The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

  “A safe house,” Mr. Reed says. He attempts to smile. “You’d be surprised how many people have taken an interest in your career, Miss Watson. The first colored woman to become an elevator inspector. That’s quite an accomplishment. We’re glad to have you in our camp.” He pats her thigh. “All this business should be sorted out on Monday. Mr. Jameson, our House counsel, will talk to Internal Affairs and they’ll back off. We take care of our own.”

  She looks down at the tabloid headline. “What about the accident?”

  “You will be absolved. Did you do your job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the fault lies with the Empiricists and Mr. Chancre, who have betrayed the public trust. Mr. Jameson will take care of it. If Chancre wins the election, he’ll have no reason to press the issue. And if he loses, he won’t be able to because Lever will squash it. Once we show Chancre a united front on Monday, his goons will stop harassing you. He’ll know we’re on to him.” Mr. Reed again attempts to smile and is more successful this time. “You’ll be back in your apartment Monday night.”

  “I don’t want to,” Lila Mae says.

  “No?”

  “I want to find the black box.”

  * * *

  So complete is Number Eleven’s ruin that there’s nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite: a soul.

  Part TWO

  Ben Urich on a Saturday night: ambling quickly down the street, a blur in his favorite powder blue seersucker. He’s flipping a dime as he walks—heads, he always bets on heads and is correct about half the time. Whistling a doo-wop confection that’s always on the radio in the coffee shop where he eats his breakfast, where he folds his newspaper into tight squares to better peruse the sports pages.

  It’s late but not too late. He notices that the big shows are starting to let out, vomiting dandy citizens and intrepid tourists onto the sidewalk from brightly lit lobbies. It’s not too late, he looks at his watch, and celebrations coalesce in his mind, festivities to be groped and devoured once he picks up an advance copy of his cover story at the office. O’Connor’s? He’ll have to spend half an hour explaining what the story’s about before the inebriated inspectors start buying him drinks, not to mention the fact that the Saturday shift is a generally surly bunch, swollen with career ne’er-do-wells, men of little ambition who sweat out their days looking at the calendar for their retirement date. Tough crowd. Plus, the place isn’t that cheerful. Is downright depressing. Plus, he has no idea how amenable they’ll be to the prospect of an Intuitionist black box. Especially after a few hours of the bottom shelf. The Flamingo is starting to jump at this time of night, and that colored band they got on Saturdays is just what he wants in mood music. Sex music. The music, a few boilermakers, and a present from Lady Luck at the bar: easily impressed bottle blondes who won’t ask many questions, legal secretaries in torpedo bras, the odd beautician. Heads. This is my city, my night.

  She was talkative enough after she’d had enough Violet Marys. Suspicious at first when he pressed her too early for details about her job at United Elevator Co.—him being a notorious muckraker at the biggest trade journal there is, Lift magazine. He put on his 100-watt smile and waved his index finger at the waiter when the drinks ran dry. Keep ’em coming. He told her he didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable, he was just asking about her work, it sounded so interesting. She blushed and drained her Violet Mary. The sanctity of the journalist’s creed, the indefatigable war against industry corruption, throw in a toothy anecdote about his suffragette mother: these matters and more Ben Urich discoursed upon, to the effervescent delight of his companion, Miss Betty Williams. He was only laying the groundwork this night; the cover story would clinch the deal. Ensured of his integrity, there was no reason Miss Betty Williams couldn’t pinch a file or two from the United archives. For background purposes. The customary assurances that under no circumstances would he quote from the documents. Inviolability of sources. He was merely trying to serve the public to the best of his ability, he informed her, adhere to the values instilled in him by his mother at an early age, while she painted placards arguing for a woman’s right to vote. He noticed that her eyes flashed a bit when he dropped newsroom lingo, and commenced to disperse words like copy and lede into his lullaby, to a commensurate increase in eye-flashes. He’d drop a copy of his Lift cover story by her office and the next day or the next after that press his new acquisition for a choice file or two. Ben Urich kissed Betty Williams’s swaying cheek as he packed her off in a taxi. Fairly swooning.

  Heads. It wasn’t all smoke, however. Ben Urich takes his job as self-appointed watchdog of the country’s vertical transport industry seriously, and he feels he deserves credit for his work. Like exposing the Fairweather Scandal, which resulted in the resignations of seven elevator inspectors and five clerks in the Buildings Department and caused the formation of the first city-Guild joint commission on irregularities in municipal elevator inspection. His series on the alleged (“alleged,” whirling the journalist’s baton) mob control of elevator maintenance in the city may not have brought any indictments, but still stands as the first public report on the industry’s biggest dirty secret. Well, one of them: now that Fulton’s black box is out there somewhere, the whole future of vertical transport is up for grabs. Ben Urich’s future, too. He’s paid his dues. Can scrounge up a legit reporting gig before long, after all the fallout. One of the city’s bigger dailies, maybe even a glossy. Heads.

  There’s not much for a night watchman to do at the Lift building at this hour but scrabble at his university-by-mail course. So it comes to pass this night that Billy the night watchman is parsing Victorian English when Ben Urich taps on the front door.

  “Hey, Jane Eyre,” Ben Urich says brightly when Billy unlocks the door. “Good book.”

  “Good enough,” Billy mumbles. Billy’s a round gentleman. The loop of keys chime in his moist hand. “I woulda thought you’d be out on the town on a night like this.”

  “I’m not working,” Ben Urich informs Billy, intrepid sentry of empty office buildings. “Did the printer drop by those advance copies of the new issue? I wanted to pick up a copy.”

  “Got ’em right here,” the night watchman and nocturnal freshman says, withdrawing the bundle from behind the desk. He scissors the rope and pulls off the top copy from the stack.

  In the brief seconds it takes for Billy to hand him the magazine, Ben Urich already knows something is wrong. The flash of red. The mock-up he approved the other day featured a close-up on an engineer’s blueprint: the plans for Fulton’s black box. Not the actual plans, of course, but Lift assumes a capable imagination in its readers. The flash of red is all wrong.

  Events proceed in this negative vein. His name does not appear on the cover at all, and the illustration depicts Santa Claus in all his winter-solstice girth shimmying down an elevator cable. He wears a standard tool belt. The headline reads, GETTING READY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: 10 X-MAS MAINTENANCE TIPS. The least of Ben Urich’s objections is that Christmas is still months away, and it is criminal for the preeminent trade journal to participate in the advertising and retail worlds’ extension of the holiday season.

  They pulled it. They pulled his story.

  “Something wrong, Ben?”

  Before anger, pragmatism, as it always is with Ben Urich. With some cutting, it could go in one of the smaller elevator newsletters who don’t pay as well and have a smaller circulation. And less prestige. Could he get it into one of the general-readership mags? Have to provide more background for the lay reader, dwell more on the Intuitionist-Empiricist debate. Explain Intuitionism, a subject he knows enough about to get by without looking like an idiot, but would have a hard time articulating for the average joe. No, he’s fucked. Lift, or no one.

  “Say something, Ben. You want a little nip? I got a bottle.”

  “Is Carson upstairs?” Ben demands, twisting the copy of Lift into a club.

  “Nobody’s up th
ere, not tonight,” Billy responds.

  Ben’s out the door. It was getting hot in the lobby. He thinks back on his editor’s behavior over the last few days. Carson seemed all for it, said this was the biggest story he’d seen since the sad debut of Arbo’s Mighty-Springs, the Edsel of helical buffers. Just to make sure, Ben Urich checks the table of contents. Test-driving the new European cabs, a report on the 15th International Conference of Elevator Contractors, and that damned fluff about the holiday season, but nothing on the black box. His name wasn’t on the contents page. Ben Urich pulls his dime out of his pocket but he doesn’t flip it. He drops it in a public phone and inserts his finger into the rotary dial. Carson’s home phone is?

  “Excuse me, sir, do you know what time it is?”

  Ben Urich waves his hand over his shoulder.

  “Do you know what time it is?” the voice asks again.

  “No, I don’t,” Ben Urich says.

  He has time to dial one number and watch the plastic ring slide halfway back before he feels two hands grip his shoulders. He’s spun around. There are two stocky men before him. One has firm hands on Ben Urich’s shoulders in authoritative pincers. The man’s cheek is swollen into an angry red ball. The other man has a soft, kind face and asks Ben, “Do you know what Johnny Shush does to people who anger or otherwise tee him off?”

  The events of this night are definitely proceeding in their negative tendency. Indeed the velocity has increased. These men and their boss are why his exposé did not run. “Yes, I do,” Ben says. Best to play along and escape this night with his hide intact. He knows the drill.

  “Jim?” the talking man says.

  The man with his hands clamped on Ben Urich slaps him across the face, bends his body in half, lifts him like a baby and throws Ben into the backseat of a maroon Cadillac. The talking man is behind the wheel, the other man at Ben’s side. He holds Ben’s wrist in a snug and unquestionable grip.

  The driver starts up the automobile. Ben Urich is getting his bearings. He’s surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. His hardhitting reportage, his ruthless quest for the truth. An unknown person or persons once mailed him a dead rat wrapped in taffeta, but that could have been any number of people, for any number of things. He’s surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.

  The driver says, “We’re taking you for a little ride right now. Just a little cruise.” He extricates the car from its improbably tight berth between a dirty red van and an ominous Ford sedan. They traverse two city blocks without words. Ben Urich, for his part, would plead for his life if he could dislodge the stone from his throat.

  The driver says brightly, “Would you mind terribly if we asked you not to pursue your current story?”

  Ben Urich manages to say, “It’s done. Finished,” and the man in the seat next to him breaks his finger.

  Ben Urich’s index finger is a key player, versatile, dependable for mundane tasks and in the clinch, where it truly distinguishes itself. Never hesitant to mine a dry nostril after barnacles, yet a sensitive enough instrument for navigating house keys into cantankerous locks. Ben uses his index finger to summon waiters hither to collect the check, and to tap surfaces (tabletops, seats, his right thigh) when he’s nervous or just killing time. Far worse than the roseate flare he feels when the silent man bends his finger an ill-advised ninety degrees past where it would normally wander during normal use is the sound of the resultant break. Twiggy. The sound is far, far worse than the pain. Initially. It says to him, this is how fragile your body is. Not to mention pressing the call buttons of elevators: his index finger is the most naturally of all the hand’s digits conscripted into call-button service.

  They allow Ben Urich’s scream to diminuate into an uneven, back-and-forth whimper. The silent man even loosens his grip on Ben’s hand, to remind his captive of freedom, the ease of mobility from which he has just been exiled. “My name is John,” the man at the wheel informs Ben. “That’s Jim next to you. Jim’s just been to the dentist and won’t be adding much to our conversation. Words, anyway. Occasionally he will underscore what I say with a well-timed gesture. I don’t know where half of these people learned how to drive, but there are some truly bad drivers out on the road tonight.”

  Ben can’t move his index finger. When he tries, his other fingers merely flop around in awkward sympathy. Accountable for an essential central quadrant of his typewriter, too, his index finger is. Ben notices that the car is headed downtown, stretching through the membrane of post-theater traffic. The traffic lights are unforgiving at this time of night, mysterious and capricious, as if appalled by this latest indignity of citizens and their vehicles. Traffic lights, the quintessential civil servants. At the next stop light, Ben’s left hand crawls up the window and bleats against it. The car idling next to the Cadillac carries an aloof couple in black evening wear. Back out to the suburbs for these two, away from metropolitan disquiet. The woman looks over at Ben and the crab-wriggling of his hand. She frowns and turns back to her husband. The light changes and John commands the car forward.

  “See,” John drawls, “no one really cares about their neighbor. We could be taking you out to dump you in a landfill for all they know, and they just keep on driving. They’re more concerned about their lackluster driving skills than their fellow man.” Ben looks up groggily at the rearview mirror. The driver has been staring into his eyes. “Tell me, Mr. Urich, how many times have you lied to us tonight?”

  “I haven’t lied, Jesus, please let me out,” Ben croaks.

  John does not seem impressed. His dark eyes flicker out to the pavement before them, then return to Ben. “That’s another lie,” he says. “Since you’re obviously of a mendicant bent, I’ll tell you. Four times. And for each lie, my partner Jim is going to break a finger by exerting pressure on—well, I’m not sure exactly what the bone is called proper, it’s been a while since I flipped through Gray’s—but suffice it to say that Jim is going to exert pressure where it shouldn’t be exerted.”

  Jim bends Ben’s middle finger until it touches the back of his hand, and there is another twiggy sound.

  John starts again, “You lied when you said you wouldn’t get upset if I told you not to pursue a certain line of inquiry. I can see by the shiny areas on your suit around the elbows and knees that you are not a man who lives and dies by the petty dictates of the social sphere. Most people, they go out, they want to look their best. Like the folks in that car back there—they’ve had a little dinner, seen a show, and they look nice. But that doesn’t mean a whit to a man like you, a man of such keen moral sense. It offends you that two thugs—for that’s what we are when you really get down to it, no matter how I try to convince myself otherwise—that two thugs would tell you to back off of what you see as a moral imperative. So you lied. That was one finger.” John swivels his head back and forth. “Hold on a second,” he asks. The dark blue sedan in front of him is sending mixed messages tinged with an unsubtle flash of aggression. “Did you see that? This guy just cut me off. If he wanted to turn, he could have at least signaled, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Please, I swear I’ll back off the story,” Ben begs. “I swear.”

  “Yeah, well,” John says. “You lied again when you said you knew what Johnny Shush did to people who cross him. Because if you really did know—didn’t just cook something up from what you picked up in the tabloids or god forbid the movies—you would have never ever, ever, ever done anything to make Johnny angry. You would have known better. We wouldn’t be here right now. Driving in midtown at this time of night? Forget about it. So that was another lie, and another finger. Two more lies to go. You lied when you said you didn’t lie, so that’s another finger, but I’m going to ask Jim to hold off on the breaking-finger business for now because that snapping sound really distracts me and it’s hard enough to drive with these maniacs in this city without me being distracted. Is that okay with you, Jim? Just nod because I know it hurts to talk, what with your tooth and all.”


  Jim nods, grateful that his friend and partner understands him so well.

  “There’s one more lie, and it’s the first one you told us. When I asked you for the time, you said you didn’t know. But I know it was another one of your mendacities because I can see your watch right there, right below where Jim is holding your wrist. And that’s the worst lie of all, because when a stranger asks you the time, you should never lie. It’s just not neighborly.”

  * * *

  Lila Mae reclines on the bed, drawing plans for war. After their talk, Mr. Reed excused himself to attend to pressing business—related or not related to the matter concerning Lila Mae, she doesn’t know—and left her to the garden. A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action. Lila Mae left the garden and resumed her scheming in her room. At eight o’clock, Mrs. Gravely served her a dinner of no small culinary accomplishment. Mrs. Gravely was not as Lila Mae imagined. She was a small, energetic woman whose gray hair coiled tightly on her head like a knob. She smiled politely as she placed the tray across Lila Mae’s knees and even paused, before departing, to beat fluff into the pillows. She didn’t say anything. As Lila Mae ate (slowly, as her mother had taught her), she wondered why the handsome man from the morning had not brought it to her.

  She recognizes his knock a few hours later: light, regularly spaced, forceful. Her day’s worth of plans recede and Lila Mae sits up in the bed. Tells him to come in.

  “I just came up to see if you needed anything,” Natchez says. His thumb is locked into the corner of his pocket, his fingers splayed across a hip.

  “No, thank you,” Lila Mae responds. Then, thinking better, adds, “You’re on all night? I mean, you sleep here?”

  He shakes his head, amused. “No, ma’am,” he says, “I’m off in a few minutes. I just wanted to see if you needed anything before I leave. Mrs. Gravely’s asleep, so you’re on your own once I’m gone.”