Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“Exactly the question I asked when I picked it up off our doorstep this morning. I put a call through to the editor-in-chief, a fellow I know. The switchboard informed me that he had called in sick. Then I asked to speak to the reporter, Ben Urich, and the operator told me he hadn’t shown up for work today.”

“Are you saying that Chancre got to them?”

He looks at her. Does he suspect? His eyes are holes. He says, “That would be the logical conclusion. Our opponent has a long reach.” Mr. Reed sits back in the chair. “I thought you were going to return here after the Institute,” he says.

“I decided to spend the night in my own bed,” Lila Mae responds.

“Didn’t we agree that that wasn’t wise, Miss Watson? Given the current climate?” He’s drawing an invisible glyph on the arm of the chair with a bony finger.

Didn’t we agree. As if she were a child. “I wanted to sleep in my own bed.” She says, “Do we have any other leads?”

“I have an idea or two about who our mysterious person may be,” Mr. Reed tells her. “But I’m not prepared to discuss it. My theories are, at the moment, only half formed. In any case, I imagine that preparations for the Follies will keep our adversaries busy until after Wednesday. Do you plan to attend?”

“The Follies?”

“You’re not performing, are you?”

She’d forgotten about the Funicular Follies. “I’ve never been,” she informs him.

“I try to avoid them myself. Such a garish display. But with the election next week, it’s important for Lever to put in an appearance. In these crucial final days.”

“Of course,” Lila Mae says. It will not be wise for her to attend, since it’s a Department function and she is currently a suspect quantity in the office.

Is her concern in her face? Mr. Reed says, “You decided not to report to work today, I assume.”

“Evidently.”

“That won’t look good with Internal Affairs. That was a mistake.”

“I’ll handle it. Once we have the box, it won’t matter, correct?” Place it back in his lap.

“Of course,” Mr. Reed says to her. “But I don’t know how Chancre will play it with the tabloids.”

“I’ll handle it,” she says. “What’s next, then?”

Mr. Reed stands. “If you really want to help … if you’re not going to take my advice and talk to IAB, it’s best if you just stay out of sight. I’ll have more information in a few days and we can talk about it then.”

She nods. Reluctantly. She is not sure if Mr. Reed trusts her any more than she trusts him. Possible he went to her apartment last night to look for her and saw the mess? Perhaps he is trying to get her out of the way, now that she has served her role as their colored liaison to Mrs. Rogers. The one who knew her language.

He says, “Your room is still available upstairs. I think it is our best option at this point.”

Our . Keep her on ice, away from enemies and undue influence in this crucial time. “I agree,” she says.

Mr. Reed looks down at papers and poises his pen. She has been dismissed. Lila Mae walks stiffly out of the parlor. Every room she enters lately is a cell, she thinks as she steps up the stairs to her guest quarters. Each room is an elevator cab without buttons, controlled by a malefic machine room. Going down, no one else gets on, she cannot step off. There is a tap on her shoulders at the top of the stairs. It is Natchez, who asks, “Can I visit you tonight? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

* * *

She knew he was nervous about asking her, judging from the protracted ellipsis between “Would you like to see that new picture at the Royale” and “with me,” a gap that the song on the radio took astute advantage of, wedging in a bridge and chorus. She said yes. They’d gone to the movies together plenty of times before. Movies good and bad, over the course of many years. Lila Mae’s parents liked Grady Jr., and Grady Jr.’s parents adored Lila Mae. Grady Jr., in fact, often stopped by the house just to talk with Marvin Watson. About fishing, or the eternal question of when exactly the county would get around to paving the roads of colored town. Usually they talked on the porch, as Marvin Watson did with his friends, which was how he regarded Grady Jr. Lila Mae and Grady Jr. were friends, and he had just asked her out on a date. After she said yes, she paid for her chocolate shake as she always did when they stopped in at the drugstore. And he paid for his vanilla shake, and they went their separate ways for the afternoon.

She knew things were different from the way he smiled at her when she opened the front door to the night air. Lila Mae and Grady Jr. had grown up together, skinned knees in tandem, learned to crawl through mutual toddler encouragement. It was a tricky crescent of a smile, and Lila Mae had never observed it in his repertoire before, in all the years they had known each other. Never seen it before in her whole life, one might say. He asked, “Are you ready?” and soon Lila Mae was in the passenger seat of his father’s red and rusting pickup truck. He’d been born chubby; the subplot of his maturation had been a long skirmish toward natural proportions. Before Lila Mae could sit down in the car, she had to remove Grady Sr.’s toolbox from the seat, and on the rutted trek to the movie theater, a screwdriver and hammer clinked against each other at every pock in the road. And there were many pocks in the road. The moon had just cleared the treeline.

She knew there was not much time left for the movies, or much else. Grady Jr. was heading up to the capitol in the fall to go to college. Lila Mae had not seen much of him that summer; he spent most of the summer working at the quarry to save up for books and anything else he might need up North. Summers had not been the same for a long time, Lila Mae reckoned. There was no school, but nothing else to take its place. The streets were shrinking, and she felt about the places they led to the same way she felt about her hair when she saw it on the bathroom floor after her mother cut it off. She sensed that the change she felt within her was sister to the change within Grady Jr. They always did everything together. He didn’t speak much as they drove to the Royale.

They walked around the side of the Royale to the stairs that led to the entrance reserved for colored patrons. Walked up the stairs to the balcony seating reserved for colored patrons, up to nigger heaven, and when Lila Mae reached in her pocket to pay Skinny, Grady Jr. preempted her and paid for the both of them. Grady Jr., who had kept a rigid accounting of every cent Lila Mae had ever owed him, and would demand the two or three cents she owed him for candy or a comic book, whatever she had borrowed, each time he saw her. He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying. His father did carpentry, whatever he could pick up. His mother worked in town cleaning for the judge’s family. Scrubbing stone steps. Grady Sr. had names for each of his tools that he would never utter in the presence of another living person. A dentist. But first he had to go to college, which was not a problem because he was a nice boy, and industrious, and the colored college in the capitol was eager for boys like him. The future of the race. It was the third moon of the summer, and it hung above the treeline as if the night were a farm and it a farmer, and he would take his time as he tracked through the crops, knowing and understanding it was his and only his and he knew all its secrets.

She had not seen the movie before and had seen the movie before. That’s how Lila Mae perceived the movies. Sometimes they had different titles, but the actors were usually the same, and if they were not the same, they looked the same. At one point Lila Mae noticed that she and Grady Jr. were sharing the same armrest. She was sure that she had laid claim to it when the lights dimmed, and had not noticed when this situation came to be. Now she was acutely aware of the situation. How had he snuck his arm up there? She did not move her arm. She noticed that his arm began to press against her, a firm warmth. The pressure against her arm, and the warmth, would retreat and then insist again as it rediscovered its boldness and purpose. On the screen, a white lady with long dark hair wept as she realized that social forces would keep her from her love. Eventually, Lila Mae removed her arm and placed it across her lap. A few minutes later, Grady Jr. sighed.