Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Lila Mae hears a car door slam outside. Through the window, she sees her old Engineering professor Dr. Heywood lock the door of his car. Returning from church and prayer for the next place. Beyond. It is need. She has always considered herself an atheist. She has knelt beside her mother and father in church and said the words she was supposed to say, but she never believed them, and when she came North she stopped going. She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion. Anyone can start a religion. They just need the need of others.

They haven’t made much headway into the mess left, presumably, by Arbo and their bruiser army. Lila Mae, for her part, has spent the last few minutes sweeping up a mound of grit and then brushing it out into a thin layer before gathering it again. Mrs. Rogers has been fussing over her silly tchotchkes, her broken horses. It’s useless. Lila Mae asks, “Why did he put my name in his notebooks?”

Mrs. Rogers sits down on the couch. Too tired. Touches the side of the teapot and frowns. Cold. “Toward the end he knew he was going to die. He spent his days and nights all running around trying to finish his last project. Nights he went over to the library they named after him — he said he liked the peace there.” She’s looking at her hands. They’re palm-up in her lap, dead, overturned crabs. “He said he saw a light on in the room across the way, and one day he asked me if I knew what the name of the colored student on campus was. I told him I didn’t know, and that’s all I know about it.” Looking now in her visitor’s eyes. “You should take what’s left. I don’t want to hold on to it anymore. It’s too much.”

She rises and walks into the kitchen. Lila Mae can’t see what she’s doing. But she hears it. Hears squeaking, it takes her a few seconds to place it. It is an old pulley, doing what it was meant to do. There’s a dumbwaiter in the kitchen. A primitive hand elevator containing all the principles of verticality. She hears rocks scraping.

When the old woman returns, she holds a stack of notebooks, Fulton’s cherished Fontaines, wrapped loosely in a shred of stained leather. The sacred scrolls, of course. What did she do? Lila Mae can see it: she’s removed some bricks from the back wall of the dumbwaiter shaft and opened up a shallow dark hole. Where the texts waited. They stand for a minute, the two colored women, face to face, a generation and two feet apart, djinns of dust whirling in the shafts of afternoon light between them. Lila Mae takes the notebooks into her hands. It’s a good weight. She asks, “What made you send out the packages?”

The old woman says, “He left instructions. He said when I sent them out, someone would come.”

* * *

She got lucky the first place she checked out. She wanted to live in the colored part of the city after so long in the pale alien territory of the Institute. Graduation exercises done, Lila Mae was on her own. She needed a place to live because she had a job in the city. The first colored woman in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. She wanted to tell all the people on the sidewalk of her accomplishment, that old dignified lady on the stoop fanning herself with a newspaper, the steel-eyed cop on the corner with the sun in his buttons. That she’d made it through. The first woman of her race to earn a badge. Grab their shoulders and shake them. They wouldn’t care, of course. No one knew what kept this city up and climbing. They didn’t know her and it was the first hot day of summer.

It was the island’s colored neighborhood but it was not the colored town she’d grown up in. It had come into being overnight when the industrialists’ tunnels broke the surface and they laid a sign: SUBWAY STOP HERE. These rowhouses, tenements, the lines of them across the Island from river to river. That’s how the first tenants found this neighborhood and that’s how she found it. She emerged from the heat of the underground tunnel and pondered the intersection. Any street as viable as any other. Lila Mae randomly picked one amiable block. Halfway down, after dodging the white spray of an open fire hydrant, she saw the sign. ROOMS FOR RENT, the little afterthought VACANCY swinging on two iron hooks beneath it.

The real estate speculator who had staked out this street’s acres had opted for six-story tenements with Italianate facades, gray and sturdy. Rooms for whole families; later, two or three families in one apartment. A good investment. A skinny white man with damp black hair sat on the stoop listening to a horse race on his small radio. He mopped his brow with a rag as he yelled at the announcer, ladling out invective. Lila Mae patiently waited for the race to end and hoped that the man’s fortunes would not have an impact on his answers to her queries. He wore gray trousers held true by red suspenders and a dirty white sleeveless T-shirt. She noticed the engraving in the arch above the door: THE BERTRAM ARMS. He didn’t wait to hear the end of the race, suddenly clicking the knob with another volley of curses. Lila Mae said, “Excuse me, sir, I’m looking for the building manager.”

He looked her over. “You want a room?”

“Yes. The sign says—”

“I know what it says. Come on up,” he told her, scooping up the radio, “I’ll show it to you.”

The lobby still had its first coat of paint, queasy green coated with a healthy layer of dust trapped by congealed grease from apartment stoves. She didn’t like the smell but figured she could get used to it if she had to. “It’s on the fifth floor,” the man said. “The windows face east, and that side of the building gets a lot of light in the morning.” She followed him up the smooth steps. “No pets. Some of the tenants got pets but they’re not s’pposed to.” The heat of the day waited inside the halls. Some of the doors to the apartments were ajar to allow cross-ventilation but Lila Mae could not get a good look inside them as they climbed higher. The rooms were quiet. “There are pay phones on each floor. People generally get their messages, but you have to be nice to your neighbors.”

He opened the door to apartment 27. “See for yourself,” he said. He waited outside.

It wasn’t that big but it was clean, more or less. She could still see the vague outlines of the previous tenant’s pictures dust-scored into the walls. She saw that there were two rooms, a large main room and a smaller one that might fit a small bed. She didn’t have many things. They’ve probably cut up these apartments a bit, Lila Mae thought. She could fit a bed in there. Bigger than her room at the Institute, anyway, and she’d lived in that box for three years.

It was stuffy because the windows were closed. Lila Mae walked to the window and let the air in. She could see pretty far east, until a couple of large buildings cut off the view of the river. She’d rather face the really tall stuff downtown, but there was time for that. Without turning from the window she yelled, “How much did you say this was?”

“Fifteen dollars and forty-five cents a week,” the man said. “Due each Monday. And a three-dollar key deposit.”

She considered the room. It was a good deal, she thought. She could swing it on her salary. A new start. Lila Mae thought, she could make a home in the city.

* * *

She has been here before. In the hard plaza, among the stone animals. Whether the granite menagerie was Arbo’s idea or the sculptor’s vision is not clear. The animals — a baby rhino, a lion, a hyena, on cocked forelegs, with drooping necks, irisless eyes — watch a horizon that does not exist for the buildings, stoop to drink from an oasis that does not exist for the concrete. Any symbolism intended to illuminate Arbo’s corporate mission or personality is lost on Lila Mae. The animals don’t move. Men and women in conservative businesswear keep their distance as they navigate the plaza, towards subways and watering holes and lunch establishments. Prey, afraid deep in the strata of their consciousness of the predator’s waking, improbable and impending.