The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

Lila Mae remembers from an Institute class on elevator marketing that Arbo spent millions promoting the Smooth-Glide in the trades and at conventions. They were the first to understand the dark powers of the bikini.

The drivers mellow once they hit the city because they remember again what the city is like and get exhausted, one by one as they exit the tunnel, and can’t remember why they were in such a hurry to get there. The internecine system of one-way streets and prohibited U-turns makes retreat a difficult enterprise. This is on purpose.

Chuck’s theory is that the Safety’s reemergence is part of an oozing conservatism observable in every facet of the elevator industry, from this season’s minimalist cab designs to the return of the sturdy T-rail after the ill-fated flirtation with round, European guardrails. Says he. Been too many changes in the Guild over the last few years—just look at the messy rise of Intuitionism, or the growing numbers of women and colored people in the Guild, shoot, just look at Lila Mae, flux itself, three times cursed. Inevitably the cycle’s got to come back around to what the Old Dogs want. “Innovation and regression,”

The intrinsic circuitousness of inspecting appeases certain dustier quarters of her and her colleagues’ mentalities, the very neighborhoods, it turns out, where the key and foundational character deficits reside. Nobody’s quite up to investigating those localities, or prepared to acknowledge or remark upon them anyway; to do so would lead to instructive, yes, but no doubt devastating revelations about their jobs, about themselves. They’re that important.

Because her father taught her that white folks can turn on you at any moment.

They can turn rabid at any second; this is the true result of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence. Her position is precarious in the office, she understands that, and in O’Connor’s as well; she’s a lost tourist among heavy vowels, the crude maps of ancestral homelands, and the family crests of near-exterminated clans. Her position is precarious everywhere she goes in this city, for that matter, but she’s trained dread to keep invisible in its ubiquity, like fire hydrants and gum trod into black sidewalk spackle. Makeshift weapons include shoes, keys and broken bottles. Pool cues if they’re handy.

“That’s what happens when you let freaks and misfits into the Guild.”

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?

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.

Natchez shakes his head again and grins. “Okay, then,” he says. “You one of those visiting professors they always have staying here? You giving a speech?” “No, I’m an elevator inspector.” Lila Mae’s voice automatically rises at those last two words, up to the tone she uses when she’s on a case. “I didn’t know they let us do that,” Natchez tells her. “Even up here.” “They don’t but I’m doing it anyway.”

seen all kinds of white people in my life, and I’ll tell you something. They all alike. Every last one of them. Act like I’m not even in the room. To hear them say such things, the things they say, right in front of my face, like I’m not even in the room. Such horrible things. And they all the same, except for James. I got nothing to say to a one of them. No more. After what they did to me and mine my whole life.”

The Screaming Man’s scream was the sound a soul would make, if you could hear the sound a soul makes when it is shed of skin and exposed to the air, the harrowing mortal sphere.

They had never heard screaming such as this before. Pure. Lucent. Without corruption. As if he were a prophet, and the language of his prophecy shrieks and yelps that those he was meant to save could not understand, but only surmise that his message was important and make their own personal preparations for the Reckoning.

When they walk into town she makes him walk closely behind her, she clutches him behind her back, as if to shield him from the eyes of the white people. As if she thought they would see him and take him away from her. She does it less now that he is older and taller, but it seems to him it was always unnecessary. The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town.

Lila Mae knew he was joking because he hated himself. She understood this hatred of himself; she hated something in herself and she took it out on Pompey. Now she could see Fulton for what he was. There was no way he believed in transcendence. His race kept him earthbound, like the stranded citizens before Otis invented his safety elevator. 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.

Lila Mae thinks, Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you. When he gives lectures to his flock, years later, they are not aware of what he is truly speaking. The elevator world will look like Heaven but not the Heaven you have reckoned.

Returning from church and prayer for the next place. Beyond. It is need. She has always considered herself an atheist. She has knelt beside her mother and father in church and said the words she was supposed to say, but she never believed them, and when she came North she stopped going. She has always considered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion. Anyone can start a religion. They just need the need of others.

He wants to be there now, in the places they will build when they have the perfect elevator. He won’t be there. He knew that as soon as he started to believe in it. He had never allowed himself to believe out of fear. So of course when he started to believe, it was too late.