Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“Well, nigger, how dare you, at your age, talk about making love three, four or even two times?”

“What can I do, doctuh? I got no choice — de dam building got no elevator and she lives on de fourth floor!”

“Hambone, dat’s too much fuh me! We better be on our way befoe my gut fall out. You wan I should tell you bout de man in de elevator befoe we go?”

“What man in what elevator, Mr. Gizzard?”

“Dey dis man in an elevator all by hissef, Hambone. De car stop and in step dis beautiful lady wit de long hair and de nice eyes. Two floes later she reach over an push de Stop button. She takes off all her clothes and say to de man what was in dere, ‘MAKE ME FEEL LAK A WOMAN!’ So de man, he take off all a his clothes, throw dem on top of de woman’s clothes and say, ‘Okay, do the laundry!’ ”

“Mr. Gizzard, I do believe I hear dat wife a yo’s callin yo name.”

“Well, come along, Hambone. It’s dinnuh time and dat chicken she fried ain’t goan las long!”

They receive a standing ovation for this. Wade throws his cap out into the audience and two inspectors wrestle over it. The kitchen door swings shut on Lila Mae’s back. In the kitchen, the other colored workers do not speak on what they have just seen. They stack dirty plates in the plastic tray next to the dishwasher, nibble at leftover shrimp. Lila Mae does not mention it either, telling herself it is because she does not know the silent women she has been working with, whom she has not talked to all evening for her concentration on the Follies. She tricks herself that that is why she does not mention what she has seen, tells herself it is because she is undercover and speaking to them might trip her up, a dozen other reasons. She thinks the other women are so beaten that they cannot speak of the incident, when all of them, Lila Mae included, are silent for the same reason: because this is the world they have been born into, and there is no changing that. Through the porthole in the door, Lila Mae sees Pompey rub laughter-tears from his eyes, lean against Bobby Fundle to steady himself. See, he’s laughing so hard he can hardly steady himself.

Lila Mae reenters the banquet room with a glass pitcher of water.

At the Internal Affairs table, Arbergast looks up quickly. Something bothers him about the woman who just refilled his water glass. His ears stand up, angle back.

The boys are out of it at this point. Chuck, for example, passed out long ago, and his head rests on his white plate. Pink fingers grope at ties, loosen ties, unbutton the top buttons of strangling shirts. Rick Raymond treads valiantly in this dead pool of lassitude, says, “I know you boys are hungry, but we have one more act before we wheel out the troughs. May I present, gentle inspectors, without further ado, the man who made tonight possible: the Chair of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, Mr. Frank Chancre!” Groggy heads swivel toward the Big Man’s table. But he’s not there. They see his lieutenants, his protégés, sitting there to show the assembled who’s in favor, which of their number have gained entree into the Chair’s good graces, but no Chancre. The lights overhead click out except for the ones up front on the stage. The drummer, as his kind are wont to do, beats with anticipation.

Lila Mae refills water glasses.

Rick Raymond bites his nails.

Internal Affairs Inspector Arbergast leaves his seat.

In the shadows at the side of the stage, the figures of men can be observed straining. Ropes levitate from the stage, the light catches their fine hairs, describes movement right. Slowly extricated from the murky left is Chancre, standing on a wooden platform. His costume is familiar to all present from the engravings of the 1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations: the clothes Otis wore when he delivered unto the world its first Safety Elevator. He is standing on a replica of that renowned contraption, his hands cocked against his hips, just as they are in the advertisements for the United Elevator Co. The men at the side of the stage grunt the elevator across by painful inches, to better spool excitement. Lila Mae can’t believe he has the gall. To even compare himself to Otis, to sully their imaginations of that great day with his corpulent horror. She would have liked to see Mr. Reed’s reaction to this scene, but after a few rounds of handshaking at the beginning of the event, Mr. Reed and the tireless candidate departed the Follies. She would have liked to see their faces.

The elevator is center stage now, wood and divine despite Chancre’s perversion. This is the one that started it all, enabling the metropolis, summoning them into tumultuous modernity. The blueprint of the first elevation. The assembled feel tremors assail their skin. This is where it all comes from, this moment, their solemn mission through the city’s unforgiving and neon boulevards, past the angry facades of tenements and department stores and high-rises and office buildings. Even after years on the street, the gradual numbing of their souls to their dirty work, seeing that magnificent creation gives them all a chill. “Gentlemen,” Chancre begins, “we live in a time of great calamity. Nations clash and a great noise is heard across the land.” Arbergast is a good ways from his seat, almost at the figure who intrigues him. He thinks he knows that woman, that silhouette in the darkened room who does not move. “Babies go to bed hungry. What we took for granted in our youth — safe schools for our children, safe neighborhoods, safe streets — are quickly vanishing, lost in the moral swamp our communities have become. But there is one shining light, one ray of hope in this darkness, one thing that is still safe. And it is because of you gentlemen, because of your good work.” She does not notice his progress toward her, Arbergast sees, she’s transfixed (appalled, actually) like all the rest by Chancre’s speech. He is almost upon her, his quarry. “Fellow elevator inspectors, this night is yours. It is a dirty and thankless job, and you have performed it above and beyond the call of duty. Sirs, it is because of you that civilians,” he pauses here to withdraw scissors from his jacket and poise them at the rope reprieving his platform from gravity, “can ride vertical conveyance in this glorious metropolis and say, ‘All Safe, Gentlemen, All Safe.’ ” He dangles there, his intonation signaling to the entranced audience that he will repeat Otis’s hallowed declaration once he cuts the rope and is saved by the safety spring. Arbergast grabs the shoulder of the woman, she turns, he sees the face of Lila Mae Watson. He hears a loud crash. He sees Chancre writhing in pain on the stage, grabbing his knee and staring incredulously at his leg, which is splayed out to an unlikely angle. The spring did not bite into the notches along the inside rails, and the Chair of the Department of Elevator Inspectors has fallen. The inspectors are out of their seats and launching toward the stage. Their shouts echo in the room. Chancre screams. Arbergast looks at his hand, which just a moment earlier grasped the black material of a Winthrop Hotel domestic’s uniform. His hand is empty. She’s gone.

* * *

In Huntley’s Department Store the people need and need less once they leave. Arms full, shopping bags’ plastic loops cutting into their palms, bearing gifts: new watches equipped with glow-in-the-dark radium dials so you can know the time even in the dark; cinch belts in all the rediscovered pastels from overseas, hot now, get them while they’re hot; Cuban-heel pumps and alligator purses so coarse and smooth in the light, dizzying tactility; hypnotic suggestion girdles and air rifles and foxtail caps. Exhausting, all that baggage, now is what makes it heavy, all that invisible now-freight at the bottom of the pillage-sacks, next to receipts of purchase and coupons for the next reduced populuxe pleasure. Marvin Watson collapses the metal gate, it always sticks a bit but he knows how to ease it into itself, he knocks down the door arm and shouts, “Second Floor: Ladies Clothes. The Little Miss Shop, Ladies’ Shoes and Linens.” The animals push by him, jostling neighbors and friends and the Mayor’s niece, trampling young children under Cuban-heel pumps to gain the floor, what the floor has arrayed out there. Two thirsty women, politely disheveled, wait to board Marvin’s elevator. They are about to enter the next stage of today’s spree, having finished with the Second Floor; postcoital lassitude writ in their postures, they fan themselves with advertisements, still thirsty for more, for what’s on the higher floors before they must return to home and husbands and children. They want to go higher, and Marvin Watson, elevator attendant of Car Number Two in Huntley’s Department Store, is the man who takes them to the next level. Down, too, if they want to, but only after he’s taken his baby up to the top floor. Sometimes they ask him questions. “Where would I find a toy for my son? He’s six,” and “Where’s the ladies’ room?” Never looking at him. They are in an elevator and thus passengers and must participate in the game, staring straight ahead or up at the waffling arrow of the floor indicator, but never left or right, at the colored man who pulls the control lever. So he only sees their faces when they enter the cab, delighted for a second that their carriage has arrived and then suddenly reminded of the journey itself, rushing into the device so as to turn around and face the only exit as soon as possible. Most of the time he sets them straight, tells them first and fourth floor is where the rest rooms are, but once in a while he lies. Let them find their own way through this labyrinth. This hell of stuff.