Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Professor McKean said, “That’s right. Fulton asks this question and leaves it to the reader, abruptly proceeding on to the psychology of the Door Close button. How do you think Fulton would answer his question?”

“Obviously,” Gorse said, “the elevator arrives, the doors open for the standard loading time, and then the doors close. That’s it.”

Johnson, the burly freshman who always sat next to Lila Mae, ignored Gorse and offered in his stumbling voice, “I think that Fulton would say that the elevator arrives but the doors do not open. If there’s no need for the doors to open, then the vertical imperative does not apply.”

Professor McKean nodded. “Any other theories?”

Bernard, who could usually be relied upon to provide a sensible response, said, “For one thing, the vertical imperative applies to the elevator’s will, and doesn’t apply to passengers. I think what Fulton was referring to in this section was the ‘index of being’—where the elevator is when it is not in service. If, as the index of being tells us, the elevator does not exist when there is no freight, human or otherwise, then I think in this case the doors open and the elevator exists, but only for the loading time. Once the doors close, the elevator returns to nonbeing—‘the eternal quiescence’—until called into service again.” Bernard sat back in his metal chair, satisfied.

Professor McKean said simply, “That’s good. Anyone else?”

Lila Mae waited for someone to give her an answer. No one did. Lila Mae cleared her throat and said in a thin voice, “Fulton is trying to trick the reader. An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.”

Professor McKean nodded quickly and then inquired of his pupil, “And if we set up a film camera in the hallway to see what would happen, what would we see when we developed the film, Watson?”

Lila Mae met his eyes. “By leaving the camera there, you’ve created what Fulton calls ‘the expectation of freight.’ The camera is a passenger who declines to get on the elevator, not a phantom passenger. The film would record that the doors open, the elevator waits, and then the doors close.”

“Very good,” Professor McKean approved.

Gorse, who had been fidgeting and fussing in his seat for the last few minutes, was unable to contain his contempt. Spat, “Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there!” and slammed a fat fist onto the table. The fundamental battle.

Professor McKean frowned. He pushed his chair from the conference table until it hit the wall with a dull bang. With his right hand, he unpinned his war medal from his sleeve. His jacket sleeve, unhinged, swayed back and forth pendulously. “Gorse,” Professor McKean said, “Is my arm here or not here?”

“It’s … not there,” Gorse responded timidly.

“What’s in this sleeve?”

“Nothing,” Gorse answered.

“That’s the funny thing,” Professor McKean said, smiling now. “My arm is gone, but sometimes it’s there.” He looked down at his empty sleeve. He flicked at the sleeve with his remaining hand and they watched the fabric sway.

* * *

One time during an idle hour in the Pit, she asked Martin Gruber how Johnny Shush got his name. Martin Gruber is one of the Old Dogs, a season or two away from retirement, cushy consulting jobs. He has weathered corruption probes, bullying by numerous city administrations, and the rise of the electric elevator. But he misplaced his usual volubility at her question. He looked around to see who might be listening and instructed, “No one speaks of it. Kapeesh?” As in: shush .

Shush, whispered the black mouths of the empty warehouses, the broken windows so secure in their shattering that they no longer remember glass. She did not know the neighborhood they drove through to get to this place, this underground room. Prefabricated houses swaddled in aluminum siding thinned and disappeared, the traffic lights disappeared, there were no more people, and the warehouses began, carcasses of prosperity. As the sedan rolled by the warehouses, rumbling over old trolley tracks, it was possible at certain points for her to see sky through the windows and up through the collapsed roofs. Decay heightening the visible. She was too curious to be scared. She did not bother to speak once she recognized the driver: Lazy Joe Markham, one of the Finnegan Five.

It was an old story. Once the government broke the elevator manufacturers’ maintenance monopoly (we install them, and we’ll keep them running for a monthly fee), all sorts of sharpies moved into this newly vacated entrepreneurial nook. The mob bullied owners to use their men as elevator maintenance contractors. They never did much for the elevators’ ailments, but developed the peculiar hobby of dropping takeout Chinese containers and wax-paper sandwich wrapping down the shafts, apparently enthralled by the way the refuse twisted and tumbled as it traveled down into the darkness to molder among the buffers at the bottom. The mob had a stranglehold. Shush owned the West Side, from the crown of the Island down to the docks.

A few years ago, one of Shush’s men was caught by the cops torching a pool hall (nothing to do with elevators, some unrelated business of concern to organized crime). The cops flipped him, and he turned state’s evidence. The nervous stoolie captured the Finnegan Five on magnetic tape sharing war stories about the delightfully gusty entrails of a new luxury high-rise. Lila Mae couldn’t recall if the Finnegan Five did any hard time; more importantly, they did not rat on Johnny Shush. This one, Lazy Joe Markham, apparently had been rewarded with his silence by getting a chauffeur job.

Mr. Reed telling her, Chancre and Johnny Shush play golf together.

When they finally arrived at one warehouse, identical in dilapidation to its cohorts in the lost industrial section, Markham took her down some old stone steps, where she passed a bloodied man being carried up the stairs by other men. He was screaming.

According to her internal clock (reliable, wound as she is), she has been here for two hours now. In the room is a square wooden table with a jagged black burn in its center. Two seats face each other across the table, and she sits in the one that fixes her back to the door. In accordance with interrogation-room policies upheld in dingy Mafia hideouts and police stations all over the country. The floor of the room is clean, not that she needed confirmation of the mob’s influence over the city’s custodial unions. The door is solid and gray, studded with rivets along the edges. An industrial door for little her.

Lazy Joe Markham frisked her when he brought her into this room, lightly and decently sliding his hairy hands along her body, catching for a second at the unexpected place where her waist erupts into jagged hip bone, recovering, sliding down her trousers. He was not fresh. He was not rewarded for his search. Him and the two men who searched her apartment: meticulous and thorough, as Johnny Shush is known to be.

She has time. She may be concerned at this point. She thinks, I have to be at work tomorrow. After not checking in after the accident, if she does not appear at the Pit at nine o’clock, she knows she is officially suspicious. If Mr. Reed is right, and she will be cleared of culpability in the accident, then she must continue along the routine: submit to an Internal Affairs inquiry. Keeping her overnight will damage her case. Wishful thinking: that all they want to do is detain her. She dismissed Mr. Reed’s driver, and Marie Claire Rogers wouldn’t know her hostage car from the one that brought her to the Institute. No one knows.