Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“Hey, Jane Eyre ,” Ben Urich says brightly when Billy unlocks the door. “Good book.”

“Good enough,” Billy mumbles. Billy’s a round gentleman. The loop of keys chime in his moist hand. “I woulda thought you’d be out on the town on a night like this.”

“I’m not working,” Ben Urich informs Billy, intrepid sentry of empty office buildings. “Did the printer drop by those advance copies of the new issue? I wanted to pick up a copy.”

“Got ’em right here,” the night watchman and nocturnal freshman says, withdrawing the bundle from behind the desk. He scissors the rope and pulls off the top copy from the stack.

In the brief seconds it takes for Billy to hand him the magazine, Ben Urich already knows something is wrong. The flash of red. The mock-up he approved the other day featured a close-up on an engineer’s blueprint: the plans for Fulton’s black box. Not the actual plans, of course, but Lift assumes a capable imagination in its readers. The flash of red is all wrong.

Events proceed in this negative vein. His name does not appear on the cover at all, and the illustration depicts Santa Claus in all his winter-solstice girth shimmying down an elevator cable. He wears a standard tool belt. The headline reads, GETTING READY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: 10 X-MAS MAINTENANCE TIPS. The least of Ben Urich’s objections is that Christmas is still months away, and it is criminal for the preeminent trade journal to participate in the advertising and retail worlds’ extension of the holiday season.

They pulled it. They pulled his story.

“Something wrong, Ben?”

Before anger, pragmatism, as it always is with Ben Urich. With some cutting, it could go in one of the smaller elevator newsletters who don’t pay as well and have a smaller circulation. And less prestige. Could he get it into one of the general-readership mags? Have to provide more background for the lay reader, dwell more on the Intuitionist-Empiricist debate. Explain Intuitionism, a subject he knows enough about to get by without looking like an idiot, but would have a hard time articulating for the average joe. No, he’s fucked. Lift , or no one.

“Say something, Ben. You want a little nip? I got a bottle.”

“Is Carson upstairs?” Ben demands, twisting the copy of Lift into a club.

“Nobody’s up there, not tonight,” Billy responds.

Ben’s out the door. It was getting hot in the lobby. He thinks back on his editor’s behavior over the last few days. Carson seemed all for it, said this was the biggest story he’d seen since the sad debut of Arbo’s Mighty-Springs, the Edsel of helical buffers. Just to make sure, Ben Urich checks the table of contents. Test-driving the new European cabs, a report on the 15th International Conference of Elevator Contractors, and that damned fluff about the holiday season, but nothing on the black box. His name wasn’t on the contents page. Ben Urich pulls his dime out of his pocket but he doesn’t flip it. He drops it in a public phone and inserts his finger into the rotary dial. Carson’s home phone is?

“Excuse me, sir, do you know what time it is?”

Ben Urich waves his hand over his shoulder.

“Do you know what time it is?” the voice asks again.

“No, I don’t,” Ben Urich says.

He has time to dial one number and watch the plastic ring slide halfway back before he feels two hands grip his shoulders. He’s spun around. There are two stocky men before him. One has firm hands on Ben Urich’s shoulders in authoritative pincers. The man’s cheek is swollen into an angry red ball. The other man has a soft, kind face and asks Ben, “Do you know what Johnny Shush does to people who anger or otherwise tee him off?”

The events of this night are definitely proceeding in their negative tendency. Indeed the velocity has increased. These men and their boss are why his exposé did not run. “Yes, I do,” Ben says. Best to play along and escape this night with his hide intact. He knows the drill.

“Jim?” the talking man says.

The man with his hands clamped on Ben Urich slaps him across the face, bends his body in half, lifts him like a baby and throws Ben into the backseat of a maroon Cadillac. The talking man is behind the wheel, the other man at Ben’s side. He holds Ben’s wrist in a snug and unquestionable grip.

The driver starts up the automobile. Ben Urich is getting his bearings. He’s surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. His hardhitting reportage, his ruthless quest for the truth. An unknown person or persons once mailed him a dead rat wrapped in taffeta, but that could have been any number of people, for any number of things. He’s surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.

The driver says, “We’re taking you for a little ride right now. Just a little cruise.” He extricates the car from its improbably tight berth between a dirty red van and an ominous Ford sedan. They traverse two city blocks without words. Ben Urich, for his part, would plead for his life if he could dislodge the stone from his throat.

The driver says brightly, “Would you mind terribly if we asked you not to pursue your current story?”

Ben Urich manages to say, “It’s done. Finished,” and the man in the seat next to him breaks his finger.

Ben Urich’s index finger is a key player, versatile, dependable for mundane tasks and in the clinch, where it truly distinguishes itself. Never hesitant to mine a dry nostril after barnacles, yet a sensitive enough instrument for navigating house keys into cantankerous locks. Ben uses his index finger to summon waiters hither to collect the check, and to tap surfaces (tabletops, seats, his right thigh) when he’s nervous or just killing time. Far worse than the roseate flare he feels when the silent man bends his finger an ill-advised ninety degrees past where it would normally wander during normal use is the sound of the resultant break. Twiggy. The sound is far, far worse than the pain. Initially. It says to him, this is how fragile your body is. Not to mention pressing the call buttons of elevators: his index finger is the most naturally of all the hand’s digits conscripted into call-button service.

They allow Ben Urich’s scream to diminuate into an uneven, back-and-forth whimper. The silent man even loosens his grip on Ben’s hand, to remind his captive of freedom, the ease of mobility from which he has just been exiled. “My name is John,” the man at the wheel informs Ben. “That’s Jim next to you. Jim’s just been to the dentist and won’t be adding much to our conversation. Words, anyway. Occasionally he will underscore what I say with a well-timed gesture. I don’t know where half of these people learned how to drive, but there are some truly bad drivers out on the road tonight.”

Ben can’t move his index finger. When he tries, his other fingers merely flop around in awkward sympathy. Accountable for an essential central quadrant of his typewriter, too, his index finger is. Ben notices that the car is headed downtown, stretching through the membrane of post-theater traffic. The traffic lights are unforgiving at this time of night, mysterious and capricious, as if appalled by this latest indignity of citizens and their vehicles. Traffic lights, the quintessential civil servants. At the next stop light, Ben’s left hand crawls up the window and bleats against it. The car idling next to the Cadillac carries an aloof couple in black evening wear. Back out to the suburbs for these two, away from metropolitan disquiet. The woman looks over at Ben and the crab-wriggling of his hand. She frowns and turns back to her husband. The light changes and John commands the car forward.

“See,” John drawls, “no one really cares about their neighbor. We could be taking you out to dump you in a landfill for all they know, and they just keep on driving. They’re more concerned about their lackluster driving skills than their fellow man.” Ben looks up groggily at the rearview mirror. The driver has been staring into his eyes. “Tell me, Mr. Urich, how many times have you lied to us tonight?”