The Seventh Candidate Read Free Page B

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 The burning had withdrawn.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