The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

  She’s waiting in the car for Marie Claire Rogers to show up. The faculty houses lean behind a regiment of oak at the bottom of the hill. Always the incongruity: the preoccupied theoreticians and the bare-knuckled former inspectors united in academia, living behind indistinguishable Tudor facades. Through the car window Lila Mae can see the gymnasium where she used to live, see the small gutted hole that was her window onto campus. She draws a line across the air to the upper floors of Fulton Hall, the library where the man died. The man whose house she sits in front of now, with a man who does not speak in the driver’s seat. Sven breathes heavily through his mouth like a horse.

  The tap at the window startles her. “If you’re going to be here all day, you might as well come in,” the subject says, her words threading through the inch of open window to Lila Mae’s right. Marie Claire Rogers adds, “Just you. Not him.”

  She is a short woman, a hut on strong stumpy legs, and looks younger than Lila Mae expected. Not as used-up and exhausted as her profession should have made her. On this overcast day she is a solid living presence, a bull in a bright red sundress that squeezes up around her neck in white ruffles. Dry browned flowers clench in a fist on her straw hat. She does not wait for Lila Mae’s response, starting up the stone walkway to Fulton’s house, her house, in small, measured steps. Lila Mae tells the driver not to wait for her, she’ll make her own way back to Intuitionist House. Not a personality given easily to nostalgia, Lila Mae has nonetheless decided to walk around the campus after interviewing Mrs. Rogers. See if anyone is living in her old room. Perhaps it is the past days’ dislocation.

  Lila Mae opens the door to the foyer and sees the red blur to her left. Mrs. Rogers says, “I saw you and him parked in front when I come around the corner.” She plucks a long hat pin from her head and sets her straw hat next to her on the couch. “I waited twenty minutes and you weren’t moving. I’m not going to be kept out my own house.”

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” Lila Mae replies. “I just wanted to ask you a question or two. If you have the time.”

  Mrs. Rogers shakes her head wearily. “I wouldn’t let you in,” she says flatly, “but you’re not like them other men been coming around here, in their city suits all full of themselves. Like they have to be nice to you because you have something they want, even though they think they better than you.” She stares into her visitor’s eyes. “But I give them so much trouble I guess they figure in their heads they send you and I’ll talk to you.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And I’ll just say what I’ve been keeping because we belong to the same club.” Mrs. Rogers’s hands scrape across her lap as if to brush something away. “Why don’t you sit yourself down,” she says, standing, “while I make some tea.”

  The house is not what Lila Mae had expected, but then Fulton’s been dead for six years. It is Mrs. Rogers’s house now, by contractual agreement. There was no mention of it in the file, but there must be rumors that Fulton and Rogers were lovers. Why else go to so much trouble for a servant. Did she start redecorating when he was alive, by creeping degrees? Fifteen ceramic horses stand on the mantle above the fireplace, in poses ranging from mid-gallop to pensive graze. She can hear Mrs. Rogers clinking and fussing down the hall. Boiling water. What did Fulton say as she remade his house. Too far gone to notice the world around him, or too intent on his black box to care about the shells of things. The appearance of matter.

  Mrs. Rogers returns with tea and brown wafers. The tea smells and tastes of cloves. The chair Lila Mae sits in is old and firm. Intractable. Mrs. Rogers asks, sipping tea and eyeing Lila Mae over the lip of her cup, “Why don’t you get on with it, then?”

  “I just came here to ask you about Mr. Fulton.”

  “That’s what the rest of them men said. What people you with? You with the Institute or that Department in the city? Or some new people come to harass me?”

  “My name is Lila Mae Watson,” she says. “I’m an Intuitionist. Now I work with the Department of Elevator Inspectors. In the city.”

  “Um-hmm,” Mrs. Rogers says. Without emotion. “Ask what you going to ask.” She nibbles a biscuit with tiny teeth.

  “It was just you living here with Fulton?” Rogers may not make it easy, but she will find out what she wants to know, Lila Mae decides. She will.

  “Somebody had to,” Mrs. Rogers answers wearily. “He couldn’t get along without having someone around to keep him out of craziness. Keep him from himself. First they brought in all these nice old ladies from Europe or some such.” She waves out the window as if that place were just beyond the trees. “But James just ran them right out the house as soon as they walked in. Said they scared him, them being from Sweden and Russia and so on. Then one day he said that he’d only have me under his roof with him.”

  “And you accepted.”

  “All my kids married and gone off,” Mrs. Rogers replies, her head tilting just a bit toward a picture on the table next to her. Lila Mae hadn’t noticed it: faces and bodies she can’t discern, posed in the traditional arrangement of family photos. “What am I going to do,” Mrs. Rogers continued, “stay in that city with all that foolishness that goes on these days? There ain’t much to do out here, but you don’t have to think about some kid knocking you over the head for your money.”

  “You were friends then, you and Fulton.”

  “I worked for him and we became friends. He was good to me. Did you know they wanted me to spy on him? Once he started writing those books of his about feeling the elevator and hugging the elevator and business—”

  “Theoretical Elevators,” Lila Mae offers.

  “That’s them. Once he started up with that, those old crackers on the hill didn’t know what to do with him. Acting like he got bit by a mad dog and carrying on like that, then he starts writing those books. I think that’s what got to them the most—the books. They didn’t know what to make of them, coming over here at all hours—I don’t know if they was trying to make him stop or just keep it to himself. One day he’s off giving a speech and one of them comes in here, some dried-up old white boy, comes into my kitchen and tells me ‘they’d appreciate it if I kept them informed’ about James’s coming and goings and what he does in his room at night. Like I was going to be a spy in my own house, because that’s what this place became as soon as I moved in here. My house. I told them to get the hell out of my kitchen, and said if they came around my house again I was going to tell Fulton. And you know he’d throw a fit.” Mrs. Rogers places her teacup on the end table and stares at Lila Mae, switches gears: “What’s taking you so long?” she says forcefully. “Ain’t you going to ask me where I’m hiding the rest of Fulton’s stuff? That’s what everybody wants to know. ‘Can we just talk to you for a minute,’ ‘Do you have a minute?’ No, I don’t have a minute, not for them.”

  “We’re just trying to make sure,” Lila Mae says. She’s losing control of the situation, letting this bitter old bird get the best of her.

  “How’d you get mixed up with these people anyway?” Mrs. Rogers asks. “You all dressed like them, but you must still have some sense.”

  “I came to school here,” Lila Mae responds. Keep the conversation on Rogers, not herself. That’s not why she’s here. “A few years back.”

  “Is that all there is to it? Just that?”

  “Like I said, I’m an Intuitionist. I’m a student of Fulton’s teachings, and if there’s some more out there somewhere, I’d like to find them.”

  “You went to school here?”

  “A few years back.”

  “I think I remember you,” Mrs. Rogers says flatly, nodding her head. “There never been too many of us around here, who weren’t scrubbing floors or picking up, that is. Yes. I remember you. I remember you because you were the only colored gal around here who didn’t work here. I used to see you walking all fast everywhere, like you had someplace to go and didn’t have no time to get there. You were always walking fast by yourself.”


  “I made it through.”

  “I guess you did.” Mrs. Rogers’s brown eyes are locked fast on Lila Mae’s. “Was it worth it? All the stuff they put on you?”

  “I have my badge. I earned my badge.” Lila Mae realizes with no small measure of embarrassment that her hand is in her pocket, tracing the crest on her gold badge. She reaches for a biscuit on the tray.

  “That’s not what I’m asking, is it?” Mrs. Rogers says. Satisfied with the awkward expression on Lila Mae’s face, a crumpled ball of paper is what it looks like, Mrs. Rogers leans back on the couch and smiles. “Forgive me,” she says slowly, “I’m just an old lady going on and on on a Sunday afternoon. You came here to ask me something. You want to know if I’m holding something back. Something of Fulton’s the world and all those people up on the hill up there can’t live without.”

  “Why did you hold on to his papers? You had an agreement, right?”

  “That was what James wanted.” The smile on her face is distant and strange, as if pleased by far-off music. “He told me because he knew he was going to die soon, the way people just know they’re going to go soon, he told me that when they came around poking after his things I was to give them whatever he had in his study, but anything in his bedroom was off-limits. That’s what he told me, and I could tell he meant it. He kept some of his work in the bedroom and he kept some in his study and those are two different places. That’s what he wanted, and that’s what I was going to do by him, no matter what those old crackers and their lawyers were saying.”

  “But eventually you gave in to them.”

  “You know what I think? I think Fulton was going to burn those papers up in the fireplace, only he didn’t know he was going to go on so soon. But they brought me up in front of that judge and they make me swear on the Bible. What else am I going to do? I ask you—what else am I going to do? I had to swear on the Bible. I know James would be upset with me, but what else was I going to do? I can’t start over again, and James wanted me to have this place.”

  “And you gave them everything?”

  “I gave them everything and they still didn’t believe me. Somebody broke in here the day we buried James. Knocked everything over looking for something. I told them someone had broken in here and maybe they took something, but they still didn’t believe me.” A tiny mechanism in the old woman’s body clicks into place, suddenly activated. By what, Lila Mae doesn’t know: but she understands that her interview is coming to a close. Mrs. Rogers barks, “I look outside my window the other day, and you know what I see? I see a man picking through my trash can. I know the man who comes for the trash, and this wasn’t no trashman. Then he takes off running. What do you have to say to that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know how many people come around here lately asking the same question? Sometimes they fat and sometimes they tall and sometimes they even show some respect. They say they’re from these people or they belong to that group and so on. And do you know what I say to them? I slam my door shut. Looking at me with that look. I seen all kinds of white people in my life, and I’ll tell you something. They all alike. Every last one of them. Act like I’m not even in the room. To hear them say such things, the things they say, right in front of my face, like I’m not even in the room. Such horrible things. And they all the same, except for James. I got nothing to say to a one of them. No more. After what they did to me and mine my whole life.”

  Flying teacups, throw one of the ceramic horses at Lila Mae. In another minute if she doesn’t get out of there.

  “And they send you. Got some little nigger gal on the payroll. This is a new world. They think they can send you over here and I’ll talk to you. Like we know each other. Wearing a man’s suit like you a man. Let me ask you something. Why are you here? On a Sunday?”

  “Because it’s important,” Lila Mae responds. Defiant. Believes in her mission.

  “To who?” Mrs. Rogers demands. “To you or them?”

  And Lila Mae doesn’t say anything and Mrs. Rogers says, “That’ll do for now.” The last thing the old woman says, when Lila Mae is halfway down the walk: “He’s not the man you think he is. Remember that: he’s not the man you think he is.”

  * * *

  There were no windows and they took his watch so he had no idea how long he had been down there. Long enough to have been nicknamed the Screaming Man, long enough for him to have earned the sobriquet a dozen times over. He screamed the first time when the large man without eyes broke the first of his fingers. He screamed a couple times after that, and things just flowed from there.

  The large man did have eyes, but they receded so far into his skull that the Screaming Man might have been peering into an abyss. When they arrived at this place, the two men hoisted his quivering form down damp stone steps, through hallways gouged out of reticent earth, down to this room. They chained him to the cot that stank of piss and vomit and other murky fluids the human body can be counted on to expel from time to time. Pus. The mattress bore tattoos, dark amorphous stains that corresponded to where different body parts fell on the mattress, a brown cloud around the right knee, some murk congealed near the groin. He screamed when he saw the mattress, and screamed more as they chained him to the bed and he saw his limbs and parts positioned over previous guests’ secretions. Dazed and agonized as he was, he understood that the small room was underground and that no real people would hear his screams. For the men who held him were not real people. They were monsters and they were going to kill him.

  It cannot be said that the Screaming Man was unaware of his crime. He knew he was trespassing even as he did so. He trespassed for many reasons, for reasons going back several years, for reasons that bided their spiteful time until the moment of their vindication. The moment of the web. He did not break the laws of the country but the laws of a powerful man who commands a legion of block-browed enforcers who have pledged their fealty in blood. He had stopped screaming for several hours and had even entertained dreams of release, small dramas of contrition and forgiveness (we just wanted to send you a message), when the short man with nimble fingers entered the room and commenced to torture him. “Just pruning the overgrowth,” the short man said as he cut the Screaming Man. Said Screaming Man, who truly and thoroughly earned his nickname at that point, and for several hours afterward.

  The blood from his wounds (plural) sprayed the cinderblock wall and dried and eventually became indistinguishable from the dried blood from the others before him. It was not the spray patterns of his blood, intriguing and lively as they were, that distinguished him from his predecessors but the unaccountable originality of his screaming. His screaming, so steady and dependable for a time (crescendoing and receding, then redoubling in intensity at perfect intervals, as if pain were a virtuoso and his screams the very libretto of hell), slowly trickled away until it seemed to the men standing watch outside his door that the moment might come when the Screaming Man was not screaming. Had, in fact, stopped screaming. But then the Screaming Man would start screaming again after a time, and the man who had wagered on the Screaming Man’s relapse would wearily hold out his palm to his more optimistic comrade, who dutifully tendered his gambling losses and pondered silently to himself why some people succumb to shock and others do not.

  They all screamed, of course, those sentenced to that room by Johnny Shush’s capricious morality. But what intrigued the men who watched over the Screaming Man, as well as those who tortured him, was the cast and caliber, the inexhaustible clarity, of his screaming. Its sheer novelty, unheralded in a man of such unassuming mien. They had never heard pain sing like that before, in all the permutations of torture ever enacted on the small room’s humble stage. And some truly extravagant stuff had gone on in there over the years. One prosaic gent outside the room, went by the name of Frankie Ears on account of the vestigial, flaplike things on the sides of his face, said that it sounded like the Screaming Man was losing his job, his wife and his dog all at the
same time, this image apparently being the worst thing Frankie Ears could conjure up. But no. The Screaming Man’s scream was the sound a soul would make, if you could hear the sound a soul makes when it is shed of skin and exposed to the air, the harrowing mortal sphere. Lose five fingers—they won’t grow back, but you still got five more, right? They had cut off half his fingers (and nailed them to the clubhouse bulletin board beneath the newspaper headline announcing the Justice Department’s latest failed indictment against the irrepressible Johnny Shush) but they hadn’t cut off the other half yet. There’s still hope, the men in the small room never give up hope that they can talk their way out of the mess no matter how hard they hurt, the extremity of their disfigurement. (Hope, it has been observed, is the most terrible of all torture implements.) The Screaming Man, however, screamed as if he were losing not just his life but peaceful eternity, the silent hereafter where the dead repose on daisy beds, brows untrammeled by care. The men who stood watch downstairs, normally of imperturbable heart, experienced a new unease. Some, to themselves, plotted a career change, contemplating this or that cousin who had just opened up a restaurant or Ford dealership. They had never heard screaming such as this before. Pure. Lucent. Without corruption. As if he were a prophet, and the language of his prophecy shrieks and yelps that those he was meant to save could not understand, but only surmise that his message was important and make their own personal preparations for the Reckoning. Thank God for rest breaks, duty shifts, one guard said to himself.