Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

What else Lila Mae remembers from the Lift magazine profile last summer: Like most of the early converts to Intuitionism, Mr. Reed quit the elevator inspecting game proper to preach the new gospel. What was the point, really, those first pioneers reasoned, when Fulton had pissed on every tenet of their former faith? Here’s where Mr. Reed distinguished himself: not as a thinker but as a mule. He did the grunt work. He toiled at integrating the alien science, this tumor, into the larger elevator community, convincing petulant Institute deans to teach this heresy (the very thought of it!), brokered the admission of taciturn and unapologetic Intuitionist inspectors into big-city elevator inspector Departments. There’s the story of how he cadged Midwestern into constructing an entire Intuitionist Wing after a tortuous thirty-six-hour negotiation, winning his prize after talks degraded to a coin toss. And a fix at that — it was a trick double-heads coin he’d got out of a candy machine down the hall. A tricky old bird. That’s how Mr. Reed appears to Lila Mae now that he has his face on, after recovering from Lila Mae’s unexpected intrusion into the garden: a vulture. Not the odd pigeon he was at Lila Mae’s apartment, but a calculating scavenger. A soldier.

Of course Orville Lever pressed this soldier into service as his campaign manager. Mr. Reed is not too academic for the field men or so full of well romanticism that the brains can’t relate. Lever’s a likable chap, but everyone knows Mr. Reed is the brains behind the operation, anyone can see that, the only man capable of pulling off the election for the Intuitionists. Lila Mae doesn’t know why he’s bothered to intercede in her Fanny Briggs mess, but knows she’ll find out soon. The grim mist of master-plan comes out of his pores and pollutes the air in the garden.

After a time, Mr. Reed turns to Lila Mae and says, “It’s too bad Orry is out of town talking to the good people at Arbo. It would be nice if you two met.”

“I shook his hand once,” Lila Mae tells him. “At a rally.” Orry. Orville.

“You should come to our open nights, Miss Watson. Have you ever considered becoming a member?”

“I just assumed,” Lila Mae replies.

“You should know what we’re like by now, Miss Watson,” Mr. Reed says with a bit of exhaustion. “As a group, that is. You’re one of us.” He removes his hand from the newspaper he’s been pressing down on. “You should take a look at this,” he says, handing the paper to her.

It doesn’t take Lila Mae long to digest the tabloid article, from the heights of the loud ELEVATOR CRASH! headline to the dregs of the final quote from Chancre. Nothing she didn’t expect. “Slanted,” Lila Mae announces.

“Did you see Chancre’s last statement? I’ll try my memory … ‘My opponent and his cronies have been trying all sorts of tactics since the start of the campaign, but I think this incident says more about their tomfoolery than any of their dirty tricks.’ ”

“He’s frothing,” Lila Mae says. “ ‘Dirty tricks.’ ”

“He has a point,” Mr. Reed tells her, his mouth tight. “He’s talking about the black box.”

And that smell of rain is stronger now. The infamous design problem from her school days: What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don’t know because we can’t see inside it, it’s something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels’ teeth. It’s a black box.

“Two weeks ago,” Mr. Reed begins, rubbing his pink hands on his lap, “Lever received a packet in the mail. It contained torn-out journal entries dating back a few years, and they were notes on a black box.”

“Everyone’s working on black boxes,” Lila Mae counters. “That’s where all of American and Arbo’s research and development money goes. There’s nothing new about that.” If Otis’s first elevation delivered us from medieval five- and six-story construction, the next elevator, it is believed, will grant us the sky, unreckoned towers: the second elevation. Of course they’re working on the black box; it’s the future.

“It was Fulton’s handwriting. They were obviously ripped out of his final journals, the ones we’ve never been able to find. Obviously we were very interested. We made a few inquiries and discovered that a reporter from Lift had received portions of it, too. Chancre as well.”

Lila Mae shakes her head. “There have always been rumors that Fulton was working on a black box,” she says dismissively. “But most of the evidence shows that Fulton was devoting his energies to Intuitionist theory, not engineering. He hadn’t been involved with mechanism since he became Dean.”

“The evidence you’ve seen,” Mr. Reed says. “He was doing a bit of both, from what we know now. You have to understand that in his last year, he barely spoke to anyone at all, except his maid, and when he did come out of the house his behavior was, to say the least, erratic. The diary shows that he was working on an elevator, and that he was constructing it on Intuitionist principles. From what we can tell from his notes, he finished it. There’s a blueprint out there somewhere.”

Lila Mae tries to get her head around that last bit. At least Mr. Reed is taking it slowly, trying to walk her through it. But still. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Lila Mae murmurs, twisting a button on her suit. “I mean from an engineering standpoint. At its core, Intuitionism is about communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis. ‘Separate the elevator from elevatorness,’ right? Seems hard to build something of air out of steel.”

Mr. Reed withdraws a cigarette from a silver case. “They’re not as incompatible as you might think,” he says. “That’s what Volume One hinted at and Volume Two tried to express in its ellipses — a renegotiation of our relationship to objects. To start at the beginning.”

“I don’t get you,” Lila Mae admits. Reluctantly.

“If we have decided that elevator studies — nuts and bolts Empiricism — imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn’t the next logical step, after we’ve adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be to build an elevator the right way? With what we’ve learned?”

“Construct an elevator from the elevator’s point of view.”

“Wouldn’t that be the perfect elevator? Wouldn’t that be the black box?” Mr. Reed’s left eyelid trembles.

“Unbelievable,” Lila Mae says. She thinks of her room at the Bertram Arms. It’s a miracle she lives there, how accustomed she is to this small world. How small her expectations are. Which part of Fulton’s writing affected her most? The first line that comes to her head is an incandescent flare: There is another world beyond this one . Lila Mae asks, “What does this have to do with the accident yesterday?”

Mr. Reed takes a long, contemplative sip from the air. “Think about it,” he says. “The most famous elevator theoretician of the century has constructed the black box, and he’s done it on Intuitionist principles. What does that do to Empiricism?”

Lila Mae nods and Mr. Reed continues: “Now Chancre’s up for reelection. There have always been rumors about Fulton’s black box and suddenly comes this new variable — it does exist, and it’s Intuitionist. Not only do you lose the election, but everything else, too. Your faith. You have to embrace the enemy you’ve fought tooth and nail for twenty years.”

“You have to find the box,” Lila Mae says.

“You have to find out if it’s true or not, and you have to find out quickly.”

“And set me up as a preemptive strike,” Lila Mae realizes.