Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“Chuck, I need you to do something.”

He sucks his teeth and is silent for a moment. Then he says, “You should really come into the office. I’ve talked to this guy in IAB who’s covering Fanny Briggs and he wants to hear your side of the story. I think he’ll listen to you. I think if you just talked to him—”

“That’s why I’m calling, Chuck. What did he say about the crash?”

“That it was fishy and that you were probably set up to take the fall. He doesn’t have much to go on. Look, you can tell him you’ve been really sick. Or that you were afraid to come in because of what the papers have been saying. He’ll listen.”

“Chuck, I want you to get close to him. I need to know what else he’s got and what Forensics has to say.”

“Where are you? Is that a fire engine?”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can, Chuck, to see what you have for me. Take care.”

Lila Mae closes the door of the phone booth slowly, bewitched by the different laws of this afternoon. Even the fire engine, just now out of sight, seems rushless and enervated, fighting through an aqueous lethargy. She starts the car. Drives.

The imp found her an hour after Chancre’s mishap. She’d departed the Winthrop Hotel the way she came, through the service entrance after retrieving her suit from the changing room. After blocks of running (a sight: a maid who has witnessed her master’s murder, or murdered her master) she leaned against the glass window of an Automat. Inside the late-night denizens, the midnight refuse, slouched over java and racing forms, tuna on stale rye and their doomed itineraries. No one looked at anyone else in this crumbling sanctuary: that would risk the perfection of their isolation, their one last comfort in this concrete city. She changed back into her suit in the women’s room. She deposited her coins in the coffee machine, in the pastry machine for an arid Danish. She sat at an empty table and read the placard on the metal stand: WE CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR ONLY TEN CENTS A DAY. It was the imp. She laughed. She laughed at Chancre’s fat ass as it lolled in agony on the stage. Laughed at the drunken rallying of her colleagues as they rushed to help their leader, the foolishness of the Intuitionist campaign and Mr. Reed’s Continental affectations. She laughed because Fulton was colored and no one knew and now she had an ally. Her laughter ceased at the thought of Natchez, resolving into a steady grin. The thought of him and their secret.

A groggy Mrs. Gravely (her face smeared with a nighttime beauty cream in a way that reminded Lila Mae of Hambone and Mr. Gizzard) let her into the House and she collected her things. On the dresser, a soft pyramid, was another note from Natchez. Hope you enjoyed yourself , he wrote, and included a phone number. She introduced the note to its older brother in a wallet nook. Lila Mae lit out of Intuitionist House.

Her place was as she left it: raped. She pulled her suitcase from under the bed and packed again, this time for a much longer stay. She did not know when she would be back. After last night, there was no telling when the Shush boys would be back to enforce Chancre’s threat. She lingered in the doorway. She thought she had forgotten something. Hadn’t. She did not possess any lucky rabbit’s feet or childhood dolls to ward off the monsters of the adult world. Just clothes. Then it hit her — she retrieved her copies of Theoretical Elevators . She locked the door. It was only three flights to the street and she felt reasonable again once she stepped into the morning light. She tried to remember when Jimmy reported to work.

The afternoon light is withdrawing from the sky, and the wind rushing through the open window of the city’s green sedan murmurs autumn again. Lila Mae’s eyes stray above street level for the first time today. She parks beneath the sturdy square of the hotel’s sign. She’s a good mile up the Island from her apartment. Deep in the colored city (yet another city in this city, always one more city). The manager looks up from his desk. She says, “I need a room.”

* * *

Little Pompey, that polyp, struts up the avenue with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He stops in a stationery store and purchases what appears to be a foil packet of chewing gum. He counts his change slowly and returns to the street. Past the foamy white light of Harry’s Shave and Haircut, the stammering red and green neon of the Belmont Cafeteria. The office buildings burp their charges out onto the pavement and the scurrying bodies make it difficult to keep Pompey in their line of sight. Natchez asks, “Are you sure it’s him?”

Lila Mae’s eyes dart between the road and Pompey like a metronome. Slowly, to keep her concentration, she tells the man in the passenger seat, “If he didn’t do it, he’s plugged in enough to know who did. Who else would they send? I’m sure they had a good laugh about it. Like we were dogs fighting in a pit.” She thinks, but doesn’t say, look what they did to your uncle. Twisted his mind so that he would deny who he was.

“What if he turns down the next street?” Natchez asks. “It’s one-way.”

“Then you’ll have to follow him on foot until I can get into position on the next avenue. He knows me, but he doesn’t know you.”

Pompey does not turn down the street. He continues north, chewing pink gum.

They have come to an agreement, Lila Mae and Natchez. They will help each other out: Natchez doing what he can to help Lila Mae find out who sabotaged Number Eleven, Lila Mae lending her elevator expertise to Natchez’s quest for his uncle’s black box. She never learned what Mr. Reed’s new leads on the box were since he froze her out of the operation, so they will make do with what information they can get. “Which means the pages from Fulton’s journal,” Natchez offered on the phone, just before she was going to say the same thing. They’ll have to figure out what they can after they obtain copies of the Fulton pages possessed by Reed, Chancre and Lift. The hope is that if they collate the pages, Lila Mae’s facility with Fulton’s thought will force the writings to confess, give up who has the blueprint. And with regard to Lila Mae’s redemption: here they are on stakeout. Trailing their main suspect.

“Tell me about your town,” she says, from nowhere, her eyes still on Pompey.

“Why don’t you tell me about your town?” Natchez responds. “Or leastwise why you moved up here.”

Lila Mae’s small hands tighten on the steering wheel and she wonders again if the news of Fanny Briggs has reached her parents yet, the probability of it making the papers down there. If the other elevator operators in Huntley’s trade in this kind of gossip, and if he has heard that way, the phone in the hallway outside her apartment ringing and her not there to talk to him. She says dully, “You don’t want to hear about that. It’s not very interesting.”

“I do.”

Lila Mae breathes silently through her nose. She eases the sedan past a double-parked ambulance. “I moved up here because here is where the elevators are. The real elevators.” She points up at the jutting structures surrounding the car, the dour edifices. “Midtown is all old growth. Downtown they have high-rises that are a hundred stories tall. And elevators that match them every step of the way.” Conveniently reminded now of something she wanted to ask him. Reroute the conversation. “What made you think of pulling that stunt at the Follies?”

“I wanted to give them a warning, I guess. Of what I’m gonna do to them.” He turns his knees toward her in the seat and leans into the crack between the seat and the door. “I wanted to get back at them. For what they did to my uncle that messed up his head. For what they did to you.” Her eyes keep on the street, she feels his eyes on her. “You didn’t have to leave the House, you know,” he says. “I thought you would have realized I wanted you to take credit for it so you could get back in with Mr. Reed and them.”