The Intuitionist (30 page)

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.

Catastrophic accidents are a-million-in-a-million occurrences, not so much what happens very seldom but what happens when you subtract what happens all the time. They are, historically, good or bad omens, depending on the time and place, urging in
reform, a quest for universal standards of elevator maintenance, or instructing the dull and plodding citizens of modernity that there is a power beyond rationality. That the devil still walks the earth and architecture is no substitute for prayer, for cracked knees and desperate barter with the gods.

She does not hear the car horn, let alone the urgency of the car horn. She drifts into the right lane and almost sideswipes the mock wood paneling of the station wagon. The kids in the backseat scream, pink lungs heaving, father’s hands grip the steering wheel, but for all the commotion of this few seconds there is no accident. Lila Mae’s automobile and the family’s automobile do not crash. She decelerates and eases into the shoulder of the highway, gravel popping on the undercarriage. Rests her head on the green rubber of the steering wheel.

Arbo and Natchez are merely unanswered questions. Their intrusion into her life is a matter of cause and effect, prospering along logical trajectories of greed, and only require adequate information to explain them. Time to sift the facts through her fingers and shake out the fine silt until what is left in her hand is what happened. But there is still this matter of Fulton and Intuitionism. She thinks, what passing for white does not account for: the person who knows your secret skin, the one you encounter at that unexpected time on that quite ordinary street. What Intuitionism does not account for: the catastrophic accident the elevator encounters at that unexpected moment on that quite ordinary ascent, the one who will reveal the device for what it truly is. The colored man passing for white and the innocent elevator must rely on luck, the convenience of empty streets and strangers who know nothing, dread the chance encounter with the one who knows who they are. The one who knows their weakness.

She believes the documentary evidence Natchez showed her, even if his blood tie to Fulton has been exposed as a lie. (Back on the highway now: she hadn’t pulled over to ponder the accident that didn’t happen but the one that did, ten days before.) Fulton
was colored. In his books, the hatred of the corrupt order of this world, the keen longing for the next one, its next rules. He was the perfect liar the world made him, mouthing a supreme fiction the world accepted as truth. (Back on the highway, going where she’s going.) In constant fear of that shadow, the shadow of the catastrophic accident that would reveal him for what he was. The shadow that envelopes and makes him dark.

Almost there, Lila Mae.

The black gates of the Institute for Vertical Transport are open. On Sunday, the students depart campus to attend mass at the neighborhood churches. The churches of this town welcome all fellow believers, no matter where they were born, what circumstances and choices have led them here. She drives around the east side of campus, duly noting the squat edifice of Fulton Hall, the Engineering Building, even her old home, the Gymnasium, always quiet on a Sunday morning. Trees cluster respectfully at the side of the road as she approaches the declivity that marks the faculty housing. She parks. She closes the door of the sedan. It only takes a minute for Mrs. Rogers to answer her knock. Lila Mae says to the old woman, “He was joking, right? About Intuitionism. It was all a big joke.”

* * *

Sometimes when the wind drove the rain beneath the roof of the porch, when the wind was particularly upset at something or other, the rain would hit the front edge of the couch and wet it. That’s why the old brown couch always smelled so sour: old damp and mold. They never lifted it into the back of the truck and doomed it to the rotting piles at the town dump. It was an old couch and treasured for the solid parity it had achieved between its comforts and defects, so the Watson family kept it on the porch. One example of its magic: the porch paint did not peel if it was underneath the couch. And another: the right side had formed
a perfect bucket for Marvin Watson’s behind, widening over the years, incredibly, as Marvin’s behind widened. Marvin sat in his groove that day and tapped the envelope against his thigh. He told his daughter when his waiting ceased, when she cracked down on the first steps of the porch, “Your mother went to the store. She gave me this.”

Lila Mae had hoped to intercept the letter at the mailbox and have time to read the words and consider them for a few days before she would tell or not tell her parents. Her schedule at Mrs. Applebaum’s made it impossible. She never knew when she was going to get out. She had considered bribing Mr. Granger, the mailman who served colored town, but had decided it too complicated. She saw the red crest of the Institute for Vertical Transport, which she had seen first a few months before in the town library, and saw the soft shark teeth where her mother had opened the letter, probably with one of the Watson household’s many dull knives. As her father extended the envelope to her he said, “You didn’t tell me you had applied.” The envelope was good paper. The thick, elegant paper they have up there. No broken mills, cheap mills, there. She withdrew the letter, it was still light enough to read without getting a headache. Her father watched her eyes. He wore his house clothes, the coarse trousers and heavy shirt he wore on the weekdays, before and after work. When he was out of the Huntley’s uniform. The house clothes changed. They were replaced every few years by new versions in different colors. The Huntley’s uniform, however, remained the same. Lila Mae saw it once. He snuck it out of work one day to show Lila Mae and her mother. Colored people were not allowed into Huntley’s if they wanted to buy things. Only if they worked there. She read the letter and replaced it in the envelope.

Her father asked, “What are you going to tell Mrs. Applebaum?”

“I told her I might be leaving to go to school. I told her that when I started.”

“You didn’t tell us,” her father answered. Then he said, “There’s no shortage of people who could take your place with Mrs. Applebaum.”

She had decided when she saw him on the couch. When she knew he knew. Lila Mae said, “I hate to leave you and Ma all by yourselves.”

Her father leaned back, to a verse of metal growling from inside the couch. He said, “You don’t worry about us. You worry about yourself. It’s not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it’s the same.”

* * *

He lived here, assembled his vehicular epiphanies here, mulled over the bolts and pins of his mythology in this very house. Mrs. Rogers leaves her in the ruined parlor. Beneath her, an angry slash of ripped upholstery grins ticking. The fireplace mantle has been swept clean—she can see the coat sleeves of the men who trashed her own apartment brush across it—and her host’s collection of ceramic horses are dashed to the floor, broken heads and limbs. The men’s fingers groped inside the couch and chairs after Fulton’s notebooks and Mrs. Rogers’s loose change, smashed the two emerald lamps to see what may or may not have been inside them, cracked the frame of Fulton’s portrait over taut knees. Lila Mae rubs her hands on her thighs and surveys the damage. The odor of cigar smoke lingers in the dull air and she can see a cigar butt ground into a photograph of Mrs. Rogers and her children, in happier times, not here. They didn’t find anything but must persist, a determined gang thundering through the houses of those who might possess the object. Their violent blundering seems so pathetic to Lila Mae now, a child’s plea for attention, a good hug. They’ll never find it.

Mrs. Rogers returns from the kitchen with tea and thin butter
cookies. Lila Mae reads the old grooves in her skin, the ripples around her eyes and mouth, the after-images of old expressions. The human face is only capable of two or three real expressions, and they leave their mark. Lila Mae thinks, she only has one expression and what will her face look like forty years from now. Eroded rock, a wall of dry canyon. Mrs. Rogers sighs, “They gave this place a real going over. Just a fine mess they made. Broke all of my horses. Broke they legs off.” She doesn’t look at the mess on the floor, busying herself with the delicate disrobing of a sugar cube. “I was in the city visiting my sister and I come home to this.”

“Last night?” Lila Mae asks. “What time did you get back?”

“About eleven last night.”

Then they hit the place right after she left Ben Urich. When they realized she knew. Lila Mae’s been a practicing solipsist since before she could walk, and the days’ recent events are doing irreparable damage to her condition.

Mrs. Rogers points to a bucket in the corner. A gray dishrag slithers over its lip. Preoccupied, she says, “One of them relieved himself on the floor. You can’t smell it, can you?”

“I don’t smell a thing,” Lila Mae lies. “Did you call the police? Institute security?”

“What for? They probably the ones that did it.”

Lila Mae leans forward in her chair. “This is the first time, right? When you told the Institute that this place had been broken into after Fulton’s death and his notebooks stolen, you made that up, correct?”

“It may have been a lie,” Mrs. Rogers shrugs. Stands. She hasn’t touched her tea and snacks. It’s all ritual, Lila Mae appraises. Her host says, “I did most of the upstairs, but I haven’t finished down here. Do you want to give me a hand?” An old house and an old woman. She needs to preserve the rules of this place, the order she keeps beneath the pitched roof. Even though they have pissed on it. She bends over slowly before the fireplace
and picks up one of her fallen horses. It kneels on its stomach in her rough palm. No legs. Mrs. Rogers gets down on the floor and looks for its legs.

Lila Mae grabs the broom that leans against the back of her chair. She picks an area, sweeps couch innards and shredded paper into mounds. The old woman says, “To answer your question, yes, he was having a joke on them at first, but it wasn’t a joke at the end. It became true.” She discovers one of the tiny thoroughbred’s legs under the newspaper rack and holds it up to the window. “You have to realize something about James,” continuing, tilting the leg in the sunlight. “Deep down he was real country. No kind of sense at all in his head except his own kind of sense. That’s what made him what he was.”