Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

When Natchez and Lila Mae find his black box.

Honking behind her. It is time to move away from the dying spot, leave the animal to die in peace. On to more practical matters. What will Lift favor, she wonders, these guardians of the elevator industry? Rustic Grummans with their filigreed cabs, quaint molding encoding the history of the sacred machine, or antiseptic Arbo Executives, sheer and spartan, born of the exigencies of speed, jet plane elevators? She picks the latter, and will find she is right when she gets past the Lift night watchman, Billy, who is distracted now by the final leg of his college correspondence course, specifically his latest assignment, a five-page paper on courtship and Victorian mores.

She parks, looks at her watch. It is seven-thirty on a Saturday evening. The citizens plan their weekend rites of expiation. Lift is a monthly and their latest issue has just hit the newsstands; she hopes there will be no one upstairs. Most of the windows are dark on the silent floors above her: as she looks up, the face of the Lift building is a plank extended over the starboard side, over a sea thick with sharks. Pushes open the doors.

The night watchman sits behind a gray curvilinear desk. Sweat beads on his wide forehead and the brown hair above his craggy face is damp. Furious concentration. He seems out of breath from his mental strain, definitely out of shape physically: the buttons of his dark blue uniform allude to an ongoing border dispute with his soft belly. In his hands is a dime paperback his eyes do not stray from. On its cover a young chimney sweep digs in his pocket for pence. She says, “Lila Mae Watson. I’m here to inspect your elevators.”

Billy holds his paperback in the air and asks, “What’s ‘paraffin’?”

“A waxy substance used in candles. Mostly. Do you want to see my badge?”

Still distressed over the paraffin dilemma, Billy says, “Isn’t it a little late?”

“Night shift. Neither rain nor sleet. Wherever there’s an elevator in trouble, we’re there.” She holds her badge closer to his face. “That better?”

“I need glasses, to tell you the truth. Reading glasses, anyway.” He frowns at his book and waves her on. She picks out Lift ’s name from the white letters in the occupants’ registry next to the elevator: eighth floor. She tries to imagine what his expression will be when she tells him she has the Lift pages. Natchez wished to accompany her on her visit to Pompey’s, told her to stay out of this sneaking around out of protective impulse. She wants to see his eyes when she slides the film across the dinner table, past the miniature Hawaiian god, which glows in solemn power from its proximity to the candle. It arrives, an Arbo Executive all right, trim and lucent.

It seems, she notes, to be operating at optimum performance levels.

On the eighth floor the Executive’s sleek door recedes and she sees the Lift logo levitating on glass. The outer room is lit by three ceiling lights set above a wide and solid desk, presumably where the receptionist sits in workday hours, filing her nails with a rustless implement (that fine white dust floating in the air, nudged by ventilation grates). She pushes open the glass doors: she does not hear a sound.

Lila Mae creeps to the white stucco wall separating reception from the long newsroom beyond and peeks behind it, scanning quickly. There is no one to see her. Like sneaking a glass of water. Twenty or so desks lined up to the (north, she notes) wall, islands inhabited by paper fauna, and not an inquisitive critter in sight. All the typewriters sleep, clacking ceased. Mum’s the word. Over one desk, a good two thirds into the room, a small desk lamp with an emerald glass shade adumbrates a busy desk and a vacant chair. Was the light left on accidentally or is someone here? The building, walls and floor, hums. Then she sees eyes watching her out of the darkness, from the west wall, and she retreats behind the receptionist’s bulwark. She stares without interest at a ball of red paper in the secretary’s wastepaper basket. It looks like a valentine but it is not the season for valentines. She does not hear anything behind the partition. Her left hand traces a ridge in the stucco; invisible scar beneath her fingers, an old wound with a tale behind it, no doubt, but there’s no one to tell her and it will not speak for itself. The elevator shaft is waiting a few steps away, just behind the office doors, and elevator potentiality waiting for her summons. But she doesn’t hear a sound, and after the thought of relating to Natchez her botched mission repulses her, she peeks again behind the wall, her eyes have adjusted to the murk, and sees that what she took for eyes is a trophy. An Otis, to be exact, honoring vertical excellence. Two gold call buttons float in quartz, spaced apart according to the industry standard. The trophy rests on its side atop the listless dais of a black file cabinet. Some reporter’s coveted Otis, the surety of cheap grandeur: an exposé on graft, a report on shoddy and hazardous suspension gear in a faraway kingdom’s shafts. No, there’s no one in the newsroom except the damned industry. She is alone with an unattended desk light whose electricity is an expenditure waiting to be itemized and eliminated in the next budget of Lift magazine, Covering the Elevator Industry for Thirty Years.

She trips through the magazine’s masthead, which is corporealized now as a series of black nameplates on the reporters’ desks. She recognizes some of the names from articles. They are the chroniclers of her mission: the bards compose their tales here, on these typewriters, versifying the inspector’s glum adventures into darkened shaft. She searches for Ben Urich’s name on the desks — she remembers Mr. Reed identifying Urich as the author of the squashed article. She has never liked his articles, which seem unduly obsessed with the dingier aspects of her enterprise, fixate on the backroom deals and betrayals she has done her best to stay out of during her Department tenure. (And here she is on tiptoe now, a center stage in that intrigue.) If his desk does not contain Fulton’s notes, she will move on to the editors’ offices. Travel up the masthead to those tiny specks at the top. The ones who know.

There. His desk is clean and organized, a standout from his fellow scribes’ tabletop anarchy. Lila Mae digs into her purse (another neglected artifact from her closet dusted off tonight) and finds the miniature camera. Cups it in her hand as if it were a beautiful black frog she discovered in a creek. Lila Mae bought the camera this morning with sixty dollars she discovered in the breast pocket of her Friday suit. She’d forgotten about the miscalculated bribe — so much since then — but was glad she got to put it to good use. And her hand is on the first drawer when Ben Urich says, “You must be Lila Mae Watson.” Which, needless to say, disturbs her plan.

* * *

Big Billy Porter laughs and raises a mug to his comrade’s escapade. “You think that’s gross, Ned my good man, let me tell you about the first time I ever saw the bastards. My first month out — this is Before the Code, I’ll have you know, and the Department didn’t even have the motor pool yet. We had to take the bus or the subway — they send us out in the morning with a pocket full of change and three index cards with our cases on them. Had to find our own way around, mates, and it was a damned mess. One thing after the other. So it’s my first month out, right, and I have to inspect the old Jenkins Textile Factory downtown. I know it has to be one of those early Otis machines, you hear me, from how old the building is, but I don’t know how old. Jenkins, Jenkins Junior, I don’t know who the guy is, but he greets me on the loading dock. Like he’s been waiting for me a long time, like I don’t have anything better to do than check out that ancient rig he’s got up there, right? You know the type, boys. So he says to me, ‘We’re having a little problem with the freight elevator,’ timid like a schoolteacher. Like I don’t know that. Anyway, he drags me inside and we go up to the machine room and I’m telling you boys, you have never seen anything like this. For one thing there were no windows and you knew no one had been inside there for years. Mouse droppings all on the floor, spiderwebs hanging from the ceiling. And the dust! I thought I was going to choke to death. Anyway, I see the cables coming out of this big wood contraption, looks like a big crate. But no motor. So I ask the little guy what the hell that is and he’s talking through his handkerchief ’cause of the dust and he tells me his dad didn’t like the sound the motor made, so he had them cover it up so it wouldn’t make as much noise. And I’m thinking to myself, it was just a few years ago that United made all that money for coming up with the same innovation and here the damned owner of a rag factory has done it long before. You get patents for something like that and here it is locked up in this dump downtown. I don’t tell him that, but that’s what I’m thinking. So I tell him I’m sorry about his dad’s delicate sensibilities and all that but I’m gonna have to take a look inside it. Junior hands me an iron pipe that’s laying in the dust and I start having at the box. I’m straining and I’m trying to find a purchase point and then suddenly it gives — and they all come streaming out it, thousands of the little black bastards. And I know what you’re thinking — oh, yeah, Billy, what are you whining about, we’ve all hit a roach bomb before. But you have never seen anything like this, fellows. Thousands and thousands of them, they’re running up the bar to my hands, they’re running across the floor like water out a fountain. I jump back and I look down and they’re all up my pants and I can feel them underneath my clothes, on my skin. The other guy is screaming — he backed up against a crate and slipped, and they were all over him. Screaming like the devil. Well, I was screaming too, if you want to know the truth. They must have been breeding in there for decades, eating that old Otis wiring and having just a high old cockroach time. We didn’t know they liked to eat elevators back then — there were stories, of course, but the Department study was still years away. I almost shit my pants. I ran out that room, shut the door behind me and got the hell out of there. Hours later I still had roaches crawling out of my pockets. I don’t know what happened to Junior. Maybe the little black bastards ate him.”