Free The Seventh Candidate by Howard Waldman Page B

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