Colson Whitehead: The Intuitionist

She doesn’t know yet.

* * *

All of the Department’s cars are algae green and shine like algae, thanks to the diligent ministrations of the motor pool. On the night of his inauguration Chancre gripped the lectern with his sausage fingers and announced his Ten Point Plan. The gold badge of his office hung over his shoulders by a long, patriotic ribbon. “Department vehicles,” he thundered, “must be kept in a condition befitting the Department.” To much applause in the dim banquet room of the Albatross Hotel. Those seated at the long oval tables, gathered around Mrs. Chancre’s unholy floral arrangements, easily translated Point Number Seven to the more succinct “Those colored boys better put a shine on those cars.” One of the mechanics, Jimmy, has a secret crush on Lila Mae. Not completely secret: Lila Mae’s sedan is the only one that gets vacuumed daily, and each morning when she leaves the garage for the field the rearview mirror has been adjusted from the night shift’s contortions, to just the way she likes it. Jimmy is a slender character among the burly crew of the motor pool, and the youngest. The calluses on his hands are still tiny pebbles in his flesh.

The traffic at quitting time is a bother. Radio station WCAM equips men with binoculars and positions them at strategic overpasses to describe the gnarls and tangles. Lila Mae is never able to differentiate these men from the meandering isolates who linger at the margins of freeways. All of them make obscure, furtive gestures, all share a certain stooped posture that says they lack substantive reasons for being where they are, at the side of the road. Impossible to distinguish a walkie-talkie from a bottle of cheap wine at such distances.

They don’t have alibis, Lila Mae appraises the men at the side of the road.

Her sedan limps through black glue. The WCAM sentry warns of an accident up ahead: A schoolbus has overturned, and as the passing commuters rubberneck and bless themselves, the traffic clots.

Over here , honks a woman in a red compact. The light trilling of her car horn reveals its foreign birth, cribside cooing in alien tongues. Lila Mae thinks car horns work backward: they don’t prod and urge the laggard ahead but summon those behind, come up, follow me. Lila Mae listens to the sporadic summons, listens to the news reports of WCAM, the red brake lights smoldering on the road ahead. Each of the announcer’s words have the routine elegance, the blank purity Lila Mae associates with geometry. The announcer says that a low-pressure system is rolling east. The announcer says that there’s been an accident at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. An elevator has fallen.

Now we’re cooking.

Lila Mae turns on her Department radio and hears the dispatcher call her inspector’s code. “Come in, Z34. Report Zulu-three-four.”

“This is Z34 reporting to base,” Lila Mae says.

“Why haven’t you reported back, Z34?” Contrary to prevailing notions, the elevator inspector dispatch room is not filled with long consoles staffed by an able company who furiously plug and unplug wires from myriad inputs, busily routing. The dispatch room is a small box on the top floor of the office and there’s only one person on duty at a time. It is very neat and has no windows. Craig’s on dispatch now, and in Lila Mae’s imagination he is a skinny man with brown hair who withers in his revolving chair, dressed in suspendered slacks and a sleeveless undershirt. She’s never seen a dispatcher, and she’s only seen their room once, on her first day of work. He must have been in the bathroom, or making coffee.

“I was on a call,” Lila Mae responds. “125 Walker. I just stepped in the car.” No one is going to catch her in that lie. Lila Mae always turns off the radio when she’s finished for the day. Occasionally one of the night shift calls in sick and Craig wants her to fill in for a few hours. Until the city and the Department work out their overtime policies there’s no way Lila Mae is going to fill in for the night shift. If you haven’t killed your hangover by six o’clock, you should take your lumps, is what she thinks.

“You’re to report back to HQ immediately,” Craig says. Then he adds, “Zulu-thirty-four.”

“What’s this crap about the Briggs building?” Lila Mae asks.

“You’re to report back here immediately, Z34. Chancre wants to talk to you. And I don’t think I have to quote you Department regs on profanity over city frequencies. Dispatch out.”

Lila Mae returns to WCAM, hoping for more details. For some reason Craig’s being a hardass, and that’s not good. She considers steering over to the shoulder to bypass the traffic, brandishing her inspector credentials should a policeman stop her. But the police and the elevator inspectors have a difficult past, and it’s doubtful a cop would let her off the hook, even for city business. Of course the city has never answered Chancre’s repeated requests for sirens. No one outside the Guild seems to think they’re necessary for some reason. Over the radio, one of the WCAM sentries ahead comments on how long it’s taking the emergency techs to remove the children from the schoolbus.

Lila Mae once delivered an oral report on Fanny Briggs in the third grade. Fanny Briggs was in the newer encyclopedias. Some even had her picture. Fanny Briggs looked tired in the marginalia; her eyelids drooped and her jowls oozed down from her cheekbones. Lila Mae stood in front of Ms. Parker’s third-grade class and trembled as she started her report. She preferred to fade into the back rows, next to the rabbit cages, beneath the awkward pastels of the spring art project. There she was at Ms. Parker’s desk, and her index cards shook in her tiny hands.

“Fanny Briggs was a slave who taught herself how to read.”

One time a radio program featured Dorothy Beechum, the most famous colored actress in country, reading parts of Fanny Brigg’s account of her escape North. Lila Mae’s mother called her into the drawing room. Lila Mae’s legs dangled over her mother’s lap as she leaned toward the brown mesh of the radio speaker. The actress’s voice was iron and strong and did not fail to summon applause from the more liberal quarters of her audience, who murmured about noble struggle. Tiny particles of darkness pressed beyond the cracked, wheaty mesh of the speaker, the kind of unsettling darkness Lila Mae would later associate with the elevator well. Of course she’d do her oral report on Fanny Briggs. Who else was there?

Not much progress in this traffic.

The times are changing. In a city with an increasingly vocal colored population — who are not above staging tiresome demonstrations for the lowlier tabloids, or throwing tomatoes and rotten cabbages during otherwise perfectly orchestrated speeches and rallies — it only makes sense to name the new municipal building after one of their heroes. The Mayor is not stupid; you don’t become the ruler of a city this large and insane by being stupid. The Mayor is shrewd and understands that this city is not a Southern city, it is not an old money city or a new money city but the most famous city in the world, and the rules are different here. The new municipal building has been named the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building, and there have been few complaints, and fewer tomatoes.

When Lila Mae was assigned the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building, she thought nothing of it. It made sense that it would be either her or Pompey, the only two colored inspectors in the Department. Chancre’s no fool. There are, after all, election years in the Elevator Guild too, and this is one of them, and all sorts of unexpected things have been happening. The Department-wide $1.25 raise, for example, which according to Chancre really adds up to a pretty penny after a while. Not that the elevator inspectors, civil-servant to the core despite their maverick reputations and occasionally flashy antics, needed to be convinced of the importance of a $1.25 raise. A government job is a government job, whether it’s inspecting elevators or railroad cars full of hanging meat, and anything that brings their salaries into closer proportion to their contributions to the American good are accepted cheerfully, election-year ploy or no. Same thing with the screwdrivers. When a memo circulating soon after the raises announced that the new screwdrivers were on their way, few cared that the Guild Chair was so naked in his attempt to score points with the electorate. For the new screwdrivers were quite beautiful. Ever since the city granted license to the Department, bulky and ungainly screwdrivers had poked and bulged in the jacket pockets of the elevator inspectors, completely ruining any attempts at dapperness and savoir faire. It’s difficult to look official and imposing while listing to one side. The new screwdrivers have mother-of-pearl handles and heads the exact width of an inspection-plate screw. They fold out like jackknives and lend themselves to baroque fantasies about spies and secret missions. And who can argue with that?