Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Nothing.

At first she decides on Number Ten, next-door neighbor to the dear departed. She presses the call button and can hear, she thinks, the selector rouse groggily, still damp from dreaming. A click. Then she changes her mind and goes for Number Fourteen, Eleven’s opposite in Bank B. Fourteen is also flanked by two elevators, and must share that distinct middle child anxiety. A bell rings, cheerful and pert: it will never get more cynical and embittered, that bell, never flag in its cheer through hundreds of thousands of chimes. It wasn’t built that way. Number Fourteen welcomes its passenger and the passenger boards.

Arbo recalled their Metropolitans a year after their heavily promoted release to fix a small but eventually significant cosmetic problem. Seems the cleaning agent used by the city’s maintenance army didn’t sit very well with the cab’s inner panels of simulated wood: after a hundred applications or so of Scrubbo, the panels began to take on a green-brown color in odd patches, in shapes that reminded more than one person of mold. Disease. In short, the cleaning agent and the paneling didn’t take to each other. One approach might have been to instruct the owner of the new, deluxe Metropolitans to use a different cleaner, one less caustic and reactive to the sensitive skin of the elevators. It was not to be. The city had purchased, at a very reasonable price, at generous manhandled discount, a lifetime supply of this certain Scrubbo. What “lifetime supply” entailed exactly when it comes to a city was never fully hammered out; suffice it to say that there are crates and crates of the stuff in basements of government buildings, in janitors’ closets throughout the municipality, and they all proudly display the beguiling purple smile of the Scrubbo mascot, for whom no job is too dirty. The politicians refused to budge on this Scrubbo matter. It had been paid for. Indeed, it was agreed that the incident was Arbo’s fault for not properly testing their equipment for possible safety hazards (there is not, and has never been, any evidence for a link between the cab’s unsightly dermatological problem and human illness), and, in addition, there might be a lawsuit on the horizon. Even up in their towers, behind reinforced glass, Arbo knew which way the wind was blowing. They changed the panels for free, and to this day the Arbo Metropolitan is the elevator most city employees associate with their hapless drudgery, a fact supported over the years by polls solemnly conducted by the United Elevator Co.

These are new Arbo Metropolitans, Lila Mae notes: the inside panels do not betray the characteristic scratch marks left by the less than circumspect Arbo repairmen when they replaced the blighted panels. She noticed this fact on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. She tells herself, do not look at Number Fourteen. She is in this car to help recall, completely, her inspection of Number Eleven, which now sits in the morgue a few buildings away, in grotesque shards on metal trays. She does not wish to taint her reenactment. The reverberations of Number Fourteen’s idling drive insinuate themselves through her shoes, sing up through the muscles in her leg. She shuts them out. She does not feel them. Closes her eyes. Lila Mae reaches out into the darkness and presses the glass convexity of a button.

Number Fourteen’s counterweight begins its decent into the shaft, diffident and wary.

This is the wrong darkness. It is the darkness of this day and this time and this elevator and Lila Mae needs that further-back darkness, the one she encountered on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. She can’t touch the walls of this elevator as she did those of Number Eleven, for fear of taint. She imagines her hand extending out to the unyielding solidity of that dead elevator’s walls, the way the inner paneling embraced her hand’s curves. She’s, she’s almost at that darkness now. It is a slow curtain dropping before this day’s darkness. There. This new darkness is the old darkness of Number Eleven. She watches the sure and untroubled ascent of Number Eleven. The genies appear on cue, dragging themselves from the wings. The genie of velocity, the genie of the hoisting motor’s brute exertions, the red cone genie of the selector as it ticks off the entity’s progress through the shaft, the amber nonagon genie of the grip shoes as they skip frictionless up T-rails. All of them energetic and fastidious, describing seamless verticality to Lila Mae in her mind’s own tongue. They zigzag and circle, hop from foot to foot, fluctuate for her, their only spectator, the only one who’s ever in the seats out there. They gyrate for her and reenact without omission their roles from last Thursday’s performance. The genies never forget their lines. Lila Mae rises steady, Number Eleven is a smooth ride, alright. The genies bow and do not linger for her lonely applause. She opens her eyes. The doors open to the dead air of the forty-second floor. She hits the Lobby button.

Nothing.

* * *

And if nothing and Chancre are telling the truth (she now believes he is, mistrust now as useless as trust), then this was a catastrophic accident. That is what the remains will give up to Forensics’ latex probings: nothing. No telltale incision scar on an innocent inch of coaxial cable, no wires corkscrewing off the famously dependable antilocks. Nothing at all. (A few days from now when this is all over, Lila Mae will think to call Chuck for the exact wording of Forensics’ findings, and his confirmation will seem to her remote: without meaning.) You don’t expect them in the early failure phase; they usually pop up during the random failure phase, in adolescence, the fruit of malevolent pathology. Something gave in the elevator for no reason and its brother components gave in, too. A catastrophic accident. The things that emerge from the black, nether reaches of space and collide here, comets that connect with this frail world after countless unavailing ellipses. Emissaries from the unknowable. (The security guard assigned to the Fanny Briggs building watches her stumble from Number Fourteen, proceed across the lobby, blind, and tug on the locked front door.) She is never wrong when it comes to Intuitionism. Things occur to her. What her discipline and Empiricism have in common: they cannot account for the catastrophic accident. Did the genies try to warn her, were they aware, twitching at times, forbidden to make plain their knowledge but subtly attempting to alert her through the odd wiggle and shimmy. She wouldn’t know what to look for. Whatever signals the genies may or may not have dispatched through her darkness went unread. She imagines the proximity of the catastrophe sending ripples through the darkness from the future, agitating the genies with impending violence. It’s irrelevant. She didn’t see it. (She doesn’t appear to see him. The guard watches as she continues to pull at the front door even though the lock does not give. She keeps trying.) Chancre and Pompey did not lie, and no one else sabotaged Number Eleven, she’s sure of that too. How often do catastrophic accidents touch down here. The last one in this country was what, she searches after it, thirty-five years ago, out West. The ten passengers (midjoke, aimless perusal of the inspection certificate, fondling house-key weight in trouser pockets, trying not to whistle) had time to scream, of course, but not much else. The investigators (and what a hapless bunch they would have been, the field so young) never found any reason for it. Total freefall. What happens when too many impossible events occur, when multiple redundancy is not enough. Scratching heads over this mystery of the new cities. The last recorded incident of total freefall happened in the Ukraine, and was eventually traced to an inept contractor’s failure to properly install the progressive brakes in the undercarriage. Five died. She can’t remember the make of the elevator — what company was most popular in that region at that time. Can’t remember. (Finally the guard unlocks the door. She still doesn’t see him. He watches her stagger down the broad stone steps, about to fall any number of times.) Nobody in her business would wish a catastrophic accident on their worst enemy. They’re a superstitious lot, and envious and bitter of every colleague’s success, but wish a crash like this on a nemesis and you’re just asking for one yourself — with you in it, hollering against probability all the way down. It’s not even probability because it’s beyond calculation. It’s fate.