Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

They won’t find any reason for this crash, trace the serial number back to the manufacturer, interrogate an arthritic mechanic’s trembling fingers. This was a catastrophic accident.

“Poor Number Eleven,” Lila Mae says — one moment of feeling for the unfortunate victim, that’s all, before rerouting the incident to her own purposes: it was a catastrophic accident, and a message to her. It was her accident.

The elevator pretended to be what it was not. Number Eleven passed for longevous. Passed for healthy so well that Arbo Elevator Co.’s quality control could not see its duplicity, so well that the building contractors could not see for the routine ease of its assembly coeval doom. So well that Lila Mae Watson of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, who is never wrong, did not see it. Did it know? After all of Fulton’s anthropomorphism: did the machine know itself. Possessed the usual spectrum of elevator emotion, yes, but did it have articulate self-awareness. Erlich, the mad Frenchman, of course, posited such but he never gets invited to conferences and his monographs wilt on the shelves of his relatives’ libraries. Did it decide to pass? To lie and betray itself? Even Fulton stayed away from the horror of the catastrophic accident: even in explicating the unbelievable he never dared broach the unknowable. Lila Mae thinks: out of fear.

She has not realized her destination, what she is driving toward, despite the fact there is only one place she will reach on this route. Out of the tunnel now, her destination could not be more obvious: still, she hasn’t realized it yet. Distracted as she is by this latest inspection currently underway in her head.

Is his black box immune to the comet of the catastrophic accident. It is all jumbled now, machinations eclipsing machinations. For a second, she doubts that Fulton was colored: it could have been another one of Natchez’s lies. Something he and his masters cooked up to reel her in. She sees the scene, hovering above the highway a few automobile lengths ahead: Reed and Natchez in the downstairs study of Intuitionist House, sipping smoky antique scotch as they check their net for frayed strands. Natchez knows the open windows of a colored girl’s heart, he’s had many, Reed knows the attended latches of the Intuitionist mind, his weaknesses are hers. The progress of their scheme: Natchez hadn’t developed his film of the Intuitionist pages because he had never taken any photographs; he had been studying them all along. Tried to keep her from going to the Lift building for fear she might discover their plan. I’ve been reading a lot about elevators since I found out about my uncle . He knew all he needed to know about elevators for some time now.

No traffic on this Sunday morning, which is fortunate because she’s not paying a whit of attention to the road. She’s been this way many times. She will not take the wrong exit.

If she had met him for dinner, he would have detailed, fork jabbing above their medium-rare steaks and umbrella-adorned cocktails, his infiltration of Chancre’s office, the close escapes, how swiftly he discovered Fulton’s notes. His colleagues at Arbo, no doubt, obtained copies of whatever material had been sent to the Empiricists and United as soon as they discovered they were not the only ones to receive the mysterious dispatches. Trash her apartment when they suspect her of collaborating with Chancre, force her into Natchez’s company: if she does not trust the Intuitionists, perhaps she will trust one of her tribe, his story of correcting the injustices done to her race.

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man’s books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

She is driving on this Sunday morning to her alma mater, the Institute for Vertical Transport, to find out why her name is in Fulton’s journals. To question the only person she can ask now, the one who can explain why Arbo needed to win her confidence. Why a man she never met willed her into his death.

Catastrophic accidents are a-million-in-a-million occurrences, not so much what happens very seldom but what happens when you subtract what happens all the time. They are, historically, good or bad omens, depending on the time and place, urging in reform, a quest for universal standards of elevator maintenance, or instructing the dull and plodding citizens of modernity that there is a power beyond rationality. That the devil still walks the earth and architecture is no substitute for prayer, for cracked knees and desperate barter with the gods.

She does not hear the car horn, let alone the urgency of the car horn. She drifts into the right lane and almost sideswipes the mock wood paneling of the station wagon. The kids in the backseat scream, pink lungs heaving, father’s hands grip the steering wheel, but for all the commotion of this few seconds there is no accident. Lila Mae’s automobile and the family’s automobile do not crash. She decelerates and eases into the shoulder of the highway, gravel popping on the undercarriage. Rests her head on the green rubber of the steering wheel.

Arbo and Natchez are merely unanswered questions. Their intrusion into her life is a matter of cause and effect, prospering along logical trajectories of greed, and only require adequate information to explain them. Time to sift the facts through her fingers and shake out the fine silt until what is left in her hand is what happened. But there is still this matter of Fulton and Intuitionism. She thinks, what passing for white does not account for: the person who knows your secret skin, the one you encounter at that unexpected time on that quite ordinary street. What Intuitionism does not account for: the catastrophic accident the elevator encounters at that unexpected moment on that quite ordinary ascent, the one who will reveal the device for what it truly is. The colored man passing for white and the innocent elevator must rely on luck, the convenience of empty streets and strangers who know nothing, dread the chance encounter with the one who knows who they are. The one who knows their weakness.

She believes the documentary evidence Natchez showed her, even if his blood tie to Fulton has been exposed as a lie. (Back on the highway now: she hadn’t pulled over to ponder the accident that didn’t happen but the one that did, ten days before.) Fulton was colored. In his books, the hatred of the corrupt order of this world, the keen longing for the next one, its next rules. He was the perfect liar the world made him, mouthing a supreme fiction the world accepted as truth. (Back on the highway, going where she’s going.) In constant fear of that shadow, the shadow of the catastrophic accident that would reveal him for what he was. The shadow that envelopes and makes him dark.

Almost there, Lila Mae.

The black gates of the Institute for Vertical Transport are open. On Sunday, the students depart campus to attend mass at the neighborhood churches. The churches of this town welcome all fellow believers, no matter where they were born, what circumstances and choices have led them here. She drives around the east side of campus, duly noting the squat edifice of Fulton Hall, the Engineering Building, even her old home, the Gymnasium, always quiet on a Sunday morning. Trees cluster respectfully at the side of the road as she approaches the declivity that marks the faculty housing. She parks. She closes the door of the sedan. It only takes a minute for Mrs. Rogers to answer her knock. Lila Mae says to the old woman, “He was joking, right? About Intuitionism. It was all a big joke.”

* * *

Sometimes when the wind drove the rain beneath the roof of the porch, when the wind was particularly upset at something or other, the rain would hit the front edge of the couch and wet it. That’s why the old brown couch always smelled so sour: old damp and mold. They never lifted it into the back of the truck and doomed it to the rotting piles at the town dump. It was an old couch and treasured for the solid parity it had achieved between its comforts and defects, so the Watson family kept it on the porch. One example of its magic: the porch paint did not peel if it was underneath the couch. And another: the right side had formed a perfect bucket for Marvin Watson’s behind, widening over the years, incredibly, as Marvin’s behind widened. Marvin sat in his groove that day and tapped the envelope against his thigh. He told his daughter when his waiting ceased, when she cracked down on the first steps of the porch, “Your mother went to the store. She gave me this.”