The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

  Johnny Shush never went into the basement. He said it depressed him. When Johnny Shush arrived and the guards brought the Screaming Man up to the first floor so that Johnny Shush could deliver his usual “You done me wrong, now you gotta pay” speech to the still remarkably not-hoarse Screaming Man, it so happened that Lazy Joe Markham was bringing that colored gal downstairs. The colored gal looked at the Screaming Man, and the Screaming Man looked at the colored gal and did what came naturally. He screamed.

  * * *

  The dark blue Buick still perches at the curb, despite Lila Mae’s instructions that the chauffeur depart without her. She would make her own exit from her alma mater. The infamous Intuitionist loyalty. As she walks down the path from Fulton’s front door, Lila Mae can see the driver’s hands limp on the wheel, lollygagging like beached jellyfish. The engine barks and gargles as soon as she sits down on the smooth leather of the backseat. As she sits, she lifts the cloth of her trousers’ knees. To ease friction.

  The old woman and her musty house, where schools of dust whirl and blink in the sunlight, minute sea creatures. Lila Mae does not dread briefing Mr. Reed on the outcome of her mission—it is herself she has failed. Mrs. Rogers’s will is as blank and brute as hers. Perhaps someone did break into the Fulton home and steal the last journals after all, and it is this person who has mailed the packages of Fulton’s journal. So distracted is she over the afternoon’s turn of events that it is some time after they have cleared the filigreed gates of the Institute for Vertical Transport when Lila Mae notices that the driver no longer has the red scar on his neck, that his neck is a pink concrete column. That there are no buttons to unlock the door in the backseat, or handles to roll down the window. That this is not the car she arrived in, that this is not her driver (although both men share an affinity for silence), that they are not turning back toward the city but somewhere else altogether.

  * * *

  The ferry across Earth to Heaven. It seems silly to her now that she didn’t see it before: an Intuitionist black box. Toward the end of her sophomore seminar on Theoretical Elevators, Professor McKean had the class describe the elevators they would build if free from all constraints. Some of the students took constraint to mean the exigencies of innovation, and hustled to rescue their favorite creations of yore, merely adding, say, a modern selector to the keenly antiquated hulk of a Sprague-Pratt. Others made improvements (or so it seemed to them) upon prevailing design concepts of the day, like the sandy-haired youth from Chicago who submitted a blueprint that owed much to recent developments in Austria. Lila Mae, who at that point in her career was still hung up on linearity, cobbled together an up-to-date model from the best the big firms had to offer (a broken-arm door closer from Arbo, a corrosion-proof sheave from United), envisioning a future cooperative and patentless. (Smiles ruefully at the recollection of it now.) One young gentleman with grave eyes tendered a blueprint that consisted only of an empty shaft and “an eerie dripping sound.” No one was very happy with the high marks Morton received for such frivolity.

  Lila Mae found Professor McKean hard to figure: he’d been in the war. His left arm was gone at the elbow and he pinned back his coat sleeve with the small, bright medal he’d earned for courage in battle. No one asked him for details, there were rumors of course, but no one asked him and he did not speak of it. McKean was tall and gaunt, with gray hair still grazed down to a military buzz. Gray hair even though he was still quite young. Lila Mae is still not sure how he felt about Intuitionism. She knew it was the first time he had taught the course, and yet his tone was so flat and arid that he could have been teaching the new science for decades, to dispatched thousands. For all his enthusiasm, he might be enumerating how many shirts he was dropping off with the Chinese laundry. No passion—but then, Lila Mae thinks, Intuitionism isn’t about passion. True faith is too serious to have room for the distraction of passion.

  The seminar was held in a basement room beneath the Edoux Auditorium. The steam pipes hissed petulantly, or else the radiator gonged; at any rate one had to enunciate and raise one’s voice to be heard despite the modest dimensions of the room. The acoustics did not bother Lila Mae, who rarely spoke. She did not feel she understood enough about Intuitionism to talk about it, no matter the extent of her sincerity. As if to speak out of turn would be the apotheosis of vulgarity, the most unseemly corruption.

  The six other students did not share her prudence, and their ignorant mutterings melted into the sonic adipose of the steam heat. Three of them were, like Lila Mae, avid converts to Fulton’s mythology, another two well-meaning liberals who were intrigued enough to spend a year of their vertical education on the subject. The final member of their voyage was one Frederick Gorse, and he sat at the far edge of the boat, equally queasy with a diffuse disgust and the choppy waters of their discourse. Gorse, a plump and soft specimen (he reminded Lila Mae of an old, confident pig who understands his meat is too rotten for the slaughterhouse), was an intractable Empiricist who had only signed up for the seminar to understand, and thus better arm himself against, the apostate rabble who were making so much noise in the community. He had the Guild Chair in his eye, anyone could see that, and if his frequent ejaculations of “Poppycock!” and “Humbug!” were any indication, one day he’d be a toothy foe for Intuitionism. Upon first acquaintance Gorse already seemed an ancient nemesis. Professor McKean kept Gorse in check, Lila Mae realized later, by letting him speak; outnumbered among the converted, and arguing for the very doctrine against which the other students had united in revolt, Gorse was such an efficient teaching aid that McKean could have made a convincing case for including him in the Department’s annual budget.

  Lila Mae should have seen the black box and the new cities of the second elevation because Fulton’s first writings were technical, arcane investigations of the mechanism. Toward a System of Vertical Transport is still a basic text for Empiricist thought. No one knows enough about his history to place his design genius in relief; Fulton just appeared at the Pierpont School of Engineering one day, eighteen years old, slow of speech, tentative, and proceeded to astound. The black box explains all. It was Fulton’s odd perceptions that made him a technical wiz, his way of finding the unobvious solution that is also the perfect solution. It also allowed him, Lila Mae sees, to pierce the veil of this world and discover the elevator world. Because that’s what Theoretical Elevators did, it described a world, and a world needs inhabitants to make it real. The black box is the elevator-citizen for the elevator world.

  One day toward the end of the seminar, when spring had begun to stir above their underground bunker, Professor McKean brought up the Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger. (Obviously, they were still knee-deep in Volume One of Theoretical Elevators.) His one hand in a fist on the scratchproof surface of the conference table, Professor McKean asked if someone would care to explain the implications of last night’s assigned reading.

  Morton, the creator of the dripping-sound elevator, stated, “The Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger asks what happens when the passenger who has engaged the call button departs, whether he changed his mind and took the stairs or caught an up-tending car when he wanted to go down because he did not feel like waiting. It asks what happens to the elevator he summoned.”

  Professor McKean said, “That’s right. Fulton asks this question and leaves it to the reader, abruptly proceeding on to the psychology of the Door Close button. How do you think Fulton would answer his question?”

  “Obviously,” Gorse said, “the elevator arrives, the doors open for the standard loading time, and then the doors close. That’s it.”

  Johnson, the burly freshman who always sat next to Lila Mae, ignored Gorse and offered in his stumbling voice, “I think that Fulton would say that the elevator arrives but the doors do not open. If there’s no need for the doors to open, then the vertical imperative does not apply.”

  Professor McKean nodded. “Any other theories?”

  Bernard, who could usually be relie
d upon to provide a sensible response, said, “For one thing, the vertical imperative applies to the elevator’s will, and doesn’t apply to passengers. I think what Fulton was referring to in this section was the ‘index of being’—where the elevator is when it is not in service. If, as the index of being tells us, the elevator does not exist when there is no freight, human or otherwise, then I think in this case the doors open and the elevator exists, but only for the loading time. Once the doors close, the elevator returns to nonbeing—‘the eternal quiescence’—until called into service again.” Bernard sat back in his metal chair, satisfied.

  Professor McKean said simply, “That’s good. Anyone else?”

  Lila Mae waited for someone to give her an answer. No one did. Lila Mae cleared her throat and said in a thin voice, “Fulton is trying to trick the reader. An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.”

  Professor McKean nodded quickly and then inquired of his pupil, “And if we set up a film camera in the hallway to see what would happen, what would we see when we developed the film, Watson?”

  Lila Mae met his eyes. “By leaving the camera there, you’ve created what Fulton calls ‘the expectation of freight.’ The camera is a passenger who declines to get on the elevator, not a phantom passenger. The film would record that the doors open, the elevator waits, and then the doors close.”

  “Very good,” Professor McKean approved.

  Gorse, who had been fidgeting and fussing in his seat for the last few minutes, was unable to contain his contempt. Spat, “Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there!” and slammed a fat fist onto the table. The fundamental battle.

  Professor McKean frowned. He pushed his chair from the conference table until it hit the wall with a dull bang. With his right hand, he unpinned his war medal from his sleeve. His jacket sleeve, unhinged, swayed back and forth pendulously. “Gorse,” Professor McKean said, “Is my arm here or not here?”

  “It’s … not there,” Gorse responded timidly.

  “What’s in this sleeve?”

  “Nothing,” Gorse answered.

  “That’s the funny thing,” Professor McKean said, smiling now. “My arm is gone, but sometimes it’s there.” He looked down at his empty sleeve. He flicked at the sleeve with his remaining hand and they watched the fabric sway.

  * * *

  One time during an idle hour in the Pit, she asked Martin Gruber how Johnny Shush got his name. Martin Gruber is one of the Old Dogs, a season or two away from retirement, cushy consulting jobs. He has weathered corruption probes, bullying by numerous city administrations, and the rise of the electric elevator. But he misplaced his usual volubility at her question. He looked around to see who might be listening and instructed, “No one speaks of it. Kapeesh?” As in: shush.

  Shush, whispered the black mouths of the empty warehouses, the broken windows so secure in their shattering that they no longer remember glass. She did not know the neighborhood they drove through to get to this place, this underground room. Prefabricated houses swaddled in aluminum siding thinned and disappeared, the traffic lights disappeared, there were no more people, and the warehouses began, carcasses of prosperity. As the sedan rolled by the warehouses, rumbling over old trolley tracks, it was possible at certain points for her to see sky through the windows and up through the collapsed roofs. Decay heightening the visible. She was too curious to be scared. She did not bother to speak once she recognized the driver: Lazy Joe Markham, one of the Finnegan Five.

  It was an old story. Once the government broke the elevator manufacturers’ maintenance monopoly (we install them, and we’ll keep them running for a monthly fee), all sorts of sharpies moved into this newly vacated entrepreneurial nook. The mob bullied owners to use their men as elevator maintenance contractors. They never did much for the elevators’ ailments, but developed the peculiar hobby of dropping takeout Chinese containers and wax-paper sandwich wrapping down the shafts, apparently enthralled by the way the refuse twisted and tumbled as it traveled down into the darkness to molder among the buffers at the bottom. The mob had a stranglehold. Shush owned the West Side, from the crown of the Island down to the docks.

  A few years ago, one of Shush’s men was caught by the cops torching a pool hall (nothing to do with elevators, some unrelated business of concern to organized crime). The cops flipped him, and he turned state’s evidence. The nervous stoolie captured the Finnegan Five on magnetic tape sharing war stories about the delightfully gusty entrails of a new luxury high-rise. Lila Mae couldn’t recall if the Finnegan Five did any hard time; more importantly, they did not rat on Johnny Shush. This one, Lazy Joe Markham, apparently had been rewarded with his silence by getting a chauffeur job.

  Mr. Reed telling her, Chancre and Johnny Shush play golf together.

  When they finally arrived at one warehouse, identical in dilapidation to its cohorts in the lost industrial section, Markham took her down some old stone steps, where she passed a bloodied man being carried up the stairs by other men. He was screaming.

  According to her internal clock (reliable, wound as she is), she has been here for two hours now. In the room is a square wooden table with a jagged black burn in its center. Two seats face each other across the table, and she sits in the one that fixes her back to the door. In accordance with interrogation-room policies upheld in dingy Mafia hideouts and police stations all over the country. The floor of the room is clean, not that she needed confirmation of the mob’s influence over the city’s custodial unions. The door is solid and gray, studded with rivets along the edges. An industrial door for little her.

  Lazy Joe Markham frisked her when he brought her into this room, lightly and decently sliding his hairy hands along her body, catching for a second at the unexpected place where her waist erupts into jagged hip bone, recovering, sliding down her trousers. He was not fresh. He was not rewarded for his search. Him and the two men who searched her apartment: meticulous and thorough, as Johnny Shush is known to be.

  She has time. She may be concerned at this point. She thinks, I have to be at work tomorrow. After not checking in after the accident, if she does not appear at the Pit at nine o’clock, she knows she is officially suspicious. If Mr. Reed is right, and she will be cleared of culpability in the accident, then she must continue along the routine: submit to an Internal Affairs inquiry. Keeping her overnight will damage her case. Wishful thinking: that all they want to do is detain her. She dismissed Mr. Reed’s driver, and Marie Claire Rogers wouldn’t know her hostage car from the one that brought her to the Institute. No one knows.

  She wants the man to stop screaming.

  * * *

  Chuck, poor Chuck, he really wants it, working late on a Sunday night alone in the office, nary a critter underfoot except for his scurrying ambition. Has a bottle of soda pop to his left, a pile of notebooks to his right. In front of him, his words, pulled from himself with a struggle, they cling to his person like leeches. The words pile up the more he works on it. Right now they only make sense to him. Time will vindicate this time: something his wife, Marcy, will hear sometimes in the middle of the night, out of her husband’s sleeping lips. It’s hard to work at home, is why he’s here. Marcy’s aimless chores (rubbing rags against surfaces, holding glasses up to the kitchen light, all to some insufferable hummed ditty) distract him. He needs to work on his monograph, so he comes to the Pit. “Understanding Patterns of Escalator Use in Department Stores Simultaneously Equipped With Elevators”—the heft of the thing, he can barely stand it sometimes, being of delicate sensibilities.

  Saturday afternoons find Chuck on stakeout. For the last six months of his life, every Saturday he goes to Freely’s and watches the estuary roll through the front doors, rumble and mix into First Floor, Ladies’ Cosmetics, The Men’s Store, Jewelry. In the gallery of deluxe pleasures (perfume bottles ridged with jet-plane speed lines, curvilinear pink
and aqua automatic toasters) where all the options are set from above, by men in secret rooms on the top floor, there is still one elemental choice left to be made. Elevator or escalator. Chuck vehemently disagrees with esteemed Cuvier, who thinks the choice is random, a simple matter of proximity. As they ricochet from bauble to bauble, snared by this sparkle, seduced by that luster, the shoppers opt for the vertical conveyance at hand, whatever is convenient. Which doesn’t suit Chuck. He relies on primary sources. Ten Cents One Ascension. When the Otis Elevator Co. unveiled the world’s first escalator at the 1900 Paris Exposition, the sign at the foot of the golden gate read, TEN CENTS ONE ASCENSION. Could it be any clearer than that? This need to rise is biological, transcending the vague physics of department store architecture. We choose the escalator, we choose the elevator, and these choices say much about who we are, says Chuck. (There is more than a smidgen of spite in this formulation, unseen by driven Chuck: he’s trying to justify his specialty.) Do you wish to ascend at an angle, surveying the world you are leaving below and behind, a spirit arms wide, a sky king; or do you prefer the box, the coffin, that excises the journey Heavenward, presto, your arrival a magician’s banal theatrics? Whenever Chuck touches the black rubber of the escalator guard rail (such a mysterious substance! what alchemy!), he understands he has made a choice. The right one.

  He works late in the office, as he is now, contorting and torturing his data to support his thesis.

  His bladder, always his bladder. He eases his fingers from the typewriter keys. His desk lamp provides an intrepid cone of light, all darkness outside the circle. Chuck cannot see the huge map of the city that drapes one wall of the Pit, punctured here and there with motley colored pins marking the Department’s holy war against defective, cagey and otherwise recalcitrant vertical conveyance in this bitter metropolis. Cannot see the silent locus of office interaction, the water cooler, its cool fortitude. He walks past the rows of black binders filled with the city’s hieroglyphic elevator regulations, the codebooks of their mission through disorder, and he stubs his toe more than once, beset by unseen enemies. Out in the hallway his passage is easier (paradoxically, his bladder pains more the closer he gets to the bathroom, always), because Chief Inspector Hardwick is in his office. Whiteness throbs behind the opaque glass and he hears grunting. Hardwick shouldn’t be here this late, but then liquor stores aren’t open on Sunday and perhaps he needed to retrieve a bottle of whiskey from his office stash. This is a tense moment for Chuck. He needs to wee-wee, but his natural affability and late-night yearning for company tells him to say hello. Hardwick is monosyllabic and their greeting shouldn’t last for too long. Chuck makes a promise of flowers, a box of candy and no more soda to his bladder, and knocks on the door. He takes the grunt as a welcome and steps inside.