The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

  “I’m fine. Thank you again.”

  His body tilts to leave, but Lila Mae stops him with, “Is that where you’re from? Natchez?”

  “That’s where my mama’s from,” he replies. He leans against the door. “She didn’t like it enough to stay there, but she liked it enough to name me after it. She still wants to hear people say it.”

  “I’m from down South, too.”

  “Where?”

  “A dirty town.”

  “You’re not much for talking, are you?”

  “I talk.”

  Natchez shakes his head again and grins. “Okay, then,” he says. “You one of those visiting professors they always have staying here? You giving a speech?”

  “No, I’m an elevator inspector.” Lila Mae’s voice automatically rises at those last two words, up to the tone she uses when she’s on a case.

  “I didn’t know they let us do that,” Natchez tells her. “Even up here.”

  “They don’t but I’m doing it anyway.”

  “Is that good work—working on elevators? That’s a city job, right?”

  “It’s not bad,” Lila Mae says, stealing a quick look at his hands. His fingers are wide. Arrogant, they seem to her. “They go up and they go down. You just have to understand why they do that.” She watches his eyes. “What do you do when you’re not here? This isn’t your regular job, right?”

  “I’m just filling in. I do this and that,” he says. “Whatever comes my way. This city is tough, I’ll tell you that.”

  “It’s a tough city,” Lila Mae repeats. She’s just reached the end of her conversational props.

  Natchez doesn’t mind. “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he says. “My uncle, he’s still sick.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He says he can’t feel his leg.” Natchez frowns. “He says it feels like it’s been cut off.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “It happens to him from time to time.”

  “Thanks for checking in on me.”

  “You sleep tight, Lila Mae. Sleep tight.”

  * * *

  The children masticate rock candy in greasy teeth and wait for their saliva to thicken into sugar. In the heat everything is sticky. Their tongues are green and red, from the candy.

  At the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, the flags from every civilized country dangle in the limp air like the rags of stable hands. The sun stokes, gleams on the monstrous edifice of the Crystal Palace, which is a replica of its namesake in London: iron and wood and glass, radial ribs strengthened by slender cross-ribs. A Royal bauble. Before they invented verticality, that was all there was to aspire to, glass and steel confection delivered by spyglass from overseas.

  To the west of the Crystal Palace is the fetid Croton reservoir; east is Sixth Avenue, a gargoyle of carriages and hooves. The Crystal Palace will fall five years later in 1858, devoured by fire in fifteen minutes, and become Times Square, in due course. But today, a thousand windows snare the light and the glass is streaked with the brackish film of condensed sweat. It is a greenhouse, and what treasures bloom there! In one room is arrayed raw materials on velvet, behind glass: minerals, ores in all shapes, coal, copper, stone, marble, crystal, diverse wonders all. In one gallery a locomotive squats on iron haunches atop a black pedestal: the machine is this dynamic age distilled, these vehicular times. They come from all over the world. Hamburg presents many articles in horn, some pretty furniture, a large collection of sticks, embroideries, and Turkey showcases fine silks, raw materials, stuff of the earth, carpets and rugs much remarked upon. A million people under that glass during the course of the Exhibition. They dally and gasp at the exquisite watches from Switzerland, very diminutive, true craft, barely an inch in circumference and wound and ticking audibly, most beautifully set with lovely enameled exteriors. Grain and chocolate and guns, muskets and French pistols (the famous duels) and a stuffed Apache. Crimson fruit from Amazon vines and brown slivers of llama meat, dried and cured.

  On the second floor are the reaping machines and threshers, still and elegant, like lithe animals stooping to lick moisture. The Bowie knives weep in the sunlight; they say Americans are never seen without one. (A quick look around disproves this Continental humbug). A monkey in a sable cape on a leather leash can tell the future. One display features a horse that’s only a foot high and a two-headed infant in a jar, for the children’s delight. The ladies and gentlemen step aside and wave their handkerchiefs in deep respect as he walks by: the Chinese Mandarin and two retainers. (Newspapers later report that he was just an opium smuggler pulling a gag.)

  The sound of the organ on the second floor, against which two hundred instruments and six hundred voices would be nothing, so loud on this first day, July 14, 1853, falls away—the heat is even taking its toll on the organ, one man remarks. No, the organ has ceased because the man with the lungs of a bear, the Vice President of the United States, is about to address the assembled: “Our exhibition cannot fail to soften, if not eradicate altogether, the prejudices and animosities which have so long retarded the happiness of nations. We are living in a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind. The distances which separated the different nations are rapidly vanishing with the achievements of modern invention. We can traverse them with incredible speed. The publicity of the present day causes that no sooner is a discovery or an invention made than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts. The products of all the quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal today and we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and captial. Ladies and gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1853 is to give us a true test and a living picture of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived and a new starting point from which all the nations will be able to direct their further exertions.” The monkey in the sable cape picks a pocket.

  That first night the man attempts to kill himself and does not succeed. It is merely one act of many in the Great Hall, one rough stone among all the gathered jewels of the world. Elisha Graves Otis stands on the elevator platform. No one has seen his act before, and after all they have seen this day, there is little enthusiasm in the Crystal Palace for the unassuming gentleman. Despite his promises of the future. He is a slender middle-aged man in a herringbone frock coat; his right hand strokes a white vest. If the assembled stop to see the act, it is most probably because of exhaustion, the toll of a lifetime’s worth of exotic sights crammed into one glorious day and the swamp heat in the Palace, only now receding with the evening. And there’s nothing new about freight elevators except, perhaps, to some of the country yokels, but not to city folk.

  The platform rises thirty feet into the air, grasping for the glass dome above that is black with night. They are drawn from the Persian tapestries and the Egyptian scarabs, summoned from the Ethiopian pots to Mr. Otis, the assembled in the Great Hall come and stare at the platform and the man and the ratcheted rails. They want the future after all. “Please watch carefully,” Mr. Otis says. He holds a saw in the air, a gold crescent in the lamplight, and begins to sever the rope holding him in the air. As the fame of his act grows over the next few weeks and months, the Crystal Palace will never again be as quiet as it is now. The first time is the best time. It is quiet. The rope dances in the air as the final strands give. The platform falls eternally for a foot or two before the old wagon spring underneath the platform releases and catches in the ratchets of the guard rails. The people in the Exhibition still have a roar in them, even after all they have seen this day. A Safety Elevator. Verticality is not far off now, and true cities. The first elevation has begun. Mr. Elisha Otis removes his top hat with a practiced flourish and says, “All safe, gentlemen, all safe.”

  * * *

  The chauffeur does not speak, he drives, spinning
the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. Minute grace of a painter: he makes short, careful strokes, never too extravagant or too miserly. He has a small red cut on his nape where the barber nicked him. As the black Buick squeezes through the bars of the city toward the Institute for Vertical Transport, Lila Mae thinks back to what Mr. Reed said. He said, “Perhaps you are the perfect person to talk to her. She won’t talk to us.”

  Lila Mae Watson is colored, Marie Claire Rogers is colored.

  The file she holds contains paper of different shapes, grades and thickness. Some of the words are handwritten, some have been imprinted by a typewriter. The one on top is Marie Claire Rogers’s application for employment as a maid with the Smart Cleaning Corporation. She was forty-five years of age when she applied, had two children, had been widowed. The application lists where she had worked previously; apparently she’d spent most of her life picking up after other people and was very experienced in this line of work. Tending to messes. One of her former employers endorses her talents in a letter of reference, describing her as “obedient,” “quiet,” and “docile.” Another document, paperclipped to the application and eaved with the Smart Cleaning corporate logo, relates Mrs. Rogers’s six-months assignment to the McCaffrey household. Her term there passed without incident; Mrs. Rogers’s work was characterized by Mr. and Mrs. James McCaffrey as “efficient and careful.” The McCaffreys moved to cheerier climes, according to the Smart Cleaning Corporation’s records, and Mrs. Rogers was reassigned to one of their regular clients, the Institute for Vertical Transport.

  Lila Mae recognizes James Fulton’s signature at the foot of an employee evaluation form, dated a year after her reassignment to the faculty housing of the Institute. Ink identical to that of his signature is observable in small boxes above, where the ink has been used to form x’s in a column of boxes that indicate “excellent.” Except for one box in the “fair” column, regarding a question about punctuality. The date on the form tells Lila Mae that Fulton had just resigned from the Guild Chair (to murmurs of varied volume from the larger elevator inspector industry) to become the Dean of the Institute. The final stage of his career. He’d stolen all the plums; there was nowhere else to go.

  The Institute letterhead is more distinguished and staid than the ersatz antiquation of Smart Cleaning company stationery. Rarefied austerity appropriate to a place of higher learning. The document Lila Mae holds is addressed to the Institute’s Board of Directors, and the emotional tenor of the words, the unmodulated panic, provides an intriguing contrast to the serenity of the Institute crest atop the page. The letter urges “swift action” regarding Fulton’s “eccentric” behavior (“eccentric” being a word, Lila Mae notes dryly, that white people use to describe crazy white people of stature), detailed below. Lila Mae has heard most of the stories before—the quick rages, the sudden crying fit in the middle of groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Engineering Wing—but most of the outrageous acts she reads about now are new to her. White people cover their own. Fulton’s behavior does not make her reconsider the father of her faith; Lila Mae does not expect human beings to conduct themselves in any other way but how they truly are. Which is weak.

  The next document she finds is no real revelation, either. Fulton has acceded to the Board of Directors, the anonymous secretary reports (with much more enthusiasm than was present in his first document), and decided to resign. He has accepted our offer of allowing him to retain his faculty housing, as well as the proviso that a caretaker move in with him. This particular piece of paper (which shakes with the Buick’s velocity; not everything is within the chauffeur’s control) goes on to describe Fulton’s rejection of all the caretakers the Institute proposed (or “nannies,” as he referred to the pageant of efficient taskmasters who essayed his front door). The woman he wanted was the housekeeper, Marie Claire Rogers. No one else. The secretary is happy to report that Mrs. Rogers agreed, and will move into the old servant’s quarters on the first floor the second week of the next month. Congratulations, gentlemen, Lila Mae says to herself.

  Lila Mae and the House chauffeur, Sven, are well into uncharted suburbia, which has been overgrown with kingsize discount emporiums and family restaurants catering to the primary color crowd since the last time she was out here. It is easier to breathe than in the city, there’s less to see. She looks back down at the next piece of paper, an old Lift magazine article Lila Mae read when it first appeared. The sheets are limp and glossy, thin as a breeze. The trial is over. The judge has decided. Marie Claire Rogers must relinquish any of Fulton’s papers in her possession to the Institute for Vertical Transport. According to the Lift reporter (whose choice of adjectives reveals him to be an Institute ally), when Fulton knew he did not have long to live, he bartered his personal papers for assurances that Mrs. Marie Claire Rogers could live in his campus house for as long as she saw fit. Needless to say, the Institute had already believed that they would get Fulton’s papers once he died, having already constructed the necessary reliquary nooks; this unexpected stipulation was just a gnat’s annoyance. Or so they thought at first. Once Fulton’s spirit departed, Mrs. Rogers tendered the papers in question. But not all. Obviously some notebooks were missing, ones from the final two years of Fulton’s life. Academia, posterity, the implacable engine of history would not be denied. But Mrs. Rogers was quite adamant about holding on to the journals, and assailed her landlords with invective not often heard in Yankee climes, by white ears, relenting in her insufferable behavior only when ordered to do so by the court of the Honorable James Madison (no relation). The article ends there, but Lila Mae adds a postscript to herself, about the nature of evidence. It was obvious from the dates on the journals that some were still missing, but no one could prove that they were not, as Mrs. Rogers maintained, destroyed by Fulton in a wee-hour fit of hopelessness, or even stolen—the maid claimed that on the day of Fulton’s funeral, the house had been broken into. Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.

  The car is near the Institute. She knows this without looking up because the sounds of the city have finally fallen away, as if Lila Mae and her driver had discovered the one true valley. The gnashing and grinding of the city, the keen laughter that follows a fresh kill. Perfect place for a spa out here, to urge one’s self back into health, gather arms for the social world. The final contents of the file are the handwritten notes of one Martin Sullivan, an Intuitionist acolyte at the Institute. Subject slams door in my face, insults my mother, Subject catches me sneaking in through the kitchen window and stabs me in the hand with a meat thermometer, Subject sees me hiding behind tree and begins to approach menacingly—I decide to leave the perimeter. Martin Sullivan goes on to catalog the contents of a garbage pail collected as evidence one week earlier. Primarily food-related waste, Sullivan notes, with approximately 10 percent paper refuse. Two false starts of what appears to be a personal letter to someone named “Aunt Ida,” and so on. One item looked promising—a copy of Kwicky’s Weekly Crossword, with two-thirds of the puzzles attempted to varying degrees of completeness and accuracy. But despite my best efforts, I could not find any hidden messages or other concealed meanings in the puzzles.

  That’s it. She’s the next one up, the next hassle for an old woman.

  It has been a long time since she has been here. So long that her initial reaction is not of routine but of first impressions: she remembers entering the wide black gates of the Institute for the first time, her father’s hands on the wheel. She wonders again if news of the accident has reached her parents, if the reports contained her name. (Another thought: there is a file on her accumulating somewhere now, like the one she holds in her lap, an accretion of falsehoods.) She is not like the others who have come to interrogate and nag Marie Claire Rogers. Lila Mae has come to clear her name. At any cost.

  Mr. Reed told her, “She refuses to talk to us. Perhaps you’re the perfect one to talk to her. You’re both colored.”

  * * *

  From Theoretical Eleva
tors: Volume Two, by James Fulton.

  To believe in silence. As we did when we lived in bubbles. Sentient insofar as we knew it was warm: Silence provided that warmth. The womb. Ants have it easy for speaking in chemicals. Food. Flight. Follow. Nouns and verbs only, and never in concert. There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality). You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure. You cannot find the words, the words will not allow you to find them in time for the departure. Nothing is allowed to pass between you and your companion. It is late, a seat awaits. That the words are simple and true is only half the battle. The train is leaving. The train is always leaving and you have not found your words.

  Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits while its human freight tries to grab through the muck and find the words. In the black box, this messy business of human communication is reduced to excreted chemicals, understood by the soul’s receptors and translated into true speech.

  * * *

  No caramel soda, no prune juice, and definitely no coffee: Pompey won’t drink anything darker than his skin, for fear of becoming darker than he already is. As if his skin were a stain that could worsen, steep and saturate into Hell’s Black. They sent Pompey to sabotage the elevator stack in the Fanny Briggs building, Lila Mae is sure of that. It would have appeased their skewed sense of harmony to pit their two coloreds against each other. Dogs in a fighting pit. Pompey would have jumped at the chance, white foamy saliva smeared across his cheeks. Didn’t he say something to that effect when they were in O’Connor’s, just after the crash, when Lila Mae crouched against the wall like a thief? She’s finally got what’s been coming to her. Something like that. Pompey in his too-small beige suit, bowler hat tilted, mischievous in the machine room.