The Intuitionist

Part ONE

It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.

* * *

She doesn’t know what to do with her eyes. The front door of the building is too scarred and gouged to look at, and the street behind her is improbably empty, as if the city had been evacuated and she’s the only one who didn’t hear about it. There is always the game at moments like this to distract her. She opens her leather field binder and props it on her chest. The game gets harder the farther back she goes. Most of the inspectors from the last decade or so are still with the Guild and are easy to identify: LMT, MG, BP, JW. So far she doesn’t particularly like the men who have preceded her at 125 Walker. Martin Gruber chews with his mouth open and likes to juggle his glass eye. Big Billy Porter is one of the Old Dogs, and proud of it. On many occasions Lila Mae has returned to the Pit from an errand only to hear Big Billy Porter regaling the boys about the glory days of the Guild, before. While his comments are never specific, it is clear to everyone just what and who Big Billy is referring to in his croaking, muddy voice. Rebellious among the bureaucratic rows of the Pit, Big Billy’s oak desk juts out into the aisle so he can seat his bulk directly beneath one of the ceiling fans. He says he overheats easily and on the hottest days of the summer his remaining hair slides away from how he’s combed it, the strands easing into nautilus whorls. It’s a slow process and watching it is like waiting for a new hour. But it happens eventually.

All the inspectors who have visited 125 Walker in the past have been Empiricists. As far as she can tell. When she gets fifteen years back in the record there are no more faces to put to the initials. She recognizes the initials from the inspection records of other elevators in other buildings but has never met the people they belong to. JM, for example, is also listed in the inspection record of the elevator Lila Mae departed just half an hour ago, and EH, she’s learned over time, has a thing for worn guide shoes, something no one ever looks at except the real stickler types. Checking guide shoes is a losing proposition. Some of the initial men must be in the pictures along the walls of the Pit. The men in those pictures sport the regulation haircuts the Guild required back then, respectable haircuts fit for men of duty and responsibility. The haircuts are utilitarian mishaps that project honor, fidelity, brotherhood unto death. The barber shop two doors down from the Guild, the one that always has big band music coming from inside, used to specialize. Or so they say. Some of the younger inspectors have started wearing the haircut again. It’s called a Safety. Lila Mae’s hair parts in the middle and cups her round face like a thousand hungry fingers.

The light at this hour, on this street, is the secondhand gray of ghetto twilight, a dull mercury color. She rings the superintendent again and hears a tinny bleating sound. Down twenty years in the record she finds one of the treasures that make the game real: James Fulton and Frank Chancre inspected 125 Walker within six months of each other. From Lila Mae’s vantage, it is easy to read into this coincidence the passing of the crown. Not clear why Fulton left his office to hit the field again, though. Twenty years ago he would have been Dean of the Institute and long past making the rounds of the buildings, ringing superintendents, waiting on worn and ugly stoops. Then she remembers Fulton liked to go into the field every now and again so he wouldn’t forget. Fulton with his mahogany cane, rapping impatiently on one of the three windows set in the front door of 125 Walker. Perhaps they weren’t cracked then. Perhaps he cracked them. Across from his initials the inspection record notes a problem with the limit switch, a 387. She recognizes the handwriting from Fulton’s room at the Institute, from the tall wooden display cases where his most famous papers are kept behind glass, in controlled atmospheres.

As for Chancre, he would have been a young and rising inspector back then. A little thinner, fewer exploded capillaries in his nose. He wouldn’t have been able to afford his double-breasted navy suits on a rookie’s salary, but his position has changed since those days. Lila Mae sees Chancre swallowing the super’s hands with his oversized mitts in faltering camaraderie. It takes a long time to become a politician, but he was born with the smile. You can’t fake smiles like that. Nice building you got here, chum. Nice to see a man who takes pride in his craft. Sometimes you walk into these places, you never know what you’re going to see, bless my heart. You want to say to yourself, how can people live like this, but then we are all dealt differently and you have to play what you’re dealt. Back home, we … He gave 125 Walker a clean bill. Lots on his mind, lots on his mind.

The wind is trapped in one of Walker Street’s secret nooks, pushing through, whistling. The elevator is an Arbo Smooth-Glide, popular with residential building contractors when 125 went up. 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. On a revolving platform festooned with red, white and blue streamers, slender fingers fan the air, summoning the contractors hither. The models have perfect American navels and the air is stuffy in the old convention hall. A placard overlooked for red-blooded distraction details in silver script Arbo’s patented QuarterPoint CounterWeight System. Has this ever happened to you? You’ve just put the finishing touches on your latest assignment and are proud as a peacock to show off for your client. As you ride to the top floor, the Brand X elevator stops and refuses to budge. You won’t be working with them anymore! Say goodbye to sticky, stubborn counterweights with the new Smooth-Glide Residential Elevator from Arbo. Over two million Arbo elevators are in use worldwide. Going up?

A bald head girdled by loose curls of red hair appears at the door’s window. The man squints at Lila Mae and opens the door, hiding his body behind the gray metal. He leaves it to her to speak.

“Lila Mae Watson,” she says. “I’ve come to inspect your elevator.”

The man’s lips arch up toward his nose and Lila Mae understands that he’s never seen an elevator inspector like her before. Lila Mae has pinpointed a spot as the locus of metropolitan disaffection. A zero-point. It is situated in the heart of the city, on a streetcorner that clots with busy, milling citizens during the day and empties completely at night except for prostitutes and lost encyclopedia salesmen. It’s a two-minute walk from the office. With that zero-point as reference, she can predict just how much suspicion, curiosity and anger she will rouse in her cases. 125 Walker is at the outer edges of the city, near the bank of the polluted river that keeps the skyscrapers at bay from the suburbs, and quite a distance from the streetcorner: He doesn’t like her. “Let me see your badge,” the man says, but Lila Mae’s hand is already fishing in her jacket pocket. She flips open her identification and holds it up to the man’s face. He doesn’t bother to look at it. He just asked for effect.

The hallway smells of burning animal fat and obscure gravies boiling to slag. Half the ceiling lights are cracked open or missing. “Back here,” he says. The superintendent seems to be melting as he leads Lila Mae across the grime-caulked black and white hexagonal tile. His bulbous head dissolves into shoulders, then spreads into a broad pool of torso and legs. “How come Jimmy didn’t come this time?” the super asks. “Jimmy’s good people.” Lila Mae doesn’t answer him. Dark oil streaks his forearms and clouds his green T-shirt. A door bangs open upstairs and a loud female voice yells something in the chafing tones reserved for disciplining children and pets.

The lumpy, pitted texture of the cab’s door tells her that management has painted it over a few times, but Lila Mae still recognizes the unusually wide dimensions of an Arbo Smooth-Glide door. Taking their cue from the early days of passenger-response criticism, Arbo equipped their newest model with an oversized door to foster the illusion of space, to distract the passenger from what every passenger feels acutely about elevators. That they ride in a box on a rope in a pit. That they are in the void. If the super doesn’t strip the old paint the next time he renovates, it will eventually impede the movement of the door. (Of course a lot of graffiti in this neighborhood.) Already the elevator door halts in its furrows when it opens. A violation waiting to be born, the nascent outlines of a 787. Lila Mae decides against saying anything to the super. It’s not her job. “You’ll want to start in the machine room, I guess,” the super says. He’s fixated on the ideal triangularity of Lila Mae’s tie knot, its grid of purple and blue squares. The tie disappears near her bosom, gliding beneath the buttons of her dark blue suit.

Lila Mae does not answer him. She leans against the dorsal wall of the elevator and listens. 125 Walker is only twelve floors high, and the vibration of the idling drive doesn’t diminish that much as it swims through the gritty loop of the diverting pulley, descends down the cables, navigates the suspension gear, and grasps the car. Lila Mae can feel the idling in her back. She hears the door operator click above her in the dark well and then the door shuts, halting a small degree as the strata of paint chafes. Three Gemco helical springs are standard-issue buffers on Arbo elevators. They wait fifteen feet below her like stalagmites. “Press twelve,” Lila Mae orders the super. Even with her eyes closed she could have done it herself, but she’s trying to concentrate on the vibrations massaging her back. She can almost see them now. This elevator’s vibrations are resolving themselves in her mind as an aqua-blue cone. Her pen rests in her palm and her grip loosens. It might fall. She shuts out the sound of the super’s breathing, which is a low rumble lilting into a wheeze at the ultimate convexity of his exhalation. That’s noise. The elevator moves. The elevator moves upward in the well, toward the grunting in the machine room, and Lila Mae turns that into a picture, too. The ascension is a red spike circling around the blue cone, which doubles in size and wobbles as the elevator starts climbing. You don’t pick the shapes and their behavior. Everyone has their own set of genies. Depends on how your brain works. Lila Mae has always had a thing for geometric forms. As the elevator reaches the fifth floor landing, an orange octagon cartwheels into her mind’s frame. It hops up and down, incongruous with the annular aggression of the red spike. Cubes and parallelograms emerge around the eighth floor, but they’re satisfied with half-hearted little jigs and don’t disrupt the proceedings like the mischievous orange octagon. The octagon ricochets into the foreground, famished for attention. She knows what it is. The triad of helical buffers recedes farther from her, ten stories down at the dusty and dark floor of the well. No need to continue. Just before she opens her eyes she tries to think of what the super’s expression must be. She doesn’t come close, save for that peculiar arching of his lips, but that doesn’t count because she already saw that from when he opened the front door. The super’s eyes are two black lines that withdraw indistinguishably into the skein of his hieroglyphic squint. His lips push up so far that his nostrils seem to suck them in. “I’m going to have to cite you for a faulty overspeed governor,” Lila Mae says. The door opens slowly in its track and the drive’s idling vibration is full and strong, up here so close to the machine room.

“But you haven’t even looked at it,” the super says. “You haven’t even seen it.” He is confused, and tiny pricks of blood speckle his pink cheeks.

“I’m going to have to cite you for a faulty overspeed governor,” Lila Mae repeats. She’s removing the tiny screws from the glass inspection plate on the left anterior wall of the elevator. The side of her screwdriver reads, PROPERTY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ELEVATOR INSPECTORS. “It catches every six meters or so,” Lila Mae adds as she withdraws the inspection slip from beneath the glass. “If you want, I can get my handbook from the car and you can see the regulations for yourself.”

“I don’t want to look at the damn book,” the super says. He runs his thumbs animatedly across his fingers as she signs the slip and replaces the plate. “I know what the book says. I want you to look at the damn thing yourself. It’s running fine. You haven’t even been upstairs.”

“Nevertheless,” Lila Mae says. She opens her field binder and writes her initials at the bottom of the ID column. Even from the twelfth floor, she can still hear the woman downstairs yelling at her children, or what Lila Mae supposes to be children. You never know these days.

“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”

She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.

The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”

The door of apartment 12-A cracks behind Lila Mae. “What’s all this noise in the hall?” a high, reedy voice asks. “Who’s that hanging out there? What you want?”

The super pulls 12-A’s door firmly shut and says, “You just mind your own business, Missus LaFleur. It’s just me.” He turns back to Lila Mae and smiles again. He sticks his tongue into the hole where his two front teeth used to be. Arbo didn’t lie about their QuarterPoint CounterWeight System. It rarely fails. A regrettable incident in Atlanta kicked up a lot of fuss in the trades a few years back, but an inquiry later absolved Arbo of any wrongdoing. As they say. The model’s overspeed governors are another matter, though, notoriously unreliable, and probability says their famous manufacturing defect should have emerged long ago. Sixty bucks is sixty bucks.

“You’ll get a copy of the official citation in a few days in the mail, and it’ll inform you how much the fine is,” Lila Mae says. She writes 333 in 125 Walker’s inspection record.

The super slaps the door of 12-A with his big hand. “But I just gave you sixty dollars! Nobody has ever squeezed me for more than sixty.” He’s having trouble keeping his trembling arms still at his chest. No, he wouldn’t mind taking a swipe at her.

“You placed sixty dollars in my pocket. I don’t think I implied by my behavior that I wanted you to bribe me, nor have I made any statement or gesture, such as an outstretched palm, for example, saying that I would change my report because you gave me money. If you want to give away your hard-earned money”—Lila Mae waves her hand toward a concentration of graffiti—“I see it as a curious, although in this case fortuitous, habit of yours that has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Or why I’m here.” Lila Mae starts down the stairs. After riding elevators all day, she looks forward to walking down stairs. “If you want to try and take your sixty dollars off me, you’re welcome to try, and if you want to challenge my findings and have another person double-check the overspeed governor, that’s your right as a representative of this building. But I’m correct.” Lila Mae abandons the super on the twelfth floor with the Arbo Smooth-Glide. The super cusses. She is right about the overspeed governor. She is never wrong.

She doesn’t know yet.

* * *

All of the Department’s cars are algae green and shine like algae, thanks to the diligent ministrations of the motor pool. On the night of his inauguration Chancre gripped the lectern with his sausage fingers and announced his Ten Point Plan. The gold badge of his office hung over his shoulders by a long, patriotic ribbon. “Department vehicles,” he thundered, “must be kept in a condition befitting the Department.” To much applause in the dim banquet room of the Albatross Hotel. Those seated at the long oval tables, gathered around Mrs. Chancre’s unholy floral arrangements, easily translated Point Number Seven to the more succinct “Those colored boys better put a shine on those cars.” One of the mechanics, Jimmy, has a secret crush on Lila Mae. Not completely secret: Lila Mae’s sedan is the only one that gets vacuumed daily, and each morning when she leaves the garage for the field the rearview mirror has been adjusted from the night shift’s contortions, to just the way she likes it. Jimmy is a slender character among the burly crew of the motor pool, and the youngest. The calluses on his hands are still tiny pebbles in his flesh.

The traffic at quitting time is a bother. Radio station WCAM equips men with binoculars and positions them at strategic overpasses to describe the gnarls and tangles. Lila Mae is never able to differentiate these men from the meandering isolates who linger at the margins of freeways. All of them make obscure, furtive gestures, all share a certain stooped posture that says they lack substantive reasons for being where they are, at the side of the road. Impossible to distinguish a walkie-talkie from a bottle of cheap wine at such distances.

They don’t have alibis, Lila Mae appraises the men at the side of the road.

Her sedan limps through black glue. The WCAM sentry warns of an accident up ahead: A schoolbus has overturned, and as the passing commuters rubberneck and bless themselves, the traffic clots.

Over here, honks a woman in a red compact. The light trilling of her car horn reveals its foreign birth, cribside cooing in alien tongues. Lila Mae thinks car horns work backward: they don’t prod and urge the laggard ahead but summon those behind, come up, follow me. Lila Mae listens to the sporadic summons, listens to the news reports of WCAM, the red brake lights smoldering on the road ahead. Each of the announcer’s words have the routine elegance, the blank purity Lila Mae associates with geometry. The announcer says that a low-pressure system is rolling east. The announcer says that there’s been an accident at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. An elevator has fallen.

Now we’re cooking.

Lila Mae turns on her Department radio and hears the dispatcher call her inspector’s code. “Come in, Z34. Report Zulu-three-four.”

“This is Z34 reporting to base,” Lila Mae says.

“Why haven’t you reported back, Z34?” Contrary to prevailing notions, the elevator inspector dispatch room is not filled with long consoles staffed by an able company who furiously plug and unplug wires from myriad inputs, busily routing. The dispatch room is a small box on the top floor of the office and there’s only one person on duty at a time. It is very neat and has no windows. Craig’s on dispatch now, and in Lila Mae’s imagination he is a skinny man with brown hair who withers in his revolving chair, dressed in suspendered slacks and a sleeveless undershirt. She’s never seen a dispatcher, and she’s only seen their room once, on her first day of work. He must have been in the bathroom, or making coffee.

“I was on a call,” Lila Mae responds. “125 Walker. I just stepped in the car.” No one is going to catch her in that lie. Lila Mae always turns off the radio when she’s finished for the day. Occasionally one of the night shift calls in sick and Craig wants her to fill in for a few hours. Until the city and the Department work out their overtime policies there’s no way Lila Mae is going to fill in for the night shift. If you haven’t killed your hangover by six o’clock, you should take your lumps, is what she thinks.

“You’re to report back to HQ immediately,” Craig says. Then he adds, “Zulu-thirty-four.”

“What’s this crap about the Briggs building?” Lila Mae asks.

“You’re to report back here immediately, Z34. Chancre wants to talk to you. And I don’t think I have to quote you Department regs on profanity over city frequencies. Dispatch out.”

Lila Mae returns to WCAM, hoping for more details. For some reason Craig’s being a hardass, and that’s not good. She considers steering over to the shoulder to bypass the traffic, brandishing her inspector credentials should a policeman stop her. But the police and the elevator inspectors have a difficult past, and it’s doubtful a cop would let her off the hook, even for city business. Of course the city has never answered Chancre’s repeated requests for sirens. No one outside the Guild seems to think they’re necessary for some reason. Over the radio, one of the WCAM sentries ahead comments on how long it’s taking the emergency techs to remove the children from the schoolbus.

Lila Mae once delivered an oral report on Fanny Briggs in the third grade. Fanny Briggs was in the newer encyclopedias. Some even had her picture. Fanny Briggs looked tired in the marginalia; her eyelids drooped and her jowls oozed down from her cheekbones. Lila Mae stood in front of Ms. Parker’s third-grade class and trembled as she started her report. She preferred to fade into the back rows, next to the rabbit cages, beneath the awkward pastels of the spring art project. There she was at Ms. Parker’s desk, and her index cards shook in her tiny hands.

“Fanny Briggs was a slave who taught herself how to read.”

One time a radio program featured Dorothy Beechum, the most famous colored actress in country, reading parts of Fanny Brigg’s account of her escape North. Lila Mae’s mother called her into the drawing room. Lila Mae’s legs dangled over her mother’s lap as she leaned toward the brown mesh of the radio speaker. The actress’s voice was iron and strong and did not fail to summon applause from the more liberal quarters of her audience, who murmured about noble struggle. Tiny particles of darkness pressed beyond the cracked, wheaty mesh of the speaker, the kind of unsettling darkness Lila Mae would later associate with the elevator well. Of course she’d do her oral report on Fanny Briggs. Who else was there?

Not much progress in this traffic.

The times are changing. In a city with an increasingly vocal colored population — who are not above staging tiresome demonstrations for the lowlier tabloids, or throwing tomatoes and rotten cabbages during otherwise perfectly orchestrated speeches and rallies — it only makes sense to name the new municipal building after one of their heroes. The Mayor is not stupid; you don’t become the ruler of a city this large and insane by being stupid. The Mayor is shrewd and understands that this city is not a Southern city, it is not an old money city or a new money city but the most famous city in the world, and the rules are different here. The new municipal building has been named the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building, and there have been few complaints, and fewer tomatoes.

When Lila Mae was assigned the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building, she thought nothing of it. It made sense that it would be either her or Pompey, the only two colored inspectors in the Department. Chancre’s no fool. There are, after all, election years in the Elevator Guild too, and this is one of them, and all sorts of unexpected things have been happening. The Department-wide $1.25 raise, for example, which according to Chancre really adds up to a pretty penny after a while. Not that the elevator inspectors, civil-servant to the core despite their maverick reputations and occasionally flashy antics, needed to be convinced of the importance of a $1.25 raise. A government job is a government job, whether it’s inspecting elevators or railroad cars full of hanging meat, and anything that brings their salaries into closer proportion to their contributions to the American good are accepted cheerfully, election-year ploy or no. Same thing with the screwdrivers. When a memo circulating soon after the raises announced that the new screwdrivers were on their way, few cared that the Guild Chair was so naked in his attempt to score points with the electorate. For the new screwdrivers were quite beautiful. Ever since the city granted license to the Department, bulky and ungainly screwdrivers had poked and bulged in the jacket pockets of the elevator inspectors, completely ruining any attempts at dapperness and savoir faire. It’s difficult to look official and imposing while listing to one side. The new screwdrivers have mother-of-pearl handles and heads the exact width of an inspection-plate screw. They fold out like jackknives and lend themselves to baroque fantasies about spies and secret missions. And who can argue with that?

So when the word spread that Lila Mae had been assigned the 18-deep elevator stack in the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building (18-deep!), a career-making case for any inspector, few were surprised and whatever ground Chancre lost among the Old Dogs of the Guild was more than compensated for by the goodwill generated by the raise and the new mother-of-pearl jackknife screwdrivers. Lila Mae knew when she got the assignment that it was meant to draw attention from Chancre’s opponent in the race for the Guild Chair, the liberal Orville Lever, who apparently thinks that only Intuitionists are capable of building coalitions, shaking hands with fundamentally different people, etc. Lila Mae (who, by the way, is still not making much headway in the evening traffic) may be an Intuitionist, but she is a colored woman, which is more to the point. Chancre’s assistant left a note on her desk: Your good service won’t be forgotten after the election. As if she needed to be bribed with a vague promise of promotion (and probably a lie anyway). It’s her job. She’s taken an oath and such things are to be taken seriously. Lila Mae held the note in her small hands, and even though she did not look up from her desk she knew that all of them, the Old Dogs and the New Guys in their retrograde Safety haircuts, were looking at her. The way the gossip flows in the Pit (Lila Mae is situated quite far downstream), they probably knew she got the case before she did. Probably skinny Ned, that vapor, that meandering cumulus masquerading as a man, sentenced to desk duty after the infamous Johnson Towers debacle, talked to a guy who talked to a guy in Chancre’s inner circle and the word came down: the colored gal gets the job. Not any of them, not Pompey. There are no surprises in election years, just a bit more static.

And here’s Chancre now, arms struts at the tails of his signature double-breasted suit, twenty feet tall on a billboard for the United Elevator Co. Lila Mae’s car creeps through the bottleneck at the entrance to the tunnel so there’s no missing him. No more honking for this glum procession — they can see the tunnel now, and there is always the mandatory period of pensive anticipation on entering the tunnel. ALL SAFE declares the copy across his feet, a play on Otis’s famous declaration at the 1853 Crystal Palace Exposition. The reference doesn’t mean much to the people in the cars around Lila Mae — elevator ads probably only register in civilian heads as a dim affirmation of modernity, happy progress to be taken for granted and subconsciously cherished — but Otis’s phrase is the hoist pulling her and her fellow inspectors out of bed each morning. The sacred motto.

Even long observers of the mysterious ways of corporate vanity are hard-pressed to understand the sudden ubiquity of elevator ads. In addition to billboards like the one towering over Lila Mae right now, the elevator industry’s advertisements line park benches, adorn the buses and subways of the city’s transit system, brace the outfield walls of baseball stadiums, bright non sequiturs. Other places, too. One time before the start of a double feature at her favorite movie house — the Marquee on Twenty-third Street, notorious among those in the know for its free popcorn refills — Lila Mae sat astonished as a thirty-second movie reel introduced American Elevator’s new frictionless drive. From time to time Lila Mae still catches herself humming the spot’s elastic doo-wop chorus, never mind that the frictionless drive in question is just American’s old 240–60 drive in a smart new housing. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon, the vocality of the international short-range vertical transport industry, and there’s no one to explain it. How much Chancre makes in endorsements each year is anyone’s guess, but it goes without saying that he has a lot riding on his reelection to Guild Chair. Just look at him up there. So far Lila Mae thinks her role in the campaign is limited to window dressing — evidence for the new, progressive face of the Elevator Guild, and by extension, city government.

She doesn’t know yet.

She’s almost inside the tunnel when WCAM finally decides to update the situation at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. The yellow tiles inside the tunnel glisten and Lila Mae sees a long throat strangled by mucus. In his geometric voice, so full of planes, WCAM’s radio announcer says that Chancre and the Mayor will be holding a press conference to discuss what transpired at the new municipal building early this afternoon. But before he can say something more, something tangible that Lila Mae can use to prepare herself, the tunnel eats the transmission. Like that. Then there’s just the agitated scratch of static inside her sedan and the earnest humming of multiple tires on the tunnel floor outside. Near silence, to better contemplate the engineering marvel they travel through, the age of miracles they live in. The air is poisonous.

Something happened. It was her case. Lila Mae drums her fingers on the steering wheel and relives her call to the Briggs building the day before. Those looking for a correlative to Fanny Briggs’s powerful, lumpy body in the shape of the building dedicated to her will have to bear in mind the will to squat that roosts in the soul of every city architect. Government buildings are generally squat rather than tall, presumably to better accommodate deep file drawers of triplicate ephemera. So it has been for generations. But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring? While the architects understand that the future is up, the future is in how high you can go, it is difficult to shake old habits. Habits clamp down on the ankle and resist all entreaties, no matter how logical. As it is in politics, the only victor in the end was ugly compromise. The Fanny Briggs Memorial Building hunkers down on the northern edge of Federal Plaza in the renovated section of downtown, burly and squat for five floors before launching into space with another forty stories of pure, unsullied steel. The net effect is chrysalid, a photograph of a glass insect emerging from a stone cocoon. When Lila Mae first walked up the broad stone steps of the building, she looked up at the monolith above and felt a trembling instant of vertigo: It was a big responsibility. The mandatory Latinate motto was engraved above the entrance.

Lila Mae is outside the tunnel now and can’t think of what she did wrong. She needs a plan.

Keep cool, Lila Mae.

* * *

The weird thing about the tunnel is that on the world-side, the city’s skyline is merely one incident among many on the horizon. From the world’s side of the tunnel the skyline is a row of broken teeth, an angry serration gnawing at the atmosphere, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on, dirty water and more land beyond that dirty water, the humble metropolitan outpost just departed, a crop of weedy smokestacks, lots of stuff, 360 degrees to choose from and the generous illusion of choice. Then the tunnel, and no more sky. Nothing but teeth. 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.

As she turns the corner to Headquarters, Lila Mae sees that the press conference is under way, although it takes her a few seconds to put two and two together. Remarkable pinstripes on the newspapermen and radio reporters; if the city fathers could only regulate construction, keep tabs on how this place looks from afar, maybe the city could be those pinstripes: uniform, doubtless, regimented. The thicket of fedoraed men is such that initially she can’t make out Chancre and the Mayor, but then Lila Mae sees the strange red halation that forms around Chancre’s Irish face when all the blood rushes into it, when the incumbent Guild Chair is set for one of his eruptions. She feels exposed, a voyeur in full moonlight on the clearest night of summer. Because they are talking about her, because she is implicated in all this — she knows this much, if not the specifics. The press conference bows around the entrance to Headquarters, and the garage ramp is mercifully unimpeded. The flashbulbs crackle and pop like dry brush beneath the feet of hunters.

City buildings may be deficient in adequate staple supplies, comfortable chairs and quality toilet paper, but never in fluorescent lights. Lila Mae eases her sedan into the rank gloom of the garage and past the observation window of the mechanics’ office. The six-man crew in their dark green uniforms crane over their office’s old, reliable radio and Lila Mae prays she will make it safe past them, be spared the customary frowns and code-nods. Dicty college woman. This space in the garage is what the Department has allowed the colored men — it is underground, there are no windows permitting sky, and the sick light is all the more enervating for it — but the mechanics have done their best to make it their own. For example: A close inspection of Chancre’s campaign posters, which are taped to every other cement column despite regulations against campaign literature within a hundred yards of Headquarters, reveals myriad tiny insurrections, such as counterclockwise swirls in the middle of Chancre’s pupils, an allusion to his famous nocturnal dipsomania. You have to stand up real close to the posters to see the swirls, and even then they’re easy to miss: Lila Mae had to have Jimmy point them out to her. Horns, boiling cysts, the occasional cussword inked in across Chancre’s slat teeth — they add up after a while, somehow more personal and meaningful than the usual cartoons and pinups of office homesteading. No one notices them but they’re there, near-invisible, and count for something.

Lila Mae closes the door and squeezes between the cars: it’s past seven and none of the night shift have left yet, which hasn’t happened in the three years she’s been with the Department. She doesn’t have a plan yet, figures she has at least until the press conference is over before she has to meet Chancre, and that much time to get her story straight. Unfortunately, Lila Mae realizes, she turned in her inspection report on the Briggs building yesterday afternoon, and even if she could think of a way to sneak into Processing, past Miss Bally and her girls, they would have already removed it. As evidence. How long before they pull in Internal Affairs, if they haven’t already? No one owes her any favors. After three years she doesn’t owe any favors and no one owes her any back, which was how she liked it up ’til now. She is reconsidering her position. Maybe Chuck.

“How’s she running today?” Jimmy asks. The young mechanic always says that when Lila Mae comes in from the field, figuring that his consistency and friendly shop talk will one day seem worth it, fondly recollected as a period of prehistoric innocence in their romance. He didn’t sneak up on her really — Lila Mae was just too preoccupied to notice his wiry body canter out of the office across the cement. She’s not too preoccupied, however, to notice that his daily query sounds uncertain today, the usual ambiguity over whether he is asking about Lila Mae or the Department sedan even more confused. He is smiling, however, and Lila Mae thinks maybe things aren’t that bad after all.

Lila Mae asks, “What are all these cars still doing here?”

“They’re all listening to Chancre and the Mayor talk about the building.” He’s not sure how much to say, or how to say it. He pulls his rag from the back pocket of his overalls and twists and bends it.

It’s going to be like pulling teeth. After all this time, Lila Mae is not sure if Jimmy is just shy or dim-witted. Whenever she decides for sure one way, Jimmy does something to make her reconsider, initiating another few months’ speculation. “They’re talking about the Fanny Briggs building, right?”

“Yes,” Jimmy says.

“And what happened to it?” She’s taking it step by step. She is very aware that her time is running out.

“Something happened and the elevator fell. There’s been a lot of fuss about it and — everybody — in the garage — is saying that you did it.” Sucks in his breath: “And that’s what they’re saying on the radio, too.”

“It’s okay, Jimmy. Just one more thing — is the day shift upstairs or are they in O’Connor’s?”

“I heard some of them say they were going over to O’Connor’s to listen to Chancre.” The poor kid is shaking. He stopped smiling some time ago.

“Thank you, Jimmy,” Lila Mae says. Up the ramp, out onto the street, and it’s three stores over to O’Connor’s. She can probably make it without being seen by the people at the entrance. If Chuck is there. On her way out, Lila Mae grabs Jimmy’s shoulder and tells him she’s running fine. Fibbing of course.

* * *

Lila Mae has one friend in the Department and his name is Chuck. Chuck’s red hair is chopped and coaxed into a prim Safety, which helps him fit in with the younger inspectors in the Department. According to Chuck, the haircut is mandatory at the Midwestern Institute for Vertical Transport, his alma mater as of last spring. Item one (or close to it) in the Handbook for Students. Even the female students have to wear Safeties, making for so many confused, wrenching swivels that Midwestern’s physician christened the resulting campus-wide epidemic of bruised spinal muscles “Safety Neck.” 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,” Chuck likes to tell Lila Mae over lunch, lunch usually being a brown-bag negotiation over squeezed knees in the dirty atrium of the Metzger Building a few blocks from the office. “Back and forth, back and forth.” Or up and down, Lila Mae adds to herself.

Chuck maintains that after a quick tour of duty running the streets, he intends to park himself at a Department desk job for a while and then pack it up to teach escalators at the Institute. Chuck’s a shrewd one. Given elevator inspection’s undeniable macho cachet and preferential treatment within the Guild, it takes a unique personality to specialize in escalators, the lowliest conveyance on the totem pole. Escalator safety has never received its due respect, probably because inspecting the revolving creatures is so monotonous that few have the fortitude, the stomach for vertigo, necessary to stare at the cascading teeth all day. But Chuck can live with the obscurity and disrespect and occasional migraines. Specialization means job security, and there’s a nationwide lack of escalator professors in the Institutes, so Chuck figures he’s a shoo-in for a teaching job. And once he’s in there, drawing a bead on tenure, he can branch out from escalators and teach whatever he wants. He probably even has his dream syllabus tucked in his pocket at this very moment, scratched on a cheap napkin. A general survey course on the history of hydraulic elevators, for example — Chuck’s kooky for hydraulics, from Edoux’s 1867 direct-action monstrosity to the latest rumors on the hybrids Arbo Labs has planned for next year’s fall line. Or hypothetical elevators; hypothetical elevator studies is bound to come back into vogue again, now that the furor has died down. Chuck’s assured Lila Mae that even though he is a staunch Empiricist, he’ll throw in the Intuitionist counterarguments where necessary. His students should be acquainted with the entire body of elevator knowledge, not just the canon. Chuck feels his future in the Guild is assured. For now, in one ear and out the other with all the “tread jockey” jokes.

No jokes or other forms of gentle and not-so-gentle ribbing right now, however: Chuck has been more or less accepted by the rest of the Department after a brief period of imperceptible hazing (imperceptible to New Guys like Chuck and perennial outsiders like Lila Mae on account that most of it consists of secret code words and birdlike hand gestures only members recognize, let alone notice), and besides, tonight everyone’s crowded around the radio listening to the press conference. The big news. Lila Mae, having crept out of the garage and walked over to O’Connor’s so tentatively that anyone watching her would have thought her to have just that morning discovered her legs, is not surprised to find her colleagues listening to the radio describe an event unfolding a scant hundred yards away. They could have easily joined the newsmen outside the front of HQ, but that would have been too direct. The trip is everything to elevator inspectors — the bumps and shudders, not the banalities of departure and destination — and if the radio waves must first amble from the reporters’ microphones to the receiver atop the WCAM Building and dally there a bit before returning (nearly) to the humble spot of their nativity, so much the better. 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. Really. The first one to suggest they go over to O’Connor’s to hear Chancre and the Mayor, the one who made it easy for them to indulge their widening array of avoidances and circumabulations, is probably drinking free all night.

The day shift and the night shift are firmly installed in slouching semicircles around O’Connor’s radio, which is enshrined behind the bar underneath an emerald neon shamrock. She spots Chuck’s red hair halfway into the pack. The wolves are intent on the sounds. On the radio, the Mayor says we’ll get to the bottom of this affair, pillory the guilty parties, launch a full-scale investigation into the terrible accident at the Fanny Briggs building, dedicated to one of our country’s most distinguished daughters.

“Do you think that a party or parties resistant to colored progress may be responsible?” a reporter asks the Mayor, to much furious murmuring in O’Connor’s. Everyone thinks, as they must, of last summer’s riots, of how strange it was to live in a metropolis such as this (magnificent elevated trains, five daily newspapers, two baseball stadiums) and yet be too afraid to leave the house. How quickly things can fall into medieval disorder.

“Right now we’re hesitant to speculate on who may or may not be responsible,” the Mayor says. “We don’t want to inflame any emotions or incite the baser impulses. I was present at the scene and all I know is that there was a great clanging, a loud clangalang, and much confusion, and I knew that something terrible had transpired at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. Right now we’re concentrating on the facts at hand, such as the inspection records. But Mr. Chancre, the Chair of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, will be handling those questions. Mr. Chancre?”

Needless to say, Lila Mae doesn’t frequent O’Connor’s very often, usually just on the Department’s bowling nights, when it’s just her and Chuck and the resident alcoholics, this latter party posing no threat except to clean floors. Because her father taught her that white folks can turn on you at any moment. She fears for her life in O’Connor’s because she believes that the unexpected scrape of a chair across the floor or a voice’s sudden intensity contains the potentiality of a fight. On the few occasions Lila Mae has been in O’Connor’s during the broadcast of a baseball game or a boxing match, every cheer sent her looking for makeshift weapons. It doesn’t help matters that the bartender rings a large brass bell when a patron doesn’t tip; she jumps every time. Jumps at that sound and at the starter’s pistol they fire to quell disagreements, heated exchanges over the various merits and drawbacks of heat dispersal in United Elevator’s braking systems, say. 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.

“I’ll bet you ten dollars Chancre makes a campaign speech.”

“Sucker bet.”

Peril tonight especially. Imagine it like this: Everything known is now different.

“She really put her foot in it now.”

“Her and the rest of that bunch, by Roland.”

“Chancre’s a cinch now.”

Never mind that Lila Mae hasn’t been in a fight since the third grade, when a young blonde girl with horse teeth asked her, Why do niggers have curly hair?

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

“Shut up — I want to hear the man.”

The first thing a colored person does when she enters a white bar is look for other colored people. There is only one other colored person besides Lila Mae who ever ventures past the sneering leprechaun who cavorts on O’Connor’s door, and that’s Pompey, who’s here tonight, elbows on the bar, sipping whiskey daintily as if it were the Caliph’s tea, the cuffs of his shirt bold out of sad and comically short jacket sleeves. The bartender sweeps away empty glasses with a clockhand’s impatience so there’s no estimating the margin of safety. For Lila Mae, not Pompey. These men would never hurt Pompey, little Pompey, who surely would have commanded some limp mare at the racetrack had he not found his illustrious vocation. (Or it found him, for there’s something akin to fatal resignation in the inspectors’ attitude toward their life’s work.) Here’s a story about Pompey that’s true or not true: it doesn’t matter. One time George Holt, Chancre’s predecessor, called Pompey into his office near quitting time. The Guild Chair’s office is on the executive floor above the Pit, and since reprimands and termination notices arrive in official Department interoffice mail envelopes, invitations upstairs are universally regarded as omens of good fortune. Promotions, plum assignments, keys to the better sedans. Again: Pompey, the first colored elevator inspector in the city, is summoned up to see Holt for the first time, after putting in four years on the streets. The difficulty of all colored “firsts” is well documented or at the very least easily imaginable, and need not be elaborated except to say that Pompey had an exceedingly hard time of things. When Holt called him upstairs, Pompey believed his appallingly obsequious nature, cultivated to exceptional degree during his time in the Department, had finally served him well. Holt had never spoken to him before and Pompey found him surprisingly affable. Holt offered him a cigar, the scent of which Pompey was well acquainted with, as it lingered in random pockets of the Department’s hallways and offices, marking where Holt had walked and surveyed, an acrid reminder of authority: bodiless, unseen, everywhere. Pompey brushed his tongue across the inside of his cheeks to forage the residue of the faintly cinnamon smoke, the very wisps of Holt’s esteem. He expected confidences; Holt told him he was going to kick him in the ass. Pompey laughed (this executive humor was going to take a little getting used to) and went along with the joke, even after Holt told him to bend over. Which he did. Pompey continued to chortle until Holt kicked him in the left ass cheek with the arrowhead of one of his burgundy wingtips (Pompey’s angle of vision precluded determination of exactly which shoe). Then Holt told him to leave his office. The next day a small memo appeared on Pompey’s desk informing him of his promotion to Inspector Second Grade. True, Holt didn’t first ask him to shine the shoe. And he got to keep the cigar.

Lila Mae hadn’t heard the story until Chuck told her about it. Far from explaining Pompey’s animus toward her, the story merely obscured matters. 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? Pompey says now, “She’s finally getting what’s been coming to her for a long time now,” and Halitosis Harry smacks him on the back in agreement. Nobody’s spotted her yet except for the bartender, who’s too much of a pro to say anything. She’s not hiding exactly, but most of her body is secreted behind a pillar conveniently situated between the door and the crowd at the radio. The same leering leprechaun on the front door of O’Connor’s shimmies on the pillar in triplicate. Or maybe she is hiding. She’s not sure. She doesn’t know how to get Chuck’s attention. He’s been quiet through all of it. One of her colleagues lets fly a rolling rebel yell at something Chancre just said.

“Is it true that the inspector was an Intuitionist?” a reporter asks.

“Yes, the inspector of the Fanny Briggs building, a Miss Lila Mae Watson, is an Intuitionist. I’m real reluctant to turn this terrible affair into a political matter, but I’m sure most of you are well aware that my opponent in the election for Guild Chair is also an Intuitionist.”

Lila Mae realizes that the time she spent thinking about how to navigate O’Connor’s would have been better spent listening to the radio or simply going up to Chuck and grabbing him out of the mob. That would have surprised them. But now she’s no more wiser than when she entered.

“Do you think that Intuitionist methods, which in the past you have described as ‘heretical and downright voodoo,’ may have played a part in today’s crash?”

“Right now Internal Affairs is looking into that very possibility. We have a copy of the building’s inspection report and believe me, we are scrutinizing and cogitating as I speak. Gentlemen, it’s just these very kinds of occurrences I have been trying to eradicate in my four years as Guild Chair, and I don’t think I’m being immodest when I tell you I think I’ve made a pretty good go of it. Our Department sedans are shiny as never before and morale has never been so high. It’s almost scary. Sometimes people ask me how I made this Department the crown jewel, the very pearl of city services. I tell them that sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Why hold truck with the uppity and newfangled when Empiricism has always been the steering light of reason? Just like it was in our fathers’ day, and our fathers’ fathers’. Today’s incident is just the kind of unfortunate mishap that can happen when you kowtow to the latest fashions from overseas. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, gentlemen, I can give you my blood oath on that little crawdaddy.”

It occurs to her that now she doesn’t have an alibi either, just like the anonymous wraiths on the side of the highway. No one knows who they are.

* * *

Not that Lila Mae couldn’t use some excitement in her life, as the two men searching her apartment are discovering through items and effects. Jim’s on his knees in Lila Mae’s closet, forcing his plump fingers into her shoes and testing the heels for secret hiding places. She has one pair of worn sneakers, left over from when she first moved to the city and spent long hours on trudging marches between the buildings. Each time she came to the city’s edges and saw the churning brown rivers beyond, Lila Mae would hit a right angle and turn back into the buildings, deeper in. She’d never experienced anonymity like that: it’s as if the place stimulates enzymes that form a carapace. The walks petered out about a year ago. Now she sits. The rest of her footwear consists of Department-reg wingtips, shined to obsessive gleam in the wake of Chancre’s image crusade. She has five pairs of them, arranged to the days of the work week. Friday’s pair is missing.

Jim’s already searched every pocket of her clothes, traced every stitch. Find it, is his motto. Jim’s the more obvious of this duo, sworn to his day’s specific orders. Today’s are “get evidence.” John’s the philosophically inclined one, prone to staring moodily out of the attic window of the house he lives in with his parents. Continuing to stare out even after Louisa, his next-door neighbor, has finished undressing and turned out the lights. John needs patterns, and labors after them even when circumstances betray him. Because there must be patterns, experience is recursive, and if the pattern has not announced itself yet, it will, eloquent and emphatic in a mild-mannered sort of way. He’s still searching for a concordance between the loss of his virginity (purchased) and an ankle sprain (accidental) exactly three years later, give or take an hour. John is sure it will come, awaiting another item in the series or a new perspective on the extant ones. No matter. For now he satisfies himself with an appraisal of Lila Mae’s clothes, which gently brush over Jim’s bent back. Very few casual clothes, and what there are of them favor autumnal spectra: damp browns, rust, brittle grays. Her four dark blue suits (one, again, is missing) are identical, describing, John thinks, a pathological affinity for regularity, the constant and true. An attempt to fit in that unavoidably calls attention to itself. It appeases John’s societal schemata that Lila Mae is of the colored persuasion.

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. Their fraternity glut the police files of known assailants; they reach for the grocer’s last box of cereal to prevent the next customer from enjoying it, and don’t even like cereal. Banks are full of them, and movie theaters and public transport. The invisible everymen, the true citizens. Lila Mae counts few people in this world as friends. Jim and John are the rest. Dusty brown clumps of hair, prow jaws, complexions quick to blood. Eaters of steak, fat gobblers, belchers. (The Department of Elevator Inspectors is overflowing with men like this, but don’t be fooled by their officious demeanors and methodical bent: these guys aren’t Department.) Hot dogs and mustard is Jim’s favorite meal, mustard being a discreet element and not mere condiment. John likes hamburgers with ketchup — fine distinctions are not lost on John, who is the sort that prides himself on knowing what is what. With regards to their present duty, what’s what is that they haven’t found what they are looking for.

Two rooms: a main room with just enough space to prevent Lila Mae from being trampled by herself, and a smaller cube that barely accommodates a bed and dresser. A plant, a piggy bank, a plastic pear. Her few possessions are aloof in their perches, on sills and tables, confident that their ranks will not grow and that the competition for Lila Mae’s attention (or lack thereof) will remain as it has been for some time. What strikes John the most is the studied appearance of habitation. She is trying to convince other people that she lives here, but the impression instead is that of slow moving-out, piece by piece. Nothing rattles in the piggy bank.

“This place must get a lot of light,” John says. Outside of Lila Mae’s window, the red bulb on top of a radio tower blinks slow as a lizard.

“A lot of light,” Jim replies.

“How much do you think she pays for this place?”

“I wouldn’t live in this neighborhood if you paid me,” Jim says without regret.

The neighborhood is tidal, receding and dilating according to the exigencies of the city. Years before, a rich man decided to erect a monument to himself, an elevated train that traversed the city, even in neighborhoods, like this one, which were not even neighborhoods yet, but stubborn farmland scattered with the wooden houses of optimistic citizens. Pig pens and goats. To justify the trains and the rich man’s romance, speculators assembled dreary and sturdy tenements and directed immigrants’ inquiries north, to the new territory. The train justified itself in due course and the speculators did quite well for themselves — there was a destination now, the harbor disgorged hundreds daily, and they had to live somewhere. The neighborhood named itself, created a persona: optimistic, scrabbling, indebted to the grand new country of which it was merely a small and insignificant part. Then the coloreds surged and dreamed of the north, too. They had been told something and believed it. One by one, the lights in the windows of the Poles’ and Russians’ apartments extinguished, and when the windows blazed again, it was a colored light that burned within them. The neighborhood retained its old name, but it meant something very different. Never mind that a few Poles and Russians continued to operate grocery and butcher stores and occasionally extend credit; no one doubted that the neighborhood’s new meaning prevailed, for the Poles and Russians turned out the lights in their stores at nightfall and scurried back on the elevated trains to their new neighborhood. The neighborhood is changing again. Its meaning blurs at the edges as white people return, obeying the city’s rules of teeming density and insidious rents. Only the real estate agents, who understand that meaning is elastic, know the borders of the neighborhood for sure, modulating their sales pitches to reassure their clients that they are not moving into the colored neighborhood, but into the farther reaches of the adjacent white neighborhood. None of this impresses Jim, who would not move into the neighborhood if you paid him.

There is no elevator in Lila Mae’s building. She has two paintings on the walls of her gloomy abode, amateur landscape watercolors. Like the art in motel rooms: fits in with the general atmosphere of Lila Mae’s apartment. John picks up the one photograph in the apartment, which rests on the end table next to Lila Mae’s grim, scarecrow couch. Right now Lila Mae is only a few blocks away from her apartment, but when her father shot the picture ten years before, she stood on the porch of her childhood home with her mother, skinny and quiet. The denuded light and sad lethargy of the tableau says late summer: the cold months are coming. Lila Mae seems comfortable with this knowledge. Hers is essentially a sad face, inward-tending and declivitous, a face that draws the unwary into the slope of its melancholy. Something in the bones, and inherited, John decides after an appraisal of her mother. Children are doomed to reiterate the mistakes in their parents’ physiognomies, as if trapped by curses that mark generations and wait for unknowable acts of atonement. Jim’s parents are obviously close kin, and if you ask him he won’t deny it.

At one point she got a bird, but it died.

John notices Jim rubbing his jaw. “Tooth still hurting you?” he asks.

Jim nods solemnly.

“You better go to the dentist tomorrow,” John advises. “No use walking around in pain if you don’t have to be.”

John discovers Lila Mae’s books in a ziggurat stack beneath the end table. They’re all work books, the standard texts: Zither’s An Introduction to Counterweights, Elisha Otis: The Man and His Times and so on. She has all of Fulton’s books, from the groundbreaking Towards a System of Vertical Transport, to the more blasphemous parts of his oeuvre, Theoretical Elevators Volumes One and Two. So far their information has been correct, as it always is.

“Looks like a real blue-ribbon type,” John decides, flipping through Guidebook to Elevator Safety for incriminating papers.

“You always call ’em,” Jim says.

“She’s got all the right books.”

“You always call ’em,” Jim says.

Jim and John are neat ransackers. When their cases return to their homes, they suffer only the vaguest sense of loss, a nagging perplexity, and with so many other possible causes of that sense of loss, few suspect that these two men have been pawing their things. John sees himself as a crucial gear in the city’s mechanism, a freelance poltergeist of metropolitan disquiet. Jim and John’s employers are proud of them, and when they receive their briefing on tonight’s activities, Jim and John will not be reprimanded for failure. The particular organization they work for can afford to forgive, as long as that forgiveness is tracked and tabulated like absenteeism, pencil theft, fire damage (accident, insurance fraud), and at the end of each quarter, the books tally.

What Jim and John are missing is the safe behind the somber painting of haystacks. Where she keeps all of her important things. Perhaps John would have found the safe eventually if Lila Mae hadn’t disturbed their search. It takes her a few attempts to realize that the reason she can’t unlock her door is because it is already unlocked. Jim and John do not take the time allowed by Lila Mae’s clicking and fumbling to clamber down the fire escape, or hide in the closet, or pull out their guns and recline on Lila Mae’s couch in a rather labored we’ve-got-you-covered pose, no, they continue to shake the joint down and that’s how Lila Mae finds them, John scrutinizing a pile of receipts from the middle left hand drawer of Lila Mae’s sad afterthought of a kitchenette — you never know what notations can be encrypted into a seemingly innocuous phrase such as “Bob’s Grocery: A Place to Shop” or in the numerical fortress of “prices” and “taxes”—and Jim scraping a finger through the jar of peach preserves Lila Mae received last Christmas from her mother’s sister, checking for little treasures like bus station locker keys and microfilm, microfilm, which Jim has never encountered in all his searches through so many apartments, but will one day, he’s sure of it. That’s how Lila Mae finds them, John peering, one big eye, through a magnifying glass and Jim licking his fingers. Given obscenity’s remarkable gallop into conversational speech, colorful epithets are to be expected in Lila Mae’s address to the two strangers lurking about her apartment. But it is John who is the first to speak. He says, “You’re the little lady.”

* * *

The counterweight, conscripted into service by the accident, rockets into the aerie of the shaft, angry with new velocity.

* * *

Only Chuck knows for sure whether it is his congenitally weak bladder (family lore tells of three aunts and a cousin with the same affliction) or his distaste for Chancre’s unabashed politicking that makes him rise from his leatherette stool and pad over to O’Connor’s scary toilet facilities. Chancre is still spinning out today’s accident into a stump speech on the accomplishments of his four years as Guild — and hence Department — Chair. The election is just around the corner, after all, and Chuck (a clever man, but not precocious about it) knows Chancre’s game. This press conference allows Chancre to reach members of the Elevator Inspectors Guild who no longer work for the city, the “unactives” who have retired from the lonesome life running the streets, have secluded themselves behind the ivy gates of the Institute for Vertical Transport or entered into the private sector, consulting the dolts from United and American and Arbo on what elevators are really about, the secrets the shafts have to tell to those who know how to listen. The men in the Department are Chancre’s, mostly Empiricists, he’s seen to that, but the unactives are a mercurial bunch, tending to cranky, nonpartisan dispositions. And they vote. Anyone who’s a member of the EIG votes every four years on the new Guild Chair, and the Guild Chair automatically becomes the head of the city’s Department of Elevator (and escalator, Chuck adds) Inspectors. Chuck still doesn’t know how this arrangement between the Guild and the city came about, and when he asks one of the Old Dogs about it, they change the subject and look nervous. Chuck hasn’t been able to find anything on paper about it, not even in the silent archives of the Institute, not a single precedent, but nevertheless: the Guild members elect their Chair, and the Chair gets a nice government job. Chuck supposes that if an incumbent lost his reelection bid, he could conceivably refuse to budge and cling to his cushy leather chair for dear life, but that’s never happened. Chuck can see Chancre doing it, though, and as he walks into the alcove in front of O’Connor’s bathrooms he wonders what would happen then.

She pulls him into the ladies’ room before he knows what happened. The ladies’ room in O’Connor’s was designed to accommodate one person. Two people is cozy, and three is scandalous, but that’s how many are in there now: Chuck, Lila Mae and Piefaced Annie. Piefaced Annie, she of the gravely mug, is passed out on the toilet, as she always is at this time of day. O’Connor’s lone female alcoholic, Piefaced Annie puts in a long day and needs this time to rest up for the long final lap of the day’s drinking. She doesn’t look passed out so much as eerily blissful, almost as if … Lila Mae has already taken her pulse just in case. It was a short scurry from her flimsy hiding place in the bar to the bathrooms; she started when she saw Chuck rise and made it around the corner before he’d even escaped the crowd. In the spirit of decency, Lila Mae pushed Piefaced Annie’s legs together from their aerated generosity.

Chuck is equally disturbed by three things: the ease of his kidnapping, which insults his sense of alertness; the unfamiliarity of being in a ladies’ bathroom, which brings to his mind an unsettling flash of his mother squatting; and the surety that Lila Mae is going to drag him into this deplorable business about the Fanny Briggs building. “Lila Mae,” he says, “I don’t think this is very appropriate.” He can feel the wet sink dampen the backs of his thighs.

“Sorry about this, Chuck,” she replies, “but I have to know what happened today.”

“You haven’t checked in upstairs yet?”

“I wanted to be prepared.”

In the end, it is Piefaced Annie’s resemblance to his mother that upsets Chuck the most. He feels like a dirty little boy, standing in the dank cubicle with her. Compared to that, talking with a fugitive from Departmental justice is small potatoes. He looks up at the yellow water stains on the ceiling and tells Lila Mae, “One of the elevators in the Fanny Briggs stack went into total freefall this afternoon. The Mayor was showing off the place to some guys from the French embassy so they could see how great the city works and whatnot. He presses the call button and boom! the cab crashes down. Luckily there was no one on it.”

For the first time it occurs to Lila Mae that someone might have been hurt. “That’s impossible. Total freefall is a physical impossibility.” She shakes her head.

“That’s what happened,” Chuck reaffirms. He’s still looking up at the ceiling. They can hear some of their colleagues whooping outside the door. “Forty floors.”

“Which one?”

“Number Eleven, I think.”

She remembers Number Eleven distinctly. A little shy, but that’s normal in a new cab. “The entire stack is outfitted with the new Arbo antilocks,” Lila Mae argues. “Plus the standard reg gear. I inspected them myself.”

“Did you see them,” Chuck asks tentatively, “or did you intuit them?”

Lila Mae ignores the slur. “I did my job,” she says.

“Maybe you missed something.”

“I did my job,” Lila Mae says. She hears her voice rising: keep cool. “What did Chancre say?”

“Had the Mayor in his office ever since it happened,” Chuck says, attempting to be helpful. “So I don’t know what the official story is, but you get the gist from his speech. He’s making it into a political thing because you’re an Intuitionist. And colored, but he’s being clever about it.”

“I heard that bit.”

“Internal Affairs is looking for you.”

“What are the guys saying?”

“What you would expect,” Chuck tells her. Piefaced Annie groans and he shivers.

“Total freefall? You’re sure?” There’s no way. The cables, for one thing.

“Yes, I’m sure,” he says. “Lila Mae, I think you should really go upstairs and talk to the IAB guys. Even if you did miss something — however much you don’t want to admit that possibility — the sooner you go and talk to them, the better it’s going to go. They’re fair. You know that.”

“That would be standard procedure,” Lila Mae muses. “But this isn’t a standard accident.”

“You should really go upstairs, I’m telling you. There’s nothing else you can do in a situation like this.”

“Chuck, look at me.” She’s decided. “You haven’t seen me, okay?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Tell me you haven’t seen me.”

“I haven’t seen you.”

One of the side effects of people intent on erasing you from their lives is that sometimes they erase you when it might not be beneficial. It would have been delightful for Lila Mae’s fellows in the Department of Elevator Inspectors to see her leave the ladies’ room, because they could have enjoyed a few furious moments of invective, of throaty howls. No one sees Lila Mae when she departs O’Connor’s and it’s their loss. The newsmen outside headquarters are scrabbling away across the sidewalk like dry leaves in the wind. Midtown is clearing out. No one lives in midtown.

Lila Mae has decided to go home. She needs a night to go over exactly what happened at the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building. She can pretend that she didn’t hear about the accident until tomorrow morning. Plausible. And she has a good face for telling lies. She’s on the subway platform when the problem of the dispatcher occurs to her. Craig told her she had to report to base. The subway arrives: she’ll say she thought it was a paperwork thing that could wait until Monday. That lie could cause her some trouble with IAB, but it’s not totally implausible. Even if they don’t believe her, they can’t discipline her unless she was negligent, and Lila Mae will not allow the possibility that she was negligent. It’s impossible.

When Piefaced Annie shakes off her stupor, she will recall a strange dream about elevators and falling, and will chalk it up to falling off the toilet, which will happen in about an hour.

* * *

From Theoretical Elevators, Volume One, by James Fulton:

We do not know what is next. If we were to take a barbarian and place him, loincloth and all, before one of our magnificent cities, what would he feel? He would feel fear, doubly: the fear of his powerlessness before our architectural excess and our fear, the thing that drives our architectural excess. The dread of imperfection. We do not need cities and buildings; it is the fear of the dark which compels us to erect them instinctively, like insects. Perspective is the foot-soldier of relativity. Just as the barbarian would gaze upon our cities and buildings with fear and incomprehension, so would we gaze upon future cities and future buildings. Is the next building ovoid, pyramidic? Is the next elevator a bubble or is it shaped like a sea shell, journeying both outward and into itself …

Take capacity. The standard residential elevator is designed to accommodate 12 passengers, all of whom we assume to be of average weight and form. This is the Occupant’s Fallacy. The number 12 does not consider the morbidly obese, or the thin man’s convention and necessity of speedy conveyance at the thin man’s convention. We conform to objects, we capitulate to them. We need to reverse this order. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect. Nothing we create works the way it should. The car overheats on the highway, the electric can opener cannot open the can. We must tend to our objects and treat them as newborn babes. Our elevators are weak. They tend to get colds easily, they are forgetful. Our elevators ought to be variable in size and height, retractable altogether, impervious to scratches, self-cleaning, possessing a mouth. The thin man’s convention can happen at any time; indeed, they happen all the time …

* * *

What else can she say? His statement is friendly, steeped in chummy argot, the intonation jovial, and the man’s face so banal and uncomplicated, so like this country, that Lila Mae almost thinks she knows him. When the man says, “You’re the little lady,” all she thinks to say is, “I guess I am.”

Pause. Jim nods knowingly.

“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?” Lila Mae demands.

“What do you think we’re doing?” John responds. “We’re going over your place looking for evidence.”

Pause. Jim, again, nods knowingly. Actually, it’s more of an involuntary response to getting caught in the act, despite the reassurances of John’s cool act.

“Internal Affairs doesn’t have that kind of authority,” Lila Mae says curtly, “whether I checked in after my shift or not. Get the hell out of my apartment.” There have never been this many people in her apartment before.

Jim and John take a step closer to Lila Mae. A decent lunge and they would have her.

“So we’re Internal Affairs?” Jim asks. The burgundy residue of Aunt Sally’s preserves glistens on his right forefinger.

“Yes — we’re the watchdogs of the Elevator Inspector Industry,” John seconds.

“Department,” Jim says. He licks the remaining preserves off his finger.

“We’re the watchdogs of the Elevator Inspectors Department,” John says.

“The Department of Elevator Inspectors,” Jim corrects.

John takes advantage of Jim’s distraction to flip his magnifying glass into the air and catch it. Scare her. He makes a sudden fake forward, grinning, but Lila Mae stifles her flight-response. Damned if she’s going to look weak. Her visitors’ absurd wordplay annoys her, perhaps even more than their trespass into her home, her one safe place. She has spent a lot of time trying to find the correct arrangement of things. She never has guests, sure, but there is always the off chance. Sure. “Let me see some identification,” Lila Mae demands. “Now.”

“Let’s show her wink-wink identification,” Jim intones.

“That’ll be all, gentlemen,” a voice behind Lila Mae says. The voice is as smooth as a beach stone. It belongs to a short man in a perfect blue blazer. Pince-nez in this day and age, that’s what the man polishes with a handkerchief as he enters Lila Mae’s apartment, polishing far too diligently for there to actually be any grit on the lenses. He moves with the rapid movements of a pigeon, and his left arm resembles a wing, pressed close to the body as it is, nooking a leather satchel. He places his hand on Lila Mae’s shoulder and it is then that she truly gets scared. She cannot feel his skin but she knows it is cold. “There’s no reason for you to be harassing this young lady,” he says.

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 stranger, this latest stranger inquires, “Do you know who I am?” as he squeezes Lila Mae’s shoulder.

John sighs and answers, “I know your identity, Mr. Reed, and a few biographical details, but can I say I really know you?”

Jim is about to add his usual improv backup to his partner, a dialogic placeholder such as, “Does anyone really know anyone?” or “In the Biblical sense?” but Mr. Reed flicks a hand, dismissing him. Such rubbish. Mr. Reed looks at Lila Mae for the first time. “Miss Watson, did you invite these men into your home?”

Everything is different now, it seems to Lila Mae. Nothing in her apartment appears to have been moved, and yet everything is different. That’s how she feels. She doesn’t feel as if she lives here anymore. Lila Mae looks down at Mr. Reed, for he is a short man, shorter than Lila Mae, and she says, “No, I did not.” She doesn’t live here.

“If I may be so bold …” Mr. Reed begins. His eyes are wide and far apart. Like a pigeon’s. Lila Mae nods. Mr. Reed looks back to Jim and John and says, “Gentlemen, I must insist that you leave this place immediately.”

John shakes his left kneecap in his trousers and Jim places the jar of preserves on the kitchen counter, screwing the top back as he does so. Even though he’s been found out, habit tells him not to leave a trace. “Immediately,” John mimics, trying to save face through his characteristic deadpan sass, which is now halfhearted and at best a face-saving gesture.

“Immediately,” Jim says.

Jim and John head for the dim hallway outside Lila Mae’s apartment. They keep a safe distance from Lila Mae and the diminutive Mr. Reed. John takes the doorknob into his hand and says, “You want this open or closed?”

Mr. Reed looks at Lila Mae. “Open,” she says.

Jim and John don’t speak until they reach the landing of the floor below, and Lila Mae can’t make out what they say. She hears words, though, and the sound is a loud buzzing in her ears incommensurate with the actual volume. She feels dizzy but hides it well. She doesn’t know Mr. Reed from Adam. So far he’s just another white man with an attitude, never mind his keen sense of timing. “Mr. Reed, is it then?” she asks.

“Mr. Reed, yes,” Mr. Reed says. “I’m Orville Lever’s secretary. He sent me to fetch you.”

“I don’t need fetching. Though I suppose I should thank you for helping me out there.” Lila Mae walks over to the sullen kitchenette and returns the jar of preserves to the icebox. Then she thinks better of it and drops it in the trash.

“It was my pleasure, Miss Watson. If I may?”

“Have a seat,” Lila Mae offers. She has little choice.

“I’m not sure if you fully realize the difficult position you’re in, Miss Watson. Today’s accident has some very disturbing repercussions.”

“Which is why the Intuitionist candidate for Guild Chair has seen fit to send someone over to look after me. I don’t think I need looking after.”

“May I ask you a question? Why didn’t you report back to the Department after your shift?”

“I was tired.”

“It is standard operating procedure after an accident to report to your superiors, is it not?”

“I didn’t know there was an accident until I saw the late edition on the train home.”

“I think we should be going, Miss Watson. I wouldn’t advise staying here tonight.”

“This is my home.”

“And if I hadn’t stopped in?”

“I would have taken care of them.”

“My car is waiting downstairs. You inspected the Fanny Briggs building, did you not?”

“You know I did.”

“Then what went wrong?”

Nothing went wrong.

“You are aware, Miss Watson, that those men weren’t from Internal Affairs, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then who were they?”

Nothing.

“Has it occurred to you yet that you were set up?”

The accident is impossible. It wasn’t an accident.

Even if Jim and John had found Lila Mae’s safe behind the painting, the contents wouldn’t have interested them, except to flesh out John’s coveted psychological profile of this night’s subject. A soccer trophy from high school (everyone on the team got one, even Lila Mae, who sat on the bench all season and only joined the squad at her mother’s urging she “be social”). Her high school graduation ring (poor craftsmanship). A love letter from a dull boy, her diploma from the Institute for Vertical Transport, and her prizewinning paper on theoretical elevators. Not much, really.

* * *

Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer’s oaths aside, scratched — gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.

Marvin Watson was proud of his daughter. She was doing what he had never been able to do: she was studying to be an elevator inspector. His pride was limned with shame over these circumstances. He had long dreamed of the day when he would drive his only daughter, his baby and blood, off to school; and here it was. But he did not leave the pickup and did not look up at the building in which she was to live. He cranked down the window to kiss her goodbye. The old truck hiccuped if it idled for too long, setting everything to a furious tremble, and Lila Mae’s lips did not even graze her father’s cheek when she leaned over to kiss him goodbye. Her father drove off and never saw the room in which she would live for three years, a converted janitor’s closet above the newly renovated gymnasium. They had just renamed the gymnasium after the dashing young heir to a driving-sheave fortune, a gentleman from the country’s South who had donated a large sum of money to be spent at the Institute’s discretion. Lila Mae lived in the janitor’s closet because the Institute for Vertical Transport did not have living space for colored students.

The Institute’s campus had formerly been a health spa for rich neurasthenic women from the Northeast’s larger cities, which is why the students were never too far from statues of Grecian nymphs, nub-nosed spirits whose long manes eased liquidly into their sagging tunics. The spa failed after newer spas opened in the weatherless regions of the Southwest. Weatherlessness is much more amenable to those in search of succor for bodily complaint, evoking timelessness and immortality, and soon the rich neurasthenic women from the Northeast’s larger cities boarded planes to be free of the seasons and the proximity of their braying families, the cause of their disrepair. The elevator magnates who bought the land and refurbished the spa’s physical plant into something more suitable for a place of learning were disheartened by the rich suburb the surrounding neighborhood eventually became, and pondered, on winter nights when their wives and children were asleep and the only company was a bottle of aged Irish spirits, how life would have been different if they traded in real estate, and not mechanical conveyance. Verticality is such a risky enterprise.

Lila Mae did not mix much with the other students, who were in turn thankful that she had spared them the burden of false conciliation. As she had when she was in elementary school, she sat in the final row of her classes and did not speak unless there was no other option. She retired early in the evening, shuttering her eyes to the urgent grumblings of the gym’s boiler room, whose howls filled the empty building at night like the protestations of wraiths. She rose early in the morning, when the first sunlight crept over the statues of Grecian nymphs before it advanced to the metropolis a few miles to the west. The admission of colored students to the Institute for Vertical Transport was staggered to prevent overlap and any possible fulminations or insurrections that might arise from that overlap. The previous tenant of the janitor’s closet had had a sweet tooth. Every cleaning produced yet another crumpled wrapper of Bogart’s Chewing Gum. Occasionally professors called Lila Mae by his name, even though it would have been difficult to say there was any resemblance. Lila Mae never pointed out the mistake to her professors, who were a cranky bunch, mostly former field men who had rejected retirement to teach at the most prestigious elevator inspecting school in the country. A black gown is remarkably effective in conferring prestige on even the most rough-hewn of men.

She learned plenty her first semester at the Institute for Vertical Transport. She learned about the animals in the Roman coliseums hoisted to their cheering deaths on rope-tackle elevators powered by slaves, learned about Villayer’s “flying chair,” a simple pulley, shaft and lead counterweight concoction described in a love letter from Napoleon I to his wife, the Archduchess Marie Louise. About steam, and the first steam elevators. She read about Elisha Graves Otis, the cities he enabled through his glorious invention, and the holy war between the newly deputized elevator inspectors and the elevator companies’ maintenance contractors. The rise of safety regulation, safety device innovations, the search for a national standard. She was learning about Empiricism but didn’t know it yet.

She remembers when she first saw the light. She was usually so tired by nightfall that she rarely noticed anything except that her room was either too hot or too cold, that the walk down to the public ladies bathroom on the floor below was full of shadows, and that janitors evidently did not need more than a single naked bulb to perform their duties in maintenance closets. The poor illumination gave her headaches when she tried to read. One night she couldn’t sleep. Literally — she had to study. All semester, she’d neglected her class on the changing concepts of governmental attitudes toward elevator inspection (the evolution of the machines interested her more, to tell the truth, her first few months there) and now she had to cram for the following morning’s exam. Her body didn’t like coffee and tea and she rarely stayed up late, so Lila Mae took to pinching her wrist when her head began to dip. Upon rising from one of her unscheduled naps, she noticed a light in Fulton Hall. On the top floor, where the small library was. There shouldn’t have been anyone in there, the library closed at dusk — elevator inspectors, even acolytes, generally being morning people. She wondered if the administration had extended the library’s hours during exam period; Lila Mae had discovered she was often ignorant of much routine information her fellow students possessed. But the lower floors of Fulton Hall were dark. She decided the light had been left on accidentally and returned to the arid court transcripts of The United States vs. The Arbo Elevator Company.

Spring arrived, and a new semester. The work was more difficult than before — she’d discovered Volume One of Theoretical Elevators and was having trouble sleeping. One day in February she saw the light again in Fulton Hall. The light wasn’t on every night, there was no set schedule she could define, but it was on too frequently for it to be accidental. She couldn’t help but notice. Fulton Hall had formerly been the spa’s pep center, a wide stone building in the center of campus. Walkways of pink tile radiated from the structure to all the important buildings for the treatment of psychosomatic maladies. Mud Therapy, Colonic Irrigation, Bleeding Chambers. Now the buildings housed Engineering, Advanced Concepts, the Hall of Safety. A pink path also led to the gym, which had also been a gym during the time of the spa, and filled with medicine balls. The path led, more or less, directly from the lit window in Fulton Hall to the janitor’s closet where Lila Mae lived.

Occasionally she would see a figure moving through the stacks. She decided it was an old man: He walked with a cane. Sometimes instead of turning on the lights, he used a lantern, and he walked even more slowly then, as if inordinately afraid of dropping it. She saw him about a dozen times in all, and always felt as if they were the last people on earth. It was the same feeling she gets when she’s in a shaft, standing on the car. There’s an old inspector’s maxim: “An elevator is a grave.” Such loss and devastation in there. That’s why the inside walls of the car are never sheer: they’re broken up into panels, equipped with a dorsal rail. Otherwise it would be a box. A coffin. On the nights the figure haunted Fulton Hall, he was Lila Mae’s elevator. The thing she stood upon in the darkness of the shaft, just him, just her, and the darkness. In the elevator well, slits of light seep from the door seams on each floor at regular intervals, and do not comfort. The slits of light speak of more light that is out of reach: There will be no redemption.

If she had known the identity of the man on the last night she saw him, would it have changed her response? On that last night he saw her and waved at her, slowly, communicating all he knew and what she already understood about the darkness. Would it have changed her response to his wave (nothing, not even a nod, the polite thing to do) if she had known the man was James Fulton and that the following morning a hungover janitor would discover his body on the library floor, dead of a stroke, the lantern wick still glowing dully? Probably not. That’s the kind of person Lila Mae is.

* * *

Anyway, slept. In the biggest bed she has ever slept in, swimmable, Lila Mae buoyant despite her negligible body fat (a skinny one, she is). The bed possesses an undertow conducive to dreaming, but she doesn’t remember her dreams when she wakes. On waking, her half-dreaming consciousness segues into a recollection of her visit to the Fanny Briggs building. It was simple: that’s what Lila Mae is thinking about in her room at 117 Second Avenue.

The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city offered visitors the spacial bounty of the lobby. The ersatz marble was firm underfoot like real marble, sheer, and produced trembling echoes effortlessly. The circle of Doric columns braced the weight above without complaint. The mural, however, was not complete. It started out jauntily enough to Lila Mae’s left. Cheerless Indians holding up a deerskin in front of a fire. The original tenants, sure. A galleon negotiating the tricky channels around the island. Two beaming Indians trading beads to a gang of white men — the infamous sale of the Island. Big moment, have to include that, the first of many dubious transactions in the city’s history. (They didn’t have elevators yet. That’s why the scenes look so flat to Lila Mae: the city is dimensionless.) The mural jumped to the Revolution then, she noticed, skipped over a lot of stuff. The painter seemed to be making it up as he went along, like the men who shaped the city. The Revolution scene was a nice setpiece — the colonists pulling down the statue of King George III. They melted it down for ammunition, if she remembers correctly. It’s always nice when a good mob comes together. The painting ended there. (Someone knocks at the door of her room in 117 Second Avenue, but she doesn’t open her eyes.) Judging from the amount of wall space that remained to Lila Mae’s right, the mural would have to get even more brief in its chronicle of the city’s greatest hits. Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the intervening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please.

The Deputy Undersecretary of Municipal Construction waddled over from the far wall. He said, “You come to see the elevators?” He had the fatty arrogance of all nepotism hires. Somebody’s nephew, somebody’s sister’s boy.

She nodded.

“Is this going to take long? I’m supposed to go on break now.” On break from what? Only security guards and janitors ever experience buildings like this. Like fraught ships gnashed between the ice, waiting for that warming current still far off, detained in some other part of the world. The rats hadn’t even moved into the building, the roaches still deliberating. A month from now, at this time of day, the lobby will be befouled with citizens. To see a building at this stage, Lila Mae thought, is an honor. The deputy undersecretary was bored and fiddled in his pockets. The muralist’s scaffolding tottered above Lila Mae like a rickety gallows.

“Just show me to them,” Lila Mae said. It will be easy.

Before Lila Mae can re-create her inspection further, the porter opens the door to her room, despite her silence. He holds the silver platter with hands snug in white gloves. He smiles. She pulls the thick red blankets up to her slight chin.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he says, “but it seemed a shame to let this nice breakfast go to waste.”

“Thank you,” Lila Mae says. She sits up against the oak headboard. The headboard’s detailed engraving of United’s first lift motor digs into her left shoulder. The man sets the platter across her waist. Eggs, ham, juice. Normally when offered so much food early in the morning (a rare occurrence, to be sure) Lila Mae pecks, and politely moves the food around on the plate to maximize the illusion of being eaten. This morning she is grateful.

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. She doesn’t take to it, being waited on by colored people. This is wrong.

He is at the window. “Shall I open the curtains?” he asks.

Lila Mae nods. It’s later in the morning than she thought. The light congeals in globs on the leaves of the old trees in the courtyard. The back walls of the adjoining buildings are decrepit compared to the facades they present to the street, but serve their purpose: to fortify against those who might take the treasures of the courtyard. The garden of old money.

Lila Mae is about to dig into her breakfast when she notices that her green suitcase is ajar across the room, next to an imposing-looking bureau. And empty.

“Don’t worry,” the porter reassures, observing her stare. “It wasn’t me. Mrs. Gravely unpacked your things last night. Mr. Reed thought it would make you more comfortable.” His eyebrows bow. “What is it?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she says. “I’m just tired.”

“You don’t look tired at all,” the porter says. “You’re a vision. Like you’re up and ready to go.”

Hmm. Lila Mae shakes her head and says, “Thanks.”

“I mean it,” he says through a grin. “This isn’t my regular job — my uncle is sick, that’s why I’m here. I’m filling in for him. But if I’d known his job had this many extras, I would have come around here before.” He extends his hand. “My name is Natchez,” he says.

“Lila Mae.”

Hmm.

* * *

“Are you with us, Miss Watson?”

“Yes, sir. I was just thinking that—”

“You are aware this is a timed exam?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then we’ll begin. 1846.”

“Sir William Armstrong designs and manufactures a hydraulic crane. Erected at Newcastle, the crane utilized water pressure from London’s mains. Armstrong eventually used the same principles in his weighted accelerator.”

“The main function of the pole shader?”

“Is to prevent heating outside the prescribed parameters.”

“A citizen has what chance of being in an elevator misfortune?”

“Injury or fatality?”

“Both.”

“One in three hundred million and one in six hundred fifty million, respectively.”

“Nonmetallic material may be used in T-rails provided what?”

“The rated speed for the car does not exceed zero point seven six meters per second.”

“The three types of safety gears?”

“Instantaneous, Instantaneous with buffered effect, and Progressive. Instantaneous type exerts a rapidly increasing pressure on the guide rails during the stopping period. The stopping time and distance are short. These gears can be employed in cars rated for speeds not in excess of zero point seven six meters per second. Instantaneous type with buffered effect incorporates an elastic system of either energy accumulation or energy dissipation. It generally consists of a system of oil buffers on the lower car frame and safety planks on the guard rails. Effective for rated speeds of up to two point five meters per second. Progressive type applies limited, increasing pressure on the guard rails and is primarily used in Europe on cars with rated speeds of one meter per second or less.”

“That was a very full answer.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“The standard accident curve possesses what shape?”

“The failure rate for elevators is expressed by RT equals one minus FT, where R is reliability, T is time and F is failure. The equation is characterized by a ‘bathtub’-shaped curve with three distinct phases. The initial or ‘early failure’ phase begins with a relatively high incident of accidents — mostly due to installation errors — and then drops off sharply. This is the first wall of the ‘bathtub.’ The next phase, called the ‘random failure’ phase, is a plateau and extends for the majority of the elevator’s service life. This flat plane is the bottom of the ‘bathtub.’ The accidents in this phase are unpredictable and generally result from passenger misuse or poor maintenance. It is also in this phase that the rare ‘catastrophic accident’ occurs. The curve ascends quickly again in the final, or ‘wear-out’ phase, when the elevator is past its period of prime use. The opposite wall of the bathtub. Most of these accidents can be prevented, again, by diligent inspection and careful maintenance during this crucial time. May I take a drink of water?”

“Yes. The Four Questions?”

“As put forth by Mettleheim: How did this happen? How could this happen? Is it exceptional? How will it be avoided in the future?”

“The verdict in The United States vs. Mario’s?”

“Ruled that restaurant dumbwaiters are hand elevators and subject to scrutiny by municipal elevator inspectors, despite the fact that they do not carry human freight.”

“And the fallout?”

“Critics charged that the elevator inspector ‘cabal’ was attempting to unduly extend the scope of its jurisdiction.”

“The Sixteen?”

“Elevator, freight: an elevator used for carrying freight on which only the operator and the persons necessary for unloading and loading are permitted. Elevator, gravity: an elevator utilizing gravity to move the car. Elevator, hand: an elevator utilizing manual energy. Elevator, inclined: an elevator traveling at an angle of inclination of seventy degrees or less from the horizontal. Elevator, multideck: an elevator having two or more compartments located immediately above the other. Elevator, observation: designed to permit exterior viewing by passengers. Elevator, passenger: an elevator used primarily to carry persons other than the operator. Elevator, power: utilizing power other than gravitational or manual. Elevator, electric: a power elevator utilizing an electric driving-machine. Elevator, hydraulic: a power elevator where the energy is applied, by means of a liquid under pressure, in a cylinder. Elevator, direct-plunger hydraulic: a hydraulic elevator having a plunger or cylinder attached directly to the car frame or platform. Elevator, electro-hydraulic: a direct-plunger elevator where liquid is pumped by an electric motor. Elevator, maintained-pressure hydraulic: a direct-plunger elevator where liquid under pressure is available at all times for transfer into the cylinder. Elevator, roped-hydraulic: a hydraulic elevator having its piston connected to the car with wire ropes. Elevator, private residence: a power passenger elevator installed in a private residence or in a multiple dwelling as a means of access to a private residence. Elevator, sidewalk: a freight elevator for carrying material exclusive of automobiles and operating between a landing in a sidewalk or other area exterior to a building and floors below the sidewalk or grade level. That’s the Sixteen.”

“You’re doing very well, Miss Watson.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“We’re almost done here. Answer me this: Do you know how many colored elevator inspectors there are in this country?”

“Twelve.”

“And do you know how many are employed as such? Are not working as shoeshine boys? Or maids?”

“I don’t know. Less than twelve.”

“So you don’t know everything. That will be all, Miss Watson. You’ll receive your grade next week.”

* * *

The falling elevator’s wake is sparks, thousands of them, raking the darkness all the way down.

* * *

The address is 117 Second Avenue but everyone knows it as Intuitionist House. Edward Dipth-Watney, two-time winner of the Werner von Siemens Award for Outstanding Work in Elevator Innovation (first for his Flyboy limit switch, the second time for the “smart” overspeed governor), purchased the townhouse two decades ago, when the movement was still the soiled stepchild. The elevator community regarded Edward Dipth-Watney as a man of quixotic temperament; while not entirely swayed by Intuitionism, he felt that anything that caused such bellowing and recrimination merited a place to germinate and unfold itself, and hopefully cause more bellowing and recrimination. He was also a well-known model train enthusiast.

Edward Dipth-Watney’s achievements were, and still are, appreciated; his name will maunder about the indexes of elevator inspector textbooks until the end of time. One snapshot: Arbo Elevator Co., the fortunate licensees of Dipth-Watney’s Flyboy limit switch, dipping the prototype in gold and bestowing it upon its inventor as a Christmas gift one cold year. Edward Dipth-Watney was not interested in the gilded privileges of fame, however. The longevity of Fulton’s science was uncertain; nonetheless, Dipth-Watney reasoned, if God had given him a gift, the least he could do was to help others find theirs. It was this same faith in God’s will that prevented Edward Dipth-Watney from witnessing the results of his efforts on behalf of the international Intuitionist brotherhood. He believed the cyst on his neck to be another of His gifts, a reminder against vanity. He was incorrect.

In the years following its benefactor’s death, the House thrived into the international headquarters of Intuitionism, continuing to stubbornly prosper even after Institute administrations reversed themselves, offered classes on the new science and even bestowed large (although not well-situated) offices upon its intrepid instructors. Very little actual research goes on at the House, but burning midnight oil was never the building’s intended purpose. Inspectors and theoreticians of elevators are still social creatures despite the toll their profession exacts on their souls. Every Tuesday, James Fulton (and later, Orville Lever) stood in the downstairs drawing room and lectured on the intricacies of his science. Lectured on the implications of European maintenance deviations on Intuitionism, expounded on the gloom of the shaft and how it does not merely echo the gloom inside every living creature, but duplicates it perfectly. Afterward there were mint juleps for everyone, and still later, after Fulton had retired to his Tudor-style house on the Institute for Vertical Transport’s north campus, Swedish films featuring large-breasted volleyball players. Fulton was unaware of this dubious activity; the House chauffeur regularly packed the Tuesday night lectures with traveling salesmen who were in search of a good time and willing to pay for it. Fulton, if he ever wondered about it, probably took his lay audience as evidence of the universal applicability of his theories.

Ever since Lever replaced Fulton as the man of the House, the importance of 117 Second Avenue has trebled in the hearts and minds of the global Intuitionist tribe. It is now his campaign headquarters and home to a formidable optimism new to these generally sullen detective-philosophers of vertical transport. The new rumors have invigorated; the conventional wisdom whispers that Lever has a genuine chance of winning the election for Guild Chair. Their time has come, as they knew it would. Lever’s Tuesday night lectures no longer linger haughtily over the errata of nuts-and-bolts Empiricism, but excoriate. The House walls vibrate with the sibilants of campaign rhetoric. If he wins, the House will change forever.

For now the regular life of the House continues as it has for years, so as not to jinx the gathering magic of the time. From the continent come foreign scholars of the art, and after lecturing at the Institute they retire to the House and the second-floor guest rooms. (Lila Mae would be astonished to hear the names of the luminaries who have slept in the bed she lies in right now. Her fingers are laced beneath her skull and she stares at the ceiling.) Grand parties celebrating the publication of the latest Intuitionist tract are held here, and it is custom for the guests to comment with trickling awe on the sublime properties of Mrs. Gravely’s apple brown Betty. The local membership (those who have sworn oaths to Intuitionism, savvy Empiricists hedging their bets, and apolitical inspectors who just want to get away from the wife) still convene for poker games and, on special nights, to taste unblended scotches of the finest quality. Correlative to the House’s widening influence, the Swedish films have swelled in attendance now that the chauffeur, emboldened by how much his supplemental income has increased his estimation in his in-laws’ eyes, started inviting House members to join the tieclip, toaster and Bible salesmen at his after-hours confabs in the garage, said members whom he can single out with ruthless acuity, something in their eyes.

Ask her and Lila Mae will not admit that her heart skipped a beat when Mr. Reed suggested it might be wise for her to spend a night or two at the House, but it’s true. A secret part of her wanted to stay in her home so that other unwanted guests might drop in and give her an outlet for her anger. It was rare that she felt this way, relishing violence. She is mistress to her personality and well accustomed to reminding her more atavistic inclinations that the world is the world and the odd punch or eye-gouge will not make it any other way. Very disturbing, however, this late business. It’s one thing to understand the muck of things, accept it, live in it, and quite another to have that muck change so suddenly and dramatically, to stumble down to a newer, deeper shelf. That’s how Lila Mae sees it. Things are happening too fast for her to convince herself that she does not need time to think, to get to the bottom of things. Even if that involves taking assistance from this man Reed — and it is the acceptance, and not the aid itself, which galls her and makes her pride curdle. It means she owes him. This specimen.

Her room at the House is twice as large as her one at the Bertram Arms, and twice that again when the curtains are wide, as they are now, and all that forbidden light takes the room. She gets sky in her room at the Bertram Arms, but she doesn’t get light. There’s a difference. She doesn’t know what to do with her breakfast platter — does she leave it outside the door, as they do in hotel scenes at the picture show, or does she leave it at the side of the bed, act naturally? Time to get up at any rate. There’s not a single piece of dust on the large oval mirror hanging on the opposite wall of the room. Rubs her belly: she should eat like this more often. 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. The tailor seemed to know what she needed, understood the theater Lila Mae needs to leave the house whole and be among other people. An old man.

Mrs. Gravely (whoever that is, the cook, a bitter old bitch, Lila Mae can see her, gray-haired and bitter for sure) has hung her suits in the closet, along with two white cotton shirts Lila Mae has never extended the courtesy of a hanger to. Even her clothes are getting the royal treatment in Intuitionist House. Lila Mae packed the extra suit even though she does not intend to stay another night. She doesn’t know why. Her suit does not betray the scent of mothballs, which lingers in the closet, medicinal fog.

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. Not in front of a mirror or in front of strangers, gauging her success by their expressions of horror, disgust, etc. She did it by lying in her bed, feeling and testing which muscles in her face pained under application of concerted tension. To choose the most extreme pain would be to make a fright mask. A caricature of strength. She achieved calibration one night while testing a small muscle attached to her upper lip, hitting upon a register of pain a few inches below the high-tide mark of real pain. This register of discomfort became the standard for all the muscles in her face, above the eyebrows, under the jaw, across the nostrils. She didn’t check with the small mirror in the janitor’s closet, didn’t need to. She knew she’d hit it.

Her face is on. She’s ready to see Mr. Reed, whom she spies through the window. He sits on a stone bench in the garden, polishing his pince-nez, which are never dirty.

* * *

See, the Empiricists stoop to check for tell-tale striations on the lift winch and seize upon oxidation scars on the compensating rope sheave, all that muscle work, and think the Intuitionists get off easy. Lazy slobs.

Some nicknames Empiricists have for their renegade colleagues: swamis, voodoo men, juju heads, witch doctors, Harry Houdinis. All terms belonging to the nomenclature of dark exotica, the sinister foreign. Except for Houdini, who nonetheless had something swarthy about him.

Some counter-nicknames from the Intuitionists: flat-earthers, ol’ nuts and bolts, stress freaks (“checking for signs of stress” being a commonly uttered phrase when the Empirically trained are out running the streets), Babbits, collators (this last word preferably hissed for optimum disdain).

No one can quite explain why the Intuitionists have a 10 percent higher accuracy rate than the Empiricists.

* * *

Everything in the garden is dying, that’s what time of year it is. The leaves blaze and desiccate in their dying before twisting to the ground as ash. Lila Mae crunches toward Mr. Reed in one of the city’s secret gardens. The taciturn sentries (Victorian row houses, stodgy brownstones) have their backs turned to her. This interloper has dispensation, business with authority, and there are hungry thousands on the street beyond demanding closer scrutiny. Keep them out. Keep the dying garden safe.

“Mrs. Gravely doesn’t allow smoking in the house,” Mr. Reed says, affectless. “I smoke out here.” He brushes some leaves off the bench and motions for Lila Mae to sit. He is not the same man as last night. For a few seconds, anyway. Then the lines of consternation in his brow relax: he puts his game face on, parrying Lila Mae mask for mask. “I trust the accommodations were up to your standards?” Mr. Reed inquires.

Messing with her, a jibe at the clenched room she lives in? Keep cool: “I slept fine,” Lila Mae says.

“And the breakfast? How was the breakfast?”

“It was good.”

“The gentleman who brought it to your room — he was polite?” Mr. Reed is looking very intently at the ground. He’s thinking out loud, Lila Mae thinks.

“Yes.”

“Our usual man called in sick this morning,” Mr. Reed whispers, trancelike. “He sent over his nephew. We’ve never used him before.”

Lila Mae doesn’t say anything. She can smell more rain coming. A few yards away, the ubiquitous dead leaves clot the surface of a stone fountain still retaining a puddle from the rain a few days ago. The fountain cherub dances on one foot (dances to what? to next year’s spring, to having a master to dance for?), its tiny mouth cupping the sodden autumn air. What Lila Mae knows about Mr. Reed: graduated at the top of his class at the Midwestern Institute for Vertical Transport, quickly hustled up the ladder in one of the larger Departments on the other coast. All the signs of becoming an industry bigshot. Then Fulton unleashed Volume One and the man was smitten. Lila Mae can relate: the first volume of Theoretical Elevators was a conversion experience for her, too, after a pithy index entry in her Intro textbook (“Fulton’s recent vulgarities notwithstanding …”) dispatched her into uncharted backwaters of the library stacks. No wonder the Institute exiled Intuitionist classes into the dingy recesses of the course catalog, no wonder the tiny classrooms were always so full, the instructors broken and cursed under the burden of such knowledge. Fulton’s words discovered and altered Lila Mae early in her studies; she can only reckon what kind of spiritual catastrophe the book would have caused in a man like Mr. Reed, who had dutifully served Empiricism for so long. Must have felt the world had betrayed him.

What else Lila Mae remembers from the Lift magazine profile last summer: Like most of the early converts to Intuitionism, Mr. Reed quit the elevator inspecting game proper to preach the new gospel. What was the point, really, those first pioneers reasoned, when Fulton had pissed on every tenet of their former faith? Here’s where Mr. Reed distinguished himself: not as a thinker but as a mule. He did the grunt work. He toiled at integrating the alien science, this tumor, into the larger elevator community, convincing petulant Institute deans to teach this heresy (the very thought of it!), brokered the admission of taciturn and unapologetic Intuitionist inspectors into big-city elevator inspector Departments. There’s the story of how he cadged Midwestern into constructing an entire Intuitionist Wing after a tortuous thirty-six-hour negotiation, winning his prize after talks degraded to a coin toss. And a fix at that — it was a trick double-heads coin he’d got out of a candy machine down the hall. A tricky old bird. That’s how Mr. Reed appears to Lila Mae now that he has his face on, after recovering from Lila Mae’s unexpected intrusion into the garden: a vulture. Not the odd pigeon he was at Lila Mae’s apartment, but a calculating scavenger. A soldier.

Of course Orville Lever pressed this soldier into service as his campaign manager. Mr. Reed is not too academic for the field men or so full of well romanticism that the brains can’t relate. Lever’s a likable chap, but everyone knows Mr. Reed is the brains behind the operation, anyone can see that, the only man capable of pulling off the election for the Intuitionists. Lila Mae doesn’t know why he’s bothered to intercede in her Fanny Briggs mess, but knows she’ll find out soon. The grim mist of master-plan comes out of his pores and pollutes the air in the garden.

After a time, Mr. Reed turns to Lila Mae and says, “It’s too bad Orry is out of town talking to the good people at Arbo. It would be nice if you two met.”

“I shook his hand once,” Lila Mae tells him. “At a rally.” Orry. Orville.

“You should come to our open nights, Miss Watson. Have you ever considered becoming a member?”

“I just assumed,” Lila Mae replies.

“You should know what we’re like by now, Miss Watson,” Mr. Reed says with a bit of exhaustion. “As a group, that is. You’re one of us.” He removes his hand from the newspaper he’s been pressing down on. “You should take a look at this,” he says, handing the paper to her.

It doesn’t take Lila Mae long to digest the tabloid article, from the heights of the loud ELEVATOR CRASH! headline to the dregs of the final quote from Chancre. Nothing she didn’t expect. “Slanted,” Lila Mae announces.

“Did you see Chancre’s last statement? I’ll try my memory … ‘My opponent and his cronies have been trying all sorts of tactics since the start of the campaign, but I think this incident says more about their tomfoolery than any of their dirty tricks.’ ”

“He’s frothing,” Lila Mae says. “ ‘Dirty tricks.’ ”

“He has a point,” Mr. Reed tells her, his mouth tight. “He’s talking about the black box.”

And that smell of rain is stronger now. The infamous design problem from her school days: What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don’t know because we can’t see inside it, it’s something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels’ teeth. It’s a black box.

“Two weeks ago,” Mr. Reed begins, rubbing his pink hands on his lap, “Lever received a packet in the mail. It contained torn-out journal entries dating back a few years, and they were notes on a black box.”

“Everyone’s working on black boxes,” Lila Mae counters. “That’s where all of American and Arbo’s research and development money goes. There’s nothing new about that.” If Otis’s first elevation delivered us from medieval five- and six-story construction, the next elevator, it is believed, will grant us the sky, unreckoned towers: the second elevation. Of course they’re working on the black box; it’s the future.

“It was Fulton’s handwriting. They were obviously ripped out of his final journals, the ones we’ve never been able to find. Obviously we were very interested. We made a few inquiries and discovered that a reporter from Lift had received portions of it, too. Chancre as well.”

Lila Mae shakes her head. “There have always been rumors that Fulton was working on a black box,” she says dismissively. “But most of the evidence shows that Fulton was devoting his energies to Intuitionist theory, not engineering. He hadn’t been involved with mechanism since he became Dean.”

“The evidence you’ve seen,” Mr. Reed says. “He was doing a bit of both, from what we know now. You have to understand that in his last year, he barely spoke to anyone at all, except his maid, and when he did come out of the house his behavior was, to say the least, erratic. The diary shows that he was working on an elevator, and that he was constructing it on Intuitionist principles. From what we can tell from his notes, he finished it. There’s a blueprint out there somewhere.”

Lila Mae tries to get her head around that last bit. At least Mr. Reed is taking it slowly, trying to walk her through it. But still. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Lila Mae murmurs, twisting a button on her suit. “I mean from an engineering standpoint. At its core, Intuitionism is about communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis. ‘Separate the elevator from elevatorness,’ right? Seems hard to build something of air out of steel.”

Mr. Reed withdraws a cigarette from a silver case. “They’re not as incompatible as you might think,” he says. “That’s what Volume One hinted at and Volume Two tried to express in its ellipses — a renegotiation of our relationship to objects. To start at the beginning.”

“I don’t get you,” Lila Mae admits. Reluctantly.

“If we have decided that elevator studies — nuts and bolts Empiricism — imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn’t the next logical step, after we’ve adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be to build an elevator the right way? With what we’ve learned?”

“Construct an elevator from the elevator’s point of view.”

“Wouldn’t that be the perfect elevator? Wouldn’t that be the black box?” Mr. Reed’s left eyelid trembles.

“Unbelievable,” Lila Mae says. She thinks of her room at the Bertram Arms. It’s a miracle she lives there, how accustomed she is to this small world. How small her expectations are. Which part of Fulton’s writing affected her most? The first line that comes to her head is an incandescent flare: There is another world beyond this one. Lila Mae asks, “What does this have to do with the accident yesterday?”

Mr. Reed takes a long, contemplative sip from the air. “Think about it,” he says. “The most famous elevator theoretician of the century has constructed the black box, and he’s done it on Intuitionist principles. What does that do to Empiricism?”

Lila Mae nods and Mr. Reed continues: “Now Chancre’s up for reelection. There have always been rumors about Fulton’s black box and suddenly comes this new variable — it does exist, and it’s Intuitionist. Not only do you lose the election, but everything else, too. Your faith. You have to embrace the enemy you’ve fought tooth and nail for twenty years.”

“You have to find the box,” Lila Mae says.

“You have to find out if it’s true or not, and you have to find out quickly.”

“And set me up as a preemptive strike,” Lila Mae realizes.

Pompey.

“It didn’t have to be you,” Mr. Reed tells her. “It could have been anyone. If Chancre can’t find the box, he can at least stall until after the election, fight the rumors by orchestrating a high-profile failure for the Intuitionists. And their liberal policies.”

Liberal meaning her. “But I haven’t heard any rumors.”

“It’s been pretty inner-circle, Miss Watson. Until Monday, when the new issue of Lift comes out. It’s the cover story. Forced Chancre’s hand.” Mr. Reed taps his cigarette case on his thigh and stares at the cherub in the fountain. It hasn’t moved. It never does. “An elevator doesn’t go into freefall. Not without help. He’s scared. Yesterday proves it. And as for us,” he looks back at Lila Mae, “let’s just say we’re anxious to get our hands on the box and let it speak for itself.”

“Who were the men at my apartment?”

“Are you surprised at Chancre’s tactics? That he’s a thug? He plays golf every Tuesday with Johnny Shush. They were probably some of Shush’s men. The mob does more than just control the city’s elevator maintenance contracts, you know. They have a lot of muscle.” He looks up at the sky for a long moment. “It looks like it’s going to rain, but it’s not. Not today.”

He’s getting that airy look in his eyes again. “So where is it?” Lila Mae prods.

“We’ll find it soon,” Mr. Reed replies. “We think we know who sent out the journals. I think we’ll have it soon.”

This slow debate about the rain: it’s not about rain at all, but the fragility of what we know. We’re all just guessing. The second elevation, she thinks. The new cities are coming. “Thanks again for yesterday,” Lila Mae says. “And for the room.”

“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 there, 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.”

“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.

Lila Mae recognizes James Fulton’s signature at the foot of an employee evaluation form, dated a year after her reassignment to the faculty housing of the Institute. Ink identical to that of his signature is observable in small boxes above, where the ink has been used to form x’s in a column of boxes that indicate “excellent.” Except for one box in the “fair” column, regarding a question about punctuality. The date on the form tells Lila Mae that Fulton had just resigned from the Guild Chair (to murmurs of varied volume from the larger elevator inspector industry) to become the Dean of the Institute. The final stage of his career. He’d stolen all the plums; there was nowhere else to go.

The Institute letterhead is more distinguished and staid than the ersatz antiquation of Smart Cleaning company stationery. Rarefied austerity appropriate to a place of higher learning. The document Lila Mae holds is addressed to the Institute’s Board of Directors, and the emotional tenor of the words, the unmodulated panic, provides an intriguing contrast to the serenity of the Institute crest atop the page. The letter urges “swift action” regarding Fulton’s “eccentric” behavior (“eccentric” being a word, Lila Mae notes dryly, that white people use to describe crazy white people of stature), detailed below. Lila Mae has heard most of the stories before — the quick rages, the sudden crying fit in the middle of groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Engineering Wing — but most of the outrageous acts she reads about now are new to her. White people cover their own. Fulton’s behavior does not make her reconsider the father of her faith; Lila Mae does not expect human beings to conduct themselves in any other way but how they truly are. Which is weak.

The next document she finds is no real revelation, either. Fulton has acceded to the Board of Directors, the anonymous secretary reports (with much more enthusiasm than was present in his first document), and decided to resign. He has accepted our offer of allowing him to retain his faculty housing, as well as the proviso that a caretaker move in with him. This particular piece of paper (which shakes with the Buick’s velocity; not everything is within the chauffeur’s control) goes on to describe Fulton’s rejection of all the caretakers the Institute proposed (or “nannies,” as he referred to the pageant of efficient taskmasters who essayed his front door). The woman he wanted was the housekeeper, Marie Claire Rogers. No one else. The secretary is happy to report that Mrs. Rogers agreed, and will move into the old servant’s quarters on the first floor the second week of the next month. Congratulations, gentlemen, Lila Mae says to herself.

Lila Mae and the House chauffeur, Sven, are well into uncharted suburbia, which has been overgrown with kingsize discount emporiums and family restaurants catering to the primary color crowd since the last time she was out here. It is easier to breathe than in the city, there’s less to see. She looks back down at the next piece of paper, an old Lift magazine article Lila Mae read when it first appeared. The sheets are limp and glossy, thin as a breeze. The trial is over. The judge has decided. Marie Claire Rogers must relinquish any of Fulton’s papers in her possession to the Institute for Vertical Transport. According to the Lift reporter (whose choice of adjectives reveals him to be an Institute ally), when Fulton knew he did not have long to live, he bartered his personal papers for assurances that Mrs. Marie Claire Rogers could live in his campus house for as long as she saw fit. Needless to say, the Institute had already believed that they would get Fulton’s papers once he died, having already constructed the necessary reliquary nooks; this unexpected stipulation was just a gnat’s annoyance. Or so they thought at first. Once Fulton’s spirit departed, Mrs. Rogers tendered the papers in question. But not all. Obviously some notebooks were missing, ones from the final two years of Fulton’s life. Academia, posterity, the implacable engine of history would not be denied. But Mrs. Rogers was quite adamant about holding on to the journals, and assailed her landlords with invective not often heard in Yankee climes, by white ears, relenting in her insufferable behavior only when ordered to do so by the court of the Honorable James Madison (no relation). The article ends there, but Lila Mae adds a postscript to herself, about the nature of evidence. It was obvious from the dates on the journals that some were still missing, but no one could prove that they were not, as Mrs. Rogers maintained, destroyed by Fulton in a wee-hour fit of hopelessness, or even stolen — the maid claimed that on the day of Fulton’s funeral, the house had been broken into. Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.

The car is near the Institute. She knows this without looking up because the sounds of the city have finally fallen away, as if Lila Mae and her driver had discovered the one true valley. The gnashing and grinding of the city, the keen laughter that follows a fresh kill. Perfect place for a spa out here, to urge one’s self back into health, gather arms for the social world. The final contents of the file are the handwritten notes of one Martin Sullivan, an Intuitionist acolyte at the Institute. Subject slams door in my face, insults my mother, Subject catches me sneaking in through the kitchen window and stabs me in the hand with a meat thermometer, Subject sees me hiding behind tree and begins to approach menacingly — I decide to leave the perimeter. Martin Sullivan goes on to catalog the contents of a garbage pail collected as evidence one week earlier. Primarily food-related waste, Sullivan notes, with approximately 10 percent paper refuse. Two false starts of what appears to be a personal letter to someone named “Aunt Ida,” and so on. One item looked promising — a copy of Kwicky’s Weekly Crossword, with two-thirds of the puzzles attempted to varying degrees of completeness and accuracy. But despite my best efforts, I could not find any hidden messages or other concealed meanings in the puzzles.

That’s it. She’s the next one up, the next hassle for an old woman.

It has been a long time since she has been here. So long that her initial reaction is not of routine but of first impressions: she remembers entering the wide black gates of the Institute for the first time, her father’s hands on the wheel. She wonders again if news of the accident has reached her parents, if the reports contained her name. (Another thought: there is a file on her accumulating somewhere now, like the one she holds in her lap, an accretion of falsehoods.) She is not like the others who have come to interrogate and nag Marie Claire Rogers. Lila Mae has come to clear her name. At any cost.

Mr. Reed told her, “She refuses to talk to us. Perhaps you’re the perfect one to talk to her. You’re both colored.”

* * *

From Theoretical Elevators: Volume Two, by James Fulton.

To believe in silence. As we did when we lived in bubbles. Sentient insofar as we knew it was warm: Silence provided that warmth. The womb. Ants have it easy for speaking in chemicals. Food. Flight. Follow. Nouns and verbs only, and never in concert. There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality). You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure. You cannot find the words, the words will not allow you to find them in time for the departure. Nothing is allowed to pass between you and your companion. It is late, a seat awaits. That the words are simple and true is only half the battle. The train is leaving. The train is always leaving and you have not found your words.

Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits while its human freight tries to grab through the muck and find the words. In the black box, this messy business of human communication is reduced to excreted chemicals, understood by the soul’s receptors and translated into true speech.

* * *

No caramel soda, no prune juice, and definitely no coffee: Pompey won’t drink anything darker than his skin, for fear of becoming darker than he already is. As if his skin were a stain that could worsen, steep and saturate into Hell’s Black. They sent Pompey to sabotage the elevator stack in the Fanny Briggs building, Lila Mae is sure of that. It would have appeased their skewed sense of harmony to pit their two coloreds against each other. Dogs in a fighting pit. Pompey would have jumped at the chance, white foamy saliva smeared across his cheeks. Didn’t he say something to that effect when they were in O’Connor’s, just after the crash, when Lila Mae crouched against the wall like a thief? She’s finally got what’s been coming to her. Something like that. Pompey in his too-small beige suit, bowler hat tilted, mischievous in the machine room.

She’s waiting in the car for Marie Claire Rogers to show up. The faculty houses lean behind a regiment of oak at the bottom of the hill. Always the incongruity: the preoccupied theoreticians and the bare-knuckled former inspectors united in academia, living behind indistinguishable Tudor facades. Through the car window Lila Mae can see the gymnasium where she used to live, see the small gutted hole that was her window onto campus. She draws a line across the air to the upper floors of Fulton Hall, the library where the man died. The man whose house she sits in front of now, with a man who does not speak in the driver’s seat. Sven breathes heavily through his mouth like a horse.

The tap at the window startles her. “If you’re going to be here all day, you might as well come in,” the subject says, her words threading through the inch of open window to Lila Mae’s right. Marie Claire Rogers adds, “Just you. Not him.”

She is a short woman, a hut on strong stumpy legs, and looks younger than Lila Mae expected. Not as used-up and exhausted as her profession should have made her. On this overcast day she is a solid living presence, a bull in a bright red sundress that squeezes up around her neck in white ruffles. Dry browned flowers clench in a fist on her straw hat. She does not wait for Lila Mae’s response, starting up the stone walkway to Fulton’s house, her house, in small, measured steps. Lila Mae tells the driver not to wait for her, she’ll make her own way back to Intuitionist House. Not a personality given easily to nostalgia, Lila Mae has nonetheless decided to walk around the campus after interviewing Mrs. Rogers. See if anyone is living in her old room. Perhaps it is the past days’ dislocation.

Lila Mae opens the door to the foyer and sees the red blur to her left. Mrs. Rogers says, “I saw you and him parked in front when I come around the corner.” She plucks a long hat pin from her head and sets her straw hat next to her on the couch. “I waited twenty minutes and you weren’t moving. I’m not going to be kept out my own house.”

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” Lila Mae replies. “I just wanted to ask you a question or two. If you have the time.”

Mrs. Rogers shakes her head wearily. “I wouldn’t let you in,” she says flatly, “but you’re not like them other men been coming around here, in their city suits all full of themselves. Like they have to be nice to you because you have something they want, even though they think they better than you.” She stares into her visitor’s eyes. “But I give them so much trouble I guess they figure in their heads they send you and I’ll talk to you.”

“Something like that.”

“And I’ll just say what I’ve been keeping because we belong to the same club.” Mrs. Rogers’s hands scrape across her lap as if to brush something away. “Why don’t you sit yourself down,” she says, standing, “while I make some tea.”

The house is not what Lila Mae had expected, but then Fulton’s been dead for six years. It is Mrs. Rogers’s house now, by contractual agreement. There was no mention of it in the file, but there must be rumors that Fulton and Rogers were lovers. Why else go to so much trouble for a servant. Did she start redecorating when he was alive, by creeping degrees? Fifteen ceramic horses stand on the mantle above the fireplace, in poses ranging from mid-gallop to pensive graze. She can hear Mrs. Rogers clinking and fussing down the hall. Boiling water. What did Fulton say as she remade his house. Too far gone to notice the world around him, or too intent on his black box to care about the shells of things. The appearance of matter.

Mrs. Rogers returns with tea and brown wafers. The tea smells and tastes of cloves. The chair Lila Mae sits in is old and firm. Intractable. Mrs. Rogers asks, sipping tea and eyeing Lila Mae over the lip of her cup, “Why don’t you get on with it, then?”

“I just came here to ask you about Mr. Fulton.”

“That’s what the rest of them men said. What people you with? You with the Institute or that Department in the city? Or some new people come to harass me?”

“My name is Lila Mae Watson,” she says. “I’m an Intuitionist. Now I work with the Department of Elevator Inspectors. In the city.”

“Um-hmm,” Mrs. Rogers says. Without emotion. “Ask what you going to ask.” She nibbles a biscuit with tiny teeth.

“It was just you living here with Fulton?” Rogers may not make it easy, but she will find out what she wants to know, Lila Mae decides. She will.

“Somebody had to,” Mrs. Rogers answers wearily. “He couldn’t get along without having someone around to keep him out of craziness. Keep him from himself. First they brought in all these nice old ladies from Europe or some such.” She waves out the window as if that place were just beyond the trees. “But James just ran them right out the house as soon as they walked in. Said they scared him, them being from Sweden and Russia and so on. Then one day he said that he’d only have me under his roof with him.”

“And you accepted.”

“All my kids married and gone off,” Mrs. Rogers replies, her head tilting just a bit toward a picture on the table next to her. Lila Mae hadn’t noticed it: faces and bodies she can’t discern, posed in the traditional arrangement of family photos. “What am I going to do,” Mrs. Rogers continued, “stay in that city with all that foolishness that goes on these days? There ain’t much to do out here, but you don’t have to think about some kid knocking you over the head for your money.”

“You were friends then, you and Fulton.”

“I worked for him and we became friends. He was good to me. Did you know they wanted me to spy on him? Once he started writing those books of his about feeling the elevator and hugging the elevator and business—”

“Theoretical Elevators,” Lila Mae offers.

“That’s them. Once he started up with that, those old crackers on the hill didn’t know what to do with him. Acting like he got bit by a mad dog and carrying on like that, then he starts writing those books. I think that’s what got to them the most — the books. They didn’t know what to make of them, coming over here at all hours — I don’t know if they was trying to make him stop or just keep it to himself. One day he’s off giving a speech and one of them comes in here, some dried-up old white boy, comes into my kitchen and tells me ‘they’d appreciate it if I kept them informed’ about James’s coming and goings and what he does in his room at night. Like I was going to be a spy in my own house, because that’s what this place became as soon as I moved in here. My house. I told them to get the hell out of my kitchen, and said if they came around my house again I was going to tell Fulton. And you know he’d throw a fit.” Mrs. Rogers places her teacup on the end table and stares at Lila Mae, switches gears: “What’s taking you so long?” she says forcefully. “Ain’t you going to ask me where I’m hiding the rest of Fulton’s stuff? That’s what everybody wants to know. ‘Can we just talk to you for a minute,’ ‘Do you have a minute?’ No, I don’t have a minute, not for them.”

“We’re just trying to make sure,” Lila Mae says. She’s losing control of the situation, letting this bitter old bird get the best of her.

“How’d you get mixed up with these people anyway?” Mrs. Rogers asks. “You all dressed like them, but you must still have some sense.”

“I came to school here,” Lila Mae responds. Keep the conversation on Rogers, not herself. That’s not why she’s here. “A few years back.”

“Is that all there is to it? Just that?”

“Like I said, I’m an Intuitionist. I’m a student of Fulton’s teachings, and if there’s some more out there somewhere, I’d like to find them.”

“You went to school here?”

“A few years back.”

“I think I remember you,” Mrs. Rogers says flatly, nodding her head. “There never been too many of us around here, who weren’t scrubbing floors or picking up, that is. Yes. I remember you. I remember you because you were the only colored gal around here who didn’t work here. I used to see you walking all fast everywhere, like you had someplace to go and didn’t have no time to get there. You were always walking fast by yourself.”

“I made it through.”

“I guess you did.” Mrs. Rogers’s brown eyes are locked fast on Lila Mae’s. “Was it worth it? All the stuff they put on you?”

“I have my badge. I earned my badge.” Lila Mae realizes with no small measure of embarrassment that her hand is in her pocket, tracing the crest on her gold badge. She reaches for a biscuit on the tray.

“That’s not what I’m asking, is it?” Mrs. Rogers says. Satisfied with the awkward expression on Lila Mae’s face, a crumpled ball of paper is what it looks like, Mrs. Rogers leans back on the couch and smiles. “Forgive me,” she says slowly, “I’m just an old lady going on and on on a Sunday afternoon. You came here to ask me something. You want to know if I’m holding something back. Something of Fulton’s the world and all those people up on the hill up there can’t live without.”

“Why did you hold on to his papers? You had an agreement, right?”

“That was what James wanted.” The smile on her face is distant and strange, as if pleased by far-off music. “He told me because he knew he was going to die soon, the way people just know they’re going to go soon, he told me that when they came around poking after his things I was to give them whatever he had in his study, but anything in his bedroom was off-limits. That’s what he told me, and I could tell he meant it. He kept some of his work in the bedroom and he kept some in his study and those are two different places. That’s what he wanted, and that’s what I was going to do by him, no matter what those old crackers and their lawyers were saying.”

“But eventually you gave in to them.”

“You know what I think? I think Fulton was going to burn those papers up in the fireplace, only he didn’t know he was going to go on so soon. But they brought me up in front of that judge and they make me swear on the Bible. What else am I going to do? I ask you — what else am I going to do? I had to swear on the Bible. I know James would be upset with me, but what else was I going to do? I can’t start over again, and James wanted me to have this place.”

“And you gave them everything?”

“I gave them everything and they still didn’t believe me. Somebody broke in here the day we buried James. Knocked everything over looking for something. I told them someone had broken in here and maybe they took something, but they still didn’t believe me.” A tiny mechanism in the old woman’s body clicks into place, suddenly activated. By what, Lila Mae doesn’t know: but she understands that her interview is coming to a close. Mrs. Rogers barks, “I look outside my window the other day, and you know what I see? I see a man picking through my trash can. I know the man who comes for the trash, and this wasn’t no trashman. Then he takes off running. What do you have to say to that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know how many people come around here lately asking the same question? Sometimes they fat and sometimes they tall and sometimes they even show some respect. They say they’re from these people or they belong to that group and so on. And do you know what I say to them? I slam my door shut. Looking at me with that look. I 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.”

Flying teacups, throw one of the ceramic horses at Lila Mae. In another minute if she doesn’t get out of there.

“And they send you. Got some little nigger gal on the payroll. This is a new world. They think they can send you over here and I’ll talk to you. Like we know each other. Wearing a man’s suit like you a man. Let me ask you something. Why are you here? On a Sunday?”

“Because it’s important,” Lila Mae responds. Defiant. Believes in her mission.

“To who?” Mrs. Rogers demands. “To you or them?”

And Lila Mae doesn’t say anything and Mrs. Rogers says, “That’ll do for now.” The last thing the old woman says, when Lila Mae is halfway down the walk: “He’s not the man you think he is. Remember that: he’s not the man you think he is.”

* * *

There were no windows and they took his watch so he had no idea how long he had been down there. Long enough to have been nicknamed the Screaming Man, long enough for him to have earned the sobriquet a dozen times over. He screamed the first time when the large man without eyes broke the first of his fingers. He screamed a couple times after that, and things just flowed from there.

The large man did have eyes, but they receded so far into his skull that the Screaming Man might have been peering into an abyss. When they arrived at this place, the two men hoisted his quivering form down damp stone steps, through hallways gouged out of reticent earth, down to this room. They chained him to the cot that stank of piss and vomit and other murky fluids the human body can be counted on to expel from time to time. Pus. The mattress bore tattoos, dark amorphous stains that corresponded to where different body parts fell on the mattress, a brown cloud around the right knee, some murk congealed near the groin. He screamed when he saw the mattress, and screamed more as they chained him to the bed and he saw his limbs and parts positioned over previous guests’ secretions. Dazed and agonized as he was, he understood that the small room was underground and that no real people would hear his screams. For the men who held him were not real people. They were monsters and they were going to kill him.

It cannot be said that the Screaming Man was unaware of his crime. He knew he was trespassing even as he did so. He trespassed for many reasons, for reasons going back several years, for reasons that bided their spiteful time until the moment of their vindication. The moment of the web. He did not break the laws of the country but the laws of a powerful man who commands a legion of block-browed enforcers who have pledged their fealty in blood. He had stopped screaming for several hours and had even entertained dreams of release, small dramas of contrition and forgiveness (we just wanted to send you a message), when the short man with nimble fingers entered the room and commenced to torture him. “Just pruning the overgrowth,” the short man said as he cut the Screaming Man. Said Screaming Man, who truly and thoroughly earned his nickname at that point, and for several hours afterward.

The blood from his wounds (plural) sprayed the cinderblock wall and dried and eventually became indistinguishable from the dried blood from the others before him. It was not the spray patterns of his blood, intriguing and lively as they were, that distinguished him from his predecessors but the unaccountable originality of his screaming. His screaming, so steady and dependable for a time (crescendoing and receding, then redoubling in intensity at perfect intervals, as if pain were a virtuoso and his screams the very libretto of hell), slowly trickled away until it seemed to the men standing watch outside his door that the moment might come when the Screaming Man was not screaming. Had, in fact, stopped screaming. But then the Screaming Man would start screaming again after a time, and the man who had wagered on the Screaming Man’s relapse would wearily hold out his palm to his more optimistic comrade, who dutifully tendered his gambling losses and pondered silently to himself why some people succumb to shock and others do not.

They all screamed, of course, those sentenced to that room by Johnny Shush’s capricious morality. But what intrigued the men who watched over the Screaming Man, as well as those who tortured him, was the cast and caliber, the inexhaustible clarity, of his screaming. Its sheer novelty, unheralded in a man of such unassuming mien. They had never heard pain sing like that before, in all the permutations of torture ever enacted on the small room’s humble stage. And some truly extravagant stuff had gone on in there over the years. One prosaic gent outside the room, went by the name of Frankie Ears on account of the vestigial, flaplike things on the sides of his face, said that it sounded like the Screaming Man was losing his job, his wife and his dog all at the same time, this image apparently being the worst thing Frankie Ears could conjure up. But no. 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. Lose five fingers — they won’t grow back, but you still got five more, right? They had cut off half his fingers (and nailed them to the clubhouse bulletin board beneath the newspaper headline announcing the Justice Department’s latest failed indictment against the irrepressible Johnny Shush) but they hadn’t cut off the other half yet. There’s still hope, the men in the small room never give up hope that they can talk their way out of the mess no matter how hard they hurt, the extremity of their disfigurement. (Hope, it has been observed, is the most terrible of all torture implements.) The Screaming Man, however, screamed as if he were losing not just his life but peaceful eternity, the silent hereafter where the dead repose on daisy beds, brows untrammeled by care. The men who stood watch downstairs, normally of imperturbable heart, experienced a new unease. Some, to themselves, plotted a career change, contemplating this or that cousin who had just opened up a restaurant or Ford dealership. 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. Thank God for rest breaks, duty shifts, one guard said to himself.

Johnny Shush never went into the basement. He said it depressed him. When Johnny Shush arrived and the guards brought the Screaming Man up to the first floor so that Johnny Shush could deliver his usual “You done me wrong, now you gotta pay” speech to the still remarkably not-hoarse Screaming Man, it so happened that Lazy Joe Markham was bringing that colored gal downstairs. The colored gal looked at the Screaming Man, and the Screaming Man looked at the colored gal and did what came naturally. He screamed.

* * *

The dark blue Buick still perches at the curb, despite Lila Mae’s instructions that the chauffeur depart without her. She would make her own exit from her alma mater. The infamous Intuitionist loyalty. As she walks down the path from Fulton’s front door, Lila Mae can see the driver’s hands limp on the wheel, lollygagging like beached jellyfish. The engine barks and gargles as soon as she sits down on the smooth leather of the backseat. As she sits, she lifts the cloth of her trousers’ knees. To ease friction.

The old woman and her musty house, where schools of dust whirl and blink in the sunlight, minute sea creatures. Lila Mae does not dread briefing Mr. Reed on the outcome of her mission — it is herself she has failed. Mrs. Rogers’s will is as blank and brute as hers. Perhaps someone did break into the Fulton home and steal the last journals after all, and it is this person who has mailed the packages of Fulton’s journal. So distracted is she over the afternoon’s turn of events that it is some time after they have cleared the filigreed gates of the Institute for Vertical Transport when Lila Mae notices that the driver no longer has the red scar on his neck, that his neck is a pink concrete column. That there are no buttons to unlock the door in the backseat, or handles to roll down the window. That this is not the car she arrived in, that this is not her driver (although both men share an affinity for silence), that they are not turning back toward the city but somewhere else altogether.

* * *

The ferry across Earth to Heaven. It seems silly to her now that she didn’t see it before: an Intuitionist black box. Toward the end of her sophomore seminar on Theoretical Elevators, Professor McKean had the class describe the elevators they would build if free from all constraints. Some of the students took constraint to mean the exigencies of innovation, and hustled to rescue their favorite creations of yore, merely adding, say, a modern selector to the keenly antiquated hulk of a Sprague-Pratt. Others made improvements (or so it seemed to them) upon prevailing design concepts of the day, like the sandy-haired youth from Chicago who submitted a blueprint that owed much to recent developments in Austria. Lila Mae, who at that point in her career was still hung up on linearity, cobbled together an up-to-date model from the best the big firms had to offer (a broken-arm door closer from Arbo, a corrosion-proof sheave from United), envisioning a future cooperative and patentless. (Smiles ruefully at the recollection of it now.) One young gentleman with grave eyes tendered a blueprint that consisted only of an empty shaft and “an eerie dripping sound.” No one was very happy with the high marks Morton received for such frivolity.

Lila Mae found Professor McKean hard to figure: he’d been in the war. His left arm was gone at the elbow and he pinned back his coat sleeve with the small, bright medal he’d earned for courage in battle. No one asked him for details, there were rumors of course, but no one asked him and he did not speak of it. McKean was tall and gaunt, with gray hair still grazed down to a military buzz. Gray hair even though he was still quite young. Lila Mae is still not sure how he felt about Intuitionism. She knew it was the first time he had taught the course, and yet his tone was so flat and arid that he could have been teaching the new science for decades, to dispatched thousands. For all his enthusiasm, he might be enumerating how many shirts he was dropping off with the Chinese laundry. No passion — but then, Lila Mae thinks, Intuitionism isn’t about passion. True faith is too serious to have room for the distraction of passion.

The seminar was held in a basement room beneath the Edoux Auditorium. The steam pipes hissed petulantly, or else the radiator gonged; at any rate one had to enunciate and raise one’s voice to be heard despite the modest dimensions of the room. The acoustics did not bother Lila Mae, who rarely spoke. She did not feel she understood enough about Intuitionism to talk about it, no matter the extent of her sincerity. As if to speak out of turn would be the apotheosis of vulgarity, the most unseemly corruption.

The six other students did not share her prudence, and their ignorant mutterings melted into the sonic adipose of the steam heat. Three of them were, like Lila Mae, avid converts to Fulton’s mythology, another two well-meaning liberals who were intrigued enough to spend a year of their vertical education on the subject. The final member of their voyage was one Frederick Gorse, and he sat at the far edge of the boat, equally queasy with a diffuse disgust and the choppy waters of their discourse. Gorse, a plump and soft specimen (he reminded Lila Mae of an old, confident pig who understands his meat is too rotten for the slaughterhouse), was an intractable Empiricist who had only signed up for the seminar to understand, and thus better arm himself against, the apostate rabble who were making so much noise in the community. He had the Guild Chair in his eye, anyone could see that, and if his frequent ejaculations of “Poppycock!” and “Humbug!” were any indication, one day he’d be a toothy foe for Intuitionism. Upon first acquaintance Gorse already seemed an ancient nemesis. Professor McKean kept Gorse in check, Lila Mae realized later, by letting him speak; outnumbered among the converted, and arguing for the very doctrine against which the other students had united in revolt, Gorse was such an efficient teaching aid that McKean could have made a convincing case for including him in the Department’s annual budget.

Lila Mae should have seen the black box and the new cities of the second elevation because Fulton’s first writings were technical, arcane investigations of the mechanism. Toward a System of Vertical Transport is still a basic text for Empiricist thought. No one knows enough about his history to place his design genius in relief; Fulton just appeared at the Pierpont School of Engineering one day, eighteen years old, slow of speech, tentative, and proceeded to astound. The black box explains all. It was Fulton’s odd perceptions that made him a technical wiz, his way of finding the unobvious solution that is also the perfect solution. It also allowed him, Lila Mae sees, to pierce the veil of this world and discover the elevator world. Because that’s what Theoretical Elevators did, it described a world, and a world needs inhabitants to make it real. The black box is the elevator-citizen for the elevator world.

One day toward the end of the seminar, when spring had begun to stir above their underground bunker, Professor McKean brought up the Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger. (Obviously, they were still knee-deep in Volume One of Theoretical Elevators.) His one hand in a fist on the scratchproof surface of the conference table, Professor McKean asked if someone would care to explain the implications of last night’s assigned reading.

Morton, the creator of the dripping-sound elevator, stated, “The Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger asks what happens when the passenger who has engaged the call button departs, whether he changed his mind and took the stairs or caught an up-tending car when he wanted to go down because he did not feel like waiting. It asks what happens to the elevator he summoned.”

Professor McKean said, “That’s right. Fulton asks this question and leaves it to the reader, abruptly proceeding on to the psychology of the Door Close button. How do you think Fulton would answer his question?”

“Obviously,” Gorse said, “the elevator arrives, the doors open for the standard loading time, and then the doors close. That’s it.”

Johnson, the burly freshman who always sat next to Lila Mae, ignored Gorse and offered in his stumbling voice, “I think that Fulton would say that the elevator arrives but the doors do not open. If there’s no need for the doors to open, then the vertical imperative does not apply.”

Professor McKean nodded. “Any other theories?”

Bernard, who could usually be relied upon to provide a sensible response, said, “For one thing, the vertical imperative applies to the elevator’s will, and doesn’t apply to passengers. I think what Fulton was referring to in this section was the ‘index of being’—where the elevator is when it is not in service. If, as the index of being tells us, the elevator does not exist when there is no freight, human or otherwise, then I think in this case the doors open and the elevator exists, but only for the loading time. Once the doors close, the elevator returns to nonbeing—‘the eternal quiescence’—until called into service again.” Bernard sat back in his metal chair, satisfied.

Professor McKean said simply, “That’s good. Anyone else?”

Lila Mae waited for someone to give her an answer. No one did. Lila Mae cleared her throat and said in a thin voice, “Fulton is trying to trick the reader. An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.”

Professor McKean nodded quickly and then inquired of his pupil, “And if we set up a film camera in the hallway to see what would happen, what would we see when we developed the film, Watson?”

Lila Mae met his eyes. “By leaving the camera there, you’ve created what Fulton calls ‘the expectation of freight.’ The camera is a passenger who declines to get on the elevator, not a phantom passenger. The film would record that the doors open, the elevator waits, and then the doors close.”

“Very good,” Professor McKean approved.

Gorse, who had been fidgeting and fussing in his seat for the last few minutes, was unable to contain his contempt. Spat, “Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there!” and slammed a fat fist onto the table. The fundamental battle.

Professor McKean frowned. He pushed his chair from the conference table until it hit the wall with a dull bang. With his right hand, he unpinned his war medal from his sleeve. His jacket sleeve, unhinged, swayed back and forth pendulously. “Gorse,” Professor McKean said, “Is my arm here or not here?”

“It’s … not there,” Gorse responded timidly.

“What’s in this sleeve?”

“Nothing,” Gorse answered.

“That’s the funny thing,” Professor McKean said, smiling now. “My arm is gone, but sometimes it’s there.” He looked down at his empty sleeve. He flicked at the sleeve with his remaining hand and they watched the fabric sway.

* * *

One time during an idle hour in the Pit, she asked Martin Gruber how Johnny Shush got his name. Martin Gruber is one of the Old Dogs, a season or two away from retirement, cushy consulting jobs. He has weathered corruption probes, bullying by numerous city administrations, and the rise of the electric elevator. But he misplaced his usual volubility at her question. He looked around to see who might be listening and instructed, “No one speaks of it. Kapeesh?” As in: shush.

Shush, whispered the black mouths of the empty warehouses, the broken windows so secure in their shattering that they no longer remember glass. She did not know the neighborhood they drove through to get to this place, this underground room. Prefabricated houses swaddled in aluminum siding thinned and disappeared, the traffic lights disappeared, there were no more people, and the warehouses began, carcasses of prosperity. As the sedan rolled by the warehouses, rumbling over old trolley tracks, it was possible at certain points for her to see sky through the windows and up through the collapsed roofs. Decay heightening the visible. She was too curious to be scared. She did not bother to speak once she recognized the driver: Lazy Joe Markham, one of the Finnegan Five.

It was an old story. Once the government broke the elevator manufacturers’ maintenance monopoly (we install them, and we’ll keep them running for a monthly fee), all sorts of sharpies moved into this newly vacated entrepreneurial nook. The mob bullied owners to use their men as elevator maintenance contractors. They never did much for the elevators’ ailments, but developed the peculiar hobby of dropping takeout Chinese containers and wax-paper sandwich wrapping down the shafts, apparently enthralled by the way the refuse twisted and tumbled as it traveled down into the darkness to molder among the buffers at the bottom. The mob had a stranglehold. Shush owned the West Side, from the crown of the Island down to the docks.

A few years ago, one of Shush’s men was caught by the cops torching a pool hall (nothing to do with elevators, some unrelated business of concern to organized crime). The cops flipped him, and he turned state’s evidence. The nervous stoolie captured the Finnegan Five on magnetic tape sharing war stories about the delightfully gusty entrails of a new luxury high-rise. Lila Mae couldn’t recall if the Finnegan Five did any hard time; more importantly, they did not rat on Johnny Shush. This one, Lazy Joe Markham, apparently had been rewarded with his silence by getting a chauffeur job.

Mr. Reed telling her, Chancre and Johnny Shush play golf together.

When they finally arrived at one warehouse, identical in dilapidation to its cohorts in the lost industrial section, Markham took her down some old stone steps, where she passed a bloodied man being carried up the stairs by other men. He was screaming.

According to her internal clock (reliable, wound as she is), she has been here for two hours now. In the room is a square wooden table with a jagged black burn in its center. Two seats face each other across the table, and she sits in the one that fixes her back to the door. In accordance with interrogation-room policies upheld in dingy Mafia hideouts and police stations all over the country. The floor of the room is clean, not that she needed confirmation of the mob’s influence over the city’s custodial unions. The door is solid and gray, studded with rivets along the edges. An industrial door for little her.

Lazy Joe Markham frisked her when he brought her into this room, lightly and decently sliding his hairy hands along her body, catching for a second at the unexpected place where her waist erupts into jagged hip bone, recovering, sliding down her trousers. He was not fresh. He was not rewarded for his search. Him and the two men who searched her apartment: meticulous and thorough, as Johnny Shush is known to be.

She has time. She may be concerned at this point. She thinks, I have to be at work tomorrow. After not checking in after the accident, if she does not appear at the Pit at nine o’clock, she knows she is officially suspicious. If Mr. Reed is right, and she will be cleared of culpability in the accident, then she must continue along the routine: submit to an Internal Affairs inquiry. Keeping her overnight will damage her case. Wishful thinking: that all they want to do is detain her. She dismissed Mr. Reed’s driver, and Marie Claire Rogers wouldn’t know her hostage car from the one that brought her to the Institute. No one knows.

She wants the man to stop screaming.

* * *

Chuck, poor Chuck, he really wants it, working late on a Sunday night alone in the office, nary a critter underfoot except for his scurrying ambition. Has a bottle of soda pop to his left, a pile of notebooks to his right. In front of him, his words, pulled from himself with a struggle, they cling to his person like leeches. The words pile up the more he works on it. Right now they only make sense to him. Time will vindicate this time: something his wife, Marcy, will hear sometimes in the middle of the night, out of her husband’s sleeping lips. It’s hard to work at home, is why he’s here. Marcy’s aimless chores (rubbing rags against surfaces, holding glasses up to the kitchen light, all to some insufferable hummed ditty) distract him. He needs to work on his monograph, so he comes to the Pit. “Understanding Patterns of Escalator Use in Department Stores Simultaneously Equipped With Elevators”—the heft of the thing, he can barely stand it sometimes, being of delicate sensibilities.

Saturday afternoons find Chuck on stakeout. For the last six months of his life, every Saturday he goes to Freely’s and watches the estuary roll through the front doors, rumble and mix into First Floor, Ladies’ Cosmetics, The Men’s Store, Jewelry. In the gallery of deluxe pleasures (perfume bottles ridged with jet-plane speed lines, curvilinear pink and aqua automatic toasters) where all the options are set from above, by men in secret rooms on the top floor, there is still one elemental choice left to be made. Elevator or escalator. Chuck vehemently disagrees with esteemed Cuvier, who thinks the choice is random, a simple matter of proximity. As they ricochet from bauble to bauble, snared by this sparkle, seduced by that luster, the shoppers opt for the vertical conveyance at hand, whatever is convenient. Which doesn’t suit Chuck. He relies on primary sources. Ten Cents One Ascension. When the Otis Elevator Co. unveiled the world’s first escalator at the 1900 Paris Exposition, the sign at the foot of the golden gate read, TEN CENTS ONE ASCENSION. Could it be any clearer than that? This need to rise is biological, transcending the vague physics of department store architecture. We choose the escalator, we choose the elevator, and these choices say much about who we are, says Chuck. (There is more than a smidgen of spite in this formulation, unseen by driven Chuck: he’s trying to justify his specialty.) Do you wish to ascend at an angle, surveying the world you are leaving below and behind, a spirit arms wide, a sky king; or do you prefer the box, the coffin, that excises the journey Heavenward, presto, your arrival a magician’s banal theatrics? Whenever Chuck touches the black rubber of the escalator guard rail (such a mysterious substance! what alchemy!), he understands he has made a choice. The right one.

He works late in the office, as he is now, contorting and torturing his data to support his thesis.

His bladder, always his bladder. He eases his fingers from the typewriter keys. His desk lamp provides an intrepid cone of light, all darkness outside the circle. Chuck cannot see the huge map of the city that drapes one wall of the Pit, punctured here and there with motley colored pins marking the Department’s holy war against defective, cagey and otherwise recalcitrant vertical conveyance in this bitter metropolis. Cannot see the silent locus of office interaction, the water cooler, its cool fortitude. He walks past the rows of black binders filled with the city’s hieroglyphic elevator regulations, the codebooks of their mission through disorder, and he stubs his toe more than once, beset by unseen enemies. Out in the hallway his passage is easier (paradoxically, his bladder pains more the closer he gets to the bathroom, always), because Chief Inspector Hardwick is in his office. Whiteness throbs behind the opaque glass and he hears grunting. Hardwick shouldn’t be here this late, but then liquor stores aren’t open on Sunday and perhaps he needed to retrieve a bottle of whiskey from his office stash. This is a tense moment for Chuck. He needs to wee-wee, but his natural affability and late-night yearning for company tells him to say hello. Hardwick is monosyllabic and their greeting shouldn’t last for too long. Chuck makes a promise of flowers, a box of candy and no more soda to his bladder, and knocks on the door. He takes the grunt as a welcome and steps inside.

The man is not Hardwick. The man is squat, fat, and has a few greasy strands of black hair stroked across his denuded pate. Even from the doorway Chuck can see ashing on his shoulders sloughed off from his remaining hair. The man doesn’t seem to mind Chuck’s appraisal. He’s eating a large submarine sandwich like a watermelon, chewing outward to his mitts. And has a generous stack of folders that apparently have been keeping him busy.

“You must be Charles Gould,” he says through ground salami. “It says in your file you like to come in on Sundays.”

“What are you doing in Hardwick’s office?” Chuck asks in return.

Wearily, the man withdraws a leather billfold from his jacket and flips it open. “Bart Arbergast, Internal Affairs,” he says. “I’m working on the Fanny Briggs case.”

Chuck hasn’t heard from Lila Mae since their encounter in O’Connor’s bathroom (when you gotta go, you gotta go, insists his bladder), and he recalls the angry scuttlebutt of his comrades: That uppity bitch was bound to mess up sooner or later; they’ve handed the election over to Chancre now. Chuck tried to call her yesterday, but when the operator put the call through to the public phone in the hallway outside her room, no one answered, not even one of her strange neighbors. No Caribbean lilt to tell him Miss Watson does not answer her door. “I’m sorry to disturb you, then,” Chuck tells the IA man, his hand on the doorknob.

“Not so fast,” Arbergast says, sucking up a sliver of onion into his mouth like a cat devouring a mouse. “You’re a friend of this Watson character, yes?”

“Friends can be hard to come by in this Department.”

“I understand what you’re trying to say,” Arbergast nods. “Gould — that’s a Jewish name, right?”

“Yes. What of it?”

“And you’re an escalator head, huh?”

“Yes, that’s my area of expertise. I think it’s important to have a specialty. Something you’re good at. That way—”

“Just like those damn escalators — you just go on and on.” Arbergast sticks a fingernail into his gums. “To be honest, I don’t care much for you tread jockeys. Why don’t you just start your own guild instead of trying to weasel in with the elevator boys? It complicates things, all this interdepartmental paperwork you guys cause.”

“If the higher-ups would recognize that escalators are just as important for speedy conveyance as elevators, there wouldn’t be such headaches all the time.”

Arbergast inspects the soft brown matter beneath his fingernail and eats it. “At least you guys stay out of trouble,” Arbergast says. “Mostly. I was just looking at your file. Seems you had a little incident at Freely’s a few months back. Something about harassing the clientele?”

“That was blown all out of proportion,” Chuck says quickly. “I was merely trying to ask the woman what made her walk out of her way toward the elevator bank when there was an escalator right there, and she told the store dick that I was bothering her. Tell me if you think this makes sense: there’s big queue for the elevators — she could see that clearly from her vantage point — and yet she rejects the escalator, which was nearly empty. She—”

“Roland’s bones! You escalator boys got a snappy answer for everything, don’t you?”

Tiny red freckles of exasperation emerge in Chuck’s cheeks. “Is this an official interrogation, or can I leave?”

“You can leave anytime you want,” Arbergast grants, rubbing his lips with his sleeve. “But if you want to help your friend, you might think about helping me out with some things that are bothering me.” He waves his sandwich nowhither. “Want to have a seat?”

A few yards away, down the hall: forgiving porcelain. Chuck pulls a chair from the wall and sets it opposite Arbergast. The things he does for friendship.

Arbergast looks over his notes. “Last Friday,” he begins, “there’s an accident at the Fanny Briggs building. Eighteen-deep elevator stack. State of the art. City’s pumped millions into the building, it’s the Mayor’s big baby. This Lila Mae Watson of yours inspects it, gives it a clean bill of health. Are you with me?”

“You haven’t told me anything new yet.”

“It’s lip like that gives you guys your reputation. So why give the assignment to Watson? She’s got a clean record. Impeccable, in fact. But it’s a pretty plum, Fanny Briggs. Something Chancre would probably give to one of his toadies for good service. Why her, is what I’m asking.”

“Like you said, she does good work,” Chuck says, crossing his legs. “She deserved it.”

“Deserves got nothing to do with it,” Arbergast grunts. “One of the stack crashes, coincidentally just as the Mayor is about to take a test drive. That makes it a high-profile mess-up. If you wanted someone to take a fall, you couldn’a planned it better.”

“Perhaps,” Chuck concedes. This IAB guy is starting to seem more interesting than he did a few minutes ago. He notices shallow depressions around the man’s temples where forceps pulled him from his mother’s legs.

“Take the elevator itself,” Arbergast continues. “Top of the line, like I said. Forensics hasn’t turned in a report on what they scraped off the bottom of the well, but I can tell you a thing or two. The cable snapped. That’s new Arbo alloy cable. You could lug a freighter with that stuff, but it comes in two somehow. The cab itself had those new Arbo antilocks on them. I was there when Arbo performed the final trials on those babies, and they’re sweet. Officially rated for two-five meters per second, but they can take twice that. They didn’t fire. That’s just for starters. This elevator went into total freefall, which hasn’t happened in five years, and that was in the Ukraine and who knows what kind of backward standards they got there. They probably got their cabs hooked up to mules out there, for all I know. It hasn’t happened in this country since before you were born.”

“So you’re obviously thinking sabotage, then.”

“You said it.” Arbergast pops the last nub of his sandwich into his mouth. “Somebody was monkeying around in there. And this Watson is the last person we know for sure who came into contact with them.”

“There’s a problem with your thinking, Inspector,” Chuck says. He presses down absently on his crotch: let’s wrap this up. “Why would Lila Mae — Inspector Watson — give the stack a clean bill if she was going to sabotage it?”

“I don’t know. Throw us off. Give herself an alibi.”

“That just doesn’t hold water, I’m afraid.” Hold water. “You’re going to have to find someone else to pin this on.”

“What you have to understand, son, is that I’m going to pin this on whoever fits.” Arbergast crosses his arms across his newly replenished belly. “That’s my prerogative as a member of Internal Affairs. I got no one else. Tell me this, tread jockey: where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck answers.

“She should have checked in after her shift. Motor Pool says she returned her vehicle after her shift on Friday but didn’t punch out.”

“That’s not so rare. I myself don’t always punch out. Sometimes you’re just tired.”

Arbergast nods quickly. “Assuming she didn’t hear about the accident on the radio, of course. But why not come in the next day? Surely she would have heard about it by the next afternoon. It was in all the papers.”

“She’s not required to. Her next shift is tomorrow, and that, according to regulations, is when she has to come in.”

“She’s not even curious?” Smiling now. “Just a little? It’s her career.”

“You have to understand something about Lila Mae. She’s different than you and me.”

“She’s colored.”

“That’s not what I’m referring to, Inspector. With how she sees things. It’s not easy for her to work here. Just look at the paper, how Chancre named her to the press. If it was one of his boys, he never would have told those jackals who’d inspected Fanny Briggs.”

“He seized an opportunity for his campaign,” Arbergast dismisses. He lets out a burp so lively it is almost visual. “That’s politics. You know that. I’m going to tell you something. I don’t care for Chancre much. He’s ruthless. He’s a bully. And I don’t care much for the Intuitionists and their hocus-pocus. I care about what happened at Fanny Briggs last Friday at approximately 3:35 P.M. I don’t care if the Mayor was showing around the King of Siam. I just want to know what happened to that elevator. Somebody fixed it good. And what I know now is that Lila Mae was the last one up there. She must know something. More than what she put in her report. Personally, I don’t like Watson as the perp here, but she’s all I got and I’m going to go with what I got. So why don’t you do your friend a favor and have her talk to me as soon as she punches in tomorrow. Or she’s going to be in more trouble than she already is.” Arbergast stands up, last month’s issue of Lift magazine in his mitt. “Now I got to check out the head. You’ve kept me here long enough.”

Arbergast takes his time in the bathroom, but after Chuck has finally appeased his bladder (for now), he puts a call through to Lila Mae’s building. He has never seen Lila Mae’s building, but he can picture the phone ringing on and on in the empty hallway.

* * *

She hears keen laughter in the hall outside her room, gut chortle she has heard many times before in the office. She hears the steel door scrape open behind her. Chancre says to the men outside the door, “A Chinaman and nun, oh that’s rich, my boys, that’s rich,” and he’s inside the room. (Cell, she prefers.)

Enter Chancre in his Sunday suit, a white number favored by Southern gentlemen. He sits in the seat opposite Lila Mae, swabs his greasy neck with a blue polka-dot handkerchief. “Not many windows in here, huh?” he says, looking with distaste at the dingy room. There is no maître d’, cigarette girls with incandescent smiles and fishnet stockings.

She says nothing.

“Heard you had yourself a little visit to that colored lady of Fulton’s today,” Chancre says. He inspects the damp lines of grit he’s just rubbed into his hankie. “Your old stomping grounds, right? I still go back to old Bridgehook whenever I can. Chairman of my thirty-fifth reunion. Can you beat that?”

There is not much to hear from the other side of the table.

“That’s right, you don’t talk much. I’ve heard that you don’t like to talk much. It’s all right. Must be hard for you in the Department. They can be a rough bunch of guys sometimes — I should know, because I made them that way.” His wet lips part: faintly yellow teeth. “But you’ve distinguished yourself. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your good work. Bobby’s always given you high evaluations. Are you happy there, working for the Department, Miss Watson?”

“I like my job,” Lila Mae responds. Her voice is thin. He is fat and pink. On the United Elevator Co. advertisements, they airbrush away the pocks in his cheeks, the red slivers in his nose. In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Chancre says brightly. “You have a great future ahead of you, I can see that. If only you don’t misstep. And it’s easy to take a wrong step.”

“This your way of trying to win my vote?” Lila Mae asks. “A one-on-one campaign speech?” Where will Chancre be without his elevator industry endorsement money, his grilled porterhouse steaks soft in blood, tumblers of whiskey. Where will he be when the black box emerges from the silt, breaks the surface, and utters Fulton’s final curse against him and his ilk?

Chancre smiles and sits back in his chair. It complains of his bulk and Lila Mae would love to see it crash down, dash Chancre to the floor. Chancre says, “I don’t need your vote. Not at this point. There’s no way Lever is going to cinch this election. I’ve seen to it.”

“And what happens when Lift comes out tomorrow and your constituency reads about the black box?”

He smiles again. “Lift isn’t running anything about Fulton. They’ve changed their editorial stance on the issue, you might say.”

Lila Mae doesn’t respond to that. She hears screaming from the next room, a door slamming shut and Shush’s cronies laughing out in the hall. Keep her here, let the accident scandal grow, hurt Lever even more. He is a thorough man, she thinks.

“What did you talk about with the maid?” Chancre redirects.

This next bit is something new for the usually taciturn Miss Watson: sarcasm. She says, “The new helicals coming out next month from United.” Not much, really, but sass does not come easily to her.

“I know you don’t have it on you because they searched you. Do Reed and Lever already have it?”

“So who did you get to monkey with the Fanny Briggs stack? Pompey?”

“I suppose if you had it,” Chancre considers to himself, “Reed wouldn’t have sent you out to the Institute.”

“Total freefall — that’s overdoing it a bit, isn’t it? That’s not a natural accident. Even IAB will figure that out.”

Chancre shakes his head. He says with amusement, “I don’t know what line that Reed has been feeding you to get you in on his scheme, but we didn’t do anything to the elevators in the Fanny Briggs building. I don’t have to. The Chair is mine — right now we’re just taking care of details.”

Lila Mae smirks. “Just as you didn’t have Shush’s men search my place.” Look at him. Chancre bullied his way up the ranks of the Department, expert in the currency of deal, the Old Dog of Old Dogs. Slapping the backs of his comrades in good fun, guffawing, chasing whores with the Mayor when he was still Assistant District Attorney and as hungry as Chancre. She remembers he defeated the previous Guild Chair, “Boss” Holt, by default when the old bastard withdrew the night before the election. Chuck’s collection of lore describes certain pictures: Holt in an assignation with a long-limbed chorus girl. A setup.

“Reed really has you turned around, doesn’t he?” Chancre says. He folds his handkerchief in half, and half again. “A frame job, then? Why would we wait until after this accident of yours before searching your house? If we had, according to your theory, sabotaged Fanny Briggs, why would we wait until you’d been tipped off we were out to get you? Now, let’s say by some strange turn of events you were in possession of the blueprints. You would have handed them over to Reed and Lever like a good little girl, and there would have been no need to go to your house.” The handkerchief is in his pocket, right where he wants it. “You didn’t even enter into things until the accident on Friday, and even then, you weren’t a concern until you went over to that swami shack you guys call a clubhouse and they sent you to talk to Fulton’s woman.” Chuckling now. “You Intuitionists really are crazy. Maybe instead of ‘separating the elevator from elevatorness’ you should separate paranoia from fact.”

She sits back and makes a fist in her lap, under the table, where the smug old cracker can’t see it. Why is he feeding her this line? The elaborate abduction scene, the trip through the industrial graveyard, making her sit in the dungeon to accelerate her fear. “You certainly made the most of the accident in your press conference,” she says. Watch his eyes through all this palaver.

“There’s an election on, isn’t there? I’m supposed to make the most of it.” Chancre drops his politician game and looks deep into Lila Mae’s eyes, switching tactics as if he knows what Lila Mae is thinking. “Look, Lila Mae Watson: those friends of yours have got you into a heap of trouble. Two weeks from now, where will you be? In my Department, that’s where. The boys give you grief, I know that. But you’ve been spared. You should have seen what they did to Pompey to break him in. Now he’s my boy. I’m not like the rest of the fellas, though. I’m all for your people. You might not think so, but I am. I’m all for colored progress, but gradual. You can’t do everything overnight — that would be chaos.” His fingers fiddle the air between him and Lila Mae. “I want to make you an example. Of what your people can achieve. That’s what makes you run, right? To prove something?”

Lila Mae says, “In exchange for what?”

Chancre pauses a moment, savoring, responds: “Do your job. Serve the Department. Reed’s got you running around looking for Fulton’s little box — well, if you happen to find it, you give it to us. What good is it going to do them in the long run? They may sway some of the undecideds, but the Empiricists have always been the party of the Elevator Inspectors Guild, and always will be. You believe what they tell you and think that Lever and them are ‘friends of the colored people’ or some such, but they’re the same as anyone else. They want to get what they can out of the system. Just like me. And just like you.” He shouts, “Joe — open it up, will you? We’re done here.”

Back to Lila Mae: “We’re done here, right?”

“I can go?”

“We’ll even give you a ride. Aren’t a lot of buses around here.”

She hears the door open behind her. Chancre stands. “So we understand each other, right?”

Lila Mae says, “And if I don’t go along?”

Chancre stretches and sighs. “I thought I was clear. I pride myself on making myself understood. Especially around election time. I want you to find Fulton’s box and give it to me. Because no one cares about a nigger. Because if you don’t, the next time you come down here, you won’t meet with me. You’ll talk to one of Shush’s boys, and they are never misunderstood.”

* * *

Lila Mae has forgotten this incident. But no matter. It still happened. It happened like this:

It was a night in late August, a night that rekindled in rattling windows and tree branch palsy that lost recollection of autumn, misplaced for the succession of bright summer distractions, trapped heat in small rooms and sweaty underarms. But it was always there waiting. Autumn always comes, and that first night late in summer is a reminder, a small hello, dear, that it is coming. That night toward the end of her sixth summer was the night of the annual visitation.

She couldn’t sleep for the wind’s tiresome argument with the house. A minor player in that argument, almost a bystander, was the scraping of dry leaves across the field behind the house — it was to Lila Mae that it spoke, recommending a glass of water for her parched throat. It was silent downstairs, and late; this realization pit itself against her mother’s quite firm instructions that she be in bed by nightfall. And stay there. Here it was, a good ways into nightfall, and she was indeed in bed as instructed. And thirsty. Her parents must be asleep — she hadn’t heard a sound since that last sound, that loud hinge-squeaking of her parents’ bedroom door as they retired for the night. At the usual time, when they always went to bed. She had contemplated this larceny many times before and always persuaded herself against it: to steal a glass of water. The possibility of a spanking hand invariably convinced her against that course of action, so rebellious, going for a glass of water when she should be in bed. But not tonight. Tonight fall had happened by, and that meant another summer had passed. More or less — there would still be a hot day or two, but hot days under the brown pall of autumn. Another summer had passed. She could count summers and that meant she was older, or so her persuasions whispered. Old enough, her dry throat urged, to hazard discovery while on a late-night adventure for a glass of water. She pulled back the quilt with a dangerous flourish. So be it: a glass of water.

The door opened without a sound. She knew it would — she’d gotten that far, at least, on her previous, scrubbed missions. She looked down the hallway to her parents’ room and saw no line of light beneath the door. They were asleep. She paused, knowing that her parents were everywhere, like air, and perhaps possessing bat-powers of hearing. She’d learned about bats and how they hang upside down on clothespin claws when they sleep, and how they have big ears because they have no eyes. She did not hear the springs in her parents’ bed sing as they did when her father heaved himself out of bed to investigate, for example, a little girl’s illegal trespass beyond her door. Creak — the floorboards creaked. With that first blush of courage she stepped into the hall and the floorboards creaked. So loud they’ll be out spanking her any second. But no. Still no sound from their room. If she stepped very slowly with just her little toes first, the floor did not give up creaks. She was brave after four steps, quickening her feet’s pressure on the gullible floorboards after four successful steps, and on the fifth they creaked. She could feel the dirt beneath her toes even though she’d watched her mother sweep that very afternoon, with her sure, strong strokes. There was invisible dirt and she felt it. She did not hear the bed springs sing. When she got to the head of the stairs, she remembered that the stairs were very loud if you stepped on them, but not loud at all if you stepped close to the wall, away from the center where there was less support. Needless to say, she was very thirsty when she finally made it down the stairs, for it took a long time for her to traverse the peril of the stairs. She remembered half a prayer and said that half a prayer to herself all the way down; she could not be bothered to remember that other half of the prayer because she only faked it in church, mouthing the words, only occasionally speaking them so her parents would not spank her. She did not hear any sound from the room upstairs, so maybe half a prayer is enough sometimes. Or has no effect one way or another. She wondered what she had been afraid of all the other times before when she had been thirsty at night and wanted to come downstairs but didn’t. Felt that same wonder as she padded across the parlor rug and slowly opened the door to the kitchen. After feeling her way around the kitchen table and its sharp corners, she reached into the sink for a glass, and that was when her father struck a match, loud and rough, on a leg of the kitchen table and lit the kitchen table candle. She almost wet her nightclothes. Thought, they really are everywhere. She pulled her arm back quickly and stood before her father’s hands.

He’d been sitting in the dark with a glass of his whiskey. The dark grease from his day’s work on his automobile was smeared up his large arms to his elbows. She saw that he was half slumped over the table and making words with his mouth but not making sounds. He looked at her through heavy eyes. Her father pushed the wooden chair away from the table and tapped his lap. He told her to come here. She sat on his lap, hesitating for a second because she thought the machine grease on his pants might stain her nightclothes and she would get in trouble with her mother, but her father said to come so she sat on his broad lap. He tapped the paper on the table and asked her, “They teaching you how to read, girl?”

She nodded, looking at the yellow paper on the table before her. It had drawings on it, and words.

Her father said, “Tell me what that says, then,” tapping the paper again and leaving a portion of black fingerprint on the page.

She peered down at the paper, which was yellow in the candle’s light. Above and below the drawings the words sat in small lumps and taunted her. She thought she would get in trouble. There were a lot of words she had never seen before so she looked for a few reassuring words she did know and found them scattered around. At. The. She struggled. She didn’t know where to start because the words she had learned aready were far apart, not grouped together so that she could pick a spot and begin there. Starting one place was the same as starting any other place. So she picked one of the drawings at the top of the page, the one that looked like her mother’s loom, and drew the tiny letters together, taking them one at a time and drawing them together. Where the white space was, that was the end of the word. The wind still aggravated the windows in their frames, and the leaves chortled. She said haltingly, “On … yon … ho-host-ing …”

Her father said, she felt the words in his chest against her back, “Union Hoisting Engine.” Her father read, “ ‘Arbo’s Patent Double Gear Hoisting Engine, adapted in connection with Safety Platform for Storage Warehouses, Packing Houses, Shipping Docks, Mines and etc. Motion of Platform at will of attendant up to a hundred feet per minute.’ That means it’s strong and fast,” he added. Her father pointed to another drawing that looked like two small water barrels connected by a wooden frame. Her father read, “ ‘Lifting Power-Gear Combination. For Universal Hoisting Machine, as illustrated below, showing the ‘Belt Attachment’ by which the machine is instantly stopped in case the Gearing reaches an unsafe motion from any cause, as in the breaking of a Belt while the machine is in use.’ That means if anything goes wrong, that will hold the elevator up. So it won’t break.” He continued through the Arbo Elevator Co.’s old catalog, reading out to her the names of machines, the Universal Hoisting Machine, the Metropolitan Hoisting Engine, the Relief Hoisting Engine, the Automatic Safety Drum, the Lifting Power-Screw Combination — this last one almost looking like a fat metal bat to her, hanging on the ceiling like it did in the drawing. Her father read every word on the page to her and when he was done he told her, “You better listen to your teacher. You better listen to your teacher and learn what she tells you.”

He shook her off his lap and drank his whiskey. “What’d you come down here for?” he asked her, talking loud now, not like when he was reading and he whispered.

“A glass of water.”

“Then get it and get your ass in bed,” he told her.

She was in the parlor with her glass of water when she heard him blow out the candle in the kitchen. Like he was autumn.

* * *

Everything is a mess. Her bureau rifled, oddly sad stockings hang limp out a drawer. Papers in no stack, their perpendicular corners mapping the better part of 360 degrees across the rug. Her potted plant depotted, an akimbo regret of roots and soil. Her plastic pear, Lila Mae’s one salvo toward knicknackery, dud on the floor. Some of her books are downright gone, Ettinger’s Hoists and Pulleys an agony of broken spine, The Counterweight and Its Effects hiding under the radiator among cobwebs. Cushions overturned and exposing cleaner faces. Window shades askew, indolently slouching in their frames. A mess. Untidy.

Lila Mae closes the door of her apartment. This is not Shush’s style, unless they wanted to underscore her discussion with Chancre. As if her drive out to the warehouse weren’t enough. (Markham had the gall to tip his chauffeur’s cap to her when he dropped her off here.) The two men who were here the other night were religious in their neatness. They’d obviously been here a while before she came upon them, Lila Mae thinks, and had left no mark. Respectful guests. These new men did not need to make a secret of their work, didn’t care. They thought she had it, or had a clue, a scratchmark on a pad, that might lead them to it. The black box.

She hadn’t wanted to go back to Intuitionist House. She wanted to see her apartment, sit on her couch where she has boiled away so many hours, until they lifted away in a fog. Where she feels as much peace as she ever feels in this city. Chancre’s words rippling out, perturbations, even to here. She thinks, he’s trying to get under her skin but does not understand that Reed and Lever do not have her loyalty. Her loyalty is to Fulton, to his words, and she is involved now because she has been wronged. They have sullied her name. He will not confuse her.

Will she sleep here tonight. Will the man Natchez still be at the Intuitionist House, and will she hear his comforting rap at her door.

She hasn’t eaten since breakfast and here it is after midnight and most of her neighbors’ windows are dark. Her block is a working block, where the lids rest firm on the metal trash cans in front of the buildings, because that is how they do things in this country they have sailed to, to scrabble up. Things are different here than on the dear islands they have departed. Packing, cramming a life into a few tattered bags as an offering for a better life. They go to sleep early because hard work is how you get ahead in this country. So they have been told.

The door to her icebox is ajar, the snout of a milk bottle peeks out, its issue a dry white cloud on the floor. She picks up a can of tinned meat from the kitchen tile. She digs out some of the gray material onto a piece of bread and mashes the meat into a lumpy layer with the underside of her spoon. The meat and the bread are of the same consistency. The hunger dizziness in her head drains away down some inner sluice. She eats and thinks: to visit her house on Friday and then trash it today is redundant except to prime her fear. Reel in their threats from abstraction. She looks over her room, at the things they have touched: there is no indication as to when they were here. They could have wrecked her room late Friday night after she left, or any time on Saturday, before they were sure she did not possess it. Chancre’s invidious spell: we did not sabotage the Fanny Briggs stack, we have not been to your apartment. Who else, then? A shard of gristle digs into her gums. What’s left of the animal when you have ground it up: a few stubborn pieces. She will not be so easily dislodged. He cannot make her distrust Reed because she has never trusted Reed.

The painting has not been moved. She removes it from the wall, twists the combination into the lock and opens the safe. Everything is there. She thinks, these white men see her as a threat but refuse to make her a threat, cunning, duplicitous. They see her as a mule, ferrying information back and forth, not clever or curious enough to explore the contents. Brute. Black.

She goes into her bedroom and replaces the mattress on the box spring. She is soon asleep in her clothes. The sheet is dislodged from one corner, and its loose and untucked edge cuts beneath her neck, a soft guillotine.

* * *

She grabs the griffin’s head and rams it against the plate. The griffin was, Lila Mae guesses, a gift from Griffin Elevator Co., the now-defunct British firm. Siding with the Intuitionists is never terribly wise.

After a time, the heavy door of Intuitionist House opens and she sees Natchez. His broad face is glad after an initial moment of surprise. He says, “You’re back, Lila Mae,” and shifts the paneled door wide.

“Did you miss me?” Lila Mae asks, before she can check herself. Check that impulse.

Natchez sweeps his arm into the foyer. “Mr. Reed was running around like a chicken with his head cut off yesterday.” He surveys, assesses: “But you seem to be in one piece.”

She sees herself in the long mirror on the other edge of the hall. She is in one piece. For now.

“May I?” Natchez asks and Lila Mae reluctantly gives him her trenchcoat. He has to do his job. His employers are always watching. Everywhere the pair are under cruel gazes from the smoky portraits of men she recognizes from textbooks, paintings that entomb their subjects with the final slash of brown paint. Any dispensation she has been granted is provisional: she is not wanted here. “They’re in the parlor,” Natchez says. If he considers his position and place, his face does not betray it.

They walk toward the parlor, Natchez trailing a step behind her. She wants him parallel, equal. “Your uncle is still sick?” she asks.

“It takes some time when he gets his spells,” Natchez answers. “He’ll be up again soon.”

The parlor door is ajar. She can see one long bookcase; she can hear, “I stand before you a fellow disciple, here to talk to you about the pernicious visible.” She turns to say goodbye to Natchez, but he is no longer there. She knocks lightly and strides inside, her step suddenly strong.

Mr. Reed and Orville Lever rise from their brown leather armchairs when she enters. Polite for a lady. The fireplace between them is orange and live, to warm their cold blood. It is not cold outside. Mr. Reed places his folder at his feet and says, “Orry, this is Miss Lila Mae Watson.” His expression is hard for Lila Mae to read, stone.

Lever extends his hand. “Mr. Reed has told me so much about you, Miss Watson, about all you’ve done for us.” Lever is a perennial sapling despite his gray hair and loose neck-flesh. There is room at his cuffs, his collar, and his pants drape deflated off small knees. She cannot remember if he looked this wasted the last time she saw him, but that was before the campaign. Lila Mae thinks she would probably look worse than this if she had to talk all day, she who abhors speaking. He wears a nailhead suit in a Saville Row cut, in contrast to Chancre’s street thug look: their contest is between the academy and the pool hall, chess and boxing. The Intuitionists have chosen an appropriate champion.

“Orry,” Mr. Reed says, “why don’t you run along upstairs and continue rehearsing by yourself? That’s probably a more constructive use of your time than worrying yourself over these matters.”

Lever nods and gathers his speech. “Yes, yes,” he agrees sleepily, “You’re right. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.” He turns to the elevator inspector. He is one of those translucent white people, every vein swims up to the surface of his skin. “Miss Watson, it was a pleasure. I hope we’ll meet again soon.”

Once the door is shut, Reed directs Lila Mae to Lever’s seat and she sinks into it. It seems to close around her body. He says, “Where have you been, Miss Watson? We were worried when you didn’t return yesterday with Sven.” His tone is even, emotionless.

“I decided to make my own way home,” Lila Mae answers. She has no doubts about the efficacy of her game face, the cadences she reserves for white men like Mr. Reed. “I haven’t been back to the Institute for a long time.”

“I thought something had happened to you.”

“Mrs. Rogers wasn’t much help, I’m afraid.”

Mr. Reed nods quickly. His mind is turning on itself. “Sven says she let you in. You’re the first person she’s said more than two words to since we received the packet. What did she tell you?”

“She says she doesn’t know anything about the blueprint,” Lila Mae tells him. “She was adamant about that. That she’s already given up all she had.”

“Do you believe her?”

“It’s hard to say. I don’t think she trusts anyone.”

Mr. Reed sets his head back against the chair and crosses his legs, considering this. “The postmark. The postmark on the package was from the Institute’s post office. I was sure …” He drifts off for a moment. “Do you think she may be holding out for an offer of monetary compensation?”

Lila Mae shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s it,” she says. “I saw her face. I don’t think she’ll talk to me again.”

Mr. Reed doesn’t say anything. He gets up and walks over to the writing table. He hovers there, then remembers something and tries to look nonchalant as he locks a drawer. Lila Mae can’t see it but she can hear it. So what do you have in there Mr. Reed? He removes a magazine from a pile of papers and gives it to Lila Mae. She looks at the cover of Lift, the silly illustration of Santa Claus, and searches through the contents page. She is aware that Mr. Reed is watching her, and makes a show of searching for the article on Fulton even though Chancre informed her that it would not appear. She looks up finally and asks, “Where is it?”

“Exactly the question I asked when I picked it up off our doorstep this morning. I put a call through to the editor-in-chief, a fellow I know. The switchboard informed me that he had called in sick. Then I asked to speak to the reporter, Ben Urich, and the operator told me he hadn’t shown up for work today.”

“Are you saying that Chancre got to them?”

He looks at her. Does he suspect? His eyes are holes. He says, “That would be the logical conclusion. Our opponent has a long reach.” Mr. Reed sits back in the chair. “I thought you were going to return here after the Institute,” he says.

“I decided to spend the night in my own bed,” Lila Mae responds.

“Didn’t we agree that that wasn’t wise, Miss Watson? Given the current climate?” He’s drawing an invisible glyph on the arm of the chair with a bony finger.

Didn’t we agree. As if she were a child. “I wanted to sleep in my own bed.” She says, “Do we have any other leads?”

“I have an idea or two about who our mysterious person may be,” Mr. Reed tells her. “But I’m not prepared to discuss it. My theories are, at the moment, only half formed. In any case, I imagine that preparations for the Follies will keep our adversaries busy until after Wednesday. Do you plan to attend?”

“The Follies?”

“You’re not performing, are you?”

She’d forgotten about the Funicular Follies. “I’ve never been,” she informs him.

“I try to avoid them myself. Such a garish display. But with the election next week, it’s important for Lever to put in an appearance. In these crucial final days.”

“Of course,” Lila Mae says. It will not be wise for her to attend, since it’s a Department function and she is currently a suspect quantity in the office.

Is her concern in her face? Mr. Reed says, “You decided not to report to work today, I assume.”

“Evidently.”

“That won’t look good with Internal Affairs. That was a mistake.”

“I’ll handle it. Once we have the box, it won’t matter, correct?” Place it back in his lap.

“Of course,” Mr. Reed says to her. “But I don’t know how Chancre will play it with the tabloids.”

“I’ll handle it,” she says. “What’s next, then?”

Mr. Reed stands. “If you really want to help … if you’re not going to take my advice and talk to IAB, it’s best if you just stay out of sight. I’ll have more information in a few days and we can talk about it then.”

She nods. Reluctantly. She is not sure if Mr. Reed trusts her any more than she trusts him. Possible he went to her apartment last night to look for her and saw the mess? Perhaps he is trying to get her out of the way, now that she has served her role as their colored liaison to Mrs. Rogers. The one who knew her language.

He says, “Your room is still available upstairs. I think it is our best option at this point.”

Our. Keep her on ice, away from enemies and undue influence in this crucial time. “I agree,” she says.

Mr. Reed looks down at papers and poises his pen. She has been dismissed. Lila Mae walks stiffly out of the parlor. Every room she enters lately is a cell, she thinks as she steps up the stairs to her guest quarters. Each room is an elevator cab without buttons, controlled by a malefic machine room. Going down, no one else gets on, she cannot step off. There is a tap on her shoulders at the top of the stairs. It is Natchez, who asks, “Can I visit you tonight? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

* * *

She knew he was nervous about asking her, judging from the protracted ellipsis between “Would you like to see that new picture at the Royale” and “with me,” a gap that the song on the radio took astute advantage of, wedging in a bridge and chorus. She said yes. They’d gone to the movies together plenty of times before. Movies good and bad, over the course of many years. Lila Mae’s parents liked Grady Jr., and Grady Jr.’s parents adored Lila Mae. Grady Jr., in fact, often stopped by the house just to talk with Marvin Watson. About fishing, or the eternal question of when exactly the county would get around to paving the roads of colored town. Usually they talked on the porch, as Marvin Watson did with his friends, which was how he regarded Grady Jr. Lila Mae and Grady Jr. were friends, and he had just asked her out on a date. After she said yes, she paid for her chocolate shake as she always did when they stopped in at the drugstore. And he paid for his vanilla shake, and they went their separate ways for the afternoon.

She knew things were different from the way he smiled at her when she opened the front door to the night air. Lila Mae and Grady Jr. had grown up together, skinned knees in tandem, learned to crawl through mutual toddler encouragement. It was a tricky crescent of a smile, and Lila Mae had never observed it in his repertoire before, in all the years they had known each other. Never seen it before in her whole life, one might say. He asked, “Are you ready?” and soon Lila Mae was in the passenger seat of his father’s red and rusting pickup truck. He’d been born chubby; the subplot of his maturation had been a long skirmish toward natural proportions. Before Lila Mae could sit down in the car, she had to remove Grady Sr.’s toolbox from the seat, and on the rutted trek to the movie theater, a screwdriver and hammer clinked against each other at every pock in the road. And there were many pocks in the road. The moon had just cleared the treeline.

She knew there was not much time left for the movies, or much else. Grady Jr. was heading up to the capitol in the fall to go to college. Lila Mae had not seen much of him that summer; he spent most of the summer working at the quarry to save up for books and anything else he might need up North. Summers had not been the same for a long time, Lila Mae reckoned. There was no school, but nothing else to take its place. The streets were shrinking, and she felt about the places they led to the same way she felt about her hair when she saw it on the bathroom floor after her mother cut it off. She sensed that the change she felt within her was sister to the change within Grady Jr. They always did everything together. He didn’t speak much as they drove to the Royale.

They walked around the side of the Royale to the stairs that led to the entrance reserved for colored patrons. Walked up the stairs to the balcony seating reserved for colored patrons, up to nigger heaven, and when Lila Mae reached in her pocket to pay Skinny, Grady Jr. preempted her and paid for the both of them. Grady Jr., who had kept a rigid accounting of every cent Lila Mae had ever owed him, and would demand the two or three cents she owed him for candy or a comic book, whatever she had borrowed, each time he saw her. He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying. His father did carpentry, whatever he could pick up. His mother worked in town cleaning for the judge’s family. Scrubbing stone steps. Grady Sr. had names for each of his tools that he would never utter in the presence of another living person. A dentist. But first he had to go to college, which was not a problem because he was a nice boy, and industrious, and the colored college in the capitol was eager for boys like him. The future of the race. It was the third moon of the summer, and it hung above the treeline as if the night were a farm and it a farmer, and he would take his time as he tracked through the crops, knowing and understanding it was his and only his and he knew all its secrets.

She had not seen the movie before and had seen the movie before. That’s how Lila Mae perceived the movies. Sometimes they had different titles, but the actors were usually the same, and if they were not the same, they looked the same. At one point Lila Mae noticed that she and Grady Jr. were sharing the same armrest. She was sure that she had laid claim to it when the lights dimmed, and had not noticed when this situation came to be. Now she was acutely aware of the situation. How had he snuck his arm up there? She did not move her arm. She noticed that his arm began to press against her, a firm warmth. The pressure against her arm, and the warmth, would retreat and then insist again as it rediscovered its boldness and purpose. On the screen, a white lady with long dark hair wept as she realized that social forces would keep her from her love. Eventually, Lila Mae removed her arm and placed it across her lap. A few minutes later, Grady Jr. sighed.

As for Lila Mae, she had her own plans for the future and had started to make inquiries.

“That was some movie,” Grady Jr. said, as they started for home.

“It sure was,” Lila Mae seconded.

As they cleared the town limits, Grady Jr. said, “That was some movie. It was pretty short.”

“It seemed like a regular movie,” Lila Mae said.

“No-uh,” Grady Jr. said. “I looked at the clock when we were leaving the movie. It wasn’t even an hour and a half long. It was short.” There were no more streetlights, and few houses to offer light from their windows.

“Maybe it was,” Lila Mae replied.

Grady Jr. cleared his throat and stared at the road. “This morning when I ran into your father, I told him that I’d have you back on the front porch by eleven, but it’s not even close to that, and we’re already on the way to your house.”

He had turned off the county road, into the patchy trail that wound to Miller’s Hollow. She had passed the overgrown entrance countless times, and sometimes her mother or her father would make a joke that she didn’t understand. She knew one or two jokes herself, though: that half of colored town wouldn’t be walking and breathing if not for Miller’s Hollow, and more than one marriage ceremony had been performed, under duress, a month or two after the betrothed had spent some time at Miller’s Hollow. There was another way to the Hollow, a path through the woods that the children played in. Whenever the clearing’s daylight was visible through the trees, the children stopped and doubled back into the woods. While they were not prohibited from going there, the children understood that it was not their place. It would have been a nice place to play and stumble; kites would have soared in the lively wind that poured up out of the quarry. But the children understood, and found other places to play.

Lila Mae felt let down when she and Grady cleared the woods. It wasn’t a hollow at all, she saw, but a wide clearing that terminated at the sullen lip of the quarry. The excitement over such an illicit adventure evaporated quickly. The hollow wasn’t thrilling or scary or even dull; it was just a place where no trees grew, and brown grass dried out in the sun.

“That was some movie,” Grady Jr. said again. He cleared his throat again.

“Yes it was,” Lila Mae said. That was the last either of them said for a time. She was aware of his breathing, and the new loudness of everything in the car, every minute shifting. The car’s engine ticked off seconds as it cooled, insects clicked and night birds exchanged confidences. She could see the white stone of the other side of the quarry over the curved red hood of the car. It looked like the moon. She’d left the earth some moment when she had blinked and now she and Grady Jr. were on the moon, and that’s why it felt so cold, because the moon is cold. And still.

Grady placed a trembling hand on her shoulder and it stopped trembling once he put it there, once he had a place to place it. She felt she was supposed to look at him, and did so. His lips first bumped into her nose, then her cheek, and then he recovered and placed his lips on her lips. His lips were dry and sharp. Once his lips were in place, he did not move them, and the two of them, Lila Mae and Grady Jr., sat there for a time, their lips touching. Then he pulled his lips away and stared out the windshield and placed his hands firmly on the steering wheel. Lila Mae adjusted her feet around the toolbox.

Grady said, “It must be eleven o’clock by now.”

Lila Mae said, “It must be.”

They looked over at her house when the pickup truck pulled up in front. They could see her father draw back the curtain in the porch window and wave.

Grady said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

Lila Mae said, “I have to go inside,” and all night she cursed herself because she knew that she and Grady Jr. would never go to the movies again. She wasn’t mad at all, but she didn’t say that. He should know how she is after all this time. She wasn’t mad at all, she wanted him to kiss her more. But Lila Mae didn’t say that.

* * *

She has removed her jacket and tie and opened the top button of her shirt. Natchez did not specify a time. It’s inching on midnight. She disassembles elevators in her mind and imagines that there is a discrepancy between the mass of the elevator before disassembly and after. That this mass returns when the elevator is reassembled. Fulton did not write that, she extrapolated it from the second volume of Theoretical Elevators. She is an Intuitionist but is not a fan of the new additions to Fulton’s work that come from overseas, are debated in the rooms below her by Intuitionism’s epigonic practitioners. They muddle through and sometimes the journals are not all empty, but she prefers her own extrapolations. She thinks her creations adhere to the spiritual side of Fulton’s words, while the rest of the movement gets dizzy in the more recondite apocrypha. An unforeseen loss in mass. A mystery.

When he enters he holds a piece of chocolate cake before him as he creeps through the doorway. “I thought you might like some of Mrs. Gravely’s cake,” he says. He is still in his servant’s uniform, a tight white trapezoid around his torso. He sits on the bed next to her. “It was a big hit at dinner,” he adds, “which you weren’t at.”

“I wasn’t hungry,” Lila Mae says over the fork.

“You have a lot on your mind?” he asks.

“You could say that.”

“You don’t mind that I came up here?”

“No, I’m glad.” Half gone already, the cake.

Natchez looks over to reassure himself that he closed the door and says, “I don’t know what Mr. Reed down there told you about your house, but it wasn’t like he said it was.”

She sets the plate down on the nightstand. “What are you talking about?”

Natchez takes a deep breath and looks at the door again. It’s still shut, Lila Mae thinks. He says, “Yesterday when you didn’t come back with Sven, he threw a fit. He was mad — I didn’t think that little white man had it in him, but there he was, yelling at Mr. Lever and Sven and saying all sorts of stuff. He said Sven should have waited for you. Then he said you must have made a deal with Chancre — I think that’s his name — and that you had double-crossed him. I was outside in the hallway. Then he got on the phone and told some men to go and find it. He gave them your address.”

The cake in her stomach curdles. “He said this?”

“I figured he was talking about the black box,” Natchez says. He sits up straight. “When he said ‘it.’ ”

All wrong. “What do you know about the black box?” she demands.

Natchez smiles. “I know a lot about it,” he says. “Fulton was my uncle.”

* * *

The boy dreams of places that are not like this, where there is no mud and there is pavement, where there are not wood walls that don’t keep the cold out but buildings that erupt from the ground like ancient gods awakening. The night in the places he dreams of is not abundant and terrifying, making him tiny, because the buildings are so tall that there is no night and no stars, just darkness. He is never out in the open where people can see him because the people are locked up in their holes, stacked up one on top the other like in a beehive. They do not speak. Nobody knows anybody’s business. Nobody knows where you came from.

There is another world beyond this one.

He understands that she loves him deeply and painfully. She is his mother. But he does not look like her except around the eyes. Their eyes want to hide from their faces, the mother and the son. 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. He is as light as white folk when he has not been in the sun much, perhaps that is why she was afraid, but he stays in the sun as much as he can and usually has a slight nut color to his skin. The sun never makes his skin as dark as the skin of his mother and sister. If he stays out of the sun, as in winter when the light is dead and stingy, the darkness in his skin sleeps.

He understands that his sister loves him even though they don’t have the same father, and when she gets mad at him she reminds him of this, and this is supposed to hurt him. But it doesn’t hurt him because he has never met his father so he might as well not exist. And if he doesn’t exist then there’s no point in feeling anything at all about him. You make do, like when there’s no food in the house. You make do. Besides, her father only shows up once in a while, and no good ever comes of it.

He has always been terrified of the woods. Outside, surrounding the house, advancing on the house. Except he’s the only one who knows the trees and sticker-bushes are advancing on the house, coming to get him. The moon lets him know. The moon’s light picks up the movement of the branches and places it on the wall of his room, and he watches the shadows shake and threaten him. The moon has been warning him since before he could speak that his time with his mother and sister is short: he must leave this place or something bad will happen to him. He does not belong here and the woods are casting him out. The woods say what other people’s tongues will not say.

His sister says she knew he was coming that night when their mother came home torn. She says she knew by their mother’s silence and crying after that night that something new was coming into their house, and it turned out to be him. Their mother did not go into town to work and the neighbors brought them food and took his sister into their houses some nights when their mother got loud, or was crying and would not leave her bed. Then he came and their mother got better as soon as she saw him and started to go into town again to work. To work for someone else. His sister cleaned him when he was dirty even though she was not that much bigger than him.

Some colored babies are light when they’re newborn but he didn’t get colored as he got older. His hair was very curly when he was born but it got less curly as he got older. His sister teased him that he had white folks’ hair, but one time their mother heard her say this and she yelled at his sister to never do that again. And she didn’t. She said she was sorry, later that night when they went to bed. Said it to God in her prayers, I’m sorry for what I said. The boy forgave his sister because it did not occur to him that he had been insulted until his mother got mad. His sister told the truth.

He has a few books he has stolen and they contain devices. He does not understand all the words so he makes up meanings for the words he does not know, using the words around those unknown words. Later he discovers his definitions are right. He has never had trouble understanding the devices. They mean: up.

His mother does not like him to go to town by himself but that’s where all the roads lead. And so. The colored people know who he is and do not mistake him for something else. One day he is in town at the store and he holds penny-candy in his hand. There is an old colored man he has never seen before, holding two oranges. The old man is in front of him in line and the boy is happy to wait. This peculiar thing happens: the old colored man steps aside to let him buy his candy. He thinks the man is going off to get something else but after he pays for his candy the man has not added anything to his oranges. He waits behind the boy. It takes him a long time to figure out what happened. Long after he has finished the sweet candy. What he figures out is sour.

* * *

“It could be him,” Lila Mae concedes. In the picture, two colored women and one white man stand under slanting sunlight on the porch of an old wooden house. The warped front steps grin. She reconsiders: he is not a man yet, he hides his hands in his trouser pockets boyishly. His black hair is hacked into a bowl cut, jagged and raw above his eyes. In the next picture, and the next, Lila Mae cannot see his eyes at all. He has found his trademark brown trilby, and the brim’s veil of shadow hides his mother’s eyes. He is surrounded by white men in their first suits, which are loose and shy at the wrists, just short of dignified, almost there. A cocky gang, mouths full of newly acquired cant: the graduation picture of his class at the Pierpont School of Engineering. His mother’s arm disappears behind his slim neck in the family photograph (flaky white creases where it has been folded and refolded), he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with his school chums in the graduation picture. He is welcome in both, no intruder, accepted by his companions. But in the school picture she cannot see his eyes.

“It is him,” she says. She extracts the next photograph from Natchez’s stack, hands firm. It is the Pit before the reign of cluttered walls and tacks, bureaucratic appurtenance. He stands with his fellow warriors, the first champions of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, the men who will rescue this newly vertical city from toddler pratfall. Their haircuts are Safeties, but it is not clear how he favors his hair, the trilby hides his eyes. When he held the Guild Chair, the office walls were not, as they are now, festooned with orchestrated candids of Chancre and municipal burghers, Chancre herding his porcine family in their Sunday best. In this photograph the walls are bare. No other traces of a life before this. He looks away from the camera to the stack of reports on his wide oak desk, concerned. The alumni bulletin announcing his ascension to Dean of the Institute for Vertical Transport features the head shot that she has seen many times, on dust jackets, haunting the marginalia of textbooks. He stares down into the camera now, proud or fearless or empty, offering his black eyes as matching pits for the pit-eye of the camera. He challenges the machine to a duel now, no more hiding: the better man wins reality. His face has overripened into a sagging middle age, but it is the same man from the first photograph.

“Why?” Lila Mae asks. “Never mind.”

Natchez slides his mother’s photographs into a pile in his lap. “He’d send her letters. This stuff,” tapping the memorabilia, “if he got mentioned in the newspaper. If he got a new job. As you can see, she kept it all. When she died I found it all in her trunk. Wrapped in this ribbon right here.”

He purses his lips. Lila Mae looks at the envelopes: even then, the Department used those cream envelopes with the foul glue. The ones in office now are probably from the same shoddy gross. “When she got something in the mail from him,” Natchez continues, “she’d get all mad for a few days and I learned to walk softly, because she’d whip for little stuff she wouldn’t normally raise her voice about. She told me her brother ran away when he was sixteen and she never saw him after that.”

Her hand grasps the photograph of him and Natchez’s mother and grandmother. “All this time,” she murmurs. To turn his back on these two women. “Who was his father?” she asks.

“I always knew they didn’t have the same daddy, but I didn’t know his was a white man. She never spoke of it. But there it is.” He trails off, then offers, “Somebody in Natchez. A white man in Natchez. Gran’ma Alice used to clean their houses.”

They hear someone move downstairs and they do not speak. They wait. She stares at the door, not at the man next to her. But she can feel him look at her. For the long time it takes for the sounds to move away, to another quarter of the house.

“She died last summer,” Natchez resumes in a whisper. “That’s when I found out who my uncle was.”

She can look at him again. “And the man who works here? Your uncle with the numb leg?”

A splinter of a grin. “I gave him some money to disappear for a few days. I wanted to get inside this place.”

“You want the black box.”

“It’s my birthright. I got claim to it as his nephew, is the way I see it. I’m his only living relative. From what I seen, he’s a big man with these elevator folks. The Great James Fulton. And all this carrying on they been doing the last few days, Mr. Reed and them and putting you out to talk to that woman up there. They want that machine he made. It’s my birthright.”

“Then that’s it,” Lila Mae decides. It’s true, no more rumors. The box is out there. “How did you hear about it?”

“It’s in his last letter to my mother,” Natchez answers. “I got it back at my place with the rest of my mama’s things. He sounds all crazy, going on about this and that, but then he says he’s figured out the perfect elevator. That they’ll all be surprised when they see it. But then he passed on years ago and it hasn’t come out yet, has it? Somebody has to have it because ain’t nobody using it.” He gestures vaguely around the room. “I wanted to see what these people was like, so I came here. First day here, I find you.”

His words recede. Who else knows that Fulton was colored. Mrs. Rogers. Did he tell her? Was she his mistress like they insinuate? What they say about colored people when we’re not around. What did Fulton do when they acted white? Talk about “the colored problem” and how it is our duty to help the primitive race get in step with white civilization. Out of darkest Africa. Or did he remain silent, smile politely at their darkie jokes. Tell a few of his own. “Watch that,” Natchez says, “that’s my blood.” She’s crumpled the photograph in her fist, adding new, nongeometric creases to the ones already there.

“Can I count on you?” he asks her, next to her on the bed, close enough.

“For what?”

“They always take away from our people. I don’t know if they know he was colored, but if they do you know they ain’t going to tell the truth. They would never admit that. Them downstairs would never say that they worship a nigger. Make them puke all over their expensive carpets they got. They’d die before they say that.” Lila Mae is looking down at the stack of photographs in his lap. Fulton a spy in white spaces, just like she is. But they are not alike. She’s colored. Natchez says, “When I hear them talk about his invention, they always saying it’s the future. It’s the future of the cities. But it’s our future, not theirs. It’s ours. And we need to take it back. What he made, this elevator, colored people made that. It’s ours. And I’m going to show that we ain’t nothing. Show them downstairs and the rest of them that we are alive.”

After he leaves, Lila Mae does not sleep. Because she remembers how his hand felt when he grabbed it in his and said, “I need you if I’m going to do it.”

I need you.