Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

She pulls him into the ladies’ room before he knows what happened. The ladies’ room in O’Connor’s was designed to accommodate one person. Two people is cozy, and three is scandalous, but that’s how many are in there now: Chuck, Lila Mae and Piefaced Annie. Piefaced Annie, she of the gravely mug, is passed out on the toilet, as she always is at this time of day. O’Connor’s lone female alcoholic, Piefaced Annie puts in a long day and needs this time to rest up for the long final lap of the day’s drinking. She doesn’t look passed out so much as eerily blissful, almost as if … Lila Mae has already taken her pulse just in case. It was a short scurry from her flimsy hiding place in the bar to the bathrooms; she started when she saw Chuck rise and made it around the corner before he’d even escaped the crowd. In the spirit of decency, Lila Mae pushed Piefaced Annie’s legs together from their aerated generosity.

Chuck is equally disturbed by three things: the ease of his kidnapping, which insults his sense of alertness; the unfamiliarity of being in a ladies’ bathroom, which brings to his mind an unsettling flash of his mother squatting; and the surety that Lila Mae is going to drag him into this deplorable business about the Fanny Briggs building. “Lila Mae,” he says, “I don’t think this is very appropriate.” He can feel the wet sink dampen the backs of his thighs.

“Sorry about this, Chuck,” she replies, “but I have to know what happened today.”

“You haven’t checked in upstairs yet?”

“I wanted to be prepared.”

In the end, it is Piefaced Annie’s resemblance to his mother that upsets Chuck the most. He feels like a dirty little boy, standing in the dank cubicle with her. Compared to that, talking with a fugitive from Departmental justice is small potatoes. He looks up at the yellow water stains on the ceiling and tells Lila Mae, “One of the elevators in the Fanny Briggs stack went into total freefall this afternoon. The Mayor was showing off the place to some guys from the French embassy so they could see how great the city works and whatnot. He presses the call button and boom! the cab crashes down. Luckily there was no one on it.”

For the first time it occurs to Lila Mae that someone might have been hurt. “That’s impossible. Total freefall is a physical impossibility.” She shakes her head.

“That’s what happened,” Chuck reaffirms. He’s still looking up at the ceiling. They can hear some of their colleagues whooping outside the door. “Forty floors.”

“Which one?”

“Number Eleven, I think.”

She remembers Number Eleven distinctly. A little shy, but that’s normal in a new cab. “The entire stack is outfitted with the new Arbo antilocks,” Lila Mae argues. “Plus the standard reg gear. I inspected them myself.”

“Did you see them,” Chuck asks tentatively, “or did you intuit them?”

Lila Mae ignores the slur. “I did my job,” she says.

“Maybe you missed something.”

“I did my job,” Lila Mae says. She hears her voice rising: keep cool. “What did Chancre say?”

“Had the Mayor in his office ever since it happened,” Chuck says, attempting to be helpful. “So I don’t know what the official story is, but you get the gist from his speech. He’s making it into a political thing because you’re an Intuitionist. And colored, but he’s being clever about it.”

“I heard that bit.”

“Internal Affairs is looking for you.”

“What are the guys saying?”

“What you would expect,” Chuck tells her. Piefaced Annie groans and he shivers.

“Total freefall? You’re sure?” There’s no way. The cables, for one thing.

“Yes, I’m sure,” he says. “Lila Mae, I think you should really go upstairs and talk to the IAB guys. Even if you did miss something — however much you don’t want to admit that possibility — the sooner you go and talk to them, the better it’s going to go. They’re fair. You know that.”

“That would be standard procedure,” Lila Mae muses. “But this isn’t a standard accident.”

“You should really go upstairs, I’m telling you. There’s nothing else you can do in a situation like this.”

“Chuck, look at me.” She’s decided. “You haven’t seen me, okay?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Tell me you haven’t seen me.”

“I haven’t seen you.”

One of the side effects of people intent on erasing you from their lives is that sometimes they erase you when it might not be beneficial. It would have been delightful for Lila Mae’s fellows in the Department of Elevator Inspectors to see her leave the ladies’ room, because they could have enjoyed a few furious moments of invective, of throaty howls. No one sees Lila Mae when she departs O’Connor’s and it’s their loss. The newsmen outside headquarters are scrabbling away across the sidewalk like dry leaves in the wind. Midtown is clearing out. No one lives in midtown.

Lila Mae has decided to go home. She needs a night to go over exactly what happened at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. She can pretend that she didn’t hear about the accident until tomorrow morning. Plausible. And she has a good face for telling lies. She’s on the subway platform when the problem of the dispatcher occurs to her. Craig told her she had to report to base. The subway arrives: she’ll say she thought it was a paperwork thing that could wait until Monday. That lie could cause her some trouble with IAB, but it’s not totally implausible. Even if they don’t believe her, they can’t discipline her unless she was negligent, and Lila Mae will not allow the possibility that she was negligent. It’s impossible.

When Piefaced Annie shakes off her stupor, she will recall a strange dream about elevators and falling, and will chalk it up to falling off the toilet, which will happen in about an hour.

* * *

From Theoretical Elevators , Volume One, by James Fulton:

We do not know what is next. If we were to take a barbarian and place him, loincloth and all, before one of our magnificent cities, what would he feel? He would feel fear, doubly: the fear of his powerlessness before our architectural excess and our fear, the thing that drives our architectural excess. The dread of imperfection. We do not need cities and buildings; it is the fear of the dark which compels us to erect them instinctively, like insects. Perspective is the foot-soldier of relativity. Just as the barbarian would gaze upon our cities and buildings with fear and incomprehension, so would we gaze upon future cities and future buildings. Is the next building ovoid, pyramidic? Is the next elevator a bubble or is it shaped like a sea shell, journeying both outward and into itself …

Take capacity. The standard residential elevator is designed to accommodate 12 passengers, all of whom we assume to be of average weight and form. This is the Occupant’s Fallacy. The number 12 does not consider the morbidly obese, or the thin man’s convention and necessity of speedy conveyance at the thin man’s convention. We conform to objects, we capitulate to them. We need to reverse this order. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect. Nothing we create works the way it should. The car overheats on the highway, the electric can opener cannot open the can. We must tend to our objects and treat them as newborn babes. Our elevators are weak. They tend to get colds easily, they are forgetful. Our elevators ought to be variable in size and height, retractable altogether, impervious to scratches, self-cleaning, possessing a mouth. The thin man’s convention can happen at any time; indeed, they happen all the time …

* * *

What else can she say? His statement is friendly, steeped in chummy argot, the intonation jovial, and the man’s face so banal and uncomplicated, so like this country, that Lila Mae almost thinks she knows him. When the man says, “You’re the little lady,” all she thinks to say is, “I guess I am.”