Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

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 .

Spring arrived, and a new semester. The work was more difficult than before — she’d discovered Volume One of Theoretical Elevators and was having trouble sleeping. One day in February she saw the light again in Fulton Hall. The light wasn’t on every night, there was no set schedule she could define, but it was on too frequently for it to be accidental. She couldn’t help but notice. Fulton Hall had formerly been the spa’s pep center, a wide stone building in the center of campus. Walkways of pink tile radiated from the structure to all the important buildings for the treatment of psychosomatic maladies. Mud Therapy, Colonic Irrigation, Bleeding Chambers. Now the buildings housed Engineering, Advanced Concepts, the Hall of Safety. A pink path also led to the gym, which had also been a gym during the time of the spa, and filled with medicine balls. The path led, more or less, directly from the lit window in Fulton Hall to the janitor’s closet where Lila Mae lived.

Occasionally she would see a figure moving through the stacks. She decided it was an old man: He walked with a cane. Sometimes instead of turning on the lights, he used a lantern, and he walked even more slowly then, as if inordinately afraid of dropping it. She saw him about a dozen times in all, and always felt as if they were the last people on earth. It was the same feeling she gets when she’s in a shaft, standing on the car. There’s an old inspector’s maxim: “An elevator is a grave.” Such loss and devastation in there. That’s why the inside walls of the car are never sheer: they’re broken up into panels, equipped with a dorsal rail. Otherwise it would be a box. A coffin. On the nights the figure haunted Fulton Hall, he was Lila Mae’s elevator. The thing she stood upon in the darkness of the shaft, just him, just her, and the darkness. In the elevator well, slits of light seep from the door seams on each floor at regular intervals, and do not comfort. The slits of light speak of more light that is out of reach: There will be no redemption.