Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Lila Mae had hoped to intercept the letter at the mailbox and have time to read the words and consider them for a few days before she would tell or not tell her parents. Her schedule at Mrs. Applebaum’s made it impossible. She never knew when she was going to get out. She had considered bribing Mr. Granger, the mailman who served colored town, but had decided it too complicated. She saw the red crest of the Institute for Vertical Transport, which she had seen first a few months before in the town library, and saw the soft shark teeth where her mother had opened the letter, probably with one of the Watson household’s many dull knives. As her father extended the envelope to her he said, “You didn’t tell me you had applied.” The envelope was good paper. The thick, elegant paper they have up there. No broken mills, cheap mills, there. She withdrew the letter, it was still light enough to read without getting a headache. Her father watched her eyes. He wore his house clothes, the coarse trousers and heavy shirt he wore on the weekdays, before and after work. When he was out of the Huntley’s uniform. The house clothes changed. They were replaced every few years by new versions in different colors. The Huntley’s uniform, however, remained the same. Lila Mae saw it once. He snuck it out of work one day to show Lila Mae and her mother. Colored people were not allowed into Huntley’s if they wanted to buy things. Only if they worked there. She read the letter and replaced it in the envelope.

Her father asked, “What are you going to tell Mrs. Applebaum?”

“I told her I might be leaving to go to school. I told her that when I started.”

“You didn’t tell us,” her father answered. Then he said, “There’s no shortage of people who could take your place with Mrs. Applebaum.”

She had decided when she saw him on the couch. When she knew he knew. Lila Mae said, “I hate to leave you and Ma all by yourselves.”

Her father leaned back, to a verse of metal growling from inside the couch. He said, “You don’t worry about us. You worry about yourself. It’s not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it’s the same.”

* * *

He lived here, assembled his vehicular epiphanies here, mulled over the bolts and pins of his mythology in this very house. Mrs. Rogers leaves her in the ruined parlor. Beneath her, an angry slash of ripped upholstery grins ticking. The fireplace mantle has been swept clean — she can see the coat sleeves of the men who trashed her own apartment brush across it — and her host’s collection of ceramic horses are dashed to the floor, broken heads and limbs. The men’s fingers groped inside the couch and chairs after Fulton’s notebooks and Mrs. Rogers’s loose change, smashed the two emerald lamps to see what may or may not have been inside them, cracked the frame of Fulton’s portrait over taut knees. Lila Mae rubs her hands on her thighs and surveys the damage. The odor of cigar smoke lingers in the dull air and she can see a cigar butt ground into a photograph of Mrs. Rogers and her children, in happier times, not here. They didn’t find anything but must persist, a determined gang thundering through the houses of those who might possess the object. Their violent blundering seems so pathetic to Lila Mae now, a child’s plea for attention, a good hug. They’ll never find it.

Mrs. Rogers returns from the kitchen with tea and thin butter cookies. Lila Mae reads the old grooves in her skin, the ripples around her eyes and mouth, the after-images of old expressions. The human face is only capable of two or three real expressions, and they leave their mark. Lila Mae thinks, she only has one expression and what will her face look like forty years from now. Eroded rock, a wall of dry canyon. Mrs. Rogers sighs, “They gave this place a real going over. Just a fine mess they made. Broke all of my horses. Broke they legs off.” She doesn’t look at the mess on the floor, busying herself with the delicate disrobing of a sugar cube. “I was in the city visiting my sister and I come home to this.”

“Last night?” Lila Mae asks. “What time did you get back?”

“About eleven last night.”

Then they hit the place right after she left Ben Urich. When they realized she knew. Lila Mae’s been a practicing solipsist since before she could walk, and the days’ recent events are doing irreparable damage to her condition.

Mrs. Rogers points to a bucket in the corner. A gray dishrag slithers over its lip. Preoccupied, she says, “One of them relieved himself on the floor. You can’t smell it, can you?”

“I don’t smell a thing,” Lila Mae lies. “Did you call the police? Institute security?”

“What for? They probably the ones that did it.”

Lila Mae leans forward in her chair. “This is the first time, right? When you told the Institute that this place had been broken into after Fulton’s death and his notebooks stolen, you made that up, correct?”

“It may have been a lie,” Mrs. Rogers shrugs. Stands. She hasn’t touched her tea and snacks. It’s all ritual, Lila Mae appraises. Her host says, “I did most of the upstairs, but I haven’t finished down here. Do you want to give me a hand?” An old house and an old woman. She needs to preserve the rules of this place, the order she keeps beneath the pitched roof. Even though they have pissed on it. She bends over slowly before the fireplace and picks up one of her fallen horses. It kneels on its stomach in her rough palm. No legs. Mrs. Rogers gets down on the floor and looks for its legs.

Lila Mae grabs the broom that leans against the back of her chair. She picks an area, sweeps couch innards and shredded paper into mounds. The old woman says, “To answer your question, yes, he was having a joke on them at first, but it wasn’t a joke at the end. It became true.” She discovers one of the tiny thoroughbred’s legs under the newspaper rack and holds it up to the window. “You have to realize something about James,” continuing, tilting the leg in the sunlight. “Deep down he was real country. No kind of sense at all in his head except his own kind of sense. That’s what made him what he was.”

After all that has happened, Lila Mae figures she can put up with the woman’s drifting explanations. There’s no rush. Lila Mae says, “But he wasn’t who he was. He passed for white. He was colored.”

“Well look at you,” Mrs. Rogers says with exhaustion, sparing a second for a quick glance at her visitor. “Not the same girl who was knocking on my door last week, are you? With your chest all puffed out like a peacock. You’ve seen something between now and then, huh?” She places the horse on the mantle, where it rolls over on its side and exposes its white belly and manufacturer’s lot number. “I didn’t even know myself until his sister come up to visit one time, and I lived under the same roof with the man. I knew he wasn’t like no other white man I had worked for, but I didn’t think … She came up to the door one night — I don’t know, fifteen years ago? Twenty? Whenever it was, it was right before he wrote the second one of his Intuitionist books.”

This information isn’t hard to recall for Lila Mae. There was an eight-month break between the publication of Theoretical Elevators Volume One and Fulton’s embarkation on Volume Two. It was twenty years ago when Fulton’s sister knocked on his door. What did she look like. What do you say to a brother you have not seen for decades. Lila Mae can barely speak to people she saw last week.

“She shows up at the door,” Mrs. Rogers continues, “and tells me she has to see James. She was one of them down-home women. You could see she made herself the clothes she got on her back. I look her up and down because I don’t know who this woman is, and say I got to see if Mr. Fulton is receiving visitors. You should have seen his face when he walked down the stairs. His pipe fell right out of his mouth onto the floor — you can still see the carpet where he burned it. He starts fussing and telling me to go out to the store — suddenly he got to have fish for dinner. So I leave, and when I get back, she’s gone and James is sitting in his study reading his journals like nothing’s strange. Asks me what time will dinner be ready, just like that. He told me who she was later, but that was after.”