The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

skinny Ned, that vapor, that meandering cumulus masquerading as a man,

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.

Jim and John look at each other. Throughout the history of their partnership, it’s Jim who takes his cues from his comrade, things as subtle as the tilting of a nostril or the vague tremble in the left knee. Jim is not reading any signals from John, and that’s a first. They’ve never been interrupted before. It’s so embarrassing.

The porter’s mouth is quick to smile. He is a tall and broad fellow, and would almost be menacingly handsome if not for the smile. Lila Mae sees he is a strong man, although his strength is wasted on his petite duties; the white uniform fits him well, but he seems trapped by its starched and creased confines. But we take what jobs we can get, Lila Mae thinks. Whatever we can scrabble for.

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.

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.

Everything in the garden is dying, that’s what time of year it is.

Before anger, pragmatism, as it always is with Ben Urich.

(Hope, it has been observed, is the most terrible of all torture implements.)

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.

What do you say to a brother you have not seen for decades. Lila Mae can barely speak to people she saw last week.

She understood this hatred of himself; she hated something in herself and she took it out on Pompey.

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.