The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

  For the first time it occurs to Lila Mae that someone might have been hurt. “That’s impossible. Total freefall is a physical impossibility.” She shakes her head.

  “That’s what happened,” Chuck reaffirms. He’s still looking up at the ceiling. They can hear some of their colleagues whooping outside the door. “Forty floors.”

  “Which one?”

  “Number Eleven, I think.”

  She remembers Number Eleven distinctly. A little shy, but that’s normal in a new cab. “The entire stack is outfitted with the new Arbo antilocks,” Lila Mae argues. “Plus the standard reg gear. I inspected them myself.”

  “Did you see them,” Chuck asks tentatively, “or did you intuit them?”

  Lila Mae ignores the slur. “I did my job,” she says.

  “Maybe you missed something.”

  “I did my job,” Lila Mae says. She hears her voice rising: keep cool. “What did Chancre say?”

  “Had the Mayor in his office ever since it happened,” Chuck says, attempting to be helpful. “So I don’t know what the official story is, but you get the gist from his speech. He’s making it into a political thing because you’re an Intuitionist. And colored, but he’s being clever about it.”

  “I heard that bit.”

  “Internal Affairs is looking for you.”

  “What are the guys saying?”

  “What you would expect,” Chuck tells her. Piefaced Annie groans and he shivers.

  “Total freefall? You’re sure?” There’s no way. The cables, for one thing.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he says. “Lila Mae, I think you should really go upstairs and talk to the IAB guys. Even if you did miss something—however much you don’t want to admit that possibility—the sooner you go and talk to them, the better it’s going to go. They’re fair. You know that.”

  “That would be standard procedure,” Lila Mae muses. “But this isn’t a standard accident.”

  “You should really go upstairs, I’m telling you. There’s nothing else you can do in a situation like this.”

  “Chuck, look at me.” She’s decided. “You haven’t seen me, okay?”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “Tell me you haven’t seen me.”

  “I haven’t seen you.”

  One of the side effects of people intent on erasing you from their lives is that sometimes they erase you when it might not be beneficial. It would have been delightful for Lila Mae’s fellows in the Department of Elevator Inspectors to see her leave the ladies’ room, because they could have enjoyed a few furious moments of invective, of throaty howls. No one sees Lila Mae when she departs O’Connor’s and it’s their loss. The newsmen outside headquarters are scrabbling away across the sidewalk like dry leaves in the wind. Midtown is clearing out. No one lives in midtown.

  Lila Mae has decided to go home. She needs a night to go over exactly what happened at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. She can pretend that she didn’t hear about the accident until tomorrow morning. Plausible. And she has a good face for telling lies. She’s on the subway platform when the problem of the dispatcher occurs to her. Craig told her she had to report to base. The subway arrives: she’ll say she thought it was a paperwork thing that could wait until Monday. That lie could cause her some trouble with IAB, but it’s not totally implausible. Even if they don’t believe her, they can’t discipline her unless she was negligent, and Lila Mae will not allow the possibility that she was negligent. It’s impossible.

  When Piefaced Annie shakes off her stupor, she will recall a strange dream about elevators and falling, and will chalk it up to falling off the toilet, which will happen in about an hour.

  * * *

  From Theoretical Elevators, Volume One, by James Fulton:

  We do not know what is next. If we were to take a barbarian and place him, loincloth and all, before one of our magnificent cities, what would he feel? He would feel fear, doubly: the fear of his powerlessness before our architectural excess and our fear, the thing that drives our architectural excess. The dread of imperfection. We do not need cities and buildings; it is the fear of the dark which compels us to erect them instinctively, like insects. Perspective is the foot-soldier of relativity. Just as the barbarian would gaze upon our cities and buildings with fear and incomprehension, so would we gaze upon future cities and future buildings. Is the next building ovoid, pyramidic? Is the next elevator a bubble or is it shaped like a sea shell, journeying both outward and into itself …

  Take capacity. The standard residential elevator is designed to accommodate 12 passengers, all of whom we assume to be of average weight and form. This is the Occupant’s Fallacy. The number 12 does not consider the morbidly obese, or the thin man’s convention and necessity of speedy conveyance at the thin man’s convention. We conform to objects, we capitulate to them. We need to reverse this order. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect. Nothing we create works the way it should. The car overheats on the highway, the electric can opener cannot open the can. We must tend to our objects and treat them as newborn babes. Our elevators are weak. They tend to get colds easily, they are forgetful. Our elevators ought to be variable in size and height, retractable altogether, impervious to scratches, self-cleaning, possessing a mouth. The thin man’s convention can happen at any time; indeed, they happen all the time …

  * * *

  What else can she say? His statement is friendly, steeped in chummy argot, the intonation jovial, and the man’s face so banal and uncomplicated, so like this country, that Lila Mae almost thinks she knows him. When the man says, “You’re the little lady,” all she thinks to say is, “I guess I am.”

  Pause. Jim nods knowingly.

  “What the hell are you doing in my apartment?” Lila Mae demands.

  “What do you think we’re doing?” John responds. “We’re going over your place looking for evidence.”

  Pause. Jim, again, nods knowingly. Actually, it’s more of an involuntary response to getting caught in the act, despite the reassurances of John’s cool act.

  “Internal Affairs doesn’t have that kind of authority,” Lila Mae says curtly, “whether I checked in after my shift or not. Get the hell out of my apartment.” There have never been this many people in her apartment before.

  Jim and John take a step closer to Lila Mae. A decent lunge and they would have her.

  “So we’re Internal Affairs?” Jim asks. The burgundy residue of Aunt Sally’s preserves glistens on his right forefinger.

  “Yes—we’re the watchdogs of the Elevator Inspector Industry,” John seconds.

  “Department,” Jim says. He licks the remaining preserves off his finger.

  “We’re the watchdogs of the Elevator Inspectors Department,” John says.

  “The Department of Elevator Inspectors,” Jim corrects.

  John takes advantage of Jim’s distraction to flip his magnifying glass into the air and catch it. Scare her. He makes a sudden fake forward, grinning, but Lila Mae stifles her flight-response. Damned if she’s going to look weak. Her visitors’ absurd wordplay annoys her, perhaps even more than their trespass into her home, her one safe place. She has spent a lot of time trying to find the correct arrangement of things. She never has guests, sure, but there is always the off chance. Sure. “Let me see some identification,” Lila Mae demands. “Now.”

  “Let’s show her wink-wink identification,” Jim intones.

  “That’ll be all, gentlemen,” a voice behind Lila Mae says. The voice is as smooth as a beach stone. It belongs to a short man in a perfect blue blazer. Pince-nez in this day and age, that’s what the man polishes with a handkerchief as he enters Lila Mae’s apartment, polishing far too diligently for there to actually be any grit on the lenses. He moves with the rapid movements of a pigeon, and his left arm resembles a wing, pressed close to the body as it is, nooking a leather satchel. He places his hand on Lila Mae’s shoulder and it is then tha
t she truly gets scared. She cannot feel his skin but she knows it is cold. “There’s no reason for you to be harassing this young lady,” he says.

  Jim and John look at each other. Throughout the history of their partnership, it’s Jim who takes his cues from his comrade, things as subtle as the tilting of a nostril or the vague tremble in the left knee. Jim is not reading any signals from John, and that’s a first. They’ve never been interrupted before. It’s so embarrassing.

  The stranger, this latest stranger inquires, “Do you know who I am?” as he squeezes Lila Mae’s shoulder.

  John sighs and answers, “I know your identity, Mr. Reed, and a few biographical details, but can I say I really know you?”

  Jim is about to add his usual improv backup to his partner, a dialogic placeholder such as, “Does anyone really know anyone?” or “In the Biblical sense?” but Mr. Reed flicks a hand, dismissing him. Such rubbish. Mr. Reed looks at Lila Mae for the first time. “Miss Watson, did you invite these men into your home?”

  Everything is different now, it seems to Lila Mae. Nothing in her apartment appears to have been moved, and yet everything is different. That’s how she feels. She doesn’t feel as if she lives here anymore. Lila Mae looks down at Mr. Reed, for he is a short man, shorter than Lila Mae, and she says, “No, I did not.” She doesn’t live here.

  “If I may be so bold …” Mr. Reed begins. His eyes are wide and far apart. Like a pigeon’s. Lila Mae nods. Mr. Reed looks back to Jim and John and says, “Gentlemen, I must insist that you leave this place immediately.”

  John shakes his left kneecap in his trousers and Jim places the jar of preserves on the kitchen counter, screwing the top back as he does so. Even though he’s been found out, habit tells him not to leave a trace. “Immediately,” John mimics, trying to save face through his characteristic deadpan sass, which is now halfhearted and at best a face-saving gesture.

  “Immediately,” Jim says.

  Jim and John head for the dim hallway outside Lila Mae’s apartment. They keep a safe distance from Lila Mae and the diminutive Mr. Reed. John takes the doorknob into his hand and says, “You want this open or closed?”

  Mr. Reed looks at Lila Mae. “Open,” she says.

  Jim and John don’t speak until they reach the landing of the floor below, and Lila Mae can’t make out what they say. She hears words, though, and the sound is a loud buzzing in her ears incommensurate with the actual volume. She feels dizzy but hides it well. She doesn’t know Mr. Reed from Adam. So far he’s just another white man with an attitude, never mind his keen sense of timing. “Mr. Reed, is it then?” she asks.

  “Mr. Reed, yes,” Mr. Reed says. “I’m Orville Lever’s secretary. He sent me to fetch you.”

  “I don’t need fetching. Though I suppose I should thank you for helping me out there.” Lila Mae walks over to the sullen kitchenette and returns the jar of preserves to the icebox. Then she thinks better of it and drops it in the trash.

  “It was my pleasure, Miss Watson. If I may?”

  “Have a seat,” Lila Mae offers. She has little choice.

  “I’m not sure if you fully realize the difficult position you’re in, Miss Watson. Today’s accident has some very disturbing repercussions.”

  “Which is why the Intuitionist candidate for Guild Chair has seen fit to send someone over to look after me. I don’t think I need looking after.”

  “May I ask you a question? Why didn’t you report back to the Department after your shift?”

  “I was tired.”

  “It is standard operating procedure after an accident to report to your superiors, is it not?”

  “I didn’t know there was an accident until I saw the late edition on the train home.”

  “I think we should be going, Miss Watson. I wouldn’t advise staying here tonight.”

  “This is my home.”

  “And if I hadn’t stopped in?”

  “I would have taken care of them.”

  “My car is waiting downstairs. You inspected the Fanny Briggs building, did you not?”

  “You know I did.”

  “Then what went wrong?”

  Nothing went wrong.

  “You are aware, Miss Watson, that those men weren’t from Internal Affairs, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then who were they?”

  Nothing.

  “Has it occurred to you yet that you were set up?”

  The accident is impossible. It wasn’t an accident.

  Even if Jim and John had found Lila Mae’s safe behind the painting, the contents wouldn’t have interested them, except to flesh out John’s coveted psychological profile of this night’s subject. A soccer trophy from high school (everyone on the team got one, even Lila Mae, who sat on the bench all season and only joined the squad at her mother’s urging she “be social”). Her high school graduation ring (poor craftsmanship). A love letter from a dull boy, her diploma from the Institute for Vertical Transport, and her prizewinning paper on theoretical elevators. Not much, really.

  * * *

  Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer’s oaths aside, scratched—gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.

  Marvin Watson was proud of his daughter. She was doing what he had never been able to do: she was studying to be an elevator inspector. His pride was limned with shame over these circumstances. He had long dreamed of the day when he would drive his only daughter, his baby and blood, off to school; and here it was. But he did not leave the pickup and did not look up at the building in which she was to live. He cranked down the window to kiss her goodbye. The old truck hiccuped if it idled for too long, setting everything to a furious tremble, and Lila Mae’s lips did not even graze her father’s cheek when she leaned over to kiss him goodbye. Her father drove off and never saw the room in which she would live for three years, a converted janitor’s closet above the newly renovated gymnasium. They had just renamed the gymnasium after the dashing young heir to a driving-sheave fortune, a gentleman from the country’s South who had donated a large sum of money to be spent at the Institute’s discretion. Lila Mae lived in the janitor’s closet because the Institute for Vertical Transport did not have living space for colored students.

  The Institute’s campus had formerly been a health spa for rich neurasthenic women from the Northeast’s larger cities, which is why the students were never too far from statues of Grecian nymphs, nub-nosed spirits whose long manes eased liquidly into their sagging tunics. The spa failed after newer spas opened in the weatherless regions of the Southwest. Weatherlessness is much more amenable to those in search of succor for bodily complaint, evoking timelessness and immortality, and soon the rich neurasthenic women from the Northeast’s larger cities boarded planes to be free of the seasons and the proximity of their braying families, the cause of their disrepair. The elevator magnates who bought the land and refurbished the spa’s physical plant into something more suitable for a place of learning were disheartened by the rich suburb the surrounding neighborhood eventually became, and pondered, on winter nights when their wives and children were asleep and the only company was a bottle of aged Irish spirits, how life would have been different if they traded in real estate, and not mechanical conveyance. Verticality is such a risky enterprise.

  Lila Mae did not mix much with the other students, who were in turn thankful that she had spared them the burden of false conciliation. As she had when she was in elementary school, she sat in the final row of her classes and did not speak unless there was no other option. She retired early in the evening, shuttering her eyes to the urgent grumblings of the gym’s boiler room, whose howls filled the empty building at night like the protestations
of wraiths. She rose early in the morning, when the first sunlight crept over the statues of Grecian nymphs before it advanced to the metropolis a few miles to the west. The admission of colored students to the Institute for Vertical Transport was staggered to prevent overlap and any possible fulminations or insurrections that might arise from that overlap. The previous tenant of the janitor’s closet had had a sweet tooth. Every cleaning produced yet another crumpled wrapper of Bogart’s Chewing Gum. Occasionally professors called Lila Mae by his name, even though it would have been difficult to say there was any resemblance. Lila Mae never pointed out the mistake to her professors, who were a cranky bunch, mostly former field men who had rejected retirement to teach at the most prestigious elevator inspecting school in the country. A black gown is remarkably effective in conferring prestige on even the most rough-hewn of men.

  She learned plenty her first semester at the Institute for Vertical Transport. She learned about the animals in the Roman coliseums hoisted to their cheering deaths on rope-tackle elevators powered by slaves, learned about Villayer’s “flying chair,” a simple pulley, shaft and lead counterweight concoction described in a love letter from Napoleon I to his wife, the Archduchess Marie Louise. About steam, and the first steam elevators. She read about Elisha Graves Otis, the cities he enabled through his glorious invention, and the holy war between the newly deputized elevator inspectors and the elevator companies’ maintenance contractors. The rise of safety regulation, safety device innovations, the search for a national standard. She was learning about Empiricism but didn’t know it yet.

  She remembers when she first saw the light. She was usually so tired by nightfall that she rarely noticed anything except that her room was either too hot or too cold, that the walk down to the public ladies bathroom on the floor below was full of shadows, and that janitors evidently did not need more than a single naked bulb to perform their duties in maintenance closets. The poor illumination gave her headaches when she tried to read. One night she couldn’t sleep. Literally—she had to study. All semester, she’d neglected her class on the changing concepts of governmental attitudes toward elevator inspection (the evolution of the machines interested her more, to tell the truth, her first few months there) and now she had to cram for the following morning’s exam. Her body didn’t like coffee and tea and she rarely stayed up late, so Lila Mae took to pinching her wrist when her head began to dip. Upon rising from one of her unscheduled naps, she noticed a light in Fulton Hall. On the top floor, where the small library was. There shouldn’t have been anyone in there, the library closed at dusk—elevator inspectors, even acolytes, generally being morning people. She wondered if the administration had extended the library’s hours during exam period; Lila Mae had discovered she was often ignorant of much routine information her fellow students possessed. But the lower floors of Fulton Hall were dark. She decided the light had been left on accidentally and returned to the arid court transcripts of The United States vs. The Arbo Elevator Company.