Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

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.”