The Intuitionist Read online

  Lila Mae knew he was joking because he hated himself. She understood this hatred of himself; she hated something in herself and she took it out on Pompey. Now she could see Fulton for what he was. There was no way he believed in transcendence. His race kept him earthbound, like the stranded citizens before Otis invented his safety elevator. There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie. He secretes his venom into the pages of a book. He knows the other world he describes does not exist. There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.

  Lila Mae looks at the old woman. She busies herself with her collection, attempting to right those mangled equine forms. They will not stand. The kind thing to do would be to put them out of their misery, but she will not do that. She hangs on to them. Perhaps one day they will be right again. Mrs. Rogers and Fulton living together in this house, as employer and employee. She tends to the colored business and he tends to his white business. Secretly kin, but she does not know that. So no, Lila Mae sees, he does not believe in the perfect elevator. He creates a doctrine of transcendence that is as much a lie as his life. But then something happens. Something happens that makes him believe, switch from the novel but diffuse generalities of Volume One to the concrete Intuitionist methodology of Volume Two. Now he wants that perfect elevator that will lift him away from here and devises solid method from his original satire. What did his sister say to him. What did he wish after their meeting. Family? That there could be, in the world he invented to parody his enslavers, a field where he could be whole? A joke has no purpose if you cannot share it with anyone. Lila Mae thinks, Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you. When he gives lectures to his flock, years later, they are not aware of what he is truly speaking. The elevator world will look like Heaven but not the Heaven you have reckoned.

  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 s
aw 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.

  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 s
ay 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.”

  He no longer speaks like a colored man from the South. Like Natchez. Nor is his face the same as it was, in this fluorescent light, in this circulated air. The leather is sure in her hands. She traces the zipper’s serrations with a fingertip. “How’d you find out about Fulton?” she asks.

  “A few years ago when we realized his later stuff was missing, we just did the legwork no one had had a reason to do before. Found out where he came from. His sister had just died. She didn’t have any heirs, so we just bought her estate. Using the term loosely, of course.”