The Seventh Candidate by Howard Waldman

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 in the office. 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 20-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 5:30.
     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 Dorothea 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 the greatest 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 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 5:30 p.m. 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 totally accepted her employer's interpretation of the attendant's presence, amplified

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 phased-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. 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."