The Intuitionist (11 page)

“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.”

“I’m fine. Thank you again.”

His body tilts to leave, but Lila Mae stops him with, “Is that where you’re from? Natchez?”

“That’s where my mama’s from,” he replies. He leans against the door. “She didn’t like it enough to stay there, but she liked it enough to name me after it. She still wants to hear people say it.”

“I’m from down South, too.”

“Where?”

“A dirty town.”

“You’re not much for talking, are you?”

“I talk.”

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.”

“Is that good work—working on elevators? That’s a city job, right?”

“It’s not bad,” Lila Mae says, stealing a quick look at his hands. His fingers are wide. Arrogant, they seem to her. “They go up and they go down. You just have to understand why they do that.” She watches his eyes. “What do you do when you’re not here? This isn’t your regular job, right?”

“I’m just filling in. I do this and that,” he says. “Whatever comes my way. This city is tough, I’ll tell you that.”

“It’s a tough city,” Lila Mae repeats. She’s just reached the end of her conversational props.

Natchez doesn’t mind. “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he says. “My uncle, he’s still sick.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He says he can’t feel his leg.” Natchez frowns. “He says it feels like it’s been cut off.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It happens to him from time to time.”

“Thanks for checking in on me.”

“You sleep tight, Lila Mae. Sleep tight.”

* * *

The children masticate rock candy in greasy teeth and wait for their saliva to thicken into sugar. In the heat everything is sticky. Their tongues are green and red, from the candy.

At the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, the flags from every civilized country dangle in the limp air like the rags of stable hands. The sun stokes, gleams on the monstrous edifice of the Crystal Palace, which is a replica of its namesake in London: iron and wood and glass, radial ribs strengthened by slender cross-ribs. A Royal bauble. Before they invented verticality, that was all there was to aspire to, glass and steel confection delivered by spyglass from overseas.

To the west of the Crystal Palace is the fetid Croton reservoir; east is Sixth Avenue, a gargoyle of carriages and hooves. The Crystal Palace will fall five years later in 1858, devoured by fire in fifteen minutes, and become Times Square, in due course. But today, a thousand windows snare the light and the glass is streaked with the brackish film of condensed sweat. It is a greenhouse, and what treasures bloom there! In one room is arrayed raw materials on velvet, behind glass: minerals, ores in all shapes, coal, copper, stone, marble, crystal, diverse wonders all. In one gallery a locomotive squats on iron haunches atop a black pedestal: the machine is this dynamic age distilled, these vehicular
times. They come from all over the world. Hamburg presents many articles in horn, some pretty furniture, a large collection of sticks, embroideries, and Turkey showcases fine silks, raw materials, stuff of the earth, carpets and rugs much remarked upon. A million people under that glass during the course of the Exhibition. They dally and gasp at the exquisite watches from Switzerland, very diminutive, true craft, barely an inch in circumference and wound and ticking audibly, most beautifully set with lovely enameled exteriors. Grain and chocolate and guns, muskets and French pistols (the famous duels) and a stuffed Apache. Crimson fruit from Amazon vines and brown slivers of llama meat, dried and cured.

On the second floor are the reaping machines and threshers, still and elegant, like lithe animals stooping to lick moisture. The Bowie knives weep in the sunlight; they say Americans are never seen without one. (A quick look around disproves this Continental humbug). A monkey in a sable cape on a leather leash can tell the future. One display features a horse that’s only a foot high and a two-headed infant in a jar, for the children’s delight. The ladies and gentlemen step aside and wave their handkerchiefs in deep respect as he walks by: the Chinese Mandarin and two retainers. (Newspapers later report that he was just an opium smuggler pulling a gag.)

The sound of the organ on the second floor, against which two hundred instruments and six hundred voices would be nothing, so loud on this first day, July 14, 1853, falls away—the heat is even taking its toll on the organ, one man remarks. No, the organ has ceased because the man with the lungs of a bear, the Vice President of the United States, is about to address the assembled: “Our exhibition cannot fail to soften, if not eradicate altogether, the prejudices and animosities which have so long retarded the happiness of nations. We are living in a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind.
The distances which separated the different nations are rapidly vanishing with the achievements of modern invention. We can traverse them with incredible speed. The publicity of the present day causes that no sooner is a discovery or an invention made than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts. The products of all the quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal today and we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and captial. Ladies and gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1853 is to give us a true test and a living picture of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived and a new starting point from which all the nations will be able to direct their further exertions.” The monkey in the sable cape picks a pocket.

That first night the man attempts to kill himself and does not succeed. It is merely one act of many in the Great Hall, one rough stone among all the gathered jewels of the world. Elisha Graves Otis stands on the elevator platform. No one has seen his act before, and after all they have seen this day, there is little enthusiasm in the Crystal Palace for the unassuming gentleman. Despite his promises of the future. He is a slender middle-aged man in a herringbone frock coat; his right hand strokes a white vest. If the assembled stop to see the act, it is most probably because of exhaustion, the toll of a lifetime’s worth of exotic sights crammed into one glorious day and the swamp heat in the Palace, only now receding with the evening. And there’s nothing new about freight elevators except, perhaps, to some of the country yokels, but not to city folk.

The platform rises thirty feet into the air, grasping for the glass dome above that is black with night. They are drawn from the Persian tapestries and the Egyptian scarabs, summoned from the Ethiopian pots to Mr. Otis, the assembled in the Great Hall come and stare at the platform and the man and the ratcheted rails. They want the future after all. “Please watch carefully,” Mr. Otis
says. He holds a saw in the air, a gold crescent in the lamplight, and begins to sever the rope holding him in the air. As the fame of his act grows over the next few weeks and months, the Crystal Palace will never again be as quiet as it is now. The first time is the best time. It is quiet. The rope dances in the air as the final strands give. The platform falls eternally for a foot or two before the old wagon spring underneath the platform releases and catches in the ratchets of the guard rails. The people in the Exhibition still have a roar in them, even after all they have seen this day. A Safety Elevator. Verticality is not far off now, and true cities. The first elevation has begun. Mr. Elisha Otis removes his top hat with a practiced flourish and says, “All safe, gentlemen, all safe.”

* * *

The chauffeur does not speak, he drives, spinning the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. Minute grace of a painter: he makes short, careful strokes, never too extravagant or too miserly. He has a small red cut on his nape where the barber nicked him. As the black Buick squeezes through the bars of the city toward the Institute for Vertical Transport, Lila Mae thinks back to what Mr. Reed said. He said, “Perhaps you are the perfect person to talk to her. She won’t talk to us.”

Lila Mae Watson is colored, Marie Claire Rogers is colored.

The file she holds contains paper of different shapes, grades and thickness. Some of the words are handwritten, some have been imprinted by a typewriter. The one on top is Marie Claire Rogers’s application for employment as a maid with the Smart Cleaning Corporation. She was forty-five years of age when she applied, had two children, had been widowed. The application lists where she had worked previously; apparently she’d spent most of her life picking up after other people and was very experienced in this line of work. Tending to messes. One of her former
employers endorses her talents in a letter of reference, describing her as “obedient,” “quiet,” and “docile.” Another document, paperclipped to the application and eaved with the Smart Cleaning corporate logo, relates Mrs. Rogers’s six-months assignment to the McCaffrey household. Her term there passed without incident; Mrs. Rogers’s work was characterized by Mr. and Mrs. James McCaffrey as “efficient and careful.” The McCaffreys moved to cheerier climes, according to the Smart Cleaning Corporation’s records, and Mrs. Rogers was reassigned to one of their regular clients, the Institute for Vertical Transport.