Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

* * *

She tugs the metal beads dangling from the light shade. He sits on the edge of the desk, ass a paperweight. The right sleeve of his powder-blue seersucker is rolled up in an unruly bunch to the elbow, where his arm transforms into an odd white appendage that ends in tiny pink fingertips. A stained cast. His face is slack and exhausted, dusted with tiny gray scrub-hairs. She says, “You know who I am.”

“I figured you would come sooner or later,” he tells her. “Once I got the other parts of his journal. You haven’t been to the office so you must be up to something. Your file says you’re one sharp cookie — I figured you’d be coming around. Do the same thing I would do in your position.”

Even with his injury, Ben Urich attempts a pose of metropolitan bachelorhood. His left index finger hooks into the cuff of his pants, easy baby, just passing the time. “You look confused,” he says. “I have been too, over the last few days, to be perfectly honest. Ever since I finished the article on the black box.”

“Which never came out.” She replaces the camera in her purse and zips it shut.

“My editor was convinced that we shouldn’t run it.” He raises the white club that is his right hand. “And I was soon persuaded that his decision was right. Or, attempts were made to persuade me.”

“Johnny Shush,” she offers.

“How much of his journals have you seen?”

“None yet. I was just about to take my first look.”

“Yeah, like I said, I figured you’d be around soon. You or someone else. They’re in the bottom drawer. Beneath last year’s pinups.”

The drawer slides and shudders. Bangs loud in the deserted newsroom. Lila Mae lifts two calendar pages featuring two famous picture-show starlets in erotic repose, finds the goods beneath them, split in shadow. “You can take them out,” Ben Urich tells her at her hesitation. She recognizes the cramped handwriting, the internecine, slashing script. She has studied it under the gaze of the Institute librarian, in locked rooms — she even, in the early, giddy days of her conversion, practiced Fulton’s handwriting for hours. Knows the ink. For one entire semester Lila Mae wrote her class notes in that hand, believing it would bring her closer to him. As if the mechanics of delivering the idea to the physical world were half the process. She mastered his hand, its reticent parabolas and botched vowels. Here it is now, on the familiar notebook paper Fulton preferred. She tracked down the manufacturer once; they have a plant across the river where they still turn out the Fontaine line. The teeth along the inside edge complete the tableau: they have been torn out of his notebooks.

Says to herself, “It’s his.” She could be in the Institute stacks, she could be in her old room above the gymnasium, in her converted janitor’s closet. It is that real. She decodes that scratch, tumbles down its slopes and sudden cliffs, halfway down the page past a series of glyphs she doesn’t recognize: Anymore tests at this point would be redundant. It works, and all that is left is to deliver to the cities . It works.

“Is it what you wanted?” Ben Urich drawls.

“It is it exactly.” She doesn’t lift her eyes from the pages. “Who sent them out?”

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be talking. If you knew, you wouldn’t be here,” rubbing his good hand over the dirty cast, “so I guess I’ll have to scratch you off the list.”

She barely hears him. The cream-colored paper is in her hand. She could memorize it and transcribe it later. Place her recreations next to Natchez’s photographs and see where they lead. She’ll present her copy at the dinner table and slide it to him. Her present. Still looking down … it required principles — a way of thinking — I thought I had abandoned . She repeats the phrase to herself, making it indelible. As cover she asks, “How did you know I was coming?”

“It was written, you might say. Like my fingers. I assume from the reports that you’ve been staying at Intuitionist House. That you’re working with Reed and Lever to make sure Chancre and his masters don’t get it first.…” He trails off. “Which means that the Intuitionists don’t have it yet.”

“I left the House.” I have walked away from it, only to return and find that it has not changed. It works .

“Didn’t like the food?”

“Didn’t like the conversation.”

“Then you’ve found a different partner. I thought for a minute that you might be Arbo’s way of telling me they’re still watching me.”

What he said: Chancre’s masters. Finally, after too long pondering the minutiae, she looks up from Fulton’s notes. “Arbo? What do they have to do with this?”

His eyebrows jumping. “I thought you were smart. A hundred-percent accuracy rate.” The highest in the Department, Lila Mae adds to herself, not that anyone would ever mention that. “Until Fanny Briggs anyway. Who do you think really needs the black box?”

She stares at him, the pages in her small hand bending to the floor.

“I can see you’re genuinely taken aback,” Ben Urich says. He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a shiny dime. “Arbo and United — they’re the real players here. I see I’ve upset you. Why don’t you have a seat?” She sits down slowly in Ben Urich’s seat, where he muckrakes, where he exposes. Through the windows in the north wall, she sees the dark windows of the offices across the street. No one there.

“This is a real surprise,” Ben Urich says. “You’re the key, after all.” He flips the dime in the air, as is his habit, but he’s not used to his left hand yet. He misses the silver on its descent and it rolls away into the darkness.

“What are you trying to tell me, Urich. What the hell are you trying to tell me?”

She’s talking to his back. He’s on his knees trying to retrieve his dime. “Who else needs the black box more than United and Arbo,” he asks a ball of dust, “the biggest elevator manufacturing concerns in the country? The world. Arbo broke my hand to make me back off the story, for Pete’s sake.”

“Arbo. Arbo’s dwindling markets.”

“They’re in bad shape, that’s for sure. Overseas sales down forty-five percent, domestic thirty. Ever since their Jupiter line never took off and United came back swinging. Got it!” he says, returning to his desk. “Christ, you want some water or something?”

“Ever since United got Chancre to endorse their line,” Lila Mae considers. Her voice is faint, as distant as the quiet rotors in the machine room above her.

“Of course,” Ben Urich confirms. “Every major elevator market in the world looks to this city’s Department for guidance. This is the most famous city in the world. The Big Skyscraper. I don’t have to tell you that the whole world, every contractor and two-bit real estate tycoon, comes here first. This city.”

Remembers Reed, that first day in Intuitionist House, telling her that Lever was out of town talking to the good people at Arbo, that’s why the candidate could not meet her. “Arbo,” she says, “is bankrolling their campaign.” Whoever owns the elevator owns the new cities.

“I should hope so. It’s not like the Intuitionists are rolling in dough. Those dues don’t add up to much after you deduct all those wine and cheese symposia. Shoot, you only have that House because crazy old Dipth-Watney was feeling generous to the underdog. Arbo owned the Department when Holt was Guild Chair, and it was United’s money that won the Chair for Chancre. You know that story about Holt and the chorus girl? — she was one of United’s Safety Girls. Did you think this was all about philosophy? Who’s the better man — Intuitionism or Empiricism? No one really gives a crap about that. Arbo and United are the guys who make the things. That’s what really matters. The whole world wants to get vertical, and they’re the guys that get them there. If you pay the fare.”