Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Who is he to her? A ghost. She asks her partner, who is not her partner now but someone who is dead and will not answer except in what remains of him, his words, “Why did you do it?”

“You’ll understand.”

“I’ll never understand.”

“You already do.”

Another mid-tempo number begins. The ballroom is appreciative. Without knowing when, she has taken the lead from her partner and now she guides their steps. His eyes are closed and she sees the small brown bumps on his tight eyelids. It is safe in here in the eye of the storm. Outside, down the stairs, out on the street, the city retreats under angry wet assault, high pressure. Low spirits out in the city tonight. It came unexpectedly. The news said a little rain, that’s all. Not this. The sewers are full, the gutters are drowned and disgorge litter, doctor’s bills and bank statements, they float higher, to the sidewalk levees and over them. The citizens pull the shades back and wait for the end. Lobbies and delicatessen floors wet now.

In here it is dry, in these red walls fading to pink. This new song is slow. She feels rain on her bosom but it is not rain but his tears. His chest shudders against her chest. She says, “Let it out.” She can see every distinct hair on his head, the veins of blood vivid beneath the scalp. She leads. Her feet are sure on these warped wooden floors. It is safe in here. Out of the metropolitan welter. She has been leading them in an irregular square, repeating the pressure in this one area as if repetition will make them real, wear down the barrier into the next world. The other couples sway. They revolve around her and her partner, shuttling near and far in private orbits. Each partner, thrown against the other, is shelter, a polite warmth. The city is gone. This room is a bubble floating in the dark murk. The ballroom lights still warm the soul, the band continues to play through some mysterious dispensation. The bodies of the others move gently around her and her partner. A reprieve for those here tonight in the Happyland Dime-A-Dance.

From the lost notebooks of James Fulton:

By the ninetieth floor, everything is air, but that’s jumping ahead a bit. It starts with the first floor, with dirt, with idiocy. As if we were meant for this. As if this is what fire meant, or language. To crawl about, prey to the dull obviousness of biology, as if we were not meant to fly. To lift. It starts on the first floor, with the grub’s-eye view of the world: dirt. What will, happen: it will move from the first floor, from safety, from all you’ve ever known and that takes a bit of recalibrating your imagination. To recognize that come-hither look of possibility. Trust in the cab, made by people like you, trust is the worst of it: it was made by people like you and you are weak and you make mistakes. They have incorrectly imagined this journey, misfigured the equipment necessary. By the fifth floor, the unavoidable consideration of physical laws, the slender fragility of the cables holding the car. Your own fragility. The elevator does not complain, climbs in a bubble of safety, fifteen and sixteen and twenty-six floors and no mishap: well that’s no comfort, the accident could come at any time, and the higher up the worse it will be. Could anything survive a fall from this height? They say they have safety devices but things can go wrong and things often go wrong. Giddy at forty — made it this far. And yet still so much to say goodbye to if this is the end. This floor, fifty, where they all wait, those who will not receive apologies, the dead, those who have been wronged and are too low now for reconciliation. Those broken by your passage, the odd ricochets of your passage to this ride: there’s nothing to be done. There is only the ride. At seventy-five no turning back. No need for safety devices because there’s only up, this ascension. It is not so bad, this thing, that world falling away below and there are sturdy cables and a fine cab, dependable allies. Even the thought, if there were only more time , possesses no weight here, for nothing has weight, it has all been taken care of, the motor can handle any mass differential between the cab and the counterweight, that’s its job, and what wish could possibly weigh so much that the machine could not accommodate it? Half enjoying it now. The walls are falling away, and the floor and the ceiling. They lose solidity in the verticality. At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension. It’s all bright and all the weight and cares you have been shedding are no longer weight and cares but brightness. Even the darkness of the shaft is gone because there is no disagreement between you and the shaft. How can you breathe when you no longer have lungs? The question does not perturb, that last plea of rationality has fallen away floors ago, with the earth. No time, no time for one last thought, what was the last thing I thought last night before I fell asleep, the very last thought, what was it , because before you can think that thought everything is bright and you have fallen away in the perfect elevator.

* * *

The grid is quiet this Sunday morning. The citizens do not live this far downtown. Too much power in the lattice. Some tried. They discovered their hair on the pillow upon waking, fingernails and teeth loose and swimming in their flesh. Never mind the impossible prospect of organizing complete sentences. (She tightens her tie, tinkers with her collar.) So no one lives in the financial district anymore, no one lives too close to the humming municipal temples. The streets of Federal Plaza are deserted and there are no shadows for the clouds, which snare the light and stain every ray silver. She parked outside Mama’s Bakery last night for a few hours, clambered over the upholstery into the back seat, nestled into a corner but did not sleep. At the first alarms of dawn she pulled her dress over her head. Armed herself in her Monday suit — not the right day, of course, but her calendar’s been scrambled of late. A manufacturing defect. It is not as crisp as she likes it; the erectile reserves of Chinese laundry starch have been woefully depleted. Her suit is good enough for what she needs to do, however, as far as she can tell from the automobile’s tiny mirrors. She rubs spit into a dry patch of skin below her right eye. She drags her fingers through her hair.

It started here. A week ago. It is in its guts.

Lila Mae pounds on the door for ten minutes (she counts) before the sleeping guard steps out of the darkened lobby and up to the glass. His tight brown curly hair points in wild directions and is firmly matted on the right hemisphere, the same side of his face, it turns out, that is bloodless and etched with odd wrinkles. Lila Mae presses her badge up to the glass. He pauses to scratch his right buttock before unhooking the wide loop of keys on his belt.

“I thought you guys were all finished with Number Eleven,” he says.

“It’s never finished,” she says, halfway down the lobby, brogues clattering on the faux marble like hooves, charging like a bull.

She hears, distantly, the keys rattle as the guard locks the front door. His voice in the fog: “You need me to let you into the basement?” She does not look back. He’s already been ejected from consciousness, got the bum’s rush from her psyche. Lila Mae stands in the middle of Elevator Bank B. This is the longest she’s gone between inspections since she joined the Department. Never taken a vacation, and here she is a whole nine days since she departed 125 Walker. She lays her palms on the first floor entrance of Elevator Number Eleven of the Fanny Briggs building. She feels the metal beneath the green industrial paint. It is black and cool. Ambient temperature. From far away, she hears the guard ask a question but she cannot make it out because it is so far away.