The Intuitionist Read online

  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.

  “How much do you think she pays for this place?”

  “I wouldn’t live in this neighborhood if you paid me,” Jim says without regret.

  The neighborhood is tidal, receding and dilating according to the exigencies of the city. Years before, a rich man decided to erect a monument to himself, an elevated train that traversed the city, even in neighborhoods, like this one, which were not even neighborhoods yet, but stubborn farmland scattered with the wooden houses of optimistic citizens. Pig pens and goats. To justify the trains and the rich man’s romance, speculators assembled dreary and sturdy tenements and directed immigrants’ inquiries north, to the new territory. The train justified itself in due course and the speculators did quite well
for themselves—there was a destination now, the harbor disgorged hundreds daily, and they had to live somewhere. The neighborhood named itself, created a persona: optimistic, scrabbling, indebted to the grand new country of which it was merely a small and insignificant part. Then the coloreds surged and dreamed of the north, too. They had been told something and believed it. One by one, the lights in the windows of the Poles’ and Russians’ apartments extinguished, and when the windows blazed again, it was a colored light that burned within them. The neighborhood retained its old name, but it meant something very different. Never mind that a few Poles and Russians continued to operate grocery and butcher stores and occasionally extend credit; no one doubted that the neighborhood’s new meaning prevailed, for the Poles and Russians turned out the lights in their stores at nightfall and scurried back on the elevated trains to their new neighborhood. The neighborhood is changing again. Its meaning blurs at the edges as white people return, obeying the city’s rules of teeming density and insidious rents. Only the real estate agents, who understand that meaning is elastic, know the borders of the neighborhood for sure, modulating their sales pitches to reassure their clients that they are not moving into the colored neighborhood, but into the farther reaches of the adjacent white neighborhood. None of this impresses Jim, who would not move into the neighborhood if you paid him.

  There is no elevator in Lila Mae’s building. She has two paintings on the walls of her gloomy abode, amateur landscape watercolors. Like the art in motel rooms: fits in with the general atmosphere of Lila Mae’s apartment. John picks up the one photograph in the apartment, which rests on the end table next to Lila Mae’s grim, scarecrow couch. Right now Lila Mae is only a few blocks away from her apartment, but when her father shot the picture ten years before, she stood on the porch of her childhood home with her mother, skinny and quiet. The denuded light and sad lethargy of the tableau says late summer: the cold months are coming. Lila Mae seems comfortable with this knowledge. Hers is essentially a sad face, inward-tending and declivitous, a face that draws the unwary into the slope of its melancholy. Something in the bones, and inherited, John decides after an appraisal of her mother. Children are doomed to reiterate the mistakes in their parents’ physiognomies, as if trapped by curses that mark generations and wait for unknowable acts of atonement. Jim’s parents are obviously close kin, and if you ask him he won’t deny it.

  At one point she got a bird, but it died.

  John notices Jim rubbing his jaw. “Tooth still hurting you?” he asks.

  Jim nods solemnly.

  “You better go to the dentist tomorrow,” John advises. “No use walking around in pain if you don’t have to be.”

  John discovers Lila Mae’s books in a ziggurat stack beneath the end table. They’re all work books, the standard texts: Zither’s An Introduction to Counterweights, Elisha Otis: The Man and His Times and so on. She has all of Fulton’s books, from the groundbreaking Towards a System of Vertical Transport, to the more blasphemous parts of his oeuvre, Theoretical Elevators Volumes One and Two. So far their information has been correct, as it always is.

  “Looks like a real blue-ribbon type,” John decides, flipping through Guidebook to Elevator Safety for incriminating papers.

  “You always call ’em,” Jim says.

  “She’s got all the right books.”

  “You always call ’em,” Jim says.

  Jim and John are neat ransackers. When their cases return to their homes, they suffer only the vaguest sense of loss, a nagging perplexity, and with so many other possible causes of that sense of loss, few suspect that these two men have been pawing their things. John sees himself as a crucial gear in the city’s mechanism, a freelance poltergeist of metropolitan disquiet. Jim and John’s employers are proud of them, and when they receive their briefing on tonight’s activities, Jim and John will not be reprimanded for failure. The particular organization they work for can afford to forgive, as long as that forgiveness is tracked and tabulated like absenteeism, pencil theft, fire damage (accident, insurance fraud), and at the end of each quarter, the books tally.

  What Jim and John are missing is the safe behind the somber painting of haystacks. Where she keeps all of her important things. Perhaps John would have found the safe eventually if Lila Mae hadn’t disturbed their search. It takes her a few attempts to realize that the reason she can’t unlock her door is because it is already unlocked. Jim and John do not take the time allowed by Lila Mae’s clicking and fumbling to clamber down the fire escape, or hide in the closet, or pull out their guns and recline on Lila Mae’s couch in a rather labored we’ve-got-you-covered pose, no, they continue to shake the joint down and that’s how Lila Mae finds them, John scrutinizing a pile of receipts from the middle left hand drawer of Lila Mae’s sad afterthought of a kitchenette—you never know what notations can be encrypted into a seemingly innocuous phrase such as “Bob’s Grocery: A Place to Shop” or in the numerical fortress of “prices” and “taxes”—and Jim scraping a finger through the jar of peach preserves Lila Mae received last Christmas from her mother’s sister, checking for little treasures like bus station locker keys and microfilm, microfilm, which Jim has never encountered in all his searches through so many apartments, but will one day, he’s sure of it. That’s how Lila Mae finds them, John peering, one big eye, through a magnifying glass and Jim licking his fingers. Given obscenity’s remarkable gallop into conversational speech, colorful epithets are to be expected in Lila Mae’s address to the two strangers lurking about her apartment. But it is John who is the first to speak. He says, “You’re the little lady.”

  * * *

  The counterweight, conscripted into service by the accident, rockets into the aerie of the shaft, angry with new velocity.

  * * *

  Only Chuck knows for sure whether it is his congenitally weak bladder (family lore tells of three aunts and a cousin with the same affliction) or his distaste for Chancre’s unabashed politicking that makes him rise from his leatherette stool and pad over to O’Connor’s scary toilet facilities. Chancre is still spinning out today’s accident into a stump speech on the accomplishments of his four years as Guild—and hence Department—Chair. The election is just around the corner, after all, and Chuck (a clever man, but not precocious about it) knows Chancre’s game. This press conference allows Chancre to reach members of the Elevator Inspectors Guild who no longer work for the city, the “unactives” who have retired from the lonesome life running the streets, have secluded themselves behind the ivy gates of the Institute for Vertical Transport or entered into the private sector, consulting the dolts from United and American and Arbo on what elevators are really about, the secrets the shafts have to tell to those who know how to listen. The men in the Department are Chancre’s, mostly Empiricists, he’s seen to that, but the unactives are a mercurial bunch, tending to cranky, nonpartisan dispositions. And they vote. Anyone who’s a member of the EIG votes every four years on the new Guild Chair, and the Guild Chair automatically becomes the head of the city’s Department of Elevator (and escalator, Chuck adds) Inspectors. Chuck still doesn’t know how this arrangement between the Guild and the city came about, and when he asks one of the Old Dogs about it, they change the subject and look nervous. Chuck hasn’t been able to find anything on paper about it, not even in the silent archives of the Institute, not a single precedent, but nevertheless: the Guild members elect their Chair, and the Chair gets a nice government job. Chuck supposes that if an incumbent lost his reelection bid, he could conceivably refuse to budge and cling to his cushy leather chair for dear life, but that’s never happened. Chuck can see Chancre doing it, though, and as he walks into the alcove in front of O’Connor’s bathrooms he wonders what would happen then.

  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.”