The Intuitionist Read online

  Part TWO

  From the lost notebooks of James Fulton:

  By the ninetieth floor, everything is air, but that’s jumping ahead a bit. It starts with the first floor, with dirt, with idiocy. As if we were meant for this. As if this is what fire meant, or language. To crawl about, prey to the dull obviousness of biology, as if we were not meant to fly. To lift. It starts on the first floor, with the grub’s-eye view of the world: dirt. What will, happen: it will move from the first floor, from safety, from all you’ve ever known and that takes a bit of recalibrating your imagination. To recognize that come-hither look of possibility. Trust in the cab, made by people like you, trust is the worst of it: it was made by people like you and you are weak and you make mistakes. They have incorrectly imagined this journey, misfigured the equipment necessary. By the fifth floor, the unavoidable consideration of physical laws, the slender fragility of the cables holding the car. Your own fragility. The elevator does not complain, climbs in a bubble of safety, fifteen and sixteen and twenty-six floors and no mishap: well that’s no comfort, the accident could come at any time, and the higher up the worse it will be. Could anything survive a fall from this height? They say they have safety devices but things can go wrong and things often go wrong. Giddy at forty—made it this far. And yet still so much to say goodbye to if this is the end. This floor, fifty, where they all wait, those who will not receive apologies, the dead, those who have been wronged and are too low now for reconciliation. Those broken by your passage, the odd ricochets of your passage to this ride: there’s nothing to be done. There is only the ride. At seventy-five no turning back. No need for safety devices because there’s only up, this ascension. It is not so bad, this thing, that world falling away below and there are sturdy cables and a fine cab, dependable allies. Even the thought, if there were only more time, possesses no weight here, for nothing has weight, it has all been taken care of, the motor can handle any mass differential between the cab and the counterweight, that’s its job, and what wish could possibly weigh so much that the machine could not accommodate it? Half enjoying it now. The walls are falling away, and the floor and the ceiling. They lose solidity in the verticality. At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension. It’s all bright and all the weight and cares you have been shedding are no longer weight and cares but brightness. Even the darkness of the shaft is gone because there is no disagreement between you and the shaft. How can you breathe when you no longer have lungs? The question does not perturb, that last plea of rationality has fallen away floors ago, with the earth. No time, no time for one last thought, what was the last thing I thought last night before I fell asleep, the very last thought, what was it, because before you can think that thought everything is bright and you have fallen away in the perfect elevator.

  * * *

  The grid is quiet this Sunday morning. The citizens do not live this far downtown. Too much power in the lattice. Some tried. They discovered their hair on the pillow upon waking, fingernails and teeth loose and swimming in their flesh. Never mind the impossible prospect of organizing complete sentences. (She tightens her tie, tinkers with her collar.) So no one lives in the financial district anymore, no one lives too close to the humming municipal temples. The streets of Federal Plaza are deserted and there are no shadows for the clouds, which snare the light and stain every ray silver. She parked outside Mama’s Bakery last night for a few hours, clambered over the upholstery into the back seat, nestled into a corner but did not sleep. At the first alarms of dawn she pulled her dress over her head. Armed herself in her Monday suit—not the right day, of course, but her calendar’s been scrambled of late. A manufacturing defect. It is not as crisp as she likes it; the erectile reserves of Chinese laundry starch have been woefully depleted. Her suit is good enough for what she needs to do, however, as far as she can tell from the automobile’s tiny mirrors. She rubs spit into a dry patch of skin below her right eye. She drags her fingers through her hair.

  It started here. A week ago. It is in its guts.

  Lila Mae pounds on the door for ten minutes (she counts) before the sleeping guard steps out of the darkened lobby and up to the glass. His tight brown curly hair points in wild directions and is firmly matted on the right hemisphere, the same side of his face, it turns out, that is bloodless and etched with odd wrinkles. Lila Mae presses her badge up to the glass. He pauses to scratch his right buttock before unhooking the wide loop of keys on his belt.

  “I thought you guys were all finished with Number Eleven,” he says.

  “It’s never finished,” she says, halfway down the lobby, brogues clattering on the faux marble like hooves, charging like a bull.

  She hears, distantly, the keys rattle as the guard locks the front door. His voice in the fog: “You need me to let you into the basement?” She does not look back. He’s already been ejected from consciousness, got the bum’s rush from her psyche. Lila Mae stands in the middle of Elevator Bank B. This is the longest she’s gone between inspections since she joined the Department. Never taken a vacation, and here she is a whole nine days since she departed 125 Walker. She lays her palms on the first floor entrance of Elevator Number Eleven of the Fanny Briggs building. She feels the metal beneath the green industrial paint. It is black and cool. Ambient temperature. From far away, she hears the guard ask a question but she cannot make it out because it is so far away.

  Nothing.

  At first she decides on Number Ten, next-door neighbor to the dear departed. She presses the call button and can hear, she thinks, the selector rouse groggily, still damp from dreaming. A click. Then she changes her mind and goes for Number Fourteen, Eleven’s opposite in Bank B. Fourteen is also flanked by two elevators, and must share that distinct middle child anxiety. A bell rings, cheerful and pert: it will never get more cynical and embittered, that bell, never flag in its cheer through hundreds of thousands of chimes. It wasn’t built that way. Number Fourteen welcomes its passenger and the passenger boards.

  Arbo recalled their Metropolitans a year after their heavily promoted release to fix a small but eventually significant cosmetic problem. Seems the cleaning agent used by the city’s maintenance army didn’t sit very well with the cab’s inner panels of simulated wood: after a hundred applications or so of Scrubbo, the panels began to take on a green-brown color in odd patches, in shapes that reminded more than one person of mold. Disease. In short, the cleaning agent and the paneling didn’t take to each other. One approach might have been to instruct the owner of the new, deluxe Metropolitans to use a different cleaner, one less caustic and reactive to the sensitive skin of the elevators. It was not to be. The city had purchased, at a very reasonable price, at generous manhandled discount, a lifetime supply of this certain Scrubbo. What “lifetime supply” entailed exactly when it comes to a city was never fully hammered out; suffice it to say that there are crates and crates of the stuff in basements of government buildings, in janitors’ closets throughout the municipality, and they all proudly display the beguiling purple smile of the Scrubbo mascot, for whom no job is too dirty. The politicians refused to budge on this Scrubbo matter. It had been paid for. Indeed, it was agreed that the incident was Arbo’s fault for not properly testing their equipment for possible safety hazards (there is not, and has never been, any evidence for a link between the cab’s unsightly dermatological problem and human illness), and, in addition, there might be a lawsuit on the horizon. Even up in their towers, behind reinforced glass, Arbo knew which way the wind was blowing. They changed the panels for free, and to this day the Arbo Metropolitan is the elevator most city employees associate with their hapless drudgery, a fact supported over the years by polls solemnly conducted by the United Elevator Co.

  These are new Arbo Metropolitans, Lila Mae notes: the inside panels do not betray the characteristic scratch marks left by the less than circumspect Arbo repairmen when they replaced the blighted panels. She
noticed this fact on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. She tells herself, do not look at Number Fourteen. She is in this car to help recall, completely, her inspection of Number Eleven, which now sits in the morgue a few buildings away, in grotesque shards on metal trays. She does not wish to taint her reenactment. The reverberations of Number Fourteen’s idling drive insinuate themselves through her shoes, sing up through the muscles in her leg. She shuts them out. She does not feel them. Closes her eyes. Lila Mae reaches out into the darkness and presses the glass convexity of a button.

  Number Fourteen’s counterweight begins its decent into the shaft, diffident and wary.

  This is the wrong darkness. It is the darkness of this day and this time and this elevator and Lila Mae needs that further-back darkness, the one she encountered on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. She can’t touch the walls of this elevator as she did those of Number Eleven, for fear of taint. She imagines her hand extending out to the unyielding solidity of that dead elevator’s walls, the way the inner paneling embraced her hand’s curves. She’s, she’s almost at that darkness now. It is a slow curtain dropping before this day’s darkness. There. This new darkness is the old darkness of Number Eleven. She watches the sure and untroubled ascent of Number Eleven. The genies appear on cue, dragging themselves from the wings. The genie of velocity, the genie of the hoisting motor’s brute exertions, the red cone genie of the selector as it ticks off the entity’s progress through the shaft, the amber nonagon genie of the grip shoes as they skip frictionless up T-rails. All of them energetic and fastidious, describing seamless verticality to Lila Mae in her mind’s own tongue. They zigzag and circle, hop from foot to foot, fluctuate for her, their only spectator, the only one who’s ever in the seats out there. They gyrate for her and reenact without omission their roles from last Thursday’s performance. The genies never forget their lines. Lila Mae rises steady, Number Eleven is a smooth ride, alright. The genies bow and do not linger for her lonely applause. She opens her eyes. The doors open to the dead air of the forty-second floor. She hits the Lobby button.

  Nothing.

  * * *

  And if nothing and Chancre are telling the truth (she now believes he is, mistrust now as useless as trust), then this was a catastrophic accident. That is what the remains will give up to Forensics’ latex probings: nothing. No telltale incision scar on an innocent inch of coaxial cable, no wires corkscrewing off the famously dependable antilocks. Nothing at all. (A few days from now when this is all over, Lila Mae will think to call Chuck for the exact wording of Forensics’ findings, and his confirmation will seem to her remote: without meaning.) You don’t expect them in the early failure phase; they usually pop up during the random failure phase, in adolescence, the fruit of malevolent pathology. Something gave in the elevator for no reason and its brother components gave in, too. A catastrophic accident. The things that emerge from the black, nether reaches of space and collide here, comets that connect with this frail world after countless unavailing ellipses. Emissaries from the unknowable. (The security guard assigned to the Fanny Briggs building watches her stumble from Number Fourteen, proceed across the lobby, blind, and tug on the locked front door.) She is never wrong when it comes to Intuitionism. Things occur to her. What her discipline and Empiricism have in common: they cannot account for the catastrophic accident. Did the genies try to warn her, were they aware, twitching at times, forbidden to make plain their knowledge but subtly attempting to alert her through the odd wiggle and shimmy. She wouldn’t know what to look for. Whatever signals the genies may or may not have dispatched through her darkness went unread. She imagines the proximity of the catastrophe sending ripples through the darkness from the future, agitating the genies with impending violence. It’s irrelevant. She didn’t see it. (She doesn’t appear to see him. The guard watches as she continues to pull at the front door even though the lock does not give. She keeps trying.) Chancre and Pompey did not lie, and no one else sabotaged Number Eleven, she’s sure of that too. How often do catastrophic accidents touch down here. The last one in this country was what, she searches after it, thirty-five years ago, out West. The ten passengers (midjoke, aimless perusal of the inspection certificate, fondling house-key weight in trouser pockets, trying not to whistle) had time to scream, of course, but not much else. The investigators (and what a hapless bunch they would have been, the field so young) never found any reason for it. Total freefall. What happens when too many impossible events occur, when multiple redundancy is not enough. Scratching heads over this mystery of the new cities. The last recorded incident of total freefall happened in the Ukraine, and was eventually traced to an inept contractor’s failure to properly install the progressive brakes in the undercarriage. Five died. She can’t remember the make of the elevator—what company was most popular in that region at that time. Can’t remember. (Finally the guard unlocks the door. She still doesn’t see him. He watches her stagger down the broad stone steps, about to fall any number of times.) Nobody in her business would wish a catastrophic accident on their worst enemy. They’re a superstitious lot, and envious and bitter of every colleague’s success, but wish a crash like this on a nemesis and you’re just asking for one yourself—with you in it, hollering against probability all the way down. It’s not even probability because it’s beyond calculation. It’s fate.

  They won’t find any reason for this crash, trace the serial number back to the manufacturer, interrogate an arthritic mechanic’s trembling fingers. This was a catastrophic accident.

  “Poor Number Eleven,” Lila Mae says—one moment of feeling for the unfortunate victim, that’s all, before rerouting the incident to her own purposes: it was a catastrophic accident, and a message to her. It was her accident.

  The elevator pretended to be what it was not. Number Eleven passed for longevous. Passed for healthy so well that Arbo Elevator Co.’s quality control could not see its duplicity, so well that the building contractors could not see for the routine ease of its assembly coeval doom. So well that Lila Mae Watson of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, who is never wrong, did not see it. Did it know? After all of Fulton’s anthropomorphism: did the machine know itself. Possessed the usual spectrum of elevator emotion, yes, but did it have articulate self-awareness. Erlich, the mad Frenchman, of course, posited such but he never gets invited to conferences and his monographs wilt on the shelves of his relatives’ libraries. Did it decide to pass? To lie and betray itself? Even Fulton stayed away from the horror of the catastrophic accident: even in explicating the unbelievable he never dared broach the unknowable. Lila Mae thinks: out of fear.

  She has not realized her destination, what she is driving toward, despite the fact there is only one place she will reach on this route. Out of the tunnel now, her destination could not be more obvious: still, she hasn’t realized it yet. Distracted as she is by this latest inspection currently underway in her head.

  Is his black box immune to the comet of the catastrophic accident. It is all jumbled now, machinations eclipsing machinations. For a second, she doubts that Fulton was colored: it could have been another one of Natchez’s lies. Something he and his masters cooked up to reel her in. She sees the scene, hovering above the highway a few automobile lengths ahead: Reed and Natchez in the downstairs study of Intuitionist House, sipping smoky antique scotch as they check their net for frayed strands. Natchez knows the open windows of a colored girl’s heart, he’s had many, Reed knows the attended latches of the Intuitionist mind, his weaknesses are hers. The progress of their scheme: Natchez hadn’t developed his film of the Intuitionist pages because he had never taken any photographs; he had been studying them all along. Tried to keep her from going to the Lift building for fear she might discover their plan. I’ve been reading a lot about elevators since I found out about my uncle. He knew all he needed to know about elevators for some time now.

  No traffic on this Sunday morning, which is fortunate because she’s not paying a whit of attention to the road. She’s been this
way many times. She will not take the wrong exit.

  If she had met him for dinner, he would have detailed, fork jabbing above their medium-rare steaks and umbrella-adorned cocktails, his infiltration of Chancre’s office, the close escapes, how swiftly he discovered Fulton’s notes. His colleagues at Arbo, no doubt, obtained copies of whatever material had been sent to the Empiricists and United as soon as they discovered they were not the only ones to receive the mysterious dispatches. Trash her apartment when they suspect her of collaborating with Chancre, force her into Natchez’s company: if she does not trust the Intuitionists, perhaps she will trust one of her tribe, his story of correcting the injustices done to her race.

  No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man’s books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

  She is driving on this Sunday morning to her alma mater, the Institute for Vertical Transport, to find out why her name is in Fulton’s journals. To question the only person she can ask now, the one who can explain why Arbo needed to win her confidence. Why a man she never met willed her into his death.