Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“I don’t want to be in their good graces.”

“But they still your bosses, right? Even if they did go to your house. You have to put up with them.”

She shakes her head. Pompey extricates his shoe from a tentacle of newspaper that’s just attacked him. “I just want to clear my name — and for you to get what belongs to you. How did you know what to do to the elevator? To make it fall like that.”

Natchez laughs. “Pretty simple compared to what machines they got up in buildings today. Did you like it?”

“You know I liked it, Natchez.”

He bangs the dashboard with the flat of his hand, smiles wide. “Had to learn a lot about elevators in the last few weeks. More than I want to know. Don’t know how you can do your job like you do, to tell you the truth.”

“They grow on you. Like people. You never know who you’re going to get to like.” Stop right there, Lila Mae. “Then they pop up one day and you like them.” This isn’t characteristic of her at all. “You get to know them and you like them more each time.”

“Like you and me, Lila Mae?” To the nervous twitch of her eyebrows, he says, “That’s okay. You keep driving. When I first saw you I thought you one of them uppity Northern girls. All about what you can do for them and how much do you have in your pocket and all that. But you’re not like—”

“Look,” Lila Mae directs, deflects. “He’s stopping.”

Pompey knocks on the window of a discreet brown door. He glances over his shoulder suspiciously; Lila Mae and Natchez have pulled over on the other side of the street, on the uptown rut of the avenue. She can make out the gold stenciling, crescent-shaped, on the soaped-out window: PAULEY’S SOCIAL CLUB. The door opens and Pompey retreats into the darkness.

“It’s a bar,” Natchez offers. “One of them old speakeasies. Stopping off for a little rye before he goes home.”

“He’s not going home,” she says. Lila Mae looks up at the street sign: Pompey has walked eleven blocks up from the office. Then she sees the car. “See that dark blue car parked outside?” she asks. She knows it, recognizes the blank, bovine face of the driver. “The man inside is Lazy Joe Markham. One of Johnny Shush’s boys. The mob.” The driver stares straight ahead, for now, looking down and beyond the hills and depressions of this busy street, past the downtown buildings, into the black river.

“A mob place? What’s a nigger like that doing at a mob hangout?”

“We’ll see soon enough,” Lila Mae says. “Do you have the camera?”

“Got it right here.”

She’s relieved that Natchez does not start talking again. Not that she does not like what he says, but it is too much for her in this tiny car, and so quickly after so much time. She had entered into a contract with the city similar to the one she has lately arranged with Natchez. An exchange of services. She will keep the city vertical and intact, and the city will leave her alone. And now look at her: she let the city down last Friday, was remiss in her duties, and look at the metropolis’s retribution. It has given her Natchez. When she picked him up, she looked in his face for traces of Fulton’s austere intractability, something to ground him in her world. In the gentle bump of his nose, parabolic symmetry of his ears, she did not see Fulton. He was his own man. Not of her elevator world, but a traveling cable to that place the rest of the citizens live. Through a crack in the buildings’ canopy, she sees a blimp, slug in the sky, primitive and unevolved. The future is in jet fuel speed, jet plane steel. There is no room in the sky for this pathetic bug.

He rouses her: “He’s on the move again.”

Pompey waddles away from Pauley’s Social Club. Lila Mae and Natchez and Joe Markham watch him as he walks uptown in a pale gray Growley Elevator Repair uniform, a toolbox in his right hand. She starts the car.

Pompey has tools.

* * *

At intersections and crowded areas between sedans and trucks the gutter reflected the bitter pastels of metropolitan neon, rainbows hacked down to earth and dirt. Lila Mae followed a trail of cigarette butts. Up one block and around the corner and further still. She was lost. It wasn’t a trail left by a single individual, for one thing, and cigarette butts aren’t as reliable as footprints. They’d been banished to the pavement, dashed there by multitudes of citizens, different brands, some lipstick-smudged or saliva-damp, half smoked, dragged out, crushed under heels or left to smolder to the filter. There was always another a few steps ahead. It might lead to the subway: she needed to get home and couldn’t remember where the subway was. In one respect Lila Mae was correct. The cigarettes did lead to the subway. They led to where anyone had walked. It was her first week on the job.

Later, she realized he saw her coming. Her hands fiddling anxiously in her trouser pockets, tentative footfalls, looking up at the street numbers. An easy mark. She stopped at the corner, confounded. Lila Mae was sure this was where she had emerged from underground this very morning. Chastised herself. This was a ridiculous mistake, not one she allowed herself to make. She’d spent the previous Sunday on her couch decoding the subway map, superimposing its feeble order over the few scattered sections of the city she was already acquainted with. Never mind that she found the entire mechanism distasteful. Shuffling into mole holes: aesthetically weak, not to mention just plain atavistic, this horizontal maundering about. She closed her eyes at the intersection. Lila Mae could see the map sagging over her knees in her apartment, the tangled train routes — but she couldn’t remember the stops. The street numbers. He was there when she opened her eyes, he said, “Nice evening,” his foot on the green chipped lamppost, his hand brushing grit off his white spats. “Nice evening,” he repeated.

She inspected him. Perhaps thirty (an older man), pretending to be a rogue. He wore one of the new slim suits she had observed with increasing frequency since she moved into the city, a vaguely European cut that hung close on his body, sharp along the shoulders thanks to a layer or two of padding. How many of her city paychecks would it take to get one of those numbers? The perfect point of his white silk tie was matched by the opposite-tending arrow of the handkerchief launching from his breast pocket: two halves of a diamond. He had a boy’s face, she reckoned, or a man’s face bulging with boyish mischief, topped by the elegant waves of an obviously well-maintained conk. These are the kind of men they have in the city, Lila Mae told herself, dispatching her daze to the back of her mind. Keep alert. She said, “I’m looking for the subway.”

“Where are you trying to go?” he asked, slapping his foot off the lamppost.

“I’m looking for the uptown train,” she said. The traffic light changed with an audible clunk and the downtown automobiles surged.

She could cross now if she wanted to, right now, cut off this young gentleman before he got any ideas. She looked into his face again. He had wild bristly eyebrows, a nice touch, one deliberate unkempt spot to offset his careful preening. “That’s a few blocks over,” he offered. “I’ll escort you — a beautiful lady like yourself shouldn’t be out by herself at this hour.”

Lila Mae remembered that very line from the movie she had seen not two days ago. At least he likes going to the picture show, she thought. “That’s not necessary,” she said. Waited for the light to change.

“I’d curse myself all night if I didn’t,” he said, and when the light changed and he stretched his arm wide across the avenue, after you, she walked and did not rebuke him as he trotted alongside her. City charm, playing games. He kept talking (even though she did not answer him as she stared ahead to the next corner to see if she could sight the train entrance), informing Lila Mae that he’d just left a business meeting of some sort, and that the meeting had gone well, though he was sad that it had run so late because it was not often he had free time when he came to the city. He enjoyed the sights and the people here. They were characters. He didn’t know anyone, he said, his voice falling a bit theatrically into mock woe, and she smiled at this. Despite her self and her armor. She walked quickly, out of fear, she knew. She didn’t know how to act in situations like this. Last Friday at this time she was packing her few possessions into boxes, under the faint overhead bulb in her janitor’s closet. Lila Mae and her new companion crossed another street. He held out his hand to traffic, stop, even though the stoplight held the automobiles still and idling. Mock gallant. She smiled at this gesture too, though inwardly now: her game face was in place. He said his name was Freeport Jackson and asked her name, although, he added, if she didn’t want to tell him he understood. This was a dangerous city and you never knew. She gave him her name, in the cracked syllables she had already decided, after much practice, would be her work voice, the voice she would present to building representatives as she snapped open the gold badge of her office. He said, “Lila Mae Watson, may I walk you to the subway?” She said he already was. Past an all-night druggist, which surprised her, she’d never encountered such a thing before. But in this city people need things at all hours of the night, she thought. This place will take some getting used to.