Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“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.