The Seventh Candidate Read Free

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 hell o ! 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,