 'Don't you see enough of him as it is?' and you answered, 'Quite enough.' Twice. And yet you are anxious to rent a room to him in your flat where necessarily you would see even more of him."

"Excuse me," Lorz stammered with contained rage. "Not 'anxious' at all, not one bit 'anxious'. I don't understand where this conversation is going. I rang up in all innocence about the salary raise which, I should think, is clear evidence that my employee's work is satisfactory. As for the room I proposed..."

"What color did you have the room painted?"

The question took Lorz by surprise. He hadn't seen the inside of the room for thirty years. He answered: "White."

"Brilliant white, of course."

"No. Dull ivory."

"Ahh..." Mysels breathed. It was a sound of deep relief. Then briskly: "We'll see about your offer. The room will have to be inspected of course. But the color and the rent sound good. Excellent, even. Naturally Teddy can be visited over the weekend. But why should your assistant visit him? He can go out. He can go to the cinema, to a restaurant, wherever she wants. Wherever, I said. He's perfectly free. But how old is she?"

Lorz said he wasn't sure. He thanked Mysels and hung up.

That was how the director learned that Theo would be free the following weekend and that the room might be visited any day now. After Mysels' practical green light it was the only thing that could conceivably prevent Theo from occupying it. It was already Monday. He had to act very fast.

On Tuesday loud, burly men came. By evening the room was empty. It hadn't been cheap. The three painters he consulted demanded a fortune to do the job that week. He was briefly tempted by the idea of having Theo himself paint the room he'd soon be living in. It would combine economy for himself, guaranteed satisfaction for Theo plus the mutually beneficial effect of the boy's company that very first free weekend. But the weekend was three days away and the inspector could come any minute.

So reluctantly and at outrageous expense Lorz had the room painted by a professional.

The ink was hardly dry on the check and the furniture already ordered when the director learned from his assistant that the Commission had found a flat for Teddy in the Fourth District within walking distance of the hospital.

***

8

It was in early August, at about the time law and order in the underground completely broke down and the first overtly pornographic posters appeared, that Theo started showing deceptive symptoms of improvement. He'd been installed in his new flat for a little over a month. There was a gnawing mystery surrounding that flat, but to all appearances the boy coped with independence satisfactorily. He seldom collapsed inwardly when he ran out of Basic White now. They'd find him easily enough in the corridors of National Library (it was a small station) waiting for one of them to pick him up and take him back to the Ideal office, the way it used to be. The first time it happened his assistant bought a cake and a half-bottle of sweet white wine to celebrate his return. She hadn't realized that neither Teddy nor her employer could touch alcohol. She drank the wine all by herself with guilty pleasure.

Another victory: they finally convinced the boy to return to the (very relative) safety of Crossroads. All pretence of law enforcement had collapsed in the small stations like National Library. Muggings were round the clock. Old ladies had been knifed for foolishly defending their purses. Rape was committed, incredibly, at high noon. In the same week (out of bored sadism, one surmised) two beggars sleeping on benches were burned alive with petrol in the early morning hours. Pitched battles took place between teenage gangs, not just with the usual crowbars but with firearms. In one week there had been four deaths, one of them an uninvolved passenger. The police had abandoned the field, had retreated to the hub stations, beleaguered fortresses.

The director's first reaction of morose satisfaction (the bloody harvest of what had been sown thirty years before) was followed by a return of his earlier fears for Theo. He became conscious again of his father's ceremonial dagger in the depths of his briefcase. He had less confidence in its protective aura the morning he saw the headlines about the first of the charred beggars in Rose Garden. It was a small station too.

So he was vastly relieved when Theo started operating in Crossroads once again. Still, as he well knew, violence could explode there too when least expected. The director began progressively lengthening his protective lunch-hour visits (within more reasonable limits than before, though). Close to the ladder he scrutinized all the passersby. He held the briefcase tightly, at the ready.

By a significant concordance it was in the same month, August, that the posters started their descent into outright pornography. Symmetrical disorder above and below. With this difference: the law combated one sort of disorder (inefficiently), the other it protected. Let a scandalized passenger lacerate one of the pornographic posters (as many, not just the director, must have felt the urge to do) and the law, powerless against the laceraters of old ladies, would react instantly with fines and imprisonment.

Undisguised pornography could be dated quite precisely with the famous (infamous) Pilsober poster. Even his assistant noticed that one. She said, inadequately: "What will they think up next?" She'd been less observant with the Gulliver's Travels poster a month before. There, incitement to the unnamable was insinuated rather than blatant as with Pilsober.

Still, it took a solid lack of discernment not to understand the implicit message. "They're Waiting for You" was the title of that poster, one of sixteen his assistant had brought back from a client for previewing. In a week it was all over the underground. There was the cultural excuse of golden-domed temples among palms in the background. In the foreground, the real business was going on. Smiling children with black almond eyes not over ten years old surrounded a middle-aged tourist. Some had their arms about his neck, their cheeks against his. Their golden bodies were practically nude. One was actually feeding the tourist. His mouth, half-open, awaited the fruit. "They're Waiting for You." Forced to wait for you. A ring had just been broken up. The videocassettes. By charterfuls they came. There was no greater crime.

Sharing indignation helped. He'd said to his assistant as she was unrolling the other posters: "Did you see the Gulliver poster with the tourist and the children?"

"Yes, I did. Nice."

"Nice. You found the poster nice."

His tone made her suspect something shocking she hadn't noticed. She smoothed the poster out again. He observed with displeasure the eager way she approached her face to it and scrutinized the background with parted lips as though seeking tiny copulations at the base of the temples. She's changed, within as without, he thought, remembering her former innocence. "Miss Ruda" and her braided pigtails were like a faded sepia daguerreotype.

"I don't see anything," she said in a tone which he took for disappointment. The connection with her former self was totally severed.

"The foreground subject, perhaps?" he said.

She pulled her head back and stared at the whole poster. "Is something the matter with it? The children are beautiful."

"The tourist seems to appreciate their beauty."

"Well, why not? Don't you?"

She didn't understand. He dropped the subject. He wasn't really annoyed. He was almost touched. Despite everything – neckline, cigarettes, perfume and forwardness – she'd preserved a sizable part of her basic innocence after all.

The epoch-marking Pilsober poster even attracted brief knots of passengers in the corridors that morning. How could one help not seeing the couple? Whole stretches of corridors displayed them in repetition. It was like those bordello mirrors and their multiple reflections that one had – purely accidentally – read about. Again and again one saw the couple, the lovers (lovers, one guessed, for such excesses seemed incompatible with legal union), naked on a rumpled bed. The man was on his back, eyes shut in abandon. His body was cut short well below the navel, at the extreme last moment, by the left-hand margin. She, propped up on an elbow, gleaming lips parted, was reaching for that margin. The legend was huge and red. "She must have it!! Next week she will have it!!" That was all. Nothing announced the product advertised.

One saw it constantly. And one thought of it.

One tried not to. But how couldn't one? Think of it.

All of the underground passengers must have thought of it.

And then the following week there they were again, in the follow-up poster, indefatigable on their rumpled bed. As implicitly promised, the rest of the naked lover was totally revealed, from another angle. The strategically placed shadow, barely adequate, teased the gaze. The woman was still propped up on an elbow, now presenting her naked breasts to millions of onlookers. Her hand was reaching over and beyond her naked lover toward a foaming bottle of beer on the side-table. "Better than anything else: Pilsober!!" said the slogan.

That was the first one. The next were worse. More and more agencies were following suit. Everything was being sexualized, even cat-food. And the very slight distance between the director and these new scandalous posters vanished altogether when his assistant brought back the next batch of previews a few weeks later. Two more clients had gone over to the new trend.

The vandals practically ignored these new-style posters. If the trend toward indecency continued, Ideal Poster would soon be out of business. It confirmed the director's solitary analysis a year before of the advertising industry's takeover of (carefully defused) radical slogans and postures. Vandalism preyed on the ideal of course, he tried to explain to his assistant, and there was nothing, God knew, ideal about these. The obscenity was inscribed in the poster itself. Graffitied addition would have been absurdly pleonastic he said. He was certain she would ask for the definition of "pleonastic." Instead, she wagged the foot of her crossed left leg. She hadn't even taken out her agenda-book to note the word. She stifled a yawn and called attention to it by making exaggerated amends, saying, "excuse me," leaning forward and blinking conscientiously, miming interest.

He didn't continue. She'd changed after all.

Outdone by the new posters, the vandals concentrated on Helena. By the operation of some strange duality it was her summer as well as Pilsober's. She posed everywhere else on the walls in elegiac icons of a world of beauty and decency. She was uncontaminated by the proximity of the new-style posters. She ran before poppied wheat fields, hair streaming out behind her. She was softly mirrored on shining sands not body-to-body but hand-in-hand. One heartbreakingly lovely scene lighted up the tiled tunnels for months. Wearing a high-buttoned tulle dress and a broad brimmed ribboned straw hat she throned high on a swing, suspended week after week at blue apogee. Head thrown back, she smiled up at the sky.

As though the violence and indecency weren't disturbing enough, there was the mystery surrounding Theo's flat. After the director finally succeeded in swallowing (without digesting) his anger at the senseless last-minute rejection of his room, he tried to find out where Teddy's flat was located.

For some reason the Commission was evasive about the address. "Within walking distance of the hospital," they'd told his assistant and nothing more, she claimed. He, Lorz, hadn't even been given this information. He asked Theo a dozen times but the sheet of paper he placed before the boy remained blank.

At first this mystery was no more than a minor irritation. In the director's mind, the ex-storage space he'd transformed at such great expense was still "Theo's room." Lorz was determined to justify the hauling and painting bills. He decided to invite the boy there that very first free weekend. It almost became an economic issue. He also found therapeutic reasons for the invitation.

The more he thought of their relationship the more he was convinced that their contact had had curative virtues for the two of them. He attributed Theo's successive breakthroughs to what had gone on between them at the hospital: the talk, (even if one-way), the work on the newsmagazine, the chess games. He owed his own relative improvement, he felt, to his efforts to break free of unhealthy self-focus and reach out to another human being. But they had drifted apart. Weren't they both suffering a relapse because of this?

For Teddy's recent rally was short-lived. By late August the old symptoms began returning. He unplugged again spectacularly – it was like brutal withdrawal symptoms – when his ration of Basic White ran out. His assistant had been the first to note the boy's growing haggardness. Did he eat regularly? she wondered. She plied him with cakes, which he usually ignored. Half the time he even refused the director's thin dripping slices of raw beef. How was it the hospital people didn't notice all that?

They did notice Lorz's own problems, though. The young sharp-nosed doctor had frowned significantly during the last check-up. Lorz had confessed to sleeplessness, irritability, colored visual patterns, but not to what alarmed him most of all: growing awareness of his bowels. No burning, no pain as yet, but (the idea occurred to him one night) something like the uncomfortable awareness of one's lungs brought about by a slight impoverishment of the oxygen of the air. This image gave the director breathing difficulties, which he attributed to the growing pollution of the capital's atmosphere. The new concern with his lungs briefly relieved him of concentration on his bowels that sleepless night.

Of course there were the obvious immediate explanations for his health problems. There was the wear-and-tear of those evenings in the underground trying to coax Theo up and out. Plus the lengthening of the workday to make up for the time wasted – from a strictly business point of view – on Theo. Even his assistant seemed exhausted and more irritable. Altruism was taking a lot out of them.

More profoundly, the director blamed his declining state on the absence of the old contact. When had they been alone during the past months? Certainly they saw each other (he, at least, saw Theo) every workday. But this wasn't contact. During the lunchtime visits – when he was able to locate the boy in the labyrinth of Crossroads – he was on guard-duty. Vigilance was essential. It got in the way of communication. And anyhow there was no way to hold – or even to gain – the boy's attention there. The only reality for him in the underground was those marred faces and landscapes. In the office at 12:30pm and again at 6:50pm the director could hardly talk to the boy in the presence of his assistant. She monopolized the conversation in any case.

The director nostalgically recalled the Day of Giving when Theo had overwhelmed him with the contents of a room. Also the twelve gift-wrapped ticking rectangles. That was all long ago. Recently there'd only been that marvelous moment when the boy had carefully wiped the smear of Basic White from his face.

Theo was slipping away from him. He must absolutely talk to the boy undistracted, draw him out of the killing obsession with the posters, open him to other things. He imagined them together in the new white and yellow room, both looking at art albums (hadn't Theo been an artist?). He'd win the boy's attention and analyze the paintings. Or they could return to chess games or Chinese puzzles. After (or perhaps the next day if he stayed over) they could go for a drive in pursuit of the dwindling countryside. They could walk through surviving fields in the sunshine. It would do them both great good.

He repeated the invitation all week long whenever he could. A little celebration, he explained. In his flat at three o'clock. If you want to. The beef, as much as you like. Three o'clock at my place. Only if you want to. We might go for a ride in my car. A picnic. If you like. Unless you have other things to do. Do you understand me, Theo? Saturday, three o'clock, at my place.

Did the boy understand? The director printed his address on a slip of paper and gave it to him.

Afraid Theo may have lost the paper, the director gave him a new slip of paper with his address and the appointment date the next day.

He did this every day.

Three o'clock then four then five went by that Saturday afternoon. In the white and yellow room the director leafed through the Michelangelo album, careful not to get the spicy blood sauce on the powerful marble limbs. He told himself repeatedly that he hadn't really believed that Theo would come.

That night he was awakened by incredibly loud thumps on the staircase, as though a marble statue were negotiating the steps. He sat upright in his bed. A full moon as blinding as the sun invaded the room. His eyes started to weep. The thumping came louder and louder. He looked at his alarm clock. It was exactly three. He hadn't bothered saying 3:00pm to him, thinking it was obvious: daytime three. Theo had misunderstood.

The whole building seemed to echo with those thumps. Was the door locked? Frightened, Lorz got up and reached his door, breathing hard. He tested the bolts, all five of them. The door was locked. The thumps stopped. Was that breathing he heard on the other side of the door? The door was being tried. Or was it the wind?

After a long wait the clumping resumed, the sound slowly diminishing down the stairs. Lorz stood on his side of the door for a long time and then went back to bed.

When he woke the next morning he assumed he'd dreamed it all. He didn't understand why he'd received the imagined (surely imagined) nocturnal visit in the form of a nightmare.

The Monday morning following the invitation fiasco the director's assistant removed her diary from her drawer. She hadn't touched it for months. She unlocked the golden clasp with the tiny key. She stared down at the page, then up at the bright wall, biting the pen, and then wrote furiously as she used to do in the old days when she'd seen Theo in the hospital the day before on Sunday. But Theo wasn't in the hospital anymore.

That same day, early in the afternoon, the phone rang while she was in the storeroom. The director took the call and winced at the familiar inquisitorial voice. "Mysels, the Commission. Miss Ruda? Where is Teddy?" The director, still resentful at the room fiasco, replied coldly. "Lorz, Ideal. At this precise moment, 3:12pm? Working in the underground, in the Crossroads station. Doing his usual efficient job, I imagine."

Mysels asked suspiciously why Teddy hadn't shown up for the medical check-up as he was supposed to. It was the second straight check-up he'd missed. And how was it that he was never in his flat after work or during the weekend?

"My relationship with my employees is strictly professional. What they do outside their six hours with Ideal is their business."

"Our business too. Actually I didn't expect you to know. I wanted to talk to Miss Ruda."

She was back at her desk by now and the director pointed at her phone. He hung up and busied himself with a letter already disposed of with an air of total absorption as though her progressively shocked voice were going on miles away.

"Yes... Oh really?... How should I know? Why do you ask me, Mr Mysels?... What?... Why Mr Mysels, that's no question to ask a... I'm surprised at you. I wouldn't dream of asking you personal questions like that... You certainly cannot 'draw conclusions...'... All I can say is that I wouldn't worry about Teddy. I'll talk to him about the check-up, goodbye."

She replaced the receiver, shrugging her shoulders. Still staring down at the letter, Lorz waited for clarification. After a few minutes he said that he could understand the Commission worrying if Theo didn't show up for appointments and was never home.

"Maybe they don't come around at the right times. Or maybe the El makes too much noise when they knock and he can't hear."

She blinked once, returned to her work for a few seconds, and then spoke about the latest batch of preview posters. Had he seen the new Pilsober? Funnier even than the last one.

So Lorz learned that she knew where Theo's flat was located. How had she found out? Why hadn't she told him? The information she let slip enabled him to narrow down the area of search. There was nothing obsessive about that search. An hour or so after work, sometimes after dark he followed the El.

At the end of the week, at a bit past ten in the evening, he found it, an old four-story building squeezed thin between larger, more modern apartment houses. In the cold white marble hall he saw the name Mr Tedd on letterbox 4a. A queer foreign-sounding name but not as queer, they must have thought, as Mr Teddy. Like all the other letterboxes, it was rusted as though disused for years. There was no mail inside any of the boxes. The other names, penciled, were nearly illegible. It was a strange place to have chosen for him. It was impossible to reach the staircase. You needed to press a code to open the hallway door.

He went outside and looked up just as the elevated train rumbled past, five meters away from the fourth-floor windows. He could well imagine that a knock on his door would have gone unheard. His assistant had drawn the same conclusion. Or had she been in a better position to know than on a street corner looking up at the windows? There was something else strange about Theo's building. The neighboring buildings were crossword puzzles of lighted windows, some warm yellow, others ghostly flickering blue from the television screens. Dramatic music, mimed shots and the deep boom of theatrical voices came from those windows.

Theo's building stood dark and silent. Not a single window was lighted. Not a ray of light came from the fourth floor. He could be out, of course. It wasn't even eleven o'clock. He (Lorz) had come too early. But there were seven other flats in the building. Why were they dark too? Maybe they were inhabited by old people who went to bed early.

Lorz waited till 11:30pm for the boy to return or switch on the light. The building remained black and silent. The yellow and blue squares in the other buildings went out one by one. The voices and music thinned and then fell silent.

Lorz returned home.

***

9

At 6:30pm August 27 it was her turn to pick Teddy up. As soon as she pushed through the Crossroads turnstile she saw what he'd done right and left, everywhere. She broke into a run through a maze of corridors. There were more and more of them. She finally located him in the East Gate corridor. By then, he'd run out of Basic White. But instead sitting slumped at the foot of his ladder, he was furiously attacking the poster with a key. It was a miracle he hadn't already been arrested. With great difficulty she got him to stop and return to the office, promising him unlimited quantities of chemicals.

When they entered the Ideal office she made an imperious gesture to her employer to say nothing, do nothing. Instead of preparing coffee she roughly parked Theo in his usual corner with a heap of posters and a carefully limited amount of chemicals, very little Basic White. She beckoned to the director to come into the storeroom with her.

She carefully closed the door and stood with her back against it. She stared at him tight-lipped. It was Theo of course, thought the director. God alone knew what he'd done now. But by the way she was staring at him one could almost believe that it was Lorz himself who had committed some unpardonable misdeed.

"What is it now?"

"Those posters you're always talking about. Your 'obscene posters''. All of them. Ours, other peoples'. He's put white rectangles everywhere. Then he tried to use a key on them when the paint ran out."

His assistant whispered it with hostile passion. And now, before he had time to cope with the news, realize the full scope of its implications, she went on, practically accusing him (Lorz, the director, her employer) of responsibility for what Theo had done.

"Who gave him that idea? When you pick him up is that what you talk to him about, how awful the new posters are? Do you realize what this means?"

He realized, better than she did, what it meant. It meant that unless prompt painful measures were taken (and they would be but wasn't it already too late?) it was an end to Ideal Poster. He saw it all: the outbreak of the scandal, "humorous" articles in the press, lawsuits hurled at him like a lapidation, disgrace, bankruptcy. What would become of him at his age, in failing health?

Objectively, whatever Theo's intentions, his interventions were graffiti. He'd madly reversed the normal roles. An Ideal operator was being paid to deface posters belonging to Ideal clients. Other Ideal operators would be paid to rectify his defacements. It was like a serpent eating its own tail. And all those witnesses, millions of them. At any moment a client would see it or learn about it. It spelled the disgraceful end of Ideal.

"Do you realize what this means?" she repeated, offensively insistent as though addressing a small dull-witted child.

"That we'll both be looking for a job very soon," replied the director tight-lipped himself now. "Easier for you than for me. If Ideal goes out of business you won't stay unemployed very long. What about me, though? What can I do at my age, with my health problems?"

"Who's talking about Ideal or a new job?" she whispered vehemently. A vein stood out in her neck. I'm not talking about you or me. I'm talking about Teddy. What's going to become of Teddy?"

The director had to accept the humiliation of self-defense. He told her that he'd never said a word about those posters in front of Theo. He'd been on his guard about what he said and did ever since the painting episode.

This was true. But something else was true too, he realized. Didn't she know, having leafed through the magazine carelessly left on his desk once, about those experiments or games or attempts at contact via the newsmagazines long ago in the hospital? How already he'd perhaps set the example half-humorously with ink-effacer disguised as Basic White. Those corrupt faces eclipsed by white full moons. And already then, the strategic distribution of white rectangles on the most outrageous of the advertisements and the boy's quick imitation. He recalled the exaggerated attack on the soft-focus perfume nude with the plum-colored nipples. He recalled the words of the dead doctor: "Why like a child do you scribble over the photographs? Or cover them up with white paint? What is this madness of teaching Teddy such things?" He recalled: "You have made perhaps irreparable harm. What has given you such an idea?"

"Who gave him the crazy idea, then?" said his assistant, not knowing she was echoing a dead man's unanswered question. "The only ideas he has are the ones you put in his head."

The director asked her to use a different tone of voice when speaking to him and to moderate her vocabulary. Her hysterical accusations were monstrous.

Her painted eyes widened. Hysterical, had he said?

The exchange went on, worsened, sometimes rose from whispers to levels audible in the next room and then one or the other would make a gesture toward that room and they would lower their voices, defining the limits of their quarrel, defining the quarrel itself, perhaps, as a device to stave off contemplation of the disaster.

But then she went too far. She said that without her, Ideal would have gone out of business years ago. She did all of the work. She got nothing but insults for her pains. He didn't seem to realize how much he owed her.

At that he couldn't help countering: "Whose idea was it in the first place to hire him? Also God knows it wasn't my idea to get up and look at his poster that morning, either. First my health, now my business, I owe you so much."

He heard her breathe, lower than a whisper, "Oh," and he quickly added that it wasn't doing any good saying stupid things to each other, things they didn't really mean, at least he didn't and he was sure she didn't either. She knew he wasn't to blame for what had just happened. They had a problem to solve, he said. They had to convince Theo to stop the crazy censorship. Maybe it wasn't too late. He would speak to the boy first. He touched her arm as he went past her into the office.

Theo was crouched over the poster with the indefatigable white-tipped brush. It was hard to gain his attention, impossible to keep it. Perhaps it was because of the director's confused groping for the right words, his false starts and stammerings. Theo's gaze slipped past his employer's face and rested on the giant map of the underground with pin number seven still (for the moment) stuck in the big red dot of Crossroads.

Finally Lorz coaxed the boy to his feet and guided him away from the poster and the map into the storeroom. He sat the boy down and drew up a chair. His assistant left the storeroom.

Where Theo was now seated the light was unkind. His face took it badly. For the first time the director saw what his assistant had so often talked about. The contour of his skull was visible. His cheekbones had emerged alarmingly. Below were shadowed wastes. His skin was peculiarly pale, white almost. He's dying, the director thought. Why hadn't he seen it before? The posters are killing him. Theo was drowning in the posters. He was going under.

The director sensed confusedly that all this was the consequence of the boy's fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the posters. He had to bring it out into the open, articulate it in simple repetitious words for Theo to grasp it.

He started with the physical nature of the posters. He told Theo that the posters were rectangles of paper, of such and such a size, thickness and grade. Basically they were paper-pulp, once pungent trees, now dead supports for photographs, most of them taken in studios with paid models who smiled on command. They were representations of representations. Not to be confused with reality. The posters were nothing but thousands of differently tinted dots. Yes, there were certain real things represented by the colored dots – say, mountains or sunrises or skies – but those real things weren't down in the underground. Granted, the individuals who graffitied the decent posters with indecencies were despicable or sick. But – listen carefully – it wasn't as if they were mutilating a real landscape or face. You had to make that essential distinction. If you didn't, anything was possible, all levels of reality were mixed up and colored dots and a real granite mountain were the same. That was madness, to deny hierarchies of reality.

Those colored dots, then, weren't real like real smiles or skies. Essentially the colored dots were chemical dyes with long formulas. They were configured into an illusion of smiles and skies (and the original smiles themselves were artificial and sometimes the skies too, just a cloth backdrop in the studio). All of which meant this: that nothing essential was being soiled when the poster was graffitied. This being so, one had to look upon poster correction as a job, like street cleaning. Infinitely more skilled, of course, but a job anyhow, a source of income, not a mission in life, not something to which you sacrificed life and reason as Theo was doing. A simple job. So as a job he, Theo, must limit himself to contractual posters and limit his corrections to six hours. Not a minute more. And not think about them until the next day at 1:00pm, not a minute before.

Lorz paused for breath. He was sweating, his glasses steaming up as though he were wrestling with boulders instead of concepts.

So much for the decent posters, he said. Out of the corner of his eye, as he dabbed his forehead with his silk handkerchief, he perceived his assistant standing in the doorway looking down at the floor, listening. He raised his voice slightly. The pornographic posters, granted, were in a separate category. They were a public offense against decency, polluting innocent gazes. He'd always believed that even though he had never told him (Theo) that, never. A less lax society wouldn't tolerate such things. And yet these posters must not be censored. Do you understand? Must not. Yes, granted, in issuing this stern injunction his employer, he, Edmond Lorz, the director of Ideal Poster, was party to the spiritual pollution. He was paid to protect the pornographic posters against graffiti as he was for the other, decent, posters and he accepted the payment, with all the implications of that acceptance. Theo mustn't think, not for a fraction of an instant, that he, the director, wasn't cognizant of his objective complicity.

But one had to compromise, Lorz went on. Refusal to compromise was madness. It could even happen – this might seem inconceivable, nevertheless it was true – that one's understandable reaction to such horrors might have consequences even worse than the (after all pictured) horrors themselves. What Theo had done to the pornographic posters was absolutely unacceptable, monstrous. It endangered Ideal. It endangered Theo himself. Do you understand the danger, Theo? What would become of him if he continued? There were policemen to uphold laws however lax and unfair these laws might be. He could be arrested. There would be no more legitimate poster correction then. All the graffiti that he'd removed would accumulate again. And what would become of him then outside of Ideal? There was no place to flee. From tomorrow on, then, he must turn over a new leaf. Do you hear, Theo? Five hours of work, not a minute more. Only contractual posters, strictly Ideal posters, do you understand? And you do not, do not, touch the indecent posters except to remove graffiti! And you must eat and get sleep and not think of the posters after work. Think of whatever you like, anything else. Mountains, fields, stars, soccer-matches, other people, real people, whatever, but not posters. Anything except posters.

The director leaned back in his seat with a curious feeling of lightness and exaltation. He got up, dizzy, and went to the doorway where she was standing. He looked at her. Her face remained shut on him.

"I hope he understands now," he said.

"He didn't understand a single word," she said. "I didn't either."

It was her turn. She sat down stiffly in the chair facing the boy. Lorz moved away into the office and stopped not far from the doorway.

Teddy, listen to me, she said. Look at me. I'm going to talk to you again about what you did to the posters today, the paint you put on those posters. I'm going to say it in simple language that anybody can understand. You did something very bad. You're going to be punished for it. I'm going to punish you so the others won't punish you worse. You'll see how pretty soon. I won't be nice with you any more. Look at me. You like it when I'm nice, don't you? Well, no more, never again if you ever do that again. I don't like to punish you, Teddy. But if you do that again to the posters the others are going to punish you too but much worse because they don't love you at all.

Look at me. You want to stay here with us, don't you? Here in Ideal, I mean. It's not much, I know, but it's all we've got. If you make trouble they'll take you away. They'll lock you up. They'll put you in a straitjacket, squirt you full of drugs to keep you calm, don't you understand that? Put you with the loonies. You don't want that, Ted. I wouldn't be able to stand that. Mr Lorz wouldn't want that either, I think. We're your only friends. You wouldn't see us again. You wouldn't see me any more. That wouldn't matter to you if you didn't see me any more?

Her voice stopped a moment.

I'll give you something else Teddy if you do as I say. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. She was whispering something unintelligible in the office where Lorz stood near the door. Then louder: "Would you like that, Ted? Look at me when I talk to you. No, sit down!"

A chair clattered to the floor. A second later the director was in the storeroom. Theo had got up and was making for the big locker where the huge cans of Basic White were stored, secured by a stout brass padlock, ever since the painting incident. She retreated in front of the locker with her arms outspread, barring access. She said, "No!" sharply. "You're not getting that paint now or tomorrow. That's your punishment for what you did. Tomorrow you're not getting any paints or chemicals either. Tomorrow you're staying here in the office with us like you were supposed to, one day a week. Because of what you did today to those posters. After, we'll see."

Theo was almost upon her, towering over her.

"No," she said again and wasn't afraid to push at him. He remained there as motionless as a ten-ton statue being pushed.

Lorz stepped between them. "Be reasonable, Theo," he soothed, pulling the boy away from the locker and his assistant. They went into the office and toward the door. She tried to help Theo with the ladder. He moved away and slung it over his shoulder by himself.

"You shouldn't be so brutal with him," Lorz said in a low voice.

She reached up for Theo's shoulder and on tiptoe kissed his cheek. "I'm not always brutal, he knows that," she said. The boy averted his face. She pushed him out, saying that she had a letter to type. She said something else to him in the hallway. Lorz couldn't make it out.

She closed the door and went over to her desk. Her typewriter began chattering, her bracelets clinking. At such a time. She stopped and frowned at the sheet. She reached for the ink-corrector. She rarely made typing errors.

"What are you doing?" the director asked, taking advantage of the pause.

"Typing the New Dawn invoice," she said absently, applying the white fluid.

"Can't it wait?"

"For what?" She blew on the corrected spot.

"Teddy's posters, of course. They can't remain in that state."

"The night-shift'll take care of it in two hours. You can detail a couple of the operators to Crossroads." She went back typing, like machinegun fire.

"That's not soon enough," said the director, forced to raise his voice. "They don't know how to do surgicals anyhow. I wonder if you could stop typing. Just for a few seconds."

"Damn, another mistake." She yanked the sheet out of the roller, crumpled it and shot it into the wastepaper basket.

"You'll have to tell me which of the posters he censored and roughly how many," said the director. "Our posters, naturally. The others can wait. I have to know which ones to take with me."

"You're going to do the job yourself?"

"Who else knows how to handle surgical jobs except me?" He added pointedly: "Outside of you, that is."

It was strange that she hadn't instantly volunteered, strange that in this supreme emergency she was abandoning him. She took a new sheet of paper. He thought she was going to insert it in the roller of her typewriter and go back to the letter. Instead she took a pen and at intervals jotted things down. She did it in silence. Finally she placed the sheet on the corner of her desk. She took another sheet of paper and fed it into the roller. "I think I have all of the posters. The ones I saw. I didn't see them all. He works fast."

Lorz took the paper. He studied the list and then went over to the stacks of posters that lined the walls. The typewriter started chattering again, the bracelets clinking. He hiked up his trousers, squatted and pulled out sheaves of posters. The chattering stopped.

"How long is it going to take you?" she asked, getting up. She brought the letter over to his desk for him to sign.

"With one operator perhaps four hours. With two, half as long."

"I have things to do this evening. There's nothing in my contract that says I have to do overtime."

He didn't answer. There was nothing to answer. She went into the storeroom and returned a few minutes later, her mask heavily rejuvenated. She said good night curtly. He said good night curtly too and added that she should try to be less brutal with Theo. It wasn't a wise way to behave with him.

He returned to the stacks and pulled out more of the posters she'd listed. He hadn't done a surgical in over ten years. A total replacement over the censored posters would have been technically easier but much longer than a surgical repair job: wasn't that the very selling point of Ideal? He chose the instruments and chemicals with great care: pots of paste, cutters with sets of spares, numerous scissors of different shapes and sizes, the instrument they called the "scalpel" for the initial incision, liter bottles of water, sponges. There wasn't room for all that in a single knapsack.

On his way to Central Station he glimpsed his own image in a full length cinema-mirror. Under the weight of the rolls of posters and the two bulging knapsacks plus the ladder he was nearly bent a twisted double. He resembled an expressionistic picture of a saint or criminal, ingeniously tortured. He was exhausted even before he set to work in Crossroads. Didn't she realize how sick a man he was? What "things to do" could be more important than relieving him of part of the burden?

Thank God Theo hadn't caught them all. There, for instance: the Happy Felix cat food poster with the fluffy black Persian in the low cut girl's lap and the smirking man with the legend, that legend. The verbal obscenities had escaped Theo. But nothing that was visually offensive had got past him, unfortunately.

Lorz started in on panels 54-101 covered by the Airstream Bra ad. The woman now sported great white squares in the place of the original naked breasts. She was reaching for a bra presented by a kneeling angel with golden wings. "For when he's not around," the legend ran. Somewhat blurred in the background a bare-chested young man was contemplating dreamy-faced his cupped hands. Grimly the director snipped and pasted and restored her to nudity over and over again. Then he rolled on to the others and others beyond those others. He penetrated deeper into the tiled maze. Onlookers gathered behind him.

The chore turned out to be one of the supreme humiliations in a life abundant in these. Lips compressed to the thinnest of lines at the imposed role of obsessive saboteur of decency, the director of Ideal Poster snipped out a thousand times the lustful faces, breasts, as well as the parts judged by the censor as insufficiently shadowed. A thousand times he applied the whitish fluid paste to their neutral side, adjusting them over the white squares and rectangles with the greatest of care to totally nullify the nullifications, trimming, readjusting, restoring the objects.

In the past, of course, surgery had been the other way round: the covering of obscenities by the original decency. Particularly terrible now were the gutted posters after his scissors had got to them: great holes in the place of breasts and parts, even more obscene than the originals. He hastily stuffed them into the trash-bins like a maniac getting rid of mutilated victims.

The director tried to concentrate on the job and exclude from his consciousness the comments and sounds of derision behind his back. An old toothless derelict followed him about for half an hour, driveling: "titsies, titsies, wooo, woooo" and making coital sounds and meows. Lorz longed for some magic fluid that would obliterate them all as easily as Theo had obliterated what he, Lorz, was resurrecting.

He went on and on. The stream of passengers began thinning out in the corridors. There were fewer and fewer of the snickering onlookers. By eleven-thirty the director found himself alone in the East Gate corridor.

His relief lasted no more than a minute. He heard a faint echoing slap of leather soles. Two policemen were marching down the corridor, tiny blue at the convergence of the twin lines of Pilsober's censored lovers that the director was restoring to indecency. He mastered the blind urge to flee and grimly busied himself with his task. The official sole slapping stopped behind him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a club poking about in the knapsack, uncovering the pre-cut breasts and shadowed parts. He heard them muttering. He resisted the temptation to volunteer information. When addressing what he tried earnestly not to mentally formulate as his social inferiors he tended, he knew, to careful even precious language, badly received. He limited himself to: "Good evening, officers." That archaic monarchical title, "officer" was perhaps a mistake. He got no reply. The club went on poking about in the knapsack.

In the old days as an active operator he'd often had to cope with suspicious policemen. But explanations had been easy then. They could see the obscenities he was obliterating. Not, as now, imposing. His trembling hands botched the job. He had to fish out another pair of breasts. His hand entered into competition with the club. He muttered an apology. He feared arrest. Fortunately the radio at the belt of one of the policemen broke into unintelligible crackles. He growled into the apparatus. The club stopped poking. They left. He went on.

It was already midnight when the director gathered up his tools and chemicals and took the E Express for Central Station and Ideal. Had he ever been as tired in his life? But at the same time he experienced a rare satisfaction at having undone Theo's suicidal corrections. He felt that his message to the boy had got through, that analysis had proved superior to brutal threats.

Shooting past the local station May 23 he caught a glimpse of Theodore on his ladder scratching away at another Pilsober poster, the left breast. He had a knife now. He was whisked away and the train window framed the gloom of the tunnel with red and green lamps hurtling by.

The director stared at his watch. By the time he reached the express stop and finally caught a local back to May 23 the boy might be gone. In any case it would be very near to closing time. The Underground Police would be clearing the stations of all the passengers. Necessarily, the boy would return to his flat. Lorz had to head him off, get there before him. He would have it out with him, make real threats as his assistant hadn't dared to do, threats to inform the Commission of the true situation with Ideal if he didn't stop.

Lorz arrived at Theo's street at 1:10am and posted himself at the corner opposite the building with its dark windows. A broken reddish moon stood high above it.

It gradually sank behind the building.

By 3:00am he realized that Theo wouldn't be returning that night. Where could he be? The director had a sudden vision of him still in the underground, now empty and silent, scratching away, perhaps back in Crossroads, undoing the director's work that had undone his own earlier work. Lorz saw Theo going on endlessly from station to station day and night, neither sleeping nor eating, like an automate, correcting and undoing the corrections of corrections.

Impossible. At 1:30am. synchronized loudspeakers in all sixty-three of the capital's underground stations blared the message of eviction and the Underground Police investigated the toilets (the moment most of the overdose victims were discovered) and banged their clubs on the tiles over the heads of the derelicts snoring on the benches and hustled them out and sixty-three brass gates clashed shut barring the station entrances. It hadn't been that way at the beginning of his (Lorz's) avocation as poster-rectifier before the meeting with the fat executive with the pigskin briefcase turned it into sensible vocation. Lorz (not yet Director) recalled certain days when the prospect of return to the empty flat had caused him to hide in the toilets and then work a while longer in the blessed emptiness of the underground corridors and sleep in the toilets. That was before drugs. Who bothered searching the toilets then?

Anyhow Theo couldn't keep it up endlessly. He had to be sleeping at this time of night. But if not in the underground and not in his flat, sleeping where? The obvious answer finally came to Lorz.

He unlocked and pushed the door open very slowly. The only sound in the office was the ventilator, whirring tirelessly day and night. He didn't turn on the ceiling mercury lamps. He mustn't be awakened brutally. So in the dark Lorz guided himself along the wall until he reached the storeroom doorway. In the absolute darkness (but the director knew the layout of his office better than his own face) he tiptoed into the cubicle where the cot was.

He thought he could hear breathing. "Theodore?" he whispered. He got no reply. He ventured away from the wall and approached the spot.

"Theo," he whispered again. He stretched out his hands over the cot and gradually lowered them. They encountered cold sheets.

He felt his way out of the storeroom and groped toward the wall opposite and the light switch. He tripped over something heavy and metallic that had no business there and pitched forward into more strangeness: fragments of musty-smelling wood. His knee hurt. He slowly hobbled at a new angle toward the wall. His feet encountered more wooden fragments. When he turned on the overhead mercury lamps the light blinded him worse than the darkness. He started weeping so hard that his lenses were streaming wet.

When his eyes could finally focus he thought at first that those wet lenses had created an optical illusion of chaos. But the objects stayed there even after he'd wiped his glasses dry: the deformed typewriter he'd stumbled over and his assistant's desk reduced to shambles as though someone had bashed it with a sledge-hammer. Theo had been in the office, after all, but not to sleep.

The director went back into the storeroom and turned the lights on there too. Theo had worked over the big locker too but not senselessly for the sake of destruction. The stout brass padlock had resisted but had been bypassed. The heavy sheet metal of the doors had been forced at the bottom and wrenched up and back to gain access to the contents. It looked as though explosives had gone off inside. The locker was empty.

How could he have taken all those drums? Where did he stock them? How could he have had the strength with his bare hands (Lorz guessed) to do what he'd done to the desk and the locker?

The director felt a brief flare in his bowels. He slumped into a chair.

After a while he nodded off.

***

10

When the pain awoke him he returned to the chaos of the office for the pills in his desk drawer. Lying among the debris of her desk he saw her expensive-looking diary with the twining pink flowers on the blue linen cover and the tiny heart-shaped brass lock. Near a broken pencil and a scattering of paper clips there was the tiny brass key. He picked them up and went over to his desk.

He switched on the lamp and without hesitation unlocked the heart-shaped clasp. He was too numb to feel guilt at the intrusion. He didn't have the conscious thought that within the pretty flowered covers there might be an explanation for the destruction that had placed the diary in his hands. He leafed through it.

He came upon the sketches at once. There was an uninspired but recognizable ink head of Theo. Also, even less successful, Theo again, practically nude on his ladder, painting the office. She was poor at male anatomy. A few pages further his own face shocked him. It covered the whole page. It was badly done, more an unsuccessful caricature than a portrait. Or was that how she saw him? He looked like a blind man with those opaque glasses. She'd drawn something tiny in each lens with a fine-pointed pencil. He had to turn the diary upside-down to make it out, recognizably, as herself, great-eyed, one in each lens. On other pages there were long lists. Numerous grocery lists, mainly tinned and frozen food. Lists of fruit trees, apples and pears.

The farm was a major subject. She'd sketched the roughest of maps of the route there. He observed National Highway 18, saw the turn-off and the road that wiggled into childish representations of mountains with no names. On the next page she'd sketched the farmhouse. There was a kitchen garden and a field filled with lollypop representations of trees labeled as peach. How was that possible? She'd said only apples came there. But he'd heard of protected situations, windbreaks, south-exposed walls. His horticultural knowledge, picked up in the encyclopedia, was fragmentary.

He turned his attention to her notes. The relative importance (to her) of an entry was disclosed at a glance by the size of the writing, the use of capitals and exclamation marks. There were adolescent-style self-admonitions in big caps: "I do it too much. Stop doing it!!!" "Did it again." "Oh, hopeless." "Leave it all." "Leave everything." Lorz concentrated on the last twenty or so pages.

June 15. Jon last night. Much much better than Max. More gentle.

There were numerous notes on other men, their strong points and shortcomings, perhaps psychological. The director thought of the claimed bluebirds long ago and the belled goats. Then he encountered a reference to "Peter" and her indignation at what he'd told her at the restaurant: that he liked "older women." The presence late in the diary of "Peter" removed his doubts. He, the director, could vouch for the authenticity of Peter: the fat cross-eyed job inspector. It gave authenticity to the other men friends. She'd made no secret of her "freedom" as they called it. What exactly did she "tell him not to do"?

On the next page, June 30, he saw the huge capitalized words: !!!! Read Teddy's lips finally. He said my name. Over and over, my name. Not said really but you could see it was that: Do-ro-the-a. Here the director pictured Theo's lips, gigantic in his mind, as he'd seen them that night in the underground and tried to impose "D-or-o-the-a" on the movements. The syllables fitted more or less except for the initial labial. But "Basic White" fitted better. "Ed-mond" clearly didn't fit at all. He went on leafing though the diary.

July 12. He did it again. I wish he would stop it.

Who was the "he"? Peter? Jon? Joseph? Others? Stop what?

A few pages further there was a giant exclamation mark down the whole of the left margin.

August 4. !!! Teddy spoke to me. Looked straight into my eyes and said something. Didn't understand. Asked him to repeat. He didn't. Foreign language? Tell E. about it?

August 5. !!! Understood this time. !!! Almost fainted. Of all things for his first words! Comic, almost. Answered no, of course. Never tell E. about it.

August 8. Again. Said no again. Told him my age. Lied a little. As if he couldn't see! Asked him who he was, real name. Said same thing. No, I said, no. Not now.

August 9. Says nothing. Won't even look at me. Later, maybe, I said.

August 11. Wouldn't accept the sweets. I cried. Hand on shoulder. Yes, later, I said. Everything all right.

August 12. Oh God, I must be crazy. Crazy, crazy. Almost killed. Gentle, gentle, I said.

The director stared at the entry. He took out his address book and looked at the calendar. August 12 was a Sunday. There was little doubt where they had been.

The director heard shuffling footsteps in the corridor outside the office door, coughs and a key in the lock. Quickly he closed the diary, locked it and placed it and the key back in the chaos where he had picked them up. It was bald tubercular-looking Number 4, followed by fat twitchy-faced Number 10, so 5:00am. Ten past five, they were always late. He'd slept longer than he'd thought.

The operators didn't look confused at the presence of their employer. They gave no more than an unconcerned glance at the wrecked desk. The rest of the morning shift straggled in, bleary-eyed, yawning and unshaved, also uncurious about the chaos in the office, making no comments about the mangled locker in the storeroom. They took their knapsacks and ladders and shuffled out of the office.

Lorz locked the door behind them. He went through his drawers in search of the ineffectual pills for the burning, back again after so long. He turned off the lights in the office, went into the storeroom, filled a glass with water and gulped down two yellow capsules. He took his shoes and jacket off, turned off the light and lay down on the cot. He feared the worsening pain in his bowels would keep him awake but he fell asleep at once.

The glaring light from the office awoke him. Or perhaps it had been the key in the lock. He heard her say, "My God" repeatedly and heard her stirring about the ruins of her desk. She stopped at the threshold of the storeroom and saw him on the cot. She was holding the flowered diary in her hand. She hadn't seen the violated giant locker yet. It was 7:45am. She switched on the storeroom lights. "What are you doing here? My God, what happened to my desk? And the typewriter? What were they looking for? Were you here when it happened?"

"No," he replied, glasses still facing the ceiling. He had his hands clasped behind his head and had removed his shoes. He looked comfortable and unconcerned.

"Why don't you get up and help me with the desk?" she almost shouted.

Glue the pieces together? He was too tired to make the sarcasm. Then she saw the gutted locker. She must have made all the connections all at once because she made another little "Oh" sound like the day before. He heard her sitting down. His eyes were still shut against the light. After a while she asked in a weak voice: "Did Teddy do that?"

"Unless there was a second burglar with a key to the office. Count yourself fortunate. It could have been you instead of your desk."

He heard her say that now at long last he'd have to buy her another desk, a new modern one, metal this time, they stood up better than wooden ones. And of course a typewriter, electric this time. She mentioned different makes, quoted prices. Lorz saw his mother in the gutted flat, with her husband just dead, intent on pasting together the pieces of the smashed Chinese vase. Now his assistant was saying that she wanted him to buy another locker, much more solid this time with a fool-proof lock and that when Teddy came back at 12:30pm he wouldn't be given the chemicals, ever again. He agreed absently.

She returned to it again and again. No chemicals, ever again, did he hear?

Finally to make her stop he said that Theo wouldn't be coming back for quite some time. Wasn't that obvious? He had what he wanted.

After a long silence she wondered why it had to be their chemicals, their paint, any white paint instead of Basic White could have done. He could so easily have bought it. When would he be back?

The director said he didn't know why it had to be Basic White and why theirs. Secretly he thought he did. He said that he'd be back, theoretically, when he ran out of Basic White. When? Say a liter of Basic White a day. Those rectangles and squares were a drain on the paint. He'd taken four hundred liters. It was a problem for six-year-olds. "A year and a half," she said after a while. "One year, four months and two weeks," he corrected in his curiously distant uninvolved voice. "But so many things can happen before then."

Now the director spoke in a low tone of voice as to himself. The supplier had to be contacted, at least two thirty-liter drums to tide them over the week. The desk was beyond repair. So was the typewriter. A second hand machine and desk had to be picked up, it shouldn't be too dear. They had to get the stolen drums back: not just because of the cost of the paint, considerable, but to cut off his supply. If they told him the Commission or even the police would be informed he'd bring them back. Probably. It was a possibility at least.

No problem getting hold of him, the director went on. The only place he could possibly have stored those bulky drums of paint was in his flat. He had to be there at this very moment. He'd worked (sabotaged, rather) all day long till past midnight in the underground. He must have been dead tired even before the burglary.

He ignored her interruption ("He's not a burglar!") and grappled with the enigmas surrounding the theft, maybe to put off facing the full implications of the twisted empty locker and the smashed desk.

The burglary must have taken place between 12:30am and 3:30am. He'd glimpsed the boy at 12:15am in the May 23 station. How had he been able to manage it? The second shift arrived at 9:00pm, picked up their chemicals in their padlocked lockers. They returned at approximately 12:30 and would have noticed the burglary, left a note. So Theo had operated after 12:30. But the underground shut down at 1:30am. This gave Theo barely an hour to transport almost half a ton of Basic White. From Central Station (the nearest station to Ideal) to Theo's flat required at least twenty-five minutes. Only one trip was possible. How had he managed that half a ton? One thing was certain: he would return to the flat for supplies.

The director resumed his reflections in his detached voice, more to the ceiling than to her. Theo had certainly been exhausted when he finished hauling (how?) the last of the drums of Basic White to his flat, he said. He must have pitched into his bed and gone to sleep. He had to get sleep sometime. He turned his head and looked at her. Theo was asleep in his bed right now, he said. No chance he'd wake up for hours. So in an hour's time, he'd go over and wait till Theo came out of the building. Oh yes, he knew where it was located. He'd make him bring the paint back. An ultimatum.

But he was too tired for that now. In half an hour she should wake him up, he told her. He turned toward the wall.

He woke up an hour later. The office was empty. She'd left a note on the table. She would be back that afternoon.

At almost 9:30am night seemed to be closing in. The sky was black with thunderclouds. The long-announced rain was almost upon the capital after months of drooping roses and marigolds in the public squares. The atmosphere was stagnant.

Lifting his face as the first fat drops pattered down he saw a strange glow in the fourth-story window as though an old fashioned roller-shade intercepted the light within. Drops exploded on his uplifted lenses. The last time he'd looked out of wet lenses a few hours ago he'd seen real chaos and taken it for an optical illusion. This time the distortion of the wet lenses produced a ghostly smiling face superimposed on the fourth-story shade, a genuine optical illusion this time, harmonious instead of chaotic. The light inside the room, at least, was no illusion.

He'd been right. Theo was there. Theo hadn't even had the energy to switch the lights off before collapsing onto his bed.

Luck was with him. A mason burdened with tools and a sack of plaster came and started struggling with the street door. Lorz held it open for him. The man fingered the code buttons for the corridor door. Lorz was helpful again. Once the mason had disappeared up the stairs he slipped inside. He encountered no one in the gloomy staircase. When he reached the fourth floor he saw two doors on the short landing. One was curiously boarded up. A key dangled from the lock of the other door. It was ajar. He pushed it open.

No neutral refuge for his eyes except the floor. They were plastered everywhere else in rigorous order on the walls and the ceiling: laughing children, tender-eyed dogs, pine-rimmed lakes, starry skies, piled-up clouds, fondled cats, snow-capped mountains, smiling Helena on her swing, russet forests, blue skies, flower-spangled meadows, vineyards, surf on the beach where Helena strolled, sailing-boats with pregnant sails, geometric gardens, patchworks of tilled fields, hand-in-hand couples in the forest, sea gulls, roses, wheat fields, birds on flowered boughs, herds of zebras, old bridges, celebrated towers, weddings, blue bays.

Lorz knew them all. Leaving at 7:00pm, Theo had often been given batches of the posters that lined the office walls to dump in the ash can. All that insistent harmony stuck strictly side by side on the walls, the doors, the window, the ceiling (everywhere except the carpeted floor) without the buffer of the soiled white tiles as in the underground produced the worst of chaos, a war of colors, a conflict of lines. You couldn't go on looking. It reminded him of the effect his mother's room produced with the mirrors, except here it was worse, you couldn't sanely reduce the myriad images to a few pieces of furniture, an overhead light, a dozen Christs.

She was standing stricken in the middle of the room beneath the overhead light looking about her as though seeing them for the first time. Thunder began faintly and built up. Now the noise was astonishingly close. It resolved into the El train going past the opaque window. Then the real thunder came, like inconceivable towers toppling. The rain dashed against the pane where Helena, smiling, blocked vision. Seen from the street below, filtered by the thickness of the pasted poster-paper, he had taken her for another optical illusion.

Lorz looked in the bathroom and the closets. Then he stretched out on the bed.

"I had to lie down too," she said.

The thunder subsided to mutterings. A quarter of an hour later he got up and they left. She locked up. The stolen half-ton of Basic White wasn't in the flat. It was still another enigma to busy his mind with as they went down the stairs. The rain was coming down too violently for them to walk to the underground station. She flagged down a taxi. In the back seat next to her the odor of her perfume and sweating body built up. He cranked down the window even though rain dashed in on his arm and lap. He felt like sticking his head outside the window in the rain and wind. He asked her where she'd got the key to his flat. She replied that she'd had a spare cut for him, in case he lost the original. While she was at it she'd asked for another in case of emergencies. Like this one.

Lorz asked if his flat had looked like that the last time she'd been there.

She answered quickly that there'd been no last time. The key was for emergencies. Today was the first emergency.

When they got out of the taxi in front of the Ideal building they found Dr Silberman standing in the doorway in rubbers and a rolled-up dripping umbrella. He was wearing a bright yellow raincoat and a floppy rubber fisherman's hat of the same color.

"I thought I would finally keep that promise to drop in some day," he said blandly, shaking hands with them. "I seem to have chosen the wrong day, doubly so."

The director apologized for the rain and for their absence: a work-emergency, he said. They went down the staircase and entered the office. She switched the lights on.

"Yes... Yes..." said Dr Silberman looking around at the office. "The bare essentials, I'm afraid," said the director. "Purely functional." His assistant helped the doctor off with his bright raincoat. She draped it over a chair. Little pools gathered on the floor beneath it. The doctor wiped the raindrops off his pince-nez. He started wandering about the office. He seemed particularly interested in the piles of posters that lined the walls. The director asked him if he didn't want to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them. Silberman didn't seem to hear. He went on moving about ponderously, back turned to them, looking at the posters. He was like a visitor in a shabby art-museum conscientiously inspecting oddly presented pictures.

"Yes," he said again. Obviously it had no relation to the director's invitation. He turned about. "I believe Mysels rang you up a few days ago concerning Teddy. We haven't seen him for over two weeks now."

"So he told me," the director replied.

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"Teddy?" said the director's assistant. "Yesterday evening at 6:30pm of course. As usual. And before that at 12:30pm, the usual time. He's very punctual with us."

The doctor sat down before the director's desk. "I couldn't trouble you for a cup of coffee, could I? Drive the damp out of my bones."

She stared insistently at her employer. "I'll be right back," she assured the doctor, as though her presence were indispensable. She almost ran into the storeroom.

"Yes, we've been having difficulties contacting Teddy," said Silberman, leaning back in his chair.

"Mr Mysels told me about that, how you couldn't get into his flat," said Lorz as his assistant appeared in the doorway, holding the jar of instant-coffee.

"Oh, there was no difficulty getting into his flat," said the doctor. "We have a key, of course. The difficulty was that he was never there. And there were certain... indications that Teddy isn't doing too well. Not well at all."

"Certain indications?"

"Signs, let's say."

Signs. Icons. Lorz wondered if Theo had already started in on the ceiling or the window the last time they'd let themselves in.

"You're quite certain that Teddy has been acting in a normal way – a reasonably normal way – with you?" Dr Silberman asked.

"One hundred percent normal," said the director's assistant from the doorway. The kettle began whistling faintly behind her. Dr Silberman continued looking at the director.

"Teddy's work and behavior with Ideal have been entirely satisfactory," said the director.

"Yes, I remember, those were the exact words you checked on the job report. But that was months ago." He turned to the director's assistant.

"Does he take his medicine regularly?" He had to raise his voice. The whistle was shrill now.

"Regular as clock-work. 6:30pm. I make sure." She disappeared and came back a few seconds later with the kettle, steam billowing from the spout.

"Yesterday evening, for instance?"

The director recalled that Theo hadn't taken the pills the evening before. There had been too much drama.

She placed a decorated tile on the desk and the kettle on the tile.

"Of course, yesterday evening," she said. "Regularly at six-thirty when he comes back. Closer to seven, actually."

"I ask because we looked for him yesterday afternoon in Crossroads."

"We?" said the director. "You and somebody else?"

"Not personally. Crossroads is hard on the feet. I avoid it whenever I can. No, representatives of the hospital, I meant. They couldn't find him this time."

"This time?" she asked.

"A few days before, a... representative of the hospital did find him in Crossroads, working very hard, apparently. He tried to convince him to come back with him to the hospital for a check-up. Teddy was very very reluctant to, it seems. Yesterday the two of them couldn't find him anywhere. He's easy enough to recognize, though. But if you say you picked him up at 6:30..."

Silberman broke off and looked at the jar of instant coffee.

She smote her forehead theatrically and rushed back in the storeroom, all the while insulting her brains loudly so that, the director guessed, nothing would be said during her absence. She came back with the cups and saucers, the sugar and biscuits and served them. They drank in silence. Silberman placed his empty cup in the saucer.

"I asked about his medicine because his prescription has to be renewed. If he's been taking the medicine regularly as you say he has, there's enough for just two more days. It would be dangerous for him not to continue." Dr Silberman got up, went over to the chair and the puddle. He struggled into his raincoat.

"I imagine one of you will be here in the office tomorrow at six," he said, smiling. He tugged down the brim of the floppy fisherman's hat to the pince-nez. "We'll come then, if you agree. Teddy comes back at about seven, I believe you said. There'll be no problem."

The director didn't have to ask who the "we" were this time. He knew one of them already: the dead doctor's squat detached shadow. Accompanying the doctor to the door, Lorz asked in the most casual of voices: "Am I wrong? I had the idea that Teddy's medicine was the same as mine."

"It is. But the dosage is much stronger. Your cases can't be compared." He opened the door and then turned about. "You do take yours regularly, I hope. It would be unwise to interrupt the treatment."

"Oh I see that he does," said his assistant. "As long as I'm around there's no reason to worry."

***

11

The director stood before the underground map with the red pins stuck in major stations. His back was turned to his assistant. She was at her desk, crouched over a file, turning over paper after paper, as though hunting for something. Not a word had been exchanged between them since Silberman left five minutes before. They hadn't even commented on what they'd seen in the flat. There'd just been the director's two questions in the taxi on secondary matters and her prompt replies.

There was another minor mystery to occupy his mind. Why hadn't the two hospital "representatives" come across Theo in Crossroads? Still staring at the map the director saw the black dot of the May 23 station on Line 9, one of the spokes radiating out of Crossroads, and remembered the boy locally scratching away at the poster with a knife before he was whisked away and replaced by the blackness of the tunnel. He thought he understood now. Not for the first time, Theo had left his Crossroads base to foray in satellite stations and with great luck must have returned to the giant station after the "representatives" had given up their hunt.

But Theo wouldn't be systematically returning to Crossroads anymore. The director felt certain that the boy was now taking on the total challenge of the underground network. He was operating haphazardly, unpredictably. At any given moment he could be in any one of the capital's sixty-three stations. Which made it almost impossible to locate him.

And he had to be located. Every minute of his obsessive activity censoring the posters held the menace of arrest. Arrest, routine investigation, transfer to the hospital for the briefest of time and then transfer to nowhere. Theo had to be found.

Where? How?

Lorz imagined hunting for him in the stations. The tangle of the thirteen lines before his eyes was like a fishing net, the dots of the stations floaters. He, the (compassionate) hunter, would be entangled in that net. It would be worse, far worse, than that long-ago search for him in the endless corridors of the hospital-complex when the boy was still his candidate. He saw himself getting out at every stop, scrutinizing the posters, trudging up Himalayas of stairways, trying to breast the peak hour flood of passengers, standing perplexed before bifurcations of corridors, choosing a line at random, and then shooting off in the wrong direction while at the other end of the net, somewhere, the boy obliterated and obliterated.

A whole lifetime wouldn't be long enough. And if by miracle Lorz found Theo, what words could convince him to flee?

Flee where?

The solution to this last problem (but not to the first two) came to him suddenly. The refuge existed, of course. It offered more than security. The boy's psychic needs could be satisfied. Not of course by letting him do to the director's flat what he'd done to his own with the jarring poster patchwork but by diverting obsession into safe channels, getting him to do what he'd done to the Ideal office months ago. The rest of the apartment was almost as dingy as the locked room with the broken furniture, now the boy's shining refuge, had been.

Theo would paint the whole vast flat white (acrylic white), three coats. The job would take weeks. The expense and inconvenience would be great. But that was nothing compared to what the contact between the director and his employee would bring about. He saw it as a symbiosis, reciprocal benefit. The boy's alarming symptoms of obsessive censorship would wear off. His own burning punishment would stop with this disinterested turn, at long last, to another human being.

His assistant asked where he was going as he reached the door. He couldn't disclose the totality of his project to her, of course.

Crossroads first of all, he said. If he was there, give him his pills and try to reason with him. That wouldn't work, of course. But tell him to keep clear of Crossroads. And tell him not to come back to his flat or the office.

"You said he wouldn't be coming back here before a year and a half."

"His reactions aren't always predictable. He might be coming back to see you, for instance."

"Finish off the job he started on my desk, you mean?"

"I wasn't thinking of anything like that."

"That's what you practically said a few hours ago."

"I doubt that he'll be coming back here."

"They're sure to pick him up then. He can't stay down there destroying posters. Where else can he go, though?"

"No idea," he said although he had the clearest idea about that. How could he tell her that? He opened the door on the corridor.

"I have an idea," she said, staring down at the file as though it were written there. The director waited, holding the knob of the open door.

"Couldn't you keep him in your flat for a while? Mine's too small and where I live it's awfully public, people spying at the windows all the time. I don't care personally if they see me taking a man to my flat. Nobody takes me for a saint there any more after what happened. It's just that they might talk about it to the wrong people. He stands out. You have all those rooms in your place and practically no neighbors. Couldn't you clear one out, fix something up for him, a cot? It would be just for a while until we decide what to do."

Lorz didn't answer immediately. Finally he said that he would have to think it over. It was a difficult decision to make. He stifled a yawn. She did too.

He closed the door and returned.

"Would you like another cup of coffee?" he asked. "You haven't been getting much sleep either. Don't move."

He took the three saucers and cups off his desk and rinsed them in the storeroom washbasin. He plugged the electric kettle in. While waiting for the water to heat up he moved the sugar and coffee onto her desk and asked her how he was going to find the boy. It was the necessary first step. He explained that Theo could be anywhere in the underground. It would take a lifetime locating him, getting on and off at all the stations. Had she any ideas about that? She often had excellent ideas, he said.

The kettle started whistling. He got it and poured the water into their cups. They sipped in silence. Finally she said that it might take a day or two to locate him, not a lifetime. They wouldn't have to get off at every station and investigate every corridor. Just take a train at a terminal station and do the whole line. Chances were there would be at least one of the... new-style posters on the platform wall. The rectangles showed up a kilometer away. He might not be in that particular station but at least they'd be able to localize him roughly. "As soon as one of us spots him he phones the other. There'd have to be the two of us to convince him to leave."

Like the hospital representatives, he thought. Except they had stronger arguments.

She made him agree that after he had searched that morning she'd spell him in the afternoon. If it was necessary, she added, optimistically.

But at noon he rang up from an underground booth and said they'd waste less time if he kept on looking. At six-thirty he rang up again and told her to go home.

He returned home himself at 1:00am, the pain in his bowels growing. He was unable to swallow a bite of food even though he'd had no more than a sandwich all day long. He went to bed and stared up at the ceiling.

The search had been even worse than he'd imagined. He saw the underground as a chessboard with endless squares and he and his employee pieces light years removed, never destined to meet. The illogical chessboard image (chessmen met only in a relation of hostility) was probably inspired by the multitude of white squares that had lured him out of the train at station after station, line after line that long day. They were everywhere, Theo nowhere. And he'd soon made a disturbing discovery. In Richfield an angular man of indeterminate age was distributing white rectangles on the pornographic posters. Half an hour later in West Gate he saw an exalted-looking adolescent girl of great ugliness with a bulging pimpled forehead doing the same thing. How many others were there?

Theo's censorship had become a model. His intensely personal action had taken on social dimensions. But the satisfaction the director derived from the discovery that he and Theo weren't spiritually isolated was counterbalanced by the tremendous complications it created in finding the boy. To be sure, he could ignore the great number of the obliterations that were accompanied by slogans such as "No to pornography!!" Also he learned to distinguish between the perfect squares of Theo and the imperfect imitations. Still the multiplication of censors made the task of locating the boy hopeless.

Where was Theo sleeping at this moment with the underground shut down? On some park-bench? In prison? Hypodermically tranquilized in a hospital room? Lorz finally fell asleep.

The next day, a Saturday, the bowel burning peaked so sharply that three times he had to break off the quest, leave the train and sit bent double on a station bench waiting for it to let up. It was during that third attack that the idea came to him.

Lorz returned to Ideal and prepared everything with the greatest care like a speleologist readying himself for some unimaginably deep and perilous descent. He opened three of the operators' lockers and transferred four liter jars of Basic White to his knapsack. He added a liter each of black and red paint, three sets of crayons, two boxes of florescent chalks, the full range of brushes and a fistful of ballpoint pens and pencils. It would be a great burden at first but would gradually lighten, he comforted himself.

There was still the need for protection. He transferred his father's ceremonial dagger from his briefcase to the knapsack. He reflected a moment and took a wheeled step-ladder. It was cumbersome but unavoidable for what he had to do. He made sure he had sufficient money in his wallet and carefully checked his vial of blue pills. Assuming Theo had taken them regularly, his vial would be empty by this evening.

Lorz was tempted to leave a word for his assistant, saying that he'd gone down again Saturday afternoon. But to write this was to accept the possibility that he wouldn't be back by Monday morning.

It was 5:04pm. Saturday, September 3 when he left the office. He didn't even notice that the burning was gone.

He'd intended to begin with Central Station but soon realized that it was impossible. Saturday was the worst of all possible days for what he had in mind. The hub stations swarmed at all hours. There wasn't a single stretch of empty corridor. The beggars were out in full force, the musicians too and of course the pickpockets to work the hordes of suburban shoppers loaded down with purchases. There were the groups of loud young drifters from the industrial outskirts, solitary women-hunters, prostitutes, the dangerous ethnic gangs with their studded jackets and savage hairdos swaggering down the center of the corridors, lording it over the native born, forcing them, eyes fearfully downcast, against the filthy tiles of the curved walls. The corridors echoed with their raucous voices. They lacerated and graffitied the posters in public sight.

How did they dare do that? Lorz posed the question to himself in its literal sense, not out of indignation now but envy. What he intended doing, for the first time in his life, was, technically, no different from what they were doing. But how could he do it before all those witnesses?

So the mobbed corridors and platforms of Central Station forced him into the least frequented of the stations. He set up the ladder in the first empty corridor and prepared the tools and chemicals. Shooting glances right and left, he climbed up to the green landscape of Soft-Joy Sweaters. In the blue sky above the hundreds of white sheep he daubed the first of the hundreds of messages planned for that night. He did it in contrasting red.

THEO! MEET ME AT MIDNIGHT CENTRAL STATION PANEL 96.

He repeated it over and over in other corridors.

He couldn't help recalling similar personal messages that defaced posters, like that of the madman who for a whole year had plagued Ideal with his tireless declaration (how many thousands of them?): "Valeria I Love You!" with a heart that resembled nude buttocks viewed from a certain angle.

But how many of those personal but public messages were motivated by the desire to save a human life? How many of the passengers who, despite the director's choice of little-frequented corridors, surprised him on his wheeled step-ladder could guess that the real purpose of the message he was scrawling was disinterested protection of a vulnerable human-being through the gift of a roof, affection and – urgently – medicine.

Already he'd pictured the consequences of the absence of the pills: the boy seized by a fit of epilepsy at the edge of a platform, pitching forward and down onto the path of an oncoming train, his body involved with the wheels.

Voices and footsteps again. He switched to the alternate brush and the jar of Basic White and started censoring what he'd had just scrawled. Pathetic subterfuge.

Did they believe it? Weren't they laughing?

This will be a night of humiliation. My gift to you: humiliation, foreseen, accepted, endured.

Well before midnight he stood to one side of panel 96 in Central Station in the uproar of voices, brawls, shuffling soles, discordant beggar music, all periodically covered by the trains. He tried to get down a sandwich for nourishment without breathing in the reek of burned axle grease, vomit, hemp smoke and unwashed bodies. He endured the solicitations of drug dealers and prostitutes of both sexes, thinking again: my gift to you.

At 12:45 he acknowledged defeat. He moved away from panel 96 and collapsed onto the nearest bench. What he'd done was useless. What chance was there that Theo would stop at those six minor stations lost in the immensity of the net? And if he did, and assuming he took one of the prepared corridors, what chance that he'd notice the message in competition with other graffiti?

It was the walls of the great hub stations – beginning with Central Station – that had, absolutely, to bear the message. There was no guarantee of success even then. To be sure that the message would be received it would have to be repeated everywhere, on all the posters of all the sixty-three stations.

The director ventured into the maze of this idea. How long would it take to daub and scribble the message on the 12,843 posters of the capital's underground network? The mathematics of the thing made him dizzy. Even scribbling away at top speed twenty-four hours a day, not a moment off for sleep or food, he wouldn't be even halfway through before the first messaged posters would start coming down. They stayed up on average only three weeks. To say nothing of the gigantic problem of operating in full view of witnesses. Thousands of witnesses. Tens of thousands. Not just the voyagers but underground employees and policemen empowered to arrest poster vandals.

Arrest and the judge's insinuating question: "For what purpose did you want to meet the individual you call Theo at that late hour?" Who would believe his story of pills? Then prison and his name, his father's name, in the tabloids. I wouldn't survive the humiliation, he thought.

But wasn't there a way of communicating his message without the presence of witnesses? Did he dare do that, at the risk of his life? He let the dangerous idea mature in his mind while he turned to other aspects of that evening's fiasco.

He had to recognize that the message he'd scrawled was ineffective. It had to be radically modified.

First, the meeting-place had to be changed. A poster-panel number was too abstract. Theo might confuse this number with another. He thought immediately of the Great Clock of Central Station with its octagonal faces giving the hour in eight world capitals. It was universally known.

Next there was the absence of incentive. In the past, therapeutic contact had always required the enticement of a gift: those thin raw slices of beef in the spiced blood sauce, chocolates, Chinese puzzles, a watch, etc. Why should Theo respond to the invitation now? For the pleasure of his company? he thought with sad irony. What could he promise him?

He thought he knew. In his mind he amended the message. He even printed it in his address book:

THEO! THEO!! THEO!!! MEET ME UNDER THE GREAT CLOCK CENTRAL STATION MIDNIGHT FOR BASIC WHITE

A few jars of Basic White might seem a poor lure for a man already in possession of half a ton of the stuff, yet Lorz felt sure that it would have the same effect on Theo as a single gold coin on the wealthiest of misers.

Assuming he read the message. Something essential was lacking. Only a tiny fraction of the 12,843 posters would be inscribed with the message. How could they be given maximum impact? He had to go further. There had to be an image. An image to be effaced.

He watched the idea germ, spread, take possession of his mind. He tried to banish the insistent image. I couldn't, he said to himself, half aloud. Knowing, however, that he could, had to, would.

A few minutes before closing time Lorz went to the end of the empty East Gate platform next to the tunnel-mouth. He let his knapsack and ladder and then himself down on the ballast. He advanced between the tracks in the gloom of the blue-painted bulbs. He was careful to avoid the mortal third rail.

The loudspeakers behind him blared the order to vacate the underground. The message was repeated at thirty-second intervals.

He reached the first of the niches set at 200-meter intervals for the safety of the track crews. A red bulb glowed feebly above it. Another red light opposite turned green. He started forward again and had covered a dozen meters when he heard the train ahead. He stumbled back to the niche, unslung the knapsack and ladder and pressed his back against the rough concave wall. As the rumble loudened he grasped obscure pipes overhead. The red and green lights down the track floated into sight, grew with the roar. He squeezed his eyes shut.

It blasted past in seconds, compressing the air out of his lungs, pulling at him.

A mercifully short maintenance crew train. The rumble died away.

He stood motionless in the niche for quarter of an hour. Except for the chirp of crickets about him there was absolute silence. By now the corridors and platforms were empty. The folding brass gates of the entrances to Central Station had been deployed and locked.

He trotted back to the tunnel entrance, hoisted himself back onto the empty silent platform and started in.

He printed the first message to Teddy in Basic White on a green lawn.

Now the image.

He dipped the second brush in the red paint and summoned up the image as he'd seen it on a hundred thousand posters, that image he'd effaced and caused to be effaced for over a decade. He kept it before him as though what his hand was now perpetrating above the message had originated in other minds, he doing no more than a mechanical job of transcription.

He operated with fantastic rapidity, platform after platform, corridor after corridor with no idea of the passage of time. He printed his message on one out of every twenty posters. With what crowned the words to Theo it eclipsed all the neighboring graffitied posters.

Red and gigantic, it couldn't fail to attract Theo's censorious attention.

It was only at 4:13am that he became aware of his inexplicable blunder. A huge proportion of the posters he'd chosen to bear the message and that image were Ideal posters. How could he have done that? First one of his operators and now the director and founder of Ideal Poster himself engaged in self-sabotage.

That was minor. He thought of the two operators permanently assigned to Central Station. In an hour and a half they would be there and efface most of the messages. He would have to wait and head them off. But how could he openly ask them to spare the most shameless of the graffiti?

Then with a certain relief he remembered that tomorrow – today, actually – was Sunday. The Ideal operators wouldn't come until Monday morning.

He was placing the last of the jars in the knapsack and had already reduced the ladder when a challenging shout startled him. Tiny at the far end of the corridor two underground employees in dark-blue uniforms were trotting toward him. "What are you doing here?" one shouted. "Stop!" the other shouted. They were echoing the question and command he'd been directing to himself for hours.

He grabbed the ladder and the knapsack and started running awkwardly. The ladder wagged between his legs, almost tripping him up. The jars in the knapsack chinked dangerously. He finally reached the escalators rolling on in the emptiness. He glanced over his shoulder. He could hear the fast echoing slap of their shoes and their multiplied shouts but they were still in the corridor. He lay face down on the descending escalator, hidden, he hoped, by the waist-high ramps. The machine dumped him on the pavement of the lower level.

He picked himself up, raced down a short corridor and took the left fork. Their shouts echoed everywhere. Now he burst out onto a platform near the black mouth of the tunnel. With no hesitation he let himself down onto the tracks for the second time that night and went on running in that deep gloom punctuated by red now green caged lamps. A different tunnel but identical to the first. He slid down to a squatting position in a niche. Maybe he was still being pursued. But he couldn't go any further. He tried to stifle his hoarse gasps.

There was a low grease-smeared iron door set in the dark base of the tunnel opposite. He got up, stepped very high over the third rail and reached the door. He pushed it open. He had to stoop to enter. A caged bulb inside burst into weak but blinding light. It spilled out on the gleaming rails. He quickly shut the door behind him. A ventilator started up.

He found himself in a tiny storeroom with unpainted roughly daubed cement walls. It looked disaffected. Greasy garments were dumped in one corner, in another corner lay a heap of obscure rusty tools. Great bolts and spikes were heaped on old newspapers.

The light went out. The ventilator collapsed into stillness. He pulled the door open. Light again. The ventilator started up. He saw an old fashioned toggle switch and turned it on. After a while he opened the iron door on the tracks and dared look up-track from where he'd fled. He could see a pinhead of light: the end of the tunnel. Was he being pursued?

Too exhausted to resist, he pulled the greasy work-clothes into the semblance of a pallet and stretched out. He meant to rest for a few minutes before resuming his flight to the next station. The underground would be reopening in half an hour.

When the roar and rattle awoke him he opened his eyes on blackness. He was totally confused. His flat? The office? The hospital? The roar died away. Memory came back. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch.

3:07.

Had time regressed? Then he realized with a shock: 3:07pm, of course. Ten hours had gone by. He also realized that he'd be imprisoned in the tiny dank space until ten more hours went by and the underground shut down at 1:30am and the trains stopped running. At a cadence of a train every three or four minutes he'd be crushed trying to make it to the tunnel mouth and the platform. Suppose midway between two niches he sprained his ankle?

At the sudden thought that he'd miss the midnight appointment, he struggled into his knapsack and slung the ladder over his shoulder. He pulled the iron door open.

The noise of another train built up. In a few seconds the twelve carriages thundered past. The concussion made him stagger back. Sparks, squares of lighted windows stretched out to a continuous line with quick blurs of seated passengers then darkness again.

He started running, with high steps because of the ties, and dangerously fast as though sucked forward by the partial vacuum in the train's wake. Three times he had to seek refuge in niches. There was no getting used to it. Each time he was certain that he would be pulled under the wheels.

It seemed hours before he managed to emerge from the black tunnel mouth, heave knapsack and ladder onto the Crossroad platform and hoist himself frantically after them before the astonished eyes of three passengers. He hadn't worked this part of the station. Wasn't it possible that Theo had made some sign of assent beneath one of the messages?

He took the escalator up to the next level and at the sight of a blue-neoned food stand was seized by ravenous hunger. His mouth was blotter-dry. He washed down two sandwiches with two bottles of beer. There was a surprising number of passengers for a Sunday. He reached a corridor he'd worked early that morning.

The message and scandalous red icon had vanished from the posters.

He turned left into another corridor.

They'd vanished there too.

Looking closely he saw the clumsy brush-strokes of his operators. The posters had been corrected.

Something was wrong. Yesterday had been Saturday and today was Sunday. There were no poster corrections during the weekend. Now he thought of the unusual number of passengers and his ravenous hunger.

He rose on an escalator to the nearest newsstand and saw that the day marked on the newspapers was Tuesday. He passed his hands over his bristly face. How could he have slept two and a half days?

Like a blow came the realization that he'd missed the appointment with Theo. He imagined the boy waiting for him under the Great Clock. He heard in his mind the dead doctor's nagging voice about a brief window of opportunity. And he, the director, had spoiled everything. Hadn't come. Had not come! Teddy had shown signs of upset.

He thought of his assistant. He hadn't the energy or the courage to phone her. He'd phone her when he found Theo. Profoundly discouraged, he abandoned his idea of messages. He reverted to the original search for posters with telltale white squares. He did a stretch of Line 6 then switched to Line 12. He was as certain of failure in his present quest as he'd been confident of success when scrawling the messages.

But at 11:05pm, after no more than two hours of search, the director located Theo with strange ease at the least likely of small stations. The train slowed before a platform with posters covered with squares of authentic perfection. Lorz's practiced gaze and fingertips judged the age of the corrections: a half-hour. Theo could have gone on to another station and then another line. But in the corridor there were more squares and rectangles: done a bare quarter of an hour before.

Something was the matter with them. They'd lost their perfection. Near the tunnel mouth, the last posters bore lop-sided squares, revealing some of the flesh that was meant to be covered. The squares were still wet. Basic White dribbled from them to the edge of the platform. There were splashes of white on the ballast below. Theo had taken the train tunnel to reach the next station. Why? Why hadn't he taken the train?

Everything was repeated as in a dream. It was as though his ordeal in the other tunnels had been a rehearsal for what lay before him now. He felt for the vial of pills in his pocket and realized that he himself hadn't taken them now for three days. He let himself down, as once before, on the ballast. As before, there were the initial blue bulbs in the gloom, the rails feebly gleaming red from the caged lights further on, the ties and crunch of the ballast underfoot, the niches and the trains thundering past into silence, the chirping of the strange cannibal crickets of the underground tunnels.

And finally an iron door like the other iron door. He pushed it open. Again the weak but blinding light of a caged bulb. Again a ventilator started up. This storeroom was slightly larger than the other. Dust was everywhere. It looked disused for decades. Again tools lay in a corner. They were rusted and covered with thick spider-webs. On a cheap filthy table there was an antique upright phone. Next to it was a heap of yellowed newspapers dating back to the monarchy. Against the rear wall, on either side of another iron door, were carefully stacked drums of paint and chemicals, piles of brushes, erasers, spatulas, sponges, cutters, scissors, paste-pots. Soiled faded blue work-clothes were gathered into a pallet. There was the imprint of a body on it. The iron door between the drums of paint was much smaller than the one that gave on the tracks. He pulled it open. "Theo," he whispered into the square of pitch darkness. "Theo," he said in a louder voice. It echoed cavernously.

On a shelf there was an old broken briar pipe and a box of kitchen matches wrapped in wax paper against the damp. He struck one against the crudely daubed cement wall and it sullenly burst into flame. It gave off a sulphurous stench. He remembered the matches of his childhood, 3b on the scale of punishment for playing with them. How long ago had they ceased manufacturing such matches? He took the yellowed newspapers and twisted them to torches with difficulty. The brittle paper fragmented. He lit the first torch, stooped and advanced in the low passageway almost in a squatting position. The atmosphere was choking. The flame gutted and went out. He retreated back to the storeroom, filled his lungs with air and returned, nursing the flame. The flickering yellow light was absorbed by the dark massive masonry. He transferred the guttering flame with care to the next twisted paper.

At the end of the low passageway he came up against another iron door. He pushed at it. It was locked. He pushed harder and heard a rattle on the other side. He pictured the padlock, devoured by rust. With dread he imagined it yielding to his push, the door squealing open and he pitching forward into the cleft that ran at a right angle to the big silent empty passageway with the bare bulbs dangling from the vaulted ceiling of the subterranean maze of Old Hospital where he'd once been, seeking Theo as now.

The flame went out. He backed precipitously away from the locked door into the storeroom again. He closed the first iron door between the drums of paint and sat with his back against it. He mastered the urge to flee the storeroom and what was behind his back. Theo would be returning any minute.

He clasped his knees and let his head fall on his chest. The posters he'd worked over arose in confusion in his mind: smiling faces, chateaux, geometric gardens, warmly lit interiors, herds of cows, glazed green pottery, greetings at open doors. They were all situated and circumscribed by the dirty white tiles. Now he saw the farmhouse she'd sketched in her diary, free of tiles and startlingly real: the kitchen garden, the orchard, the forest with three peaks behind it.

Once the iron door that gave on the tracks rattled fiercely above the deafening roar of a passing train. Once the old fashioned phone on the table rang on and on urgently. He didn't move.

The pain woke him up. It was 2:46. A train roared by, situating the hour in the afternoon. He wasn't sure of the day. He looked at the pallet with no more than the imprint of a body. He held his abdomen tightly. Finally he got up. He didn't bother with his knapsack and ladder. He switched off the light and pushed open the door on the tracks.

He walked between the rails, back turned to the station with the white squares, the last ones lopsided. He had to flatten himself four times in niches before he emerged from the tunnel. Someone was shouting in the station.

He levered himself up onto the platform, went past a telephone booth with smashed glass and graffiti inside.

The opposite platform stretched out like an immensely elongated stage. At his end two young teenagers were shouting. They pushed each other, then started shaking vending machines for coins.

At the further end Theo was on his ladder censoring a poster. It bore no resemblance to a square now. It was a dripping blotch. He got down slowly and advanced the ladder to the next poster. His body seemed wasted, his face skull-like and white as the paint. Now he was doing a correction job on graffiti. It was the wrong shade of green. Part of the graffiti was still visible.

The director moved to the telephone booth as fast as the pain allowed him to.

When she heard him say her name she started making a great fuss, possibly crying even, and he had to answer her question and say that yes, he was all right, but then he couldn't place another word. It was like a burst dam. She'd thought he was dead, gone a whole week without a word or a simple phone call, had thought he'd been killed in the underground, had phoned his flat a hundred times, even gone there, had thought he was sick inside and had almost gone to the police to ask them to force the door, the business was going to pieces, their best client gone, she'd moved into the office, slept there, ate there, he had no right to do that to her.

When she stopped for breath a second, a harsh intake of air, he told her he'd found Theo in the underground, she should come quickly to... He looked through the smashed glass of the booth at the blue-and-white station plaque. She should come to Trinity station, he said.

***

12

She ran out onto the platform but didn't look where he was pointing across the rails. She didn't look at Theo. He realized what he must look like from the expression on her face and became aware of his torn and dirtied suit, the scuffed black shoes gray with dust, the filth and blood on his hands from crawling in the tunnel that led to the padlocked iron door. "What happened to you?" her lips questioned without sound. "I've found him," he said, still pointing. Theo hadn't left the platform. He hadn't come close to finishing the posters there. Since the phone call, twenty minutes ago, he'd done no more than five of them. Each one had taken longer to do. His performance had steadily worsened. His last corrections now looked like clumsy graffiti themselves.

The two young adolescents, maybe thirteen and clearly SubCons or Berbs, had noticed Theo and had strolled over to examine his corrections. They laughed. The smaller and darker of the two had very white even teeth. They imitated the languorous postures of the models. They laughed. Then they made squalling sounds before the baby and the diapers. They laughed harder. The alarming blotches meant to be squares or rectangles offered them a surface. They took out felt-pens and started scrawling on them, purple and black, probably restoring in aggravated form what was below the Basic White. The posters were too far off to tell. They did poster after poster, drawing closer to Theo. He had stopped trying to efface the graffiti on Helena's dress and was staring at them and at what they'd done to his posters. Gobs of white from the number three brush fell on his sweatshirt and bare forearms. He climbed down the ladder stiffly.

"Go away!" she cried to them. "Keep away from him!" Her voice was covered by a train pulling in at the other platform. It masked what was going on. When it pulled out the adolescents were much closer to Theo. He was moving toward them. "Go away!" she cried again and once again a train came, this time on their side, another express slowing down because of the curve. They heard nothing but the roar of the train going by for a few seconds, then long screams and then the train was gone. It was like a horizontal curtain being pulled back.

One of the children was sprawled on the ground. His head was at an impossible angle. Theo had the other child by the neck and was banging his head against the tiled wall at the foot of the poster. The methodical impact wasn't covered by his assistant's screams. There was blood on the tiles and, astonishingly high, on the posters.

Unable to bring it out in words or to act (the skull on the sign spoke of imprisonment and fine and of 5,000 volts) Edmond Lorz stood stock still. He tried to summon up words to communicate across the third rails again, as his assistant let herself down onto the ballast and started across. What he wanted to say was that it was all colored dots, no more than that. He tried to utter the command to stop the logical consequence of that error, what he was doing to the boy's head against the tiles below the poster where, maculated by his blood, she sat high in the swing smiling up at the blue sky, but the impacts went on. They went on and on and the words couldn't come. He raced for the stairs.

His assistant leaped over the first third rail. A train roared out of that other tunnel. The boy's head was being worked methodically. The blood on the tiles had dripped onto the ground. She crossed the second third rail as the train started braking and emitted a warning blare. She lifted herself up to the platform just in time as the second express powered past, slowing down in a squealing of brakes and furious showers of sparks.

The director stumbled up the flight of stairs and suddenly recalled that for days now he'd been frequenting the third rail and could have crossed over as she had done. He ran on and then down the stairs to the other platform.

His assistant was behind Theo, her arms about his neck, as in a kind of embrace, her hair wild, trying to pry him away from the boy's throat. She was biting his shoulder. The director saw Theo release the boy who slumped to the ground. Theo turned round and grabbed her by the throat with one hand. His fist smashed her face. He lifted her up by the waist and hurled her against the wall. She slumped to the ground her mouth and one eye open. He returned to the boy, clearly dead, replaced his hands about his throat, lifted him to operating posture and went on with the methodical impacts.

The express train had finished braking. Half of the carriages were in the tunnel. It started backing up. The doors would open any second.

"Theo!" he cried. "Theo!"

On her back, paralyzed with pain, she could see as in a mist the train doors opening, people emerging at the far end of the platform, running toward them. There were cries. She could see in a thickening mist how Teddy stopped suddenly. Still holding the child by the throat he moved toward the director, the boy's sneakered heels dragging in the puddles of blood. It was like an offering. "No," said the director and shrank back. Released, the boy pitched forward and sprawled on the pavement.

Something was broken inside. She choked on blood that came up from deep within. Teddy was approaching her. His forearms and hands were patterned with red and white.

"Edmond, help me. Help me, Edmond," she tried to cry.

Teddy broke into a trot. He loped past her and reached the mouth of the tunnel. He leaped down onto the tracks. She saw the director like a sleepwalker going past her, past the corrected posters with the dead children's graffiti of lollipop trees, stick-men, suns. Now he broke into a run. He was waving something.

"Theo, your pills, your pills!" she heard him crying and saw him clumsily letting himself down on the tracks and running toward the mouth of the tunnel where the other had gone into the darkness. He vanished in turn there.

More blood came up. She too went into darkness.

***

Part Four

1

The fourth day the inspector was allowed to see her. He was a quiet gray man. He wanted her to tell the story from the beginning. She shook her head as best she could. He wanted at least certain information about her employer and the individual called Teddy. Neither of them had been found yet, he said. She didn't react. Looking down at her he judged it was all the drugs she'd been given because of the pain and the shock. He tried again. He promised just a few questions and then he would go.

Why had her employer followed the individual known as Teddy?

Didn't know.

Hadn't he tried to defend her?

No.

Or at least see if she was badly injured? Try to get help?

No.

What did he do?

Went into the tunnel.

Why did he do that?

Didn't know.

The inspector wished her a speedy recovery. As soon as they located her employer of course they would inform her.

Shouldn't bother.

Dr Silberman came to see her every few days. The first time he brought flowers and sweets. She said with difficulty that he should eat the sweets himself. Each time there was silence or a question she didn't want to answer she told him to take another sweet. Dr Silberman told her that no one knew where he was. The police had gone to his flat five or six times to question him about Teddy and he wasn't there. He wasn't at the office either. Her employer hadn't been a stable individual even before the accident. It must have been a terrible shock for him. A terrible shock for everyone naturally.

She wasn't listening. She wanted the names of the children's parents. She wanted to send them money, write to them when she'd be able to, tell them how it was her fault, her idea, to hire him, something else was her fault and her fault also what had happened long ago to her father.

Help me.

He answered that of course she would get help. He, Silberman, would continue to visit her but for real help she needed a specialist. Wasn't he a specialist? Of course, but a different specialty. He could recommend the sort of specialist she needed.

The broken bone healed. The ugly bruises on her wrist, thigh and neck yellowed and faded. Her eyes were still badly discolored and the nurse suggested wearing dark glasses for the first week or so outside. She replied that she'd prefer showing her eyes, no matter what they looked like, to hiding them. She stopped dying her hair. It was coming up real at the roots but it wasn't the old real brown, it was grayish-brown but maybe that was the real color now. For a long time it looked strange, part grayish-brown, part blonde. She had her hair cut short. Finally it was all the old-new color. She stopped making up, using perfume. It was too much work for nothing. She stopped wearing the costume jewelry and the bracelets because of the effort and the jingling. She didn't wear the dresses that showed the discoloration of her neck. Anyhow they didn't go well with the growing gray of her hair and the thinness of her neck and chest. She watched her words, said what was necessary for the given situation and no more.

Dust grew deeper in the director's apartment. The bulb in the swivel lamp on the desk burned out. The cacti stood in darkness and finally died. Ideal Poster ceased its obsessive activity. There was no notable increase in the underground graffiti. The great subterranean office was taken over by an electronics concern and used as a storage-room while waiting for the building to be razed.

She found a job as a secretary. It lasted two months. She thought the specialist she saw once a week was disappointed when she told him it hadn't worked out, even though he hid his feelings as usual. Then she found another job. The specialist was pleased, but carefully. Also carefully pleased when she told him she was taking driving lessons. She'd told him it had always been one of her ambitions, she didn't know why. "What for?" she sometimes asked him. He preferred her to find the answer to that question herself. Sometimes she thought of driving out to the Central Mountains. She spoke to him about it. She'd already spoken about the farm to him. The doctor asked her (he never told her anything) if she thought it was wise to think about that.

To celebrate her driving license, which she said she owed to him, she bought him a book of poetry. She mentioned in passing that next week was her birthday, not saying how old, and told herself she wasn't disappointed when he didn't give her anything. Then she came across the business of "transfer" (it sounded like the underground) in a book on popularized psychiatry she took out of the library and learned that it was a normal reaction.

She discussed makes of cars with him although it was expensive to talk about cars with him, even for five minutes. He gave a balanced judgment on the makes and later on she couldn't remember which make he'd inclined to. She bought a small second hand car with too much mileage on it.

Sometimes on Sundays she drove with concentration along the west motorway on the slow lane. The slowest trucks passed her. She would go on till what she saw on either side of the motorway railings was reasonably green and wooded. Then, without leaving the motorway, she would turn into a rest area. If the weather was acceptable she ate her sandwiches at one of the green-painted concrete tables. If it was raining or too cold she would eat in the car. After, she would stroll about the rest area, looking at the trees and fields through the high wire fence. Then she would drive back.

But usually she spent her weekends reading, anything, all day in the public library on Saturdays. She spent hours over the choice of the three books to take out, then at the last moment, at closing time, grabbed anything. Once she took out a textbook on organic chemistry and at home stared for hours at the hydrocarbon linkages and the formulas. What she liked best of all were travel books and exploration accounts. She asked the doctor if that wasn't escapism. She understood him to say that, like almost everything else, it was acceptable in moderation.

She started going to church again but ended by finding the young priest distant and stopped going after a month. She avoided the underground even to go to her office although there was a direct line. She went there by bus. It was a roundabout route involving a transfer, the other kind. When her fellow employees wondered at this she sometimes spoke of claustrophobia. They spoke of the dangers of the underground. One wasn't safe anywhere.

One morning she saw the brief newspaper article in the lap of a passenger next to her in the bus. She felt nothing, neither pain nor satisfaction. Or maybe the two cancelled each other out. She preferred to think that all that was something that had happened a long time ago to somebody else.

The second week back home her phone started ringing in the middle of the night and she could hear faint breathing, but got no answer. This went on for a week. She took to leaving it off the hook and then since this was about the only call she got she had her phone rental cancelled for two months. It was a saving.

One Friday afternoon in early January, a holiday, she sat at her window and watched the season's first blizzard slowly effacing the bushes, the paths, the benches in the small square opposite the council-house. By five o'clock the whiteness had turned blue and then it was night with pallor everywhere. The snow raged in the cones of light of the street-lamps. She ate a sandwich, read a few pages of a detective story, looked at cartoons on television.

At about eight there was a knock on her door. As everybody did in that dangerous suburb she asked who it was without opening the door. A man's voice said something about keys. She looked through the wide-angled spy hole that equipped all the doors but couldn't make out the figure in the gloom of the corridor. Why hadn't he turned on the landing-lights? She asked him what he wanted and she heard the voice say that he wanted the keys. She fastened the stout chain and opened the door a crack. She looked and closed the door and bolted it. She left the chain secured.

He went on talking on the other side of the door. She told him to go away. He went on talking. When he got no answer he started banging on the door. She threatened to call the police if he didn't go away. She took the phone as close to the door as the wire allowed and dialed without removing the receiver. She didn't remember the number anyhow. The police would be there in ten minutes, she said. Through the door she heard him say something unintelligible about a case of self-defense. Then he returned to the keys. He wanted them. Had to have them. Where could he go without his keys?

"I have no keys," she said to the locked door. "No keys of yours. I thought you were dead. Everybody thinks you're dead. Aren't you surprised I'm not dead?"

He said something about having almost died and then he asked her to open the door. What for? The keys, he repeated patiently. And also to see her. What keys? She had all the keys, he said. The keys to the Ideal office, the key to his flat and the key to his car. But there was a problem with Ideal. His voice lost its assurance, sounded bewildered.

What happened to my business? Where is Ideal? Where is the building? There's a big hole instead of the building. And my car? It's disappeared. Who stole my car? And you disappeared too. And I can't get into my flat, I haven't got the right keys. You must have them. So I came to get the keys. But of course not to the hole, I don't know what to do about that. At least the keys to the flat, the ones you took when I was in the coma.

She said she'd given the flat keys back to him a long time ago, years ago. She didn't know where his car was. She had spare keys to the office somewhere but since he said there was no office anymore, just a hole, there was no point looking. She hadn't known about the building. She hadn't been in that district for a year. More than a year. He should go away, leave her alone.

A year, he repeated in the bewildered voice. He asked what the month was. She told him. When he asked what the year was she put the phone down on the floor. She unfastened the chain and shot back the bolts and opened the door.

Instead of entering he stood there in the gloom of the landing and asked her, in a pedantic voice, to please not look at him. For reasons he would explain he wasn't presentable. The gate had opened unexpectedly. He would explain everything but first he would appreciate it if she would let him use her bathroom. The shower, actually. She shouldn't worry for her washrag and towel. He had everything, even soap. It was possible to buy almost anything down there. Once presentable he would explain everything.

At this she felt like closing the door on him but it was too late. He went past her, almost tripping on the phone wire. She looked anyhow. His voice and his glasses were almost all he'd held on to. The rest was like a scarecrow in winter. He was carrying a bulging valise. He opened a few wrong doors and then went into the bathroom with the valise.

She mopped up the puddle of water and melting snow before the door where he'd been standing, also the wet shoe-prints that led to the bathroom door and the wrong ones. She heard the hiss of the shower. She shut the living room door and returned to the television program. There was still the hiss of the shower. She turned the sound up. It was a cartoon with loud music and sound effects for the cat and the mouse ceaselessly overcoming destruction: dynamite, bear-trap, sledge-hammer, steamroller.

Other cartoons followed. In one of the pauses she listened. She couldn't hear the hiss of the shower any more. She went back to the detective novel. Occasionally she glanced up at the screen when the sound announced super-catastrophe.

At nine she switched off the TV. She went into the kitchen and prepared another sandwich and a cup of coffee. Finally she opened the living room door on the corridor. There was no sound. She opened the bathroom door. The mirror was steamed up. His dirty clothes lay in a neat heap in a corner. On the glass shelf above the washbasin there was a safety razor, blades, shaving cream, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and a plastic cup. They shared the shelf with her own things although a space separated them.

The valise was on one side of her bedroom door. She pushed the door open. The ceiling light was on. He was lying on her bed snoring slightly. He was wearing a wrinkled blue-striped shirt with a dark tie, a dark jacket and trousers, both badly creased. His newly shined black shoes were carefully aligned on the carpet next to the bed. Even asleep he wore his glasses. One of the lenses had been broken and was mended with scotch-tape. The dirt was gone from his face. It looked worse that way. His neck bore a purple-green bruise.

She shook him. "Get off my bed." His lips moved. He settled back into sleep. She shook him much harder. He cried out, propped himself up on his elbows, still crying out. The dark lenses faced the ceiling. He stopped the noise and collapsed into his original position. She couldn't tell if his eyes were open. "Get out of my flat," she said in a loud voice. He snored slightly. She left the bedroom.

She put on her coat, scarf and boots. She opened the door on the landing and then closed it and went back. She took her alarm clock and set the alarm for eleven. She found a sheet of paper and a pen. Still in her coat and boots she sat down at the kitchen table and printed in big characters: "Leave my flat. When I come back in an hour if you are still here I will phone the police. This is a solemn promise."

She should have stopped there but with her face screwed up ferociously against any possible surprise attack of tears she went on and on, listing the unforgivable things of those six years. It was all there in her memory. She'd forgotten nothing, needed a second sheet then a third.

The alarm clock rang. She stopped it, reset it for midnight, and returned to the sheet. Not really finished, she stopped anyhow. She went into her bedroom, placed the alarm clock like a bomb centimeters from his ear and the sheets of paper alongside it.

Opening the door on the landing again, she remembered she hadn't numbered the sheets and almost went back. But then she thought that he could begin anywhere, it didn't matter, there was no beginning and no end to what he had done and hadn't done.

Normally at that hour nobody dared venture out. But with the blizzard even the thugs and rapists would be indoors behind bolted doors. The floors rose without halt in the elevator-window. The elevator jolted still and opened on the empty lobby.

She had to push the plate-glass main door with all her might against the wind, which blasted into the lobby with swirls of snow. She pulled the hood over her head and fought her way down the cement lane that ran before Buildings C and D, past ash cans and prone Christmas trees with shreds of tinsel still in the yellowing branches. She crossed the street and went into the square. She had to guess at the path. The wind dashed snow into her face. Underfoot ankle-deep it crunched. She decided to walk around the square fifteen times. The fifth time around in the midst of her own previous footsteps her teeth started chattering. She shuddered violently and couldn't stop. What was she doing here, evicted and shuddering in the cold?

She followed her earlier footprints back to the lobby and sat down on the bench near the radiator. It was ten to midnight. In ten minutes it would go off in his ear. She saw him propped up on his elbows, crying out. Wasn't it sometimes dangerous to be awakened like that? She leaned against the radiator and dozed off. She woke up violently at exactly midnight as though the alarm had gone off in her own ear. Then she fell asleep again.

She was awakened by the elevator jolting to a halt and the doors sliding apart. He stepped out with his blind-man's glasses and the bulging valise and the shiny black shoes. The shelf above the washbasin had been cleared too, she imagined. Didn't he see her sitting there on the bench? He'd said he'd explain. He went over to the plate-glass door and opened it. She felt the icy draft where she was seated. Where was he going? The lobby was more or less heated. Why didn't he sit on the bench till tomorrow morning? Why was he going out into the blizzard like in a melodrama? She hadn't said that. What he was doing now was something new to add to the third sheet next to the alarm clock. Had he read them?

He had reached the end of the cement lane. Now he was in the street. She caught up with him and pulled his sleeve. She asked him where he was going.

To the underground.

To go where?

To the underground.

The nearest underground station was two kilometers away, she said. The busses weren't running at that hour. By the time he got there on foot the underground would be closed, she said, trying to steer him back to Building C. He should return to the lobby and tell her about it.

There wasn't time, he said. Walking fast he could make it to the station. You could stay inside at closing time (if you knew the trick) but you couldn't get in once it was closed.

At least sit in the lobby till the blizzard let up, she said. It was better than sleeping on an underground bench.

She heard the old superiority in his voice as he said that he'd never slept on the benches with the beggars. Never once. He had his storeroom, cleaned and furnished. No more spiders. Just crickets. They were almost company. It sounded like the countryside.

Crickets in the underground? Tell me about it in the lobby. Have you eaten? Plenty of food in the storeroom, he said with the old superiority.

She sneezed violently three times. We'll both catch pneumonia, she said. Walk me back to the lobby at least. I'm scared to by myself. It's dangerous here. I know you wouldn't want anything to happen to me.

When they reached the lobby she steered him toward the elevator. She pushed the elevator button and started sneezing again. She said she was going to have a plate of hot soup to head off the cold. He could have some too if he wanted. "Yes, of course, that's why I came," he said.

In the slowly rising elevator the dark disks of his glasses were aligned with her eyes. If he was really looking at her it must have been the first time since he came. She felt like pulling the hood down further to conceal her face. Her hair was already concealed.

She'd changed back to the old days, he said. The same as on the photo. He'd often looked at her where he had been. It had been a great help at certain moments. It was like having company when the crickets stopped. He dug out a creased photograph from his wallet and showed it to her. She looked at the black-and-white identity-photo for a second and then handed it back to him.

The elevator jolted to a halt. She opened the door and told him to sit down for a few minutes in the living room.

She called him into the kitchen. He slowly approached the formica table where the two dishes were steaming next to the waxed package of pre-sliced bread. His face was alive for the first time. He must be starving. He stood over the soup without sitting down. "But this is bean soup," he said in the same bewildered tone he'd used asking about the key and the hole and the year. "Tinned bean-soup." She'd left the empty tin in the sink. She went over and dropped it in the garbage-pail.

"If I'd known you didn't like bean soup I'd have asked you what kind, like in a restaurant." She sat down and started eating. He stood there. When she finished she said: "Do you want the soup or don't you?"

"Yes, but not that soup."

"No problem," she said and poured the second plate of bean-soup into the sink. It was for the gesture since she'd have to remove the beans one by one from the filter. "You can sleep on the sofa. It's because of the weather. Tomorrow morning you leave. If you don't have any money I'll give you a little."

In the night he came to her. She pushed him away (and in the movement discovered that his forehead was burning) but of course it wasn't that. His lips were near her to talk. He was kneeling alongside her bed. He whispered that he was a changed man. He apologized "for everything." For what? she challenged, to see how much he remembered. He mentioned the things he apologized for.

He hadn't remembered a tenth of it. He hadn't read her three sheets after all. He did remember the last, big, thing but couldn't remember why he'd done that. He said that probably it was because the harm had already been done on the platform. Theo could have done it again on other platforms, in other corridors. It was the pills. He had to be given the pills. He had to be found. But he didn't find him, not till last week. He didn't know where he disappeared to in the tunnel. So he went back to the storeroom in the other station and waited. He never came. He looked for him. He had the pills, still had them. He didn't dare take them for himself. He went on writing messages in all the stations. That's what he'd been doing all those weeks, months, maybe.

She hadn't understood a word. How could you live in the underground that long? she asked, wondering whether if pressed for impossible details he'd come out with the truth which she thought she now knew but which he refused to know: where he'd really been and had escaped from.

He said it wasn't hard to stay there for a month or so as he'd done (maybe a little longer because the passengers changed from shirt-sleeves to scarves and after the bathing suits on the posters there was Father Christmas in the sleigh with a nude woman and ribboned bottles of whisky). There were clothing shops and shoe polish and bookshops in Central Station. He had his credit card for the cash dispensers in the hub-stations until the screen refused to honor the card. During the dead hours of closing time there were the toilets with washbasins to keep clean and to wash the clothing. Food was no problem: sandwiches from the vending machines and food stands under the mercury tubes as long as the money lasted. Then there was food thrown away, unimaginable scandalous waste, and toward the end people had often been kind to him and of course there'd been the hidden storerooms for sleeping. You could spend weeks or months in the underground without once coming up and out. You could spend a whole lifetime there, although coming up and out was better if you were able to, if you knew where to go as he did now.

Why didn't you then? Why didn't you leave the underground since that's where you say you were all this time?

He'd tried to come up. He tried to tell it to her, how time after time he'd tried. At the sight of the skies – one blue, the other overcast, the third or fourth storm-rent – he'd been paralyzed. Unable to breathe. Could breathe only when he went back down the steps into the safety of the underground. So he stayed underground and searched, wrote messages everywhere. When he didn't search he stayed in the room with the trains thundering past. You never really got used to them because the rails were just outside. When they became too bad there was the other gigantic space. Because there was another iron door and a passageway with no air, the flame was constantly going out. But once, he reached it and threw himself against it all his might and lost consciousness and logically should have died of suffocation. But when he awoke there was a draft of damp air coming from the cleft. The rusty padlock had burst and the iron door – the third iron door: was she following? – was open on the cleft. And beyond the cleft there were the passageways with the vaulted ceilings and the naked bulbs. After, he often walked there. Sometimes he got lost in the maze of passageways. It happened again last week. He had to sleep there and thought he'd never get out. Finally he heard the sound of the trains and he returned, closing the iron doors behind him. Waited then till the trains stopped and the underground was empty. Then went out on the ballast and the rails as he did every night. Walked to the next station, put up the messages, then the tunnel beyond again and a new station, as he'd done so many times for nothing. But that night he found him. Didn't find him. Was found by him.

Suddenly he was crying, like harsh hiccups. You make me nervous whispering in my ear like that, she said as a diversion, pulling her head away. She was horrified. She couldn't associate those sounds with her ex-employer. It was as though a total stranger were in the dark next to her. To make amends for the cruelty of this thought she told him to lie down on the bed, not under the sheet, under the blanket. He should take his shoes off. He obeyed.

She got up and went into the bathroom. She came back with four aspirins and two glasses of water. He was still talking, hadn't realized she'd been gone for a minute. She'd missed the beginning, just got the fragment: so another message on a poster with the distant meeting-place proposed in red paint before some panel or other but suddenly the meeting-place was there, the powerful arm, his neck in the crook of it, he clutching for the dagger at his belt (he'd learned how to carry it there) and stabbing wildly, some stabs in his own body but others deeper still in the body of the other and then he lost consciousness. When he awoke, bleeding badly, he saw other gouts of blood leading to the stairs and before he could follow them, it was opening-time, the blue-uniformed underground employees were coming and he got down on the ballast and hid in the tunnel all day long and part of the night in a niche till the trains stopped.

He broke off. After a while his breathing became regular in the dark next to her ear. Didn't he ever read the papers down there? she asked. (She thought: maybe they don't let them read papers there and then thought of the ugly bruise on his neck and finally didn't know what to think). It was true, she said, that it was tucked away in an inside page. If she hadn't seen it, accidentally, in the bus she wouldn't have known herself. She reached over and grasped his arm, shook him a little to make sure he heard what she was saying. Whoever had attacked him and he had stabbed in perfectly legitimate self-defense (she would have done the same) it wasn't him, couldn't be: not stabbed but electrocuted by the third-rail in a tunnel, not yesterday like he said but months and months ago. It had been in the papers.

He was snoring slightly. She dozed off and when she woke a little he was saying something about woods, a kitchen garden, an orchard, three peaks. It sounded vaguely familiar. She tried to remember if it wasn't one of the thousands of posters they'd corrected in the old days. She dozed off and awoke half-a-dozen times to his monotonous voice. Once she heard him say it was what saved him. From the start down there he'd seen it when he couldn't sleep in the storeroom because of the trains. She'd been in it. At first a small figure in the orchard with the three mountains behind her. Then she stood behind the closed gate. He was on the other side. Sometimes it rained. More often there was sunshine. The gate was always closed. But that night, the bleeding finally stopped and she'd opened the gate. He saw everything there. In the darkness of her room he tried to tell about it. He went on. She fell asleep again.

She returned to hear his monotonous voice saying that he'd known that this time he could so he packed his things in the valise. He got up and walked the rails and when the station opened got up on the platform and took the escalator up to the stairs leading out. And sure enough he could. It was starting to snow. He climbed up and out. He'd gone to the building that wasn't there, a hole, and to his flat with the wrong keys – or had someone changed the lock? – so that didn't work, but as soon as she gave him the keys to the car they could go.

"Go where?"

"To the farm."

"What farm?"

"Your farm of course. I don't know any other."

"Go there in winter? Now?"

"Winter or summer. Spring or autumn. What does that matter?"

"We'd never get there, for one thing. The roads are icy."

"I'm a careful driver."

"Who says I'd let you drive my car?"

"You have no car."

"Don't I? Oh don't I? Anyhow the last time I saw it, most of the windowpanes were broken. The house, I mean. The house was practically falling to pieces. And that was a long time ago."

"We'll put new panes in. We'll repair everything that needs repair."

"Anyhow I work on Monday. It'd take two days to get there and back."

"We won't be coming back."

"We won't be going, you mean. I won't, anyhow. Not in a blizzard. Let me sleep."

The sounds from the living room awakened her. The bed was empty. He was puttering about in the living room. She went in, squinting against the light. He had his shoes on again, also his jacket. He was squatting in front of the valise, neatly placing his razor and toothbrush in it.

He stood up. "I knew you had the keys," he said triumphantly, holding her car keys high by the metal tag. Then he made a fist about them.

"They're my keys," she said indignantly. He wasn't going to begin with the keys again at past 3:00am. She shouldn't have left them on the table.

"You don't drive," he said with what she took to be contempt. At that she felt rage rising, part of it at her stupid weakness for having invited him back in the flat, most of it aimed at him. It was as though by taking her car keys, doubly stealing them by denying they could possibly be hers, he was depriving her of something precious, her space of independence, her almost secret dissipation (only the doctor knew about it), the semi-monthly drive down the motorway to the rest-area and back. She tried to keep the anger down and reason with him.

"But if you can't find your car for God's sake what good are the keys even if they were yours which they aren't, they're mine? What good are the keys?"

He stared at her, still making a fist about her keys. Finally it got through.

"Yes... Yes, that's true. I have the keys to my car. You're right. It's the car itself I haven't got. I'm very tired. I can't think." He stared at the keys and the name of the make on the metal tag. "These aren't my keys," he said indignantly. She could imagine that behind the lenses his eyes were glaring at her. "I've never owned an Italian car. Wouldn't dream of an Italian car. They must be your keys," he tried to convince her. He handed them back. He looked at her with grave satisfaction.

"You have a car. And apparently you know how to drive. Everything's all right, then. I wanted to drive you there in my car. Now you'll drive us there in yours. It's the same thing. We'll leave tomorrow."

"Drive you where?" she asked in a small voice, very tired. After the keys the other thing would start up.

"To the farm, Dorothea, your farm." He said it patiently as though making allowances for her slow comprehension.

"When spring comes round, maybe."

"I can't wait that long. It's the same above as below, everything colored dots, except you and the farm. I'll find my car. I didn't look in the right spot."

He picked up the valise. The door shut behind him. She moved forward and tripped over the wire of the phone she'd placed on the floor to open up to him hours ago. By the time she picked herself up and opened the door the landing was empty and the elevator-motor whining.

She ran into her bedroom and struggled into her coat and boots. She ran back and saw that the elevator had stopped at the ground floor. By the time she called it back and got down he'd be gone. She ran back into her bedroom, wrenched aside the curtain and opened the window.

Snow blew in. She saw him coming out of the building. He was tiny below.

She yelled his name. The wind whipped the words away. He didn't hear. She yelled till her lungs ached. He was going. She seized the table-lamp, yanked the plug free and with both hands heaved it out into the night. My God, not there. It would hit him, kill him. It smashed on the snow-covered pavement centimeters from his left foot.

He started, stopped, turned round, looked up, saw her. Windows were lighting up left and right. Yellow squares were punctuating the dark mass of Building G. She waved. "Come back!" she cried. Did he understand it had been to attract his attention, not meant to kill him as she almost had? Had almost killed him.

She smiled till it hurt with her arms outstretched, her hands making quick beckoning movements toward the room behind her. With her arms and hands like that she had the impression of being a bird ready to fly up and out leaving the sullen suburb behind. The snow blew in on her harder. They started shouting at her from the other windows and balconies.

"Come back," she cried. "We'll go tomorrow." It was 3:56am: already tomorrow.

***

2

She caught up tardily with his excitement at kilometer 58 when the car went past her rest area, as though into some uncharted territory although the white fields and bare trees didn't change. She didn't realize it until he told her that the car was doing 120. It was the first time she'd ever gone above a safe 70. He pointed out that that at 120 she should shift up to overdrive but that 120 was perhaps a bit fast for a snowy motorway. They didn't want to go back to the hospital. There was a much better place waiting for them.

She didn't like having to share her powers of decision behind the wheel but slowed down a little anyhow. He told her it was better not to brake, she should just lift her foot from the accelerator. Even this didn't prevent her from suddenly yelling above the motor: "Adventure! Adventure!" She felt that her face must be radiant again but didn't dare check in the mirror for fear of an accident. "Adventure!" she yelled again at the immediate prospect of a shared weekend in the country instead of the usual two days with books and television.

It was almost as if he'd guessed her hidden restrictive meaning. He said: "It's no adventure, we know exactly where we're going." He said it in a sober voice as though ten minutes before he hadn't suddenly pulled out two ties from the valise. He'd held them like dangling snakes in one hand while with the other hand he cranked down the window. She saw what he was going to do and tried to stop him. He'd need them, she said. It was a mistake to have said that, but all he'd replied was, "On a farm?" and flung them out and stuck his head out to see where they went.

His idea had been to get to the mountains that very morning before the predicted snow. But it was well past noon when they left. He was much better, she decided. She'd convinced him to take one of his pills the night before. Could it have been that? His forehead was cool. He spoke calmly and coherently even if the subject never varied. She found answers to some of his questions. When he asked if there were tools for the kitchen garden she replied that you couldn't dig in January. The ground was hard as iron. Wouldn't the saw be rusted? he wanted to know. They'd need a good saw for the dead wood behind the house for fire. It might very well be rusted, she replied. It had been so long ago.

He'd wanted to go before breakfast. But there were things to do and to buy, she told him. The cat had to be entrusted to the neighbor, money taken out of the bank, the debt that had to be settled. His haircut took time too. He throned facing a mirror, she seated behind him, supervising, occasionally commanding the scissors. "You look like a new man," she said when he arose, hardly rejuvenated, shedding a shower of gray snips from the gown. Then he needed new clothes. To convince him she said that you didn't wear a jacket and trousers in the country. He could pay her back when things got better. In the clothing shop she cast quick proud glances about her. She was like the other women with their men in tow, clumsy and sheepish among the fitting rooms and full-length mirrors. Like the other women she stood frowning with pursed lips, giving orders to turn round, bend down, lift his arms.

She steered him before a mirror and asked him how he found himself. "I am a new man," he pronounced finally in the gravest of tones. It was almost true, she thought. In his padded jacket, blue jeans and stout walking shoes plus the new haircut he almost looked like a different person. The glasses were the only thing that hadn't changed. She'd try to convince him to have another pair made up when they returned: clear lenses for when the sun didn't shine, to get through to him.

The mirror confirmed her radiant feeling and she decided to dye her hair again but a more reasonable shade, costume-jewelry as well but in moderation.

There were the necessary food purchases. Maybe a restaurant once or twice she said but most of the meals would have to be taken in the car. It started snowing a little as she led him to a supermarket. She bought bread, tomatoes, olives, cold cuts, sliced cheese and two bottles of white wine. With the cold it would all keep in the car trunk for the two days as well as in a fridge. While she bought the food he wandered over to the hardware department and bought a log-saw, a hammer and two handfuls of big nails. When she joined him he was standing still, deaf to her like a statue, staring into the faces of the passing customers.

She hooked her arm in his and steered him outside, praising his purchases and telling him about her own. The snow was coming down harder. Where are we going? he finally said. The bus-stop, she replied. She'd promised a friend she'd pass by that morning and pay back a debt. It wasn't far. She told him the address. It was a mistake. As they passed by the underground entrance he stopped again, gathering snow, and said it would be faster taking the underground, a direct line, just two stops. She said, no, she suffered from... She tried to remember the word for fear of crowds she'd seen in the book on psychiatry. "From agrophobia," she said. She hooked her arm in his and feeling his resistance said that the underground reminded her of the vaulted farmhouse cellar where they used to ripen goat cheese. "Goat cheese?" he said, coming with her. All the way on the bus and back she spoke to him about the eighty-three goats back then and he outlined his plans for goats again, chickens too of course and rabbits. She knew he was more or less himself again when, an hour after she'd pronounced the word, he corrected her. It wasn't "agrophobia" as she'd said but "agorophobia," "agora" from the Greek, signifying "a place of assembly." Her word, "Agrophobia," logically would mean "fear of agriculture." That hardly could apply to her, could it? "No," she replied after a pause.

The blizzard had been centered in the region of the capital. By kilometer 120 the fields held no more than scattered patches of snow. They were bluish in the gathering twilight. The headlights of oncoming cars switched on. He advised her to switch hers on too. She'd never driven at night. He had to show her where the controls were.

Fog started rising all about them. She slowed down radically despite what he said about the dangers of excessive slowness in fog. She gripped the steering wheel like a life buoy, leaning forward over it for better vision. Her arm and neck muscles ached. Over and over in the rear-mirror she could see twin smears of yellow slowly focusing into headlights and then the frightening rumble and loom of the truck, the ripping sound of its tires on the wet road, the jump of the car as it powered past, then the spray of dirty water on the windscreen from the rear wheels. Loud music announced her error again. Once more she'd turned the radio on instead of the windscreen wipers.

The steep grades were the worst. He expected her to pass the recent trucks. You're doing 40. We'll never get there at this rate. He offered, for perhaps the tenth time, to relieve her at the wheel. Shift down when you pass, he said. In overdrive you'll never make it.

Her mood of exhilaration had collapsed. Migraine was building up in her left temple. It was like driving-lessons again except this one was going to last all day instead of half an hour and the instructor had no professional patience. Finally, she pulled up to the side of the road (without signaling the maneuver, he pointed out).

"You drive," she ordered. "I can't take it any more." Yes, he agreed, the driving conditions were particularly bad with the fog. He took over, at first calling her attention to the various maneuvers involved in passing until she asked him to please stop.

By kilometer 240 it was already 7:35pm and she vetoed his idea of driving all night. They'd have to find a room. They were hungry. She was anyhow. That didn't convince him. They could eat while he drove, he said. As for sleeping he wasn't tired at all. She could sleep in the rear while he drove. Finally she said that at night she'd never be able to guide him to where he wanted to go. It would be hard enough in the daytime, she added. Reluctantly he agreed to a hotel.

The hotel turned out to be another problem. It was strange, she thought. Whatever activity they contemplated, major or minor, it turned into a problem. Her idea was to turn off the awful motorway and explore the countryside for an inn. She imagined a beamed ceiling, a log fire, candles on the table. He pointed out that driving off the motorway at night was risky given the weather. An inn would be very hard to find. Anyhow it would cost a fortune. They'd be sure to find something cheap on the motorway. They had better things to do with the money. Whose money? she couldn't help thinking and then felt guilty at the thought.

The hotel on the motorway was called Happy Dreams. Illuminated signs announced it fifty kilometers in advance and then at intervals of growing urgency. Finally a huge red neon arrow came into sight. It stabbed downward at half-second intervals.

The five-story futuristic building was set back just fifty meters from the motorway. It was windowless. There were no cars in the car park. They saw nobody inside. A machine accepted banknotes, even made change. It delivered a perforated plastic card marked 5. In a narrow first floor corridor where soft music was playing, the card opened the door marked 5.

It was the tiniest of rooms. There was a plastic table with two hinged seats. The table was attached to the wall. There was no other furniture, not even a bed. In one corner was a closet. In another corner, a cabin of frosted glass. The door slid open on a square meter equipped with a toilet and a shower. When you locked the door a mercury tube blinked on and the ventilator started.

From one wall a small streamlined TV peered at them from a flexible tube. It resembled an extraterrestrial's head. On another wall a window-size rectangle contained an autumnal wood scene with deer. Diffused light behind the color transparency gave it depth. You could almost believe you were looking out through a real window on the trees and alert animals instead of at a wall and beyond the wall the motorway. To one side of the table were two buttons. Beneath one button was a diagram of a table. Beneath the other button was a diagram of a bed.

She pressed the bed button. There was a click and then a chime. The seats tucked away under the table. A section of the wall slowly pivoted, taking with it the table. The wall continued pivoting and presented a folded bed in the place of the table. The bed hummed and slowly unfolded. It was small. It occupied nearly half the surface of the room. She pressed the other button. The bed slowly made way for the table again.

She placed the food and a bottle of white wine on the table. It was to celebrate, she said. It turned out she couldn't open the bottle. She'd forgotten to buy a corkscrew. He said it didn't matter. They could drink tap water. It did matter, she said, how could you celebrate on lukewarm chlorinated tap water? She tried picking at the cork with a nail file for ten minutes. The headache was coming back. Celebrate what? He started constructing a sandwich. Can't you wait a minute? she said.

Finally she went back to the car where he'd left his new hammer. The price tag was still on it. When she came back she told him that the car park was still empty except for their vehicle. They were the only people in the hotel. There must be at least thirty rooms and all of them were empty except this one. Wasn't that strange? Wasn't it a little scary? He saw what she'd done to the bottle. He warned her of the danger of perforated intestines from tiny glass fragments in suspension. If she really insisted on drinking it he advised filtering the wine through a handkerchief.

I should have brought candles too, she said. She switched off the light coming from the square of frosted glass in the ceiling. The gloom made the forest and the deer more insistent. He agreed that it was better that way.

They started eating in the pallor of the forest scene, stared at by the deer. She spoke at great length about the food and wine. It was her only independent contribution. She couldn't enlarge it beyond that. Her attempts to talk about neutral subjects from their past came up against his total rejection of that past. All that interested him was their future. But as her conception of that future was radically different from his – something she couldn't say outright – all she had to talk about were the incidents of the trip, largely unpleasant.

Finally, he did most of the talking. It was the same subject. He had no other subject. Her role was reduced to answering technical questions about the farm. But didn't that role confirm her acceptance of his fantastic vision of their future?

So after a while she dared ask him a fundamental question. "Where's the money going to come from?" On the surface, that question conformed to the rules of the game he'd implicitly laid down. It seemed to be strictly about the future, as he saw it.

It would be hard at first, he allowed. He didn't want to conceal the fact. But there was a virtue to that. Finally they'd be at grips with basic elemental things: cold, hunger and thirst. They'd have great skies over them in compensation. There'd be the initiation to bare survival in the bleak month or two till spring.

She tried to object that spring didn't come till May in the mountains, but he went on. Survival, he repeated. First fire. There was the dead wood standing in the forest behind the farmhouse. He'd gather it. He had a new saw for that. Water would come from the well, of course. The well was frozen in January, she said. From the lake, then. The lake was frozen too, even harder, she said almost in triumph. Then they'd melt the snow for water, he said, disposing of the problem. As for food, he'd lay snares for rabbits, she'd show him how. There were chestnuts and berries and nettles for soup as she'd always said. It would be their first meal. There are no nettles in winter, Edmond, she objected in a small hopeless voice and it was far too late for chestnuts and the birds had got the last berries months ago.

In any case, he said, they weren't reduced in the immediate future to living off the land. They weren't absolutely penniless. He'd read of survival for months on pennies. Sacks of flour for unleavened bread, sides of salted pork. She must have read about that too. They could scrape by. Later on in the ease and abundance of summertime they'd look back with nostalgia at the hardships of founding-time. Surely she had a little money in the bank to tide them over? Later of course he'd put his flat up for sale.

With the flat, her question about where the money was going to come from, supposedly limited to the future, now took in the past he refused to hear or talk about. But she couldn't speak of the debts of Ideal and the obvious significance of the changed locks on the door of the apartment, once his.

Frustrated, she began raising objections more explicitly but without daring to get to the heart of the thing. Temporizing seemed the best tactic. You can't be serious about staying there, she said. We'd die of cold and hunger. If I'm able to locate it we'll spend a few hours there, reconnoitering. You'll see what it's like, what we're up against in the winter. Then we'll drive about the mountains, go to an inn like I wanted to instead of a horrible place like this. Then we'll drive back. Maybe in the spring if you still want to we could move out there.

We will never return, he said.

But you don't just pull up and go like that, she objected. He asked what was important back there for her. She blinked at the question, thought a little and said that there was her cat, her job, she would have to give notice, there were the three borrowed books that had to be returned to the library by the end of the week, she had a dental appointment on Wednesday, two dresses that had to be picked up at the dry-cleaner's. She stopped. Wasn't the plumber coming in for the toilet leak?

Those were all reasons for leaving and for never returning, he said. Leaving for what? where? she thought. She said: "But I want to go back. I didn't even want to go to the farm in the first place."

"You used to talk about it all the time."

"Things have changed. I don't even think about it any more."

"If what bothers you is the idea of both of us being there together, naturally our relationship will be regularized."

She blinked again. As she'd done so often years before, she asked him for a definition. She said she didn't understand the meaning of "regularize a relationship."

He replied that the term was self-explanatory. Anyhow, their relationship would have to be regularized after what happened last night.

She asked him what he meant by that. What had happened last night?

He said that perhaps she could take such an act casually, but he couldn't. He had old fashioned views on such things. For him what had happened last night was binding.

"Nothing happened last night. Nothing at all."

"Oh," he said.

"Anyhow what gave you the idea that I want to... have a regularized relationship with you?"

"From the beginning, from the very first day I hired you, that was obvious. We should have, long ago."

"You'd have saved on my salary that way."

"You're not yourself again, Dorothea. I want you to be yourself, forever, the way you used to be. How can you say what you said?"

"We do nothing but quarrel. We haven't stopped quarreling since this morning. We're incon... We don't get on at all."

"I haven't been quarreling with you, Dorothea. 'Incompatible' is the word, but we're not. We are perfectly complementary."

"Stop telling me about words all the time. I'm not an imbecile. You see how incompatible we are, about everything, even words. Where's the salt?"

A few minutes later she returned to the subject. There was all her furniture and books and records, you couldn't just leave them there like that and disappear. It was crazy. She wasn't even sure she'd be able to find the farm.

"Of course you'll find the farm. You drew the route in your diary."

She set the goblet of wine down on the table. After a while she said in a barely audible voice: "You looked at my diary?"

He refilled her goblet out of the jagged-necked bottle. "All of that is the past."

"You actually looked at my diary?"

"It was lying on the floor that night. Why are we talking about all that?"

"My private locked diary?"

"Certainly it was an indiscretion on my part. I apologize for that."

Long silence.

"Did you read everything?"

"Certainly not everything. Mainly I saw the map."

"It's a... an unforgivable violation of my privacy. I would never have done that to you."

There was another long silence. He went on eating.

"You must have been shocked," she said.

He swallowed his chlorinated water, dabbed his lips with the paper napkin and then pursed them, visibly reflecting as he buttered another slice of bread.

"I accept you as you are, Dorothea, with all your qualities but also your shortcomings which are things of the past. Just as, I like to think, you accept me with whatever shortcomings I may have had."

At that, she burst into laughter, irrepressible and bitter, and was silent for the next quarter of an hour, saying no more than, "Don't know," when he asked more of his technical questions. He frowned. They passed each other the salami and cheese with elaborate politeness.

Finally she said: "Just a few shortcomings like leaving me for dead, not a glance, not a phone call after. I could mention others if you really want to know. I filled three sheets."

She felt depressed, close to tears. She hadn't imagined it like this, not at all like this. A terrible thought came to her. Maybe I'm not an easy person. Maybe I've been living alone too long. Maybe I'm too old for it. Hadn't he practically proposed to her?

Why are we talking about the past? he said. They'd agreed that the past was dead. After a while he said he'd tried to phone her, over and over, from down there but there'd been no answer.

Yes there had been, she said. He'd rung her up in the middle of the night, three different times. She'd answered. She'd heard him breathing. You were the one who didn't answer.

Why are we talking about the past? he repeated. After a while, he said that the first time he heard her voice he couldn't say anything. He'd thought she was dead. It must have been gladness that prevented him from talking. And when he was about to talk she hung up. The two other times he hadn't dared. He didn't know why. He hadn't been well. Then he'd rung her up again. He was going to tell her everything, where she could meet him, which station, which panel, because he still couldn't leave, but when he phoned a voice said over and over that the number didn't exist anymore. He'd thought she'd left the capital for the farm without him. But all that was behind him.

His voice was taking on the strained sound of the night before and she said it didn't matter, he was right, they shouldn't always be talking about the past. It was dead.

She cleared the table and took everything back to the car.

When she returned he was standing in the doorway, staring at the blank wall of the corridor.

He asked her if she'd heard it too, the voice.

No, she hadn't heard any voice here outside of his and hers.

A man's voice. You must have heard it.

We're all by ourselves here, Edmond, just the two of us. There's still no other car in the car park.

He said he would look on the other floors. He'd be back in a few minutes.

He started down the corridor. She closed the door and locked it.

After half hour had gone by she unlocked the door. Taking the staircase, she started looking for him, saying his name on every floor, louder and louder. She found him on the top floor, seated with his back against the corridor wall, head bowed. She placed her hand on his shoulder. He started and looked up at her.

"I heard him again. He was saying my name."

"That was me calling you. Let's go back. I'm tired. You must be tired too."

She guided him to the elevator and then to their room. She pressed the button. They were melodiously warned. The bed replaced the table.

In the night he drew close to her back, timidly touched her shoulder and then a breast. She moved slightly out of his hand saying she was sick. At that word instead of persistence or reluctant relinquishing, there was the old familiar recoil and she said he shouldn't worry, it wasn't catching unless he changed his sex. In a few years she'd be beyond it and children. She started talking about children, the ages and names she preferred. She asked him which age he preferred and without waiting for an answer started weeping. She said it was the wine. She came with flowers for me in the hospital, she said. I couldn't understand half she said. I don't know what language it was in. I couldn't give her the money. It would have been like buying the flowers. She stroked my head and cried and cried.

He said nothing for a minute. Then he said he'd dig a flower garden for her. They'd plant rosebushes. She liked roses, didn't she? She'd show him how to dig the holes and he'd do it for her.

Sometime in the middle of the night she awoke and saw in the pallor of the wood-scene (he'd asked her if she minded leaving it lit) how he was staring up at the ceiling. She saw his eyes and drew close to him. Go to sleep, she said. She said it over and over and went to sleep herself.

When she woke up, he was puttering about in the room. In the pallor of the wood-scene she could see that he was dressed. He was placing clothing in his valise. He couldn't leave without her, she said. Even if he had a car he'd never be able to find the farm without her. Don't leave me here all alone in this horrible place. There was no question of leaving her, he said. He'd intended waking her up, of course. No, they couldn't stay in this horrible place. She should get up and dress.

Instinctively she looked at the window-like space to see the state of the sky. It was the same golden noon as hours ago. Her watch said 6:37am. The real sky outside must still be dark.

They stopped for petrol at eight. They were the only customers. There was a little yellowish light gathering low in the overcast sky. The rare capital-bound trucks still had their headlights on. There was no traffic at all on their side. In the shop she bought a corkscrew and while she was at it another bottle of white wine. He bought a detailed map of the region and they consulted it. Twenty kilometers ahead on both sides of the motorway they could see patches of green with scattered towns and villages: hill country. South of it, the mountains. When he asked her to locate it exactly she made a gesture toward a particular part of the mountains, a gesture that encompassed a good fifty square kilometers. She'd never been able to read maps, she said. Once they were in the mountains she'd know, she assured him.

They looked at the near green with longing. She said they should turn off at the next exit. He noted that it was over a hundred kilometers from the turn-off she'd marked in her diary map but he didn't dare refer to that again. There must be a number of possible routes. He just asked her if she was sure that it was the right road. All roads lead to Rome, she said. He corrected: all roads flee Rome, which she didn't understand. They had coffee with more of their sandwiches. They had to watch the money, he said. He said that he'd have to drive carefully. They had to hope it wouldn't snow again. The whole sky was filling with a sullen yellow.

She felt the conflict of distress and relief growing at each sign that announced the impending turn-off into green (green on the map, white in reality now).

Now they were there. He slowed down to quit the motorway. But the turn-off was blocked by police-barriers with no-exit signs. The next exit twenty minutes later was also blocked off. Exit after exit was blocked off. It went on for fifty kilometers. Maybe we won't be able to turn off, he said with a note of panic that expressed her own. She had to reassure him although she too had had that thought, had imagined them both condemned forever to the empty motorway and the hotel room with the immobile noon deer and a voice that didn't exist.

Before she had time to come up with a valid reason for the barred exits they heard a siren behind them, then powerful motorcycles. A goggled motorcycle policeman in black leather roared alongside them making imperious signals to get on the slow lane. More black riders on motorcycles powered past, then expensive cars and finally a prodigiously long low black car with more black riders in escort.

In a few seconds the motorway was empty.

Somebody important, she said. Wasn't he dead? he asked. Wasn't it a hearse? A dead man wouldn't be in that much of a hurry, she replied. And why the motorcycle police? Or the blocked exits? Nothing threatened the dead. In any case they'd be able to turn off into the countryside in a few minutes.

But the countryside had disappeared and on both sides there were piles of tarred ties still holding a little dirty snow, rusty heaps of girders, used car lots, the flaming pipes of chemical plants, mountains of garbage with crows and gulls circling above. That went on and on. Finally they took the turn-off she'd marked on her diary map after all. It had already started snowing. From here on you'll have to guide me, he said.

They rose in low gear at a snail's pace in the blizzard. He should have bought chains. They'd been driving about for hours. The visibility was limited to a few meters. All they could see in the white turmoil was roadside shrubbery, a few meters of white road, occasionally the loom of a mountain shoulder. Sometimes ruined farmhouses haunted the snowfall with broken roof-beams and heaps of broken slate tiles. All you see are ruins here, he said. Where are the people? Even when she was a small girl it was a dying region, she said. Now it's practically dead. Ghost farms were what they used to call them. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Whole villages stood deserted. Even when she was little the young people left the mountain farms and went to the cities. There were just the old people. And then the old people died. I wonder if we shouldn't turn left here?

He drove straight on. He'd long since given up heeding her directives. By now they'd become anxious self-queries rather than directives. He gripped the wheel, crouched over it, his forehead almost against the windscreen. His nostrils flared as though scenting it out beyond the swirling white curtain despite the persistent odor of salami and white wine in the car.

Without warning, he slammed the brakes on. The car went into a skid which he was able to master. There's somebody on the side of the road, he said. He's lost. He'll freeze to death.

He put the car into reverse gear and backed up dangerously fast in a shrill whine. He stopped the car at the side of the road. This is no place to get lost, he said. Stay here. I'll be back with him in a minute.

He got out of the car and disappeared instantly behind the swirling curtain of snow.

She waited in the absolute silence for five minutes and then followed his deep footsteps to where he was standing in front of a snow-draped scarecrow with outflung broomstick arms.

It was just this scarecrow, she said, touching his arm.

No, he was standing by the roadside. We have to find him. He'll freeze.

Look, she said, pointing at the blank snow ahead, and then at the snow behind them. There are just your footsteps and mine, she said and was able to convince him to return to the car. He sat behind the wheel for a while and then things were better. He started the engine and they moved forward slowly in the worsening blizzard.

Another hour had passed when something big and ghost-like stumbled across the road just ahead of the car. "A deer!" he exclaimed. "We're in wild country, we can't be far!" She thought it was a dog but said nothing. "It's a sign. We've practically arrived," he muttered. "The other side of this hill, I'm sure." It was a hill that he had to take in second gear, steeper and steeper as though to justify the reward of what lay on the other side. The wheels whirred at intervals from the faulty adherence. The car began swerving from side to side. Let's go back, Edmond, she implored. He'd already made the prediction of arrival while mounting other hills.

We'll never go back, he shouted but seconds later the wheels started spinning furiously and the motor rose to hysteria and they did go back, backwards at least, slowly, then faster down the promised hill. To the furious spin of the wheels was now added a slow spin of the car itself, ghosts of roadside bushes wheeling about. Faster, faster, the underbrush much closer now, then flailing branches, thumps from beneath, bangings, wild jolts, scratchings, showers of twigs and brambles joining the snowflakes against the windscreen.

And there, the end to it all, a dark tree slowly looming. It loomed gigantically and there was a crunch of metal, a breakage of glass as they were thrown forward. They cried simultaneously.

"Edmond!" she cried.

"The car!" he cried.

The car settled at a slight angle and the engine coughed and expired. They sat in pallid gloom. The pine had dumped a great cowl of snow on the car. They were still braced against the shock, which had been minimal. She asked him again if he was all right and he finally said in a dead voice that he wasn't hurt. If he didn't ask about her she supposed that since she'd asked over and over about him in a panicked but pain-free voice he must have assumed she was all right too. He was still crouched over the wheel in much the same attitude as when the car had been on the road. They hadn't a scratch. A narrow escape, she said to cheer him up. And maybe the engine hadn't suffered.

He turned the key and the engine confirmed that it too was all right. The sound revived him. He scrambled out and inspected the damage. Nothing essential had been affected, he reported: a headlight smashed, a fender crunched, the bumper twisted, the hood bent a little. They could try the hill again, but first they had to get the car back on the road. Luckily there was no ditch.

My car, she thought as he shifted from first into reverse and back again rapidly, dosing the power. The car responded to these fast skilful movements by moving gently forward and back a few centimeters in a wild whirl of the rear wheels. He pushed out of the car. Forgetting the log-saw he'd bought he tried to break off branches from the pine with his bare hands. He shoved what he managed to gather under the rear wheels. He deputized her to the driver's seat and pushed the car all the while yelling instructions. She wasn't letting out the clutch smoothly enough. He received spurts of snow and twigs from the rear wheels. There was a strong smell of burned rubber. He returned to the car and collapsed into the driver's seat, breathing heavily. His hands were bleeding.

She didn't dare interrupt the silence. He was surely devising other means of getting the car back on the road. Finally he exclaimed triumphantly: "But this close we don't need a car at all." He forced the door open against the snow and wind. "You're not to move from the car, Dorothea. I'll be back soon. Not to move! This is wild country, Dorothea. There may even be bears."

He wasn't well acquainted with mountains. To imagine what it was like beyond the white swirling curtain of snow he summoned up art museum memories of late eighteenth century pre-romantic landscapes: mineral chaos, crags, clefts, abysses, dashing cataracts, etc. He added snow to the recalled scenes and also what he was seeking. He moved knee-deep toward it.

"Come back," she cried. He was doing exactly the wrong thing. She'd often read that in such emergencies the very worst thing you could do was to leave the car and go for help. The nearest village must be twenty kilometers away. You had to wait until help came. She pushed against her jammed door. By the time she forced it open he was gone. She cried out his name. The wind swept it away. The driving snow had a metallic taste. But there'd be no problem catching up with him on the road. The wind whipped the snow in her face. Half-blinded, she stumbled over concealed branches and boulders.

On the blank whiteness of the road there was just the long disorder of their skid. She bent down, peered hard. His shoes would have left prints. There was nothing. She returned to the car and saw his footprints – leg prints – striking out in a direction opposite to the road.

Understanding now, she shouted into the shifting curtain of white: Edmond! Edmond! It's not there, Edmond, come back! It's not here at all! She stumbled forward, repeating the message: Come back! I'll tell you where it is! It's not here at all! She must have floundered round and round in the deep snow for her footprints multiplied. Lost in that labyrinth of her own making, she didn't know which of the footprints led back to the car.

She heard him calling her name beneath the hiss of the wind in the pines. She let herself be guided by his alarmed voice. The car materialized in the whiteness and he too alongside it.

They got inside. I told you not to leave the car, he said sternly. I told you of the dangers. I heard you shouting. I thought it was a bear or a boar. There are certainly boars here. He prepared to leave again. She repeated what she'd shouted into the storm. It's not here at all. Don't go out there again. I'll tell you where it is. It's not here at all. She worked the cork free from the bottle of wine and poured what was left into the two waxed goblets.

"Not here?"

"No. Don't leave the car. Drink more wine, you're shivering."

"Show me where, then."

"You're soaked."

"Where? Show me."

"Wait."

She got out and managed to open the badly jammed trunk. She dragged out the two valises and made him get into the rear of the car. The driver's seat was drenched. She gave him his towel and his dark trousers. She turned her back and changed into her best skirt meant for the inn. When she had finished he asked her again. She didn't answer. He reached for the detailed road map. First something to drink to warm them up, she said. She couldn't see straight for the cold.

She went out again and got the two bottles of wine, two waxed goblets and the corkscrew. To give him something else to think of she asked him to uncork the bottle. He tried. His hands were trembling so badly that she did it herself, expertly. He started to open the car door.

It's no use going out in the blizzard to find the farm. You'll never find it here. She held onto him, she wouldn't let him go again. He started unfolding the road map. Here or anywhere on the map, she added.

So, the dashbord clock marking ten past two, the snow crowding in on all sides and the fuel-gauge needle deep in the red zone, she finally said she didn't know.

When he asked her again to show him where it was on the map she repeated that she didn't know. The one place she knew it was was inside her head, had been for twenty years, she went there when things became too hard, didn't need a map for that, she said. The doctor said lots of people had a farm in their head, something like a farm. They both had had it in their heads. It was gone from hers, now it would be gone from his. He didn't understand and she had to say it in three different ways. She urged the wine on him and he drank it dazed.

"You're not telling the truth," he said.

"This time I am. Here, give me your cup."

"But I saw the map in the diary."

"All in the head like all of the rest. Don't spill it."

"Everything? All the other things?"

"All in the head, like the farm," she said. "Come on, drink."

He sat still for a long time. She heard his slow difficult breathing. Everything must be collapsing inside. She slipped her arm about his shoulders. The engine coughed twice and died. The fuel-gauge needle was below the red zone. The blower still distributed heat.

She waited for him to ask her why she'd invented all that. She'd answer that the specialist had been trying to make her find out. Then he (Edmond) would say that she must have been very unhappy to have to do that.

Yes, horribly unhappy, she said to his silent profile as though he'd said all that. He had no idea how unhappy, she said. She started weeping. It was the wine, she gasped between sobs. She was sure that at any moment he'd reach over and touch her shoulder or more and ask her if she couldn't tell him about it. He sat there like a statue. "I'll never be able to tell anybody who really cares," she brought out. "I used to think: some day if I meet someone who cares maybe I will. I have to pay someone to care." She sniffed and blew her nose and drank more wine.

The temperature in the car was dropping. The snow hadn't let up. Half of the windscreen was white. His face was set in an intensity of thought as though he were grappling with the most arduous of problems. Finally he said: "How can you possibly help cure me, Dorothea? It was supposed to be that way. But you're just as unwell as I am. How can anyone be as unwell as me?"

He said it in genuine wonder, not plaintively and without the outrage that the notion would have produced earlier. He even touched her arm briefly. She'd had so much to offer him: a new life. Now in despair he remembered all of those images that had saved him down among the graffitied posters. Now the three blue peaks, the orchard, the woods had shrunk to posters themselves composed of hundreds of thousands of miniscule colored dots bordered with dirty tiles.

The blower blew more feebly and filled the car with frigid air. She reached over unsteadily and managed to turn it off. By three o'clock the idea had taken possession of their minds that they wouldn't survive there in such wild country, perhaps twenty kilometers from the nearest inhabited farmhouse. They clasped each other for warmth on the rear seat. Drowsily she suggested that they clear the snow on the road and build a fire with dead branches, nothing burns like old pine. It would keep them warm and maybe attract help. Yes, we might do that, he said, not moving. She told him the way to do it, something she'd read, she said, but had never done: you ball up paper and build a kind of wigwam of twigs over it. Then you build a second wigwam over the first but branches. Yes, we could do that he said, his lips close to her ear. In a minute he would get up and do it. "Maybe we'd better," she said after a while. "Yes. Give me a pack of matches."

"I have no matches."

"A lighter, then."

"I have no lighter."

"You have to have matches or a lighter. You smoke." He said it with no alarm or urgency, simply to establish the facts.

"I stopped smoking, I never really liked it." She apologized for that although she knew he'd disliked her smoking.

He said she'd done well to have stopped, also the perfume and the make up, she was far prettier, far more real with her real face.

This wasn't her real face, hadn't been her real face, it was a disguise too, she said. But he started kissing her face and neck. How drunk you must be, she thought but let him go on. How drunk I am, she thought, and let him in those last moments before a reputedly painless death. It gave warmth but then it was colder after. But they were both tired and started drowsing off as they said you did in the books describing that sort of going. The wind rocked the car. All of the windows and the windscreen were covered by white.

They were found in time. Huddled together at an angle in the rear-seat of the car, slightly embarrassed because of survival after such a farewell, they still clasped each other for warmth as the tow truck started jolting them to the nearby town.

It had stopped snowing. As they swung onto the main road five hundred meters from where the accident had occurred, the sun came out in the disguise of a shivery pale disk. They were in the outskirts of a small town. There were used car lots on both sides with big decorated Christmas trees not yet taken down. Huge billboards jerked past. He caught a glimpse of a circus advertisement with lions, a spangled trapezist, clowns, then Pilsober Beer's naked lovers. There was a cluster of new prefab houses with a small forest of TV antennas, still holding lines of snow.

As the landscape jerked past he assured her that they'd find the farm, it existed, maybe not hers, surely not hers but it was there, hardly in ruins, much deeper in the mountains than they'd gone. The problem was they hadn't gone deep enough. They would the next time. He would put his apartment up for sale for the money. And as for running a farm successfully, even if neither of them had any knowledge of the thing, he remembered having seen an encyclopedia in a second hand book shop window, The Agricultural Encyclopedia, small for an encyclopedia, no more than four or five volumes, and maybe a little dated, but it was a start, he'd start studying it methodically and then they'd begin the search in the spring. They had new drugs for hay fever, it appeared. Had he never told her that he suffered from hay fever?

She said she had a phobia about spiders. Did they have drugs for that? Maybe it was something that wore off.

The tow truck stopped before a railroad crossing. Brick-red wagons heaped with rusty iron rumbled past interminably. Looking elsewhere out of the window he thought he saw a flash of blue over the white roadside bushes. He was alarmed for his fragile optic nerve but then it was repeated, the flash of blue – a bird? – gone now. No, back again, unmistakably a bird. He tugged at her arm and said, look, a blue bird. She leaned over and stared through the window, frowning with attention. "Are you sure?" she said.

End

