Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

Lila Mae hadn’t heard the story until Chuck told her about it. Far from explaining Pompey’s animus toward her, the story merely obscured matters. Did Pompey resent Lila Mae for presenting them with a more exotic token, thus diluting their hatred toward him, the hatred that had calcified over time into something he came to cherish and savor as friendship; or were his haughty stares and keen disparagements his attempt at a warning against becoming him, and thus an aspect of racial love? Pompey says now, “She’s finally getting what’s been coming to her for a long time now,” and Halitosis Harry smacks him on the back in agreement. Nobody’s spotted her yet except for the bartender, who’s too much of a pro to say anything. She’s not hiding exactly, but most of her body is secreted behind a pillar conveniently situated between the door and the crowd at the radio. The same leering leprechaun on the front door of O’Connor’s shimmies on the pillar in triplicate. Or maybe she is hiding. She’s not sure. She doesn’t know how to get Chuck’s attention. He’s been quiet through all of it. One of her colleagues lets fly a rolling rebel yell at something Chancre just said.

“Is it true that the inspector was an Intuitionist?” a reporter asks.

“Yes, the inspector of the Fanny Briggs building, a Miss Lila Mae Watson, is an Intuitionist. I’m real reluctant to turn this terrible affair into a political matter, but I’m sure most of you are well aware that my opponent in the election for Guild Chair is also an Intuitionist.”

Lila Mae realizes that the time she spent thinking about how to navigate O’Connor’s would have been better spent listening to the radio or simply going up to Chuck and grabbing him out of the mob. That would have surprised them. But now she’s no more wiser than when she entered.

“Do you think that Intuitionist methods, which in the past you have described as ‘heretical and downright voodoo,’ may have played a part in today’s crash?”

“Right now Internal Affairs is looking into that very possibility. We have a copy of the building’s inspection report and believe me, we are scrutinizing and cogitating as I speak. Gentlemen, it’s just these very kinds of occurrences I have been trying to eradicate in my four years as Guild Chair, and I don’t think I’m being immodest when I tell you I think I’ve made a pretty good go of it. Our Department sedans are shiny as never before and morale has never been so high. It’s almost scary. Sometimes people ask me how I made this Department the crown jewel, the very pearl of city services. I tell them that sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Why hold truck with the uppity and newfangled when Empiricism has always been the steering light of reason? Just like it was in our fathers’ day, and our fathers’ fathers’. Today’s incident is just the kind of unfortunate mishap that can happen when you kowtow to the latest fashions from overseas. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, gentlemen, I can give you my blood oath on that little crawdaddy.”

It occurs to her that now she doesn’t have an alibi either, just like the anonymous wraiths on the side of the highway. No one knows who they are.

* * *

Not that Lila Mae couldn’t use some excitement in her life, as the two men searching her apartment are discovering through items and effects. Jim’s on his knees in Lila Mae’s closet, forcing his plump fingers into her shoes and testing the heels for secret hiding places. She has one pair of worn sneakers, left over from when she first moved to the city and spent long hours on trudging marches between the buildings. Each time she came to the city’s edges and saw the churning brown rivers beyond, Lila Mae would hit a right angle and turn back into the buildings, deeper in. She’d never experienced anonymity like that: it’s as if the place stimulates enzymes that form a carapace. The walks petered out about a year ago. Now she sits. The rest of her footwear consists of Department-reg wingtips, shined to obsessive gleam in the wake of Chancre’s image crusade. She has five pairs of them, arranged to the days of the work week. Friday’s pair is missing.

Jim’s already searched every pocket of her clothes, traced every stitch. Find it, is his motto. Jim’s the more obvious of this duo, sworn to his day’s specific orders. Today’s are “get evidence.” John’s the philosophically inclined one, prone to staring moodily out of the attic window of the house he lives in with his parents. Continuing to stare out even after Louisa, his next-door neighbor, has finished undressing and turned out the lights. John needs patterns, and labors after them even when circumstances betray him. Because there must be patterns, experience is recursive, and if the pattern has not announced itself yet, it will, eloquent and emphatic in a mild-mannered sort of way. He’s still searching for a concordance between the loss of his virginity (purchased) and an ankle sprain (accidental) exactly three years later, give or take an hour. John is sure it will come, awaiting another item in the series or a new perspective on the extant ones. No matter. For now he satisfies himself with an appraisal of Lila Mae’s clothes, which gently brush over Jim’s bent back. Very few casual clothes, and what there are of them favor autumnal spectra: damp browns, rust, brittle grays. Her four dark blue suits (one, again, is missing) are identical, describing, John thinks, a pathological affinity for regularity, the constant and true. An attempt to fit in that unavoidably calls attention to itself. It appeases John’s societal schemata that Lila Mae is of the colored persuasion.

Jim and John are white, and thanks to the vagaries of statistical distribution, average citizens of this country. Contrary to the universal constant of partners, Jim and John are not tall and short, fat and skinny, jaunting into comic dissimilarity. They look alike, and look like a great number of other people. Their fraternity glut the police files of known assailants; they reach for the grocer’s last box of cereal to prevent the next customer from enjoying it, and don’t even like cereal. Banks are full of them, and movie theaters and public transport. The invisible everymen, the true citizens. Lila Mae counts few people in this world as friends. Jim and John are the rest. Dusty brown clumps of hair, prow jaws, complexions quick to blood. Eaters of steak, fat gobblers, belchers. (The Department of Elevator Inspectors is overflowing with men like this, but don’t be fooled by their officious demeanors and methodical bent: these guys aren’t Department.) Hot dogs and mustard is Jim’s favorite meal, mustard being a discreet element and not mere condiment. John likes hamburgers with ketchup — fine distinctions are not lost on John, who is the sort that prides himself on knowing what is what. With regards to their present duty, what’s what is that they haven’t found what they are looking for.

Two rooms: a main room with just enough space to prevent Lila Mae from being trampled by herself, and a smaller cube that barely accommodates a bed and dresser. A plant, a piggy bank, a plastic pear. Her few possessions are aloof in their perches, on sills and tables, confident that their ranks will not grow and that the competition for Lila Mae’s attention (or lack thereof) will remain as it has been for some time. What strikes John the most is the studied appearance of habitation. She is trying to convince other people that she lives here, but the impression instead is that of slow moving-out, piece by piece. Nothing rattles in the piggy bank.

“This place must get a lot of light,” John says. Outside of Lila Mae’s window, the red bulb on top of a radio tower blinks slow as a lizard.

“A lot of light,” Jim replies.