The Intuitionist Read online

  For now the regular life of the House continues as it has for years, so as not to jinx the gathering magic of the time. From the continent come foreign scholars of the art, and after lecturing at the Institute they retire to the House and the second-floor guest rooms. (Lila Mae would be astonished to hear the names of the luminaries who have slept in the bed she lies in right now. Her fingers are laced beneath her skull and she stares at the ceiling.) Grand parties celebrating the publication of the latest Intuitionist tract are held here, and it is custom for the guests to comment with trickling awe on the sublime properties of Mrs. Gravely’s apple brown Betty. The local membership (those who have sworn oaths to Intuitionism, savvy Empiricists hedging their bets, and apolitical inspectors who just want to get away from the wife) still convene for poker games and, on special nights, to taste unblended scotches of the finest quality. Correlative to the House’s widening influence, the Swedish films have swelled in attendance now that the chauffeur, emboldened by how much his supplemental income has increased his estimation in his in-laws’ eyes, started inviting House members to join the tieclip, toaster and Bible salesmen at his after-hours confabs in the garage, said members whom he can single out with ruthless acuity, something in their eyes.

  Ask her and Lila Mae will not admit that her heart skipped a beat when Mr. Reed suggested it might be wise for her to spend a night or two at the House, but it’s true. A secret part of her wanted to stay in her home so that other unwanted guests might drop in and give her an outlet for her anger. It was rare that she felt this way, relishing violence. She is mistress to her personality and well accustomed to reminding her more atavistic inclinations that the world is the world and the odd punch or eye-gouge will not make it any other way. Very disturbing, however, this late business. It’s one thing to understand the muck of things, accept it, live in it, and quite another to have that muck change so suddenly and dramatically, to stumble down to a newer, deeper shelf. That’s how Lila Mae sees it. Things are happening too fast for her to convince herself that she does not need time to think, to get to the bottom of things. Even if that involves taking assistance from this man Reed—and it is the acceptance, and not the aid itself, which galls her and makes her pride curdle. It means she owes him. This specimen.

  Her room at the House is twice as large as her one at the Bertram Arms, and twice that again when the curtains are wide, as they are now, and all that forbidden light takes the room. She gets sky in her room at the Bertram Arms, but she doesn’t get light. There’s a difference. She doesn’t know what to do with her breakfast platter—does she leave it outside the door, as they do in hotel scenes at the picture show, or does she leave it at the side of the bed, act naturally? Time to get up at any rate. There’s not a single piece of dust on the large oval mirror hanging on the opposite wall of the room. Rubs her belly: she should eat like this more often. Misses her suit: she doesn’t spend her little money on things that she doesn’t need, but she needs the cut of her suit to see herself. The bold angularity of it, the keen lapels—its buttons are the screws keeping her shut. The tailor seemed to know what she needed, understood the theater Lila Mae needs to leave the house whole and be among other people. An old man.

  Mrs. Gravely (whoever that is, the cook, a bitter old bitch, Lila Mae can see her, gray-haired and bitter for sure) has hung her suits in the closet, along with two white cotton shirts Lila Mae has never extended the courtesy of a hanger to. Even her clothes are getting the royal treatment in Intuitionist House. Lila Mae packed the extra suit even though she does not intend to stay another night. She doesn’t know why. Her suit does not betray the scent of mothballs, which lingers in the closet, medicinal fog.

  Dressed, she’s in front of the mirror. Armed. She puts her face on. In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard? It took practice. Not in front of a mirror or in front of strangers, gauging her success by their expressions of horror, disgust, etc. She did it by lying in her bed, feeling and testing which muscles in her face pained under application of concerted tension. To choose the most extreme pain would be to make a fright mask. A caricature of strength. She achieved calibration one night while testing a small muscle attached to her upper lip, hitting upon a register of pain a few inches below the high-tide mark of real pain. This register of discomfort became the standard for all the muscles in her face, above the eyebrows, under the jaw, across the nostrils. She didn’t check with the small mirror in the janitor’s closet, didn’t need to. She knew she’d hit it.

  Her face is on. She’s ready to see Mr. Reed, whom she spies through the window. He sits on a stone bench in the garden, polishing his pince-nez, which are never dirty.

  * * *

  See, the Empiricists stoop to check for tell-tale striations on the lift winch and seize upon oxidation scars on the compensating rope sheave, all that muscle work, and think the Intuitionists get off easy. Lazy slobs.

  Some nicknames Empiricists have for their renegade colleagues: swamis, voodoo men, juju heads, witch doctors, Harry Houdinis. All terms belonging to the nomenclature of dark exotica, the sinister foreign. Except for Houdini, who nonetheless had something swarthy about him.

  Some counter-nicknames from the Intuitionists: flat-earthers, ol’ nuts and bolts, stress freaks (“checking for signs of stress” being a commonly uttered phrase when the Empirically trained are out running the streets), Babbits, collators (this last word preferably hissed for optimum disdain).

  No one can quite explain why the Intuitionists have a 10 percent higher accuracy rate than the Empiricists.

  * * *

  Everything in the garden is dying, that’s what time of year it is. The leaves blaze and desiccate in their dying before twisting to the ground as ash. Lila Mae crunches toward Mr. Reed in one of the city’s secret gardens. The taciturn sentries (Victorian row houses, stodgy brownstones) have their backs turned to her. This interloper has dispensation, business with authority, and there are hungry thousands on the street beyond demanding closer scrutiny. Keep them out. Keep the dying garden safe.

  “Mrs. Gravely doesn’t allow smoking in the house,” Mr. Reed says, affectless. “I smoke out here.” He brushes some leaves off the bench and motions for Lila Mae to sit. He is not the same man as last night. For a few seconds, anyway. Then the lines of consternation in his brow relax: he puts his game face on, parrying Lila Mae mask for mask. “I trust the accommodations were up to your standards?” Mr. Reed inquires.

  Messing with her, a jibe at the clenched room she lives in? Keep cool: “I slept fine,” Lila Mae says.

  “And the breakfast? How was the breakfast?”

  “It was good.”

  “The gentleman who brought it to your room—he was polite?” Mr. Reed is looking very intently at the ground. He’s thinking out loud, Lila Mae thinks.

  “Yes.”

  “Our usual man called in sick this morning,” Mr. Reed whispers, trancelike. “He sent over his nephew. We’ve never used him before.”

  Lila Mae doesn’t say anything. She can smell more rain coming. A few yards away, the ubiquitous dead leaves clot the surface of a stone fountain still retaining a puddle from the rain a few days ago. The fountain cherub dances on one foot (dances to what? to next year’s spring, to having a master to dance for?), its tiny mouth cupping the sodden autumn air. What Lila Mae knows about Mr. Reed: graduated at the top of his class at the Midwestern Institute for Vertical Transport, quickly hustled up the ladder in one of the larger Departments on the other coast. All the signs of becoming an industry bigshot. Then Fulton unleashed Volume One and the man was smitten. Lila Mae can relate: the first volume of Theoretical Elevators was a conversion experience for her, too, after a pithy index entry in her Intro textbook (“Fulton’s recent vulgarities notwithstanding …”) dispatched her into uncharted backwaters of the library stacks. No wonder the Institute exiled Intuitionist classes into the dingy recesses of the course catalog, no wonder the tiny classrooms were always so full, the in
structors broken and cursed under the burden of such knowledge. Fulton’s words discovered and altered Lila Mae early in her studies; she can only reckon what kind of spiritual catastrophe the book would have caused in a man like Mr. Reed, who had dutifully served Empiricism for so long. Must have felt the world had betrayed him.

  What else Lila Mae remembers from the Lift magazine profile last summer: Like most of the early converts to Intuitionism, Mr. Reed quit the elevator inspecting game proper to preach the new gospel. What was the point, really, those first pioneers reasoned, when Fulton had pissed on every tenet of their former faith? Here’s where Mr. Reed distinguished himself: not as a thinker but as a mule. He did the grunt work. He toiled at integrating the alien science, this tumor, into the larger elevator community, convincing petulant Institute deans to teach this heresy (the very thought of it!), brokered the admission of taciturn and unapologetic Intuitionist inspectors into big-city elevator inspector Departments. There’s the story of how he cadged Midwestern into constructing an entire Intuitionist Wing after a tortuous thirty-six-hour negotiation, winning his prize after talks degraded to a coin toss. And a fix at that—it was a trick double-heads coin he’d got out of a candy machine down the hall. A tricky old bird. That’s how Mr. Reed appears to Lila Mae now that he has his face on, after recovering from Lila Mae’s unexpected intrusion into the garden: a vulture. Not the odd pigeon he was at Lila Mae’s apartment, but a calculating scavenger. A soldier.

  Of course Orville Lever pressed this soldier into service as his campaign manager. Mr. Reed is not too academic for the field men or so full of well romanticism that the brains can’t relate. Lever’s a likable chap, but everyone knows Mr. Reed is the brains behind the operation, anyone can see that, the only man capable of pulling off the election for the Intuitionists. Lila Mae doesn’t know why he’s bothered to intercede in her Fanny Briggs mess, but knows she’ll find out soon. The grim mist of master-plan comes out of his pores and pollutes the air in the garden.

  After a time, Mr. Reed turns to Lila Mae and says, “It’s too bad Orry is out of town talking to the good people at Arbo. It would be nice if you two met.”

  “I shook his hand once,” Lila Mae tells him. “At a rally.” Orry. Orville.

  “You should come to our open nights, Miss Watson. Have you ever considered becoming a member?”

  “I just assumed,” Lila Mae replies.

  “You should know what we’re like by now, Miss Watson,” Mr. Reed says with a bit of exhaustion. “As a group, that is. You’re one of us.” He removes his hand from the newspaper he’s been pressing down on. “You should take a look at this,” he says, handing the paper to her.

  It doesn’t take Lila Mae long to digest the tabloid article, from the heights of the loud ELEVATOR CRASH! headline to the dregs of the final quote from Chancre. Nothing she didn’t expect. “Slanted,” Lila Mae announces.

  “Did you see Chancre’s last statement? I’ll try my memory … ‘My opponent and his cronies have been trying all sorts of tactics since the start of the campaign, but I think this incident says more about their tomfoolery than any of their dirty tricks.’ ”

  “He’s frothing,” Lila Mae says. “ ‘Dirty tricks.’ ”

  “He has a point,” Mr. Reed tells her, his mouth tight. “He’s talking about the black box.”

  And that smell of rain is stronger now. The infamous design problem from her school days: What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don’t know because we can’t see inside it, it’s something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels’ teeth. It’s a black box.

  “Two weeks ago,” Mr. Reed begins, rubbing his pink hands on his lap, “Lever received a packet in the mail. It contained torn-out journal entries dating back a few years, and they were notes on a black box.”

  “Everyone’s working on black boxes,” Lila Mae counters. “That’s where all of American and Arbo’s research and development money goes. There’s nothing new about that.” If Otis’s first elevation delivered us from medieval five- and six-story construction, the next elevator, it is believed, will grant us the sky, unreckoned towers: the second elevation. Of course they’re working on the black box; it’s the future.

  “It was Fulton’s handwriting. They were obviously ripped out of his final journals, the ones we’ve never been able to find. Obviously we were very interested. We made a few inquiries and discovered that a reporter from Lift had received portions of it, too. Chancre as well.”

  Lila Mae shakes her head. “There have always been rumors that Fulton was working on a black box,” she says dismissively. “But most of the evidence shows that Fulton was devoting his energies to Intuitionist theory, not engineering. He hadn’t been involved with mechanism since he became Dean.”

  “The evidence you’ve seen,” Mr. Reed says. “He was doing a bit of both, from what we know now. You have to understand that in his last year, he barely spoke to anyone at all, except his maid, and when he did come out of the house his behavior was, to say the least, erratic. The diary shows that he was working on an elevator, and that he was constructing it on Intuitionist principles. From what we can tell from his notes, he finished it. There’s a blueprint out there somewhere.”

  Lila Mae tries to get her head around that last bit. At least Mr. Reed is taking it slowly, trying to walk her through it. But still. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Lila Mae murmurs, twisting a button on her suit. “I mean from an engineering standpoint. At its core, Intuitionism is about communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis. ‘Separate the elevator from elevatorness,’ right? Seems hard to build something of air out of steel.”

  Mr. Reed withdraws a cigarette from a silver case. “They’re not as incompatible as you might think,” he says. “That’s what Volume One hinted at and Volume Two tried to express in its ellipses—a renegotiation of our relationship to objects. To start at the beginning.”

  “I don’t get you,” Lila Mae admits. Reluctantly.

  “If we have decided that elevator studies—nuts and bolts Empiricism—imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn’t the next logical step, after we’ve adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be to build an elevator the right way? With what we’ve learned?”

  “Construct an elevator from the elevator’s point of view.”

  “Wouldn’t that be the perfect elevator? Wouldn’t that be the black box?” Mr. Reed’s left eyelid trembles.

  “Unbelievable,” Lila Mae says. She thinks of her room at the Bertram Arms. It’s a miracle she lives there, how accustomed she is to this small world. How small her expectations are. Which part of Fulton’s writing affected her most? The first line that comes to her head is an incandescent flare: There is another world beyond this one. Lila Mae asks, “What does this have to do with the accident yesterday?”

  Mr. Reed takes a long, contemplative sip from the air. “Think about it,” he says. “The most famous elevator theoretician of the century has constructed the black box, and he’s done it on Intuitionist principles. What does that do to Empiricism?”

  Lila Mae nods and Mr. Reed continues: “Now Chancre’s up for reelection. There have always been rumors about Fulton’s black box and suddenly comes this new variable—it does exist, and it’s Intuitionist. Not only do you lose the election, but everything else, too. Your faith. You have to embrace the enemy you’ve fought tooth and nail for twenty years.”

  “You have to find the box,” Lila Mae says.

  “You have to find out if it’s true or not, and you have to find out quickly.”

  “And set me up as a preemptive strike,” Lila Mae realizes.

  Pompey.

  “It didn’t have to be you,” Mr. Reed tells her. “It could have been anyone. If Chancre can’t find the box, he can at least stall until after the election, fight the rumors by orchestrating a high-profile failure for the Intuitionists. And their
liberal policies.”

  Liberal meaning her. “But I haven’t heard any rumors.”

  “It’s been pretty inner-circle, Miss Watson. Until Monday, when the new issue of Lift comes out. It’s the cover story. Forced Chancre’s hand.” Mr. Reed taps his cigarette case on his thigh and stares at the cherub in the fountain. It hasn’t moved. It never does. “An elevator doesn’t go into freefall. Not without help. He’s scared. Yesterday proves it. And as for us,” he looks back at Lila Mae, “let’s just say we’re anxious to get our hands on the box and let it speak for itself.”

  “Who were the men at my apartment?”

  “Are you surprised at Chancre’s tactics? That he’s a thug? He plays golf every Tuesday with Johnny Shush. They were probably some of Shush’s men. The mob does more than just control the city’s elevator maintenance contracts, you know. They have a lot of muscle.” He looks up at the sky for a long moment. “It looks like it’s going to rain, but it’s not. Not today.”

  He’s getting that airy look in his eyes again. “So where is it?” Lila Mae prods.

  “We’ll find it soon,” Mr. Reed replies. “We think we know who sent out the journals. I think we’ll have it soon.”

  This slow debate about the rain: it’s not about rain at all, but the fragility of what we know. We’re all just guessing. The second elevation, she thinks. The new cities are coming. “Thanks again for yesterday,” Lila Mae says. “And for the room.”