Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Lila Mae has been here before. In her last semester at the Institute for Vertical Transport. Arbo invited the graduating class to a recruitment meeting conducted in a long room with glass walls high above the street. As Lila Mae and her fellows sipped coffee and nibbled at French pastries, the tall man from Arbo, in his dark and expensive suit, described the nurturing atmosphere and opportunities for advancement the elevator manufacturing concern could offer graduates of the most prestigious elevator inspection school in the country. At one time he, too, was fresh out of elevator school and eager to rescue the cities. At one time, he revealed, he was lured by the romance of life in the trenches, the dizzy rush of wrestling the devices to the ground until they confessed, the holy crusade against defect. Arbo offers more, he said, his hands wide across the vista behind him, the low countries beyond the city, the very clouds palpable. Arbo creates the future, he told them, inspectors serve the future. The students considered their shabby clothes and the grimy institutional yellow of Department offices. These recruitment sessions at elevator companies were a ritual. Lila Mae considered them a final test of their commitment to public service. Temptation. In all the years of the process, not one student had ever forsaken the lure of the streets, the moral imperative of the good work. They trickle to the corporate world only after a tour of duty down there, in the shadows, dodging rats. Only after being tested, after considering the grim pennies of a city paycheck, do they return to Arbo and United and the rest, defeated, hats in hand, begging for release and better suits. Near graduation time, the elevator concerns extend invitations, and the students listen to the devil and hold their ground.

The Arbo Building is one of the tallest in the city, as befits a company whose prosperity is an index to verticality. As big as they are, they cannot fill the building: they enable the city and leave it to others to fill, as it has always been. Lila Mae has to ask the security guard at the front desk where the man’s office is. He consults a ledger. He directs her to Elevator Bank C, the express elevators. Arbo cannot fill the entire building, but they’ve got dibs on the top floors. It keeps them on their toes: no matter how high they are, the sky still distracts and reminds that there is always higher.

The express elevator is empty, one of the latest Arbo models, and silent as it disdains the low floors. Ignores them. Lila Mae rides alone. She so rarely rides with civilians, the people who justify her profession. Or former profession. She’s not on the clock today. Not this Monday.

On the eightieth floor, the receptionist asks if she can help Lila Mae, her voice cheer in a vacuum. Lila Mae says she’s here to see Raymond Coombs. She gives her name. The receptionist enunciates into the squat gray intercom. Coombs is startled, words crackling into the flat air of the office. He instructs the receptionist to let her pass.

The carpet is pliant under her feet, chewing up those brogues of hers. In the hallway she passes a display case containing a miniature replica of Arbo’s first machine, the Excelsior. The brochure reprinted on a placard behind the glass promises “a delightful marriage of luxury and industry, where passengers can ride comfortably, ferried to the destination by the very best of today’s mechanical conveyance.” The hallways are silent, everybody’s in their offices or out somewhere. Lila Mae stalls out before the antique device. It seems sad to Lila Mae. They do not care about comfort anymore. There’s no more hiding the machine’s purpose, out with the couches and engravings of griffins and nymphs. Below the manufacturer’s oath, Lila Mae sees an endorsement from the management of the Charleston Hotel, the recipient of the prototype lift. It says, “The upper floors can now be the most desirable in the house, whence the guest makes the transit in less than half a minute of repose and quiet, and, arriving there, enjoys a purity and coolness of atmosphere and an exemption from noise, dust and exhalations.” They took the wrecking ball to the old Charleston years ago. Wasn’t tall enough.

Raymond Coombs’s office lacks one wall. Substituted is glass; but for the blinds stacked up by the ceiling, Coombs’s back could be to air. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbow. He wears a crisp white oxford shirt punished by gold suspenders — corporate creation as opposed to the coarse fabrics of the man’s former disguise. Those struggling working-man stitches. His tie is red and green and shiny. She says, “Nice office,” looking beyond him to the dirty river hundreds of feet below.

Coombs says, “I’ve paid my dues.” He closes a file on his desk. To be truthful, he is more surprised at being interrupted at his paperwork than at her appearance in his office. He removes his tortoise-shell glasses and places them in his shirt pocket.

Lila Mae notices a photograph on the east wall of the room, a head shot of the famous reverend. The man who is so loud down South. She says, pointing, “They let you have his picture up.”

“My employers allow me a certain latitude,” he responds, shrugging. “I do my job and that’s all they care about. Would you like a seat?”

She stands. “When did it start? That Friday or before that?”

He purses his lips and considers. “As soon as we saw your name in his notebooks. Personally, I didn’t think much of it. The codebreakers downstairs spent two days working this column of numbers we found in the margin of one of the notebook pages. Didn’t get anywhere. It turned out Fulton was just trying to add up his dry cleaning bill. He put all kinds of shit in there. So, no, at first your name being in his notebooks didn’t mean anything in and of itself, but the guys upstairs wanted us to follow up every lead.”

The intercom buzzes. Raymond Coombs instructs the young woman at the front desk that he doesn’t want to be disturbed.

Lila Mae nods toward the photograph on the desk. “That your wife?”

“Married for twelve years. Works over at Metropolitan Hospital. She’s a registered nurse.”

“Kids?”

“A boy.” Coombs turns the photograph from view. His voice is an octave or two higher than it was in Intuitionist House, in her hotel room. He says, “We didn’t know what you knew, if anything. We’d already dispatched Jim and John to your apartment, but once we heard about the accident at Fanny Briggs, I thought it might be wise to send Reed up there to intercept. I figured the news of the black box might be enough to flush you out. See what you knew. The accident changed everything. It was a bonus. That made it personal. Yes,” he says, fingers flitting on his club tie, “I’d have to say that the accident helped things considerably.”

His eyes travel slowly down her body, rest on the brown leather satchel she holds across her abdomen. “Do you want me to go on?” he asks.

She nods. No one could foresee the accident.

“At first we really did think that Chancre had sabotaged Number Eleven,” he says, finishing-school diction all the way, “but our spies informed us that he was as surprised as we were. Luckily, you were fixated on the idea, with our encouragement, and that Pompey fellow. At least you were predictable that way,” he says, grinning. “Let one colored in and you’re integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.”

She doesn’t take the bait. “Keep talking,” Lila Mae orders.

“Once we knew we had you,” he continues, “I saw that you could still be useful, even if we weren’t sure about what you knew about the notebooks. You certainly didn’t give up any information, but we just chalked that up to what we’d read in your Department file — that you didn’t trust anybody. I told Reed to send you to see Fulton’s old maid — the old bat wasn’t responding to any of our overtures. But when you didn’t come back after that, I had to turn on the charm. It threw us for a loop.”