Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

As for Lila Mae, she had her own plans for the future and had started to make inquiries.

“That was some movie,” Grady Jr. said, as they started for home.

“It sure was,” Lila Mae seconded.

As they cleared the town limits, Grady Jr. said, “That was some movie. It was pretty short.”

“It seemed like a regular movie,” Lila Mae said.

“No-uh,” Grady Jr. said. “I looked at the clock when we were leaving the movie. It wasn’t even an hour and a half long. It was short.” There were no more streetlights, and few houses to offer light from their windows.

“Maybe it was,” Lila Mae replied.

Grady Jr. cleared his throat and stared at the road. “This morning when I ran into your father, I told him that I’d have you back on the front porch by eleven, but it’s not even close to that, and we’re already on the way to your house.”

He had turned off the county road, into the patchy trail that wound to Miller’s Hollow. She had passed the overgrown entrance countless times, and sometimes her mother or her father would make a joke that she didn’t understand. She knew one or two jokes herself, though: that half of colored town wouldn’t be walking and breathing if not for Miller’s Hollow, and more than one marriage ceremony had been performed, under duress, a month or two after the betrothed had spent some time at Miller’s Hollow. There was another way to the Hollow, a path through the woods that the children played in. Whenever the clearing’s daylight was visible through the trees, the children stopped and doubled back into the woods. While they were not prohibited from going there, the children understood that it was not their place. It would have been a nice place to play and stumble; kites would have soared in the lively wind that poured up out of the quarry. But the children understood, and found other places to play.

Lila Mae felt let down when she and Grady cleared the woods. It wasn’t a hollow at all, she saw, but a wide clearing that terminated at the sullen lip of the quarry. The excitement over such an illicit adventure evaporated quickly. The hollow wasn’t thrilling or scary or even dull; it was just a place where no trees grew, and brown grass dried out in the sun.

“That was some movie,” Grady Jr. said again. He cleared his throat again.

“Yes it was,” Lila Mae said. That was the last either of them said for a time. She was aware of his breathing, and the new loudness of everything in the car, every minute shifting. The car’s engine ticked off seconds as it cooled, insects clicked and night birds exchanged confidences. She could see the white stone of the other side of the quarry over the curved red hood of the car. It looked like the moon. She’d left the earth some moment when she had blinked and now she and Grady Jr. were on the moon, and that’s why it felt so cold, because the moon is cold. And still.

Grady placed a trembling hand on her shoulder and it stopped trembling once he put it there, once he had a place to place it. She felt she was supposed to look at him, and did so. His lips first bumped into her nose, then her cheek, and then he recovered and placed his lips on her lips. His lips were dry and sharp. Once his lips were in place, he did not move them, and the two of them, Lila Mae and Grady Jr., sat there for a time, their lips touching. Then he pulled his lips away and stared out the windshield and placed his hands firmly on the steering wheel. Lila Mae adjusted her feet around the toolbox.

Grady said, “It must be eleven o’clock by now.”

Lila Mae said, “It must be.”

They looked over at her house when the pickup truck pulled up in front. They could see her father draw back the curtain in the porch window and wave.

Grady said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

Lila Mae said, “I have to go inside,” and all night she cursed herself because she knew that she and Grady Jr. would never go to the movies again. She wasn’t mad at all, but she didn’t say that. He should know how she is after all this time. She wasn’t mad at all, she wanted him to kiss her more. But Lila Mae didn’t say that.

* * *

She has removed her jacket and tie and opened the top button of her shirt. Natchez did not specify a time. It’s inching on midnight. She disassembles elevators in her mind and imagines that there is a discrepancy between the mass of the elevator before disassembly and after. That this mass returns when the elevator is reassembled. Fulton did not write that, she extrapolated it from the second volume of Theoretical Elevators . She is an Intuitionist but is not a fan of the new additions to Fulton’s work that come from overseas, are debated in the rooms below her by Intuitionism’s epigonic practitioners. They muddle through and sometimes the journals are not all empty, but she prefers her own extrapolations. She thinks her creations adhere to the spiritual side of Fulton’s words, while the rest of the movement gets dizzy in the more recondite apocrypha. An unforeseen loss in mass. A mystery.

When he enters he holds a piece of chocolate cake before him as he creeps through the doorway. “I thought you might like some of Mrs. Gravely’s cake,” he says. He is still in his servant’s uniform, a tight white trapezoid around his torso. He sits on the bed next to her. “It was a big hit at dinner,” he adds, “which you weren’t at.”

“I wasn’t hungry,” Lila Mae says over the fork.

“You have a lot on your mind?” he asks.

“You could say that.”

“You don’t mind that I came up here?”

“No, I’m glad.” Half gone already, the cake.

Natchez looks over to reassure himself that he closed the door and says, “I don’t know what Mr. Reed down there told you about your house, but it wasn’t like he said it was.”

She sets the plate down on the nightstand. “What are you talking about?”

Natchez takes a deep breath and looks at the door again. It’s still shut, Lila Mae thinks. He says, “Yesterday when you didn’t come back with Sven, he threw a fit. He was mad — I didn’t think that little white man had it in him, but there he was, yelling at Mr. Lever and Sven and saying all sorts of stuff. He said Sven should have waited for you. Then he said you must have made a deal with Chancre — I think that’s his name — and that you had double-crossed him. I was outside in the hallway. Then he got on the phone and told some men to go and find it. He gave them your address.”

The cake in her stomach curdles. “He said this?”

“I figured he was talking about the black box,” Natchez says. He sits up straight. “When he said ‘it.’ ”

All wrong. “What do you know about the black box?” she demands.

Natchez smiles. “I know a lot about it,” he says. “Fulton was my uncle.”

* * *

The boy dreams of places that are not like this, where there is no mud and there is pavement, where there are not wood walls that don’t keep the cold out but buildings that erupt from the ground like ancient gods awakening. The night in the places he dreams of is not abundant and terrifying, making him tiny, because the buildings are so tall that there is no night and no stars, just darkness. He is never out in the open where people can see him because the people are locked up in their holes, stacked up one on top the other like in a beehive. They do not speak. Nobody knows anybody’s business. Nobody knows where you came from.

There is another world beyond this one.

He understands that she loves him deeply and painfully. She is his mother. But he does not look like her except around the eyes. Their eyes want to hide from their faces, the mother and the son. When they walk into town she makes him walk closely behind her, she clutches him behind her back, as if to shield him from the eyes of the white people. As if she thought they would see him and take him away from her. She does it less now that he is older and taller, but it seems to him it was always unnecessary. The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town. He is as light as white folk when he has not been in the sun much, perhaps that is why she was afraid, but he stays in the sun as much as he can and usually has a slight nut color to his skin. The sun never makes his skin as dark as the skin of his mother and sister. If he stays out of the sun, as in winter when the light is dead and stingy, the darkness in his skin sleeps.