Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“I saw it made the papers.” And seeing it cheered her. Bad ink goes both ways.

“It was a pretty spectacular fall,” he says. “They were sitting pretty after Fanny Briggs — put the Intuitionists in their place and all that — but with the Otis routine, Lever’s regained some support. Some people are even saying that Reed and Lever were behind it.” It’s not much of a stretch, Lila Mae thinks, to see Reed taking credit for Natchez’s prank. “With that and the Fulton rumors,” Chuck continues, “the election is up in the air again. Have you heard about the Fulton stuff?”

She can’t remember what face she’s supposed to have on. “The rumors about the black box?” If Reed and Lever have leaked to the rank and file that the box is out there, they must be confident that they’ll find it soon. Or perhaps they already have it. She’d know if she were still on the inside. Lila Mae wonders what their response is to her disappearance from the House.

“Right,” Chuck says. “Apparently Lift was supposed to run a story on it this week, but it didn’t appear. There’s all sorts of speculation about that, of course, but the bottom line is that some of us have hope in Lever again, and some of the fence-straddlers are coming around to our side. Do you think it’s true, Lila Mae? That it’s out there?”

“It could be.”

“Just think of it — Fulton’s black box. Do you know what it means? The second elevation is coming. Everything around us, all that out there, will come down. All of it,” animated, looking at Lila Mae for a companion in his romance of the future. She is, to say the least, subdued. Chuck slides his finger into his coffee cup and withdraws a long black hair. “Some of the guys were mumbling that the perfect elevator might put us out of work, but there are always maintenance issues and all that. It should be pretty interesting come Tuesday night. Are you going to vote?”

“I’ll have to see how things are faring. Has Forensics come back yet?”

He shakes his head. “No autopsy yet. You know how they are — they’re so happy to get some work that they got to milk it and keep everybody in suspense. But it looks like they’re going to release their findings on Monday morning.”

Monday morning is perfect for her, is what she thinks. By that time she should have what she needs from Pompey, and that, coupled with the forensics report, should clear her. Forensics is capable of being bought off — they work for the city — but they report to the Mayor’s office, and no matter what else the Mayor and Chancre have cooking, the Mayor knows better than to mix with the elevator inspectors’ election. The election is a family matter, and the inspectors take family matters very seriously. “What about this man Arbergast?” Lila Mae asks. “How’s his case going?”

“That’s the bad part, Lila Mae,” Chuck frowns. “He’s got nothing from what I can tell. Not with you gone. Nobody’s talking. When Forensics comes back with their report — and I think we both know it was sabotage — you’re still the number one suspect. You haven’t been heard from in a week.” His voice squeaking. “After that report comes in, he’s going to have to bring in the cops because it officially becomes a criminal case. And you look guilty, Lila Mae. You look guilty.”

“I was guilty before. Now they just have an excuse to get the rope.”

“Why don’t you come in, Lila Mae,” Chuck says. Almost pleading.

“Let’s not start that again.”

“I can help you. Talk to Arbergast. He’ll help you out. You’re one of us.”

She considers, for a second or two, if they’ve gotten to Chuck. It could be any number of parties. But she has called him because she trusts him, and she needs that trust. She’s ready to accept the consequences. “It’ll all be okay come Monday,” she says, believing it to be true.

“You’re not going to let me in, are you?”

She trusts him: just look at him now. Nobody’s gotten to him. She wishes she could let him in, but there will be time next week to share all she has learned … No. Not all. She knows she’s not going to tell him about Fulton. She can’t. It is in his face now: that faded look, the uninteresting flatness of a background object in a photograph. Their friendship, so real a moment ago, is remote. She’s left him behind. She won’t be telling him anything. “It’ll all be over in a few days, Chuck,” she says. “Then I’ll tell you everything.”

“And the police?” Chuck asks.

She purses her lips, then remembers. “One more thing, Chuck — what do you know about 366 Eighth Avenue?”

“366 …” He presses out his cheek with his tongue, a habit Lila Mae has always found vaguely repulsive. “I know that building,” he says finally. “I saw it on the Board this morning. I think it’s set up for inspection next week. Marberley has it.”

“It’s a new building. No one from the Department has seen it yet?”

“No, it’s a checkup. Marberley wrote it up for some violations a few weeks ago.”

She’s in her car five minutes later, uptown in her room at the Friendly League Residence half an hour later. This is the smallest room yet. Liverpool’s “moving drawing rooms” of the turn of the century, steeped in Victorian largesse, spacious enough for a hundred passengers and decorated with smoked mirrors and yielding cushions, could have fit three of this room inside (an elevator in an elevator, an elevator-passenger). The basement coffers of the Friendly League Residence, unofficial repository of the city’s outcast furniture (rescued from the dump, rescued from burned-out tenements), have outfitted this room with one chair of leprous upholstery and a writing table more than suited for the sober composition of suicide notes. Tall brown cabinet doors hide the Murphy bed, up now, tilted in its hinges and half-stuck after years of wrangling by haggard guests.

She has not seen any of the other guests but can imagine them. The city’s tidal forces wash the weak-treading citizens out here, to the edge, to pitiless crags like the Friendly League Residence. Old men in gray clothes with beards like dead grass, stooped and shuffling. The alibiless. Jagged coughing haunted the halls last night, stealing out of multiple rooms, a sodden death-chorus. It kept her awake, to say the least, manifested in her dreams when they finally came as thunder and wet rain over her childhood home. She couldn’t go outside for the rain, in her dreams. She shook the night off quickly this morning, after finding the sun peeking over the low rows of tenements, which trooped off to the far north of the island, into the black river. Not a lot of elevators in this neighborhood. This is the place verticality indicts, the passed-over flatlands, what might as well still be forest and field. No, Chancre and Lever will not find her here. The other guests’ invisible shuffling-out-of-rooms ended around ten this morning and she waited another hour before venturing out of her box, figuring then it was probably safe. The manager downstairs did not look up from the comics as she pushed aside the front doors and let them slam behind her. He has seen many things.

She spent the afternoon on the city’s turf. In the Hall of Records downtown, on the other edge of the island, right across from the Fanny Briggs building. She walked quickly through the shadow the new building spat across Federal Plaza, eyes away from that structure, quick into the revolving door of the Hall of Records. Lila Mae offered her badge to the clerk, a short old crone who did not even bother to check her identification, so preoccupied was she on stamping, with a gleaming steel device, the seal of the city on a heathen mound of paperwork. Lila Mae could clearly discern, upside down, the holy seal convert that bureaucratic rabble. If the Department had issued a warning out on her badge, it had not reached this office yet. When she was finished with the broad ledgers of the Hall of Records, she went to meet Chuck at Bickford’s, and Fanny Briggs’s long shadow had seeped into the air, indistinguishable from night.